He interlinked their fingers and led her to where the guys waited. He didn’t know how else to make it clear to them without actually giving voice to the words that she was important to him. But he figured they were all smart enough to figure it out. “You’re welcome.”
“Arms out like this,” Dalton ordered as soon as they were within a foot of him.
“Um, what?” Rose looked all kinds of confused and stepped back. Caleb did an inner fist pump when she moved slightly behind him as if she trusted him to be the buffer between her and the others.
“What my boss means,” Caleb glared at Dalton, silently warning him to tone it down, “is we need to scan you to see if you have a tracker on you somewhere.”
“Have I somehow ended up in the movies and nobody told me?” Rose muttered.
“It won’t hurt,” he reassured her. “He won’t even touch you, just run the wand a couple of inches off your body. I can do it if you prefer.” He kind of hoped she’d ask him to be the one to scan for bugs. But even though she had no idea of how things often worked in his world, the woman he was rapidly coming to think of as his once more slapped on a brave face, sucked it up, and did what needed to be done. He had the impression she was used to sucking it up because things went sideways when she least expected it.
Not anymore, baby. Not on my watch.
“It’s okay.” She clenched the fingers of the hand behind his back into his shirt for a split second, then released it again and stepped up next to him. “I’m ready.” She held her arms straight out from the shoulder.
“I’ll be fast.” Dalton slightly redeemed himself to Caleb by promising to work quickly. “I won’t even touch you. Ready?”
Rose nodded. Caleb kept one eye on the device and one on Rose as Dalton ran the scanner wand around her.
Damn.
He cursed silently in his head when the device stayed the same color, and it didn’t beep. The best-case scenario would have been for the tracker to be on her clothes or something because he had a feeling she would lose her mind at what was to come next.
“Clear,” Dalton confirmed.
“What does that mean?” Rose asked the question, then immediately huffed. “What am I saying? I know what it means. But how is he tracking me if it’s not on me?”
“Then it’s on something you own,” Dalton said before Caleb could.
Caleb winced as he figured out where that tracker might be. Thankfully, Dalton wasn’t a complete asshole and gave her a couple of seconds to figure it out. His boss opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut again when Rose’s eyes widened.
“My camera?”
“If that’s the only other thing you had with you today.” He fucking hated the stricken look on her face. Some asshole was going to pay for being the reason it was there. He just had to figure out how to find him before he found Rose. “Or if it’s something you brought from your old life.” He didn’t even care that they had an audience and tugged her in for a hug. “We’ll be careful. I promise,” he whispered against her hair.
“It’s all I have left,” she hiccupped, “from before.”
“Bingo, that’s how he’s finding you,” Kacey informed her.
His brother really was a prick. “Kace…”
Rose surprised the crap out of him by laying her hand on his arm and shaking her head. “It makes sense,” she said. “I hate it, but it makes sense.” She turned to the guys. “It’s on the floor where I was sitting.”
Kacey dipped his chin and went around to the passenger seat of his truck to grab her camera case.
Caleb sighed. Every instinct he had told him whoever had planted that tracker was going to be so fucking pissed that it was found and disposed of. It would be disposed of because there wasn’t a hope in hell he’d allow it to keep running—especially not if Rose wanted to keep her camera, and he knew she would. The only question which remained was if the asshole had some other means of tracking her too.
Kacey placed the unopened camera bag on the hood of Dalton’s truck, stepped back, and nodded to Caleb.
Good, his brother had figured out Rose was important to him. Caleb glanced at Rose. “You want to open it for us?” He had a feeling the camera would need to be disassembled, and if he did it, he might break it.
“Just let me take out the sim card, and you can have it.” She lifted her chin. “I won’t risk Indy’s wedding photos, even to avoidhim.”
She didn’t need to say who ‘him’was. Caleb had to admire the grit she’d found some time in the space of twenty minutes between the two parking lots. He nudged her toward the hood. “Open it and grab the sim card. The guys can take it from here.” She nodded and unzipped the camera bag.
“How do we know the tracker isn’t in the sim card?” one of his teammates, Bryan *BB* Boyer, asked.
“That’s a question for Trev,” Dalton said, then glanced at Wolf, “or Tex.”
