I jerked back when a car door closing outside caught myattention. It was after three a.m. If anyone was out and about at this hour, they were up to something they didn’t want anyone else to know about.
Like coming to tie up the loose end from a decade-old crime.
I forced a deep breath to fill my lungs and glanced at Bray’s gun on the coffee table. He’d kill me if I grabbed it, but I wasn’t about to die while he dozed on my couch. I left it for the time being and crept to the living room window. The apartment was silent other than the dull hum of the TV and my thudding heart. I was hardly breathing.
When I peeled back the curtain, I didn’t see an enraged henchman coming to collect. I saw Jana Russo having climbed out of a luxury EV parked in front of Melanie’s house. She wore all black like a cat burglar and glanced down the street as Sandra Whitley climbed out of the passenger side, also in all black.
I blinked a few times and flinched when headlights turned the corner and flashed across their bodies. Within a few seconds, Melanie’s SUV was pulling into her driveway.
“Bray!” I called in a whisper like they might hear. “Bray, come here and look at this!”
He stirred with a grumble but didn’t wake.
“Oh, for the love of—” I snapped and hurried back to the couch, worried I’d miss something if I was gone from the window for too long. I gripped his beefy shoulder and shook it. His skin was hot and smooth under my hand. “Calvin Bray, wake up. I need your assistance, please.”
His eyes fluttered open, and he blinked up at me a few times. Embarrassment filled his face when he saw me glaring down at him. “Did I—?”
“Fall asleep on the job? Yes. But we can worry about that later. Come here and look.” I tugged on his arm. He was still sleepy enough his arm stretched all the way out while my hand slid down until our palms touched.
“What’s going on?” he said groggily.
I squeezed his wide palm and yanked him off the couch, sending the throw blanket to the floor. “You know, you really need to work on your nocturnal endurance since half the shady shit you need to see seems to go down at night. Come to the window. The moms are up to something.”
At this, he snapped to attention. His hand tightened around mine, and he let me pull him to the window. “What are they doing?”
“I don’t know. I heard a car door outside, so I looked out the window. I just saw Jana and Sandra pull up in that car, and then Melanie came home.” I pointed at the scene still playing out across the street. Melanie had opened the garage and pulled the SUV inside. Light poured out from the open garage, casting the driveway in a golden pool. Melanie climbed out of the driver’s door and closed it. She too wore head-to-toe black.
“I know I’m only one day into nannying, but I don’t think you go on three a.m. diaper runs with your gal pals dressed like that,” I whispered.
“Definitely not,” Bray said. “They are coming home from a job.”
Right as he said it, Melanie came to the edge of the garage and swept the street with her gaze. When her eyes landed on my apartment, both Bray and I gasped. We ducked at the same time, landing crouched shoulder-to-shoulder on the carpet below the window.
“Do you think she saw us?” I asked, heart hammering.
“Let’s hope not. Shit, we need to see what they are doing though.”
We stared at each other from inches apart. Our breath mingled. I could still smell his shower somehow. His eyes shone in the dim TV light.
“What were you doing out of bed?” he whispered, like the thought had only now occurred to him.
A heat wave instantly burned my body. I felt like I hadA sweaty sex dream about you woke me upwritten on my forehead. “I, um … woke up and needed something to drink.”
I couldn’t tell if the answer satisfied him, because he was suddenly distracted by a thought. His eyes lit. “The cameras.”
“What?” I asked, still reeling from thoughts of my dream.
He spun away from me, still in a crouched position, and crawled to his bag by the couch. The curtains were closed, but we still needed to stay low, just in case. “The security cameras are recording right now. We just need to look at the live feed and we can see what they are doing in the street.” He dug in his bag and pulled out his tablet.
“Good idea,” I said, and moved to join him.
He’d sat with his back to the couch’s end and glanced up to see me crawling. The color spotting his cheeks made me realize he had a view straight down my camisole. He quickly looked away as I scrambled to sit next to him.
“Do you see anything?” I asked as if my heart wasn’t pounding.
He tapped at the screen to bring up the app. Soon, we were staring at a black and white live stream of the street. I leaned in to see the small screen, and neither of us made an effort to move when our bare arms pressed together. He was hot and solid, and the feel of his skin touching mine quelled the nerves coursing through me over what we might witness. He used his thumbs to pinch the screen to zoom in.
Jana had returned to the sedan parked at the street to open the trunk. From it, she pulled a duffel bag, which looked heavy by the way she hoisted it.
