His Personal Mission Read online

  Besides, he wasn’t really a jerk, he was nice enough. And when he worked, he was good at it. It was simply that he was handsome beyond belief—and he knew it. She guessed he always had. She wondered yet again what it must be like to be able to slide through life simply on your looks.

  “Well?” Russ prompted when she didn’t leap to say yes to his offer.

  “Sorry,” she said, standing up and grabbing her phone to stuff it back in the capacious bag she called a purse. “A call just came in. I have to meet a…relative.”

  “We just finished a long one. Somebody else can go. We deserve a break.”

  “The family of a missing girl deserves a break,” Sasha said pointedly.

  Russ sighed. At least he’d learned that about her—nothing could distract her from helping someone who needed her particular talents.

  “Want me to come with?” he asked as she reached the doorway, and him.

  “No, I’ve got it. You go get your lunch, take your break.”

  His gaze narrowed over impossibly perfect cheekbones, as if he wondered if she’d meant the words as a slam. And perhaps, on some level, she had. She couldn’t picture Russ ever skipping a meal or forgoing a break—even though he was right, it was deserved, the Novato case had been long and hard—to jump right into another case.

  But he had offered, she reminded herself, and smiled at him. “I’ll call you if it turns into something and I need the help. Thanks.”

  Appearing mollified, he nodded and moved aside so she could pass. She caught a whiff of expensive men’s cologne. At least Ryan only smelled of soap and shampoo, she thought, much preferring the simplicity. It made the times when they’d gone out to dinner, when he had put on something, seem more special somehow. And his entire approach less…practiced.

  God, woman, you are being ridiculous, she told herself as she walked through the building, a converted Tudor-style home that had once been known as “the purple place” for its odd paint job. Thankfully it no longer looked like a misplaced San Francisco row house, and blended in nicely with the others like it in the neighborhood that had once been residential gone seedy but was now a successful business area. Again, mostly thanks to Redstone, who had bought it specifically for a headquarters for the foundation; when Josh took an interest, the business world listened.

  She walked out to her little yellow coupe, parked in the small courtyard they’d turned into a parking lot to avoid destroying the lovely garden they’d reclaimed from the front of the building. And every step of the way, she continued her self-lecture.

  Just because the guy called out of the blue doesn’t mean anything’s changed.

  She hit the button on her key, and the brightly colored car chirped and unlocked itself obediently.

  He’s got a problem, that’s all, something he knows you’re good at. He’s probably got a steady girl by now, anyway, one who isn’t so picky.

  She yanked open the driver’s-side door and tossed her big bag on the seat.

  You’re acting like you’ve been missing him all this time.

  She got into the car and jammed the key into the ignition with more gusto than was needed. She hurried to start the car and head out. She needed to focus on driving.

  So she could stop thinking about the irritating fact that her last thought had been true.

  Chapter 2

  Ryan watched Sasha thread her way past crowded tables back to the booth he’d managed to snag because he’d once bussed tables here. She was still the most amazing woman he’d ever seen.

  She’d laughed when he’d told her that once, saying she had a mirror, thank you, and knew she wasn’t beautiful. Striking, she could manage, she’d said. With the sense of a guy who’d just been asked if something made a woman look fat, he’d stumblingly answered, “That’s what I mean. No, I meant…You’re not…I mean, you are, but…different.” He remembered that drowning feeling as he gave up and muttered, “You make it hard to breathe.”

  To his amazement her laughter had turned to a genuine smile. And she’d told him that was the nicest compliment she’d gotten in a while.

  Things hadn’t changed, he thought as he watched eyes lift and heads turn as she went by, a spot of bright, mobile color in the sunny yellow sweater she wore. It was, he knew, her favorite color, usually paired with black, “for contrast” she’d told him. She had a huge bag in the same colors slung over her shoulder; the bag was different, but the size the same as he remembered.

  She’d cut her hair; that was about the only real change. And the short, sleek bob, longer at the front and sides than in the back so it moved every time she did, suited her. He usually preferred long hair, but there was something about the bare nape of her neck….

  And then she was there, and he belatedly stood up, remembering his mother telling him a gentleman always did when a lady arrived. He thought such things ridiculously old-fashioned, but Sasha had also once told him she was an old-fashioned kind of girl, so he figured it couldn’t hurt.

  She smiled at him.

  Score one for Mom, he thought as Sasha slipped into the booth opposite him.

  Suddenly he couldn’t think of a thing to say. He’d rehearsed in his head what he’d tell her about Trish, but he’d somehow forgotten to work on anything else. Desperate, his gaze landed on the brightly colored bag.

  “Still carrying your life around, I see,” he said, then groaned inwardly at the lameness of it.

  “You never know,” she said, as she always had when he’d teased her before about seeming to need a ton of stuff with her at all times. “Besides, it’s a special bag. It was made for me by a friend.” He looked more closely as she went on. “It was knitted, then washed in really hot water to shrink it. It’s called felting.”

  “Shrink it?” he said, eyeing the thing that seemed the size of a large briefcase skeptically.

  “It’s perfect,” she said, her voice taking on an imperious tone he hoped was teasing. “It’s solid, sturdy, but nice and soft to the touch.”

  She stroked a finger over it as if to demonstrate. It was a simple motion, and he had no explanation for the sudden hike in his pulse rate. He studied the bag for a moment, more to give himself a moment to collect himself than out of real interest, but when he did, he noticed the intricacy of the pattern.

  “It looks like the geometric screen saver Ian uses.”

  Sasha laughed. “Maybe that’s where she got the idea.”

  “She?”

  “Liana Kiley.”

  His head came up then. “Liana? Our Liana?”

  Sasha grinned. “I love the way you Redstone people are. Yes, your Liana. I figured you’d know her, given she works in your neck of Redstone, as it were.”

  He did know Liana. She worked for Lilith Mercer, who was cleaning up a mess left by the former head of the R&D division, a task he’d been involved in periodically, including some time spent with the pretty redhead. She was relatively new to Redstone, but that she was a perfect fit had become clear very early. Ryan liked her. And not just because she liked computers and was pretty good with them; she was a genuinely nice person.

  And apparently a friend of Sasha’s, which he hadn’t known.

  “Your colors,” he said, not sure what else to say; that she was friends with someone he saw almost every day bothered him somehow.

  “Liana called it ‘Fright of the Bumblebee,’” she said with a grin.

  He couldn’t deny it fit; the explosion of yellow and black did look a bit like a bumblebee gone berserk.

  The waitress arrived with two large glasses and set them down, along with a couple of menus, then left to give them time to look. Sasha looked at the glass, then at Ryan.

  “I took a chance you’re still into Diet Coke,” he said.

  She smiled. “As long as it’s not decaf. I mean, what’s the point?”

  He laughed, and the knot in his gut loosened a bit. “Order something. I’m buying.” She lifted a brow at him. “I called you,” he pointed out.

&
nbsp; “Point taken,” she said, picking up the menu. “And since they fund us as well, I know how Redstone pays.”

  “I’m not hurting.”

  She looked up from the menu. “Not about that, anyway.”

  For an instant he thought she meant hurting about her, and he winced inwardly. Then he realized she had to mean Trish, and he felt like a fool, and worse, an uncaring idiot, for even momentarily forgetting the matter at hand.

  “Tell me about your sister,” she said in that soft, encouraging tone that had always made him want to go out and climb a mountain or slay a dragon, and not in any virtual world, but the real thing.

  She’d never met Trish during the short time they’d been together, but he knew he’d told her about his little sister, probably with that exasperated tone most older siblings used. Although with ten years between them, he’d moved out on his own when she was nine, so he hadn’t had to deal with the teenage angst on a daily basis.

  And then he’d hacked himself into that colossal mess and she’d become a staunchly furious eleven-year-old defender, changing his view of his pesky little sister.

  “She was there for me when I was in trouble,” he said, only vaguely aware, lost in the memory, “and now I’m afraid she’s in trouble.”

  “So you’re going to be there for her,” Sasha said, and the approval in her tone warmed him. “Tell me what’s happened. Was there trouble at home?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “Not the kind that would make her take off. My folks are great.”

  “You’ve always said so,” Sasha said. “But sometimes siblings see things differently.”

  He shook his head. “Trish got along fine with them. No fights, no blowups. Just the usual teenage stuff. She thought they were overprotective, but so did I.”

  “Sometimes,” Sasha said again, this time carefully, “parents are different with girls.”

  Ryan considered this for a moment. “My dad was, a little. Extraprotective. But Trish could get around him, too, in a way I never could.”

  “Girls and their daddies,” Sasha said. “It’s a fact of life.”

  “Yeah. I envied her sometimes, when I was still at home. There she was, seven years old, wheedling things out of him that I couldn’t get at seventeen. But it was hard to stay mad at her when she…” He trailed off awkwardly.

  “When she adored her big brother?”

  A sheepish smile curved his mouth. “Yeah.”

  “That’s the natural order of things, too,” Sasha said.

  There was a pause as the waitress took their order—she still went for his own favorite cheeseburger, which likely meant, given she hadn’t changed at all, she still worked out like a tri-athlete—and then she continued.

  “You said it’s been a week.”

  He nodded.

  “And she just turned eighteen?”

  He nodded again. “On the ninth.”

  “Any reason to think she didn’t just take off on some celebration of her newly gained adulthood?”

  And there it was, Ryan thought. The same wall they’d run into with the police. “Concrete reason? Like something I could show you?” He sighed. “No. The opposite, in fact.”

  “Opposite?”

  “She left a note.” To her credit, Ryan thought, her expression didn’t change. “Not a suicide note,” Ryan said quickly, since that was the first thing the cops had asked.

  “I assumed it wasn’t, or you wouldn’t be talking to me, the police would be investigating. Are they?”

  “No.”

  She merely nodded. “Do you have it?”

  “No. My folks do.” He shifted in his seat. “They didn’t know I was going to call you.”

  “Will it bother them?”

  Not nearly as much as it bothered me, he thought.

  “I don’t think so. They just want somebody looking for Trish, and obviously the police won’t unless we come up with some evidence something’s wrong. I mean they took a report, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t going to go far.”

  “They have some big limitations,” Sasha said. “So what did the note say? Any clues?”

  “Thank you,” he said impulsively. At her questioning look he tried to explain. “For not…instantly writing this off. For not giving me that look the cops did, the minute I told them about the note.”

  Although she looked pleased, she waved his thanks off with a gesture and refused to bash the police. “They have different priorities, and too darn many rules. We don’t. And we have access to Redstone’s resources. That’s why we’re so successful. So what did the note say?”

  “Just that she had to go somewhere, not to worry, and she’d call when she could. But she’s supposed to start college in the fall, at U.C. Davis. She wants to be a vet.”

  “And did she? Call, I mean?”

  “No. And she’s not answering her cell.”

  “Didn’t even call friends?”

  “Her best friend is spending the summer in Australia. Graduation present. She said she didn’t know anything, even laughed at the idea of Trish taking off on her own.”

  Sasha nodded thoughtfully.

  “Boyfriend?”

  “No. She never dated much. She was focused on school. She was seeing one guy a year or so ago, but they broke up. I don’t know why.”

  “Nasty break?”

  Ryan looked uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I only barely knew about the guy.”

  “Would your parents know?”

  “Probably. They keep a close watch—” He stopped, as if realizing that however close his parents had watched their daughter, it apparently hadn’t been close enough.

  “I’ll talk to them about it,” Sasha said. “And I’ll want to see the note.”

  “There was nothing in it about where she was going, or how long she’d be gone, or even if she’d be back. Nothing,” he repeated in obvious frustration.

  “Did she have a car?”

  “Yes, my dad’s old one, but it’s at home still.”

  “How about finances? Credit card?”

  “She had a checking account, and savings, but that’s it. My folks wouldn’t let her have a credit card, afraid she’d do the kid thing and get in way over her head.”

  “She’ll get a million credit card offers once she gets to college,” Sasha pointed out, refraining from stating her opinion on that common practice.

  “They knew that. They just flat out told her she couldn’t have one while she was underage and they might be held responsible for her irresponsibility, and that if she got one once she left the house, they wouldn’t help her with it.” One corner of his mouth quirked upward. “I got the same lecture at the same age.”

  “Good for your folks.”

  “I knew you’d say that,” Ryan said, but with a smile.

  “She’s never expressed a desire to take off when she was old enough, see the country or the world?” Sasha asked.

  “Trish? Hardly. She didn’t even like going on family vacations. She’s never even talked about wanting to go anywhere. She was looking forward to going to school, but she was even a bit nervous about that, it being so far away. In her eyes, anyway,” he amended, as if realizing that to many people, especially those connected to a worldwide entity like Redstone, a distance of less than five hundred miles was almost negligible.

  “So she’s a homebody?”

  He shrugged. “She liked life here. Her friends, going to the beach. And she volunteered a lot at Safe Haven.”

  “Safe Haven?”

  “It’s an animal shelter, sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “It’s mainly for the pets of people who have to go to the hospital, or older people who have to go into a nursing home, to take care of them while the owners can’t.”

  Sasha smiled widely. “That’s a wonderful idea.”

  Ryan nodded; even he had had to admit his little sister had found a worthwhile cause. “It’s the main reason Trish wanted to be a vet, to come back and work for
Safe Haven one day. They take care of the animals until the owner can take them back, and when it’s an option, they take them to visit their owners until then. That’s one of the things Trish was doing as a volunteer.”

  “Good for her.”

  “She was helping with adoptions, too, when they knew the owners wouldn’t be able to take their pet back. They always try to place them with people willing to make the effort to continue the visits.”

  Sasha blinked. “To their original people?” Ryan nodded. “That’s beyond wonderful, that’s beautiful. Whoever thought of that should be very proud.”

  “Actually, there’s a Redstone connection. Emma McClaren runs it. She’s married to Harlan McClaren. Also known as Mac McClaren.”

  Sasha blinked. “The treasure hunter?”

  “The same.” He wasn’t surprised she knew the name; anybody even vaguely aware of world happenings had heard of the man who had such a knack for finding and salvaging fortunes both sunken and buried.

  “Wow.” Her brow furrowed. “But what’s the Redstone connection?”

  Ryan grinned. “Who do you think bankrolled Josh Redstone when he was starting out?”

  Her eyes widened. “Really?”

  “And now he’s Josh’s right-hand financial go-to guy. He’s got as much of a knack with finances and investments as he does finding treasure. And he’s available to anybody who’s Redstone. He’s why even our file clerks have a retirement plan that’s the envy of the corporate world.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “Few people do. Neither he nor Josh brags much.”

  “You’re quite the Redstone booster, aren’t you?”

  He bristled slightly. “Redstone doesn’t need me to boost it. It speaks for itself.”

  “That wasn’t criticism. I have the highest opinion of Redstone, and Josh. We wouldn’t exist if not for them, and him, and if we didn’t, I’d be trying to get a job there.”