Chapter Fifty-Two
Maggie
“Eleanor hid a camera!” Maggie whisper-shouted in the hall. Ethan was practically dragging her away from the office and the
family bedrooms but, to Maggie, it felt more like floating.
“I see that.” He bit his lip like he was trying very, very hard not to smile. And failing. Like she was adorable and sweet
and his favorite kind of candy.
“This looks like a clock! But it’s not!” She pointed to the little lens in the center. “That’s a camera!”
“So you’ve said.”
“Eleanor hid it!” Maggie whisper-shouted again. “And I found it!”
“I know. I was there when it happened.” He wore a patient, put-upon expression, like someone trying to get a drunk friend
home from a bar or a three-year-old out of a bounce house. Which tracked. At that moment, Maggie felt like a combination of
both.
“Eleanor just blew this case wide open!”
Ethan stopped walking. “Actually...”
In Maggie’s experience, there was a high correlation between men who use the word actually and men who deserve to be hit in the ear with a snowball, but there was a warmth in Ethan’s eyes when he told her, “I’d say
you just blew the case wide open.”
Not we . You. And it was all she could do not to jump up and down, maybe do a dance. Spike a ball of indeterminate purpose. At that moment,
Maggie was high on adrenaline and kissing and the all-consuming rush of being right. Not to mention a steady dose of Ethan
Wyatt pheromones, which should probably come with a warning from the FDA.
So she kissed him again because she was going on instinct and didn’t allow herself to second-guess it. But there was something
in the set of his shoulders, the feel of his hands on her waist, that made her pull back and look down at the nanny cam that
was smushed between them. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s not your nothing face. That’s your we might want to bury that before it explodes face.”
“I didn’t realize I had one of those,” he said, and Maggie tried not to roll her eyes.
“Oh, you totally have one of those.”
“No.” He was shaking his head. “I was just thinking... We can’t play it.”
“Of course we can play it!” she whisper-shouted again, gesturing wildly with her flashlight. But then she remembered...
Flashlight. Darkness. Electricity. “Oh my gosh, we can’t play it.”
Then his tall body pressed against hers in a way that would have driven her crazy three days before. It would have felt intimidating
and toxic but now it felt warm and safe as his fingers went to the back of her neck, massaging gently and making her moan.
“Which means, we can’t say a word about that.” He cut his eyes down at the camera sandwiched between them. “To anyone.”
He was right. Someone in that house was a murderer who just hadn’t gotten the job done yet. If anyone knew about that camera...
Ethan pushed back and reached for it. “Here. You go back to the room and I’ll go put that someplace no one will look.”
“No.” She held it to her chest. It was the closest she had ever come to uttering the phrase my precious .
“Maggie.”
“I’m not letting it out of my sight.” She sounded strong. She sounded sure. It was the way she always felt right before Colin
made her regret it; when, actually, what she should have been regretting was him.
“Maggie.”
“No one knows it exists, right? And they already searched our room, so when you think about it...” Maggie trailed off when
she saw Ethan smirking. “What?”
“You called it our room.”
She had. And she hadn’t even realized it. “I meant my room.”
“Oh, but you said our room.”
“I misspoke.”
“You—”
A low growl filled the air, but it wasn’t a sexy growl. No. It was worse. So, so, so much worse, because it was a hungry growl. And it was coming from her.
“That wasn’t me,” she blurted. But then her traitorous stomach did it again.
“Okay.” Ethan pointed to the door ten feet away. “You go to our room and lock the door, and I’ll go raid the kitchen. And then we’ll decide what to do. When I get back. To our room. ”
She opened her mouth to argue, but her stomach growled again, so she darted for the bedroom and closed the door and turned
the key, but she could hear him laughing as his footsteps faded down the hall.