“I have it,” she told him.
One dark brow lifted. “Where?”
Grinning, she slowly slid the hem of her dress up her thigh, revealing her phone in the elastic strap.
“Holy shit.” His gaze returned to hers, fiery. “That has to be the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen.”
You oughta see me with a Desert Eagle .50 caliber in a thigh holster came to mind. What she actually said was “Found it at the boutique with the dresses.” She started through the door before they ended up locking the damn thing and falling on the bed. “Let’s go.”
10
Everly sighed in exasperation, pulled her heels off, and followed Bella onto the sand for the third time in the last twenty minutes. She took Bella’s arm and steered her back to the stone patio where guests chatted.
“Bella, that’s the third time I’ve asked you not to go on the sand.” She sat on the edge of a deck chair and slipped her heels back on, retying the straps. Then she stood, faced Bella, and lowered to a crouch. “Sweetheart, if you do it again, I’m going to have to put you in a time-out, and you’ll miss all the fun.”
“Okay,” she said with a pout.
“These might help.” Decker’s voice pulled Everly’s gaze up. He held a canvas bag.
Everly stood to look inside and found several toys. She sighed in
relief. “This is perfect. I don’t know why I didn’t think to bring any,” she lied. She knew exactly why she’d forgotten, and his name was Austin Hix.
She pulled out a spinner toy and offered it to Bella. Thrilled with the toy, Bella sat beside Everly, who looked up at Decker. “That’s the first time she’s sat down since we got here. My feet thank you.”
Decker smiled. “I’ve been with her since she came home with Hix. I’ve had to learn how to entertain her over the last year. Everyone’s had a pretty steep learning curve.”
“Mr. Hix sure seems to handle her like a pro.”
Decker nodded. “I admire the hell out of the guy. I can’t say how I would have reacted to the news that I had a daughter the way Hix did.”
Everly had been fascinated by Decker’s file. He was a career military guy, with eighteen of his twenty years devoted to army special forces.
“I doubt that,” she said, smiling. “You seem like a good guy, despite our rocky start.”
He chuckled. “I’ve been meaning to ask you”—he glanced at her with one of those how-you-react-to-this-will-tell-me-something laser looks—“why aren’t you using the Wi-Fi at the house?”
She smiled. “Maybe our rocky patches aren’t over yet.”
“I’m just doing my job.”
“At Hix’s direction.”
“He is my boss.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Considering how suspicious you both are, I’m surprised it’s taken you this long to ask.” She crossed her arms. “Tell me this. Would you care why I’m not using the house internet if you were able to hack into mine?”
“Probably not.”
She just held his gaze for a long moment. In anticipation of just this situation, she’d already formed an answer. But even though they had the right and the sense to track her and question her, it was becoming tedious.
How she longed for the “get in, shoot to kill, get out” days.
“I have an international internet service,” she said.
“I know that. The question is why?”
“Because wireless internet service is always sketchy in Third World countries. I move around too much to depend on one cellular service, so I make phone calls via internet. I’m sure you can see how problematic that could be if I depended on a poorly operated service provider.”