Kade went to the kitchen counter and opened a black case, extracting a slim laptop from it. He handed the laptop to Zeke. “Let’s find this bastard.”
ZEKE
I’d never realizedFiona was so impatient, but if I’d learned one thing today, it was that. We’d spent hours monitoring her ex’s location on the laptop. At first, she’d been engrossed, but she’d gradually grown frustrated with how slowly everything moved. Bergen had spent an hour at a cafe for breakfast, then returned to a residential complex—my team were looking into whether it was his apartment building—for another couple of hours.
When he’d gone into motion again, Fiona had been excited, practically vibrating as she sat next to me, only to slump when he entered a restaurant she said used to be one of his favorites.
Another hour passed. Kade had left not long after we started our cyberstalking, and Fiona didn’t seem to appreciate my amusement at the way she was pacing and muttering, desperate for something to happen.
“This is so boring,” she complained forty minutes into Bergen’s restaurant visit. “I thought spying on people was supposed to be thrilling.”
I laughed, smiling at how put out she sounded. With her lower lip set in a sulky pout, she was adorable.
“Most surveillance doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat,” I said. “At least we can do this from the comfort of the apartment so you can pace all you like. Could you imagine if we were stuck in a car together watching him?”
She grimaced. “Okay, good point. But surely he has better things to do than eat. The man has a stolen painting worth millions. If that were me, I wouldn’t be going out for brunch with my friends.”
“All the better to throw suspicion off,” I said.
“What suspicion?” She threw her hands up. “The onlyones who suspect him are us, and we don’t have the ability to arrest him, so why would he care?”
I leaned back against the sofa and eyed her thoughtfully. “So, your problem is that you’re bored?”
She sighed and pushed her hair off her forehead. “I’m sorry, I just wish he’d do something that would distract me from what he said yesterday about me being in an orange jumpsuit.”
I felt a pang of sympathy.
“Hey.” I waited for her to look at me. “It’s going to be all right. And if you need a distraction, I have just the thing.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively and she laughed. That laugh made me feel like a king.
“I need to find something to keep my hands busy,” she said. “Do you have any paper?”
I gestured toward the case on the counter. “Look in there.”
She checked inside and pulled out a pad of blank notepaper and a pencil. Then she sat at the end of the sofa, her feet tucked beneath her, and started scribbling. I checked the screen to make sure Bergen hadn’t moved, although it wasn’t really necessary since I’d set an alert to ping if he was in motion for more than a few minutes.
I lit my phone screen to see if I had any messages, but there were none, so I opened my work inbox and began looking through the emails I’d received for our other, more routine jobs. Benson had been handling the bulk of those. I really needed to update his job title from assistant to something more fitting of what he actually did. Without him, my life would be infinitely more difficult.
I finished replying to an email about a potential new client who Benson thought sounded dodgy, then glanced at Fiona. She’d showered and gotten dressed a while ago, much to my disappointment, and now her hair spilled overher shoulders like fiery silk while the pencil whizzed across the page. Her forehead was crinkled with concentration and her lower lip was caught between her teeth.
Something inside me settled. If I could see her like this every day, I’d be happy. Unfortunately, I had some ground to make up because it had been obvious she was angry about the decisions Kade and I made without consulting her. I could see her perspective, and I hated the thought that she might believe I didn’t trust her judgment, but I also knew that we’d had reasons for making those choices, and our reasons were valid regardless of Fiona’s feelings.
“What are you doing?” I asked, curious.
She looked up, blushing slightly, and angled the notepad toward me. She’d sketched me standing in the narrow alley on the side of the yacht, where I’d told her to strip and jump. My face was shadowed, my mouth smirking, and tattoos peeped out from between the open buttons of my shirt. Behind me, a few stars spotted the sky. But what really caught my attention wasn’t the drawing itself, but the way she’d captured my mood on paper. She hadn’t just reproduced my face; she’d illustrated my soul. The dark parts of it, the dirty parts of it, and the parts I sometimes allowed to be hopeful.
Emotion clogged the back of my throat. From this one single sketch, I could tell that she saw me. More than anyone else had in a long time.
“It’s amazing,” I said. “You’re very talented.”
She cocked her head, eyeing me curiously. “It’s all right. It needs a lot of polishing.”
I rubbed my hand over my mouth, unable to take my eyes off it. “You’re too hard on yourself. Really, it’s… something else.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to butter me up?”
“No.” I checked the screen one last time and went over to her, dipping my head to kiss her cheek. “You’re incredible.”
“Yeah?” Her smile was shy.
I started to draw back but she grabbed me and pulled me closer, kissing me on the mouth. I groaned and tasted her lips. She came up onto her knees, her hands wandering down my chest. I wanted to scoop her into my arms and carry her to the bedroom, then drop her on the bed and make her beg for my cock, but before I could do anything, a ping sounded from behind us.
Fiona drew back. “He’s moving.”
