Page 27 of Hunter

Hunter grinned at her before they did a thorough search of all six of the available drawers. There was no laptop in any of them, which meant it had probably been in the briefcase Penrose mentioned Wallis taking with him.

Nor was there any sign of the brown notebook Zoey told him she had seen Wallis looking through when she arrived earlier, which Hunter had also seen in the man’s possession. Hunter believed the notebook must also have been in Wallis’s briefcase.

“Does this seem odd to you?” Zoey’s query broke into his thoughts.

Hunter turned to find her standing behind the desk looking at the drawers either side of the foot well. He moved to stand beside her, assessing the two sides of the desk before speaking. “It does seem a little odd that the top two drawers were only for ornamentation— What are you doing?” he prompted when Zoey began to feel under and along the ledge at the back of the desk.

“Ah-ha.” Her cry of success was accompanied by a click, and then the whole top of the desk silently lifted on hinges at the front of the desk.

Zoey pushed it open the rest of the way, the ease with which it did so telling them that the desktop was lifted often.

“I knew it! I damn well knew it!” she accused when the completely open desktop revealed a laptop, three surveillance screens, and listening equipment in the compartment beneath. “That sneaky bastard has been watching us all foryears.” She looked at Hunter with pained eyes. “Why would he want to spy on everyone in this way?”

Hunter would take a guess that Wallis’s years of hunting for evidence of dragons had resulted in him becoming completely paranoid, even within the confines of his own home.

But those cameras also posed the question whether the reason for Wallis having departed so hastily earlier was as a direct result of his having listened to Zoey and Hunter’s conversation.

As the tech expert in the Drake family, Hunter was quickly able to turn on the laptop and gain access to all three recordings on the surveillance screens.

The first one allowed the viewer to move between cameras placed in all the bedrooms.

The second one covered the rooms downstairs.

The third one had screens that surveilled the outside of the house.

“There is nothing else on the laptop other than the recordings for twenty-four hours before those memories are wiped and then started again,” he told Zoey as he pressed the necessary keys to bring up the recordings from earlier today.

The pictures were in black-and-white, but there was no doubt they were looking at and listening to Hunter and Zoey talking in the sitting room before Zoey had suggested they move outside. The voice recording of outside was a little more patchy, but evenso, Hunter was able to hear them discussing the way in which Ben McGregor had died.

Showing Edgar Wallis that Hunter’s arrival at Tregarthen House wasn’t accidental but deliberate.

As a direct response to that, Wallis had boarded his helicopter and left this house and Cornwall almost immediately afterward.

CHAPTER TEN

I’msure this was only a large manor house when I saw it last. Zoey spoke to Hunter through their mental link as the huge silver dragon circled and then began to descend toward where a castle backed directly on a huge mountain.

The same mountain Belle had become lost on at New Year’s? Zoey wasn’t sure, but she believed so.

Don’t tell me, she huffed.You and your brothers have the ability to put up a shield to stop the local humans from seeing you actually live in a gigantic castle!

Zoey was wrapped up warm in her thick coat, a beanie, and gloves, but Hunter’s dragon gave off such a tremendous amount of heat that she hadn’t felt the cold at all, despite being thousands of feet up in the air.

Okay, I won’t tell you that.The sound of Hunter’s laughter echoed through their link.Even if it’s true.

Zoey knew it was almost nine hundred miles from Cornwall to the top of Scotland, and yet they had arrived here within an hour of leaving Tregarthen House.

At first, she had been afraid to lift her head from the safety of nestling against the heat of Hunter’s chest, but eventually, curiosity had won out over caution, and she had looked over one of Hunter’s huge dragon front legs.

Instead of seeing the ground beneath them, there was a blanket of fluffy white clouds. They appeared so thick and substantial, it looked as if they could be walked on. Except Zoey knew that if she attempted to do that, she would plummet to her death.

A graphic reminder of what had happened to Ben.

That realization made Zoey feel so sick that she couldn’t help but think that anyone who did that to another human being deserved to meet the same fate. ThatEdgardeserved to meet the same fate.

He might have been her guardian for twelve years, but he hadn’t been a loving or kind one. Consequentially, it was hard for Zoey to feel affection for someone who she knew deliberately kept his distance from her, physically and emotionally. From the start, there had been no hugs or words of comfort to help ease her pain after her parents died so suddenly.

Once again, Zoey wondered why Edgar had ever agreed to become her guardian. It certainly hadn’t been because he felt any affection for her.

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