[This chapter is dedicated to Sona1210. Thank you for supporting our story with your power stones! Much love.]

---

They stay fooling on the bed for another twenty minutes before Jess's stomach grumbles again. Noah laughed and asked, "Did your stomach just go groo-groo?"

She slapped his arm, "You aren't going to let that go, do you?" she bit her lower lip. She had no idea why she said those words to Noah. She wanted to think because she was so spent with their lovemaking that she was feeling vulnerable to the point that she had baby-talk to Noah.

"What's wrong with groo-groo? It just means that you are hungry, right?" He poked her waist and Jess shrieked.

"What did you do that for?"

"Payback for poking my face."

Jess clamped her hands on her mouth, and whispered, "You knew?"

He grabbed her hands that were covering her mouth and kissed her. "What do you think?" he asked against her lips.

"You're annoying, Noah."

"I'm annoying because you got caught admiring my handsome sleeping face?"

"You have no problem with confidence, huh?" She asked, mockingly.

"Nope. Same with handsomeness, hotness, awesomeness you may go down on your knees, I don't have any problem with them all."

Jess roared with laughter with what Noah said, "How dare you! I won't do it again if you would use it against me."

"What do you mean against you?" he smirked. "I was being grateful with how you --" he mumbled the rest of the words he was saying because Jess clasped her hands on his mouth.

"Stop! Let's just eat. I'm hungry."

She rolled away from Noah and stood up from the bed. However, Noah stayed in bed and opened his legs and arms. He was like the Vitruvian man in the middle of her bed.

"What are you doing? Get up, I'm hungry."

"I'm ready. You may eat." He said in a serious voice.

"You-- what the?"

"Why not? I'm good enough for breakfast. I'm good enough for a late lunch!"

Jess looked around her room and glanced upon the book on her bedside table that she had been meaning to read, grabbed it, and hurled it to Noah who laughed maniacally in her bed.

"That's no longer self-confidence, Tiefenbacher. That's audacity! How dare you!"

With her face burning with embarrassment from Noah's teasing, she turned on her heels and walked out of her own bedroom. She stopped on her track when she reached the door, turned back to Noah who was laughing like an obnoxious kid in his bed and said in a clear voice, "If you don't stop, I swear, I won't send you any message nor I will answer yours."

"Aww, come on!" he scrambled to stand from her bed. But Jess yanked her bedroom door open and ran outside.

Noah jerked up from Jess's bed and ran after her. "Jessica, you wouldn't dare!"

Jess in the hallway ran to the kitchen, laughing. She knew exactly what to say to scare Noah off.

When Noah caught up, she was already taking a chicken breast from the freezer. "Do you like shrimp?" she asked as if nothing happened.

"Jess, if you miss a quota of two messages a day, you will find me on your doorstep the next day."

Jess just laughed but she has a feeling that Noah would do exactly what he said.

"And yes, I like shrimp." He added but his eyes were still deadly serious with his threat.

"I was just joking!" She clicked her tongue and put the chicken breast under running water. She grabbed some kitchen towels and dried the chicken breast after running water on it.

She put it on top of a cutting board, carried it to the kitchen island, and put it down in front of Noah. "Please, cut the chicken into thin strips while I shelled the shrimp."

"What are you cooking?" he asked, rolling the sleeve of his shirt.

"Stir fry veggies. I like using chicken and shrimp together," she replied, taking all the vegetables she needed from the fridge. "You don't mind?"

"I'll eat anything you prepare."

"It's just a simple recipe. Something that Luke and I would cook whenever we don't like to cook but want to eat something decent."

She carried everything to the island counter and they worked side by side in preparing all the ingredients they needed. Noah, in the end, did the actual cooking. Jess volunteered to do the dishes after.

***

"Do you really know what you're doing?" Jess asked Noah who was busy setting up her new laptop. He put something on it for her to use the same laptop with privacy. After she complained that she doesn't want to bring two laptop computers.

"I'm almost done. It's almost five, why don't you go prepare and when you come back, it's all done."

"Hm-mmm," she stepped back from hovering over Noah's shoulder and went to her bedroom. He was right. She needed to prepare. She was having so much fun doing random stuff with Noah that she almost forgot about her flight.

She went straight to her bathroom and opened the faucet in her bathtub to fill it up. She would like to have a good soak since she will be on a long flight.

While waiting for the bathtub to fill, she went out of the bathroom to take out the clothes that she was going to wear and lay them on her bed. Luke helped her pack her clothes and he also chose this outfit for her.

When everything was laid down on the bed, she returned to the bathroom to take her bath. She was enjoying her bath when Noah knocked on her bathroom door and opened it without waiting for her to answer.

"Baby, I have to get something from my place. Be right back," he said as soon as he peeked from the door.

She was expecting him to play a prank on her or something but he quickly closed the door as quickly as he opened it.

Jess cocked her head to the bathroom door, listening if Noah was still outside but she didn't hear anything. He must have come in to tell her that he has to go to his house first.

She didn't give much thought to it and just enjoyed her bath.

Meanwhile, Noah quickly grabbed Jess's company-issued computer and went out of her apartment. He has to hurry back home before she finishes her bath.

Walking back to his apartment, he kept on telling himself that he was going to do what he was about to do as a precaution. Not because he didn't trust Jess.

When he entered his house, he went directly to his study, retrieving the program he needed to install on Jess's computer, so he could monitor what she was working on.

The same reason why she was issued with a company computer and asked to install a program on it so the technical team in the lab would know what she was working on her computer. But not, just what she was working on but basically everything that she was doing on her computer.

What he was going to do was just piggyback on that program by installing another program. No one will know that he has access too to Jess's computer. He just wanted to make sure that she was working on the program just by mere coincidence and not because of anything.

That was what he told himself while he watched the program that would allow him to peek at her working computer.

When the program was successfully installed, he pulled the USB, threw it back inside his desk drawer, and returned to Jess's apartment. Glancing at his watch, he was just at his house for less than twenty minutes.

Jess would still be in the bath. He put the computer on the kitchen table and started brewing coffee.

He heaved a deep sigh and kept on telling himself that what he did was not something that would not harm Jess or their relationship. She won't find out about it and even if, in the small chance that she did, he could just tell her that it was necessary. He was just protecting her.

'You are such a calculative bastard, Tiefenbacher.' A small voice at the back of his head was mocking him. He did what he did because he was scared and he was being a bastard.

He was thinking that Jess would do what his ex-wife did!

"Are you done with the computer?"

Noah inwardly flinched when he heard Jess' voice. She came out of her bedroom wearing suit pants and a long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows.

"Hmm," he replied as he poured the coffee into a white mug. He watched Jess pick up her laptop that he put on top of the kitchen table, and he stopped himself from grabbing the computer from Jess's hands to remove the program that he secretly installed on her computer.