Page 31 of Love Bomb

“What’s she looking at?” Kade said. “I can’t see. Her body’s blocking the camera.”

“Nothing,” Bain said, although he knew fine well what had captured her attention.

The photo had been of their last day together before Rona had been taken away. It’d been a strange day, riding through the hills, enjoying the scenery and the company of a thirteen-year-old who rarely stopped talking.

It was also the first time he’d found himself wondering why he was perfectly content to spend hours in Rona’s company, when most other girls he knew bored him after about ten minutes. He’d come to the conclusion that Rona was different because he wasn’t attracted to her, and she wasn’t really a girl anyway. She was just Rona.

“Nothing?” Kade said suspiciously.

Bain realized far too late that the word was a red flag to his brothers, and a sure sign they should keep digging.

“I think it was notes on a new formula I was working on. It won’t make any sense to her anyway.” He got up and strode to Darach. “Gimme the laptop. It’s time to shut this down before she pulls my shed apart looking for Semtex.”

“She would too.” Darach handed over the laptop.

Bain brought up the controls for the doorbell camera she’d missed and enabled the microphone—which could easily be heard inside the shed.

“Rona,” he said.

She screamed and spun around, sending a pile of files crashing to the floor.

“Look up,” he told her once she’d calmed down some. “You’re on camera.”

She searched the ceiling, spotted the camera in the corner, and froze, her hand over her heart.

“This isn’t Rona,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t know this person of whom you speak.”

“Rona, we know it’s you. We watched you break in. And pee in the snow.”

“You saw that!” she screeched, her voice back to normal. She put her hands on her hips and glared up at the camera. “You bunch of perverts,” she shouted.

“Don’t worry. You were off camera. But we did see you break into my lab, destroying a whole bunch of cameras in the process.”

She let out a long huff. “This is your own fault. If you’d just help me, I wouldn’t need to resort to extreme measures.”

Typical. She broke into his lab and it was his fault.

“Go back to the hotel, Rona. You’ve got five minutes to get out of there or I’m calling the cops.”

She let out an adorable growl, sounding like an annoyed kitten.

“I’ll meet you at your hotel room,” he told her. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“No!” She held up her hands. “We can’t meet there. We’ll wake Tom. I’ll come to your place. Or better yet, we’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Tom will cope with an early wake up call. Anyway, he should know what his girlfriend is up to.”

“I hate you Bain MacGregor,” she shouted.

“I know,” he said before giving the laptop back to Darach.

“So,” Darach said. “You’re going to rat her out to her boyfriend.”

Bain just shook his head. How little they knew.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It occurred to Rona that if she didn’t go back to the hotel, Bain couldn’t meet her there. She toyed with the idea of going to Margaret’s house instead, but Bain would just hunt her down. He was stubborn like that. Plus, she was worried that her backside had iced over, and she desperately wanted to get into warmer clothes.