Flash

other things in the cabinets. Photographs and personal effects that had once belonged to Fletcher and his wife. Jasper intended to give them to Kirby and Paul when they graduated from college.
    He walked down the row of cabinets, checking each drawer. When he was satisfied that none had been touched, he went back upstairs and locked the basement door again.
    There was no proof that anyone had been inside the house. Still, he could not shake the sensation that someone had prowled through it tonight.
    This paranoia thing may be getting worse, he warned himself. He wondered if he should be worried. This was the second time in less than two weeks that he'd imagined that someone had deliberately targeted him. For sure he would not mention his little problem to Kirby.
    Jasper paused at the doorway of his study and glanced inside.
    He had already checked this room once to make certain none of the computer equipment had been stolen, but something made him go back into it a second time.
    He stopped in the center and tried to figure out what seemed different or out of place.
    It took him a few seconds to realize what was wrong. The pen that he habitually left on top of the closed laptop was now sitting beside the computer.
    A cold feeling that had nothing to do with his damp shirt drifted through him. He reached across the arm of his chair, raised the lid of the computer, and switched on the machine. It hummed happily to itself as it went through its opening sequence. A moment later his files were neatly arrayed on the screen.
    No one had wiped his hard disk. Of course, there would be no way of telling if someone had downloaded his files onto floppy disks, he reminded himself. But he had no confidential client data or business records on this machine at the moment. He could not think of anything he had stored in the computer that was worth stealing.
    He crossed the study to the file drawers and opened them one by one. He never bothered to lock this cabinet. The truly valuable documents were all downstairs in the basement
    Nothing appeared to be out of place in the first three drawers. He was about to close the fourth when he noticed the yellow file folder in front of the red one.
    He looked at it for a long time before he removed it and glanced inside to be certain that all of the papers were there. When he was satisfied, he dropped it back into its proper place behind the red folder.
    It was very likely that anyone who chanced to glance into his filing cabinet would assume that the system he used was governed by date and the alphabet, which it was. But within that system, it was also color-coded.
    Kirby and Paul had often teased him about his elaborate, many-tiered personal filing system. Jasper had developed it on his own years ago. It worked. He had never seen any reason to alter or simplify it.
    It was just barely possible that he, himself, had misfiled the red folder at some point in the past, he told himself. But given his precise filing habits, it was far more probable that someone else had removed the file and then returned it to the wrong place tonight.
    Hell, maybe I really am getting paranoid.
    Maybe he needed another vacation.
    But what if he wasn't going over the edge? What if someone had searched his study tonight?
    If that was true, he would have to reconsider a few of the evening's events in a slightly different light. Whoever had entered his house must have known that he would be delayed getting home tonight.
    That observation gave rise to other, more troubling questions. After Olivia agreed to a working dinner with him, had she plotted to keep him busy while someone searched his house?
    He sat down at his desk to think. After a while he realized what it was that bothered him the most
    He could deal with the possibility that Olivia did not trust him. He could even handle the concept that, in her zeal to protect Glow, Inc., interests, she might have sent someone to go through his private files to see if he had a secret agenda for the company.
    What he did not want to believe was that she had lured him out onto her windswept balcony for a flaming-hot, incredibly sexy kiss that meant absolutely nothing to her.

12
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    "I t was very kind of you to take time out from your busy schedule to have breakfast with me, Olivia." Eleanor Lancaster smiled across the expanse of snowy white tablecloth.
    "
My
busy schedule?" Olivia chuckled. "Yours must be even more hectic than mine. Campaigning is exhausting. I don't