“What?” he whispered as he pulled off his earphones.
“I think I need your help.” She eased over and glanced at some sort of computer game on the screen. “Can you really hack into things?”
He frowned. “Why?”
“I need help with a case. Hacking into a database in Chicago to get a list of addresses of local coffee shops that carry a particular coffee.”
“Really?” His voice raised a little. “Does this have to do with the bombings?”
She again pressed her finger over her mouth. “Can you do it?”
“Sure,” he turned to his computer.
“Can you do it from my computer?”
He considered her a moment, then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah. I think so.”
“Stay behind me, and don’t make any noise,” she said, but he stopped her with a hand to her arm.
“Sis. You’re talking to the master. Watch and learn.”
She might not know Asher as well as she thought. They were outside in moments, going out his upstairs window, onto the roof and climbing down a ladder conveniently—and possibly permanently—propped against the roof.
“Dad thinks I’m working on the gutters. Summer project.” He winked as he followed her toward the garage.
Rembrandt emerged from the shadows. Held up a hand as Asher spotted him. “I’m with Eve.”
She sort of liked how he said that.
“Nice wheels,” Asher said as he climbed into the Camaro.
Rembrandt’s voice filled the car, a delicious tenor as he sang along to a song from Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”
They pulled up to her dark house and she led Asher into her den, firing up her computer.
Rembrandt stood behind them, watching.
Eve gave Asher the rundown of the case, what they’d found, and when he pulled up the distributor’s site, he shooed them out of the room. “I could use a pop, though.”
She fetched it, then found herself sitting on the counter in the kitchen, watching Rembrandt drink the beer Samson had left in her fridge.
He leaned against the opposite counter. Glanced at the clock.
“You really think another bomb is going to go off?” she asked, studying the little pucker of worry between his eyes.
He nodded. “Bombings are designed to make the news, to scare people out of their normal routines and to make a point. I think we’re onto something with this ICDL group. The first one got our attention. The second scared us into staying away from coffee shops. A third one alerts us to their mission and makes us sit up and listen. Their threat is not only credible but irrefutable. They want to force people to pay attention. Yeah, there’s another one coming. And I can’t live with myself if we don’t stop it.” He stared at his beer. “I don’t want it haunting me for the rest of my life.”
The way he said it, goosebumps lifted on her skin.
“I was thinking about what you said at lunch about regretting things…yes, I’d want to save my friend, but maybe if I did, I would have never become a CSI. And then…well, I might end up being, I don’t know, a doctor, or even, a barista. I could have been one of those victims at the coffee shops.”
He looked up at her.
“I’m just saying that if we did everything differently, we’d still have to learn the same lessons, somehow, right? And if we didn’t, maybe one small change would make everything different. Even, much, much worse.”
She wasn’t sure where that philosophy came from. “I guess I just think that everything happens for a reason. And going back to change it would mean we’d be a lesser person for the lack of the lesson.”
He looked at her, nodding quietly, his blue eyes in hers, as if hanging onto her words.
The expression threaded through her, tugged, and maybe that’s why she slid off the counter. Why she walked over to him.
He watched her the entire way, his gaze on her turning warm, hot. He swallowed, his breaths rising and falling.
She hesitated only a moment before she put her hands on his chest. Contoured, warm, his heartbeat pounded under her hand.
He set his beer on the counter beside him.
“Eve,” he said quietly, his voice more of a whisper.
“Everything happens for a reason, Rembrandt. Like you appearing on my doorstep tonight.” Her pulse thundered in her ears, her words crazy, daring. You like the troublemakers, Eve?
No. Just this one.
So, before her common sense could grab a hold, she rose up on her tiptoes, caught his eyes—
He took a breath in, and his hand tangled into her hair. “I like your hair down…”
Aw. She simply couldn’t—or didn’t want to—stop herself. Maybe driven by the impulse, the uncanny sense that she belonged, somehow, in Rembrandt’s arms, and he, in hers…she kissed him.
For a moment, he didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. And for a split second, a fear sliced through her that—
Um no. Because just like that, he came alive. He pulled her into himself, kissing her like he’d been holding his breath, waiting. As if, like her, the urge had lingered in the back of his mind for two days.
He tasted of the beer he’d been drinking, and her body responded, leaning into his exploration.
She hadn’t kissed many guys in her life—few, actually—but she knew the difference between a fumbling boy and a man who knew what he was doing.
It sent a dangerous, delicious spark through her. Troublemakers, indeed.
Rembrandt Stone. She wrapped her arms up, around his shoulders, closed her eyes, and a small, intimate humming sound emerged.
It only ignited a tiny growl from the back of his throat.
Apparently Inspector Rembrandt Stone was all business, whether he was solving crimes or making a move. Strangely, deliciously, he kissed her almost like he knew her, maybe better than she knew herself, his kiss soft, then deepening, then again lingering, making her ache for
