SIXTEEN
EPILOGUE
Alex Dean fixed his sharp blue eyes on the screen of his Ash Private Security laptop and prayed hard for his stepsister, Zoe, to answer the secure video call. Winter winds howled through the trees outside and shook the frost-covered windows of the Dean family cottage. A storm was coming. The video call kept ringing. He ran his hand over the back of his neck where sandy blond hair brushed the collar of his leather jacket. Where was she?
Zoe wasn’t just family. She was a colleague and fellow bodyguard who’d joined him in helping their boss, Daniel Ash, create Ash Private Security. Despite being four foot eleven, she was every bit as strong and savvy a fighter as the rest of the team. Not to mention her assignment had been a very simple one—to bring a stressed-out university student up to the remote shores of Cedar Lake, Ontario, for a weekend of quiet studying. Not a high risk assignment by any means. The twenty-year-old client, Mandy Rhodes, came from one of the high-powered families they’d grown up knowing because their families all had cottages at the isolated lake. She was also the second cousin of their close friend Joshua, who was overseas completing his final few months of military service.
But after the initial check-in call yesterday, Zoe had fallen out of contact. He hadn’t been able to get through to her last night. Then, when Alex had called again this morning to give her a heads-up that a vicious, unexpected storm now threatened to wreak havoc on the roads and send power lines crashing down, Zoe still hadn’t answered. Cedar Lake had never had reliable cell phone service, though. Even the state-of-the-art Wi-Fi hotspots on their laptops had glitched far too often. So he’d driven up in person to double-check everything was okay—and found the cottage empty.
Empty and yet oddly tidy. There were no signs of a struggle. Or that Zoe and Mandy had ever made it there. Instead, the rustic space where he’d spent his childhood summers almost looked like it’d been gone over by a professional cleaning service. Something he might’ve taken comfort in if Mandy’s parents hadn’t warned them she was so stressed out about university that the last time they’d let her come up alone to study, just a couple of weeks ago, she’d left her family cottage in such a bad state they weren’t about to let her travel up alone again. And he’d never known Zoe to be anything close to neat.
Unlike Theresa Vaughan.
He winced as his ex-fiancée’s captivating green eyes suddenly flickered across his mind. Theresa was the only person he’d ever known with the compulsion to leave every place she touched more beautiful than she’d found it—something some of the other kids on the lake had teased her about. The stunning brunette’s wealthy family owned the large cottage at the mouth of the lake. Their romance had first blossomed as teenagers when he’d been watching with his buddies from a cottage window as a thunderstorm capsized her sailboat. Her harness had gotten tangled in the rigging, trapping her underwater. While the other kids had laughed, oblivious to the danger she was in, Alex had pelted down the shore, barely pausing to kick off his shoes before he’d leaped off the dock and swum to her rescue. She was now a trauma counselor and psychotherapist who also worked with Ontario Victim Services, and remained the one and only person Alex had ever pledged his foolish heart to—even though she’d broken that heart and called off their engagement just days before the wedding.
The computer beeped. He looked up. The call had timed out. He hit Redial. Alex drummed his fingers on the table. The call icon circled on the screen. Was a suspiciously clean cottage all it took to distract him with thoughts of Theresa? Despite putting eight and a half years between himself and that summer, the memory of losing her still ached like an old scar at the edges of his heart. This was why he hadn’t been back to the lake since that day, no matter how many times his family and friends had urged him to come. Every inch was a minefield of unwanted memories, from the huge rocks in front of her cottage where he’d proposed, to the apartment over the boathouse—where he’d thrown the returned engagement ring so hard it had gotten lost under the floorboards.
The call to Zoe stopped again. He hit Redial for a second time. Then his head dropped into his hands, and he shoved his sore memories to the furthest reaches of his mind. It would only be a matter of time before the impending storm took out the power lines and cut off road access. If he didn’t leave soon, he could be stuck there in the cold, remote cottage without power for days. His sister and their client’s safety mattered. Nothing else.
“Hello? Alex?” A voice filled the air. Puzzled. Female. But it wasn’t his sister’s. No, this voice was both sweet and strong like the first coffee waking him up in the morning. “Hello? Can you hear me?”
He blinked. “Theresa?”
He looked up at the screen. Theresa sat on a chair in front of his sister’s laptop with a slightly concerned look on her face and the snow-filled windows of a different cottage in the background. Long dark hair tumbled around her shoulders in the kind of disheveled, messy way he’d always found adorable. A question hovered in her deep green eyes. She was engulfed by a giant red sweatshirt with “Canada” embroidered across it in big block letters, but because of the way the fabric fell it almost seemed to read “and.” Hang on. Wasn’t that one of his old sweatshirts?
“What’s going on?” he asked. “Where’s Zoe and Mandy?”
“Not here.” Theresa said. Her nose wrinkled. “I’m guessing Zoe hasn’t managed to call you yet. They left me at Mandy’s family’s cottage and went for a drive to find a cell phone signal and pick up some groceries about an hour ago. Mandy is supposed to be hitting the books and staying offline. But once we got here, she was really panicked about not being able to surf the internet or get a cell phone signal. So I told Zoe it might be best not to make a video or use the laptop around her. Zoe said it wouldn’t be a problem, that you’d understand, and she’d call you this morning to explain. I got out the laptop after they left. When the call kept ringing and ringing I figured it might be important.”
He sighed heavily. “It is.”
“And I presume Zoe didn’t tell you she’d brought me in on this?”
“No, she didn’t.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair. He wasn’t sure what he thought of his former fiancée making decisions that impacted an active operation, especially if it kept him out of the loop.
Zoe and Theresa had reconnected at Christmas, after Theresa and Samantha, a journalist she was working with, had been violently threatened. That had been the first thread that had relinked Alex’s life to Theresa’s. Since then there’d been even more. His best friend, Josh, was now engaged to Samantha, Alex was going to be their best man, and he’d already been warned that Theresa was invited to the wedding. Josh was also joining Ash Private Security when his tour of duty was up and had made it clear he thought Theresa’s unique perspective on crime victims would make her a strong asset to their team. Both Zoe and Daniel agreed and had already asked Theresa to advise on a few clients.
So far, all Alex had said on the matter was that he was fine with it and they all had his blessing to work with her. Just as long as he didn’t have to see her or talk to her until he was ready.
Now, ready or not, here she was.
“I don’t understand why Zoe needed to bring you in,” he said, “just because our client’s dealing with a little bit of stress.”
“Not everyone’s able to just shrug away stress and ignore it.” Her arms crossed, too, mirroring his stance. “Mandy’s not in a good place right now. She’s emotionally frazzled. Remember, both her brothers are a lot older and very successful.”
Mandy’s twin brothers were a year older than Alex, and had always