by Terry Spear
“Me?” Ryder seemed so surprised she’d change the subject. He finally finished making his turkey wrap and sat down with them to eat. “No. Not me. What about you and Kate?”
“Not me either.” Lexi took a bit of her chicken wrap.
Kate didn’t have any siblings either.
“What do you like to do when you’re not working or searching for messages?” Ryder asked.
“I love to swim,” Lexi said. “And boat and water-ski.”
“Me too,” Kate said. “I love to sail.”
“Sailing, paddling, water-skiing. I love to do that too,” Ryder said. “By the way, this doesn’t really count as my third date, does it?”
Lexi and Kate laughed. If she’d really been counting their get-togethers, he’d already have surpassed the other guys in dates. It was time to concentrate on why they were here, and she was afraid Ryder would feel compelled to tell his friend what they were doing so he could help out. She didn’t want to put anybody’s life in jeopardy. It was bad enough Kate wouldn’t let her do this on her own.
They talked about vacationing at other spots, and Ryder mentioned the trouble Aidan had had when he was looking for the cure for the wolves’ longevity issues.
“I’m so glad he and Holly found each other and resolved the situation with her pack,” Lexi said, finishing her sandwich. “I know a lot of wolves were afraid that our extended lives might be cut down to less than a human’s lifetime, so it was good that they found a cure.”
“I agree. It was great being there with them when it happened,” Ryder said.
When they were done eating, they thanked Ryder for a nice lunch, but then made their excuses. “Kate and I are going to work on some more promo ideas.”
“Good luck with that,” Ryder said.
“Thanks.” It looked like it was killing Ryder to not be able to spend more time with them, but as far as Lexi was concerned, she and Kate were looking for the message and watching out for trouble on their own.
“See you later,” Lexi said, but she didn’t really mean it.
“Great meal.” Kate sounded a little guilty for eating and running. Kate would know Lexi was upset about Ryder telling Mike about anything. She followed her out the door. When they were drawing near Lexi’s cabin, Kate said, “He only meant well.”
“I meant what I said. No one else can become involved. I understand where he’s coming from though. It’s the only reason I stayed for lunch.”
“I understand. No dinner with him tonight then? You’re just cutting him off like that?” Kate snapped her fingers to emphasize her point.
“Yeah, just like that. This is serious business. But don’t let me ruin your plans. You can have dinner with him, Kate,” Lexi said, meaning it. She would really like it if Kate enjoyed some male companionship. She didn’t have to watch Lexi every minute of every day.
“No, I don’t want to have dinner with him alone. I mean, I would, but he’s not interested in me.”
Lexi gave Kate a sideways glance as she opened the cabin door.
“Just don’t tell me you don’t want me to help you,” Kate said as they entered the cabin and locked the door.
“I need you.”
“Remember, he’s the one who helped us with the map. We would have looked forever and never found it.”
“We might still not find it there. He could be wrong,” Lexi warned her.
“True. Are you sure you don’t want to invite him over for dinner after he made us both lunch and breakfast today?” Kate asked.
Lexi gave her a look that said she wasn’t changing her mind.
Kate shrugged. “Oh, all right. He’s fun company, though, and until his friend arrives, he’s all alone.”
“Quit trying to convince me to change my mind. I’m not going to.”
Kate shook her head. “I still think he’d be a big help tomorrow, even if we don’t have a meal with him tonight.”
“Let’s go over some more promotional ideas you had for the summer collection.” Lexi had to get Kate off the topic of Ryder before she agreed to anything more to do with him that she was sure to regret.
Chapter 8
Ryder was playing a video game on his laptop, trying to keep his mind off Lexi, knowing she was pissed off that he’d mentioned anything to Mike about her trouble with Don Morgan, when someone knocked at the door, startling him. He was hopeful that Lexi, or maybe Kate, had returned to say everything was okay between them. When he peeked through the peephole, instead of seeing the women, he saw two men in dark-gray business suits standing in front of the door. One of the men had a crooked, bulbous nose that appeared to have been broken. The other guy had beady, blue eyes, a couple of nicks on his face where he’d recently shaved, and a scar that looked like someone had sliced his ruddy cheek with a knife.
Ryder opened the door. “Can I help you?”
“You can help Lexi Summerfield.” The man was clean-cut, reminding Ryder of the FBI or CIA. He didn’t like the implications of that already.
“Oh?” Ryder wondered what the hell was going on with Lexi, and his first thought was about the message she was trying to locate.
“When our dad died in a car crash, she had a mental breakdown. Tragic accident. She might not have told you, but she believes he’s trying to get in contact with her. We don’t want to have to recommit her, if it’s not necessary, but we don’t want you or anyone else feeding into her delusions.”
“Who are you people?”
“Clifford and Joe Summerfield, her half brothers. Naturally, we were broken up about our dad’s death too, but we have to move on. Lexi just hasn’t been able to.”
“Really. How do you know I’ve been visiting with her?”
“We saw her and her personal assistant just leave your cabin.”
So they only knew of the one time they’d been together? At least Ryder hoped that was the case.
“Do you have some ID?”
“Just heed my words, Mr. Gallagher. You don’t want to risk your career or anything else, should you pursue this.” The guy shook his head. “Just letting you know.”
Hell, he knew Ryder’s name already? What else did he know about him? “Thank you. I’ll take your words under consideration.” Hell, the guys weren’t wolves, so they’d lied about being her family. And she said she didn’t have any siblings.
“See that you do.”
Ryder shut the door in their faces, ran his hand through his hair, and pulled out his phone. He called Lexi, hoping these guys weren’t monitoring their call, but he suspected they might have the technology to do so. “Lexi?”
“We’re busy working on some promo,” Lexi said.
“I just had a couple of visitors. Dark-gray suits. Scowly faces. They claimed they are your half brothers, looked like they were with the government—FBI or CIA—but I couldn’t be sure of it and they wouldn’t produce any ID. They said you had a mental breakdown when your dad died in the car crash.”
“They were just at your cabin?” Lexi asked, sounding panicked.
“Yeah, they just left.”
“Okay, thanks.” She hung up on him.
“Wait!” Hell.
For a minute, Ryder wasn’t sure what to do. Then he wondered if Lexi assumed the men were listening in on their conversation. What was she mixed up in?
He suspected she was looking for a message from her father. That he wasn’t dead. Ryder knew she wasn’t crazy. He wanted to call her back, but he suspected she wouldn’t answer the phone a second time. He wanted to go over to her place, but he was afraid these men were monitoring both their cabins now.
Because of the work he did for Aidan and Holly, he always had monitoring devices packed in his bag in case anyone tried to learn anything about the research his bosses were doing. He pulled out his detector but didn’t find any listening bugs anywhere insi
de his cabin. That was good, but he would have to check for listening devices anytime he returned to the cabin now.
He hadn’t smelled their scents in the cabin before, either, though there were other scents in the cabin—human scents. But nothing new since he’d been here. They must have just arrived and seen the women leaving his place.
He left the cabin and started to circle around his place, looking for any indication the men were in the area. It didn’t take him long to find that they had rented a cabin nearby.
He searched the area around Lexi’s cabin and found a camera in a tree recording the activity at her place. They must have just set it up, or they would have seen them as wolves earlier.
He went around the back way to the cabin but didn’t find any cameras in that direction. He knocked on the back door.
Kate answered the door and frowned at him. “What are you doing here?”
He entered the cabin and shut the door. Lexi frowned at him and folded her arms.
“Lexi, the man warned me not to have anything more to do with you. He said my career could suffer.”
“He could be right.”
“Well, the two of them are staying at a cabin near me. And they’ve got video security out front, watching your place. They’ll know I’m here. They knew we were together for lunch, but I think they just found you. What the hell is this all about?” Ryder was ready to call in reinforcements, but he wanted to know what Lexi had to say about all this first. They couldn’t take on the whole government, if that was who was after her.
“My father is in the Witness Protection Program. The men you saw may not be with the government. Even you said they didn’t show you their ID.” Lexi fixed them glasses of water.
“No, they didn’t.”
Kate’s jaw dropped. “Ohmigod, Lexi, you should have told me. I wouldn’t have said a word about it to anyone.”
“Most likely, they are some of the guys who work for the man my dad testified against.”
Which made Ryder want to take care of them personally. “What do we do about the message?”
“We leave it alone for now. If they get ahold of it and figure out where my father is, he’s a dead man. Once you called, I burned the map. Dad and I will have to try again later. He’s sure to know if I don’t see him when I’m supposed to that the situation isn’t safe.”
“What do you intend to do? Go home?” Ryder hated that they’d come here on a vacation, then this happened. Then again, maybe this was the real reason they came here, not for a vacation at all.
“No. I’m on vacation. We’ll do some promo while we’re here. We hadn’t planned to, but we have more fun when we’re working on something. And you can be our model for our men’s skin-care products line,” Lexi said.
Ryder’s jaw dropped.
The women both smiled.
“No more digging in the dirt for a message that no longer matters. We have to do something with you,” Lexi said.
Ryder smiled. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind. Taking these guys down, finding your message, but modeling skin-care products?”
“Very natural. Not much of anything to it at all. We’ll do a video.”
“Don’t tell me you have the products with you.”
“We do. It must have been providence that you came here to help us.”
Hell, he couldn’t believe he’d gotten himself into modeling facial creams or whatever it was they had in store for him. He’d thought it would just be fun to be with two wolf ladies while he was on his own.
“If they want a show, we can put one on for them,” Lexi said.
“Oh, great,” he said.
“It’s a great cover story. You’re our part-time model. And we’ll fix dinner,” Lexi said.
“You’ve got a deal.” Not that he wanted to be on a video that could be seen around the world—he could just imagine what Mike would say if he ever learned of it—but he was all for having dinner with the women. He suspected he was again in Lexi’s good graces. “You sure you don’t want me to get some muscle to take care of these guys?”
“No. It’s too dangerous.”
“All right.”
Kate peered out the window. “Oh, no, Don’s here, wearing a couple of cameras and heading for our cabin.”
“Good,” Lexi said, joining her at the window. “Now that these other men are here, we can use him.”
“Oh?” Kate asked.
“I’m going to make him a proposition he won’t be able to refuse.” Lexi headed for the door.
“What’s that?” Ryder hoped she knew what she was doing.
“An exclusive interview, if he’ll harass the men in the other cabin.”
“Couldn’t that be risky for him, considering the other guys aren’t the good guys? Assuming they aren’t?” Ryder asked.
“We’ll be there to watch his back. I’m sure these guys wouldn’t want to get rid of all of us at once, not when they’re more interested in me telling them where my father is.”
“What about telling Mike what’s going on when he gets here? He needs to know about it,” Ryder said.
“If these guys take off, that might be the end of it for now. It’s really best if we don’t tell anyone else about it.”
“He wouldn’t mention it to anyone else, and the only reason to bring it up with him is that he’s going to be here.”
Lexi let out her breath. “Oh, all right, but I’m not usually this much of a pushover.”
Ryder smiled. “I didn’t think you were.”
* * *
“Okay, wish me luck.” Lexi opened the door to the cabin as she got ready to ask Don if he’d refocus his attention on Tremaine’s men.
“Ask him to be a male model,” Ryder said. “He might love it.”
“That’s an excellent idea, but it’s not getting you off the hook.” Lexi smiled at Ryder, then walked outside to join Don, who was setting up a camera on a tripod to take a picture of her cabin.
Don began snapping shots of her, as if he feared she’d duck back inside the cabin and he’d better make this worthwhile.
Her entourage of bodyguards came with her, and he glanced at each of them. “A couple of women uploaded some pictures that showed them meeting with you here while you were doing a promotional video. I figured you wouldn’t mind me doing a little write-up then.”
“It depends entirely on what you write about me. But I do have a proposition for you,” Lexi said, smiling.
“Really?” Don’s dark-brown eyes widened with speculation.
“Yeah. Two things. We’re doing a promo video on male skincare products, and I don’t want you filming or taking pictures while we’re doing it,” Lexi told Don. “But, if you’d like, you can be my other male model.”
“Other male model?” Don glanced at Ryder again. “I thought for sure he was a bodyguard.”
“He is. And he’s my male model. Now, after we do the video shoot, I want you to harass, I mean, do a piece on the men in cabin—” Lexi glanced at Ryder.
“Cabin 5,” he said.
“The two men staying there were harassing me, and they threatened Ryder.”
Don looked in the direction of the other cabin that they couldn’t see for the woods. “Has this anything to do with your dad’s death?”
Even though Don made his money off celebrities, he was a good investigative reporter, when he wasn’t taking photos of celebs.
“Maybe. They wouldn’t identify themselves,” Lexi said.
Glancing at Ryder again, Don looked like he was also dying to get a story on him, the male model.
“We’ll include you in the video, free skin-care demonstration,” she said.
“How much does it pay?” Don asked, sounding surprised.
“I’m just doing this for my modeling portfolio.” Ryder folded his arm
s, looking growly, more like a bodyguard.
“Hell, you’re being taken for a ride, pal. Do you know how much Lexi Summerfield’s worth?” Don asked. “Plenty.”
“Don, you don’t have to be in the video, but you do have the outdoor, rugged look that would work for the line.” Lexi was surprised Don hadn’t laughed at the suggestion. “After doing the video, if you want, and the piece on the guys in Cabin 5, we can do an interview. No questions about my father though.”
“All right. It’s a deal. Except I’m not working as your male model for nothing. I don’t have a model portfolio I need to set up.”
“You never know when you might find a whole new role in life. Hollywood might even be calling.”
Don laughed. “Right. Okay, let’s do this.”
This would be even more fun than the video Lexi did earlier for the women-in-the-woods cosmetics line. Who would have thought Lexi could have a couple of ruggedly handsome male models just show up for the video in the redwoods?
But she did worry about the men posing as her relations, and she hoped it didn’t come down to having to kill them. Though to keep her father safe, she would do anything.
Chapter 9
Trying not to feel self-conscious about being in a skin-care product video, Ryder said to Don, “Why don’t you go first.”
“Nah. I want to see how a professional model does it before I have my turn.”
Ryder sat down on one of the benches around the campfire, trying to keep a straight face. Of course he didn’t have a clue how to act, and this was just too funny. Lexi was applying a facial cleanser and smiling and laughing while Kate was shooting the video. Even Don was grinning, and Kate was getting a big kick out of it.
Ryder couldn’t believe how sexy Lexi’s touch felt while she caressed his skin with a gentle stroke, brushing exfoliating lotion onto his skin with featherlight contact. It was about as intimate as could be. And he wanted to give her a kiss. Not to mention she was arousing him in ways he was trying to hide, hoping the camera was only focused on his face and not a lower part of his anatomy.