If Rodrigo had done this to her, that’s what she would have done—and he would have loved it. But Eli just might give her that quizzical look of his and ask what had upset her.
She slid off the couch and refastened her clothes. The unspent energy running through her made her feel like her whole body was vibrating.
The breakfast table was covered with dirty dishes and she started to clear them away. But after just two plates, she stopped. Damn him! she thought. Who did he think he was? Who was she? Some strumpet he could pick up, then toss aside?
She sneered at the dirty table. Eli would probably wake up expecting the whole house would be clean. His mom was a great housekeeper—unlike Chelsea’s mother, who barely knew where the kitchen was. Housework would interfere with her charity work and her tennis. Or at least that’s how it had been until her husband
had the heart attack.
Chelsea put her hands to her sides. Today in the car she’d been right to tell Eli that she couldn’t stay with him, that she didn’t want the same things as he did.
As she headed for the stairs, she paused by his bedroom door. Was he in there snoring away? Dreaming about his Top Secret work? Or maybe about Pilar’s dark beauty?
She flipped the door a one-finger gesture, then went up the stairs. There were two bedrooms at the top and one of them had her empty suitcases. Since she hadn’t unpacked them, she wondered who had. Probably Jeff, she thought.
She didn’t bother to shower, just stripped off her clothes, and nude, she fell across the bed.
Sexual frustration was not a good thing!
She flopped around on the bed, looked at the clock, then turned over. Three minutes later, she looked at the clock again.
At 1:00 a.m., she gave up trying to sleep, got up, and took a shower. As she got out, toweling her hair, she saw her laptop on the bedside table. When she’d run off in such a hurry on Eli’s dreadful camping trip, she’d left it behind.
From there, they’d gone to the diner and had heard the conversation between Grace and Orin. Tonight, Eli had asked Melissa questions about Grace, but what he’d seemed to really want to know about was the shed in back.
What was it that Grace had said? Chelsea tried to remember.
“I just wondered if you’d ever found the papers from the last sale.”
“No, I haven’t. Everything is stored away and I work long hours. Besides, those things are hard for me to look at. I . . .”
“Interesting,” Chelsea said as she looked at her computer.
When they were returning from Richmond, she’d searched for Grace Ridgeway’s address in Edilean. She didn’t mention it to Eli, but she’d emailed all that she’d found to herself.
She tossed the towel onto the side of the tub, gathered her robe around her, and opened her computer.
Twenty minutes later, she’d found Grace’s house on an aerial map. She could see the shed in the back corner of what looked to be a very plain brick house set back off the road. There was a wall running along the back, but from what she could see, it wasn’t very tall. Chain link enclosed the rest of the property.
She wondered what kind of lock was on the shed door.
As she got up, she looked at the messy bed. She knew she wasn’t going to sleep tonight. Maybe if she went to Grace’s house, she could see the shed and examine the lock.
She and Eli hadn’t talked about it, but she assumed that tomorrow he planned to visit Grace. The question was whether or not he’d take Chelsea with him. The truth was that right now she felt like packing her bags and leaving. In fact, she wasn’t really sure why she’d come in the first place. If her parents hadn’t bullied her . . .
Okay, so that was their past. Right now, she could either continue being angry or she could do something.
She opened the closet door. Someone had hung her clothes inside, and the wire drawers on the side held her knits. She pulled out a black turtleneck, her black yoga pants, and a dark bandanna for her hair.
Couldn’t hurt to go and see, she thought.
Chelsea hadn’t told Eli, but in the years since she’d seen him, he wasn’t the only one who’d had a bit of experience in espionage. Hers was on a much smaller scale, but several times she’d managed to bat her lashes at men on other teams—whether cars or horses—and find out information she shouldn’t know. Out of necessity, she’d developed computer-hacking skills that might even impress Eli. And, unfortunately, she’d become an expert on finding signs of when a man was cheating.
In minutes she was dressed in all black. She tiptoed down the stairs, past Eli’s bedroom, then out to her car.
Grace’s neighborhood was quiet. There were streetlights, but no sign of life anywhere—not even the blue-gray light from a TV showed from a window. The air was still and there was little moonlight.
She parked four houses away and was glad she’d disconnected the interior light in her car so that when she opened the door, it didn’t come on.