Crossing Danger: A Shelby Nichols Adventure by Colleen Helme Page B

to droop. She’d worn herself out talking to me.
    “Well, I’d better go meet him at your apartment. You don’t think whoever broke in would come here to finish you off, do you?
    “No...if anything...I’d think they’d go back to my apartment...but now...you have it...so I don’t have to worry...” Her voice trailed off, but I heard her thinking thanks Shelby .
    “You’re welcome,” I whispered.
    ***
    The crime scene tape at Billie’s apartment had been taken down, and Dimples opened the door to my knock. He’d showered and shaved, but his eyes held weariness from lack of sleep. With a quick greeting, he ushered me inside.
    “Find anything?” I asked. A twinge of guilt flared, but I pushed it away.
    “No. But they took her computer, so I think they were after the thumb-drive like you thought. So...” His gaze zeroed in on mine, and his eyes narrowed. “What did she tell you that she didn’t want me to know?”
    “Huh?” Guilt flooded over me with a vengeance, but I tried to act dumb. “What makes you say that?”
    “Come on Shelby...I know how this works.” At my wide-eyed gaze and continued silence, he ran his fingers through his hair and sighed. “Okay, I’ll explain. First, she tells me she wants you to come to the hospital, but when I ask her why, she blows me off. Then once you get there, she tells me to go home and get cleaned up. Now it doesn’t take a genius to know she’s up to something, and you’re in cahoots with her. So spit it out...what did she tell you?”
    My mouth dropped open. I snapped it shut and tried to come up with a reasonable explanation. “That’s because it’s personal. She just needed to talk woman to woman...about what happened and other things...like...you and her.”
    His left brow raised, and he didn’t say a word, letting the seconds tick loudly by. The way his eyes narrowed reminded me of the look I always gave my kids, or my husband, when I wanted them to know I wasn’t buying their explanation.
    “Okay,” I caved. “But I’ll have you know she trusted me to keep her secret. You might regret it.”
    “I’ll take my chances.”
    “Fine,” I shrugged. “She wanted me to get the thumb-drive without telling you.”
    He stilled, confused and a little hurt. “Why would she do that?
    “Um...so you wouldn’t get it.” I shrugged. “Mostly because she worried that if the police had it, someone would conveniently lose it. Plus, I think she’d like to keep it out of the system so she can get her hands on it.”
    He nodded his head like he understood, but he was thinking we were both a little crazy to go to that extreme, and all the subterfuge was hardly called for. It also stung that Billie didn’t trust him to keep it safe...he wasn’t just ‘the police’ in this case...he was a lot more than that. And then there was me. Why hadn’t I tried to talk her out of it? What was up with that? “So...did she tell you where it is?”
    “No.” It was the truth, but now he thought I was deliberately lying to him.
    “Shelby...” he growled. How could I lie to him? After everything we’d been through together? What about our friendship? What about what was best for Billie? His brows drew down over his eyes, and loud thoughts of strangling me surfaced in his mind.
    “She didn’t have to because I sort of figured it out already,” I quickly said. “So she didn’t need to tell me.” His jaw clenched, and his fingers tightened. Yikes! I decided I might as well tell him before he burst a blood vessel and had a stroke or something. “Okay, so...I got it.”
    His brows lifted in confusion. “You have the thumb-drive? How did you get it?” He was thinking that the only way I had it was if I’d come by last night, broken into her apartment, and taken it. Would I really do something stupid like that? What if those guys had come back? And going into her apartment was breaking the law. He’d have to arrest me.
    Now I really didn’t want to tell him the