Following the voices, she was about to step into the room, but stopped when she heard Joe mention her name.

“You and Rachel been together long?” he asked.

She held her breath, waiting for the answer, not quite knowing what she wanted to hear. She’d already made up her mind about no repeats, but she was curious how Logan would respond.

“We’re not together,” Logan said after a long pause.

“Didn’t look that way to me.”

“Before everything happened, she and I fought every time we were in the same room. Now we’re just making the best of a bad situation. Don’t read too much into it.”

Making the best of a bad situation. Last night meant nothing to Logan but a way to get her under his control and make her sleep. If she’d been a different kind of a person, someone who allowed a man to wrap his hand around her heart and crush it, she might be upset right now. But that wasn’t her. She was a realist. What Kate and Jaxon and Danielle and Cole shared was an anomaly, not the norm.

Reality was her parents. A marriage practically arranged by her grandparents. They each played their traditional roles in the marriage, but there was no passion. No spark. Her mother spent her life raising her brood of children and caring for the home. Her father owned and managed a successful jewelry store, and when he wasn’t working, he was praying. When the two were together, they were cordial and friendly, but she could tell they didn’t love each other in a romantic sense. When she was twelve, she overheard her mother crying with her aunt about a man whom she had lived next to as a child, someone outside their church who had died in a car accident that day. That was the first time she could remember her mother crying, and she realized, even at that age, that her mother had loved that man at one time. Rachel had never spoken to her mom about it, but she knew now her parents had both fulfilled their duties to their families. They made the best out of a bad situation.

Just like Logan.

Walter sat in the doorframe and barked, looking back at her as if inviting her inside and, no doubt, alerting Joe and Logan to her presence.

She flipped her hair and squared her shoulders then, with a smile, entered the room. “Good morning.”

“Morning,” Logan said, not looking away from the computer screen in front of him. If his words hadn’t been clear enough for her, his reaction upon seeing her this morning certainly were.

Joe, on the other hand, greeted her with a big, knowing smile. “Help yourself to breakfast. There should be some bacon and eggs left unless your friend here gave it all to the dog,” he said, nodding at Logan.

She silently cursed the warmth spreading in her chest. “You fed Walter?”

“Yeah.” Logan didn’t stop typing as he slid her a glance. “Let him out and gave him breakfast. Didn’t want to wake you. No big deal.”

She flipped her attention to the jumble of numbers, symbols, and letters on the computer screen. “What is all that?”

“The back door to the cruise line’s passenger list,” Logan said. “First thing this morning, I pulled up the schedule of cruise ships arriving at the port today. There are four. I already broke into three other lines, but none of them had a passenger by the first or last name of Leopold.”

“Won’t the companies be able to know they were hacked? What if they trace it?”

Joe huffed out a snort. “You don’t know my boy here too well, do you? There’s nothing he can’t hack.”

“Now, that’s not true. But if I can’t hack it, I’ve got a couple friends who can.” Logan twisted around to look at her. “Don’t worry. I’m good enough to not leave a trail.”

She curled her fingers along the back of his chair. “How did you learn how to hack?”

“I’ve always been into computers. By the time I was sixteen, I could hack into just about any database. While other kids were playing football and basketball, I started my own business testing companies’ mainframes and making recommendations on how to tighten them, so they didn’t leave any holes that would allow security breaches. After I graduated, I got dual degrees in computer science and communications and put some of what I learned in the army doing military intelligence. Now I design role-playing computer games for those in the military to practice combat tactics in my spare time.”

He didn’t fit the image of what she assumed a hacker would look like. Shouldn’t he look more like Clark Kent than Superman?

She raised a brow. “You’re a computer geek?”

He shrugged. “It depends on your definition of a geek. As a kid, I made enough money to buy a car and take girls out on dates. Oh, and I was homecoming king senior year of high school.” Flashing her a bright smile, he turned back to the computer screen. “Damn it, there are no Leopolds listed as passengers or employees on any of the ships.”

Her mind went to work, cataloguing the other possibilities. She itched to do her own computer research. “What if we’re wrong? What if Leopold isn’t a person? Maybe it’s a ship.”

Before he could respond, a loud siren wailed throughout the house. She froze while Joe burst into motion, grabbing keys from the desk drawer before opening a closet.

“Shit. Is that who I think it is?” Logan asked, pointing to the security screen in the corner of the room.

The monitor revealed a stream of black cars kicking up dust as they headed down the road leading to the fence. It had to be the FBI. They’d found them. But how?

“Son of a bitch,” said Joe, grabbing two bags from the closet and throwing miscellaneous items into them. “You must have led them straight here. Got a tracker on you somewhere. We’ve got two minutes tops before they create a bypass for the electric fence.”

That didn’t make sense. They’d “borrowed” Willie’s car, and there was no way that had a tracker on it. She’d done everything Logan had told her to do. She hadn’t used a phone or a computer. There was no way to trace her, and Logan sure as hell hadn’t done anything to jeopardize them either.

“How can they do that?” she asked.

“Insulated wire,” Joe said, throwing a couple of guns and boxes of bullets into the bags. “You attach it at two different points in the gate and you can cut the middle. The electric fence keeps most people out, but with the FBI, it only buys us some time to escape.”

Logan tugged her away from the monitor and down the hall, following the cursing Joe. As they came to the staircase, Joe pressed on the side of it, opening a secret panel. He stepped inside, ushering them in with a wave of his hand.

A bark came from behind her, and she whipped her head toward its owner. Walter hurtled himself at the front door, barking and snarling as if defending them from intruders. As Joe moved farther into the hidden passageway, Logan pulled on her arm, urging her forward.

She stopped in her tracks, looking back at the dog. She couldn’t leave him here. Who knew what they’d do to him. He belonged to her now, and that meant he was hers to protect.

“I have to get Walter,” she said, pulling out of Logan’s grasp and running back toward the front door.

Logan growled but didn’t stop her. “Hurry. We’re running out of time.”

Walter continued his assault at the door until she scooped him up in her arms. From behind the curtains at the side of the door, she could see at least two dark sedans driving up the road from the gate. If it had taken the FBI only minutes to penetrate the fortress Joe had spent years building, how the hell would she and Logan ever be able to escape from here?

“Come on,” Logan shouted, hurrying her back under the stairs.

Once she and Walter entered, Logan reached around her and shut the door. The dog was still barking, his heavy little body shaking with fury. She quietly shushed him, petting him gently as she followed Logan and Joe down a narrow tunnel lit only by the flashlight in Joe’s hand. “Where does this lead?”