Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(21)

The playful smile finally fell from his face and he nodded slowly. “It did. More times than I’d like to admit.”

“Then why’d you leave?”

“Honestly?” I stayed silent, and it took Ryan a minute to answer. “I was running.” His eyes slipped out of focus as he drifted into a memory. “After you disappeared, I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t go on with life pretending like you never existed.”

I was touched by his candidness, but it saddened me, too. He hadn’t exactly said so, but it was clear that my disappearance had devastated him. He’d lost the girl he loved and it hurt him so badly that it drove him to leave his family and home in order to chase after a ghost.

It was hard to imagine what this situation must feel like for him. He’d been through something every bit as horrible as I had. Different, but equally awful. Though I knew I shouldn’t be, I was overcome with guilt thinking about how he must feel right now. But I wasn’t ready to get into the relationship discussion yet, so I moved the conversation on. “And what about the others?” Ryan shook himself from his daze and frowned at me. “The four people you said I rescued from Visticorp,” I clarified.

“Oh. You’ve met two of them—Tyson and Abiodun.”

“Okay, the kid is easy, but which one was Abiodun?”

“The really big black guy with the thick African accent. He’s older than everyone except Major Wilks.”

I nodded. He’d been the soft-spoken one who kept my temper calm when Ryan had freaked out about Tony earlier. He seemed like a nice man.

“And Tyson would be crushed if he ever heard you call him a kid, by the way,” Ryan added. “He idolizes you.”

I smiled behind my cup of tea. Tyson was cute. “And the other two?”

Ryan’s face fell. “An eight-year-old girl and a seventy-nine-year-old woman. Visticorp has them again. After the explosion, the four of them had no place to go. You said you’d find them, but of course you never did. Abiodun found an abandoned building to hide in, and then he and Tyson went out searching for you. Visticorp found the girls before they got back.

“Donovan knew they had escaped before the explosion, and combed the city like mad. Betty is a telepath. She was able to tell Abiodun they’d been found, but Abiodun and Tyson couldn’t get back to them in time. They must have knocked Betty out, because she stopped communicating right after she sent the warning. Now she must be out of range to reach us.”

My stomach churned. Visticorp was holding an eight-year-old girl and a seventy-nine-year-old woman hostage and running tests on them? It was horrific.

Ryan saw the loathing in my expression, and his own became fierce. “That’s the other reason I joined the ACEs. It’s why Tyson and Abiodun risked exposing themselves to join, too. We weren’t sure about you, but Betty and Natalia are still out there somewhere, and we need to get them back.”

I was sold. In fact, I was ready to leave. Maybe Major Wilks was right with his tough-love approach. My personal drama could wait. Donovan had done enough damage, and it was time to make him pay for it. Whether I trusted the ACEs or not, I needed their help and they needed mine. I finished the last of my tea and rose to my feet with a sigh. “I guess we should get going, then.”

As if he’d known all along that I’d go with him, Ryan smiled up at me and made himself more comfortable on the sofa. “There’s no need to rush, Jamie. They still have a long drive through the desert. We can meet them at the base in an hour. Sit down and relax for a while.”

He patted the spot next to him, inviting me to join him again, and when I narrowed my eyes, his smile turned wicked. “Wanna get reacquainted?”

Unbelievable. “Are you seriously asking me to make out with you for a hour?”

“What?” His brows rose in surprise, but his face was too innocent. “You thought I was—no, of course not.” He couldn’t keep up the ruse and cracked a smile. “I was just teasing.”

Yeah, sure, he was teasing. Big, fat liar. Big, fat, charming, incredibly sexy liar. With an irresistible smile.

“Unless you want to…?”

I so didn’t want him to see my amusement, but how could I not laugh at that? When my lips quirked up, Ryan’s grin turned movie worthy. “Pass,” I told him.

Ryan’s smile never faltered. “Another time, then.”

I rolled my eyes and crossed the room to the wall safe Tony and I kept hidden behind a bookshelf. “What are you doing?” Ryan came to stand behind me as I held my eye up to the retinal scanner. “That is so cool.”

Guys and gadgets. I personally didn’t get it, but Tony loved his tech equipment, too. “I have something that I think might help find Donovan.” I opened the safe and pulled out a small bag. Inside were a couple of different alias passports, driver’s licenses, banking information for Tony and myself, and some emergency cash. I took all those, but what I was really interested in was the tiny pouch that contained a handful of microchips. “Tony has some encrypted information on Donovan and Visticorp. He backed up Visticorp’s entire mainframe before the explosion, when he was preparing to escape. He used to call it his insurance policy. If we could figure out a way to crack it—and that’s a very big if—this could give us clues to where he would go to disappear, or the people he might be working with now.”