LITMIR.BIZ

      REALITY HAD BURST the happy bubble that was Rhys’s weekend. Monday had flown past in a blur of meetings and he hadn’t left the office until 9:00 p.m. Tempted as he’d been to call Wren on his way home, he didn’t want her to get the impression that she was a booty call…as much as her booty had definitely been on his mind.

      The next day, he was sitting at his desk, wondering where his Tuesday had gotten to when Quinn and Owen arrived to give an update on Ainslie Ave.

      “How’d the installation go?” he asked, dragging his focus back to work.

      “Good.” Quinn took a seat on the other side of Rhys’s desk. “We’re currently working through the customization requirements for the monitoring system.”

      “Has anything else come up?”

      Owen raked a hand through his blond hair. “I managed to speak with the interns after we finished up for the day. They all seemed a little cagey about answering questions, particularly where Sean was involved.”

      “So no confirmation that he’s sleeping with any of them?” Rhys remembered Wren’s admission about Aimee.

      “Not a thing.”

      Interesting. Either Aimee had lied to Quinn or she’d lied to Wren.

       What if Wren lied to you?

      He shoved the thought aside immediately. What reason would Wren have to lie to him? If something really was going on between Sean Ainslie and Aimee, perhaps the other woman had a reason for keeping it quiet. A reason she wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing with a security company.

      “I had some luck with the gallery’s ex-employees, though,” Quinn said.

      After a few minutes detailing her calls to several former Ainslie Ave employees, she got to the one that she was most excited about. “I spoke with a woman named Kylie Samuels. She worked at the gallery until six months ago when she returned to her home in Charity Springs, Idaho.”

      The name of the town rang a bell, but Rhys couldn’t place where he’d heard it before. “What’s the significance of that?”

      “Well, I did some research and it barely has seven hundred residents.” She paused as if for dramatic effect. “And guess who also happens to come from Charity Springs? Wren Livingston.”

      Rhys tried not to let the surprise show on his face. Why wouldn’t she have mentioned that someone from her hometown had also worked for Ainslie Ave? Perhaps it hadn’t occurred to her. Or maybe she didn’t know this Kylie Samuels. Though that did seem unlikely for a town of such a small size.

      “Any signs they’re connected to one another?” he asked.

      “I assumed you wouldn’t be satisfied with circumstantial evidence,” Quinn replied with a smile that made her look like the cat who’d got the cream. “They both attended the local high school and I found a picture of them from a fund-raising event.”

      She pulled up the photo on her laptop. It seemed to be several years old and showed two girls with their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders. Wren’s ear-to-ear grin struck something in his chest. She looked so much more at ease in this picture, so free and innocent. Her hair was shorter and her face was painted with big blue flowers, making her resemble some kind of fairy or nymph.

      “That’s Wren Livingston,” Owen said, pointing with his pen. He was oblivious to the fact that Rhys knew her face intimately, and now her body, as well. “And this is Kylie Samuels.”

      They could have been sisters. Kylie had blond hair, too, though it was a few shades darker than Wren’s. And she was smaller. Skinny rather than slender. They wore the same breezy smiles and crazy face paint.

      “What did Kylie have to say?” Rhys asked.

      “She really didn’t want to talk to me,” Quinn said. “But I managed to get out of her that she ended the internship early because of a clash with Ainslie. She said it was something to do with her paintings, but when I pressed her she clammed up.”

      “Did you ask her about whether or not she was friends with Wren?”

      Quinn huffed. “Barely. The second I mentioned Wren’s name, Kylie said something about having an appointment and then she hung up on me. I’ve been trying to call her back since late last week to get more information, but she won’t take my calls.”

      For the first time Rhys felt guilty for skirting the lines of appropriateness by sleeping with Wren. Up till now, it hadn’t bothered him too much because he’d seen no reason why she would be involved in the security breaches. But this information about her friend shed some new light on the situation. It created a link where there hadn’t been one previously.

      Was it possible that she’d been lying to him this whole time?

      “Keep chasing the ex-employees,” Rhys said. “See what else you can dig up. But we have to continue servicing Ainslie as a client.”

      Rhys called an end to the meeting but asked Owen to stay behind. As much as he trusted Quinn, she had a fiery personality, and once she decided that she didn’t like someone, her mind was hard to change. He needed a more balanced opinion.

      “I want your take on this,” he said, running a hand over his closely cropped hair. “I get something seems off about this guy, but surely he wouldn’t have called us in if he had something to hide.”

      “I have seen stranger things in this line of work,” Owen replied with a wry smile. “There’s definitely something going on. He seemed resistant to the cameras, and I’m not buying the line about him not wanting to monitor his staff.”

      “Me, either.”

      “The external security is also pretty strong. He’s got a monitored system that they set every night, which notifies him if there are multiple unsuccessful attempts on the pin code at either the front door or the entrance in the loading dock. If the alarm is tripped, then it notifies our call center and we dispatch someone to check it out. But…” Owen paused, rubbing a hand along his jaw. “There were no external security cameras until yesterday. Not even for the loading area behind the gallery. That’s strange.”

      “How did things go with the tech side of things?”

      “Quinn is handling that, since that’s more her forte than mine. She’s still making her way through the email logs, but it does look like someone used Ainslie’s log-in on the interns’ terminal in the studio.”

      “Is it possible Ainslie needed to access his email while

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