LITMIR.BIZ

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by a beautiful young woman.”

      Wren forced her expression to stay neutral, despite her lip wanting to curl at the sleazy way he was looking at her. “Very well.”

      “Feel free to get some work done in the studio, but don’t go home. I’ll need you to clean up once Mr. Wagner has gone.”

      “Of course.”

      She retreated before Sean could make any more requests…or comments about her appearance. He seemed to do that on a daily basis. Wren certainly wasn’t averse to compliments, but her skin always seemed to crawl whenever he was around.

      The other interns—a blonde named Aimee and a girl with a Southern accent named Lola—were painting in relative silence in the studio. Their stations were crowded with paints and tools, like chaotic rainbows of creativity. Her section, in stark comparison, was spotlessly clean.

      If only her mother could see that for once she had the cleanest workstation in the room.

      Sadly, this wasn’t due to a newfound love of tidiness…but more because her Muse had refused to show up. She’d taken on more reception duties to avoid her creative block, but Sean would expect her to produce something eventually. After all, she should be having the time of her life with an opportunity so many other artists would kill for.

      Supposedly, anyway.

      “Looks like it’s just you and me, old friend.” Wren stood in front of the canvas, which was mostly blank except for an angry-looking smudge in one corner. She laughed to herself in the quiet room, the sound rough and insincere. “And with friends like these, who needs enemies?”

      Neither Aimee nor Lola glanced in her direction. But before Wren had a chance to pick up a brush, the sound of talking floated down from the showroom. Sean’s client had arrived, which meant he would be occupied for some time. That gave her a window of opportunity to check out the storage room and some of the other rooms at the back of the gallery where she didn’t normally go.

      Tiptoeing out into the corridor, she listened to make sure that no one was coming her way. The storage room was at the very end of the building—which had once been a mechanic’s workshop that had lain abandoned for several years until Sean had purchased it. The storage room had been tacked on to the structure and fitted with a keypad to limit entry. Wren hadn’t yet been able to come up with an excuse that would allow her to request access from Sean.

      She stared helplessly at the blinking keypad. It seemed strange to lock up a storage room so tightly. Even if it housed valuable paintings, why were the interns kept out? It didn’t make sense. Wren had worked in a small gallery a few towns over from Charity Springs. Sure, small towns were different from the Big Smoke, but she’d always had access to the gallery’s stock.

      What had she been thinking turning up here without a plan? For the first time in three weeks, Wren felt the stupidity of her decision weigh on her. A naive part of her had assumed it would be easy to show up here, figure out what had happened and run back home, evidence in hand. Ready to reassure her friend that she would have justice, after all.

      “That’s because you don’t think before you act,” she muttered to herself. Again.

      “Wren?” A female voice caught her attention. “Are you free? I have a question.”

      Wren spun to find Aimee peering out of the studio, her fair brows wrinkled. “What’s wrong, Aimee?”

      “I need to put a note into the shared calendar about my day off this week and I couldn’t get in. Then I tried to reset the password and now I’ve locked us all out.” She threw her hands up in the air. “I don’t know why computers hate me so much.”

      Wren tried not to roll her eyes. In the three weeks she’d been working at Ainslie Ave, Aimee had managed to lock herself out of the computer system at least four times. Clumsy fingers, she’d claimed, but Wren found that hard to believe considering the delicate and intricate portraits she painted.

      “Can you help me?” the other woman pleaded. “I don’t want to disturb Sean again. He got very frustrated last time.”

      “Sure.” Wren headed back into the studio and took a seat on the stool in front of the old laptop that served as their shared work computer.

      Within minutes she’d located the problem—Aimee had made a spelling error when she’d created her new password, which explained why she hadn’t been able to use it to log in after the reset.

      “Okay, that should do it.” Wren clicked over to their email program. “I’ve reset it again and tested that it works. I’ll leave a note on the desktop with the password this time so you don’t forget it.”

      “Thanks.” Aimee had the decency to look mildly sheepish.

      Wren was about to move away from the computer when she noticed something strange about the email inbox. A ton of unread emails had banked up from contacts she’d never seen before. Normally, the inbox the three women shared was filled with general requests from the website’s contact form. There might be the occasional email requesting information or dates of shows, but otherwise they didn’t get many direct emails from clients.

      “Are you logged in to Sean’s email account?” Wren asked, looking up suddenly.

      Aimee cringed. “Yes, but please don’t tell him. I needed to, uh…delete an email.” She fiddled with the end of her paint-splattered tank top, the chipped pink nail polish on her fingers glinting like shards of broken glass in the afternoon sun that streamed in from a large window beside them.

      “How did you get into his account?” Wren could hardly believe Aimee was the password-cracking type.

      “He keeps it written down.” She averted her gaze and spoke softly so that Lola couldn’t hear them. “Please don’t say anything.”

      Wren knew for a fact that his passwords weren’t written down anywhere in the studio…after all, she’d looked. Which meant that Aimee had been places that Wren hadn’t, and from the expression on her face she wasn’t too comfortable sharing that information.

      “I won’t, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to be logging in to his email account from our shared computer. You might get someone in trouble,” she admonished, feeling immediately hypocritical because she knew exactly how she was going to exploit this opportunity.

      “You’re right,” Aimee said, knotting her hands in front of her. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

      “I won’t say anything.” Wren turned the laptop back to herself. “And I’ll log out so I can check on the shared inbox and make sure we haven’t missed anything. You’d better get back to your painting in case he comes in.”

      “Thank you.”

      Perhaps it made Wren a horrible person to be admonishing Aimee while planning to use her lapse in judgment to scan through Sean’s emails. But Wren had learned a thing or two about morals in the last six months—they were not as black-and-white as she’d been led to believe. For example, in Christian’s mind it had been perfectly okay for him to make up stories about her because he felt she was a bad person for hiding her “depravity.”

      Besides, she wasn’t hurting Aimee. She was simply making use of a happy accident to help her friend.

      There was nothing suspicious in his emails. Time for plan B. Her nails clicked quietly against the keys of the laptop as she searched for the passcode to the storage room. Nothing. But she did manage to find his birthday, address and home phone number, which gave her something to work with. Wren wasn’t a master spy by any stretch, but she had sat in on an internet security session at the community center back home during one of her volunteering stints. At the time she’d thought it was boring as hell, but some of the stats had stuck with her.

      Like how the majority of people use their birthdays as pin codes for ATMs and online banking. Perhaps that extended to locked rooms, as well.

      Taking

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