Free Destined For The Alpha: Six Heart-Racing Shifter Romances (Werewolf's Harem Book 7) by Vivian Wood

Aurelia realized that she should make more of an effort. Ben was nice, and cute, and it wouldn’t hurt to have an ally in the house besides Lucas.
    “Do you want a cupcake?” she asked, offering him the plate. “I just made them.”
    Ben’s face lit up immediately. With his longish hair and baby blue eyes, his excitement made him seem younger than Aurelia knew he must be. Her wolf sensed that he was in his early thirties, but just now he could have passed for late teens. It was kind of heart melting.
    “Oh man, yeah. I’ve been smelling them for an hour, salivating. I didn’t want to impose,” he said. 
    “Wait, you knew I was down here?” she squeaked.
    “Well, yeah. You were rocking out, and dancing around, and making delicious-smelling food. I’d be a shitty wolf if I missed all that somehow,” he said, grinning.
    “Damn,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I was really hoping you’d at least missed my dancing.”
    “We don’t get a lot of hot women running around in their panties here. Makes for a great place to work without distractions, but it’s not very lively. I’m glad you’re here,” he said, the teasing bleeding from his eyes at the last.
    “It is kind of big and lonely and echo-ey here, isn’t it?” Aurelia asked, taking the other cupcake and peeling away the paper wrapper.
    Ben nodded, mouth full of cake. They ate in silence for a minute, eyes drawn to the TV screen. The silence was easier now, though. More comfortable.
    “So what are you working on?” Aurelia asked, her eyes catching on his laptop.
    “Ehn… I’m starting a new software project. Web intelligence, sort of. I don’t know, it probably sounds boring.” Ben scratched his ear, uncomfortable.
    “What kind of web intelligence? Like source collection, or data analysis?” Aurelia asked, her curiosity immediately piqued.
    Ben blinked, surprised.
    “Uh, both,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to develop a system that’s a one-stop shop. Something to generate mass surveillance data, but with a feature that completely anonymizes the sources. We could feasibly get the NSA to stop tapping everyone’s information flow if we had a better way for them to do their job.”
    “Not to mention the profit you could see from that kind of citizen-friendly program,” Aurelia said, impressed.
    “Yeah,” Ben said, giving her another look. “Yeah, exactly. Lucas thinks it could have a lot of potential.”
    “Well, yeah, it’s a great idea. How are you mining data, though?”
    “Every possible avenue. Web crawlers, mainly. Websites, social media pages, anything we can access. We’re running trillions of results a day through the system I’ve set up, basically pattern mining the results to look for anomalies. Behavior changes, the system takes note. When certain patterns are met, the system accrues a list of suspicions. We set the parameters and just let it work for us.”
    “What makes it different than the current system, then?” Aurelia asked, challenging him. She liked the gleam in his eye when he talked about his work. It was definitely a good look for him, she decided.
    “We’re stripping the identifying markers from the data as it comes into our system. We’re impartial, because the data is impartial,” he said, leaning back and propping his head on his hand. The dense muscle of his biceps bulged, distracting Aurelia again.
    “Uh…” she said, pulling her thoughts back on track, “How far along are you in this project, exactly?”
    “I’ve actually made a small-scale system model. That’s what I’ve been working on for the last month. It’s basically done now, it just needs to run a ton of data so that I can check the filters and refine the parameter system. I’ve been watching it all night,” he finished sheepishly.
    “I think… I think this is the project that Lucas brought me in to work on,” Aurelia said, excited.
    “Wait, you’re an analyst?” Ben said, sounding unsure. 
    “You’re