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It wasafter ten in the morning by the time Ronan returned to the house. He and Nick had abandoned their post outside Moran’s office after midnight when the congressman left. They’d followed him home, then abandoned that location when several hours passed withoutmovement.
Ronan had been too wound up to go home. He’d dropped Nick at his car at the office and taken the elevator to MIS’s headquarters on the fifth floor, running down the ways he could get a tap on the phones of Whitmore Club members likeMoran.
It wouldn’t be hard to tap one or two of them, but the club had twenty board members. Ronan needed to narrow thefield.
Mark Reilly, their greeter-slash-security-detail, wasn’t yet at the office and Declan was undoubtedly still in bed with another Boston beauty. The whole place had the hushed air of a library, which suited Ronan’s purposes justfine.
He’d spent the next three hours reviewing the details of Elise’s case, going over every person of interest their investigation had uncovered, looking for stones that had not yet beenturned.
When he’d been through all the data, he called Clay to check on the work his team was doing to uncover the owners behind the club in Dubai. Clay was still working, butting his digital head against seemingly impenetrable firewalls and security protocols that frustrated him every bit as much as it frustratedRonan.
They’d never been able to track the home server of the Manifest site that had led Ronan and Julia to the Whitmore Club and Dubai. Whoever was structuring Manifest’s digital security was better than good, something Clay took as a personalchallenge.
Ronan had sat at his desk, his eyes pulled to the sea, a reflection of the lightening sky beyond his office’s glass walls. Nick’s words echoed in his mind, a warning: as much as Nick and Declan had come to care for Julia, they wouldn’t sanction use of the company’s resources on the Berenger case forever. Sometimes cutting your losses was good business, a fact even Ronan couldn’tdeny.
But he would not cut his losses on Julia’s sister. Not until she was ready to do so, and that would never happen. By the time he left the office he was already planning how he could keep working the case without MIS, how he would hand off the company’s leadership to Nick, bring in Reilly to work in the field, hire someone else to secure the frontdesk.
Theirs was a lucrative business. An invisible cash business. Ronan had plenty of money stashed. They all did, in part thanks to Nick’s wise investments. Ronan would use every penny to find Elise on his own if that’s what it came to, anything to ease the pain in Julia’s eyes, to break down the last barrier she held betweenthem.
It was the thought of her — at home in his bed, her eyes sleepy as she stretched, her fingers stroking Chief’s fur as she woke up — that finally got him out of theoffice.
When he stepped into the kitchen, she was at the counter, a cup of coffee and the newspaper in front of her, Chief at her feet. He was surprised to see Declan standing at the stove, cooking eggs andbacon.
Chief ran over, shoving her wet nose into Ronan’s palm. “Hey, girl. Are you begging for food again?” He baby-talked to the dog. “Julia thinks I don’t know she feeds you bacon but Ido.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Julia said. Was it his imagination that her eyes lit up when she saw him? Wishful thinking? “Longnight?”
He nodded and leaned down to kiss her. “Long night.” He looked at Declan, wondering if he’d already gotten rid of his one-night stand or if he’d had a rare night alone. “Losing yourcharm?”
“Very funny,” Declan said, turning off the heat on the bacon. A lock of dark hair fell over his forehead, a cowlick from childhood that he’d never outgrown. “I’m not a rabbit, youknow.”
“Ew,” Julia said without looking up from thepaper.
“He’s the one who brought it up,” Declansaid.
Ronan plucked a piece of bacon from the hot frying pan. “What’s theoccasion?”
Even as he asked, he knew the answer: it washer.
Julia.
She had a way of drawing them all out, bringing them together for baseball games in the living room and home-cooked meals in thekitchen.
Six months ago he would have said nothing was missing from the house. He’d lived with his brothers long enough that everything operated like a finely oiled machine. They each had their jobs and they each did them, except for Dec, who neededreminders.
Sometimes they’d ordered a pizza or had beers when they got home from the office, but they’d returned quickly to their own activities or respective wings of the house. Nick might have a date, the details of which he kept to himself with women that, like Ronan, he never brought home. Declan would be out prowling the city with his friends from college, looking to score a woman he wouldn’t hesitate to bring back to thehouse.
Ronan’s life was even less exciting — extra hours at the office or in the field, an occasional one-night stand at someone else’s place, runs with Chief by thewater.
Something had shifted since Julia had been staying with them. She was like a magnet, drawing them out from their corners, pulling them into her orbit with the smell of homemade cookies in the kitchen or reality TV in the living room, something she swore she hadn’t watched before Elise wentmissing.
The shows were a source of entertainment for them all, causing them to shout and jeer at the TV like they were the World Series, pitting them against each other in their bets of who would cheat next, who would get a rose, who would be kickedout.
It was an escape for them all, not just the TV but the house that had become a refuge against everything ugly and painful. He saw it in the way Julia spent so much time there, leaving only to walk the beach with Ronan and Chief or visit her grandfather for their weeklydinners.
As a freelance network security specialist, she was uniquely qualified to analyze Clay’s data, but she combed through it curled up on the couch with her laptop or sitting at the kitchen island, head bent to the screen, glasses sliding off hernose.
