His Personal Mission Page 3

  “Oh.” He felt a bit foolish.

  “I like that you want to defend it, though.”

  He shrugged, tracing a path through the condensation on his glass. “I don’t know where I’d be if Josh hadn’t…been who he was.”

  She knew his story, he’d told her himself when he’d realized he wanted to keep seeing her. He’d told her before she’d heard it from someone else, not wanting her to get some slanted version of his youthful exploits as a malicious hacker who’d tackled Redstone just because they were the biggest kid on the block.

  “So how’s your retirement looking?” she asked. Startled, he looked up. Saw the twinkle of humor in her dark eyes. Felt the smile start to curve his mouth before he even realized he was doing it.

  “Great,” he said. “Even my dad approves. Thinks I’m finally being responsible. I haven’t had the heart to tell him I signed up half because I wanted the kick of Mac McClaren doing my investing for me.”

  She laughed at that, but then, rather more intently, asked, “And the other half?”

  Of course she hadn’t missed that. He hadn’t forgotten how rarely she missed anything. The very trait that made her so good at what she did also made her sometimes uncomfortably observant to be around. Especially if you were prone to sliding easily along the surface of life.

  “I’m trying,” he said at last. “Somebody told me once I didn’t worry enough.”

  Her dark, arched brows shot upward. He’d startled her with that, since she’d been the one who’d said it.

  “I doubt they said exactly that,” she said.

  “Close enough.”

  To his amazement, she seemed flustered. He’d never been able to manage that before, and he wasn’t sure if it was a good or bad sign that he’d done it now. Before he could decide, their food had arrived.

  The cheeseburgers were as good as always, but he wasn’t able to give his the attention it deserved. Not with Sasha sitting across the table from him. He was grateful when, between bites—he’d always liked the fact that she enjoyed food—she turned back to the reason they were here.

  “So this is uncharacteristic of your sister?”

  “Very. Like I said, she loved living here, and her friends, and what she did at Safe Haven.”

  “Have you talked to them? The shelter?”

  “I talked to one of the other volunteers. She said Trish left Emma a note saying essentially the same thing.”

  “Did she have a work schedule there, or as a volunteer did she just drop in whenever?”

  He frowned. “I’m not sure.”

  “We’ll check that out, then. And the girlfriend. Anyone else you can think of?”

  The French fry Ryan had just swallowed seemed to jam in his suddenly tight throat. He hadn’t realized just how much he’d needed somebody to believe, somebody to take his word for the fact that something was wrong with the way his sister had just up and left everything she knew and loved.

  “You’ll help?” he said, almost wonderingly.

  “Of course,” Sasha said. “It’s what I do.”

  And if he was wishing she meant that personally as well as a representative of the Westin Foundation helping someone from Redstone, that was his problem, Ryan told himself. It didn’t matter what he wished, or that he wished it from Sasha Tereschenko.

  What mattered was that they find Trish.

  Safe.

  Chapter 3

  “Is this taking you away from something else?”

  Sasha glanced at Ryan in the passenger seat before pulling out into traffic; they were taking her car out to Safe Haven because he was low on gas and it was a long drive. And, as she’d pointed out, she got paid mileage.

  “Not at the moment. That case we just finished was the only thing right now.”

  “You and…Russ.”

  “Yes.” She saw something flicker in his eyes; he’d never liked Russ. And she was female enough to be flattered when she’d realized why.

  “Is he still…”

  “Hitting on me? Tirelessly.”

  “Did you ever give in?”

  “No. Not,” she added, “that it’s your business.”

  “I know that.”

  He said it so quietly she changed her tone. “He only wants me because I don’t want him. He finds that…hard to believe.”

  “He would,” Ryan muttered.

  Sasha stifled a smile.

  “Happy ending?” he asked.

  It took her an instant to make the shift. “The case?”

  “Yeah.”

  She had to turn her attention back to her driving as a chance to get out of The Grill driveway presented itself—not something to be bypassed even midday in this busy area. It also gave her a chance to process the thought that she was surprised he’d asked. The old Ryan, the two-years-ago Ryan, wouldn’t have even thought of that.

  That she doubted he would even have cared back then was one of the reasons she’d walked away.

  “Yes,” she said once they had merged safely into the number two lane. “We found him in time.”

  “Little one?”

  Again she was surprised. “Yes. Eight years old. Noncusto-dial parent took him.”

  “That’s kind of common, isn’t it?”

  Now she was really surprised. “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “I’m lucky my folks stayed together. Seems like all my friends’ parents divorced, remarried, had more kids, divorced, and on and on.”

  “Yes, you are lucky,” she said.

  And she was stunned. His taking for granted the life he had had always irritated her. Was this appreciation sincere, or some effort to convince her he’d changed?

  Get over yourself, she muttered inwardly. It’s not all about you, girl.

  “I appreciate your taking the time to help me. And even being willing to, when the police wouldn’t.”

  There was undeniable sincerity in the words, and again she wondered at the formerly uncharacteristic attitude.

  “They have their criteria, we have ours,” she said. “Ours is relieving pain and worry.”

  “I know. I’ve always…admired what you do.”

  He’d told her that before, but in the aftermath of discovering how…well, face it, shallow he’d been at the time, she’d discounted that along with almost everything else he’d said as just surface chat to try to charm her.

  Perhaps she’d been a little harsh before.

  But right now there was something else she had to make clear. “You know that we can’t force your sister to come back if she doesn’t want to, now that she’s eighteen.”

  “I know that.”

  “But we can find her and make sure she’s all right.”

  “That’s all I want. My folks want her home, but…I remember what it was like at that age.”

  He spoke as if that age were many decades behind him instead of merely one. That, too, was new.

  She glanced at him again. He was staring out the windshield, but she noticed he was digging his left thumbnail into the side of his index finger, a habit she’d noticed before, the only sign he’d ever shown of being concerned about anything. That it had usually been about a complex computer problem he was dealing with had been the part that irritated her.

  “Don’t you ever worry about people?” she’d asked him once in exasperation.

  He’d only shrugged. “With computers there’s always an answer. You just have to find it.”

  She hadn’t appreciated the logic and, she admitted later, the wisdom in that at the time. It had seemed just another sign that much as she liked and was attracted to him, their attitudes about some critical things simply didn’t mesh.

  “I don’t want you to get into trouble,” he said now, snapping her back to the present, his concern adding another layer to her surprise. “I know your focus is on kids, and technically Trish isn’t one.”

  “But she’s connected, through you, to Redstone. That’s all Zach will need to hear. He’d do anything for one of Josh’
s people. It’s once Redstone, always Redstone, for him. And of course, his wife is pure Redstone.”

  Sasha smiled as she said it; she greatly admired Reeve Westin, and had when she’d still been Reeve Fox. She’d been a bit intimidated at first, what with the incredible reputation of the Redstone security team, but Reeve had been wonderful, and for her own reasons staunch in her support of what the Westin Foundation did.

  And not just because she loved the man responsible for its founding; the foundation had arisen out of the tragic murder of the Redstone Aviation’s administrator’s six-year-old son. It was funded in large part by Redstone, and was now headed up by Zach Westin himself. Another layer had been added when Westin had married Reeve, the member of the stellar Redstone security team who had been assigned to his son’s disappearance. The latest in the growing string of Redstone couples.

  “How are they? Zach and Reeve, I mean.”

  “Nauseatingly happy,” she said with a grin.

  “Figures,” he said wryly. “I swear, it’s in the water at Redstone these days.”

  “So I hear. Don’t drink any, who knows what might happen to you.”

  He went very quiet then, and she wondered what about her somewhat-lame joke—which, if she was honest, had probably been a bit of a jab at him—had shut him up. For a moment she was afraid he was going to bring up the past, and she didn’t want to deal with that. She’d put him safely and thoroughly behind her, and that’s where she wanted him to stay. She was sure he’d probably done the same. After all, they’d only dated a few months. It wasn’t like they had some huge, involved history between them. They’d had some good times, yes. If she were being honest again, some of the best times she’d ever had.

  But you didn’t build the kind of life she wanted on just good times. Well, that and incredible chemistry, she thought. Yes, that had definitely been there.

  But it still wasn’t enough. Not for the long haul. Not to end up where her parents had, married thirty-five years and still mad for each other. Or for that matter, like Ryan’s parents, married nearly as long and in the same condition.

  But where she appreciated, adored and wanted to emulate her parents, Ryan was embarrassed by his. He took them for granted, more amused by them than anything, and by their staying together through thick and thin when their contemporaries seemed to split like a stream around a rock anytime the slightest difficulty came up.

  And then there was his embarrassment when they would engage in displays of affection in public, groaning that he preferred PDAs to be of the computer variety. Sasha had found them incredibly sweet, people to be admired, not embarrassed by. And Ryan had seemed bewildered when she’d pointed that out to him.

  “How are your folks?” she asked now. “This must be awful on them.”

  “They’re pulling together, as always.” There was, Sasha noted, none of the usual embarrassment in his voice now.

  “My mom keeps thinking it must be something she’s done, my dad keeps telling her she’s the perfect mother and it has nothing to do with her.”

  “Chances are he’s right, it has nothing to do with her, or them. In a stable family like yours, it’s often simply…being a teenager. Thinking you know everything. Rebellion against the status quo, all that.”

  It wasn’t lost on her that these were some of the reasons Ryan had gotten himself into trouble all those years ago. He’d never denied to her that he’d started down the path that had led him into big trouble early on. He’d hacked his first system when he was sixteen, a simple one, that of his high school in an effort to improve his grades. It had been so easy he’d graduated quickly to other hacks.

  He’d never gone for banks or financial institutions. Money wasn’t his motivation. Once he’d taken on a gaming company, in an effort to get an advance look at a new game they were developing. Their security had been much tighter than the school’s, and it had taken him a long time.

  Redstone he had tackled when he was twenty-one, simply for the challenge. He’d read an article on the brand-new Redstone genius Ian Gamble, who had developed a state-of-the-art firewall that had the computer security industry buzzing. It had taken him nearly a year to find a way past Gamble’s ingenious design.

  And if Ian hadn’t been willing to take him on at Josh’s request, Ryan didn’t know where he’d be.

  “They don’t have any idea where she might have gone?”

  “They’ve thought and thought about it, and can’t come up with anything.” He seemed to hesitate, then said quietly, “I’m worried about them.”

  “They’ll probably be fine once we find her.”

  “I appreciate the confidence,” he said. “And I know if anybody can find her, you can. But they seem full of…self-doubt. And part of that’s my fault.”

  “Why?” she asked, startled at the sudden turn.

  “First I go get into trouble, and now Trish essentially runs away from home? They thought they were doing a good job with us, but now they’re questioning everything they’ve ever done.”

  Sasha had only met his parents twice, once by accident when they’d dropped by Ryan’s apartment when she was there, and once after the breakup, when she’d gone by Redstone to return a CD he’d lent her and they’d been visiting. She’d liked them both times. Enough to wish things had gone differently. They seemed to her the epitome of the backbone of America, the kind of people who really made things work, the kind she admired and respected.

  She didn’t like the thought of them second-guessing their entire lives.

  “I’ll talk to them. Maybe I can help them see that’s not true.”

  He seemed relieved at that idea. So he did care, she thought.

  “Will they be home tonight?”

  He nodded. “Dad gets home about six, and mom’s always home in the afternoons.”

  “Is she still working for that doctor?”

  “Yeah. And Dad’s still crunching numbers at the bank.”

  She remembered suddenly how he’d once told her his dad had to be the most boring guy on the planet. Same boring work, at the same boring place, for over twenty years. That had been, she realized in retrospect, the beginning of the end. The dismissive assessment had angered her. She couldn’t be with someone who didn’t realize the value of that, who didn’t make the connection between that kind of steadiness and his own comfortable, carefree life.

  And she’d told him so, in no uncertain terms.

  “Almost as boring as sitting at a computer all day,” she said, not bothering to keep the snap out of her voice. And then wondering why; it wasn’t like it mattered anymore.

  “Computers aren’t boring!” His defensiveness was quick, instinctive. “They’ve changed the world, made amazing things possible.” He gestured at the GPS screen set into the dash of her car. “You’d be fumbling with maps if you didn’t have that thing to give you turn-by-turns right to Safe Haven’s front door.”

  “True enough,” she had to admit.

  “They’re not boring at all.”

  As they pulled to a stop at a red light, she turned slightly to look at him.

  “Did you ever think that maybe numbers aren’t boring to your father? That maybe he likes the…the logic of them, the symmetry, the balance? Did you ever think that your blessed computers are based on numbers, and that you probably inherited some of your father’s knack with them, and that that’s the reason you’re good with them?”

  She could see by his expression that he hadn’t.

  The light changed. As she turned her attention back to driving, she was inwardly chiding herself for coming down so hard. This was, after all, none of her business anymore. It probably never had been. But it had been a measure of how much she liked the guy that she’d even tried to change his attitude about some things that were very basic to her.

  Teach you to be a foolish female, try to change a male who doesn’t want to change, she thought, and not for the first time.

  “Sorry,” she said into the silence of the car,
“you came to me for help, not criticism.”

  She heard him let out a compressed breath before he said levelly, “If one’s the price for the other, I’ll take it.”

  Now that was a change, she thought, surprised anew.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I realize now how you could spend twenty years in the same place. I never want to leave Redstone. I still don’t get the accounting thing, but what you said about the numbers…that makes sense.”

  My God, Sasha thought. He really has changed.

  The old Ryan would have either laughed her off, or gotten even more defensive.

  Had he finally grown up? Had the boy who had wanted only to slide along smoothly, the only challenges he enjoyed coming from his beloved computers, finally realized that people were what really mattered?

  She didn’t know. Couldn’t be sure, at least, not yet. Maybe he was just putting on a front of connecting with real people, knowing—because she’d told him so bluntly—that she thought him lacking that skill.

  And there you go again, making it all about you. When did you get so stuck on yourself?

  She lectured herself for another moment, ending with the truth that there was only one thing she could be sure of at the moment: that her own, deep-down reaction to the possibility was unsettling. She shouldn’t care, it shouldn’t matter, she’d left Ryan Barton long behind.

  Hadn’t she?

  Chapter 4

  Sasha was still pondering the changes in Ryan, wondering just how deep they went, when the GPS he’d been so enamored of announced their destination was one mile ahead on the right. She slowed, looking, and saw a long, low, red-barn-style building set back from the road. A smaller one was off to one side, and what had apparently once been a small house sat at the end of a long driveway behind a secured gate.

  The traditional rail fencing was high, and screened on the inside to make it secure, but painted pristinely white so that the first thing you thought of was charm rather than serious function. The grounds were tidy and well kept, and the small pack of five dogs who raced along the fence to greet them, tails up and tongues lolling, gave a homey air to it all.