Ricochet (Renegades #3)(76)
Author: Skye Jordan

Nathan made a deep sound of disapproval in his throat. One she deeply appreciated.

“I decided—”

“Not to let them walk all over you anymore and left.” He tightened his arm around her and kissed her temple. “Good girl.”

“I bought out Nicole’s half of my aunt’s house with the money I’d been saving for…of all the stupid things…a wedding. It’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done.”

“Except for taking me home from the bar. That was fucking brilliant.”

She laughed. “That’s debatable.”

“Not to me,” he murmured against her hair before kissing her there. “So that’s the root of your aversion to a serious relationship.”

She shrugged. “It wasn’t a conscious decision. Not at first. Not until I came to LA, met Rubi, and saw how much fun she had with the single life.”

“Um…she’s in a relationship that sounds pretty serious to me.”

“Yeah, now. But Rubi’s had a long history of sex-only relationships, and I envied her freedom, and the way she was never upset by moving on from one guy to the next. I wanted that.”

He stroked her hair again, and from the corner of her eye, she saw him look down at her. “You know not all guys are like Dante. You know I’d never do anything like that to you, right?”

She sputtered a laugh and met his gaze. “Nathan, I hardly know anything about you. This is totally different. I knew you were leaving from day one.”

He held her gaze, his eyes soft in a way that made her stomach float and tighten in dread at the same time. “What if I didn’t?”

She frowned. “Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t leave,” he said, lowering his gaze so he wasn’t meeting her eyes.

“What…does that mean?” A streak of panic slid through her chest. “What are you talking about?”

“I mean…” He shrugged, still not meeting her eyes. “What if I came back between tours?”

The alarm burned hotter. She pushed up on her elbow and faced him. “Nathan.” She waited until he met her gaze again and read the confusion there. “You’re not making sense.”

He didn’t respond at first. Just searched her eyes, his fingers tightening on hers. “What if…I didn’t volunteer to extend my tours and came back to the States in between? Would you see me again?”

Holy. Fuck.

An unwelcome thrill sang down her spine. “You…can do that?”

He lifted a shoulder, noncommittal.

“If you can do that, why haven’t you done it before? Why do you stay overseas for years at a time?”

His head tipped, his gaze lowered to her mouth. “I’ve…never had someone to come home to before. I never had any reason to return to the States.”

Her lips parted, but she couldn’t find anything to say. Her brain was spinning. Her heart twisting.

He kissed her forehead and lowered his head to the pillow, pulling her close and tucking her head beneath his chin. “Close your eyes, baby. Get some rest.”

Rachel lay against him, their fingers still twined, his other hand combing through her hair. She squeezed her eyes shut and let out a long breath of frustration. The first man she’d been seriously attracted to since Dante, and he could only commit to a relationship for a few weeks out of every year.

She had the worst damn luck with men.

19

Ryker waited as Charlie inspected the last cluster of blasting holes the crew had drilled into the bridge’s asphalt and scanned the safety perimeter again, looking for Rachel. Everyone on the site was there, waiting for the final check, the all clear, the countdown.

But no Rachel.

He rested his hands at his hips and glanced down at Charlie, where his partner’s gloved hands checked every connection between the cylinders of RDX imbedded in the bridge’s roadway. Ryker would make the final check before they called it good, a double-tiered safety measure Marx had been pleased with—the first element of this whole fucking scene the guy hadn’t argued about.

He turned and looked toward Jax, positioned half a mile away on a wide flat spot on a hillside. Three Eurocopter Squirrels sat ready to lift off, cameras strapped to several different locations on each chopper. Marx stood nearby, arms crossed, watching Charlie and Ryker make their rounds. When he lifted binoculars to his eyes, Ryker flipped him the bird, then crossed his arms, and scanned the crowd again.

Still no Rachel.

The niggling sense of dread that had taken root the moment he’d left her cabin the night before after she’d finally fallen asleep deepened. He’d gone too far with his “what if.” He hadn’t heard from her all day, when he usually talked with her half a dozen times about job-related details. And she wasn’t the only one spooked by that little brain twist of his. Every time he pictured himself telling his men he was leaving them to go home to shack up with a chick, he felt sick with guilt. With failure.

But Rachel wasn’t just any chick.

“Looks good.” Charlie pushed to his feet and lifted his gaze to the horizon, where the sun had just started lowering in the sky. “How much time have we got?”

Ryker checked the sundial app on his phone. One Rachel had told him had been designed and created by Rubi. The script called for the scene to run at sunset. To make all three scenes match up on film so editors could cut and splice the three together to create a cohesive, realistic climactic car chase across the bridge, they had to run this blast and the final blast at the same moment in sunset as they’d filmed Wes speeding across the bridge three weeks ago, before Ryker had even landed in California. Which gave them a very small window for filming.

“Nineteen minutes.” He crouched and made the final check of the blasting caps and wires. Calculated the millisecond delays between each mini-blast in his head to make sure they would mimic automatic rifle fire. Reevaluated the angle of the drilling to verify the end result would appear as if the fire was coming from above and behind, where the choppers would have been if this were a real incident.

He took a deep breath and pulled the radio from his belt. “Chamberlin, we’re a go here.”

Jax acknowledged, and the pilots milling around him climbed into their choppers. Ryker and Charlie started toward the end of the bridge and the command post, where central communication and detonation had been set up.

“Hey,” Charlie said. “Think we could let Ray call out the countdown? He’s so jazzed about this blasting gig, I think he might be hooked.”