Total pages in book: 139
Estimated words: 128083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128083 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 640(@200wpm)___ 512(@250wpm)___ 427(@300wpm)
Rex smiled. “Thanks, man. The photos will be in your inbox momentarily. Call me when you know anything.”
Rex brought up the photos Cami had texted him and then forwarded them to Joaquin. Then he set his phone aside and took a minute to think. He trusted Joaquin would get back to him with something. How specific that something was, he couldn’t guess because he hadn’t given his friend a lot to go on. But Rex knew if anyone could get them close to their target, it was Joaquin. He’d been doing exactly that for the US government for a decade, and he was among the best. He’d tracked drug traffickers to a hut in the middle of a jungle, and lots of other bad guys to holes in the ground—sometimes literally—all over the map.
Cami had done well to come to him, not because of Rex’s skills necessarily, though he did possess quite a few, but because of his array of contacts and friends. He felt honored by her trust, but he also wondered if he should be more wary. She’d decimated his life once before. He understood how their shared past had unfolded. And even when he’d made it clear they had no need to speak ever again when she’d blindsided him, he still hadn’t blamed her for what happened in the aftermath of the crime that took her mother and sister. She’d been a traumatized teenager, and she hadn’t accused him falsely. She just hadn’t stepped up to bat for him . . . but why should she have? After what happened to her, she had to have been deeply confused and suspicious of everyone. Especially a classmate who’d been following her around like a puppy dog for years.
He winced with remembered embarrassment at how he’d worshipped her.
Yeah, I guess . . . it could have been him. Rex Lowe.
The way those words echoed in his head. The way the memory still scalded. His love for Cami had been ridiculous and mostly based on fantasy. And even at the time, he’d known it. But he wasn’t obsessed or delusional like they’d suggested. He’d loved her—99 percent the idea of her, sure, but 1 percent the actuality. He’d noticed so much, anything and everything she’d offered, knowingly or not. Her laugh, so filled with sincerity. The way she held doors open for people, even when they were so far back, they had to run to show appreciation for the gesture. The way her lip quivered so very slightly when she’d read her poem aloud in English class. Her writing hadn’t been good, in fact, it’d been somewhat terrible, but he’d thought it beautiful because it gave him another glimpse inside of her. And that 1 percent, ah, he would have slayed dragons for that tiny slice of Cami.
Teenage boys were dumbass fools. And he’d definitely been one of them.
What concerned him was that he was a man now, and he still felt that ardent pull of longing when he looked at Camille Cortlandt. And more than that, he still . . . believed in her. That was the best way he could describe it. He wasn’t even sure what that meant other than he had this feeling that she was a good person with good intentions, the same way he had when he was no more than a kid.
And though Rex had still been learning to trust himself when he was a teenager, he’d grown to rely on his instincts as a man.
So, okay, he’d go with his gut and continue to help Cami with this strange, disturbing situation she’d been pulled into. Because of whom he believed her to be, deep down where it mattered. But also because, aside from her or his feelings about who she was as an individual, there was a child in trouble.
Rex pulled away from the curb and headed back to Cami’s place and then parked down the street from her condo when he got there. Before he could even raise his hand to knock, she was pulling open the door, obviously having been watching for his arrival.
“His name is Cyrus.”
“What?”
“The little boy, my little boy. His name is Cyrus.”
He stepped inside, and she closed the door behind him. “How do you know?”
She engaged the lock and reset the security system on the wall next to the door. “I’ll show you.” Then she turned and hurried to the living room, and he followed, taking a seat on the couch next to her where the laptop had been placed on the coffee table. The little boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor, playing cards laid out in front of him. It looked like he was playing solitaire.
“See that,” Cami said, pointing at a lower portion of the wall directly next to where he was sitting. Rex squinted and leaned in.