Dammit. He wasn’t going to help her after all. “Sure. Let’s take our time. Meanwhile, Noah’s in a dark cell somewhere being tortured.” She could hardly keep the tremble out of her voice.
“We don’t know that!” Daniel protested.
“You’re right,” she spat back. “He could already be dead.” She was seriously going to give him some facial scars as a souvenir before she left.
“Okay, okay!” Jace threw his hands up, holding Piper and Daniel apart. “Let’s cool this down a bit, shall we?” He pointed to Daniel. “You sit tight and think about what we can do for intel. And stop being an ass.” Then he turned to Piper. “You get a guest room and park it for a while. And stop assuming the worst before we know anything at all, okay?”
Her breath was heaving, and she wanted to tell him to fuck off—it wasn’t his brother that was possibly being tortured to death. Instead, she did a quick scan of the room. Daniel had always been a neat freak, and the Army had just reinforced those habits. Everything was neatly put away, including a light-weight jacket hanging on the back of the bedroom door.
She looked back to Jace’s questioning expression and wrestled her voice into a semblance of conciliation. “All right. We’ll talk about this in the morning.” She turned her back on him and strode to the door, counting on him to take a moment to talk to Daniel before they left.
“We’re going to work this out,” Jace said to her brother.
She took that instant to slip her hand inside her brother’s jacket and get the one thing she really needed. Then she pulled open the door and marched into the hallway, covering the sway of the jacket with the motion of the flung-open door. She slipped her prize into her front pocket as she went.
Jace’s footsteps followed quickly after her. “Hey,” he said, catching her by the elbow again. “This way.” He nodded down the hall in the opposite direction.
She swung around and followed him down a couple turns in this gigantic estate of his to a room similar to Daniel’s but smaller. Jace opened the door and gestured her inside.
“It’s going to be all right, Piper.” His voice was gentle, and the fire in his eyes had softened. “Hopefully, Noah’s completely fine, just holed up somewhere. And if not, we’re going to find him.”
“Sure.” She tried to sound positive, but her skills were failing her—too much personal entanglement was eroding her ability to do her job. Once she found Noah, she was going to take that assignment in Bolivia she’d been avoiding and get lost in hot Latin men for a while. Get back to her normal state of not giving a shit about anything except work. And her baby brother.
Jace frowned. His eyes were deep brown, like Noah’s, and filled with a genuine concern that made her face heat. Like he saw right through her, which somehow both thrilled and terrified her. Plus the scruff on his face, at least a day’s worth, and the bed-tossed hair standing on end just made him insanely sexy in the moonlight. Her wolf wanted nothing more than to drag him into the room with her and spend the next couple hours finding out just how delicious Jace River’s body could be. But she had a mission—a brother to find, alive or dead—and taking Jace River to bed wasn’t going to help with that. At least… not anymore.
“We are going to find him,” Jace repeated, softly, reassuring. “I’ll come get you when everyone’s up.”
“Okay.” She schooled her face to hide the roiling emotion under her skin.
He nodded and turned to leave.
She almost called him back to thank him—for caring, for putting Daniel in his place, for trying to reassure her—but she held herself in check. Wouldn’t matter anyway.
She didn’t plan on seeing him again.
Jace finished the last bite of his sandwich just as the sun came up.
The warm glow spilled through the windows of the great room and painted the kitchen’s stainless steel appliances rosy red. The house was just now starting to stir—which was remarkable, given that Piper, Daniel, and he had practically brawled over rescuing her brother Noah—but the sounds of people awakening upstairs meant his time was running out.
He’d been using his tablet to search for possible disappearances of military grunts like Noah, but the information he could access publicly from the safehouse was extremely limited. His office at Riverwise was better equipped—there he had access to a couple private military networks where he could scan the back-channel chatter. Nothing that was security-related, but if there were suddenly a lack of communication from a lot of personnel, that would show up. Once his brothers, Jaxson and Jared, rolled out of their respective beds, the three of them could form a plan on how to tackle this. Maybe a trip to the office for more extensive research. Or maybe Daniel could get them into the Joint Base. They might have better access there if they could get away with it. The trick would be poking around without tipping their hand to Agent Smith—or whatever his real name was.