Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128260 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 641(@200wpm)___ 513(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
“Everything good?” he asked quietly.
“Yeah, everything’s good.”
Just as he was lowering his lips to mine, his phone rang. I sat up and moved to my side of the cab so he could answer it.
“Hello?” he answered. He listened for a couple seconds. “Okay,” he said, the word clipped. “We’re leaving now.” He turned to me and I saw the worry in his expression. “We need to get back to the cabin and pack. There’s a situation at the hotel. We’ve gotta go.”
__________
Carson had given me a quick rundown of what was going on as we showered very quickly and packed up the cabin.
Apparently, Dylan thought he was close to pinpointing the location of the guy who had set Josh up, and they needed all the guys close by, just in case.
There was also a situation going on, on the forty-fifth floor with one of the women. She was pregnant, and although she didn’t know her exact dates, the doctor who had originally examined her thought she was about eight and a half months along. They all thought they could get her home before she had her baby, but she had gone into labor that morning. Likely, she was further along than they thought.
They had two doctors on the payroll that performed their services under the table, but both of them were out of town for Christmas. They would take her to the hospital if necessary, but questions might arise there. They thought a better option would be to bring Josh in, since he had been a corpsman and was plenty qualified to deliver a baby as long as no complications arose.
We had to drive back to Vegas separately, since we had two vehicles between us. That kind of sucked since I really wanted to use the time to discuss Josh’s situation in more detail with Carson. However, I’d successfully put the case on the back burner as I’d enjoyed our reunion, and so now, I used the time alone to try to get things straight in my mind about the evidence against Josh and whether there were any loose threads that could potentially be used to exonerate him. I went over each piece, but I couldn’t come up with anything. Unfortunately, the evidence against him was overwhelming and included plenty of DNA. Juries loved DNA—they’d come back with a guilty verdict in ten minutes. The more I thought about it, the more depressed I got. The only thing I could do was bungle the case so badly that Josh got off on a technicality. Of course, that would be career suicide. But I couldn’t let an innocent man spend his life in prison. It felt like an impossible situation.
The more I pondered, the more I realized what a dangerous job Carson had taken on, full of risk not only to life and limb, but to freedom. How would I feel, sitting at home, knowing the risks he was taking every time he walked out the door on one of his “operations”?
Then again, I was already well acquainted with that scenario. I was a cop’s daughter. I knew the risk my dad took every time he put his badge on, and I was fiercely proud, just like I was of Carson. I would deal with it, just like I always had with my dad, this time knowing that the man I loved was doing work that fulfilled him and made him a hero to those who truly needed one.
Carson called me when we were about two hours from Vegas and told me to follow him off the freeway so that we could find a place to eat lunch.
When I pulled Dylan’s SUV up behind his truck in the parking lot of a roadside Denny’s and got out, he was walking toward me, smiling. I ran the last few feet to him and jumped up, wrapping my legs around his waist. “I missed you,” I said.
He was laughing. “I missed you too.”
I kissed him for a minute, a gross display of PDA that I was sure was getting us plenty of “get a room” looks. Whatever. What those onlookers didn’t know was that I’d waited almost five years for this and I wasn’t about to apologize for taking full advantage.
We ate a quick lunch and were back on the road half an hour later.
When we pulled into the garage at Trilogy, I followed Carson to the back, where he must have used a remote in his truck to open a roll-up door that, upon first inspection, looked like a storage area.
He drove his truck in and I followed him, the door rolling closed behind me. A light blinked on and I got out and looked around at the large, mostly empty area containing two other black SUVs, and now Carson’s truck and Dylan’s SUV.