“You know this car screams government issued,” I told him.
“Well, I wasn’t bringing my car,” he assured me.
“You don’t think maybe there’s something in between personal car and the car that the men in black use?”
He gave me a tip of his head, like perhaps.
After I met the team that was on-site with Dallas and me, the two of us walked around to get familiar with the Stantons’ vacation house, though it wasn’t necessary to know every nook and cranny. As Brig’s negotiator, I wasn’t staying for long, so I only needed a general idea of the layout. Which turned out to be lucky, because the house was massive.
The sixteen-thousand-square-foot, three-story, nine-bedroom, twelve-bathroom, twenty-car-garage home had been featured in Architectural Digest because it was a marvel of luxury and innovation. The house was not to be outdone by the landscaping, though. Paver walkways with embedded LED lights led to three separate infinity pools, an outdoor theater, and two bars on a patio from which you could see the Strip. It was stunning, yes, but it was also lost on me. This kind of lavish lifestyle didn’t appeal.
Dallas stood beside me in his Hugo Boss suit, hair slicked back, aviators on, shaved and pressed and looking for all the world like he belonged right where he was.
“This could be your house,” I told him. “You could pull this off.”
“Can you even imagine what the property taxes are? Or the water bill?”
“Electric bill,” I threw out.
“But I guess that’s the point, right? If you can afford to live in a place like this, the upkeep hardly matters.”
“Let’s find the bedrooms.”
It took some navigating, but we pulled up the blueprints and found where we were going.
“Ohmygod, you could fit my whole house in here!”
He was overselling it a bit, but really, not by much.
“This bed is bigger than a California king,” he said, dropping his duffel. “You could fit, like, ten people in that.”
“You want this room?” I asked, still holding on to my duffel.
He turned his head to me. “We’re both gonna stay right here. There’s no way I’ll even hear you from another room. We’ll be good and sleep on opposite sides of the bed.”
“And the team will think what about that?”
He pointed at the two oversized chairs flanking the fireplace that reclined into chaises. “I’ll tell them I’m sleeping there.”
I tipped my head at the built-in entertainment center across the room from the bed. “I wonder if there’s closed-circuit video surveillance of the house and grounds.”
A quick text to the tech crew confirmed that the FBI had wired all but the bathrooms and the master bedroom for audio and video surveillance. Dallas had been adamant that my privacy not be intruded upon, but just in case someone had disregarded that request, he and I did a visual scan of the room, checking behind mirrors and paintings, in the fireplace, under the bed, picking up and looking under anything that wasn’t nailed down. We turned off the lights and looked for any green or red LEDs that would indicate the presence of cameras, and used the small professional-grade RF signal detector, which Owen had shipped overnight, to check for bugs. Once I was sure the room was clear, I took a seat on the bed.
“What’s your thought on this? Two days, tops?” I wanted to get a feel for how he saw this playing out.
“Or less. It depends on what they want for Lane, and how much they need to see us doing to take the bait and make the agreement so we can make the bust.”
“I want this done,” I told him.
“So do I,” he agreed, standing and walking over to me. “In the meantime, we’re in here together. I know I can’t touch you, but I can see you and talk to you, and that’s going to be enough, just like it will be during the week, when we’re apart.”
“Can you stop bringing that up?”
“What’s that? Us being in different cities?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” he agreed and was quiet a moment. “I have a question.”
I waited.
“Why do you own such expensive suits?”
“I like the fit.”
He nodded.
“Plus, my Ermenegildo Zegna navy suit is made to travel.”
“You brought three different ones.”
“Mixing and matching,” I teased him. “I didn’t expect to spend so much of my time being naked.”
“You’re complaining?”
“Did it sound like I was?”
He coughed softly. “No.”
“Then?”
He gestured for me, and I smiled at him as I moved into his space, and he slipped his hand around the side of my neck and pulled me close, his lips parting to receive me. Before the insanity began, he needed this last moment of connection and intimacy, and since I craved it as well, we came together in a hard, heated rush that was grounding and exhilarating and everything in between. We parted when Dallas’s phone chirped.