Free Saved by a Dangerous Man by Cleo Peitsche Page A

list of suspects, but it won’t happen overnight.”
    “My apartment is safe. And what’s he going to do, anyway?”
    I could almost hear Corbin roll his eyes. “He’s not a nice man, Audrey. As soon as things are cleared up, you can go back to your life.”
    “You mean you’re locking me in a dungeon.”  
    “Do I seem like the kind of guy who would… No, strike that.” He got off the highway. “Are we going to the mat over this?”
    I considered. While my apartment was on the sucky end of the scale, and always cold, I didn’t like being forced to change my habits because of Henry.
    “Four days,” Corbin promised, sensing that I might be amenable.  
    “Two.”
    “Three.”
    We were downtown, near the former garment district, not terribly far from where Corbin had helped me apprehend Hoboken Syre. This area was well along the path to gentrification, the warehouses now luxury loft apartments with exposed brick and ductwork and high ceilings that surely made them expensive to heat.  
    I sighed softly. Things had gotten so complicated. “Are you staying with me until you leave?”
    “Tonight, yes. Of course.”
    “Ok, then. Three days.” Because if I had him for the night, it was only two days. I thought about the stack of files on my desk. Despite the vacation, I had planned to get started on them the next morning. “What about work?”
    Corbin’s mouth thinned into a hard line. “I don’t want you doing anything where you could have an ‘accident.’ We’ll take care of it. You get your assignments. My people will pick up the slack as much as possible.”  
    “You’re going to use your people to do my job? Maybe I should be aiming for eight days, not two.”
    A grin brightened his face. He pulled up to a gated garage, lowered his window and pressed his thumb onto the pad. Then he entered a code. The gate slowly rolled up. Corbin drove forward one car length. The gate closed behind us, then he repeated the thumb-and-code dance.
    “What is this place?”
    “Someplace I was never supposed to bring you,” he said. “Any other questions?”
    “Yeah. What’s a king snake? Wears a crown? Beheads its wives?”
    “Or it’s just a nonvenomous counter to a rattlesnake.”
    Although the garage was nearly empty, Corbin drove down a level before parking. The occupied spaces housed vehicles every bit as inconspicuous as Corbin’s enormous, tinted SUV. Line them up on the street and people would assume the president was in town. I got out and stretched. When I looked up, I counted four cameras.
    “You really need to get some surveillance down here,” I said.
    Corbin followed my gaze. “That camera is fake. Someone couldn’t sneak in here unless they passed two levels of security already and then parked in the correct sector. They would have to know that each person with access has numerous passwords. The correct password will allow access. Others will allow access but trigger an alert. The cameras you see are to give the illusion of paranoid surveillance without letting any potential troublemaker know all our tricks. And of course there are other cameras that you can’t see.”
    “Creepy.”
    “I prefer thorough.”
    “Aren’t you supposed to say ‘we’? We, the company, the organization that’s too awesome to be a three-letter agency,” I said in my best movie trailer voice.
    Corbin grinned and touched a hand to my lower back, guiding me toward a set of elevators.  
    The doors slid open and we stepped on. “And if you push the wrong elevator button, will it gas us?”
    “That’s a good idea,” Corbin said. He didn’t sound like he was kidding. “See, this is why I want to hire you.”
    “Set the gas to stun.”
    “Cute.”  
    “I prefer sexy, tempting, brilliant.”  
    “Cute. Like a kitten with big green eyes.” He looked at me like he wanted to push me up against the side of the elevator and prove exactly how “cute” made him feel.
    “Think you mean sex kitten.” Not