Trace (TraceWorld Book 1) by Letitia L. Moffitt Page B

be forcing her to take a stand.
    “And if it doesn’t? If it only involves a fascination with something most people would prefer to avoid, like death?”
    Of course she should have known what this was really about: trace, and his need for it. “There’s more to it than that.”
    “Who exactly am I hurting by doing what I do? No one gets killed, not even bugs. Few people even know trace exists. I’m not stealing anything belonging to anyone. You might as well accuse me of stealing the oxygen provided by my houseplants.”
    “You don’t have to hurt someone directly to be doing something wrong,” she said. “What about the peeping tom? He can say his victims don’t know he’s watching them undress, so what’s the harm? But it’s a violation nonetheless. What’s more,” she added, calling upon knowledge she’d gained from work and hoping she sounded authoritative, “most peeping Toms secretly hope they get caught—sometimes not so secretly. The peeping is only part of the thrill. Many of them admit they enjoy it even more when their victims realize they’re being watched.”
    “The dead can’t know,” he said bluntly.
    She didn’t flinch. “I’m not sentimental about the dead, Grayson. I’ve never believed in putting living people through life-threatening situations in order to bring back the bodies of soldiers who died in combat zones, for example. Yeah, I’d probably feel differently if a member of my family were involved, but that’s not the issue. If other people knew what you were doing, don’t you think they’d be upset?”
    “People get upset over a lot of things they don’t understand. Anything that challenges their own limited way of thinking seems wrong to them. People who worship different gods, love different people, have a different physical appearance, however superficially—all become persecuted out of ignorance. The people you work with don’t understand what you do, right? I imagine that results in a lot of bad behavior at your expense.”
    She drained the last of her martini and set the glass in the exact center of her napkin. “What I do helps people. What you do helps yourself. You turn this into something solely self-interested.”
    “Your lofty goals are just as self-serving as mine, and I’m not hurting anyone by what I do any more than you are. We are the same. If you believe I’m in the wrong, you should believe you are wrong as well.”
    “OK, yes, I enjoy my work, so there is selfishness involved. But it is work . You sound like someone trying to justify a so-called ‘victimless crime.’ Funny thing about that, Grayson: those crimes almost always do have victims. You just choose not to see them.”
    He finished his martini as well and leaned toward her with a look of amusement. “You’ve had quite an opportunity to be critical of what I do. Now it’s my turn. What I do may disgust you, but what you do I find, frankly, pathetic.”
    It seemed like a strange word to use, but she didn’t want to encourage him by questioning him about it, instead picking her olives out of the glass and making a great production of chomping on them one at a time. It hardly mattered; he didn’t need encouragement.
    “You find trace, Nola, but you don’t even get anything out of it. I find that a colossal waste.”
    “You make me sound like a truffle pig,” Nola said dryly.
    He laughed. “Perhaps. No, actually it’s worse than that. Pigs appreciate truffles; they are simply denied the reward for hunting them down. You deny yourself.”
    The way he said that—huskily, almost like a come-on—it was as if he were chiding her for playing hard-to-get. Her thoughts turned abruptly from the conversation to the fact of this . . . date, or whatever it was. There was truth and relevance in his last three words that he couldn’t have realized, because at the age of 27, Nola had never experienced what she would consider a serious long-term relationship and was starting to wonder if