Good thing, too, as she needed to see if she could book about one more project before Christmas now that they wouldn’t be involved in anything related to the Eldridge mansion. That meant upping the marketing efforts stat, and she and Kennedy had come up with a way to do that before she’d gone home last night. Sierra had just gotten off the phone with her radio ad rep, having increased her ad spend for the next ten days.

She also needed to get back to working on the first quarter of next year, filling up their schedule, as it was currently a little light on projects. Those would come, she knew, but she intended to do what she could to encourage them. Of particular interest to her was a bed-and-breakfast just outside of town that was looking for a gut job. Sierra had met with the owners a couple of days ago, had toured the property, and aimed to get the meat of the proposal down on paper this evening for her next meeting with them on Tuesday.

Not five minutes after she’d pulled up the photos of the property on her computer, she thought she heard a noise in the other room. But she’d locked the door when she’d come in, so she didn’t think too much about it, as it was probably the wind. There was a good two or three inches of snow on the ground, and the wind was on a tear.

When something tapped on the window right behind her, though, she nearly jumped through the ceiling. Because that wasn’t the wind. That noise sounded like it was made by a human.

Her heart racing, she stood, glanced around at the room as if it could tell her what to do. Her phone was in her pocket, and she pulled it out in case she needed to call the cops. The tapping came again, tink tink tink tink on the glass, and yeah, that was a person.

It was dark outside and she had the overhead light and a lamp on, so if she tried to look out the blinds, she would see nothing, and whoever was out there would see her clearly. After flipping the overhead light off, she went into the next room over, the darkened meeting room, and peeked between the blinds toward the area outside her office window. Sure enough, there was someone out there, and her mouth went dry and her grip tightened on her phone.