Page 63 of Sweet Temptation

But Maddox was just as good, right? He was one of Jude’s guys. Obviously, Ronan seemed to think so, too, if he was leaving him here with me. And Elle certainly trusted Jude and his team; they’d kept her safe her entire career.

One member of the team was as good as any other.

“Any travel you do,” he went on, “you’ll be traveling with two men. Me and someone else, so you always have coverage. But I’m still doing my assessment, putting together a complete security plan for you, and I’ll update you as I go. There are some things I’ll need to know. Like who has access to this house. And I want the names of everyone who regularly comes here. I need to be informed when people are coming over. Like your yoga instructor.”

“Carissa? She’s hardly a threat.”

“That may be. But I need to know.”

“Fine,” I said. “She’ll be back. She comes to practice yoga with me a few times a week, when I’m home from the road.”

“Okay. And who else can I expect to be showing up at the door?”

I considered that. “Ashley comes over a lot. He doesn’t always knock.”

“The door will be locked from now on. So he’ll have to.”

“Hmm. My friends Wendy and Jewel are here a lot. Elle’s here all the time. I have a massage therapist who does house calls. Do you want a list?” I asked, sarcastically, as he pulled a small notepad from his back pocket and produced a pen from somewhere.

“Yes,” he said. “Does anyone have a key?”

“My cleaning lady has one. But that’s it.”

He met my eyes. “And what about the key that was in the coffee can?”

“It’s in my bedroom.”

Oh… fuck. He was not gonna like this.

“There were… uh… a few more, though.”

“A few keys?”

“Yeah. Like, a few that went missing over the years.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“From the can?”

“Yeah, but that was just because my friends let themselves in and out… we’re partying, people get drunk and they lose keys.”

He made that skeptical little growl sound in his throat. I’d heard it a few times by now. Maybe it was a sound reserved for women who irritated him. “We’re having the locks changed.” He wrote something on his pad and I groaned.

“Seriously?”

“I’ll have Maddox’s guys do it tomorrow when they come to put in the alarm system. We’ll need your cleaning lady’s key back. We’ll have a limited number of new ones made, high security keys. They’re a little harder to make copies of.”

“My friends don’t make copies of my house keys,” I protested.

“Cleaning lady gets one,” he said, almost to himself. “You get one. I get one.”

I sighed.

“And I’ll need her info, so I can run a check if needed.”

“She’s a forty-five-year-old mom who sings while she does my dishes.”

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