And, after observing Cutter with her and Adam, and the way his herding instincts seemed to kick in at the oddest—and frequently most inconvenient—moments, that grin had appeared often.

“At it again, hey, dawg?” he’d said, clearly purposefully drawling out the last word.

“At what?” she’d asked.

“His other talent. Of which I am an eternally grateful recipient, along with almost everybody else at Foxworth Northwest.”

He wouldn’t explain beyond that, simply gave her another of those grins and said she’d find out.

But other than that, they saw little of him. He was in the area from dark to dawn, which this time of year was a long stretch. He borrowed Cutter for a security round at night, but sent him back to them afterward. He asked the last one of them to go to bed to let him know, and the first up ditto, and he always answered immediately when they hit that red button on the Foxworth phone. She didn’t know where he went to sleep, if anywhere. It bothered her, but she couldn’t deny having him around made her feel safer.

Having Adam in the house with her made her feel anything but, in an entirely different way.

She had, in the end, agreed to not take on any new work and indeed stay home for a while, although she justified it with her intention to spend every bit of that time going over what information they had as many times as necessary to come up with the solution.

That she was having more than a little trouble focusing on that was also the fault of having Adam in her house.

Her father used to tell her that if you had two different problems to deal with, that sometimes focusing on one freed up part of your subconscious mind to deal with the other, and when you went back to it sometimes you’d have the answer you couldn’t come up with when it was all you were thinking about. She’d found that to be true a great deal of the time, but right now the one problem—who was after her—and the other—Adam—were so intricately entwined it was hard to separate them.

She hadn’t meant to, had in fact specifically intended not to, but by the time she remembered that she was already at the kitchen window that looked out into the backyard. Where Adam was throwing a tennis ball for the apparently tireless Cutter. For the first few moments she just admired, loving the way his long, leanly muscled body moved, trying not to dwell on what his backside did to a pair of jeans. Trying not to picture him astride a horse, like some Western hero, maybe tipping that cowboy hat to her as he passed.