Page 18 of Shared By the Mountain Men Triplets

Rhett is by the porch with a mug in his hand and a displeased look on his face. Boone is loading something into the back of a truck, the muscles in his chest and shoulders stretching his faded T-shirt in a very distracting way. Cade’s standing near the edge of the treeline, half in shadows beneath the pines.

I park, get out, and put my laptop bag over my shoulder before Rhett can get it for me. “Good morning,” I say brightly.

As Boone answers with a similarly pleasant greeting, Rhett cuts right to the chase. “You talked to your supervisor.”

“I did.”

Cade and Boone both come over, and I’m surrounded by three identical faces wearing varying degrees of curious looks. Rhett looks like he’s ready to subject me to an inquisition.

“Can we go inside?” I gesture to my bag.

Rhett leads me up the steps, through the entryway, and straight over to the dining table. Sunlight streams into the cabin, highlighting how clean all the surfaces are.

As I set my laptop on the table, the brothers arrange themselves around me. Rhett and Boone take seats, but Cade stays near the end of the table, close enough to see the screen but not crowding me.

I open the map overlay and bring up the existing camera locations before I start talking. “My supervisor reviewed everything I sent in.”

“And?” Rhett sounds ready to be unhappy with whatever I’m about to say.

“He agrees the site is suspicious, but he can’t make any definitive conclusions.”

Cade’s eyes narrow, and Boone scoffs. “What the hell does definitive look like?”

“Identifiable criminal conduct.” I turn the laptop toward them. “Right now, we have a hidden cache, wildlife displacement, and unidentified residue pending lab confirmation. We have camera data that doesn’t match field observations, but we don’t have photographic evidence of anyone using the corridor.”

Rhett looks at the map. “Thecache isn’t enough?”

“Not when we don’t know what’s in it. We don’t even know for certain it’s still being used. Satellite imagery of the remote passes is inconclusive. If there’s illegal activity, it’s happening under cover.”

“If?” Boone asks.

“My agency can’t go on instincts. The trail cams haven’t captured any suspicious human activity. If someone’s using the corridor, they’ve been smart enough to avoid the camera locations.”

After a breath, I say, “Before he can justify a referral to another agency, my supervisor needs visual documentation. He’s not asking me to identify suspects, but I need to fix the data gap by repositioning the cameras, and to do that effectively, I need to identify the movement corridors.”

Rhett nods at that, but I brace myself.

“Camera data and morning field evidence suggest the disturbance is happening after dark, so I’ll be observing at night.”

Rhett leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “No.”

I was expecting objections from the men, but I wasn’t expecting to be shut down. “I’m not asking you to go along,” I say.

Rhett’s brows lift, and he gives a small nod. “Because you’re not going.”

“It’s my job.” I bite back the part where I tell him he has no business telling me what I can or can’t do.

“It’s a stakeout,” Boone says.

“It isn’t. I’ll be scouting camera placement.”

“At night,” Boone says.

“Yes.”

“From a concealed location.”

“Yes.”