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“Where the fuck are we?” Dawn is still off by twenty minutes and I can’t see anything past the reach of the high beams.
Three hours ago we received a frantic call from Honor’s father asking for help. Two hours after that we were loaded up in a private plane and on our way to her location a couple of hours outside New York City. Each hour that passes feels like a day as we leave behind more trees in the darkness.
I stare out over the hood, losing the last bit of my patience on a piece of tech that refuses to work. I watch the gauge on the speedometer hits sixty. From the passenger’s side, Austin punches in the location again. “Even this piece of shit doesn’t know where the hell we’re going. You sure you wrote down the address right?”
“I did.” I press down on the accelerator and take a steep curve a little too fast.
“Slow it down. We end up at the bottom of the ravine or wrapped around a tree somewhere, we’ll do nobody any good.”
I shoot Landry a harsh look through the rearview and fight to bury the insane impulse to tell him off, but I know what he says is true. I pound a fist against the steering wheel. “How the fuck did this happen? I thought you were looking out for her?”
I turn to Austin, who looks way too calm for the shit storm we’re heading into.
“Because you can’t keep a person one-hundred percent safe from seven hundred miles away, Boone. Not unless you’re part alien and can teleport. That’s how this happened.”
Landry speaks up from the back. “Can’t this damn thing go any faster?”
Austin peers over at the speedometer again and I ease off the accelerator.
“Cool the jets—we’re already doing eighty in a fifty zone. Next thing is sprouting wings. If you’d had your way, we would have parachuted over Honor’s cabin and performed an extraction. She’s safe, man. We’re the only ones who know where she’s at, according to her father. We have to go on that until we are face to face with her.”
Being the voice of reason goes against Austin’s core makeup and to see him as cool and collected as an iceberg leaves me a little perplexed and a hell of a lot worried. He’s usually the one to be taking curves at eighty and slamming fists into dashboards full-on balls to the wall mode. Not the other way around.
Whatever is going on on the inside of that head of his must be a shit storm.
“We walked out without a word to her. She’s more likely to take potshots at our heads than welcome us with open arms.”
Landry is referring to the day after the paparazzi screwed us over and her father came in to finish the job. I consider his words. “Only if she knows we’re coming. Given her father’s MO and the way he likes to keep shit from people, I doubt that to be the case.”
Austin taps his foot on the floorboard, a tic of his that irritates the crap out of me, but I let it ride. “It rips me up that she thinks it was our idea to bail. Her father was a selfish bastard.”
He forced us to leave her. A man used to getting what he wanted, Senator Steele made damn sure we walked away and left his daughter to find a normal life. Or what played out as normal to him in his world.
What could any of us say? He was right. We came with every intention the next morning into his office with a proposal of finding replacements for ourselves so we could pursue a relationship with his daughter.
Before we could share our plan, the sly fox slapped two papers down on his desk and an ultimatum. None of which included Honor by our sides.
On the left were our resignations and on the right was a freshly drafted will and testament that would have left her disowned, penniless and with us destroyed.
One required we walk away for good with no contact to ensure her future, and the other ensured it stayed that way.
She talked about it only being a one-night stand, but we all knew she wasthe oneway before our night together. Landry still does, and I have a good notion Austin is in the same boat.
It’s not that I don’t. I just think that boat has sailed, so why wish for something that I can’t have? We walked, for crying out loud. How could she want us back?
However our past played out, one thing we all agree on is that it won’t keep us from keeping her alive and safe.
“Think she’ll recognize us when we get there?”
“It’s been three years, not thirty.”
Austin’s icy tone mirrors my sentiments.
Shafts of sunlight shoot over distant mountain peaks throwing deep shadows over the lush vegetation damn near covering the small single-lane entrance. I check the rearview and sides to make sure we’re alone.
I slow and take our four-wheel-drive off-road. Deep ruts run the length of the long dirt road. Only a small sign tucked behind a few low-hanging branches tells us we are in the right place. The small lakeside community is no bigger than a couple of stoplights with a grocery store and the cliché lodges around the picturesque lake.
I come around a small bend and brake to a stop by the main lodge. Honor’s father filled us in on the place and some of the history of the location.
