Colt watched Tara’s expression. At first, he thought she was joking, but then it all sank in. She honestly believed that she’d come from somewhere else. She believed she was an alien of some sorts.
Gods and aliens. In Georgia. What the hell had he stumbled onto?
Realization dawned on him as he remembered everything he’d witnessed.
No wonder someone was after her. What kind of person would he be if he turned her in to them now? He thought about what would happen if he did. What if he didn’t? Would they still hunt her down?
This was his first big client, but that didn’t temper his resolve to at least try to figure out why they wanted her. In the past three years, he’d made a decent enough living to keep him in the one-bedroom apartment just outside of Seattle where he had started this entire journey.
What had Tara been doing in Washington State to begin with?
“What do you mean where you came from? Like, from another planet? Like an alien?” he asked.
Tara shrugged slightly and glanced towards the door as a group of people stepped inside.
“I better get back.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Later, I’d like to talk some more?”
“Sure, I get off work at…”
“Two,” Jess called out.
Tara smiled. “Two.”
“How about I swing by then?”
She glanced towards Jess, who was already taking the customers’ orders. “I’ll be here.” She disappeared behind the counter, taking her empty plate and cup with her.
He finished eating and sipping his coffee and then headed back to the hotel. He needed to dig deeper into who his client was, but instead, he sat in his hotel room and tried to find anything else on Tara that he could.
The woman, it seemed, had no online presence. When he came up with a complete blank in the databases that he had access to, he pulled up a picture of her van and searched the license plate registration.
The registration was from Oregon, and a few months outdated. When he looked closer, he realized it was registered to a mailbox store address. The same address was on Tara’s driver’s license. Was that even legal?
He kept searching. The first job she’d held was in a small coffee shop in the Seattle area when she was seventeen. Before that, there was no record of her. Not even a high school diploma or birth certificate.
As far as he could tell, Tara Dawson had just… appeared one day.
What he’d found out last night about the rest of the Hidden Creek gang, as he was calling everyone who had been there last night, had been far more detailed than what he’d found on Tara.
Mike and Ethan were your standard run-of-the-mill ex-military types. Kind of like he was. They’d served their time and had either gotten out or had been injured. Mike had gone into law enforcement and then, upon getting shot by his partner, had retired and gone into private security.
The fact that he and Mike had that in common played heavily on his mind. If the guy could make it, then there was hope for him.
Ethan, on the other hand, had been injured in the line of duty and had gotten an honorable medical discharge. Then he’d moved to Hidden Creek and started working with his brother.
Jacob St. Clair. Now he was an anomaly. He was the adopted son of Ronny and Clair St. Clair. Ronny was the old law in the small town.
But last night, the brothers had told him that Jacob was their older brother. After doing a little more digging, Colt found an article written by Brea about how the brothers had found one another by chance. It went into detail about how Rusty and Susan Kincaid, Mike and Ethan’s parents, had been forced to give up their first son when they’d still been in high school.
The grainy image of the three men and their parents assured him and anyone with eyes that they were indeed all related.
Joe Reed was no mystery. Everything the man had been or done was easily found in the Hidden Creek newspaper or the school archives online. He’d been a gym rat since hitting puberty and had taken over the local liquor store after his uncle’s death. It was the only one within thirty miles of town, so its success was assured.
He had a younger sister, Amy, who was away at college in Atlanta. His parents still lived in town and lived a pretty normal small-town life.
Mason Barrett was everything the scientist said he was last night. The man’s credentials were almost as impressive as Stephen Hawking’s.
Liz’s and Joleen’s backgrounds were straightforward, at least from what he could find on them.
But when he’d looked into the rest of the women, there were more entanglements.
Xtina’s parents had been killed in a car accident and several members in a cult had been charged with the crime. After their leader had been killed by Mike on the night they’d kidnapped Xtina, the cult members had turned on one another, which had made charging them with the crime easy.
Jess’s mother was MIA, but her father had recently moved back into town, as had Brea’s father, who was now married to her aunt, Misty.
After scanning over his notes about the rest of the players, he figured he’d do more research on Tara to see if he could find anything new.
He spent so much time looking into her past that when it was time to go and meet her, he’d only spent a few moments looking into his client.
When he parked in front of the Coffee Corner, Jess and Tara were the only two people inside. He sat in the parking lot, watching the two women chatting. They looked comfortable around one another, like they were old friends. Was it possible? Had Tara really been here before?
No. Yesterday was proof of that. She hadn’t known anyone else at Xtina and Mike’s place.
He supposed Tara was so comfortable since she’d spent the last ten years hopping from one coffee shop to the next. Her people skills had to be good enough to keep her in work.
He watched as they walked out of the Coffee Corner. Tara’s eyes moved to his truck, and she waved easily in his direction. It was then that he noticed that her van wasn’t in the parking lot. Most likely, Jess had picked her up that morning and had driven them both into work.
Jess climbed into her own car as Tara headed towards his truck. He was thankful that it appeared that she wanted him to take her back to her van.
“I hope it’s okay,” she said, opening his driver side door and climbing in. “Jess insisted that it would be okay with you if you took me back to my van after our chat.”
“Sure.” He smiled quickly, then frowned slightly when the sweet scent of coffee mixed with her perfume had his loins responding. “Where to?” he asked.
She shrugged and glanced around. “Jess mentioned this really great park just outside of town. We could go for a hike?” Tara suggested.
He glanced over at her. “Didn’t you just stand on your feet for the past eight hours or so?”
She chuckled, the sound warm and sultry, making him instantly think of long lazy nights making slow love to her.
“I think I can handle a little walk. I need some fresh air anyway.”
He pulled out of the parking lot and followed her directions to the park, all while trying not to think about fulfilling his desires.
When they climbed out of the truck in the state park’s parking lot, he grabbed a couple of bottled waters from his supply in the back seat and handed her one.
“Thanks,” she said and glanced around. “Are you up for this?”
This time he chuckled. “I usually hike twenty miles a weekend. I like to camp too,” he added. “Course, what you’ve got going, with the van and all, is far better than my old one-person tent.”
Her eyebrows shot up slightly. “It does have its benefits,” she said as they started down the trail head. “Like a toilet, shower, and clean water. Not to mention my very own full kitchen and pillow-top mattress.”
“Yeah, how does all of that fit in there?” he asked, curious. He’d seen it himself, but it was still hard to believe all of that fit in such a small space.
She shrugged. “Magic, I suppose. I bought it and built out the inside myself. I’d seen a few vans like it and wanted to make it my own.”
“In Seattle?” he asked, glancing sideways at her.
“No, I bought the van in Seaside, Oregon, from a couple that had to get rid of it so they could buy their first house because she was pregnant with triplets,” she responded with a hint of humor in her voice.
“Wow.” He shook his head. “Going from two to five in one day.”
She stopped in the pathway and looked at him. “Don’t like kids?”
He smiled. “Love ’em.” He thought about it for a moment. “But I’d like mine to be a little more spaced out. You know, get used to one of the little guys before being thrust headfirst into changing three sets of diapers.”
She nodded and started walking again.
“Why travel so much?” he asked her after a few moments.
“Why not?” She shrugged.
“Family?” he asked, trying to keep the question casual. He hadn’t found out anything about her family in his research.
“Nope,” she answered.
This time he stopped her by placing a hand on her elbow lightly. She turned towards him.
“I’m sorry. Did they die?”
She took a deep breath and then looked around. They were surrounded by tall pine and oak trees. Even though it was fall, only the oak tree’s leaves were orange and brown. Everything else was still vibrant green.
He listened as she thought about her answer, counting the calls from a mockingbird until finally she said, “I don’t know.”
“Did they take off on you like Jess’s parents did?”
“Not… necessarily,” she answered, and he could hear the pain in her voice. She took a deep breath and then stopped at the peak of a hill and sat on a large boulder. He sat next to her as she tucked her knees up to her chest. “It was my sixteenth birthday party,” she started, as her eyes scanned the horizon of plush green and orange trees ahead of them. “I had the most perfect party arranged and all of my close friends had been invited. The moment I blew out the candles on the cake, everyone just…” She flipped her fingers into the air. “Disappeared. My entire world was gone in a heartbeat.”
“Gone?” he asked, not really understanding.
She nodded and glanced over at him, and he watched a tear slip down her cheek. Reaching over, he gently brushed it away with his thumb.
“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. He’d experienced loss in his own life, having lost his older sister and father to a drunk driver when he’d been in middle school.
Her breath hitched when he touched her, and she swayed towards him until they were so close, he could see her pupils dilate. Her tongue darted out, and she licked her bottom lip. He wondered what she would taste like, how soft her lips would feel under his.
He didn’t remember moving. Didn’t know if she’d been the one who’d leaned in and placed her lips over his. It didn’t matter who had moved first after Tara’s response to the kiss. Her body melted against his as her fingers tangled in his hair.
“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said as she rested her forehead against his chest. Then she chuckled. “It’s the first time I’ve told anyone about that day.” She glanced up at him. “And it’s been a while since I’ve wanted to be with someone.”
He smiled. “What do you say we head back and grab some food? I was so busy doing research that I forgot to eat lunch.”
She stood up suddenly. “I could eat,” she agreed and they headed back down the trail.
“I’d love to hear the story of how you discovered you could fly and lift heavy things,” he said as they made their way back to his truck.
She chuckled before starting. “Most of what I can do was discovered by accident.”
He waited a heartbeat. “Kind of like Superman?”
She glanced over at him and rolled her eyes. “Men and their superheroes.”
“What?” He stopped her. “You can’t tell me you don’t admire the man of steel?”
She smiled. “I’m more of a Wonder Woman kind of girl.”
“She’s hot too,” he said, adding a shrug when Tara slapped him playfully on the shoulder. “What? I mean, what man wouldn’t want a woman who can bend steel, take down Nazis, and fly.” He realized what he was admitting the moment the words were and didn’t care. “Hot,” he added with a smile.
“Not everyone thinks the same way.” Her smile slipped slightly. “Which is why I’ve spent the past ten years moving around a lot.”
“What happened?” he asked when they reached the bend in the pathway.
She stopped and turned towards him. “I had started seeing this guy, Rob, after I found out about my strength. He wanted to videotape me showing off, and at first, I thought it was a fun thing to do. I was excited about pleasing him. Then he started planning and plotting. That’s when he threatened to send the videos to the government, who would, according to him, hunt me down and dissect me, if I didn’t start doing things.”
“What kind of things?” he asked, already hating the guy.
“For starters, breaking into ATMs.”
“Did you?”
She shook her head. “No, I took off instead.”
“What happened to Rob?” he asked.
“He put the videos up on the internet where they were immediately labeled as fake. People just can’t believe something like that really exists. Something like me,” she said softly.
He reached over and took her hand and then pulled her into his arms. “From the looks of things last night, you’re no longer alone.” He felt his heart skip when she smiled.