Page 53 of Between a Rock and a Hard Cowboy

Dammit. Emmett had managed to sneak under her radar again. This time right into her home. Her sanctuary.

This was what she got for living in his old apartment. To be fair, they didn’t know this had been Emmett’s apartment when Rosie had offered it to them—

This used to be Emmett’s apartment.

That thought started the wheels in her mind turning. He said he was back because he’d left something here. That started to really sink in.

What was he looking for?

They hadn’t found anything personal in the furnished apartment when they’d moved in. Not in the dresser drawers. Not in the one cabinet in the kitchen or in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

She spun in a slow circle, taking in the details in the tiny apartment that had been her home for almost a year. Trying to evaluate her surroundings with fresh, critical eyes.

Emmett had pulled a chair from the table over to the wall by the door before he’d flipped on the lights and before she and Linc had interrupted him.

Why?

She glanced up. Something she didn’t do often. If she was in bed she was focused on her laptop or sleeping—eyes closed. But she looked up now. Closely.

The apartment had a drop ceiling. The ceiling tiles were the kind that any could be popped out, one at a time, in case someone needed to get to the pipes or wiring or whatever building stuff the tiles were hiding.

Drop ceilings were also the perfect place to hide things. Small things. Light things that wouldn’t crash through the tiles or collapse the ceiling. Things like cash… And in Emmett’s case, a portion of that cash belonged to Olivia, Poppy and Eva.

Determined, she climbed up on the chair. Her cell phone acting as a flashlight, she’d be able to stick her head up through the hole.

She was tall enough but she had to gather her nerve to be brave enough. The fear of how many spiders could be residing up there, spiders that could jump at her face or crawl into her hair, wasn’t enough to trump her hatred of Emmett Wilder. She’d risk an arachnid attack to take down that man.

Peering around, and not seeing anything, she got even braver. She stuck her hand up in the ceiling and, cringing, ran it around the flat surface of the surrounding tiles.

Then she felt it… Something small and hard. Plastic.

She emerged with a computer jump drive clutched in her fist.

Bingo!Thisshe could work with.

Emmett was going to rue the day he chose to screw Eva Lucas—aka the Gravedigger. She’d earned that nickname from her fellow hackers back in college, because once she set her sights on someone, they were going down. She wouldn’t stop until she’d buried them.

She’d once worked her way through a list of bad guys—taking their money, their power, their reputation—one by one until they’d all been crossed off.

And now Emmett was at the top of that list.

Scrambling off the chair, she reached the floor, dragged the chair back to the table and sat. Shoving the drive into her computer she laughed when she saw he had a four-digit passcode to protect it.

As ifthatwould stop her? Ha! It would barely even slow her down.

The sun was up by the time she lifted her head from the table and realized she’d fallen asleep at the computer. Not the first time. It wouldn’t be the last either. But she hadn’t passed out until after she’d learned if not all of Emmett’s secrets, at least the biggest one.

Cryptocurrency.

Now his hidden fortune was in her hands. The only question was, what would she do with it?

ChapterTwenty-Eight

“Why is he back?” Linc’s father asked.

“I don’t know. I tried to get it out of him last night. But he’s not talking. I didn’t want to push too hard and make him suspicious,” Linc told them.

“But he was breaking into his old apartment looking for something. And that tells me something,” Ethan said.

---