She snorted with laughter. “Uh, yeah. Right.”

“No, really,” he said. “If not for those guys, you’d still be pissed as hell, and I’d still be as confused as ever.” He paused. “I’m still confused,” he admitted. “And you’re probably still pissed. But at least you’re talking to me. That’s progress.”

She harrumphed. “Talk about looking on the bright side.”

“I might as well,” he observed.

The car stopped outside her door. He told the driver to wait and got out, peering around the street before he let her out. He blocked her body with his as she unlocked the metal warehouse door, and peered around every twist of the echoing stairwell before letting her proceed.

Her apartment was so full of books, there was barely space to move. The bathtub in the kitchen was covered with a wooden top. A mini water closet occupied the corner of the room. A half refrigerator was tucked under the sink. There was a two-burner gas range, a toaster oven. He’d never seen a place so miniature.

He peered at the photos on the wall while she hustled around, pulling a suitcase out of her closet. Most were pictures of two young women and a distinguished-looking elderly woman in varying combinations and settings. “This is your mother, and sisters?”

She glanced around from where she knelt in front of a small chest of drawers. “Yes.”

He studied them. Pretty, like Nell, but in very different ways. “They don’t look anything like you,” he observed.

“We’re all adopted,” Nell said. “Lucia took us in as foster children when we were teenagers.”

That teasing bit of info made him curious. About who had made her, what had forged her. How she’d gotten to be so smart and pretty and difficult. But not tonight. There would be other chances. He hoped.

She looked exhausted, staring down at two different T-shirts in her hands as if she couldn’t decide which one to bring.

“Pack both,” he advised. “You’re not coming back for a while.”

She shot him a narrow glance. He walked over to her, and knelt. She swayed back, her eyes going big and wary as he pulled her first drawer open. He grabbed a big fistful of silky stuff. All colors. Panties, stockings. Things made of lace, ribbons, silk. He dropped the tangled wad of stuff into the open suitcase. “Pack a lot,” he repeated softly.

Her eyes dropped. Color rose in her face. Her nipples were tight, nubs poking against the stretchy fabric of her stained, rumpled dress.

That white-hot episode in the conference room hung between them in the silence, complete in every heart-thudding erotic detail. She was licking her lower lip until it gleamed, enticing him. The look in her eyes was cautious, but there was a smile hidden in it.

He scoped the room with his peripheral vision. The bed looked uncomfortable with those heaps of books, but the beanbag chair behind her had possibilities. He could wedge her into that and pin her down with his weight, juicily rocking and sliding. Her pussy doing that fluttering clutch around his cock every time she came. Yes.

He reached out, let his fingertips slide down her cheek, her soft throat. Over her breastbone. He spread out his whole hand, felt the quick, hard throb of her heart against his palm. He slid his other hand up her thigh, to the top of her stockings, gripping her where the fabric ended, and soft, hot skin began. The energy grew, swelling into something huge and inevitable. She bit her lower lip, breathing hard.

It happened again, as it had on the street. That feeling brushing by. A cobweb breaking across his mind, as his guard went down.

He froze, and his grip tightened on her thigh. He looked around the small apartment. Nothing moving. Nothing had changed. It was silent. Just the sounds of the street outside.

“What is it?” Nell asked.

“Shhh,” he hushed her, feeling around with his subtlest senses.

Two steps brought him to a barred window that looked out on a blind courtyard full of garbage cans. Empty. Just a couple of rats on the scrounge. He looked for a reason for the feeling. There always was one. By now, he trusted it blind. He was being watched. His neck crawled.

His eyes fell on the smoke detector attached to the low ceiling. He reached up and carefully detached it.

“Duncan, what are you—”

“Shhh.” He didn’t want to talk, even to explain himself. Not with unfriendly eyes watching, unfriendly ears listening.

It was almost too easy. The tiny vidcam was taped to the side of the black smoke detector, virtually invisible. The device had been gutted of its usual contents, the space inside the shell used to house the wiring and battery and radiofrequency transmitter of the camera. He stared at it, wishing that he had not touched it. Fingerfucking the evidence. Gant would lecture him. His friend never wasted an opportunity to give him hell.

“What on earth is that thing?” Nell’s voice was thin and high.

“A vidcam,” he said. “Someone’s been watching you.”

She made a strangled sound. Put her hand over her mouth.

Shit-eating bastards. Violating her hard-earned private space. Watching while she undressed, bathed, ate, slept. Probably watching her now, being hurt and scared. That infuriated him.

He laid the thing down on her table. “Don’t touch it,” he said. “It might have prints.” He looked around the room again, trying to imagine where he would plant spyware, if he were one of them.

She had an old-fashioned phone. He grabbed the horn, unscrewed the mouthpiece. Bingo. He shook the listening device onto the table without touching it, and answered the question in her eyes. “A drop-in bug,” he said. “They’ve been monitoring your phone conversations.”

Her eyes were huge. “I…but I talked to Vivi just this morning—”

“We’ll discuss it later,” he cut her off. “Not here. Let’s just get the fuck out of this place. It’s making my flesh creep.”

“Ah, y-y-yes,” she agreed, flustered. She looked around herself, wildly. “Um…what was I—”

“Laptop. And clothes,” he reminded her. “Quickly.”

It didn’t take her long once he started helping, scooping stuff out of drawers at random. That perked her up. She shoved him away with an irritated sound and finished packing clothes, but then came the shoes, the toiletries bag: vials and bottles and tubes, packets of this and that. And then the books. Fuck a duck. She heaved eight of them into the huge suitcase. Big motherlovers, too. The trolley wheels were probably going to collapse.

He dragged her out the door after that, scanned the stairwell landing, and stuck his head back inside her door. He made an obscene gesture, for the benefit of any hidden cameras he hadn’t found.

“You’re not getting her,” he told the bug that lay on the table. “Fuck off and die, shithead.” He slammed the door, for emphasis.

Nell was alarmingly quiet in the car, staring ahead, throat bobbing. He knew the feeling. She was trying to swallow it. It wouldn’t go down. But the silence was so heavy, it was making him twitch.

He reached for the first thing he could think of to break it. “Do you have a copy of that letter your sister found?” he asked.

“I have it scanned onto my computer,” she said. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I’m just—”

“Interested. Yes. I’ve noticed.” There was a touch of acid in her voice that silenced him again.

He stared out the window, wondering what his next move should be. He saw a Korean deli coming up on the corner, with banks of multicolored flowers on display. “Stop the car,” he told the driver.

Nell looked startled, as the car braked and he flung the door open. “Don’t worry,” he assured her. “This’ll just take a second.”

He stared at the flowers, at a loss, and grabbed a bunch of the best-looking long-stemmed roses out of a bucket. He handed the boy sitting next to the flowers a couple of twenties, and got back into the car.

“Here.” He handed her the flowers, realizing too late that the long, thorny stems were still dripping. He hadn’t even had them tied, wrapped, trimmed, anything. But she was looking wide-eyed, charmed. She sniffed them. Smiled at him. It had worked. Praise God.