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“What?” Priya said, leaning in. “So he could drug you all over again?”
“It wasn’t like that. He handed it to me and then walked away,” I said. I opened my mouth to say more, to tell them about the warning he’d given me outside my tent. But then I remembered him asking me not to tell anyone. I remembered how hesitant he’d been to say anything at all. If Callie was already getting close to Kai, that made everything messier.
“He said I should drink it to feel better,” I said, feeling like a traitor.
“Weird.”
“Very.”
Priya turned her glass an inch. “So I think I have my own weird shit going on,” she said.
“Oh god, what now?” Callie said.
“There’s this guy I’ve known for a few years at work. I always had the biggest crush on him. He’s hot, and he knows it. He never paid any attention to me. Ignored me, basically. Anyway, this morning, when I was getting coffee, he came in right after me and said the nicest thing about a presentation I gave last week. Out of the blue. Then he gave me this warm smile. I went all buttery and stupid and I dropped my coffee. He helped me clean up and we had this romcom moment where our hands brushed as we were picking up pieces of broken mug. I started stalking him online, obviously. It turns out he’s the nephew of the woman who persuaded me to sign up,” she said, then glanced over her shoulder. “And this is where it gets really weird.”
“What?”
“What?”
“That woman used to be Aurora’s social media manager.”
“No!” Callie whispered.
“It could be a coincidence,” Jess said, swirling her wine. “It’s a pretty loose connection. Don’t overthink it.”
“You know how much I want that to be true?” Priya said. For a moment, I wondered if she was about to cry, too.
“We just need to be…vigilant,” Jess said.
“Vigilant. Okay,” Callie said, like she was trying to persuade herself.
“But we all have to agree on one thing,” I said.
They all looked at me.
“We don’t talk about each other to our men. What we share here is sacred. It’s a vault.”
“Okay.”
They all nodded.
“And we don’t tell them about anything we’ve found online until we know we can trust them,” I said.
“And how do we know that?” Priya said. It was a very good question.
“I haven’t figured that part out yet,” I said.
There was nothing watertight about the agreement. And we were all so smitten and hungry, neither Callie nor Priya nor I was willing to walk away from the men we’d met in the last twenty-four hours.
I excused myself and walked toward the back of the bar. In the hallway by the restrooms I took out my phone and typed a message to Damian: I need to talk to you.
He answered in under a minute:
Telegraph Peak Lookout. I’m on a SAR call not far from there. there’s a trailhead at the end of the fire road. I’ll be there at seven. take it slow on the last mile.
Chapter Ten
The car jolted over another rut in the road, the suspension groaning. I’d left the bay behind me, and now dust swirled around the car in an ochre plume, clinging to the windshield. The road tilted to a steep incline, and I pressed harder on the gas.
