Page 66 of Fracture

Vinnie stirred eggs and tried to wipe the smile off his face. It wouldn’t leave.

He was happy. He couldn’t think of the last time he was happy. Maybe early in his relationship with Allison. When she still wanted to spend time with him.

He pushed thoughts of his ex out of his mind. She didn’t get to occupy the same space as Lorelei. Especially when Lorelei called out to him from the living room.

“What are we doing today?”

We. He liked the sound of that. “What do you want to do?”

She didn’t answer until he walked out of the kitchen. Her gaze ran down his body, and his dick responded instantly. “You.”

Vinnie chuckled. Four days of starting their day with sex wasn’t enough. He didn’t think he’d ever have enough of her. “I’m not going to argue with you on that. Is there anything else you want to do?”

“I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to do. I don’t know what it is, though.”

“Adam didn’t mention anything. I doubt you have a meeting or something on a Saturday.”

Lorelei shook her head and glanced at the laptop. “I think I need to dig into that more.”

“Okay.”

She looked up at him. “Will you help me?”

He tried not to grin and lost. “Of course.”

She smiled back and reached for the computer.

Vinnie finished making their breakfast and carried two plates out to the living room.

Lorelei had already logged into the computer and was looking at a file.

“What is this?” he asked.

She grabbed a slice of bacon and pointed to the screen with it. “It seems like this is where I made most of my notes. I have been trying to figure out what it means, though. I used a shorthand that I can’t understand.”

“Mind if I look?”

She turned the laptop toward him and let him take it from her lap. She picked up her plate and stabbed at the scrambled eggs while Vinnie focused on the screen.

“Are these initials?” he asked.

“That’s what Karli wondered, too.”

“But that doesn’t make sense to you?”

She wrinkled her nose. “That seems too easy. Plus, Adam didn’t know what any of them could mean. I would expect he would recognize at least some of them if they were initials.”

“True.” Vinnie looked at the notes and tried to make sense of what she could have recorded. Everything was typed in, so it wasn’t a matter of not understanding her handwriting. It was only deciphering her code.

Pairs of letters followed by numbers. Sometimes she had two numbers, sometimes three. There didn’t seem to be an order to any of it.

“Could these be case numbers?”

“Adam said they’re not.”

Vinnie didn’t like asking her the same questions she’d already answered. It felt like a waste of her time.

Initials made sense because there were two, but they could have been in a code. Still, there was no way to know what the code was.