Second Chance Summer(21)
Chapter 8
Aidan’s cell went off in the middle of a really great dream where he had the kiss with Lily playing on repeat. And damn, she’d tasted as sweet as he’d remembered. It’d nearly killed him to pull away.
He loved the way she’d held still after, staring at him in shock and wonder, how her tongue had come out to lick her lower lip as if trying to make the taste of him last.
He’d had to force himself to let go of her. But in his dream he didn’t have to let go. And she didn’t push him away either. Nope, instead she pushed him down onto her bed and—
His phone buzzed again. Damn. Reaching out in the dark, he squinted at the screen. Incoming text calling him for an S&R—a missing camper.
He dressed and ran into Hudson at the front door, hair crazy wild, his eyes hooded from sleep.
“Hey, Princess,” Aidan said. “You look like shit.”
Hudson flipped him off as they jogged out to Aidan’s truck and hit the road, driving straight into a wall of fog in the still-dark morning.
“Zero visibility,” Hudson said, looking at his weather app.
“No shit,” Aidan said, looking out the windshield.
Hudson handed him a granola bar.
“What’s this crap?” Aidan asked.
“Just eat it before I cram it down your grumpy-ass throat.”
Aidan ate the granola bar. Not because of Hud’s threat but because he was starving. And when he was done he tossed the wrapper at Hud’s head.
Hud caught it without taking his eyes off his phone. Impressive. The guy had been a skinny and sickly eleven-year-old kid when his mother brought him and Jacob to Cedar Ridge. Char, suffering in her own right, had taken them in, since it was clear their mother wasn’t mentally stable enough to handle them. From that day forward Hud had followed Gray and Aidan around with hero worship in his eyes. Unused to any sort of outdoor lifestyle, he’d often ended up hurt and stuck indoors. Char, who’d loved them all equally, had a soft spot for Hud. She’d babied him, earning him the nickname Princess.
Hudson had grown a couple of feet and a whole bunch of muscle since then, but, to his eternal frustration, the nickname had stuck.
“You really do look like shit,” Aidan said.
“I was online all night,” Hudson admitted.
Aidan knew Hud had been searching in earnest for his twin brother, Jacob. Not that they’d found hide nor hair of him.
More recently, and for more complicated reasons, Hudson had also been searching for their dad, much to Aidan’s frustration. He didn’t want that * within a thousand miles of here. “Please tell me you were up all night watching that cartoon porn again and not searching for Dad.”
In the way he’d been doing since he was a kid, Hudson set his jaw. And the big brother in Aidan sighed, knowing he’d come up against the brick wall that was Hudson’s stubbornness. “We’ve been over this, man. We don’t need him.”
“We do,” Hudson said. “And it’s not porn, it’s called anime. It’s an art form.”
Aidan shook his head. “Whatever. Just concentrate on finding Jacob. Forget Dad.”
“I can do both.”
“But you don’t need to,” Aidan insisted. “We don’t need Dad here right now.”
Or ever.
Hudson slid him a glance. “On a scale of one to goat-f*ck, how stubborn are you going to be about this?” Hud asked.
Aidan just gave him a hard look.
“So goat-f*ck then,” his brother muttered. “Perfect.”
They pulled up to the incident command center and joined the fray.
“Gonna be like hunting a needle in a haystack,” Hudson said, squinting at the fog.
No doubt. During the summer months they had more rescues than any other time of the year. With its sheer rock face for climbing, challenging trails for hiking, and some decent rapids, Colorado was a magnet for what they called weekend walkers—people who were office-dwellers during the week and adventure-seekers on the weekend. They were the main reason things stayed so busy for S&R and the fire department.
Depending on the runoff from the surrounding creeks and estuaries, the river rapids could go from an easy class two up to a class four in a blink, making it all too easy to run into trouble. And in spite of the carefully posted warnings, the signs were all too often ignored. It was as if people lost all common sense the moment they smelled fresh air and got onto a dirt trail.
Today’s trouble came courtesy of a group of six girlfriends who’d gone on an overnight hiking expedition to Eagle’s Cove. They’d decided to prank the sole single girl in their midst into thinking she was being tracked and stalked by Bigfoot because he could smell her virginity. Terrified, she’d run off, heading into the woods.
And had not been seen since.
This had been at midnight, but the girls hadn’t called it in until four a.m. because they thought she’d been playing a return trick on them by disappearing.
Plus, they hadn’t wanted to get in trouble.
But then a bear had crossed their paths, and they’d all run screaming into the night, racing all the way back to base, convinced their friend had become Bigfoot bait.
Aidan wasn’t too worried about the bear sighting. They’d most likely seen a black bear, known to be meek and mild-tempered—unless you got between a mama and her cub. That always changed the game. Hoping for the best, Aidan and Hudson geared up with the others on their team. Mitch had caught an extra shift at the fire station so he hadn’t made it, but the rest of them headed out into the predawn light.