by Paige Tyler
“Did anyone at the cleaning company see you drop it off?” he asked.
“The dispatcher checks the van in the moment I get there.”
He nodded. “Did you see anyone hanging around outside when you left here after you were done cleaning?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I didn’t really check, though.”
“Okay.” The man flipped his notebook closed. “We’d like to take a look around your apartment, if you wouldn’t mind.”
She frowned. “Don’t you need a warrant for that?”
He smiled. “Not if you give us permission.”
Colleen chewed on her lower lip. She had nothing to hide, so why didn’t she just agree? Because she’d seen way too many police procedural shows where a suspect let the cops into their home only to have them find evidence that had been planted there. What if the person who’d stolen Steve’s game framed her?
“If it’s all the same to you, I’d like you to get a warrant,” she said.
The detective’s mouth tightened, but he only nodded. “We’ll do that. In the meantime, don’t leave town.”
Steve brows drew together. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you going to arrest her?”
Colleen stared at him in disbelief. He was actually serious.
“Mr. Hughes, there’s nothing to suggest Ms. Palmer did anything wrong. Just because she worked for you doesn’t mean she stole your game. And until I get a warrant to search her apartment, there’s not much I can do.”
Steve’s jaw tightened. “No one broke in. That means whoever did it had a key and the code to the alarm.”
“Or disabled it before it went off,” the detective said. “It’s also possible that Ms. Palmer forgot to lock the door and set the alarm when she left. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go work on that warrant. I’ll be in touch.”
Colleen stood there staring at the floor, too numb to do more than that. She couldn’t even look at Steve.
“You’re good, I’ll give you that,” he said bitterly.
She lifted her head to look at him. “You can’t really think I did this.”
He folded his arms across his broad chest. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Because I…” I think I’m falling in love with you. She swallowed hard. “Because I wouldn’t steal from you.”
He snorted. “I wish I could believe that.”
Colleen took a step closer. “Steve, think about this. If I had stolen the game, would I be stupid enough to come back?”
He was silent as he considered that, and for one crazy moment, she thought he was going to believe her. She was wrong.
“What better way to throw off suspicion?”
She forgot that he liked to watch police procedural shows, too. “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I said you were a thief, not a mastermind.”
Hot tears stung her eyes and she blinked them back. “How could you think that after what we shared this past weekend?”
The muscle in his jaw flexed. “For all I know, seducing me could have been your plan all along. Maybe you thought that if you got me into bed, I wouldn’t suspect you.”
His words hurt more than if he’d slapped her. She knew she should stay and defend herself, but she couldn’t. If she did, she would surely lose it, and she was barely holding it together as it was. She turned and ran for the door, tears spilling onto her cheeks.
By the time she got to her car, she was crying so hard she could barely see. That morning she thought she might be falling for Steve, but she’d been wrong. She’d already fallen for him—hard. Why else would his accusations hurt so much?
Colleen stared at the house. Should she go back inside and try to reason with him? What would be the point? Steve was in no mood to listen to anything she had to say. The best she could hope for was that the police would find the real thief, and soon.
Digging in her purse for a tissue, she dried her eyes, then started the car. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t sit in Steve’s driveway all day. She didn’t need him accusing her of stalking him, too.
Colleen knew she should go home in case that detective showed up with his stupid warrant. But instead, she found herself heading to the cleaning company’s offices. The building would be empty at this time of day, but curling up on the couch in the break room while she waited for the other maids to come back was better than going home to her empty apartment.
As it turned out, Kristy and a few of the other maids had finished up early and were already in the break room when she walked in.
“Hey,” Kristy said. “I thought you’d be working with Hughes all afternoon.”
Colleen tried to come up with a lie to explain why she wasn’t writing game code at that very moment, but the moment she opened her mouth, the tears started again. All four women stared at her in surprise.
“Whoa.” Kristy grabbed a chair from the other table as Mia, Lauren and Gina scooted over to make room at the table. “Here. Sit.”
“What happened?” Mia asked as Colleen dropped into the chair. “Did he fire you?”
Colleen shook her head. “No. He…”
Lauren’s eyes narrowed. “Did he try something with you?”
“No!” Colleen grabbed a tissue from the box on the table and wiped her eyes. “Steve would never do something like that.”
“Steve? Since when did you start calling him Steve? Two weeks ago, he was Hughes this and Hughes that.” Kristy shared a look with the other women. “What haven’t you told us?”
Colleen hadn’t told them anything other than that she was working for Steve in the afternoons. So, she took a deep breath and told them everything. She left out the part about Steve spanking her, of course, which was probably a good idea considering how shocked they were when she told them she and Steve had slept together.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were seeing him?” Gina asked.
Colleen shrugged. “I wasn’t seeing him. Until this weekend. He asked me to stay for dinner Friday night and everything else sort of just happened. And now, he thinks I stole his game. If he should be accusing anyone, it should be his former business partner, Ed-the-scumbag-Fulton.”
Gina set down her coffee cup. “Ed Fulton?”
Colleen nodded. “Do you know him?”
“I don’t know if it’s the same guy, but I went out with this jerk named Ed Fulton a little while ago.”
Colleen sat up straighter in her chair. “Was he a computer programmer?”
Gina nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. In fact, that’s all he ever talked about. He thought I should be so impressed that he designed computer games. I’ve never met such an arrogant prick. He was lousy in bed, too. And if that wasn’t enough, I came out of the bathroom one night to find him going through my purse. The creep had the nerve to say he was looking for toll money because he didn’t have any change. Like I believed that. The son of a bitch was trying to steal from me.”
Colleen frowned. It couldn’t be. Could it? “Gina, where do you keep the security alarm codes for the houses you clean?”
“In an address book in my purse.” Gina’s eyes went wide. “Oh God, do you think that’s what he was looking for?”
Colleen nodded. “You keep an extra set of your clients’ house keys in your purse, too, don’t you? Just so you don’t have to go through the hassle of grabbing them from Caroline, right?”
It was against company policy, but all the maids had an extra set of keys made because Caroline was notorious for handing out the wrong keys during the morning rush.
Gina nodded wordlessly, her face pale.
“Fulton wasn’t trying to steal money from you,” Colleen said. “He was stealing the code for Steve’s security alarm. He probably asked you out because he knew you cleaned Steve’s house.”
Gina looked like she was about to be sick. “He even asked me once how I remembered all the codes for the security systems in the houses I clean. I told him I kept them in my purse. I
can’t believe I was so stupid.”
Colleen reached out to cover the other woman’s hand with her own. “It isn’t your fault, Gina. There was no way you could have known Fulton was going to steal the security codes. He must have made a copy of the key at the same time.”
“Well, it doesn’t make me feel any less responsible,” Gina muttered. “Or any less used. I feel like going over to that jerk’s house right now and giving that bastard a piece of my mind.”
“You know where Fulton lives?”
“Over in San Jose.”
Across the table from Colleen, Kristy eyed her warily. “Tell me you aren’t going to do anything stupid.”
Should she ask her friend to define stupid? Probably not.
“No,” Colleen lied. “I’m just going to give Fulton’s name and address to the police.”
Right after she checked to make sure he had Steve’s hard drives. She didn’t want the police tipping off Fulton and giving him a chance to get rid of the evidence. She’d learned that on those police procedural shows, too.
Thanks to MapQuest, she found Fulton’s house easily. She parked her car down the street, then casually made her way along the sidewalk and around the side of the house. Since she couldn’t exactly walk up and knock on the front door, she had to be stealthy.
Glancing over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being watched, Colleen crept over to the first window she came to and peeked inside. The house had an open floor plan like Steve’s, so she had an unobstructed view of the interior. She didn’t see Fulton anywhere. That didn’t mean he wasn’t home, though.
Making her way around to the back of the house, she found another window and cautiously looked inside. Her pulse quickened when she realized it was some kind of home office. Cupping her hands against the glass, she looked closer. A dozen hard drives sat on the desk. One of them had a cable hooked to it that led to a computer. Colleen could just make out numbers scrolling across the monitor. Crap. Fulton was downloading the code.
She turned and started for her car, but then stopped. There was no way for her to know if Fulton had just started downloading the information, or whether he was almost done. She hoped Steve had encrypted the data, but she wasn’t sure. What if Fulton finished before the police got here? Once Fulton had the data on his computer, Steve would never be able to prove it was his.
Colleen chewed on her lower lip. Her gaze went to the house again. There was only one way to help Steve—get the hard drives away from Fulton before he could steal the code and tell whatever gaming company he planned on selling it to that it was his work. That meant breaking into Fulton’s house in broad daylight.
But how was she going to do it? Colleen frowned as she studied the house’s exterior. She couldn’t break down the door or pick the lock. The first required too much strength and the second too much skill. However, she could break the window next to the door. All she had to do then was reach in and unlock it.
She looked around for something she could use to break the glass, and saw several small rocks lining perimeter of the flowerbed beside the house. She picked one up, but then hesitated. This was it. She was going to intentionally break into a house to get a guy’s computer game back for him. This had to be love, because it was the craziest thing she’d ever done.
Taking a deep breath, Colleen tightened her grip on the rock in her hand and smacked it against the window. She cringed at the loud noise the window made as it broke, glancing over her shoulder to make sure no one had heard. No one came running. That didn’t mean they hadn’t heard and weren’t calling the cops right now. Eager to get in and back out before someone came to investigate—or worse, Fulton came home—she carefully reached inside the opening and unlocked the door. Saying a silent prayer to Heaven that Fulton didn’t have a security alarm, she slowly pushed it open. Colleen carefully stepped over the broken glass, then closed the door behind her. She looked around, breathing a sigh of relief when she didn’t see a keypad for an alarm.
So far, so good.
The house was quiet and her breathing sounded loud in her own ears as she hurriedly made her way through the kitchen and down the hallway to Fulton’s home office. Once there, she made a beeline for the hard drives. One look at the computer monitor told her what she’d suspected. Fulton was running a program to decrypt the hard drive connected to it.
Swearing under her breath, she unhooked the hard drive from the computer and deleted everything the decryption software had already decoded. Cradling the hard drives in the crook of her arm, she turned to go when she spotted a gym bag on the floor beside the desk. She grabbed the bag and stuffed the hard drives into it.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Colleen jerked her head up to find a tall, blond-haired man standing in the doorway. At the incredulous look on his face, she could only assume he must be Steve’s former business partner, Ed Fulton.
Her hand tightened around the handle of the gym bag as she frantically tried to think of something to say. “I…I was just…”
Colleen’s voice trailed off as Fulton advanced on her, a menacing look in his eyes. Heart pounding, she backpedaled. Her gaze darted to the door. With Fulton between her and it, she had no hope of escape. Unless…
She waited until Fulton was right in front of her, then swung the bag full of hard drives at his head with all her strength. Fulton fell to his knees with a curse. Colleen wasted no time. Bag in hand, she raced out of the room and down the hallway into the kitchen. Yanking open the door, she flew outside, almost stumbling as she ran around the front of the house and down the street to where her car was parked.
Jumping in, she started the engine and put the car in gear just as Fulton came bounding out the front door and down the steps. Heart pounding so loud she could hear it, Colleen floored the gas pedal and sped away from the curb, too afraid to look back to see if she was being followed.
* * * * *
Steve swore under his breath as he stared at the useless computers and blank monitors. He’d been a fool to trust Colleen. And if he hadn’t been so distracted by her pretty face and sexy ass, he would have known something about her had been off. Hell, everything about her had been off. What computer programmer would get a job as a freaking maid, for crying out loud?
Shit.
That was the last time he ever listened to what his gut told him about anything. And it was sure as hell the last time he thought with his dick, that was for damn sure. God, he’d been so stupid. And the worst part was that he’d let himself fall for her.
There was a piece of him that wanted to believe he was wrong about her, but nothing, not even the tears in her beautiful blue eyes when she’d begged him to believe her could refute the evidence. There had been no forced entry, which meant whoever had stolen his hard drives had the security code to the alarm and the key to his house. No one had those except his maid.
He shook his head. She couldn’t possibly think she was going to get away with it. The police were going to search her apartment and find those hard drives. Unless she’d hidden them somewhere else. Or was working with a partner. Like Fulton? The thought made his jaw clench.
The doorbell rang, interrupting his thoughts. It’d probably be too much to hope that it was cops coming to tell him they’d found his hard drives.
The bell chimed again, more insistently this time. Someone was impatient. He jogged across the living room and into the foyer to yank open the door.
“Steve, thank God!”
He stepped back as Colleen rushed in, partly because he was stunned to see her, but mostly because she would have knocked him down if he hadn’t.
“What the hell—?” he began, but she cut him off.
“It was Fulton who stole your game, not me.” She whirled around to face him. “He got the security code for the alarm from one of the other maids who cleaned your house. And before you ask, I won’t tell you which maid. He tricked her into going out with him, then stole the security code and the extr
a set of keys to your house when she wasn’t looking.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Because I went to his house to see if he stole your hard drives. By the time I got there, he was already starting to decrypt them.” She stopped to take a breath. “I know I should have called the police, but I was worried that if they didn’t get there in time Fulton would take off with your game, so I broke in and took the hard drives back.”
Steve’s gaze went to the bag in her hand. What the hell kind of game was she playing now? Did she honestly expect him to believe she’d broken into Fulton’s house and gotten his hard drives back? More likely, she’d decided to return the hard drives because the cops were this close to tossing her in jail.
Still, the look on her face made him stop and think. She was either the best actress in the world, or she was really telling him the truth. Could he have been that wrong about her?
“Colleen—” he began, only to be cut off by the sound of a man’s voice.
“Is a regular Nancy-fucking-Drew, isn’t she?”
Steve turned to see Ed standing in the doorway. He couldn’t say he was surprised to see his former partner. The only question was whether the man were working with Colleen or not. But the gun the man had trained on both of them gave him all the answer he needed. He had been wrong about Colleen. And now they were probably both going to end up dead because of it.
Shit.
He stepped closer to Colleen. Regardless of how much he wanted to pull her into his arms and apologize right then, Steve’s gaze never wavered from Ed, or the gun in his hand. “I should have known you were the one who stole my game.”
Ed kept the gun trained on them as he closed the door. “When I heard you were coming up with a new game, I couldn’t help myself. Can you blame me? If the thing is even half as popular as your other games, I’ll still be set for life.” He glanced at Colleen. “Things would have been a lot simpler if your girlfriend hadn’t stuck her nose where it didn’t belong, of course. Now, I’m going to have to get rid of both of you.”
Steve inched closer to Colleen, putting himself between her and his crazy-ass ex-partner. “You’d kill us over a stupid game? How greedy can you be? You’re already a millionaire thanks to the games we sold when we worked together.”