“Stop teasing her, Louis. She’s had a rough night, not least because the two of us pounced on her.”
Nice of him to lay the blame on themselves. She knew—they all did—that wasn’t what had happened.
Melinda grabbed her bag from Louis and pushed past him. With these two around, knickers were a must. At the bedroom door she turned, the twins hunched over, deep in quiet conversation. About her? Or about the job they were leaving behind in London? She’d like to know what that was. What type of security Wolf Enterprises undertook. Celebrities? Government officials? Or did they stray into the darker side of society? Clients like thoseshefound on the dark web?
She ducked into the bedroom and changed, ignoring a set of red lacy underwear Pierre had packed in favor of a white cotton bra and panties. Much more together once she was no longergoing commando, she returned to the main cabin. Louis was gone, leaving her alone with Pierre.
Melinda fussed over Manchu, giving him a cuddle, water and some cat biscuits before taking a seat opposite Pierre. In front of him sat his laptop. To the side, pushed up against the wall of the jet, hers. Had he…? Suspicion curled in her gut. What if…? What if she’d made a terrible mistake? Trusting them? They’d said they were taking her to California. How would she know any different if they weren’t?
She swiveled in her seat, staring down the aisle toward the front of the plane. “Has Louis gone to talk to the pilot?”
“Oui.He’s checking that everything is fine with the flight plans we filed. That Buchanan Airfield is expecting us, and our contact is in place to make sure we get through customs smoothly.”
Oh. Buchanan Airfield. It sounded American. She reached for her laptop. “Does the jet have Wi-Fi?” She’d do a search, though there was nothing to stop Pierre from lying to her.
He cocked an eyebrow at her over his screen. “Of course it does. We’re hackers. What use would a jet be if we didn’t?”
Yeah. Stupid question. If she had a private jet, she’d make sure she had connectivity, too.
“Melinda, about last night…”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it. What happened between us was a one—”
“I meant in your apartment.”
Oh.She blinked. Well, that told her where she stood. Already forgotten.
He tapped a few keys on his laptop and swiveled it around to face her. On the screen, a photo of a man’s neck with a tattoo of an elaborate F. “Have you ever seen this tattoo before?”
It was pretty. The font stylized, interconnecting swirls curling around it, and two crossed swords suspended above it. She shook her head. “No. Why?”
“The man who attacked you had one.”
A chill ran down her spine. They’d taken a photo of it? Or had they hacked into the police database? But where was the blood? There would have had to have been blood. Louis had… What? Ripped the man’s throat out with his bare teeth? Had she imagined that part? Fabricated a kind of horror flick version of events as a way of dealing with what had happened? It was all a blur, compounded by the darkness. Her cowering in the closet, the wail of the alarm, the intruder standing over her holding a gun.
Louis returned to the cabin and threw himself into a chair next to Manchu. Her cat hissed. Like Melinda, the events in her flat were still too fresh in his mind. Louis grinned at her, and she tried to imagine those perfect white teeth being capable of ripping apart a man’s throat.
She raked her hands through her hair. These men didn’t deserve her suspicion. Without them, she’d be dead. “I never said thank you for last night. In my flat. For being there. For stopping… Thank you.” She swept her gaze over the cabin. “And for flying me all the way to California. In your company’s private jet, no less. You must have a very understanding boss.”
Leather squeaked as Pierre leaned back in his chair. “We wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Louis nodded, backing up his brother’s statement.
Melinda didn’t know what to make of the emotion that fluttered in her chest, so she ignored it and booted up her laptop. The low battery warning lit up her screen. Odd. Her battery had been full when the intruder had interrupted her, and though she’d just closed the lid, sending it into sleep mode, it shouldn’t have drained the battery completely. Had Pierre been messing with her computer? While she slept in his brother’s arms? The thought stung.
If he had, it wouldn’t take much for her to find out. But would she be happy with the answer? Despite Pierre’s brush off about their tango between the sheets, she really wanted them to be the good guys.
Chapter Fourteen
Pierre caught the narrowing of Melinda’s eyes from behind dark frames as she plugged her laptop in. Did she suspect? Did she know? Had he tripped another of her trigger alarms? She was good at that. Hiding IDS alerts in her work. If he’d found her password, if he’d logged on, he would have destroyed any evidence he’d been there, but he hadn’t got that far.
Though he knew as much as anyone about Melinda as could be gleaned from her digital footprint, and from watching her for three weeks, he’d not bothered to try cracking her encryption on his own. No, Melinda was good a hacker. She would have a strong password, void of anything personal. So he’d connected his laptop with hers, and set running a clever program Louis had developed for instances such as this.
As it churned away, he’d sent a neat little virus to the server hosting the security feed for their apartment. Any evidence, any footage of either his or Louis’ presence there, gone with the press of a key. He’d corrupted the entire security system, and anything else using that server. Then he’d wiped any stored footage in the cameras. The ones in Melinda’s apartment, too.
He’d searched the police database for early reports on the callout to her apartment. A call from Laurent earlier had let them know he’d taken care of the Faucherian. How he’d managed that when the police had already been on the scene, he hadn’t asked. All that mattered was the body was unlikely to ever see the light of day again. But that wasn’t their only problem. The crime scene techs had gathered and bagged a lot of evidencebefore Laurent had arrived. Taking and disposing of the body was the best he could manage. The rest was up to them.
Pierre needed to know what evidence the police had collected and logged. If there was anything significant, or that implicated either him or Louis. If there was any way he could keep Melinda’s name out of it, and stop the police from following her here. That her passport was in her name and her apartment bought under a false identity with no easy-to-find links to her was helpful.
