Page 57 of Paranoid

God only knew. Cade could handle him for the weekend.

Tonight, though, she had another project.

It was simple: Check out Xander Frickin’ Vale.

Another long sip, then she topped off her glass, grabbed her laptop, and, with Reno at her heels, headed upstairs. In her bedroom she stripped off her clothes, tossed them into an overflowing laundry basket, then slipped into a pair of comfy pj’s.

As the dog curled onto his bed, she headed across the landing to her office, which was located on the other side of the staircase. Like her bedroom, the office was tucked under the eaves, an attic conversion complete with built-in file cabinets, bookcase, and a long desk-height counter stretching beneath the single window. She set up her laptop next to her much larger desktop. She was good with technology and had honed her skills at finding out about people. She’d done work in HR at her last job along with bookkeeping, and then there was her side business, which, if things didn?

??t improve on the employment front, she’d have to expand.

So how hard could it be to find out some details about Vale?

She cringed inwardly, but just a little. Was she crossing some forbidden line, breaching her daughter’s privacy?

Hell no!

What about Vale’s?

She figured he gave that up when he started French kissing her daughter.

Another long swig and she went to work, her fingers flying over the keys. Within seconds she was searching for anything she could on Xander Vale. His profiles, his conversations, his photos. She found him on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, to begin with, and his privacy settings were set low if at all, so she could snoop around easily.

She scanned each screen eagerly, digging for anything she could find on the mystery man, who turned out to be not that much of a mystery. The long and short of it was that he’d grown up in Portland, gone to high school at Wilson, and was currently a college junior majoring in general studies. There were pictures of him partying, of course, at football games, downing cans of beer with various girls, none of whom was her daughter.

Typical college boy.

His parents still lived in Portland, were still married, and had two other younger kids: a boy and a girl. Xander had been an all-league football player in high school.

Now he was enrolled in college, at the University of Oregon. That would put him down in Eugene, hours away, for most of the week until the end of the term in mid-June. Unless he was taking online classes.

And what had Xander said? That he was working part-time for Chuck, that he was going to spend the summer working full-time in Edgewater?

“Not good.” She took a sip from her glass and discovered it near empty, which explained the slightly warm, buzzy feeling running through her veins.

Maybe Harper’s hot romance would flame out by summer.

“If only.”

Unlikely. It was already late May. Summer was just around the corner.

From the bedroom, Reno gave out a low growl.

Rachel spun in her desk chair and knocked over the remains of her wine, the glass toppling, the dregs of wine sloshing onto her desk. “Crap!” Again Reno growled and this time she looked across the landing to the other side of the house where the dog, tail stiff, hackles raised, stood facing the window.

“It’s nothing,” she said, as much to herself as Reno, even though she couldn’t help but feel a little niggle of anxiety, a tremor of fear as she righted the glass, sopped up what she could of the wine with some tissues. Then she snapped off the lights, crossed the landing in the darkness, and peered through the glass.

It took a second for her eyes to adjust as she stared into the backyard.

Nothing.

The landscape was calm.

Right?

Or did a shadow move in the darkness of the yard below?

She squinted, the dog tense beside her.