Operation Reunion Page 8

  But it was more than that. It was the way he carefully, slowly undressed her, caressing each inch of skin revealed as if he’d never seen it before. She understood because every bit of him, broad shoulders, powerful arms, the cords of his neck, was newly precious to her. He’d even stopped her after she’d pulled off his shirt, when her fingers would have gone to the top button of his jeans.

  He was handling her as if they’d never been together. As if it was that first night, when she’d turned twenty-one.

  She had thought she would want to hurry. She’d been aching for him every moment since he’d walked out. She’d imagined, if this ever happened again, that they would be wildly hungry from the time apart. But now—

  As she put her hands on his shoulders to try to pull him closer, he released her bra and gently, almost reverently cupped her breasts. Her breath caught. For a moment that seem liked forever he simply held her, as if he were savoring the feel of soft flesh rounding into his hands.

  That halted breath escaped in a low moan as, at last, he brushed his thumbs over her nipples. Her hands slid helplessly downward, gripping the solid muscle of his upper arms as she swayed. Still he moved slowly, so slowly, and finally she understood.

  He was seducing her all over again, not because she was unwilling, but in case she had forgotten how unutterably good they were together.

  His presence, she realized as at last he let her work down his zipper as he did the same with hers, wasn’t the only thing she’d taken for granted. She’d taken this for granted, this hot, physical connection. It had been this way since the beginning and hadn’t faded at all in five years. He could still make her shiver from across a room, and she knew, with a quiet, feminine sort of pride, that she did the same to him.

  “This is forever, Kayla,” he’d said that first night. “No turning back. Are you sure?”

  “Is that why you made us wait?” she’d asked.

  “You needed to be old enough to know for sure what you want.”

  “I’ve known since I was fourteen,” she’d told him.

  It had been nothing less than the truth. She’d loved him since the day, instead of insisting on helping her out of that tree, he’d climbed up to join her. And instead of helping her get down, he’d inspected possible routes, told her which one he himself would use, and then let her do it herself.

  Now, she owed him this, she thought as they at last went down to the bed in a tangle. No more protests or pleas for him to move faster, to satiate the hunger that had been building. She gave herself up to his hands, his mouth. This would be at his pace, but all the while she knew his goal was to drive her mad with need, and in the end her pleasure would be as great if not greater than his. Because this was Dane, and he knew her, knew how to touch her, to kiss her, to take her exactly as she wanted to be taken.

  And the next time, because now she was sure there would be one, she would return the favor, calling up everything she’d learned of him, of what he liked, to make sure he would be the one driven mad. She would show him she understood, that she knew what they’d nearly lost, how rare and special it was.

  And then he was easing into her, hot and hard, slow and taunting, and rational thought fled. Her body arched in eager anticipation as he slid home bit by bit, and the low groan that broke from him, the first sign he wasn’t as completely in control as he’d seemed, made her every muscle clench.

  He lifted his head, looked straight into her eyes. “Don’t throw this away, Kayla.”

  She tightened her arms around him. “No more taking for granted,” she said.

  Her words were apparently what he’d needed to hear because he abandoned all efforts at teasing slowness and began to move with an urgency that was no less compelling. Kayla gave herself up to the driving stroke of his body, let slip all restraint and reveled in the sweet, delicious fact that he was hers again.

  For now.

  Chapter 10

  This time Kayla smiled when she saw the dog racing out to greet them. He seemed delighted to see his new friends. In fact, when he skidded to a stop in front of them and looked from her to Dane and back again, he seemed delighted not just to see them, but to see them together.

  “Cutter, you are a very different dog,” Dane said, reaching down to scratch his ear.

  “Isn’t he?” Kayla said, glad she wasn’t the only one who saw it. “Hayley says sometimes she thinks he’s more human than dog. But smarter.”

  Dane laughed. It was a good sound, one that gave her hope.

  They headed toward the building. Quinn had called Kayla and asked her to meet him here. She had called Dane, who insisted on coming with her, as she knew he would. He’d made a promise that he would see this through with her, and Dane always kept his promises.

  They started to turn on the gravel path that led to the main door of the building, but the dog cut them off. Then he trotted a few steps to their right, away from the door and along the path that led to the warehouse. He stopped and looked over his shoulder at them.

  “I’ve been here before,” Kayla said. “That’s what started this.”

  “What?”

  She realized she hadn’t really told Dane what had happened that morning. It had sounded so silly, the idea that the dog had purposely snatched Chad’s note and carried it off to the very people who were helping her now. She’d been afraid he’d dismiss the whole thing out of hand; Dane was a very practical and sometimes literally minded guy. And in retrospect, it sounded silly even to her.

  “He...sort of led me to them,” she said. “I thought he was just playing, but now I’m not so sure.”

  Cutter gave a short bark, walked a few more steps, stopped and looked back at them once more.

  “Led you like this, you mean?” Dane asked.

  “Yes.” She sighed. If she couldn’t tell him the truth, what hope was there for them anyway? “I’d thrown away Chad’s note. He took it right out of the trash can and did this until I followed him to Quinn.”

  She expected him to say something about her being silly or fantasizing, expected him maybe even to tease her for thinking the dog had humanlike intelligence. He did neither.

  “You threw it away?”

  She knew him well enough to understand. And after last night, she knew he needed, deserved, to hear it. “I did. I wadded it up and tossed it. It wasn’t worth what it had cost me.”

  He let out a long, compressed sigh.

  At that moment, Cutter apparently lost patience with their lack of attention. Or their stupidity, Kayla thought. The dog trotted back and circled behind them. He didn’t quite nip at their heels, but he nudged them both pointedly.

  “I guess we’d better cooperate,” Dane said.

  His voice sounded strange, and she couldn’t tell if he was sorry the conversation had been interrupted or if he was relieved. He wasn’t like other guys she knew of from her friends, often dodging anything that could be described as serious discussion of the relationship. Those friends envied her the way she and Dane were always able to talk. But despite last night, things weren’t usual between them now and hadn’t been for a long time.

  “I love you.”

  It burst from her as her mind seized on the declaration as the one most important thing to say right now.

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Enough to give us this one last chance.”

  The finality in his voice told her he meant what he said. Last night had been a reminder of what she was risking. For all his easygoing nature and his tremendous patience, there was a line Dane would not be pushed past, and she had reached it. She had made promises she intended to keep, but she’d be the first to admit that if they found Chad—

  Dane stopped dead in the open doorway of the warehouse, where Cutter had led them.

  “Whoa.”

  The man who had been tinkering with something on the sleek, black helicopter inside spun around, his right hand whipping to his side. For an instant Kayla’s breath caught; he’d moved like he was used to havin
g a gun there. But then he noticed Cutter and went from alert and primed to relaxed and smiling.

  “A little warning would be good, buddy,” he said to the dog who trotted toward him. The dog made a strange noise that sounded oddly like a snort of disgust. “Yeah, yeah, they’re friendlies. I get it.”

  He walked toward them then. “Hi. You must be Kayla and Dane. I’m Teague Johnson.”

  He held out a hand. Kayla took it, noticing that while he didn’t have a crushing grip, he didn’t treat her like she was some delicate flower who would crumple at a solid clasp, either. Still, she noticed when he then shook Dane’s hand, it was firmer. A guy thing, she thought.

  And he was definitely a guy. From his buzz-cut sandy-brown hair to his battered leather jacket to his jeans with a hole in one knee, he was a guy. There was something about him, in the way he stood, the way he carried himself, that made her wonder, as she had with Quinn, if he’d been in the military. If so, it had to have been recently; he looked young.

  “Nice,” Dane said, gesturing at the helicopter. There was an undertone of awed appreciation in his voice.

  “That it is,” Teague agreed with a crooked grin that made Kayla smile in turn. “Quinn’s newest toy. He got tired of trying to arrange transport when we needed to move in a hurry.”

  “And he can afford that?” Dane asked.

  Teague laughed, apparently not hearing, or at least not reacting to, the faintly suspicious note in Dane’s voice. But Kayla wasn’t sure anyone who didn’t know him as she did would notice.

  “Thanks to Charlie, our resident financial genius, the Foxworth Foundation can afford a lot. What we do isn’t always cheap.”

  “So you work for Quinn?”

  “I’m part of his team, yes,” Teague said. “Lately he’s been letting me fly this baby.”

  “That’s nice,” Kayla said as she looked at the aircraft. She supposed it was nice, to him. “They make me a little nervous. I’ve never flown in one, and I hope to keep it that way.”

  “Well, if you don’t like this, we have a pretty little blue and white airplane out at the airstrip,” Teague said.

  “Charlie must be really good,” Dane said dryly.

  Cutter gave a low sound and darted away, drawing their attention for a moment.

  “Quinn,” Teague said.

  “What?”

  “That was his Quinn sound. He must be back.”

  “You’re saying he has different sounds for different people?”

  “For Quinn and Hayley he does. Hayley’s is a happy bark. Quinn’s is that rumble. Me and the guys, we have to share one. Except Rafe. For some reason he gets his own.” The crooked grin flashed again. “I swear, that dog isn’t really a dog. I’m not sure what he is, except he’s part of the team.”

  Kayla liked that. Liked that the dog was apparently accepted and welcomed by all. It made her feel better about them somehow.

  “What happened there?” she asked, pointing to what looked like a patch of some kind that marred the sleek black surface.

  “Same thing that happened there,” Teague said cheerfully, indicating an odd, ragged hole farther back that she hadn’t noticed yet.

  “That looks like a bullet hole,” Dane said.

  “It is. That one doesn’t affect anything, so Quinn wanted to keep it. Sort of a souvenir.”

  Kayla stared incredulously. “A souvenir? A bullet hole as a souvenir?”

  “It’s from the mission where he met Hayley,” Teague explained.

  That bit of information startled her and, oddly, warmed her a little. It was a strange feeling.

  “Did she shoot at you?” Kayla asked.

  Teague laughed. “She would have if she’d been armed, I think. We did sort of kidnap her.”

  Kayla gasped. Dane, perversely, laughed. “Now that’s a story I’d like to hear.”

  “Some other time.”

  Quinn’s voice came from behind them, and they turned to see him entering the warehouse, Cutter trotting at his side.

  “Right now,” he went on as he and the dog came to a halt beside them, “we need to talk about a possible lead.”

  Kayla’s breath caught. “To Chad?” she said, then felt silly; what else?

  “It may amount to nothing, and I warn you, it’s not fresh, but it’s the first thing we’ve turned up.”

  Kayla felt the old, eternal hope rise within her. And as they walked back toward the main building, she reached down to scratch behind Cutter’s right ear in silent thanks. The dog made a soft, yowling little noise that sounded for all the world like encouragement.

  Kayla shook her head in wonder. Maybe Teague was right, and he wasn’t really just a dog.

  She didn’t know how or why this had happened, but she felt heartened about her brother for the first time in a long time, and for that she had to thank this furry conspirator.

  Chapter 11

  Dane stared down at the image on the paper on the table before him.

  “Wow.”

  Kayla seemed beyond words, and looking at the computer-generated picture of Chad at his current age, he understood why.

  “We tried doing this a couple of years ago for the social network pages she set up,” Dane said, “but it didn’t come out anywhere near this good.”

  “It’s a special talent. Our tech guru, Tyler Hewitt, is a genius,” Quinn said. “We do a lot of missing person cases. He took some standard image-aging software and tweaked it a bit, and the results have been amazing.”

  “He looks different,” Dane said, “yet I’d recognize him in a minute.”

  “Is this what you wanted me to see?” Kayla asked. “Is this for flyers or posting or—”

  “Someone thinks they saw him.”

  Kayla jumped. “Easy,” Dane said. “He said it’s not fresh.”

  “But it’s more than I’ve had in so long,” she said almost breathlessly. “Where?”

  “A small town in Northern California. Not impossibly far from the note you got from Redding.”

  “That was three months ago.” Kayla said it evenly, but Dane suspected she was trying to keep disappointment out of her voice, remembering she’d been warned the lead wasn’t fresh.

  “Yes. But it’s a starting place.”

  “Who recognized him?”

  Quinn shook his head. “It wasn’t that definite. Just that the picture looked like somebody they’d seen. In a video game store.”

  Kayla’s head came up sharply. “A video game store? That was one of Chad’s passions.”

  Quinn nodded. “That’s why we took this one seriously.”

  “How’d you manage this?” Dane asked. He didn’t want to burst Kayla’s bubble, but this seemed a bit much after only a few days. “This is hundreds of miles away and a little town, but you just happen to come across the one person who thinks he saw him?”

  “We didn’t. Not in the sense you mean.”

  Quinn leaned back in his chair. To Dane’s surprise, the look he gave him seemed almost approving.

  “You know we don’t charge money for what we do,” he said.

  Dane instantly registered the key word in that statement. “Money,” he said.

  “What we’ve done instead,” Quinn said, “is build a network. Of ordinary people across the country, people who don’t stand out, who don’t make people clam up like the police sometimes do, people who can watch, notice, without being noticed much themselves.”

  Dane’s gaze narrowed. “You’re saying...that’s what you charge for your help?”

  Quinn nodded. “Help in turn, at some later date. Most of our people are happy to do it. They never forget what it was like to be the one backed into a corner, the one at the end of their rope, the victim of injustice.”

  “Like you were,” Kayla said softly.

  Quinn’s gaze shifted to her, but he said nothing.

  “Your parents.” If Quinn was upset, it didn’t show, except maybe in a slight lowering of his brows. “Hayley told me. I think she thoug
ht I needed to know you really did understand,” Kayla continued, apparently feeling the need to explain or to defend Hayley.

  “Then I trust her judgment,” Quinn said. Briskly, he went on. “We’ll be leaving for California first thing in the morning.”

  “Taking that little toy in the warehouse?” Dane asked.

  Quinn grinned suddenly, like a guy with the coolest car in town. “It is sweet, isn’t it? But no. We’ll take the plane. The Siskiyous are mountains I take seriously, and I’d rather be way above them.”

  “Okay,” Kayla said.

  There was undeniable excitement in her voice, and Dane supposed he couldn’t blame her. And he realized that if this turned out to be just another disappointment for her, he wasn’t going to be very happy with Quinn and company.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as we speak to our person there if it seems there’s anything to this.”

  Kayla shook her head. “You won’t have to. I’m going with you.”

  Dane went still. Quinn’s gaze narrowed. “I don’t think that would be the best idea,” Quinn said. “And it’s not necessary. We’ll check it out, and if there’s anything to it then you can—”

  “No. I want to go now. I need to. I need to do something. Something besides sit at home and wonder.”

  “You’ve already logged more frequent flyer miles than any pilot, searching for Chad,” Dane pointed out.

  “Don’t you see? This is the first chance in months, the first real possibility somebody may have seen him!”

  Dane thought she was building this up too much, and obviously so did Quinn. But Dane knew that when Kayla focused on something, there was no stopping her. It took a considerable effort for him to quash the reaction that had become nearly automatic over the past couple of years. He’d promised her he would give this a full, honest shot. One last time.

  Then it would be over, one way or another.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll both go.” He glanced at Quinn. “Assuming there’s room in this plane of yours.”

  “There’s room,” Quinn said. “But it’s still not a good idea. It could well be a wasted trip.”