Elf Against the Wall: A Holiday Romantic Comedy (The Wynter Brothers Book 2)

The metal hanging lamp creaked as I pulled the chain, flooding the room with bright-white light.

I set the phones down in a neat row. Two of the latest iPhones, one red, one silver, last year’s Samsung, and a white iPhone from two years ago.

I quickly tapped in the PIN numbers I’d memorized then disabled location sharing.

While her family members were drunk and distracted by the filming, I’d swapped my targets’ phones with identical phones that were bricked. At first, they would think the battery had run out and they’d try to charge it, but they would never really work right. At the next holiday party, I’d swap the phones back out.

After I got all the data I needed.

Braeden wasn’t the only person on my list. Two cousins, an aunt, and her father’s second cousin had all potentially had a hand in securing fraudulent insurance payouts from Van de Berg Insurance.

Normally, I’d space this out—swap out one phone, wait a bit, then swap the next. But time was of the essence.

Santa Claus wasn’t coming to town, but Aaron Richmond was, and I’d be lucky if all he did was leave a lump of coal in my stocking.

Was it easier to perform a sleight-of-hand trick when I was standing face-to-face with these people, pretending like I was just squeezing past them to the wet bar, instead of sneaking into their houses at night?

Sure.

But at the very least, the slow method would mean I didn’t have to deal with Evie. Or her family.

I was starting to think that it was a mistake to punish her for blackmailing me. I should have just taken the hit and strung her along on finding proof from Braeden.

Because it was pure torture being in that house with those people.

I couldn’t scrub off the looks of hatred, the disgust, the anger.

Sure, a few of her female relatives wanted to throw their panties out the window for me, but the rest?

I was the Grinch’s shitty older brother.

I wanted to shed my own skin after leaving the house.

The worst, though, was Evie.

Maybe it was so hard to keep her at a distance because she didn’t look like the rest of her hateful redheaded family, with her big brown eyes and the tangled hair that kept escaping from the haphazard bun. The way she looked at me was like needles under my fingernails—the mix of fascination, loathing, and desire. It was a toxic brew, and I kept wanting to dip my head to lap it up.

Somehow, I had fucked myself again, just like with trying to get one over on Aaron.

I turned back to the task at hand.

My brothers were busy with paying jobs. As much as they annoyed me, the field office was cold and lonely without them.

People thought hacking was exciting. They were wrong. It was more like archeology. Armed with a tiny paintbrush, you had to carefully uncover fragments to piece together into a dinosaur.

I stood up, flexing my arms, and picked up a Sharpie, marking a red X on another day on the calendar hanging on the wall.

I was no stranger to blowing through sleepless nights. But between all of my normal contracts for Hudson and this, it was starting to add up.

I just had to make it until Christmas, then I was going to sleep until New Year’s.

And block Evie’s number.

She was blowing up my phone: complaining that I had shown up at her parents’ house, fretting that Braeden was going to think something was up, demanding to know if I’d liked the puff pastry galette she’d baked, and asking if precious Snowball had actually caused any damage to the FedEx guy or the FedEx guy’s truck because she didn’t want Snowball to spend Christmas in doggie lockup.

Now she was assuring me that she totally wouldn’t be mad if I did sleep with Brooke Taylor but if I did to please send her photos from inside her house.

Annoyed and irritable, I shoved the phone into my pocket then grabbed my keys and motorcycle helmet.

Time to stop fucking around.