Lawless. HelenKay Dimon
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stark silence followed her words. Joel didn’t bother to explain the real-world need for not filling her in. She knew how this game was played. She’d lived with a man known for having secrets. Joel got that she hated the game, but that didn’t change it one bit.
Cam finally broke the quiet with a clap that thundered through the trees. “So, we have someone skulking around the woods.”
“And a missing phone.” She turned on Joel with a finger in his face. “Do not ask me if I’m sure this is where I dropped it.”
Those words died in his throat because saying them could get him punched. “No, ma’am.”
She treated him to a smile then. “That’s new.”
He tried not to notice how it lit up her face. “I’m not always difficult.”
“Yes, you are,” she said.
Cam nodded at the same time. “Not always, but mostly.”
“We should head back and make sure none of these weekend warriors cut off a toe.” Falling back into command mode kept Joel from telling both of them off. “We also need to check out Hope’s knee.”
She glanced down.
Cam nodded. “Maybe this Mark guy wandered into camp and there’s some reasonable explanation for all of this.”
The men started to walk but she stayed still. “What about your helicopter and wherever you were planning to go after stopping in here?”
Sounded like she still wasn’t understanding his assignment here. Joel tried again. “This is my final destination. With you.”
Cam slid his foot over the piles of leaves stacked around them. “And I’m good to hang out for a few hours.”
Her hands went to her hips, and her legs still didn’t move. “You both think something is seriously wrong.”
Joel decided not to sugarcoat this. Sure, the past half hour could mean nothing. Or it could mean Baxter Industries and her dad were right to send in reinforcements. They wouldn’t know until they got back to camp. “Stolen phone and a stalker? Yeah, Hope. Something is not right.”
Her smile came roaring back. “Good.”
He wondered if he would ever understand her mood swings. “How is that good?”
“Because you believe me. You’re not writing this off as some hysterical woman thing.”
Of all the things she could have said, that one came out of nowhere. “I’ve never known you to be hysterical.”
She eyed him up. “You know, you seem slightly smarter about women now. Maybe some things have changed about you since we last went out.”
And he worried the most obvious—how much he wanted her—hadn’t.
Chapter Three
Hope tried to ignore Joel for the entire walk back to camp. His constant stream of questions didn’t make that easy. He wanted to know about the campers and what her plan had been to get the men in and out of camp. She gave the details, even though she really wanted to stop and demand an explanation for why it was so easy for him to walk out of her life.
Then again, maybe she didn’t want to know. Her ego could only take so much, and he had the power to break her. Had from the minute she’d met him.
The forest floor crunched and crackled under their feet. Their steps echoed around her, and Cam whistled as he walked a half step behind her. It all seemed so normal...except for the missing businessman and lost phone. And who could forget the scary stalker?
Amazing how a nice morning could make a left turn into awful so quickly.
She had taken this job to emotionally recuperate. The double whammy of losing Joel and the disaster on her last climbing expedition had sent her world into a tailspin. A new career conducting business retreats and leading simple hiking and camping outings was supposed to be soothing. The way her nerves jumped around was anything but.
“Looks like we’re here.”
The sound of Cam’s voice over her shoulder made her jump and knock into Joel next to her. When her hands brushed against his, a new sensation spun through her. Something like excitement, and that didn’t make her happy at all. She wanted to be totally over him, or at the very least not feel anything. She’d do anything for a bit of indifference at the moment.
She settled for doubling her pace and broke through the trees and into the camp clearing a step before her self-appointed bodyguards. The businessmen sat on logs turned into benches around the fire pit area. They looked up as she approached.
They all started talking a second later. Shouting over each other in an attempt to hold the metaphorical floor.
Yeah, she hadn’t missed this part of their company dynamic during the past hour.
“Where have you been?” Jeff Acheson, the Baxter director of marketing, dumped his plate on the ground and stood up. His distaste for her was on full display, from his puffing red cheeks to the scowl marring what she guessed most women found to be his perfectly chiseled model face.
She took a long look at him in the bright sunshine and decided he was a bit too buffed and polished for her taste. He had a phony air about him. Probably because he listed his age as thirty-four on the questionnaire she had handed out last night to assess their skill levels, when she knew from the files Baxter gave her the number was more like forty.
That sort of thing struck her as ridiculous. She’d bet he took twice as long to get ready for a big date than she did.
She could still remember the up-and-down sweep he gave her when they’d first met in the Baxter offices. He’d turned on the charming smile back when he thought she was some sort of assistant to the real leader on the trip. That disappeared when she’d made it clear she was in charge.
But he picked the wrong time to get all uppity with her. She wasn’t in the mood. “Is Mark here?”
“What?” Lance Ringer, the Baxter personnel manager, asked.
Lance was the one guy Hope had liked immediately. He was the youngest on the retreat but didn’t try to impress her. He owned up to the fact he hadn’t been camping since he was a kid, more than twenty years ago, and would rather be home with his newborn and wife than out roughing it with the guys. Hope found his honesty refreshing.
“Mark was missing this morning and I went to look for him,” she said, waiting for Joel and Cam to pipe up and feeling a bit dazed when neither rushed to take the lead. “Did he ever come back?”
Jeff took a threatening step in her direction. “Why didn’t you tell us there was a problem before now?”
“Probably because of this type of overblown reaction.” Joel morphed from calm to a shield of muscles in two seconds. He reached around Hope, blocking some of her view of Jeff, and put a hand on his chest. “Back up.”
Jeff tried to push Joel’s hand away. “Who are you?”
“Not relevant at the moment.”
Joel didn’t move and Cam just smiled. Hope was smart enough to know those reactions meant brewing trouble. Joel’s protective nature made it tough for him to back down, and when he was faced with a pontificating blowhard like Jeff, there was no telling what could happen.
“You have a gun,” Jeff said.
Joel motioned toward Cam. “We both do.”
With the tension building and washing over all of them, she decided this might be a good time to make one point clear. “Joel is my assistant.”
She put her hand over his and it dropped away from Jeff. But the battle stance stayed, as did Joel’s unwavering gaze on Jeff.
Cam