Page 7 of The Brat Tamers

I narrow my eyes. “That was not yelling. You’ll know when I’m yelling. This is my patience coming to an end. You’ve pissed off Porter, the nicest of the three of us, so what does that tell you?”

She pouts. “He said I couldn’t bring any of my stuff.”

“What exactly do you need while you’re hiding from your would-be kidnappers who are currently torturing your sister?”

She has nothing to say to that. Instead, she presses her lips together and turns her back to me, but I can hear her mumbling. “But I have a business to run.”

“Ms. Krushner, you need to get your priorities straight. You have three minutes to grab whatever clothes and accessories you need to last you two weeks. In three minutes, I will drag you out of here with whatever you have packed. If all you remember to pack is underwear, then that’s what you will live in until this is over. Do I make myself clear?” I set a timer on my watch to emphasize my point.

“Fine.” She goes to a drawer and starts chucking clothes onto her bed.

Red lace panties fly through the air, and I turn my back to catch a shit-eating grin on Case’s face. “No.”

He chuckles and walks down the hallway, stopping and pushing open the door of another bedroom. “Check this out.”

I leave my post and stop beside him, getting an eyeful of production equipment. Someone retrofitted the entire room as a studio set with lights and multiple cameras to photograph every angle. She has a makeup table in front of one set of cameras and a changing screen in front of the others. We watched quite a few videos of her testing out new products and doing her makeup, as well as changing clothes and modeling them for the camera, but the room in those videos looked different.

“Here.” She shoves a Louis Vuitton duffle bag into Case’s chest. “I understand I won’t be able to tell my fans where I am, or what is going on, but you don’t have to worry about me broadcasting and giving away our location.”

Exchanging a quick glance with Case, I raise my brow. “Why is that?”

“Because I have a scrambler that masks my IP address.”

This gets my attention. “You do?”

“Yes, my IT guru, Claudine Humphrey—well, I guess she’s my ex-IT guru now—designed it for me a year ago when this weird guy started showing up at all of our live locations.”

“Ex?”

She frowns in that way that looks remorseful, but really isn’t. “Yeah, I had to fire her.”

I nod, my insides telling me it’s time to get on the road. “Grab it and the bare minimum, and let’s go.”

She smiles. “I knew you could be reasonable. And you say Porter is the nice one.”

Case chuckles darkly. “Oh, he is.”

She stares at him for a second before turning and filling an LV train case with beauty supplies. Then she grabs her laptop, iPad, a traveling eighteen-inch ring light and a thin, four-port hub, shoving them all into a bag full of cables.

I point to the last piece of equipment. “Mind if I look at that?”

“Sure.” She hands it to me.

It’s a basic, fifty-dollar Netgear hub, but the tamper seal has been broken. I hand it back to her and nod. “Okay. Let’s go.”

I grab her equipment bag while Case leads us out of the house. Porter has the back door open, ushering her into the truck as Case and I go to the trunk to store her stuff. I pull the hub out of the bag and lower my voice again. “We’ll swing by the front and give this to Soren.”

He nods.

I slip her laptop and iPad into a lead-lined box we keep in the trunk for this exact situation, and then I remember her cell phone. Fuck, how am I going to pry that out of her hands without a fight?

As if he is reading my mind, Case speaks loudly. “Ms. Krushner, we need to swing by the house and have Soren scan your phone, just to be sure it’s clean.”

“Whatever,” she huffs, handing her phone to Porter without a fight.

“Good thinking,” I mutter.

He grins. “You’re the boss, I’m the brains, and Porter’s the pretty one.”

“I thought you were the brute?”

“Yeah, that, too.”

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