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“I’ve never been out of Texas.”
I stare at her. “Seriously?”
She frowns, and I hate the look on her face.
“I’m not picking on you,” I explain, not wanting her to be upset with me. “I shouldn’t have assumed. You’ll be fine on the plane. I’ll hold your hand the entire time.”
She scoffs as if my offer is ridiculous. “I’m not afraid to fly. I’ve just never done it before.”
“So you haven’t changed your mind?”
She tilts her head to the side, and I can tell that’s she trying to get a read on my mood.
“Is that okay?”
I nod. “Yeah, that’s okay. What’s not okay is me just dropping you off, because that guy is giving me a bad vibe.”
She pulls her eyes from mine, looking around the parking lot. “What guy?”
I tilt my head in the direction of the guy sitting in a folding chair on the front stoop of one of the duplexes to my left.
“Jason?” she asks with a chuckle. “He’s my landlord. He’s mostly harmless.”
“Mostly?” I challenge. “Wait, let me get your door.”
I climb out of her car and make my way around the vehicle, making sure Jason, the landlord, sees me notice him.
“Explain,” I tell her when I pull open her door.
“He has parties down here a lot. I’m almost certain he supplies alcohol to the underaged college students.”
This gets my hackles up. Several women were abducted from Lindell University. A mercenary group from Mission, a little border town just south of here, also got involved in that. They had some sort of link to the very same cartel that took out their grievances on this town last year. One of those mercenaries took a woman hostage, right along with Kid’s son, Landon, and his husband, Rick. It was a mess. Although I wasn’t around for that, there’s still some bad blood between Cerberus and that mercenary team.
I press my palm to Beth’s back, making sure to really stare down the landlord. Money talks in the sex trafficking world, and it’s not unheard of for greedy Americans to get involved with the sex traffickers. They sometimes make it easy for them to get their hands on women for the trade, thinking that if they don’t physically get involved, then their hands stay clean from the crimes. Most are ignorant to what actually happens to those women once they’re pulled from their lives.
The sight of him makes me sick.
Instead of making a mental note, I stop in the middle of the sidewalk and pull out my phone, shooting off a text to Max.
“What’s his last name?” I ask loud enough for the man to hear if he’s paying any kind of attention to us.
“Brecken,” she says, her voice a whisper.
“Jason Brecken?” I confirm, making the man snap his head up in our direction.
I fire off this information to Max who only takes a minute to send a response.
Max: Jason Brecken: A local idiot. He’s harmless. We couldn’t find any connection to him and the abductions. Honestly, just a guy who hasn’t let go of his glory days. We dug deep and didn’t find a damn thing on him that would make us believe he was involved with the abduction at the college. Still a little skeevy that he hosts college parties in his early thirties though.
I feel marginally better.
“Let’s go inside,” I tell Beth, urging her off the sidewalk and giving good ol’ Jason another hard glare before using her keys to unlock the front door.
We didn’t talk about what our time spent together was going to look like, but I also don’t feel comfortable just leaving her here alone either.
“Do you want to pack a bag and go back to the hotel with me?”
“Are you leaving?”
I turn her to face me, hearing the disappointment in her voice.
“I can stay,” I tell her, pulling her closer to me. I angle her chin up, my lips almost touching hers. “Is that okay?”
She dips her head in agreement.
I press my lips to hers, pulling back after just one little sweep of my tongue across her lips.
“That’s perfect,” she says, her tone breathless.
And suddenly, I’m no longer exhausted.
Chapter 8
Beth
His hands on my body have got to be the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life. They’re somehow warm and comforting, but a trail of gooseflesh develop in their wake. The anomaly makes me crave even more from him. I want all he has to offer. I feel like I need to rush, to get as much as I can, before he realizes that there might be a reason most men who know who I am avoid me like I have something they can catch.
“Wait,” he tells me when I drop my hands to the front of his jeans and grip his erection.
The mild chastisement affects me more than it probably should, but I try to push away the disappointment.
