She’d stood stiffly as he kissed her on both cheeks, but managed a half smile when she introduced him to Nolan. They’d walked him through the house, with Nolan pointing out the parts that needed to be finished and Alexa basically rewriting the design brief from scratch. Somehow, a quick tidy-up had turned into the ripping out everything Marielle had done, a reimagining of the study and library, and a complete rebuild of the cottage. When Nolan tried to explain about his limited budget, they’d both told him to hush.
Apparently, the budget was no longer an issue.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.
On the one hand, Alexa had never been materialistic, but on the other hand, he didn’t want to take advantage of her. He was proud that he’d built Dionysus from the ground up, even if it stood on a foundation of dirty money. He’d earned it. He had. He’d weathered the storm whipped up by the Sykes family and made a new life for himself. The thought of some shadowy figure trying to tear down everything he’d created left him sick to his stomach and angry too.
Now he leaned on the doorjamb, watching Alexa as she surveyed her digital kingdom, click-click-clicking a pen as her gaze flicked over the screens. Even though the study had been cleaned up, neither of them wanted to spend any time in there, so Storm and Marcel had disassembled Alexa’s new desk, carried it downstairs, and reassembled it in the darkest corner of the library. They’d cleared the corner by moving a bunch more boxes into the study, so now it was almost impossible to get in there, whether anyone wanted to or not.
She looked up at him, and she’d swapped her contacts for glasses again, he noticed. The other day when he’d told her the glasses looked hot, she’d told him that she only wore them when her eyes got tired.
“I can’t sleep, not yet.”
“It’s two a.m.”
“Yeah, and we’re just getting to the good part.”
“The good part?” The note of joy in her tone made Nolan’s stomach lurch, and right away, he knew she’d cooked up another harebrained scheme. “Uh, where’s Jerry?”
“Close by.”
“Define ‘close by.’”
“Like, within a five-mile radius.”
Ah, hell. “Did she go over to the Leland place?”
“Maybe.”
“She’s gonna get caught. She’s gonna get caught, and then the cops will start asking questions, and?—”
“Relax, she won’t get caught. Storm’s acting as lookout.”
Nolan sank onto a couch, coughed at the dust, and blew out a long, calming breath. It didn’t help.
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I was right about Margaret being smart. She deleted my phishing emails, she doesn’t use a cloud service, and we don’t have time to waste. The quickest way to get access to her hard drive is for Jez to stuff a dongle into her laptop port.”
“We’ll all end up in jail.”
“You’re so melodramatic.” Alexa turned one of her screens around. “Look, she’s totally fine. A pro.”
The screen showed the inside of a house. The Lelands’ home, presumably. Nolan had visited a couple of times, not recently, but the place looked vaguely familiar.
“Jerry’s filming herself breaking and entering now? Is that what this is?”
“Yes?”
“We’re going to get arrested, aren’t we?”
“Relax, I can erase the footage at the push of a button.”
“Is that some kind of fancy night vision she’s using?”
The picture was surprisingly clear and in colour too. Nolan could see every detail of the deer heads hanging on the wall.
“No, the lights are on. Guess they’re not worried about the price of electricity.”
