He slammed the phone down and looked back at her, sighing heavily.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he grumbled, moving away and coming back to hand her one of his button-down shirts. “I’ll open up and wait out in the living room. Right now, I need you to call your office and get your security to review the tapes, every second for the past seventy-two hours, particularly the last twenty-four, and alert us of any suspicious conduct. All right? Your cameras could have caught something.”
She nodded. Feeling vulnerable and excited at the way he always took charge. “I already talked to the head of security, they’re already on it.”
“It’s going to be all right.” He spoke from the door, his beautiful face tight with determination.
The look he shot in her direction fairly screamed, I would kill for you and Whitney grew warm in every place on her body, including her heart. “I know.”
But as he swung around to allow their visitors inside, Whitney wished he not only meant it about the blackmail note, but about them—him and her—as well.
Quietly slipping into his shirt, she stole a whiff and loved the male scent that clung to the fabric. The dress she’d worn to the benefit seemed to have revealed even more of her bare legs than Andrew’s shirt did, so she decided it would do and padded out barefoot to the living room.
Graves, large and incredibly gorgeous, and as somber as Andrew, was sitting next to him while dabbling with Andrew’s phone, both their dark heads bent and their broad shoulders straining their shirts. Chloe was watching them with a lovey-dovey expression on her face, one that Whitney feared she’d just been wearing herself as she looked at Andrew. “Hey, you! What’s up with this?” Chloe asked. She was still wearing her glittery green gala minidress.
Whitney plopped down next to her on the living room couch. “Some stupid blackmail note I don’t even want to get into.”
Chloe laughed like an angel, all rosy cheeks and singsongy voice. She was especially rosy-cheeked ever since she’d moved in with Graves several months ago. “Seriously? What can anyone blackmail you two about?”
Whitney shrugged, and Andrew spoke out. “Darling, give your phone to Graves for a second.”
Whitney jerked her spine straight and found herself scowling at him across the top of Graves’s bent head. He’d sounded all authoritative and calm, like she really was his darling and should probably obey. God, how she hated that he now knew that she needed him. She’d been desperate for him to fight for her and have to woo her, and now she was once again helpless and almost begging for him to save her. Damn it. “We said you wouldn’t call me darling,” she said.
“My love, will you please just give the damn phone to Graves?”
Her scowl intensified to a full-blown glower. “If you can’t call me darling you can certainly not call me my—”
“Okay, you two!” Chloe snatched up the phone and carried it to Graves, whose face was smiling as he watched her approach. “Here, my love,” she whispered sexily as she bent to him, and Graves grabbed the back of her head and pulled her to him for a soft, sweet, dry kiss on the lips.
Meanwhile, Whitney glared at Andrew.
Chloe returned to a wide single chair that was angled toward the couch. “What the hell is up?” she demanded with a mixture of concern and amusement.
“What’s up is that Andrew here seems to think I’m his—”
“You are,” an emphatic male voice said.
She glared at him. “You think I’m your idiot eighteenth-century wife or your tossed-away little woman waiting for you, that’s what you think.”
“I don’t think Andrew believes that, Whit,” Chloe said.
A new voice broke suddenly into the turmoil, this one calm, low, and gruff. “I suggest you don’t engage in girl therapy here right now, baby,” Graves told Chloe without even lifting his attention from the opened back of Whitney’s cellular phone.
“Yes, baby, this is obviously not the time. Lunch tomorrow, Whit?” Chloe pressed, a blond eyebrow rising.
Whitney agreed with a brief nod, and Graves raised his head and his striking gold eyes, which had a light downward tilt at the corners that made him look sad and “unbearably hot”—this quote was from Chloe—slid from Andrew, to Whitney, and back and forth. “All right, so the way this works is that both your phone and Andrew’s have been equipped with a self-destruct chip that you can activate when receiving a call from the other. Kidnappers frequently use their victim’s phones to communicate with their families when they require a ransom.” He held one of the phones in the air and pantomimed what he said. “If Andrew gets the call on his cell phone, he can press the star and the zero simultaneously for five seconds and activate yours to self-destruct. And vice versa.”
Whitney was still caught on the phrase “self-destruct.” “You mean you’re putting a bomb in our phones?”
“Not so you can use it on me,” Andrew emphasized.
“It’s a very small bomb,” Graves calmly added. “It only has the capacity to injure the one holding it. For kidnapping situations, it has been set up to require two phone calls, one to activate, and as soon as the phone is used the next time, it will go off. Now, in the case of personal attack, you can activate your own phone by pressing star and zero for five seconds, and then slip it into their pockets or toss it in their direction.”
“Like a grenade.” Whitney stated that last bit, and when Graves calmly nodded like they were talking about pasta, she decided she wasn’t sure whether she loved her new Bond 007 phone, or wanted nothing to do with it. With her luck it would self-destruct in her own damn purse all by itself, and destroy her in the process.
“Whitney, don’t look so concerned!” Chloe laughingly cried. “Graves does this all the time for the government. Your phone locks on its own. There’s no way both buttons will be pressed accidentally.”
Whitney was hesitant to grab the phone Graves now held outstretched toward her.
When three taps on the door sounded, her eyes flicked upward from studying the apparatus. It was a struggle not to notice the fluid way Andrew moved across the living room as he went to open it.
He returned to the living room with Daniel trailing behind him, and there was just something about that man that was sexy as hell.