Page 12 of Tracked
The first thing I’d noticed about Lara when Rachel introduced us in college had been her hair. The rich red was the same shade as the first leaves on the ranch that turned in autumn, and wholly different from her sister’s dark brown. Even now, I remembered how hard I’d fought then not to stare—not to keep staring.
Wanting to stare at my girlfriend’s younger sister should’ve been a warning sign that something wasn’t right.Not wanting to be at that sorority party in the first place should’ve been a warning sign that something wasn’t right.Unfortunately, those weren’t the kind of warning signs we’d been taught to recognize on the ranch.
“Retrievalist,” I corrected.
“Not the same as a rewardist?”
The smallest grin tugged one corner of my mouth. “Sounds like you’ve read Jeffery Deaver.”
The popular author had a series in which the main character made a living by seeking missing persons rewards and called himself a rewardist. Sometimes that was what we did. Sometimes the reference helped explain our business model. But no matter how small the distinction, the terms didn’t feel the same.
“I’ve been listening to one of his books between patients at work. Probably why it’s taking me forever to get through it, but I’m really enjoying it and the narrator is phenomenal,” she said, her lips curling at the ends.
Damn dimples.I gritted my teeth as my pulse charged and my cock stiffened. How could I have forgotten those soft dimples and the way they framed her full lips? The sight dragged me right back to the painful state of arousal she’d inflicted when she hugged me.Uncontrollable and unexpected.
Cassius had raised us to be prepared for the unexpected, but I was having to accept there was no preparing for her. No preparing for hownot in controlI was of my desire around her.
I cleared my throat and then kept talking, hoping to curb my currently unmetered response. “We take jobs. We retrieve people. Things. Information. It doesn’t always come with that kind of reward,” I explained. “So ... retrievalist.”
“Fair.” Her head bobbed. “So then how do you go from prelaw to retrievalist?”
Normally, I ended this story at the beginning: that growing up survivalist had made becoming a retrievalist an easy and profitable career choice. It was a clean, simple answer:Nothing could get messy if you didn’t let people in.But talking to Lara, being around her, the things it did to me ... It was all the very definition ofmessy. And that was how the truth slipped out.
“Creed, my younger brother, was in the military police. He suffered a head injury on a mission and was recovering at Walter Reed, and one day, something triggered his PTSD and he disappeared from the hospital. Just gone ... without a trace.” I hit the blinker, turning onto the local highway. We were still about five minutes out from the diner. “I dropped everything to find him. It took me six weeks, but I finally tracked him down. He’d made it through three states and couldn’t remember what happened, how he got there, or why he’d gone.”
“Oh, wow.”
Avoiding the sympathy in her gaze was a trap, one that diverted my focus to the distracting O of her mouth and the smooth column of her throat as she swallowed. An ache unfurled from the center of my chest. A craving for something I couldn’t want. Not then. Not now.
Dammit.I forced my stare back to the road and finished the story. “He was okay. Physically. He just needed a familiar, quieter place to recuperate.”
“You searched for him on your own?”
When she looked out the window, I shifted carefully in my seat to ease some of my discomfort.Apparently, I was thirty-three going on thirteen.
“It was better that way,” I grunted, forcing my guard back up. “What’s that saying about too many cooks in the kitchen ...?”
My siblings and I had been raised to be lone wolves, that was true, but not the answer to her question.
I’d gone looking for Creed on my own because Colton was in prison, Callum was chasing a storm, and Creighton and Colby were still in high school. My only other resource would’ve been Cassius, and he wouldn’t have been a resource, but a ticking time bomb. After Mom’s death, his severe caution had morphed into straight paranoia, and I hadn’t been sure what actions he would take or lengths he would go to to find his son.
But none of that was anything Lara needed to know.
“I brought Creed back to the ranch, and over the course of the next couple of months, people I’d met during my search began contacting me. A nurse from Walter Reed whose husband went missing. A sheriff from Virginia who didn’t have the resources to help parents looking for their runaway son. A lawyer from Tennessee whose witness disappeared in a Mob case. They offered me rewards to find people the same way I’d found Creed. I had no desire to go back to law, so I agreed.”
“And brought your siblings along for the ride?”
I arched an amused brow. “Do you think anyone brings any of the Stones ‘along for the ride’?”
Her expression scrunched and she shook her head. “No.”
“Creed got stir-crazy and liked the idea of being constantly on the move. The rest of them eventually ended up in the fold for one reason or another.” My hand tightened on the steering wheel as I held back that almost every reason was traumatic. “All of us except Colby. She does her own thing, unless you count her knack forretrievingevery injured animal on the property.”
“Ahh, so youarestill in the cat-rescuing business.”
The tension broke, a low chuckle rumbling from my chest. “Retrieving business,” I corrected lightly. “And no, I think that retrieval was a one-time deal.”
“An exception to your rules?”
