He’d prided himself on the security of his home, but apparently it was more fallible than he’d known. And it had put Jasmine in danger. What if the creep had been outside her bedroom? Taken pictures of her naked?
Jasmine was waiting at the side door. She’d put shoes on. She’d also made coffee, which he didn’t realize until she handed him a cup without a word when he came back through the door.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded, her eyes moving past him to where the security team had the man seated on the low garden wall. “Who is he?”
“Don’t know yet, but he came in through a bush in the corner of the property.”
Her lips drew thin.
“It’s my fault,” Nate said. “I should have?—”
“There’s no way this is your fault,” she cut in. “Don’t give yourself a hard time over it.”
He gave her a tight smile, appreciating her words. She’d never defended him before — even from himself — and it touched his heart.
The police arrived twenty minutes later. Two officers who were professional and unhurried and had clearly been to properties like this before on calls like this one, which was both reassuring and vaguely depressing. They spoke to the man at the garden wall at length, and Nate watched from the kitchen doorway while one of them came back with the information that they’d run his ID.
The man’s name was Roy Delaney. He was licensed, the officer said, with the emphasis of someone conveying something significant. A private investigator, not a photographer. Had been for nearly twenty years.
Nate and Jasmine exchanged a glance. A private investigator? A photographer made sense, but this new information put them in way over their heads.
Nate set his coffee cup down on the counter with more care than the moment required.
“Who hired him?” Jasmine asked. She was standing beside Nate now, close enough that he could feel the tension in her without touching her.
The officer looked between them. “He’s not saying. Which is his right, technically. There’s no law requiring him to disclose his client.”
“He was trespassing on private property,” Nate said.
“Yes, and we’ll be charging him accordingly. But the client’s identity stays protected unless he chooses to disclose, and right now he’s not choosing to.” The officer paused. “He didn’t get much, from what we can tell. The lens cap was still on when you caught him. He may not have gotten anything usable, but we’ll be checking his camera to make sure.”
Nate thanked him. He watched the officers walk Delaney to their car from the front stoop, then stayed at the open door until the car had moved down the drive and the security team had closed the gate behind it. Then he turned back to the kitchen.
Jasmine was sitting at the island now, both hands around her mug, her eyes on the middle distance. The morning light was coming in through the window that Delaney had been crouched below, soft and ordinary and indifferent to everything that had just happened.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he agreed.
Nate poured himself more coffee he didn’t need and stood at the counter and thought.
A private investigator. Not a photographer chasing a story about the wedding, not a fan who’d found the address somehow. A licensed PI who’d been on Nate’s property before six in the morning with a camera and the discipline to keep his client’s name out of his mouth when the police arrived.
That was professional. That was organized. Behind this PI was someone who had hired carefully and briefed thoroughly, someone who understood that the value wasn’t in the confrontation but in the evidence, and who had enough at staketo pay for the right person and enough patience to wait for the right moment.
There was only one person Nate knew who operated that way.
He looked at Jasmine. She was already looking at him. He watched her arrive at the same place he’d just arrived, watched it move across her face — the connection made, the conclusion landed.
“Graham,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Has to be.”
She absorbed that. “He can’t prove anything with whatever the PI might have seen. Not that he would have seen anything. The most he could have seen was that we have different bedrooms, but I didn’t see him at mine. And my curtains were drawn all night long. Were yours?”
Nate cringed at that. He never drew his bedroom curtains. They faced the swimming pool, where no one could see in, and he liked the sunrise waking him up.
