Page 23 of Some Like It Royal

Awareness swarmed up her arm and back down as he wiggled the finger in question. “Your ring and middle fingers were the last two pages of this spreadsheet you reviewed, but your forefinger and thumb are just your login and the book sample you were reading before you got back to work.”

She giggled as he wagged a finger at her thumb. “Bad thumb.”

Daniel winked. “My left hand is the computer that your coworker was reviewing the same file on. My thumb and forefinger were the pizza we ordered for lunch and the movie tickets I wanted to buy, but my middle finger matches the same sheet your ring finger looked at, while my ring and pinkies are the next two in the sequence before your pinkie.” He threaded his fingers through hers, lining them up until they were in the order he described. “My program sifts those negatives to get these pages and organizes them until they are in the most logical and correct sequence with the most recent views being used.”

He covered their joined hands with his free one. “It’s time consuming and sometimes there are holes—gaps in the data stream—but we can identify because?—”

“Because of the time stamps. You can see when it was opened, what was the last view time and extrapolate?”

“Exactly.” He squeezed her hand. “We may not be able to retrieve all of their data, but I’ve found a lot of the pieces of the puzzle. We’ve just arranged for a shipment of their defective laptops—damaged by flood or crushing—back here and we’re going to see what, if any, data we can recover and then we’ll use the sifting program to manage what we find.”

“That’s amazing.” Warmth stole up her arm, the strength in his hands buffeting her, and she squeezed his hand lightly where their fingers intertwined. “You can really ‘rebuild’ them?”

“Yeah. Like I said, it won’t be perfect and there will be holes they have to fill in the gaps for, but they do a lot of business in the United States and have to file finance reports here. We’re investigating how much of the missing information might be in those reports. They’ve also networked their back up servers and if they back up data in Japan, it’s mirrored here in the States to prevent future disaster.”

“And I thought you made advanced versions of the shoe comparison program.” She may not understand the intricacies of programming, but she could appreciate the attention to detail and amount of review it would take to sort through every single piece of data.

“We do that too.”

“Omelets are ready in the dining room.” Theresa stood in the doorway, a wistful, watchful expression on her face as she looked at their joined hands. Alyx would have pulled away at the intrusion, discomfort sliding through her, but Daniel tightened his fingers.

“Thank you, Theresa.” He slid Alyx’s feet off his lap and stood, tugging her to her own feet and still, he held on to her hand. “Shall we?”

“Sure.” She fought the discomfort and pasted a smile on. “I have another question about the data.”

“Hit me.” He pulled her hand up and tucked into the crook of his elbow, holding it captive. They walked side by side, the raw heat of him pushing against her with every step. The contact’s disconcerting effect on her equilibrium was hard to ignore.

“Okay, you said the data on the ring fingers were two pages in the same sequence, but what if a fingernail is missing?” She grimaced at the mental image. “If that makes any sense.”

“It makes perfect sense.” In the dining room, he released her hand only long enough to pull out her chair. It was set for two—omelets, fresh biscuits and crispy home-fried potatoes filled each plate. Glasses of water and orange juice sat on the upper right while a fresh coffee-filled carafe sat perfectly between two empty, clean mugs.

He waited until he sat down and shook out his napkin to finish. “The fingernail may represent two or three lines of data that was not present in the information we found on my ring finger or on yours, but if the data is consecutive enough, they can figure out the missing pieces. If not, we look for alternate images on other machines, and filter for those missing cells.”

Unfolding her own napkin slowly, she frowned. “Do you have to review each piece of data to know what to look for?”

“Not exactly. The program does it. It can catalog and identify the cell numbers, every piece has a unique identifier that we can enter as anif-thenstatement.” He salted his potatoes before cutting into the omelet.

“Okay, that means if you want blue shoes, and three-inch heels come after one-inch heels, you know that two-inch heels have to come between them or are missing when you review the final product?” Not everything came down to shoes, but it was the first analogy she could think of. The scent of peppers, onions, ham and cheese teased her nostrils and her stomach growled. She took the time to cut into the omelet and steal a bite. Her mouth watered.

Perfect.

She caught him staring at her, a small smile on his lips. “Exactly.”

Okay, maybe programming wasn’t that hard after all. She grinned.

“Thank you,” he murmured and took another bite.

She washed down hers with a drink of orange juice. The cold, tart liquid braced her against the flip-flop of her heart. “For what?”

“For being curious. Not a lot of people ask what I do or when they do, they glaze over if I explain it. So, thank you.”

“Well, you’re very welcome. I may not understand it all, but you explain it very well.”

“Shoe analogies and all?” he teased and she couldn’t help laughing.

“I like shoes.”

“Nothing wrong with that.” He picked up his glass. “To shoes.”

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