Seducing Texas (So not Prince Charming #2)(29)

While Shane calls the feds, I go into my bedroom. Some of my clothes have been shredded, and I won’t say that the destruction of the designer labels doesn’t hurt because it does.

I walk into Willa’s room and it’s been trashed too. She’s sobbing into her pillow. We don’t have the money to replace any of our personal belongings.

Losing them hurts, but what if we’d been home? Gangs rape women and shoot them in the head. How am I going to protect Willa? I can’t. Not even Shane can. Hopelessness wafts up inside me, shaking away what little confidence I have.

What the hell are we going to do? I return to the living room where Shane ends his call.

“Shane?” I bury my face into his strong embrace. “This could be a host of people who did this to us. How will I care for Willa?”

He’s shaking his head. “I don’t know. I’ll stay here every night. We’ll do this together. However this ends, I need to be with you, Cyn.” His calloused thumb brushes against my cheek while his large hands hold my face.

Feeling emotionally drained, I nuzzle against them.

“What about Nikita?” I bite out.

“You know I have to see her but not for much longer.”

More tears flow. “I can’t see you kiss her again.” It seems unimportant compared to Manny’s attack on Willa and me, but I want Shane to belong only to me, not the IRS, not the feds or Nikita.

He rubs the stubble on his sexy face. He’s all man, and I need him. “Fuck. I don’t want to.”

“I don’t think I can take that again.” What am I supposed to do now?

“We should go to my place. I’d like to see how the decryption is going.”

“I can’t leave Willa here alone,” I say. She’s in her bedroom, crying.

The fed show up shortly, and Timmons surveys the damage.

His team takes fingerprints along with the local police. Timmons sighs. “This is probably your Uncle. What do you have that he wants?” He studies my lying eyes.

I can’t tell him about the flash drive or else the feds would tell us to hand it over and then we’ll have no insurance. Manny would go to prison but not until he put me six feet under. It probably wasn’t smart for me to allow the feds in here as it is.

“It could be Nikita and her gang,” I say sarcastically. “Shane is spending most nights here. Maybe she knows that.”

Timmons scowls at Shane. “Sleeping with Cyn won’t help your case.”

“I’ve been making payments to the IRS, so they’re almost happy,” Shane shoots back.

I didn’t know that, so it appears he’s working his way back to me. I shouldn’t complain.

After they dust the place for prints and take copies of ours, we head over to Shane’s.

On the way over, Willa asks, “I know this isn’t the best time to ask, but if Aedan asks me out, can I go?”

It isn’t the best time, and her impropriety grates on me. “He’s too old and we’ll lose our contract,” I say. We need the money more now than ever.

“He’s only five years older. That’s no different than Shane and you. Please.”

“You’re eighteen, so I can’t tell you what to do, but we need this money. Our contract explicitly says no dating studio employees. Please don’t make this harder than it is. I can’t be worrying about you. What about the other cowboys? Wyatt’s in college. He seems nice.”

She slumps in her seat. “I like Aedan.”

It’s not like Willa to be grumpy, but she’s the baby and I’m all she has. I’m no substitute for Mom.

“I know, but now’s not a good time.” Not knowing who destroyed our townhouse is worse than being hunted in Alaska. We’re sitting ducks in Austin. In Alaska, we had trees, boulders, and a vast wilderness for cover.

By the time we get to Shane’s, the Thai restaurant delivery has arrived at his place. Willa fixes herself a plate and sits down with her schoolbooks to work on a paper.

Shane and I go to his bedroom where he removes a print to expose a fake wall. His safe is embedded into the concrete slab and contains holes and a fan for aeration. Another smaller safe sits inside the bigger one.

“The safe weighs over 500 pounds,” he says, opening it by using his fingerprint. Inside is a small server.

He takes his laptop and connects to the server. “It’s coming along nicely. The program should crack the key on the hidden file in the next day or two.” He scans the hidden folder he’d found on my flash drive. “This is interesting.”

Weird characters fill his screen. “What is it?”

He does a search on the Internet. “Hold on. I need to try a few different UTF-8 encodings on the folder and its files.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s an extended encoding primarily used for special characters, like foreign languages.”

When we retrieved the drive, he talked about the character sets, and I’d forgotten.

He punches into the keyboard. A program interprets the filenames. “They look Asian.”

I’d read the Chinese were stealing US commercial technology, along with the Japanese and the French, but why would my father have those files? What did they have to do with the drug business?

“I should’ve taken over the security for my last company. I just don’t have the time. I’ve kept a better eye on it lately. Thanks to you.” He kisses me, and it’s not a simple peck, but a bone jarring, scintillatingly, breath-stealing kiss.