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She replayed every moment of the night on her drive to the resort. Every touch and sigh and taste. In fact, she was so turned on by the time she pulled up to the garage that she almost turned the car around and went back. She could pick up breakfast, then wake him with something even sweeter than donuts. They could have a perfect morning together before they had to part.
But no. She wasn’t going to be one of those clingy women. How many girls had wanted everything from him? And how many of those had he walked away from? No. Charlie didn’t get walked out on if she could help it. She did the walking. Unless, of course, the relationship ended up with an arrest. Once there were handcuffs involved, the semantics of it took on a smaller significance.
Regardless, she wasn’t going to sit on his lap and feed him breakfast. She wouldn’t fall that far. So just as the first hint of pink broke above the hills behind her, Charlie pulled into the resort garage and left that amazing night behind.
After dropping her bag in her studio, she headed straight downstairs to the surveillance room. Every office was still dark. If the resort were up and running, she would’ve at least passed by a housekeeping supervisor or two, but the place was eerily empty at this hour. Thank God.
She shut the door behind her and fired up the monitors. The feeds automatically drew her eye, but the rest of the hotel was dead quiet, too. Time to do what she’d come here for.
Starting with yesterday at 8:00 p.m., she worked back through the digital video. It was tedious and took forever, even when she pulled four feeds at once.
Once she’d made it through twelve hours of half the feeds, she started feeling stupid. There was nothing here. Keith owned the resort. He’d been making the rounds. There was nothing odd about that.
Charlie stood and stretched with a groan of frustration; then she forced herself to sit back down. There was no point doing this half-assed.
Thirty minutes later, she’d convinced herself she was on a wild-goose chase. She saw Keith in the videos, but he was only walking from office to office, or occasionally stopping to chat with an employee in a hallway. She made notes of each time she saw him, but the notes were about to make a quick acquaintance with the trash.
Charlie slumped in her chair and watched yesterday’s video of an interior decorator instructing a crew on exactly where a giant statue of an eagle should be placed. Charlie would have to head down to the lobby to check it out. It was a damn impressive bird.
A glance at the clock told her the sun would be fully up by now. If she wanted to go for a run, she’d have to head out in the next five minutes or there wouldn’t be time to shower before her shift.
“Shit.” She ran her hands through her hair and took a deep breath. All right. She was done with all this. Her instincts were off, yet again. She should quit this job and open a cozy shop somewhere in the countryside. She could sell... Oh, hell, what did she know anything about? Dirty greeting cards, maybe?
The monitor glared accusingly at her. She glared back. “Damn.”
Charlie pulled up the activity logs for the computer, then waited for them to load. And suddenly—just like that—all thoughts of a run vanished from her mind.
Keith had logged in at 9:00 p.m.
Keith had waited for Charlie to leave and then he’d come back to the surveillance room and he’d logged in to this computer and he’d screwed around with her files.
She wasn’t losing anything. Her instincts were just fine. She just had to learn to trust them again.
“Motherfu...” Charlie sat forward and fired up the video feeds again. She called up every instance of Keith’s appearance and then worked forward from there. Hours went by without anything suspicious. Then she saw it. A skip in the numbers. She backed up and looked again.
There. She backed up further. Ten minutes before the skip, Keith went into his office. Then there was a twenty-second-long skip. Fifteen minutes later, another brief skip in the time stamp.
Someone had come to see him. Someone’s arrival and departure had been deleted from the feed. She marked the times, then started working through each camera.
Yes. The next camera down the hallway had the same two cuts, different by only a few seconds.
“That little shit,” she growled. He’d been thorough. Really thorough.
She followed the logical path of video for someone proceeding from the garage to Keith’s office. There were a few missteps, but she eventually tracked down every digital cut.
Staring at the list she’d made, she racked her brain for some detail he could have missed, but even the parking garage footage had been altered.
Then she remembered the elevators. Those camera numbers were in a different order and the feed went to different software. “Bingo,” she breathed as she pulled up that program and opened the files.
It took her two minutes to identify the right camera, and then she had it. A light-haired woman walked onto the elevator, head down. She pushed a button, smoothed down her skirt and then looked up as the floor numbers ticked by.
“Holy shit,” Charlie wheezed. The person who’d come to see Keith was Nicole Fletcher. More important, the person whose presence Keith didn’t want anyone to know about was Nicole Fletcher. “Seriously?” Charlie barked. She couldn’t get away from this bitch.
A memory from the charity party flashed over her. When she’d still been huddled with Walker, she’d glanced over to see Keith talking to Nicole. Nicole had touched his arm and he’d pulled away. Charlie had been so wrapped up in her own embarrassment that she’d overlooked that. She’d thought Keith’s self-consciousness had been something to do with his employee making out in public.
But no...there had been that touch.
Keith was having an affair. Dawn had been smart to be worried; she’d just been worried about the wrong trashy woman in her life. It wasn’t Charlie; it was Nicole.
