AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He just hated those little rodent assholes. “I have…mice.”
“No kidding. Signs are all over the place here.”
“But there isn’t a whole lot of dust. Hell, maybe whoever turned on the lights has a Roomba around this place?”
“I seriously doubt it. I hate that this kind of personal information is just lying around here, making mouse bedding.” She pulled stacks of brown files from a wooden cabinet next. “This is confidential information here. We’re going to have to report this. You and I accessed this personal information in five minutes. This is an identity thief’s candy store. Break the windows, take the information, and—bam—identity theft without the work.”
“No kidding. I have the Ds here. Davids, Davis, Daviess—twos’s, Davies—ones—Davison, and Davidson.”
“I have four Alvaros—oner, two Alvarros, twor’s, and six Alvarezes.” She looked at him, pushing her hair out of her eyes. Man, he loved that woman’s dark eyes. Stole his soul every time she looked at him. “And that was just in this room.”
“There may be more. So, babe, let’s get to it.”
“Don’t call me babe, Lake. Just don’t.”
“How about ‘love of my life’? See, now that we don’t work together any longer, I can finally express my undying devotion.” He just kept digging through the filing cabinets. As if what he was saying wasn’t actually the truth. “And if you keep me safe from the mice in here, I will marry you and have your five-point-eight babies. I’ll keep your mansion clean, and I will definitely warm your sheets anytime you want. And since I already know how to cook—Pen told me once that you don’t all that well—I will have homecooked meals for you each day after you get home from earning the bacon, too.”
“You are something, aren’t you? Weren’t you chronically cranky when we first started working together? What happened? Alien mind exchange program?”
“I was suffering from unrequited love when we first started working together. You looked at me like I was your frog instead of your Prince Charming.” Well, hell. He had been. No denying that. He’d had his own issues to work out. Ok, maybe not the truth. They’d rather…despised…each other that first year. They could both be stubborn and territorial, after all. “I was a bit of an ass when we started working together. For which I apologize. In my defense, we had just discovered my uncle was a kidnapping bastard and attempted murderer of innocent women—like my sister-in-law, and sweet little Bailey Addy. And that whole reuniting with my missing baby sister thing put me in a foul mood for a while.”
A flash of pain went over her face. Zoey would always know she had missed out on decades with the rest of her siblings. That was a pain he understood at the basest level, too. “Well, we do have that in common, don’t we?”
He’d lost twenty years with his youngest sister when Celia had been abducted. Zoey had lost her entire childhood with her older brothers and two of her sisters. They would never get that time back, no matter what kind of relationship they could build with their siblings now. There was always going to be that hurt. “But there is the future. No one can take that from us. I plan to pester the hell out of Celia every chance I can. Let her know I am her big brother and I will always be there now. No matter what.”
She just watched him for a moment. “They said that to me, too.”
“Who?” He suspected he knew.
“Caine and Rafe and Luc. I opened my eyes in that hospital room. And there they were. My brothers. Telling me they weren’t going to ever let anything happen to me again. That was the first—and last—time I have ever heard them agree on anything. That was the first moment Ifeltlike they were my brothers for real. I bawled like a baby, of course.”
He bet she had. Hell, he’d cried like a damned baby the instant he heard she was going to pull through. He’d been in the men’s room. Clay Addy had come in, but the guy hadn’t said anything. He’d just clapped a hand on Murdoch’s back for a minute or two, then left him alone. Guarded the door from the outside until Murdoch got himself together again. Addy had understood—he had a maddening woman of his own, after all.
They moved through each of the three exam rooms, but no documents were found there. Just old medical equipment. “Some of this stuff might be reusable. After it’s sanitized.”
“I’ll talk to Rafe or Caine about the sheer amount of personal information that is available here, too.”
“I’m going to padlock the place. Whoever owns it is liable for the securing of these documents. If they won’t do it, I will. I’ll just keep Neilie boy updated.”
“You’ll probably need to get a warrant to do that.”
“Collins owes me a favor. Besides, she likes me. Thinks I’m cheeky and cute.”
“Yeah, that’s what it is.”
“I think there is one more office near the back. I shall go first. I must protect the love of my life, after all.”
“Kiss my ass, Lake.”
“Lady, you just do not know what you are offering.” He shot her a grin. “Back office. I’ll go first. In case I need to save you from the scary things in there. I could scoop you up and carry you away heroically. Over my shoulder, even.”
“Never going to happen. Maybe there are mice in there and I’ll have to rescue your ass? Why does the guy always have to rescue the girl? That never makes sense to me.”
“Honey, I have you beat in sheer weight by a good buck forty. Probably more. There is no way I would fit over your shoulder—now, if you were to drag me, that might work. I think it evolved from a matter of logistics, mostly? Although, if the need ever arises, please save me, ok?”
“I could get you out of here if I had to.” She eyed him like she was considering exactly how to do it.
“No kidding. But you’d have to just roll me everywhere, and that would be seriously uncomfortable.” Murdoch led the way down the hall, where whoever had run this place kept his office. “So who was it that ran this place? I never did figure that out.”
