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Chloe returned to a wide single chair that was angled toward the couch. “What the hell is up?” she demanded with a mixture of concern and amusement.
“What’s up is that Andrew here seems to think I’m his—”
“You are,” an emphatic male voice said.
She glared at him. “You think I’m your idiot eighteenth-century wife or your tossed-away little woman waiting for you, that’s what you think.”
“I don’t think Andrew believes that, Whit,” Chloe said.
A new voice broke suddenly into the turmoil, this one calm, low, and gruff. “I suggest you don’t engage in girl therapy here right now, baby,” Graves told Chloe without even lifting his attention from the opened back of Whitney’s cellular phone.
“Yes, baby, this is obviously not the time. Lunch tomorrow, Whit?” Chloe pressed, a blond eyebrow rising.
Whitney agreed with a brief nod, and Graves raised his head and
his striking gold eyes, which had a light downward tilt at the corners that made him look sad and “unbearably hot”—this quote was from Chloe—slid from Andrew, to Whitney, and back and forth. “All right, so the way this works is that both your phone and Andrew’s have been equipped with a self-destruct chip that you can activate when receiving a call from the other. Kidnappers frequently use their victim’s phones to communicate with their families when they require a ransom.” He held one of the phones in the air and pantomimed what he said. “If Andrew gets the call on his cell phone, he can press the star and the zero simultaneously for five seconds and activate yours to self-destruct. And vice versa.”
Whitney was still caught on the phrase “self-destruct.” “You mean you’re putting a bomb in our phones?”
“Not so you can use it on me,” Andrew emphasized.
“It’s a very small bomb,” Graves calmly added. “It only has the capacity to injure the one holding it. For kidnapping situations, it has been set up to require two phone calls, one to activate, and as soon as the phone is used the next time, it will go off. Now, in the case of personal attack, you can activate your own phone by pressing star and zero for five seconds, and then slip it into their pockets or toss it in their direction.”
“Like a grenade.” Whitney stated that last bit, and when Graves calmly nodded like they were talking about pasta, she decided she wasn’t sure whether she loved her new Bond 007 phone, or wanted nothing to do with it. With her luck it would self-destruct in her own damn purse all by itself, and destroy her in the process.
“Whitney, don’t look so concerned!” Chloe laughingly cried. “Graves does this all the time for the government. Your phone locks on its own. There’s no way both buttons will be pressed accidentally.”
Whitney was hesitant to grab the phone Graves now held outstretched toward her.
When three taps on the door sounded, her eyes flicked upward from studying the apparatus. It was a struggle not to notice the fluid way Andrew moved across the living room as he went to open it.
He returned to the living room with Daniel trailing behind him, and there was just something about that man that was sexy as hell.
“Hey, baby sis,” he said first, and Chloe instantly stood to smack a kiss noisily on his jaw. Then he turned to her. “Whitney.” His smile was charming as he greeted her.
“Hey, Danny.”
She felt a perverse sort of satisfaction seeing how Andrew’s face tightened as Danny came over to embrace her in his big Viking arms.
Daniel Lexington was one of the most followed non–entertainment industry billionaires in Chicago; the press adored him. His smile. His glinting green eyes. His masculine billboard face. Whitney loved him as the brother she’d never had.
“All right, so Fairchild tells me he wants you protected?” Easily he settled down next to her. He retrieved a small silver artifact from his jacket pocket, which looked tiny in his long fingers as he turned it around for her inspection. “So this is what Tritech has been working on as far as personal protection gadgets go. It’s still in its testing stages, but you could definitely make good use of it. See this little spider?” He set it in the center of his large palm and showed his a dazzlingly white smile.
Nodding, Whitney smiled back and enjoyed those sparkling green eyes watching her. Those eyes didn’t make her ache inside like a pair of dark liquid coal ones, and they actually made her feel good for a change instead of betrayed.
“If you activate this little red button,” Daniel continued, “it’s going to send a signal to headquarters. But if you click the blue button, you need to be sure to keep this little sucker’s belly away from you.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s a tiny, but very powerful stun gun, and it will immobilize your attacker for a good couple of seconds.”
Andrew had already brought his big body over and when he spoke, he sounded about as grumpy as a bear recently out of hibernation. “How early in the testing stages are you?” he asked.
“It’s perfectly safe and it’s not completely untried. Cade tried it on himself only last week at poker night and he’s still an asshole. So, no damage done.”
“You mean Cade West?” At both Graves’s and Daniel’s chuckles, Andrew tossed his head and burst out laughing. “He must have been disappointed it didn’t kill him.”
Whitney couldn’t help smiling. Only a man as positively suicidal as Cade West would try a damn Taser on himself. She knew he was among Andrew’s friends who didn’t give a shit about anything, much less his life.
