Page 80 of The Most Wonderful Crime of the Year

“Oh, you totally have one of those.”

“No.” He was shaking his head. “I was just thinking... We can’t play it.”

“Of course we can play it!” she whisper-shouted again, gesturing wildly with her flashlight. But then she remembered... Flashlight. Darkness. Electricity. “Oh my gosh, we can’t play it.”

Then his tall body pressed against hers in a way that would have driven her crazy three days before. It would have felt intimidating and toxic but now it felt warm and safe as his fingers went to the back of her neck, massaging gently and making her moan. “Which means, we can’t say a word about that.” He cut his eyes down at the camera sandwiched between them. “To anyone.”

He was right. Someone in that house was a murderer who just hadn’t gotten the job done yet. If anyone knew about that camera...

Ethan pushed back and reached for it. “Here. You go back to the room and I’ll go put that someplace no one will look.”

“No.” She held it to her chest. It was the closest she had ever come to uttering the phrasemy precious.

“Maggie.”

“I’m not letting it out of my sight.” She sounded strong. She sounded sure. It was the way she always felt right before Colin made her regret it; when, actually, what she should have been regretting was him.

“Maggie.”

“No one knows it exists, right? And they already searched our room, so when you thinkabout it...” Maggie trailed off when she saw Ethan smirking. “What?”

“You called it our room.”

She had. And she hadn’t even realized it. “I meantmyroom.”

“Oh, but you saidourroom.”

“I misspoke.”

“You—”

A low growl filled the air, but it wasn’t a sexy growl. No. It was worse. So, so, so much worse, because it was ahungrygrowl. And it was coming from her.

“That wasn’t me,” she blurted. But then her traitorous stomach did it again.

“Okay.” Ethan pointed to the door ten feet away. “You go toourroom and lock the door, and I’ll go raid the kitchen. And then we’ll decide what to do. When I get back.To our room.”

She opened her mouth to argue, but her stomach growled again, so she darted for the bedroom and closed the door and turned the key, but she could hear him laughing as his footsteps faded down the hall.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Maggie

Maggie meant to stoke the fire—maybe fluff her hair—but as soon as she was safely inside the room she started to pace.

She needed to hide the clock, someplace dark and secret.

She needed to put it on a shelf, right out in the open and hidden in plain sight.

She needed to brush her teeth and put on fancy underwear and also go back in time and become the kind of person who owns fancy underwear.

There were a hundred and one things that Maggie needed to be doing, but she couldn’t pick a single one, so Maggie kept on pacing.

Until she stopped.

The tiny flashlight was already back in her pocket, but the fire was going strong by that point, and in the bright orange glow she saw her laptop and a bundle of cords sticking out of her bag. And she remembered: laptops run on batteries.

“Come on, come on, come on,” she was chanting two minutes later as she waited for the laptop to turn on. She found the right cord and adapter and plugged the nanny cam in and, suddenly, she was back in the hallway, looking at Eleanor’s office door in black and white.