My nostrils flare with my deep inhale as I focus back on the road. Brad Garrett-Charles. That fucker’s name is enough to make me want to smash his nose up into his brain. There’s something about the way he looks at her, the way he touches herwhen she’s with him. All checks on him have come up clean, but I still don’t like the guy.
“He’s the one who saved Monty. I trust him,” Sinclair says.
I glance back at her, but she’s staring out of the window again.
“You know who else you can trust? Me,” Brad says, his voice dripping with smarminess that Sinclair doesn’t notice.
“You’re sweet.” She giggles.
“Come on, Sin. You know I care for you. Tell me what I can do.”
She looks at me, puzzled, as I pull over on a patch of dirt at the side of the road.
“Nothing right now,” she replies. “I’ll call you when I’m back in the city, okay?”
“You do that, beautiful.”
“Bye, Brad.”
She smiles and hangs up.
“Why did we stop?” She surveys the deserted road we’re on that twists up the side of a large hill, then looks out over at the forest beneath us.
“Give me your phone,” I instruct.
“Why?” She wrinkles her nose but hands it over.
I open it up and take out the SIM card. Sinclair reaches for it, but she’s too late.
I snap it in half and toss it out of my window where it drops off the side of the road and disappears into the forest below.
“What the hell?” She gapes after it. “Why did you do that?”
I hand her phone back. “Be grateful it wasn’t the whole thing.”
“What?”
“Your phone can be traced. And until we know how advanced these guys are, we aren’t taking any chances. You can call your father and Zoey from mine while we’re away. It’s untraceable.”
“Oh, thanks so much, you’re so fucking generous.” She scoffs, slamming back into her seat and folding her arms. “It’s Brad. It’s not like he’s in on it.”
“No, he’s not. I already checked him out.”
She whirls her head in my direction to glare at me.
“But I don’t trust him,” I add.
“You’ve never given him a chance. You decided that you didn’t like him the moment you met him.”
I don’t correct her to the fact I didn’t like himbeforeI met him.
“I never told you I don’t like him. I told you that Monty doesn’t like him,” I say.
Sinclair snorts.
“How do you know? Did Monty tell you?” Her eyes travel to Monty, who’s asleep on the backseat. She said he gets sick in the back sometimes, but she begrudgingly admitted an hour into our trip that he seems to be okay when I drive, after he clambered into the backseat and made himself comfortable on a sweater of mine I’d left there.
“Well, did he?” She fixes me with a look.
