Her expression turned so nonchalant that he almost laughed at the emotional U-turn on her face.
"I repositioned a camera to point at the flowerbed with the hibiscus."
She nodded her understanding.
"Motion triggers it, and it sends me a notification. Someone walked up to it. And he's removing something from the flower bed."
She acknowledged the news well. Her nod, mechanical. Her expression, indifferent. But he could see the wheels spinning in her head.
"Your friends can let you know who it is?"
"I think I know who it is, but I need them to confirm. And yes, I think we've got clear enough images that they can work with."
He waited for her eyes to meet his.
"I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's the same guy who started the fire on the pier."
She reached for her water and took a long drink. Fear crept into her eyes.
He needed to temper her alarm.
"This is good news, actually," he said. "It gives my team more to work with. We already knew something tragic happened. So it's good we have more to analyze. Someone to look into."
"Yeah," she said, just above a whisper. "I guess that's a good thing. They can find who's responsible."
The gravity of the whole situation hovered. A suffocating fog obliterating his ability to segue back to a casual conversation.
Thankfully, the waiter arrived and took their order, forcing them to pretend for a minute that they were a vacationing couple enjoying a delightful meal at a Caribbean resort.
The conversation lightened incrementally over the next half hour while they enjoyed shrimp, fresh fruit, and slices of cassava pone, a Caribbean cake-like dessert he'd wanted to try.
He checked the time on his phone. "When do we need to pick up Nutmeg?"
She slid her phone out of her purse and checked her messages. "He's not ready yet. They were running a little behind. They said they'll text me when he's done."
"Good," Nash said. He wasn't disappointed that they needed to kill more time. "Let's walk down to the beach. The Mandeville's Wi-Fi reaches their beach area, not anything beyond that, but we won't go far. If we're going tosit around and wait, we might as well wait on a gorgeous tropical beach."
"Not a bad idea, Mr. Stone." Her smile, soft and genuine, sandblasted some of the rust off his corroded heart. The effect she had on him was growing impossible to ignore.
He wasn't convinced a relationship was something he should pursue, though. So many ways that train could derail.
God, please give me wisdom. I didn't think I'd ever . . . Lena is confusing me. Please guide me.
The Mandeville Resort sat at the end of Isadora Island, with an entire mile of white sand Caribbean beach outlining two sides of the resort property.
When they rounded the end of the hotel building and neared the private beachfront, Lena's appreciative gasp made Nash grin.
"Yeah,"he said. "Not a bad view."
"It's breathtaking. Even more so than Emil's beach property. You can see so much more from here. I can see the cliffs in the distance."
He glanced up and down the beach. Several sets of Adirondack chairs welcomed tourists at different spots along the shore. It crossed his mind that the group of chairs farthest to the right were situated at the location where Jason, Knox, Allie, and Tayla were nearly victims of a bomb explosion weeks ago. The guilty parties were arrested or long-gone. But he still didn't want to sit in that exact spot. He also decided it best not to share that particular anecdote with Lena.
He pointed in the opposite direction. "There are a couple of chairs over there." He pointed to two light blue chairs in the shade of a copse of palms, maybe thirty feet from the incoming surf.
"Looks perfect." She slipped off her shoes, stepped into the sand, and flashed a smile at him that did that sandblasting thing again.
Oh, boy. Steady, Stone.
