Page 34 of Hot & Bothered

“Soooo, I thought about cooking for you,” he said. “But then I thought maybe after a long day at work and after everything that’s gone on, you’d rather just hunker down at your own place. So I ordered from the Ravenous Rabbit, that vegetarian place that just opened up in the fall. Have you been?”

She shook her head. “No, but I’ve been meaning to try it. Wait, are you going to get enough calories with a vegetarian meal? Don’t youneedmeat?”

He chuckled and took a left onto a one-way street, heading out of the downtown core. “I ate like nine hard-boiled eggs today, a huge protein shake, and two chicken breasts. I think I can handle just having chickpeas and tofu for one meal.”

They drove for another five minutes before he turned off onto a side road, then pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant.

“You want to come in with me, or are you cool staying here?”

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Just make sure you lock the doors.”

He nodded, leaned forward and pecked her on the cheek, before exiting the car and jogging toward the front door of the Ravenous Rabbit.

The locks engaged when he hit the fob.

Closing her eyes, Peyton took some deep, fortifying breaths, making her exhale longer than her inhale to engage her parasympathetic nervous system and calm herself down. She was on her third round of the breathing technique when her phone warbled in her coat pocket.

A glance at the screen said it was a private number. Trepidation hit her in the chest instantly, but she talked herself out of having an anxiety attack. It was a phone call. Nobody could hurt her over the phone.

Hitting the greencallbutton, she put the phone on speaker. “Hello?”

“Peyton?” came a deep, friendly rumble.

The prickles along her arms almost immediately subsided. “Yes?”

“Hey, it’s Chase Hart, Heath’s brother. We met at the bachelor and bachelorette party, then again at the wedding.”

“Oh, hi, Chase. Right, of course I remember you.”

Jace appeared through the windshield and was walking toward her, carrying a big paper bag. He unlocked the door and opened the back passenger door to put the food in the footwell.

“Yeah, so listen, I did some digging into that Michaela Mackinley and …”

Peyton held her breath as Jace closed the back door and opened the driver’s door, sliding his big frame back into the seat. He was quiet and stared at her phone screen on top of her thigh.

“The girl fell off the grid about a year ago. I was able to track her whereabouts until then. She was in Victoria for a while, then Vancouver. Once in a while, adebit card purchase popped up. She went to the hospital a couple of times, but then as of last January, she justvanished.”

Jace’s nostrils flared when Chase said he saw that Michaela had been to the hospital and made purchases on her debit card. Chase wouldn’t have figured that out without doing some database hacking.Illegaldatabase hacking. But Jace didn’t say anything.”

“If there was a body, it’d be in the hospital records. Even as a Jane Doe, and I’ve scoured hospital records on the island and lower mainland and no Jane Does matching Michaela’s description turn up. I even fed her image into the software program I’m using and had the system do a facial recognition scan through the hospital morgues and nothing turned up. If she’s dead, she didn’t die in British Columbia.”

“Tiberius said she wassold,” Jace chimed in. “So she could be anywhere.”

“True,” Chase said. “I’ll expand my search. Going international is going to get trickier and take a bit more time, but I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thanks, Chase,” Peyton said.

He grunted a response, then the call ended.

Jace exhaled deeply through his mouth and turned over the ignition. “I heard none of that.”

Peyton smiled. “Heard none of what?”

He grinned and glanced over at her, reaching for her thigh again as he backed out of the stall. “How many communists are in the funhouse tonight?”

Her smile turned sly and her eyes slid sideways toward him. “Not so many that we can’t have a little party of our own.”

It was another week before they heard anything of relevance from Chase Hart. He kept Peyton updated on his search, and she covertly kept Jace updated, too, but so far, they hadn’t found her, only that they’d tracked down her last known location and that was Nashville.

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