Page 71 of Fire Peak

He saw from his phone that it was after ten in the morning. Scrambling out of bed, he decided Charlie could deal with him in boxers and a t-shirt, and hurried into the front room.

Charlie was showing off her wound to Hailey, pulling up the bottom edge of her Burberry hip-hugger shorts. The sight of her long bare legs gave him a jolt of lust.

That disappeared when she caught sight of him and the smile dropped from her face.

Uh oh. Something was wrong.

“Good morning.” His voice was husky from oversleeping.

“Rough night?” Charlie asked coolly.

“You could say that.” He glanced at Hailey, since he didn’t want to tell her the story of being attacked last night. “But successful too.”

She got the message, and gestured with her head toward the road outside. “How about a little stroll down to Lila’s? Ani wants to check my wound again.”

“Sure. Just give me a minute.” He wanted to get inside that hardware store anyway, and warn Lila about the Chechens’ interest in it.

He went back into the bedroom to finish getting dressed.

Something was definitely wrong. Charlie hadn’t met his eyes once during that whole exchange.

Outside, they walked down the dusty road in the direction of the hardware store.

“Before we get there, let me fill you in on what happened last night.” He gave her a quick rundown of his encounter with the Chechen.

Finally, her chilly manner thawed. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“Sore, but okay. Lost another jacket.”

She didn’t seem to find that funny as she scanned him with troubled eyes. “Why did they take your jacket?”

“I’d found a photo of Bulldog. I should have taken a picture of it, damnit. It never occurred to me that someone would want to steal it. But it had his real name on the back. Chadwick Tudor the Third.”

“Chadwick? Yikes. No wonder he preferred Bulldog.”

“Right?” He laughed a little, but she didn’t join in. He filled her in on the rest of what he’d learned from Pinky, including the the fact that they’d lived in the hardware store.

She picked up the pace. “It’s a good thing we’re already heading there. Those freaky Chechens, do you think they were spying on the store?”

“Maybe, but I don’t know why. Anything big come up on your end? Did you see April?”

“No, she wasn’t around yesterday. I never saw her. But I did find out something interesting. She owns the entire mountain outright. They call it an inholding. That means it’s within the national park, but privately owned. That includes surface and subsurface rights, with no limits on what she can do with it.”

“So if there was a mineral deposit of any value in it, she’d have the rights to it.”

“Exactly.”

“Great job.” He tried another smile, but it didn’t work. In fact, she stopped along the side of the road, not far from where he’d gotten jumped last night.

“I have to ask you something. I need you to be completely honest with me,” she said, more seriously than he’d ever seen her. Her sunglasses were perched on top of her head, her blond hair in a sleek ponytail, her usually sassy features stern.

He nodded, dread already forming in his stomach. “Okay.”

“My father said you gave them some kind of advice about me, and they said it was working. What were they talking about?”

Worst suspicions confirmed. His mouth went dry. But he had to tell her the truth. He respected her too much not to. “When I left Firelight Ridge, I told Mark Jones that your father was the most important thing to you.”

Her eyes darkened. “So that’s why they decided to show up at the hospital?”

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