CHAPTER 57

“Did you find her?” Luc asked, his annoyance coming through loud and clear.

Damn the perfect digital cell phone signal.

In the old analog days, he could have pretended he hadn’t heard. “Yeah.” Deke had found Kimber, all right. And just like she had at seventeen, she’d tied his gut up in knots so crazy an Eagle Scout with Houdini ancestry couldn’t get them undone.

“You’re going to apologize for scaring her off and make sure she doesn’t get into trouble,” Luc reminded.

Deke didn’t want to. He didn’t. But as Luc had rationally pointed out, scaring the crap out of Kimber was only a temporary solution to a problem that wasn’t going to just go away because he wanted it to. Kimber was too tenacious to simply give up. She’d track someone else down to help her in her quest to catch Jesse McCall—

someone who, at best, would cause her discomfort because they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. At worst, they would take total advantage of her and hurt her.

The Colonel would kill Deke if an