“Are you sure?” Digger marched toward her from where he’d been standing across the room.
Using the coffee table as a desk, she remained on the couch, spinning the laptop around so the screen was facing him. “You tell me.”
He stopped, his eyes immediately going to the frozen image. Leaning in, his gaze narrowed slightly as if to better focus on what he was seeing.
The muscles at the side of his bearded jaw twitched, and his hardened expression practically turned to stone.
“Can you get facial rec?”
She spun the computer back around, her hands immediately going to the keys. She typed and talked, giving him the best answer she had.
“The angle isn’t great, and the bastard purposely kept his hat down low to avoid being seen on the footage. I’ll have to play around with it a bit to try to get the clearest shot of his face.”
“How long until you know?”
“Hard to say. If I can’t get a clean image from this camera, which it’s looking like that’s going to be the case, then I’ll have to see if I can find him in the footage from one of the others. Why?” She sent a quick smirk in his direction. “You got someplace else you need to be?”
“Just the shower.”
Shadow’s fingers froze, their tips hovering a few centimeters above the keyboard. Unwanted images of Digger naked and wet filled her mind’s eye in a flash.
Nope, nope, nope. You cannot think about that now. There’s a man out there who tried blowing the both of you up today. Find him, stop Stanton, and then maybe…
“You have time.” She brought her focus back down to the screen.
Digger didn’t say anything more, but he also didn’t immediately leave. He just stood there, a few feet from where she sat working, not talking or moving or doing anything other than staring. Until finally, blessedly, he turned and walked away.
Shadow refused to look, knowing if she did she’d once again become distracted. She’d stolen enough glances over the last few days to know he was a weakness she couldn’t afford.
The sound of running water reached her ears minutes later. A stretch of time passed, and at first, she thought she’d finally become a master at Operation Ignore How Sinfully Sexy Digger Is.
A few seconds later, the tempting images returned in full force, and no matter how hard she tried, she could think of nothing but him.
“Gah!”Shadow released a frustrating growl as she shot up from the couch and grabbed her computer with a huff.
Biting back the creative string of curse words close to the tip of her tongue, she stormed out of the living room and through the sliding glass doors. She slammed it shut behind her, using much more force than necessary.
Shadow stopped and looked around, spotting a small patio table and two chairs positioned against the balcony’s back corner several feet to her left. She walked over and set her laptop onto the rounded glass before plopping down into the chair with its back nearly touching the building’s brick wall.
The air was warm and a touch thicker than she preferred, but she pulled as much of it as she could into her lungs, holding it there a few seconds longer, before releasing it back into the wild.
Boy, what a mess her life had become, and she had no one to blame but herself. That wasn’t true. Michael Stanton was really the one to blame. She just prayed that she and the team could find their smoking gun soon…before it was too late.
* * *
Slade steppedout of the shower and onto the plush white mat covering the tiled floor. His bare feet sank deep as he reached for the nearby towel he’d hung up on the hook to his right. He was halfway through drying off his legs when the sound of a door slamming shut sounded from the floor below.
He stood tall, his spine becoming stiff with the tensing of his muscles. Wrapping the towel around his waist, he ignored the drips of water still present on his dampened skin as he exited the humid space and made his way across the bedroom.
Once there, he reached out, opening the door and peeking his head through the opening into the hall.
“Shadow?” Slade called out for her.
Silence was his only response.
Moving fully into the hallway, he walked a few feet to his left, stopping midway between his bedroom door and the top of the apartment’s split-level stairs. He looked over the black metal railing to his right, but Shadow was no longer sitting on the couch where he’d left her. And her computer was also missing from the glass coffee table.
Slade turned and went back the way he’d come. Bypassing the room that would be his for the foreseeable future, he continued down the hall to the next door on the right.
