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Her cheeks flamed as her blood thundered through her veins.
She scrolled down. A photo of a well-known buyer for a major department store sniffing white powder off a woman’s naked butt appeared next, with the headline: How Certain Fashion Lines End Up in Stores.
The bubbles in her abdomen popped, replaced by a panic that squeezed her kidneys.
The final image had been taken outside of her apartment building. It showed her smiling and walking down the steps, waving to an unseen someone in the distance. A crudely drawn cartoon dialogue bubble floated over her head: Hi! My Name Is Sylvie Bissette and I’m the High-Heeled Wonder!
Her fingers fumbled frantically on the touch screen as she typed in her password on the blog login page. Denied. She tried again. And again. Each time, an error message flashed across the screen. Damn! She’d meant to change the password last night, but after getting all freaked out seeing Tony’s file on her fathers, she’d forgotten about doing it. The asshole stalker must have changed the password. She couldn’t access her own site.
She stumbled backward until her back hit the wall. The phone slipped from her fingers, whacking against the hardwood floor with a hollow thud. My God. Those horrible posts. Mean. Ugly. Nasty. The bastard had turned her whole life to shit with the click of a mouse. He wouldn’t be the only one calling for her to shut down the blog now. If it hadn’t been her own Web site, she’d be one of the voices calling for the blogger’s head.
Her muscles screaming with the need for action, she swiped her phone off the floor, tossed it onto the bed, and paced the twelve-by-fourteen room. Fury boiled her blood to cold fusion levels. Which cleared her thinking and let her brain zero in on what needed to be done. Like Rocky, she apparently had to get knocked around before she could work up enough anger to land a killer punch.
She really wanted to pull the asshole’s fingernails out with a rusty pair of pliers. But that was way too good for the bastard. No. This dirtbag needed to be stripped of his anonymity and exposed for everyone to see, along with his crimes. There had to be something in those posts that gave him away.
She’d find it, and she’d nail his ass to the wall.
She couldn’t wait. She stormed out of Tony’s bedroom. Pumped up on righteous indignation, she peeled around the corner into the kitchen—
And jerked to a stop.
The early morning sunlight filtered in through a bay window, casting a warm glow around Tony, who wore a pair of worn jeans frayed at the bottom…and nothing else.
Bare toes.
Hard abs.
A police shield bisected by a black band tattooed on his left shoulder.
Her insides went gooey and she caught her breath. The man before her was very bad in a very, very good way. “W-when did you get back?” she stammered.
“About ten minutes ago. Long enough for a quick shower.” He cracked an egg on the edge of a frying pan, and the yolk sizzled as soon as it hit the heated surface. “Ready for breakfast?”
She knew just how that little yellow goop felt. “I’m so ready.”
“Good. Grab an orange juice and sit down. These will be done in a second.”
Her brain jerked back into control, resurrecting her anger and bringing high indignation along as backup. Spending the morning eyeballing Tony’s six-pack out of the corner of her eye was so not going to happen. “Wait. We don’t have time to eat.”
He flipped the egg and then reached up and took down the pepper from a cabinet. A few sprinkles and he slid the egg out of the pan and onto a plate. The motion set off a ripple of muscles across his back. “There’s always time for breakfast,” he said calmly.
“Somebody hacked into the High-Heeled Wonder and put all sorts of hateful crap on my blog. Like I wrote it. Plus they outed me.”
He paused, the pan hovering above the stovetop. The muscles in his shoulders danced for a moment, and then he clanked the Faberware down and grabbed the plate with a curse.
“So much for having one single fucking thing in our favor with this stalker.” Tony laid a blue plate loaded with toast, strawberries, and a fried egg on the table in front of her. “I’ll go grab my laptop. You eat.”
“What is with you and food?”
“I’m Italian.” He shrugged. “Eat.”
Sylvi
e had finished crunching her way through the toast when he returned, his fingers thrumming across the keyboard as he walked.
“Can you hack into the site so I can take that shit down?”
“Yes, but I won’t.”
