Free Stolen by Allison Brennan

years since Stanford. She’d changed a lot, including longer, lighter hair.
    She stepped into the gallery and scanned the room, hyper-alert for any movement. There were more people than she expected. She wasn’t surprised when she realized it was a gallery of famous cartoon stills.
    She didn’t see Sean anywhere. An elderly employee, dressed all in black with a red-and-white name badge, approached with a warm smile. “May I help you find something? We’re closing in ten minutes, but I can—”
    “No,” she snapped. The employee stopped smiling. Deanna took out her badge. “I’m Deanna Brighton, Federal Bureau of Investigation. A man walked in here, six foot one, dark hair, blue eyes, wearing a light blue polo shirt and jeans.”
    The employee looked both concerned and worried and glanced around. “Is there a problem?”
    “Where is he?”
    “I think a young man went into the Seuss exhibit. It’s in the back, through the red-and-white-striped curtains.”
    Deanna strode toward the curtains. As soon as she pushed open the drapes, she was confronted with a roomful of kids, none of them taller than her waistline. Someone in a Cat in the Hat costume was giving the captivated munchkins a tour of the exhibit, which included a car-sized replica of the machine Thing 1 and Thing 2 used to clean up Sally’s house.
    For a minute, Deanna was transfixed by the whimsical art, remembering when her dad used to read her the silly books, long after she could read them herself. She’d loved listening to his voice. It stopped when she was eight, and she liked to believe it was because she was finally too old, but she knew it was because her dad had lost hope after he lost his business. Without hope, no one could enjoy Dr. Seuss.
    She blinked, pulling herself out of her memory, and scanned the room. She walked around the periphery and still didn’t see Rogan.
    Dammit, where had he gone? She rubbed her temples. The headache she’d been nursing at Starbucks was a full-blown migraine now.
    There was another curtained doorway and she went through it, but it was a hallway that led back to the main studio. Shit. He’d ditched her!
    “Did you find him? Is there something wrong?”
    She went back outside, ignoring the employee’s questions. Her fists clenched and she pounded her sore feet on the pavement.
    “Damn, damn, damn!”
    Impossible.
    Then she saw him in the back of a cab. He tipped an invisible hat to her as the taxi turned the corner and disappeared from view.
    *   *   *
     
    Sean had the taxi driver drop him off at Grand Central Station. If the fed got the cab number—and Sean was pretty certain the woman tailing him was a federal agent—she could find out where the cab took him.
    From Grand Central he walked around to make sure she hadn’t followed in another cab, then ten minutes later took a taxi to the carriage house. He had the driver leave him two blocks away. Sean was certain the fed hadn’t followed him to the pub; that meant she was following Colton.
    Sean went up to the door and used the pass code Colton had given him to enter.
    Colton was walking up the stairs. He turned around immediately when the door opened.
    “Sean.”
    He closed the door behind him.
    “A federal agent followed me from the pub. I lost her, but I guarantee you led her to me.”
    “I wasn’t followed.” He didn’t sound confident.
    “I’m paranoid by nature. Learned that from Hunter. Are you being investigated by the feds?”
    “No, of course not.”
    “How can you be sure?”
    “I check periodically.”
    “Shit, Colton! Paxton could be setting you up. You get him the information he wants, he turns you in. He turns us all in.”
    Colton shook his head. “He knows I have something that will destroy him.”
    “What?”
    “I can’t tell you.”
    Sean ran up the stairs until he was face-to-face with Colton. “You owe me.”
    Colton didn’t like the threat. “I have our initial conversation videotaped, all right? Taped