I reached for my phone to check the time: 3:22 a.m.
I’d assumed Jagger was in the bathroom, but now I wondered.
I reached for one of the Hawks’ shirts, discarded on the floor, and realized it was Hawk’s when I caught the scent of cold air and leather. I thought of the barn, Freya and Ares swooping over the fields.
Powerful. Free.
I carried my phone out of the room and walked into the hall, then headed downstairs.
I found Jagger in the living room with his laptop, a legal pad next to him on the sofa, his handwriting scrawled across it in black pen.
He was in black sweats and nothing else, the tattoos on his chest crawling like shadows in the light from the table lamp casting a soft glow over the room. His cheeks and jaw were shaded with the whiskers that had scratched erotically at my inner thighs when he’d buried his face in my pussy in the coffee shop.
“Hey,” I said, walking into the room.
He looked up. “Hey.”
“Can’t sleep?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I need to crack this. We have all this shit, all this data. I’m trying to work it into some kind of key that might tell me where Dimitri’s men are headed next.”
“Can I help?”
He set his laptop aside on the sofa and pulled me onto his lap.
He slipped a hand between my thighs and nuzzled my neck. “Can I fuck you again?”
I set my phone on the end table. “I think the whipped cream chafed my lady bits. Maybe I’m lactose intolerant.”
He laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “There must be something I can do to help.”
“I think I’m close actually.”
“Really?”
He reached for his laptop. “I started building a history, looking for patterns.”
“Patterns?”
He nodded. “It’s what we did on Wall Street. You start to get a feel for it. It’s like a… like a rhythm. Sometimes you know something’s going up and down on news or annual reports, but other times, it’s a feeling, and that feeling isn’t as random as it seems. It’s based on the patterns your brain starts to recognize without even realizing it.”
“I still don’t understand.”
He tabbed to a spreadsheet. “Kaprolov can block the plane’s tail number from real-time tracking — that’s a safety measure, a way to allow private aircraft owners some privacy when they travel — but the flight numberisn’tblocked from historical records.”
“What kind of historical records?”
I was glad he’d removed his hand from between my thighs because honestly, it had been distracting.
“Airport movement logs, FBO arrival boards, refueling records, that kind of thing.”
“So how does that help us if it’s stuff that already happened?” I asked. “We need to know where they’re going, not where they’ve been.”
“Unless…” Jagger clicked on a tab at the bottom of his spreadsheet, “where they’ve been points to where they’re going.”
The first flutter of excitement started in my stomach. “Explain.”
