Jean-Pierre’s massive hands go to his face. “Oops! Did I say the wrong thing?”
He’s beaming as if somebody shoved the sun up his ass.
Jake rolls his eyes. “We were waiting for the big dinner at the vineyard, remember?”
I cannot understate how broad Jean-Pierre’s grin is. “I know, I know, I know. But I had to tell someone! I can’t tell Heath because he’ll tell Roly and then everyone will know. DB and Odd are men who can keep secrets.”
I can’t help but laugh. Seeing Jake so happy is a balm to my soul. He has, on a few occasions since our deep conversation, reiterated that he does not blame me for the events of that operation. But being able to see him live his best life is more powerful than even his words. Odd looks at me with adoration and just like that…I know what I’m doing with the rest of my life.
“Jean-Pierre, your secret is safe with me.”
“And me,” Odd says, smiling into the camera.
“Merci beaucoup. And, Jake, if you are going to be in your room for the rest of the evening, I’m going to take myself over to Heath and Roly’s for game night with the girls.”
“Sounds good, baby. Please, please, please try not to tell them. If they find out before Evie, she’ll make Anders look like a sane person and then use him to hide the body.”
Odd nods. “He’d do it too.”
Jake and Jean-Pierre chat back and forth in French for a few lines, kiss again, and then Jean-Pierre leaves us to it.
“Jake, buddy, I’m truly sorry about ruining dinner. But I think we’ve got the makings of an emergency.”
“Tell me.”
“First of all, if someone’s in the original Bastrop file, can you open it without them seeing it?”
“Of course. Wimberley’s got me hooked up with the best toys.”
“Good. Let’s take a look at the live file.”
“Give me just a few minutes,” Jake says, popping his knuckles, wiggling his fingers, and then typing like the devil.
While he’s pulling up the file, we switch over to my laptop so we can have a bigger screen and use our internal direct messaging system. I cover the camera and lean in for a quick kiss, which Odd happily obliges. By the time I come up for air, Jake already has a split-screen of the live file and his copied file.
“Looks like they changed a few things,” he says, scrolling both pages simultaneously.
“Can you tell when the changes were made?”
“Sure,” he says, scrolling down a little farther. “Oh, fuck.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh, fuck?’”
“Someone’s in the file right now,” he says, pointing to the blinking cursor.
Shit. “Can he see you?”
Jake shakes his head. “I didn’t open the file. It’s kind of like the local weather cam, where I dial in the exact URL and see what’s in the file without touching it. Do you know who this is?”
“Greg. I just told him we have plans in Bastrop.”
“Damn.”
He pokes around for a few minutes, then shakes his head. “He’s hiding a direct signature, but now that I know what to look for, I can tell it’s from Homeland.”
Fuck. “That’s what I thought you’d say.”
As we’re watching, he switches out the age of our mark from a vigorous thirty-nine to a decidedly less vigorous sixty-seven, making anyone who would read this file think they had a softer target to take down. He also switches his hair from brown to red, making it easy to misidentify him or, worse, identify someone else in his place.
