“Another day of this and I’m throwing away my cell phone, my tablet and my laptop,” Daria muttered, hitting the pause button on the video. “If I never have to stare at another screen again, it would be fine with me.”

      “I was thinking more along the lines of taking mine back to Illinois and throwing it in Lake Michigan,” Stefan said, sounding as weary of this as she felt. “Along with every other screen within reach.”

      She leaned back in her chair. They had been working backward a half hour at a time from the moment they already knew Bianca had come downstairs for the last time. The security video ran at fifteen frames per second, but they were watching at one-third speed, so an hour took them three times that. Add in that they had to do it twice, once for the lobby video and once for the bar video, and they had only managed to get through two hours of frame-by-frame scrutiny.

      Daria’s eyes were burning. Stefan was rubbing at his as well, so she guessed they must feel the same. He got up, stretched. Daria tried not to watch, but it was hard to take her eyes off the sheer muscled beauty of him. He moved like…she tried to think of an analogy and couldn’t. He was simply, purely male, on such an elemental level it was impossible to ignore. Although when he started to pace to the office door, images of a restless, prowling big cat came to mind.

      Then he stopped, apparently to look out the single window that gave them a view out into the rest of the building. But he didn’t speak, and so she broke the silence.

      “There must be something we can do that doesn’t involve—” she waved vaguely toward the flat screen “—that.”

      Stefan went very still. Then he turned his head to look at her, and for just an instant she saw something in his eyes that reminded her once again of that embrace. Not that she needed reminding; it was never far from her mind. Which was ridiculous, really. It wasn’t like they’d shared some long, passionate kiss or something.

      And that had been a very poor choice of comparison, she told herself as she had to fight down a jolt of heat at just the thought. She’d simply been closed up in this room alone with him for too long. It was making her mind go crazy places. That was all it was.

      “I’m going up to The Lodge,” she said abruptly. “I want to see where the places not covered by the cameras are again.”

      She wasn’t sure what she expected to find—they already knew where the few places were—but maybe something would occur to her if she looked again. And if not, at least they would have a break in the eye-straining monotony of going over and over slo-mo video for hours.

      “All right,” Stefan agreed easily enough, so easily she wondered if he wanted to get out of these close quarters, too. “But,” he added, “you might want to be aware that it’s snowing.”

      “What?” she said, startled. He gestured at the door, and she jumped up and went over to look through the window. Sure enough, the white stuff was coming down outside. Rather steadily.

      The cold white stuff. Her spoiled California bones shivered.

      “They didn’t predict this,” she said, a bit crankily.

      “What a shock. A wrong weather prediction.”

      Her gaze snapped to his face. He was grinning at her, the smart aleck. She wanted to be mad, but she simply couldn’t be in the face of that heart-melting grin. She threw up her hands and laughed instead.

      “All right, you found me out, I’m a true cold-weather wuss.”

      “You’ve been here how long now?”

      “Four years,” she said with a grimace. “And my blood shows no signs of thickening up, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”

      “I wasn’t going to hint, I was going to come right out and say it.”

      She turned and gave him a mock glare. “Didn’t you say your parents moved to Florida?”

      “Only three years ago, and after spending their whole lives in Illinois,” he pointed out. “And,” he added, “Mom says sometimes she misses it. The seasons, I mean.”