Something was beeping insistently. Emmaline blinked, willing her eyes to focus despite too few hours of sleep. Peirce shifted beside her, his body curled over her protectively. After his admission last night, he hadn’t let her even an arms-length away from him.
She shifted and he opened his eyes blearily. “Good morning,” she whispered.
That rough countenance lightened when he smiled at her, a slow, knowing lift of the corner of his mouth. “It could be,” he responded, pulling her close for a kiss.
“We should get up.”
“Why?”
“Something’s been beeping for a while. It woke me up.”
That got his attention. A swift kiss and he was out of the bed, throwing on pants and a shirt, moving toward the library. She shook her head in amusement and slipped into her new pants and soft shirt. “I’ll check the kitchen and see if there’s any food left,” she called down the hall to him. She shrugged when he didn’t respond. He was probably focused on something else.
Maybe after breakfast he could take her to the estate’s garage, show her more tricks. It would be the perfect way to keep their minds off her father’s insane plot. She’d never pegged him as a madman, but desperation and revenge could lead a man to strange decisions...
“We’ve got a problem.”
Peirce scowled as he dragged on the rest of his clothes, trying not to feel nauseous as Douglass’s image blurred and jumped all over the screen. He was in a Stallion, rolling toward the estate as quickly as possible with Kai. And Peirce didn’t know why. “What the hell do you mean, we’ve got a problem?”
“You told me to dig up what I could about Riecher.”
Peirce’s gut dropped. Had he done something else down there, something Emma didn’t know about? Had someone found out about his death? Was she in danger?
Douglass continued, not realising Peirce was spiralling. “He went to the tour as a guest.”
“Of who? Emma’s father?”
“No. Richard Stone.”
“Stone?”
“Be
fore Riecher’s death, he was listed on a shit-ton of the paperwork for Stone’s shell companies. He also had unlimited access to Stone’s highest priced brothels.”
The pieces clicked into place with grim clarity. “Oh, fuck.”
“It gets worse. A flag went up a few minutes ago; someone hacked into the estate’s security feeds. And a lot of chatter on the comm waves.”
He paused, hand at his ear, listening intently. “Hostiles in-bound. Get the hell out, sir.”
He was up, running toward the bedroom. She wasn’t there. He grabbed his gun, his knife and sprinted back down the hall, bellowing her name.
He’d made a grave error.
Chapter 10
“Emma!”
Dread was choking him, stopping the air from reaching his lungs.
“Emma!”
Why hadn’t he thought of that? He should have seen it coming!
“Gods, Emma! Where the fuck are you?”
“Peirce?”