by Cynthia Eden
Dex whipped out his own weapon. “Turn around. Slowly.”
“I know this looks really bad…” Roman began as he turned. “But I didn’t fucking do it.”
Dex glanced at the gun. “Are you fingerprints going to be on the weapon?”
“Yes,” Roman bit off. “Because it’s my gun. But I think Heather stole it when she attacked me last night. I couldn’t find it when I went back to the room today.”
A good story. One Dex wasn’t ready to believe. “I don’t care what connections you have, Roman. We’re taking you into custody.”
“Dex.” Fury seethed in his voice. “I’m being set up! I didn’t do this!”
Dex studied the scene. Roman was near the balcony. The gun was at his feet.
“I thought it was Lacey,” Roman gritted out. His desperate gaze was on her. “When I saw the coat…the hair…” A shudder worked over his body. He took a lurching step toward her. “God, I thought it was you.”
“Maybe that’s why you put a bullet in Heather’s back before you shoved her over the balcony,” Dex snarled. “Because you thought you were getting rid of Lacey.” Rage nearly choked him. “All this time, I thought you wanted her back. But the truth is…and I damn well saw it in your eyes this morning…you hate your sister, don’t you?”
Chapter Seventeen
“We’re getting the hell out of here.” Dex’s voice was ice cold. His expression was locked into deadly lines of rage, and when he moved, waves of lethal fury seemed to pour from him.
They were back in their suite, and he was grabbing her bag. “Good thing you already packed.”
“The black coat was in the luggage.” The comment slipped from her.
Dex stilled. “What?”
She sucked in a sharp breath. “This tan coat I’m wearing—when I came out of the bath, it was waiting for me on the bed. I thought you’d left it for me.”
A slow, hard shake of his head.
Oh, shit.
“I’d packed the other coat in my luggage earlier. When I was planning to, you know, get the hell out of here.” But it was obvious someone had taken that coat. Left her another one in exchange? Maybe left the tan coat so she would never look for the puffy coat?
“You’re telling me that someone came into this suite after I left you? While you were in the tub, naked and unarmed, some bastard was in here?” Cold. Low. Deadly.
She didn’t think that she’d ever seen Dex out of control. When they had sex, yes, he went wild. So did she. But this was different. The mask that Dex usually wore was cracking before her eyes, and beneath that cold exterior…
So much rage.
“Yes.” She licked her lips. “I think that’s what is happening. But I didn’t hear a sound. And if the intruder wanted me dead, don’t you think I would be dead right now?”
He cursed. Low and extremely inventively.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she responded. “The other coat should have been in the bag you’re holding. Whoever helped to get Heather out of that holding room downstairs must have taken it. We have similar builds and hair, so maybe the coat was part of some disguise to help her escape. But then the person who shot Heather saw her from the back, saw her in my coat and thought—”
“She was you.” He looked down at the luggage he gripped so fiercely.
“This is all bad. Exceedingly bad. But whoever broke into this suite has to be on a security camera.” Another question…just how had the person gotten past the agents Dex had ordered stationed outside the room? Not like the intruder was a ghost.
His eyes glittered as he glanced back at her. Then, low and rough, “No.”
“No?” No to what?
She knew he’d talked to his team downstairs. After Roman had been taken away. The conversation with the team had been quick and angry.
“All the security in the lodge went offline right before the convenient fire in the kitchen. It just came back up, thanks to Antony.”
“Antony? The tech guy who dug up all the info on me?”
A quick knock sounded at the door. She stiffened, and her gaze swung toward—
“Right. Him. Antony is on the other side of the door. I told him to haul ass up here as soon as he checked out security.” Dex let go of the luggage and strode for the door. He glanced through the peephole, then wrenched open the door. “About time.”
The man on the threshold blinked at him. Tall, blond, and wearing glasses that shielded intelligent eyes. The fellow held up the laptop in his hands. “Perfection takes time, you know that.”
“Get your ass in here.” Dex hauled him across the threshold. “You’d better have something we can use.”
The newcomer rolled back his shoulders. “It’s certainly nice to see you again, too, Dex. I’m good. Yes, very good. Thanks for asking. It was a bit of a rough flight. You know, because someone had me flying through a snowstorm, but hey, I made it. No big deal. Happy to be of service to you.”
Dex growled. “I am not in the mood for your shit.”
“You are never in the mood for shit.” The stranger’s gaze darted toward Lacey. Lingered. “Hello.” The faintest edge of curiosity was in the one word. “I don’t think we’ve met.”
She studied him and something niggled at the back of her mind. She didn’t think they’d met, either, but Lacey was sure she’d seen him somewhere before.
“Stay here. I need to talk to the guards outside.” Dex strode out.
Okay. Lacey looked at Antony. He looked back at her.
Antony cleared his throat. “I’m assuming—since you are here with Dex and he’s actually allowing the two of us to meet—that you have high enough clearance that you won’t blow my cover.”
Clearance, huh? “Working on that,” she replied.
The door flew open. “Sonofabitch!”
Lacey sighed. “Let me guess. You asked the guards if anyone came in this room, and they told you no?”
“They swear no one came through this door.” The door he slammed closed and locked. “Not like our perp can freaking walk through walls! If I find out those jerks went on a break…”
“Did they say that they left?” Lacey asked.
“They’re swearing on their lives that they never moved and that no one got past them.”
Then how had the coat gotten inside?
Dex strode toward her. His hand lifted and the back of his knuckles slid over her cheek in a careful caress. The care seemed at odds with the blazing fury in his eyes. “Nothing like that will happen again. I will not lose you.”
Lose her?
Once more, Antony cleared his throat. “You know, I can go work in another suite. If the two of you want alone time or something.”
Dex’s hand dropped.
“By the way, she does have clearance?” Antony pushed. “Because I don’t exactly want the world to know about this side job of mine.”
Dex crossed his arms over his chest. “We don’t need alone time. What we need is intel. I want you to give it to me.”
“But the clearance—”
“I trust Lacey completely.”
He did? Her stomach dipped at Dex’s rough confession.
“And I trust you, Antony,” he continued, “or else you would never be near her.”
Antony cocked his head. “I caught the kiss downstairs. Figured it was just for show. You do enjoy putting on a good show, Dex. But then I remembered how obsessed you were with discovering everything about—”
“What’s on the laptop?” Dex snapped, cutting through Antony’s words.
Hmm. She wished Antony had been able to finish telling her just what had obsessed Dex.
“Right. Laptop.” Antony lifted it and then headed toward the table near the window. “Nice to meet you, Lacey,” he tossed over his shoulder. “I take it that you are Dex’s partner on this case?”
“She’s my fiancée,” Dex responded before Lacey could say anything.
Antony stumbled. Then whirled around. “Bullshit.”
Lacey lifted her hand. Wiggled her fingers. The ring flashed.
“I thought Dex was punking me. Didn’t think you would actually agree to marry him.” Antony shook his head. “You poor, poor woman.”
“Lap…top.” Dex’s voice snapped.
Antony put it down and popped open the screen. “Just so we’re all updated, the security hack on the lodge was an inside job. Someone manually uploaded a virus into the system. Clever bug. Took down every camera and sent the fire alarms blaring.”
“What about the kitchen fire?” Dex demanded. “I thought that was real.”
“It was real, but I’m sure it was set deliberately. All the kitchen staff are swearing they didn’t do it. They just found the grills burning.”
She edged closer to the laptop. “Is that Heather’s?”
Antony’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “Yep. And she was telling the truth. She has been talking to some mystery perp. A perp who wanted her to take out Roman. She must have sure hated the guy to turn on him so badly.” He glanced over at Dex. “You know how it is, right? When your boss is a total asshat?”
“Don’t push me now.”
Antony narrowed his eyes. He finally seemed to see Dex. Antony tensed. “What’s wrong?” Just like that, the mocking veneer he’d worn since he entered the suite seemed to fall away. “You’re worried. You never worry.”
Dex didn’t worry? Lacey thought he did. She thought he just might worry all the time, about everyone.
“Has hell frozen over?” Antony’s growing concern deepened his voice. “What. Went. Down?”
“This shit is personal,” Dex said.
Antony nodded. “I see.” He pulled off his glasses. Polished them on his shirt. Swept Lacey an assessing stare. “I see,” he repeated.
“I doubt it,” Dex muttered. “You don’t even have your damn glasses on.”
Antony slipped the glasses back into place. “Happy now?”
“I’m not going to be happy until I know who Heather was working with. Tell me his name.”
Antony went back to typing on the laptop. “It’s not that easy. I don’t just wave my hand or something and everything is revealed. I’m not a magician.” He kept typing. “This is the posting she was using on the Dark Web. If you look at it, you’ll see it’s full of mercenaries looking for jobs.”
Lacey leaned in closer so that she could view the screen.
“It’s all in code. Look…right here, where this guy is offering pest control services? He means he’s a hitman.”
Lacey’s eyebrows rose.
“And this one here?” He waved toward the screen. “Where it says the poster is looking for someone to do renovation work? It means he wants a building destroyed.”
“How do you know this?” She crept even closer to him.
“You smell really, really nice,” Antony murmured. “Like roses. I bet you like to buy that Midnight in the Rose Garden bath gel, don’t you?”
That was awfully specific. “Yes, I do.”
He went back to typing.
“What else do you know about me?” Lacey asked him quietly.
“You’re a great dancer.” He was frowning at the screen. Typing faster and faster. More boxes kept popping up. “You don’t drink coffee. You like hot chocolate. You dated that drummer Tim Wraith, but haven’t seen anyone else seriously since then so your surprise engagement to Dex here is—”
She’d been right about him. “You’re the one who investigated me.” Dex had mentioned Antony before. With everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, she’d let that important detail slip too far from her mind.
Antony’s fingers stopped typing.
Dex swore. “Antony, how many times do I have to tell you, you can’t multitask for shit?”
Antony glanced back at her. “I don’t like to think of it as me investigating you. I prefer to view it as recon work. Normal, you know, for when you’re checking out an operative.”
“Learning that I like hot chocolate is normal? Learning what kind of bath gel I use?” She doubted that was on the typical background check.
Antony coughed. A fake sound. “Dex wanted to know everything about you.” A pause. “Now I see why.”
Her attention lasered toward Dex. She glared. “You know everything about me. But I know nothing about you.”
“Absolutely not true.”
“Oh, really?” She advanced on him. Their bodies brushed. “Tell me what I know. Because I feel like—”
“You know I lost my mind when I thought you were the one lying broken on the floor. If you don’t know it, you should.” His voice vibrated with his rage. “You should know that in that moment, I couldn’t see anyone else. Couldn’t even breathe, not until I moved back the hair and realized it wasn’t you. In that moment, nothing mattered. When I thought you were gone, that someone had taken you from me, the whole world went dark. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. I was on the floor next to the body, and if that had been you, I—”
“Stop. Just stop right there!” Antony directed. Or, maybe he pleaded. “This seems like an extremely personal conversation, and, fun fact about me, I don’t like being involved in other people’s personal conversations. I especially don’t like being involved in your personal conversations, Dex. Knowing info about you will only come back to bite me in the ass.”
“Probably,” Dex agreed without even hesitating.
Lacey didn’t look at the other man. She couldn’t take her eyes off Dex. The confession he’s just given had sounded so real. So honest. Almost as if… “Watch it, Dex,” she heard herself chide, “or I’ll start to think you care.”
His gaze swirled with intensity. “I. Fucking. Do.”
Her lips parted.
“I should leave.” Antony leapt up. “I can work on this in another room. You two obviously need to hash out some private stuff here—”
Dex locked a hand around Antony’s shoulder and pushed him back down. “Lacey’s safety is my number one priority. I need you to find out who was working with Heather. She’s dead so it’s not like she can talk to me now. I thought Heather was about to roll and give me usable intel. But her partner—her boss, whatever the hell he is—got to her first.”
Lacey sucked in a breath. “Wait. Do you think the perp intended to kill Heather? Or did he think she was me?” Because she’d been under the impression that—
A muscle jerked along Dex’s jaw. “I’m sorry, Lacey.”
Oh, no. “When you apologize, it makes me exceedingly nervous.”
“I know you think I’ve kept you in the dark, but the truth of the matter is that this whole time, I didn’t know who we were up against. So I couldn’t very well tell you when I didn’t know myself.”
“But—but Roman—”
“I should not be hearing this.” Antony hunched his shoulders.
“Antony, you know I would take a bullet for you, just like you’d take one for me. I trust you. So just get the job done, will you?”
Antony. Antony. Her head turned toward him. The name and face clicked in her mind. “Antony Kyle,” she realized as she connected his face with the flash in her mind. “You’re the famous gaming designer. A little bit of a recluse. You usually let your partner take the spotlight.” His partner’s name was… “The bad boy of tech,” Lacey murmured. “Sebastian Ridgeway.”
“He hates that nickname,” Antony told her. “With a passion.”
“I read an article about the two of you a few months back. You own that big gaming company—
“Shark Gaming and Design.” His shoulders stiffened a bit. “I’d appreciate it if you would not tell the world about my involvement with Dex. I do try to keep that part of my life on the down low.”
“You’re a spy?”
His head inclined toward her. “I prefer the term seasoned technical operative.”
“Okay.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Did Dex blackmail you into the job?”
“No.” Spoken softly. “
Dex is my friend, even though some days I want to strangle the guy.”
Her eyes opened. I can relate to that feeling.
“Dex has my back, and I have his. His methods might not be ones that others can understand and they might fall on the dangerous side, but Dex is one of the good guys.”
Dex swore. “Are you seriously trying to talk me up right now? Is that what you’re doing? Being a wingman or some shit? Trying to make me look—”
“Like less of an asshole?” Antony hurried back to typing. “Indeed, I am. I figured you needed as much help as you could get. See, that’s Dex’s deal. He doesn’t let people close. If people get close to him, then those people are vulnerable. It’s why he was apologizing to you, in case you didn’t know. I bet Dex never intended for you to be in danger. Hell, I’d imagine he thought the safest place for you was at his side. That’s probably the whole reason he got you to come to this lodge with him in the first place.”
He was wrong. “No. He wanted me to be his partner on this case. You know that. You even asked me when you came into the suite—” But Lacey stopped because…
Dex.
“You’re always three steps ahead,” she recalled. He’d told her that before.
Dex’s eyelids flickered.
“You didn’t want me to help you bring anyone down, did you?” And suddenly, she was seeing everything differently in her head. “You…wait…” She held up her hand. The diamond caught the light and glittered. “You proposed to me as soon as we arrived at the lodge. I thought you did it with everyone around because you were setting up our cover story. But the ring—it was protection, wasn’t it? You wanted me to use my real name. You were adamant that I do that. You—”
“I found you,” Dex said simply. “I knew who you were. I knew why you’d matter to Roman. I also know that Roman has plenty of enemies. Enemies who would love to use a long-lost sister against him. I thought that by giving you my ring—and, yes, my protection—and by setting up a meeting between you and Roman—a meeting here at the lodge, where I could watch over you, then your safety would be assured.”
“All of the agents here…they’re to keep me safe?”
“Doing a shitty job of it.” Dex raked a hand over his face. “I’m doing a shitty job of it. You were almost shot at the cabin, and then I just had a hard message delivered to me—loud and clear in the lobby.”