“Before Seattle?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said softly and watched as recognition of what she was admitting crossed his face.
Chapter 6
Colt watched Tara’s expression. At first, he thought she was joking, but then it all sank in. She honestly believed that she’d come from somewhere else. She believed she was an alien of some sorts.
Gods and aliens. In Georgia. What the hell had he stumbled onto?
Realization dawned on him as he remembered everything he’d witnessed.
No wonder someone was after her. What kind of person would he be if he turned her in to them now? He thought about what would happen if he did. What if he didn’t? Would they still hunt her down?
This was his first big client, but that didn’t temper his resolve to at least try to figure out why they wanted her. In the past three years, he’d made a decent enough living to keep him in the one-bedroom apartment just outside of Seattle where he had started this entire journey.
What had Tara been doing in Washington State to begin with?
“What do you mean where you came from? Like, from another planet? Like an alien?” he asked.
Tara shrugged slightly and glanced towards the door as a group of people stepped inside.
“I better get back.”
“Sure,” he agreed. “Later, I’d like to talk some more?”
“Sure, I get off work at…”
“Two,” Jess called out.
Tara smiled. “Two.”
“How about I swing by then?”
She glanced towards Jess, who was already taking the customers’ orders. “I’ll be here.” She disappeared behind the counter, taking her empty plate and cup with her.
He finished eating and sipping his coffee and then headed back to the hotel. He needed to dig deeper into who his client was, but instead, he sat in his hotel room and tried to find anything else on Tara that he could.
The woman, it seemed, had no online presence. When he came up with a complete blank in the databases that he had access to, he pulled up a picture of her van and searched the license plate registration.
The registration was from Oregon, and a few months outdated. When he looked closer, he realized it was registered to a mailbox store address. The same address was on Tara’s driver’s license. Was that even legal?
He kept searching. The first job she’d held was in a small coffee shop in the Seattle area when she was seventeen. Before that, there was no record of her. Not even a high school diploma or birth certificate.
As far as he could tell, Tara Dawson had just… appeared one day.
What he’d found out last night about the rest of the Hidden Creek gang, as he was calling everyone who had been there last night, had been far more detailed than what he’d found on Tara.
Mike and Ethan were your standard run-of-the-mill ex-military types. Kind of like he was. They’d served their time and had either gotten out or had been injured. Mike had gone into law enforcement and then, upon getting shot by his partner, had retired and gone into private security.
The fact that he and Mike had that in common played heavily on his mind. If the guy could make it, then there was hope for him.
Ethan, on the other hand, had been injured in the line of duty and had gotten an honorable medical discharge. Then he’d moved to Hidden Creek and started working with his brother.
Jacob St. Clair. Now he was an anomaly. He was the adopted son of Ronny and Clair St. Clair. Ronny was the old law in the small town.
But last night, the brothers had told him that Jacob was their older brother. After doing a little more digging, Colt found an article written by Brea about how the brothers had found one another by chance. It went into detail about how Rusty and Susan Kincaid, Mike and Ethan’s parents, had been forced to give up their first son when they’d still been in high school.
The grainy image of the three men and their parents assured him and anyone with eyes that they were indeed all related.
Joe Reed was no mystery. Everything the man had been or done was easily found in the Hidden Creek newspaper or the school archives online. He’d been a gym rat since hitting puberty and had taken over the local liquor store after his uncle’s death. It was the only one within thirty miles of town, so its success was assured.
He had a younger sister, Amy, who was away at college in Atlanta. His parents still lived in town and lived a pretty normal small-town life.
Mason Barrett was everything the scientist said he was last night. The man’s credentials were almost as impressive as Stephen Hawking’s.
Liz’s and Joleen’s backgrounds were straightforward, at least from what he could find on them.
But when he’d looked into the rest of the women, there were more entanglements.
Xtina’s parents had been killed in a car accident and several members in a cult had been charged with the crime. After their leader had been killed by Mike on the night they’d kidnapped Xtina, the cult members had turned on one another, which had made charging them with the crime easy.
Jess’s mother was MIA, but her father had recently moved back into town, as had Brea’s father, who was now married to her aunt, Misty.
After scanning over his notes about the rest of the players, he figured he’d do more research on Tara to see if he could find anything new.
He spent so much time looking into her past that when it was time to go and meet her, he’d only spent a few moments looking into his client.
When he parked in front of the Coffee Corner, Jess and Tara were the only two people inside. He sat in the parking lot, watching the two women chatting. They looked comfortable around one another, like they were old friends. Was it possible? Had Tara really been here before?
No. Yesterday was proof of that. She hadn’t known anyone else at Xtina and Mike’s place.
He supposed Tara was so comfortable since she’d spent the last ten years hopping from one coffee shop to the next. Her people skills had to be good enough to keep her in work.
He watched as they walked out of the Coffee Corner. Tara’s eyes moved to his truck, and she waved easily in his direction. It was then that he noticed that her van wasn’t in the parking lot. Most likely, Jess had picked her up that morning and had driven them both into work.
Jess climbed into her own car as Tara headed towards his truck. He was thankful that it appeared that she wanted him to take her back to her van.
“I hope it’s okay,” she said, opening his driver side door and climbing in. “Jess insisted that it would be okay with you if you took me back to my van after our chat.”
“Sure.” He smiled quickly, then frowned slightly when the sweet scent of coffee mixed with her perfume had his loins responding. “Where to?” he asked.
She shrugged and glanced around. “Jess mentioned this really great park just outside of town. We could go for a hike?” Tara suggested.
He glanced over at her. “Didn’t you just stand on your feet for the past eight hours or so?”
She chuckled, the sound warm and sultry, making him instantly think of long lazy nights making slow love to her.
“I think I can handle a little walk. I need some fresh air anyway.”
He pulled out of the parking lot and followed her directions to the park, all while trying not to think about fulfilling his desires.