Page 6 of Tracked
“This way,” Calder said, and walked down the three steps leading off the porch.
I stared at first, thinking he had to be going to my car or his truck—if that was even his truck—because there was nothing else here, but he turned and walked right by them.
Jogging to catch up, I followed him along the front of the house, unable to stop myself from admiring how those pants fit hisgluteus maximus.
Like cosmic punishment, my boot caught on a rock and made me stumble. Calder glanced over his shoulder. If he caught me staring at his ass, he didn’t let on.
I really needed to stop cataloging every well-defined muscle belonging to my sister’s ex-boyfriend.
“I take it Rachel told you where my family lived,” he said, heading deeper into the property until the gravel drive tapered into wild grass.
“She mentioned ... described coming here.”That one time.
My sister hadn’t been a model girlfriend by any stretch of the imagination, but that didn’t absolve Calder for how he’d treated her that night. Even days later, when she’d told me what happened, she could hardly get the words out over her sobs. She’d had many breakups before, but I’d never heard her devastation quite like that.
“And I assume you’ve gone to the police?”
“They were my first stop.” My hand balled in a fist as I recounted how that had gone. “When I didn’t find her at her apartment, I went straight to the station to report her missing. When I explained what happened, they told me to wait and that not every crappy boyfriend who takes a girl on a camping trip intends to murder her.”
There wasn’t a time when I’d ever not been professional, but that moment sure came close. It was like the national coverage and publicity of the case where thathad happenedturned the two officers I’d spoken to bitter instead of better.
Calder muttered something under his breath; it sounded like a frustratedof course, but with the wind blowing across the property, it was hard to be sure.
“As I was leaving, the receptionist mentioned there was a private company in the area that specialized in finding missing people. She said you’d rescued a young girl who’d been stranded in Yellowstone for over a week when even the park rangers had given up. Well, maybe not you—”
“Maddie,” Calder interrupted. “Her name was Maddie, and it was me.”
I swallowed. “I asked for the name of the company, and as soon as she told me Stone Tracking Services, I realized who it was—that it had to be you.”
“Had to be me?”
“Maybe not you, but your family.” Last I knew, he’d been heading into a law internship. “Rachel told me that your family was big into hunting and tracking. Plus, there was the time you found Pebbles.” The grass started to thicken, turning from yellow to green as we walked farther from the house.
Calder slowed and looked over his shoulder. “That’s right. I was surprised she made it all the way to the next town over.”
“All the way into a tree in the next town over.” Heat fizzled along my spine when I remembered, quite vividly, those minutes as he climbed to reach the escaped cat and bring her back down.
How both heads of hisbiceps brachiivisibly flexed as he grabbed those first branches. The curve of hisdeltoidsandtrapeziusmuscle bulging against his shirt as he hoisted himself higher. Then there was the broad sweep ofpectoralis majorfrom his sternum to his shoulders as he reached out and plucked Pebbles from the end of the branch and held her to his chest. And, of course, no lesson was complete without recalling the reveal of hisrectus abdominiswhen his shirt snagged on a twig on the way down, lifting the fabric to reveal twin stacks of tightly bricked abs.
The way he’d looked at me when he returned Pebbles to my arms wasn’t part of the lesson, though.An imagined look, of course, because he was Rachel’s boyfriend.
“So you knew it had to be me because I saved your cat a dozen years ago?” He chuckled, the sound feeling like a luxury for a man who lived so sparsely.
“She was technically Rachel’s cat,” I corrected without thinking, and Calder stopped.
Procerus, corrugator—his brows knotted tighter as he stared at me. “She said Pebbles was yours.”
Oh, Rachel.
It had been twelve years, but it was these stupid little lies of hers that hurt the most. The ones that reminded me of the lengths she’d go to hide who she was to please the person she was with.
“She knew you didn’t like cats, so she asked if I could keep Pebbles at my place,” I explained, wishing this little lie was the extent of it, but it was nothing compared to the bigger ones.
After a few months of dating, Rachel had started telling Calder she was staying at my house off campus for the night when she was really at frat parties with her roommate. I wasn’t complicit in the lies, just a casualty after the fact. An obligatedIf Calder asks, Lara, I was with you last nightalibi. I’d told her to leave me out of it, but she never did. And because she was my sister—always the two of us against the world—I’d protected her. Maybe more than I should have.
Back then, I hadn’t known enough or had enough foresight to give my sister relationship advice. It was only after their breakup that the guilt hit me.
I was an analyzer. A diagnostician.A doctor.And I couldn’t help but diagnose the cause of my sister’s increasingly problematic relationships as symptoms stemming from a single traumatic injury: that first devastating heartbreak inflicted by Calder Stone.
