Page 65 of My Three Mountain Men

I started to laugh, but Ryder shot me a warning look.

“First of all, great detective work,” I said, slow clapping in my frustration. “I hope you get a promotion. Second of all, who cares if I disappeared? I never sent anyone looking for me. I never wasted any resources in a search.”

“Simone,” all three cousins grumbled, and I looked at them.

“What?!”

“That’s not what the scene in your hotel room in Aspen said,” the sheriff replied flatly, his eyes narrowing. “You left all your clothes. There were droplets of blood and signs of a struggle.”

He shook his head again. “You social media influencers take everything too far, and now someone is paying the price for your silly pranks.”

More confusion overcame me. “What?” I sputtered again. “What are you talking about?”

“Jack, you’re wrong about all of this,” Ryder interjected. “She was attacked and left for dead on the summit. Brooks found her.”

Jack looked at us skeptically, but I was still stuck on what he’d said.

“Who’s paying the price? What are you talking about?”

Knox put a protective arm around my waist, but I shrugged him off, my heart racing as anxiety flooded me. “What happened while I was up here?”

For the first time, the sheriff looked at me as if maybe I wasn’t just some attention-seeking brat.

“You really don’t know?” he pressed.

“Obviously, she doesn’t,” Ryder snapped. “Tell us.”

“There’s a man being accused of your murder right now. A witness came forward and said that you were seen arguing with him outside your room before you went missing. The case was circumstantial without a body.”

Dizziness overtook me, my knees buckling. “W-what? Who?”

“Ryan Schwartz.”

“Who?”

All eyes were on me as my mind worked furiously.

“He was staying at the hotel. His ex-girlfriend, Aimee VanBuren, testified that you two were involved—”

“Oh, my God…”

My legs failed then, and I realized what the witch had done. Knox caught me before I hit the floor, but my jagged breathing almost brought me to the brink of passing out.

That bitch had blamed an innocent man for her own crime!

CHAPTER28

Knox

Iwatched as Simone threw random items into one of our hunting bags, none of them really hers. She hadn’t arrived with anything, after all, but I didn’t stop her. She was distracted and trying to outlet her frustration.

“This is my fault,” I muttered, causing her to stop and gape at me.

“I’m sorry, what?” she demanded. “How the hell can you possibly blame any of this on you?”

“If I hadn’t screwed with the modem…” I muttered helplessly.

“The modem has been fixed forever,” she reminded me, resuming her futile task of filling the bag with too-large items that she would never wear outside of here. “We just stopped going online and looking. All of us.”

---