The Rebel Tycoon's Outrageous Proposal. Abby Gaines

that he didn’t want. He dismissed the thought. No way was he chickening out.

      He hauled himself over the smaller wall and started across her immaculate patch of lawn. He’d bet the Feds hadn’t set the condo’s alarm, so their people could come and go easily. But the back door and downstairs windows had more yellow tape across them. Best not to disturb it.

      Jared climbed the fire escape to reach the largest upstairs window, which he guessed was Holly’s bedroom. He draped his jacket over his elbow and smashed the glass. Too late, it occurred to him she was the sort of woman who would have dead bolts on her windows. He fumbled in the darkness to find the window catch. Yep, a dead bolt.

      With the key in it. Suppressing an exclamation of triumph, he unlocked the window and slid it open. He stepped gingerly into the room, partly to avoid the broken glass, partly out of the crazy notion that the more carefully he moved the less likely he would be to trigger an alarm.

      When he was sure the only sound he could hear was the thudding of his heart—surely breaking and entering hadn’t been this stressful the last time he tried it?—he pulled the heavy draperies shut behind him and snapped on the bedside lamp.

      Holly’s bedroom was as neat as he would have expected. If the FBI had searched it, they’d done a good job of tidying up afterward. The white damask counterpane on the double bed was unwrinkled, with two square pillows propped carefully on single points against the light-colored wood of the headboard.

      Twin matching nightstands flanked the bed, both surfaces clear of clutter. Next to the tallboy dresser, a small armchair was upholstered in a light-blue check. The walls, he guessed in the dim lamplight, were cream or off-white.

      It could have been sterile. But it felt simply… honest.

      On the wall opposite the bed hung framed photographs of two teenagers, a boy and a girl.

      On the other wall, directly above the bed, hung something so out of place it had to be important.

      An oil painting, unframed, in bold oranges and reds, measuring about a foot square. Behind all that color was a green-blue swirl of background, cold where the rest was warm.

      With difficulty, Jared tore his gaze from it. He wrapped his jacket around his right hand so he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints.

      Ten minutes later he was done. He switched off the bedside lamp and opened the draperies. Light from the three-quarter moon provided almost as much illumination as the lamp had. As he prepared to exit through the window, a scratching sound froze him in place. Was it inside? A cat, maybe? After a moment he heard it again. He stepped out of the bedroom into the hallway, then moved to the top of the stairs.

      The sudden wail of a burglar alarm almost sent him into cardiac arrest.

      “Damn.” Jared raced back into the bedroom, picked up his load and headed out the window. Clambering down the fire escape was much faster than his ascent—every second he expected to be confronted by an angry neighbor or an unusually vigilant security company, the kind a woman like Holly would hire.

      Holly’s back gate wasn’t locked from the inside, thank goodness. He sprinted across the communal area, praying all the way that the gate to the road would have a release button, rather than another card swipe. It did.

      He threw the bundle into the car, hurled himself in after it and drove off, remembering to slow down as he hit the arterial road. Two hundred yards later, a security company vehicle passed him going the other way. A half mile farther on, a police car passed, lights flashing but siren off out of respect for the quality neighborhood.

      The blood pounding in his ears, Jared drove all the way home right on the speed limit. He must be getting old.

      BECAUSE SHE’D BEEN wide-awake since before six o’clock, contemplating her first day at Harding Corp with mingled dread and anticipation, Holly was first to the front door when the pounding started at six forty-five.

      “Quiet,” she muttered as she scrambled for the dead bolt key that, to AnnaMae’s amusement, she’d hidden under the clay pot that held her friend’s umbrellas. “You’ll wake the neighbors.”

      She glared at the man on the doorstep. “Special Agent Crook. How are you this morning?” A thought struck her. “Is it Dave? Have you found him?”

      He gave her a peculiar look, as if he didn’t believe Dave actually existed. “Can I come in?”

      That being a purely rhetorical question, Holly stepped back and tugged AnnaMae’s tight spare robe, a satin concoction with a delicate floral pattern, closer around her. She followed Crook into the living room.

      “Where were you at eleven o’clock last night?” he asked, accepting her offer of a seat.

      “Right here, listening to a David Gray CD and having a cup of coffee with my roommate while my…blouse soaked in the tub,” she said with careful precision that nonetheless omitted to mention she’d also washed her underwear.

      “I’ll need to confirm that with your roommate.”

      “I can vouch for her,” AnnaMae said from the doorway. “She came in at ten-thirty, which I know because I asked her to wait a moment while my TV show finished. Then we had coffee, as Holly said. We both went to bed at eleven-thirty.”

      “Where were you before you came home?” he asked.

      “I had dinner at the Green Room with a client,” Holly said. “Is this about Dave? Is he all right?”

      “Someone broke into your condo last night.” Crook rolled his eyes when she gasped. “Your alarm went off at eleven. The security company got there five minutes later, but whoever did it was long gone. It doesn’t appear anything was taken—TV, DVD and so on. I need to know if you had any valuables.”

      She shook her head. “Nothing, since you confiscated my laptop. Is there any damage?”

      He ignored the question. “Did you keep any work files at home that someone might have tried to retrieve for you?”

      “You think I organized someone to break into my own home?” Appalled, she stared at him. “I thought you already searched the place.”

      “We did. We cleaned out your home office.”

      She winced.

      “But maybe there’s a safe we didn’t find.” He scowled at her. “We will find it, so you might as well tell me now.”

      “There’s no safe.” Holly was still trying to absorb the news. “It must have been kids fooling around. How did they get in?”

      “They broke an upstairs window, managed to get it open.”

      “I always lock my windows and hide the key.”

      Crook had the grace to look shamefaced. “One of our guys left the key in the lock.”

      “I’ll expect you to compensate me for any loss or damage,” Holly said, outrage overriding her instinctive respect for an officer of the law.

      Crook grunted, a sound that could have meant either yes or no. Or more likely, Get off my back, lady. He hauled himself up off the sofa. “Call me if you think of anything else that might be relevant. We’ll dust for fingerprints this morning.” He looked her in the eye. “We don’t think this was kids, Ms. Stephens. We think this is about whatever you’re mixed up in.”

      When he’d gone, Holly sank into the spot he’d vacated on the couch. “Can things get any worse?”

      “You need coffee.” Her friend bustled out of the room.

      Holly shut her eyes, clamped a hand to her forehead to ward off an incipient headache. She breathed deeply—in, out, in, out. A tap-tapping at the window jolted her out of her attempted trance. She screamed, and AnnaMae came running.

      “What is it?”

      Holly pointed a trembling finger at the window where a