Page 53 of Rescued

But he was interrupted by an alert on his phone. Breanna already knew enough about this place to recognize an ‘urgent’ signal.

“Fuck,” Switch muttered. He pulled his phone out of his pocket and read the message. “Double fuck,” he said. “One of the Ridge’s other cases has turned into an unexpected crisis. They’re putting together a strike force ASAP, and they’re short a pilot. Gunn wants me to fly one of the transport birds. Tactical meeting right now.”

Breanna knew better than to ask if it was dangerous. All the missions were dangerous. Instead she asked, “How long will it take?”

“No way to tell,” he said. “My guess is, meeting, deployment, night attack—we’ll probably be back sometime tomorrow. Hopefully I’ll see you before we go, but if not—” He pulled her in for a toe-curling kiss. “I’ll be back for another one of those if I can. Be good.”

“Sure,” she said, a pit of dread growing in her stomach. “Good luck.”

“Don’t need luck when you’re good.”

He kissed her one more time, and took off for the command center.

After he left, Breanna didn’t know what to feel. Scared for Switch and the other men, scared for herself, thinking what might happen to her if he didn’t come back.

Anger at being so dependent on him.

But she wasn’t, she reminded herself.

She still had her insurance policy—her ace in the hole. She was the same person she’d always been, and her plan was the same.

Find Kimberly, if she was still alive. Or if she couldn’t, make her way to the tax haven where the bonds had been issued and use the passwords to cash them in. Go somewhere warm and beautiful and safe, and live there happily ever after.

With money, she could hire someone to find Kimberly, and share the money with her.

Breanna Carter always found a way to be okay. Even if her heart was broken.

Chapter 23

The mission team moved out just after dark. Switch made a flying visit back to the cabin on the way up to the airfield, kissed her goodbye one more time, and was gone.

Gunn had taken a big portion of the pack’s manpower with him, including Mikey, Sanchez and his boys, Boomer and Boomer’s brother. There was just a skeleton crew left at the Ridge—mostly men she didn’t know.

She felt more alone than she had standing on the roof in Queens, before Switch picked her up.

It’s just for a day or so, she told herself. The mission isn’t even far—just a couple of hours away. Don’t be a baby.

So she spent the evening making more cookies and boxing them up for all her friends. She even made a huge batch for the mess hall, that anyone could take.

She put on her favorite Eddy Arnold album when she went to bed, using Switch’s laptop, but she still had a hard time falling asleep. And she had bad dreams.

She woke up at dawn, after a restless night. It was a morning just like her first morning on the ridge—chilly and misty, but with sun just starting to burn through the fog.

And totally quiet. The men weren’t back yet—she would have heard the helicopters.

She hoped they were okay.

Breanna knew she wasn’t going to sleep anymore, so she got up and dressed in jeans and a hoodie of Switch’s he’d appropriated from the supply shed. It smelled like him, and his scent was both calming and worrying, because she couldn’t stop thinking about him.

She hoped he was okay.

To quiet the churning in her stomach, she opened her bag and, for the first time in days, looked at her bearer bonds.

Millions of dollars, in her hands. Never having to worry about money. Never having to be in a place where she worried about her friends getting killed every time they left the compound.

She shoved them back in the compartment, but she kept the phone out, sticking it in the pocket of her hoodie.

Then she went to the kitchen. On the way, her gaze fell on her end of the table, that Switch had cleared so she could work. It held her most recent sketches of the community center and her notes for Mikey.