I awoke after my doze with my damnation in my arms, and for the moment, I couldn't have been happier. If I was to be damned, there were a lot worse ways to go than to wake up with Adriana Bertoli nestled in my arms, her fiery hair cascading over my left arm and chest, the soft weight of her right breast resting in my palm, her hips snuggled up against me. In the soft glow of her bedside lamp, she was an angel, even with her eyes closed.

I sighed and kissed her forehead, knowing how much had changed for me, even with just that one time. First, I was damned, a dead man walking. The reason was simple. There was no way in the world I could even think of not wanting her again. Her final whispered words as she fell asleep captured me more than her body had, as perfect as it was.

If I couldn't resist her, then I knew it was only a matter of time before Don Bertoli found out. We could be together on only the third Tuesday of each month in a random hotel a thousand miles from Seattle, and still, somehow, he would find out. That's just the way things happened with him, and part of the reason he was such a good boss. And once the Don found out I'd been with Adriana, regardless of whether Margaret approved of it, I'd be found dead within twenty-four hours.

The second thing that surprised me as I held her in the quiet hours of the night was that I didn't feel the immediate need to wake her for another round. My cock wanted it. I could feel it hardening against her ass. It was rip, roaring, and ready to go. It wanted this moment for as long as I could remember, and just once wouldn't do. Even still, I didn't feel the emotional need. Normally, I was a sexual-timed all-you-can-eat buffet, seeing just how much I could get done in the amount of time before the woman's body gave out into utter exhaustion. With Adriana, though, I felt differently. Let her rest, my heart said. She's special. There will be more to come.

With a start, I wondered what time it was. Twisting my neck painfully to look behind me, I saw that it was nearly three thirty in the morning. I'd been out for a while. The staff would start to wake in an hour or so, but more importantly to me was that the outdoor patrols hadn't come back in yet. They were under strict orders. Once the doors were locked and the security system was armed, nobody went in or came out until the morning staff went on duty at five. There were even outdoor bathrooms if someone had to take a piss. Still, I couldn't be sure someone didn't have a case of insomnia.

With regret, I eased myself away from Adriana, my heart breaking when she mumbled in her sleep. “No . . .”

“Shh, I'm just going to stretch a bit,” I whispered softly, kissing her hair. I found the edge of the blanket and folded it over her, confident that nobody would disturb her sleep and find her gloriously naked underneath the blanket. Easing my way around the room, I was glad I'd taken the time to fold up my clothes neatly, even finding my socks still stuffed inside my shoes. I looked around after I finished dressing and nearly smacked my head as I saw two pieces of incriminating evidence: the condom wrapper and the condom itself. I gathered both of them and reminded myself to dispose of them.

Slipping out of Adriana's room, I paused at the door, sparing a look back at her sleeping figure on the bed. Memories flashed through my head, and I couldn't help but smile.

I heard footsteps coming down the corridor, and I nearly jumped out of the room, closing her door behind me. I had only a second to slide down into the chair when one of the morning staff, a cook named Kathy who I'd once hooked up with, came down the hallway. “Good morning, Daniel. Still awake?”

“Of course,” I said, pulling my laptop in front of me and hoping she didn't notice I was just turning it on now. “What's got you up so early? Trying to get a sunrise yoga session in or something?”

“Indigestion, actually,” she said. “Since all this stuff kicked off with Princess Firecrotch in there, I can't get a full night's sleep. Someone told me you were staying outside in the hall recently, and I was thinking that seeing if you were up would be a better use of my time than tossing back and forth, debating if I wanted to try and chew on a Rolaid before faking another hour and a half of sleep or not.”

Kathy's mouth was one of the main reasons I'd both fucked her and hated dealing with her. While she was a talented cook, she was disrespectful of nearly everyone else besides the Don, especially Adriana. She never missed an opportunity to talk down about her, with a list of nicknames that ranged from merely disrespectful to downright disgusting. Princess Firecrotch was one of the milder ones.

“Kathy, you know I hate it when you disrespect the Bertolis,” I admonished. “Seriously.” I figured she wasn't as careless with her tongue around anyone else, and that she thought since I slept with her in the past, I could be trusted.

“Well, what does she have that I don't have, besides a last name and some bigger tits?” Kathy said with a sneer. “She's an art student with some double Ds. At least I went to culinary school before going to work.”

I didn't want to be drawn into an argument. My lovemaking with Adriana was so near at hand that I wasn't sure I'd maintain my objectivity. “Kathy, I know your feelings. But I'm a Bertoli man, you know that. I'm asking you to cut the comments around me. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some work to do.”

She crossed her arms and gave me a dirty look. “She's got you whipped, and she hasn't even given you any pussy yet. And to think, you could have been having me this whole time.”

“I've had better,” I said evenly, looking her in the eye. “Much better. Is there anything else?”

“Fuck off, Oliver,” Kathy hissed back, turning and stomping away. I chuckled under my breath and wondered if she knew that her attempt at giving me a nickname hadn't gone over my head. While I had stopped at a high school education, I'd read Oliver Twist back when I was in junior high. I mean, come on, orphan boy gets involved with criminals before making good? What kid in my position in life wouldn't want to read it? Between that and Great Expectations, I was fully educated in Dickenson’s ideas on what could happen to orphans. So far, reality was far different from fiction.

I shook my head, thanking my luck that I had gotten out of Adriana's room when I did, and turned my attention to the laptop. I hadn't been totally lying. I did want to complete some work, mainly on analysis of the photos that Vincent Drake had sent in his most recent harassing email. There was something about them that tickled my brain, and I wanted to see if my sleep-induced theory was right.

Pulling up the message, I made sure my volume was turned off and started to dissect the email. The slide show had been pretty basic, what you could put together with a typical office suite program, and by doing a little splicing of code, I was able to pull out the actual slide show itself from the surrounding programming. It surprised me somewhat that a man who had the programming skills to do a desktop hack would be so lazy as to use just an office suite for the video itself, but it was a bit of good luck for me. Perhaps he wasn't as skilled as I thought, but just knew how to use ready-made code you could pull off the right websites if you knew what they were.

Once I had the slides isolated, I took a look at the pictures that were taken with me in them. I soon saw that all of them were taken from the same area of the campus, although they'd been taken on different days. With that hint, I looked at Google Maps, using the satellite overhead shot to identify the areas of campus that he had most likely taken the photographs from. I hoped that it would be something easy, like a single apartment building or something equally stupid. In fact, the most likely area was a narrow band of woods that bordered one edge of campus, planted about forty years ago to help separate the campus from the busy street on the other side. It stretched for nearly a half-mile, and on the other side was a major street. While it helped me in that it eased my fears of Drake bringing a rifle to the same spot in order to take a shot, I still wasn't totally at ease.

I shrugged and sent the information to Adam in an email. He said in his last message that he had some feelers out on Drake's cyber trail, going through the photography equipment he'd used. Apparently, the market for such items is pretty small, and Adam had some ideas.

The gray light of pre-dawn started lighting up the sky, and I sighed, stretching in my chair. There were still at least two hours before I had to wake Adriana up, and until then, I couldn't even go get coffee, which I desperately needed. Sure, I was damned, but even the damned could protect an angel, and that was what I was going to do.