Page 19 of Rushed: Christopher

Christopher’s quiet, worried voice broke through my own confusing thoughts.

“Sorry,” I responded. “So you know about all that?”

“About the kids and what my family does for them?”

“Yeah.”

Christopher nodded. “It may have all started with Gio, but it didn’t end when he came home. There are too many other kids out there waiting for someone to come for them. There are too many terrified, desperate parents who are clinging to every last ounce of hope they have that they will see their child again.”

His poignant words had me silently nodding because that was exactly why we did what we did. Years earlier, King and his brothers of the heart had been like any other family in the world; they’d been living their lives, completely unprepared for what fate had planned for them. One of the brothers, Luca, who shared no blood with King but called him best friend, had lost his son, Gio, to sex traffickers when the boy was only around eight. What had followed had been a hellish search by all the brothers. Thankfully, with the help of a group of like-minded men and women, they’d been able to bring Gio home, but he’d been only one of thousands of kids waiting for their own rescue to come.

“Well said,” I murmured in response to Christopher’s words. “So you wanted to know about what happened after I left the military. After my tour ended, I was a little lost. I knew I could go home to Colorado and join my dad’s business, but I knew it wasn’t something I really wanted. My dad did too.”

As I thought about my father, a stab of pain swept through me. The man had been my biggest champion, and my mother had been right there next to him cheering at the top of her lungs.

“Rush?” Christopher said softly, and then I felt his fingers touching mine. Not entirely believing it was really happening, I looked down to confirm it, and sure enough, his uninjured hand was resting against my own.

I must have been staring too long at our nearly joined hands because Christopher began to pull his hand away, his expression uncertain. At the same time, someone honked their horn at me because the traffic light had turned green. I closed my fingers around Christopher’s as I got the car moving. When he didn’t try and pull away, I linked our fingers.

“I thought they’d be ashamed of me,” I admitted.

“Who? Your parents? For leaving the army?”

I nodded.

“They weren’t,” Christopher said without hesitation. It wasn’t a question, and he didn’t seem to be looking for confirmation. As far as he was concerned, he was just stating a fact.

“How do you know?” I asked in surprise. The young man was an enigma, and I was enjoying peeling back all the layers that made him so much more than what he appeared to be at first glance.

“They raised you into the man you are, Rush. There’s nothing cowardly about doing what was right for you. Being who you are. You loved them very much. That’s obvious from the way you talk about them… from the heart. You had to learn that from somewhere. They were proud of you. I don’t need to have met them to know that.”

I found myself squeezing his fingers just a bit harder. “You’re right. They were very proud of me for following my heart.”

Christopher nodded his head like he’d won a bet. I found myself smiling. “How’s your hand feeling?”

“Starting to feel it now,” he admitted.

“We’ll be there in a few minutes,” I said. I paused and then added, “Soooooo, you never answered my question,” I pointed out.

Christopher looked at me in confusion.

“How did you know I left the army after my first tour?”

When his cheeks reddened, I felt my insides jump, though I had no idea why. Maybe the idea of him thinking about me even once after we’d first met appealed to me.

More than it should.

“Christopher?” I said in mock warning. “Spill.”

CHAPTER SIX

CHRISTOPHER

Icouldn’t make sense of how I’d gotten myself into this mess.

Any of it.

First off, to be so stupid as to even let Rush get close enough to me for physical contact to be an issue…that had been off-the-charts stupid.

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