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Five minutes later, she was in his office, pushing the painting to access the safe. She placed the decoder over the keypad and turned it on.
She went back to her room and quietly started packing, checking on the decoder every fifteen minutes or so. After the first hour, she went to the kitchen and started packing food. Once she was gone, she planned to hunker down in her hotel room and figure out her next steps.
Her heart skipped a beat at the thought. What if this was it? In the next hour or so, she could be holding the Jewel of the Sea in her hands. She’d spent so long dreaming about recovering her legacy that the thought of being this close was paralyzing.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The decoder might not even work.
She crept down the hallway toward the office and pushed open the door. Then she gasped.
It was finished. All she has to do was turn the handle.
You do this, there’s no going back. You don’t get to keep him. You don’t get to pretend that Diana and Rafe could have been together.
That thought kept her frozen in position for way too long. She wanted to be with him. She wanted to stay. She wanted to feel his not-so-gentle kiss on her lips. She wanted to make him lose control again, but next time without the benefit of drugs. She wanted him to be that desperate for her. The only thing he’ll feel now is desperation to catch you.
No. It was too late for all that. She’d made her bed before she ever came here. Gripping the brushed-nickel handle, she turned it down. The safe gave way with no audible sound. The door cleared to reveal a few folders, several stacks of cash and a thumb drive.
No diamond.
And instead of disappointment, Diana felt a brief flash of joy that it wasn’t there.
When her thoughts stopped swirling, she reached out and took everything out of the safe. A few bundles of cash. A stack of folders. A flash drive.
She grabbed the tiny laptop Charisse had retrieved for her. She needed to know what was on that drive.
There was just one problem. She wanted Rafe to be the man she’d gotten to know over these past few weeks, not the killer she’d been told he was. Either way, she was going to have to hurt him, and there was no way she was going to get to keep him.
chapter sixteen
She shoved the flash dr
ive inside. The command prompt told her it would take three minutes to decrypt the files, and she wasted no time.
She took the laptop back to her room and set it on the bed. Then she opened the closet to look for something to put her things in, finally settling on a small duffel bag. She’d gathered everything together, but she couldn’t very well carry it all in a shopping bag. Still, she hesitated before taking it, but she knew what she had to do. Funny that after everything she’d done to him, she paused at the thought of stealing his duffel bag.
He’s not going to care about the bag once he realizes what you’ve done. The annoying little voice in the back of her mind just wouldn’t stop pointing out the obvious.
While the files were still opening, she packed the rest of her things. She had to be ready to move. Rafe wouldn’t sleep forever, and she was already pushing it. Maybe part of her was hoping he’d wake early and stop her from leaving. He’d tell her that he didn’t care who she was or that she’d been plotting against him from the start, that he loved her anyway and they could take on the world together.
Yeah, right.
But even as she sneered at the overly sappy thought, her heart banged a mournful beat in her chest. She could deny it all she wanted, but there would always be a part of her that wished that scenario could be real. Her stomach clenched.
She should stop the pretending. He’d hate her in mere hours.
By the time she finished shoving her clothes in the bag and had swiped all her toiletries from the bathroom sink as well, the computer was done. She clicked on the program to see just what Rafe had deemed important enough to keep under lock and key.
She understood why it had taken so long. There were so many files. Names, dates, account numbers. Her mouth fell open as she accessed document after document.
Classified files.
Diana covered her mouth as she read through profiles on foreign dignitaries and notorious crime lords from around the world. These files contained everything about the person in question, including their family members and their routines. What was all this?
As she kept reading, her stomach seized up. The people in these files were not good men. Certainly not the kind of men she wanted to have information on.
Drug lords, murderers, terrorists and human traffickers. Why would Rafe have profiles on these men? If Rafe associated with these kinds of people, he couldn’t be the man she thought he was.
Then she opened another file, and her father’s face filled the screen.
