Page 11 of A Date With Death

“I was so close earlier. Didn’t realize there was a half bath over there.”

“At least you made it to a bathroom. Can’t complain about that.” He wheeled his chair toward the back of the room.

She fell in step beside him. “What is this floor made out of? I can’t figure it out.”

He leaned over the side of the chair as if noticing the floor for the first time. “Beats me. Came with the house. Come on, right turn, obviously, since the hall starts here.”

Along the way, he pointed out the various rooms but didn’t stop until they reached the far end.

“He motioned toward the door in front of them. This leads—”

“Let me guess. Man cave?”

“Home office.”

“Oh. Kind of anticlimactic after walking all this way.”

“It wasn’tthatfar.”

She gave him a droll look. “Says the man whorolledall the way here. I’ve already gotten my ten thousand steps for the day. And that’s just since I walked out of your bedroom.”

“Do you want to see the coolest part of the house or not?”

“Coolest? Robert Downey Jr. inIron Mancool or Keanu Reeves inJohn Wickkind of cool?”

“More like Bruce Willis inanythingkind of cool.”

She grinned and they fist-bumped. “Then my answer is most definitely yes.”

He shoved the door open. Then he moved back and motioned her forward. “After you.”

The excitement on his face had her expecting something amazing when she stepped inside the room.

She wasn’t disappointed.

Chapter Seven

Bryson rolled into his office behind Teagan and did something he rarely did these days. He simply enjoyed the moment. He didn’t worry about his aching hip or rehash the would haves, could haves, should haves of his life. Instead, he basked in the sheer joy on her face as she turned in slow circles, taking it all in.

There was a lot to take in.

The expansive room was a microcosm of the house itself, fully contained with a kitchenette in one corner, a bathroom, a bedroom intended for those all-nighters if he needed a quick nap before heading back into the main room to continue his work.

On the left side was the library. Floor-to-ceiling cherrywood bookshelves were filled with all kinds of law enforcement textbooks on topics like forensics, crime scene analysis, and profiling. Past the library, nearly every inch of wall space was adorned with matching cherrywood cabinets, drawers and open shelving. Storage would never be a problem here. The boxes that Mason had sent over were neatly stacked beside some of those storage cabinets. Something for him to tackle later, after everything was scanned electronically. That was the real beauty of this room—the technology.

A large round stone table in the middle of the room was control central for the massive daisy-chained monitors that took up most of the opposite wall. From that table, he could bring up reports or photographs or even the internet and display the information on any individual monitor, or slide it across all of them to form one picture. It was a profiler’s dream, to be able tohave everything at his fingertips at one time so he could make comparisons and see the entire case at a glance.

Too bad he’d never actually used the darn thing on a case.

Teagan had made a full circuit of the room, opening doors and checking behind them, looking into the storage cabinets. But she surprised him by returning to the library, rather than the round table. She traced her hands almost reverently across the books, like a beautiful butterfly, flitting from tome to tome. When she finally turned around, she motioned toward the two leather wing chairs and circular rug that completed the library effect.

“This is amazing. You have books I’ve only dreamed of reading, rare ones that my college couldn’t even get their hands on when I tried borrowing them through our library system. Two of the books have your name on them. I didn’t know you’d authored any texts.”

“Neither do most people,” he said dryly. “My publisher lost a fortune on those.”

“Then they don’t deserve to be your publisher. They obviously don’t know how to market your work or it would have sold a gazillion books.”

“Are you one of the six people who bought a copy? Is that how you know they’re amazing?”