She froze as something cold clamped around her left wrist and tightened.
“What the hell are you doing?” she demanded, pulling against the handcuff.
But Dalton tugged her forward and locked the other handcuff to a metal rail under the window behind his desk. “You need to cool off a little. You aren’t going to talk to the press or to my boss or to anyone right now. You’ve caused enough trouble.”
“Son of a bitch! You haven’t even seen how much trouble I can cause.” She grabbed for his jacket, but he stepped out of the way. She was going to scratch his eyes out. He could not do this to her. He could not. “Unlock these right now. This isn’t funny.”
He grinned. “It’s a little funny.”
Screw him, she had the key in her purse. She dove for it, but he was there a millisecond sooner. He snatched it up and set it on a chair well out of her reach.
“If you leave me locked in here, I swear I’ll scream so loud even the Dallas Cowboys will hear me.” She was going to kill him in some particularly horrible way. Maybe acid or boll weevils or flesh-eating bacteria. Whatever it was, it was going to be painful. She would make sure of it.
“Go right ahead. The walls are made of concrete. The only one who will hear you is you.” He blew her a kiss. “I’ll be back in an hour or so. By then you should have calmed down enough to face the world in a civil manner.”
Civil manner? Was he British? Who talked like that?
“You really think that’s how this is going to go down?” she demanded. “Because I promise, you’re going to pay for this … big time.” It was a wonder her teeth didn’t grind to dust, she was so pissed.
“I’m counting on it.” He raised the hand that she’d slid between her thighs not two minutes ago and licked his index and middle fingers. “Believe me, baby. I am so looking forward to you making me pay.”
“Don’t call me baby.”
He just blew her a kiss and then disappeared.
“Bastard. You no-good, rotten son of a bitch. Get back here and unlock me!”
She got no response at all. Not even Eleanor peeked her head in the door. Damn it, maybe this office really was soundproofed after all.
Just the thought sent her from seriously pissed off straight into a towering rage. She kicked the desk and jerked at the cuffs, even pounded on the window, and still no one came to her rescue.
She tossed his desk, looking for a letter opener or screwdriver or something she could use to get the damn cuffs off. In the movies, all you needed was a paper clip, but she couldn’t even find one of those. What kind of office was he running here?
Bastard. He’d better believe she was going to make him pay.
She sat down hard in his chair and tried to think through the fury.
Her eyes landed on his computer. It was a very powerful tool, and he’d left it in the hands of a sexually frustrated, angry-as-hell woman. That was his second mistake, right after locking her in these damn handcuffs to begin with.
At least now she knew how she was going to make him pay. He’d made a serious tactical mistake, and she was totally going to take advantage of it.
She hit the space bar and a screen popped up asking for his password. Of course he’d have it password protected. Bastard. So what were the chances he’d be one of the thirty percent of people who actually wrote down their password and left it on their desks? She didn’t think the odds were great, but she checked anyway. She started by looking around the monitor for a password written on a sticky note, then pulled out all of his drawers and dumped the contents on the floor.
She kind of hoped she’d find something kinky, but the only weird thing was the alarming amount of pencils he had. How could she possibly be thinking about having sex with a man who had that many pencils?
She forced herself to stop counting the things at sixty-five, and finally, written on a sticky note taped to the underside of the bottom left drawer, she found what looked like a password.
She typed it in and bam, she was in.
So much power … so much time alone. Clearly, Dalton wasn’t half as smart as he thought he was.
She could email the police and tell them that she was being held against her will, but that really wasn’t painful enough.
She pulled up his contacts and smiled. Starting with Hank Alfred, she cut his cell number and pasted it into Cory Almoni’s cell. For the next thirty minutes she played musical cell numbers so that when he linked his phone and his contacts updated, he’d try to call Marco Heinz and get Julie Jetter. There were three groups in his contacts, groundskeeping, support staff, and catering. Harmony pulled up his email and created a new message to groundskeeping, support staff, and catering. They were all getting a pay raise effective immediately of a thousand … no, five thousand dollars a year. Manual labor was hard work—they deserved every penny.
After pulling up his web browser, she signed him up for several prison dating websites, turned on the parental controls so that he could only surf the web from midnight to four thirty in the morning, and turned on Windows Narrator and set it to “echo user’s keystrokes” so it would read along as he typed. Then she took a screenshot of his desktop, hid his icons, and put the screenshot up so it looked like his desktop. And finally, she changed his password.
But that only took fifteen minutes, and once it was done, she was bored again. She was sifting through the pile of junk she’d dumped out onto the floor, contemp