“I didn’t know what you liked,” She laughs.
“I would have cooked,” I offer as I drop the barely touched slice back into the box and close the lid.
“With one arm?”
She has me there. “Thank you for ordering.”
She nods, a blush brightening her cheeks as she closes the remaining boxes and stands from the stool, moving to transfer them to the fridge.
We clean up in a companionable silence, moving around each other like we’ve done it for years and not the week it’s only been, but we don’t touch, not even a single brush of our arms and when everything is back to normal, I open my mouth to suggest watching a movie but she beats me to it.
“I’m going to head to bed,” She fakes a yawn.
“Sure.” Lifting my arm, I rub at the nape of my neck and don’t miss the way her eyes watch my arm flex. I may even add a little extra tensing for her, like a fucking teenager. It’s the meds, becausesurelyI’m not this pathetic.
She leaves with a blush on her cheeks, only this one spreads down her pretty, slender neck and disappears beneath the neckline of my T-shirt.
There’s somethingrightabout seeing a woman in your clothing, how it hangs off her, how she looks so free and comfortable in it, but it’s like a claiming. Even if Sloane isn’t mine.
The door to her room shuts with a soft click I hear only because of how silent the house is, but instead of sitting down here alone like I do so often, I grab my laptop and head up too. I need to figure out who targeted me on the street and deal with the threat before they decide to take another shot.
The guys have been working on it, but they don’t know these systems the way I do, don’t know the tricks and hacks to breachsecurity systems and security feeds. Shutting my bedroom door, I carry the laptop across to the bed and lean against my headboard, placing it on my thighs to work.
Behind my head, I hear the shuffle of her body against the sheets; the bed knocking lightly against the wall, as if she’s just tossed herself onto her side or back.
I groan as I hit my head against the headboard, squeezing my eyes closed. I should not be imagining what she looks like in bed, the sheets all wrapped up around her body, how her hair might spread across the pillow.
The shuffling from her side of the wall stops.
Running a hand down my face, I listen for more sounds from her, the desperation for a mere sound keeping my muscles drawn tight. I’ve been semi fucking hard since her little tease earlier.
Naked, actually.
Fuck.
The thought of her sleeping naked in my sheets, in my house… the images had come hard and fast. I could see it so viscerally I’d almost choked on my damn tongue.
She’s my daughter’s nanny, my employee;she doesn’t want me. It should all be enough to put a halt to all these delusions with her, but Sloane has crawled under my skin, and I’m not sure anything can carve her out.
Forcing my attention to my laptop, I open the app I use to hack the city’s security feed, bypassing the firewalls effortlessly to bring up the last week's worth of footage and scan the timestamps, finding the date and time of the shooting.
I didn’t get a good look at the shooter while it was happening, too busy trying to not have my brains blown out, and I’m hopingI’ll recognize them or at least figure out who hired them. Sure, it could have been a random attack, but I doubted it.
Pulling the feed, I skip forward until I spot both me and Sloane on the sidewalk and then bring up the second camera, showing further down the street. We’d just gotten Lily in the car when the first shot was fired, so I slow the feed to begin just before that.
About seven seconds before the first shot, a motorcycle pulls into the street, coming to a stop three car lengths away. A helmet covers his face, but he’s only in a black t-shirt, showing off a series of tattoos on his arms. Zooming in, I take as many snapshots of him as I can so I can run them in the database to see if there’s a match on any of the files I have.
I start to play the video again, watching him pull his gun from the back of his pants, and he doesn’t hesitate to open fire on us. It wasn’t random; he was aiming for me and the car, not giving a fuck that I wasn’t alone.
I am being watched, and someone wants me dead.
Not my first fucking rodeo. Closing down the app, I open the database and load in the images of the tattoos before I hit the search button, watching it as it starts to scan all the files inside, the names of every person in there flicking on the screen too quickly to read.
It eventually stops and pulls up a profile.
“Motherfucker,” I growl and reach for my phone, dialing my brother.
“You good?” He says by way of greeting. I can hear him moving around, his steps echoing across a hard floor.
