LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter Four

      Ten minutes later Hope had her leg wound bandaged and cleaned by Joel and carefully kneeled on the floor of her cabin, putting as little weight on the injury as possible. After a quick check under the bed she sat back on her heels and stared up at Joel. “Can I panic now?”

      As far as he was concerned, they’d passed that point one missing businessman ago. “Soon.”

      Joel had come out here as a favor. He’d dragged Cam because he needed a ride. Now they had a full-fledged mess on their hands.

      Time was the issue. Mark had been missing for potentially twelve hours or more. That amounted to an emergency. The weather had stayed warm, but the breeze had kicked up and the air carried the scent of rain.

      From all accounts Mark wasn’t a seasoned hiker. Animals, accidents, falls—the list of dangers went on and on. He could be hurt or worse.

      Joel needed to get word to the rest of his team in Annapolis of the potential issue in West Virginia. They might need search and rescue, or air support, and he sure as hell wanted an answer to who was stalking Hope.

      Then there was the bigger problem. The lingering sense of something being off. This should have been a routine assignment for Hope. He understood her dad’s worries, and Joel shared them when it came to her safety around a bunch of idiot men in the middle of nowhere, but this felt bigger. Targeted.

      Joel didn’t like it, and the frown on Cam’s face and way he walked around, staring at the floor, suggested he wasn’t a fan either. Joel wanted to chalk it up to the mix of guilt and want that pummeled him every time he looked at Hope. She was the one woman who tempted him to give it all up and hunt for a normal ending to his story.

      Leaving her was the one time when he’d acted like a complete jerk with a woman and deserved a swift kick. He was lucky she hadn’t treated him to one.

      But the tic in the back of his neck wasn’t about his feelings for her. He loved her until he couldn’t see straight. Probably always would. No, this was something else.

      He’d been attuned to danger—real danger, not the kind his father manufactured in his sick head—since he joined the military to escape his childhood. He learned to recognize it during his short tenure at Algier Security and honed it at the Defense Intelligence Agency. With Connor’s help and the support of the Corcoran Team, he understood not to ignore it and instead figured out how best to handle it.

      And he was into it up to his eyeballs now.

      “Let’s do a weapons check.” Joel touched a hand against the gun strapped to his side, then performed a mental rundown of the rest. One at his ankle and the two knives hidden under his clothing, plus the others in the lockbox on the helicopter.

      He glanced at Hope. “What do you have?”

      “Charlie has a gun.” She stood up next to Joel at the side of the bed. “I have a knife and a bow.”

      “Bow?” Cam broke off from his staring to watch her from across the mattress. “Is that really practical?”

      That was the kind of talk that usually led to a demonstration. People underestimated Hope. They saw the pretty face and tight body and decided she must be the type to sit on daddy’s piles of money and do nothing.

      Joel had made that miscalculation for exactly three minutes before he saw her do a verbal takedown of a guy in her father’s office who called her sweetie. Joel had been about to give the guy a lesson in respect, but she’d handled it.

      And he’d been hooked ever since. He found other women attractive, but none of them were her. None came close.

      He decided to fill Cam in on the nonprivate part. “She was basically a Junior Olympics champion.”

      “Not just basically.” Bending over, she pulled the case out from under the bed and opened it. “Want to see my medals? I have several bows—recurve, long bow and a few compound. You’ll have to trust me that I know how to use all of them.”

      Cam stretched and looked over the bed from his side. “Why did you bring one here? That one’s recurve, right?”

      She flashed him a smile. “The man knows his hardware.”

      “Definitely.”

      “Well, I figured I could show the men how to use it. People generally assume it’s easy and have no idea how much strength it takes. And...” Her smile grew to high wattage as she closed the case. “Having a bow and arrows in the room tends to cut down on drunken male idiocy.”

      That time Cam laughed. “Impressive.”

      “What do you guys have?” she asked as she sat on the bed.

      The laughter in her voice caught Joel in a spell. Seeing her lighthearted and happy, if only for a few seconds, touched off something inside him.

      Near the end they had fought a lot. Then he’d made her cry. He could have gone a lifetime without seeing that, without having her despair rip through him, shredding him from the inside out.

      He forced his attention back to the present before the old feelings of guilt swamped him. “Guns, knives.” Joel thought about a man tracking her through the woods. “My bare hands.”

      Her head fell to the side and her hair cascaded over her shoulder. “Strangely, I find that comforting.”

      A stark silence zipped through the room. It was charged and uncomfortable enough to have him thinking about the big bed right in front of him and Cam squirming as if he wanted to bolt.

      He inched toward the door, looking like he was about to do just that. “I should head back to the helicopter and lock it up. Also need to check in with Connor.”

      Joel nodded. “Fine.”

      “Who is that?” she asked, seemingly unaware of the firestorm she’d set off in the man she’d once dated.

      Joel swallowed a few times and thought about every unsexy thing he could to overwhelm the other thoughts in his head. After a few seconds, his control zapped back to life. “Our boss, Connor Bowen. He runs the Corcoran Team.”

      “Yeah, like I said, I should contact him.” With his hand against the door, Cam appeared to want to do it right then.

      Joel didn’t disagree. He’d been toying with yelling for the cavalry, but he didn’t want to rush everyone in before they conducted a few more easy steps. “Let’s see if we can figure this out first. It’s

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