You’re starting to sound like my mom.
Raleigh already knew where Andorra’s trail began, and he loped over to the starting point and ran along following her scent. It was a few days old now and not as strong, but it was still indefinably her. She’d followed the river mostly, only diverging from it when the land was too difficult for a human to climb. He found where she’d camped and she’d burned the bones of the fish she’d eaten and there was a small amount of paper ash as well, likely a packet or wrapper from something else she’d had to eat.
The next day she’d wandered a bit, evidently having had some difficulty getting back to the river. Once again she’d caught fish and she’d dug a tiny hole where she’d planted the seeds from an apple. He grinned. The chances of an apple tree growing in the wild here were microscopic, but he liked that she’d made the attempt. He looked at the sky. Time was passing but he decided to follow her once more. This had been a longer day, but only because she’d followed a track for part of the time. For him the track was like a highway and he’d raced down it so fast he’d almost missed where she entered it and had to back up a little to follow her across to the river. Once again there was absolutely no sign that anyone had accompanied her, or followed her, or even been on the mountain recently.
To be home by dark he needed to hurry. He bunched his muscles and ran in a flat-out sprint straight up the mountain, ignoring tracks, trails, and pathways, leaping from rock to rock where necessary. After a while he had to slow down to a steady, ground-covering lope. It was fully dark when he got back, but he wasn’t very late. And he had the comfort of knowing she really had hiked up the mountain alone.
* * * *
Kingston was as conflicted as hell. He wanted Andorra as his mate so much it was like a physical pain slicing through his brain, but he couldn’t believe she’d just miraculously appeared on his doorstep out of nowhere. Over the years plenty of women had appeared at his apartment in the city, leaning against his car in the parking lot, sitting next to him at formal dinners, and just about everywhere else he’d been. And in every single case, without fail, it’d been a woman who wanted to marry his money. Well, to be accurate, the pack’s money. Some of them were shape-shifters, most of them were human. Some of them were rich bitches, or gold diggers. Others were quite nice women, women he actually liked, but behind them was a man, usually their father or brother, who planned to take control of part of his empire in return for the woman. There was no way on earth he could trust Andorra. She simply could not be innocent. But he wanted her to be his with a passion that left him gasping for air.
He scribbled a list of the things he knew about her then began searching. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Pinterest. It was quite some time later when he finally found a microscopic reference to her in what was apparently her high school yearbook. Even better, it gave the names of her father, her stepmom, and her stepbrother and the stepbrother did have a Facebook account—and a hell of a lot to say.
Kingston trawled back through the timeline for six months and hit pay dirt. It seemed her stepbrother had been really angry about leaving their apartment, but even angrier about Andorra’s Dad emptying the bank accounts, money which had been supposed to pay his college fees. The young man’s language was not pretty, and some of the comments he’d gotten were even wilder. Kingston was surprised they hadn’t breached Facebook’s terms of service. But what was clear was that the story Andorra had told him was true in every particular. Her father had taken the money and the blonde from his office, a woman scarcely older than his daughter, and left.
Was she working for her father perhaps? Had the man ordered her to come up here and catch them a man who could afford to keep them all in luxury? It would be quite normal for her to love her father and do whatever he asked her. It could also be why she was so obedient if she was used to doing whatever she was told by her father.
Convinced he’d solved the riddle, Kingston went back to the stepbrother’s Facebook page and read through his personal details, collecting every bit of information he could find about Andorra’s father. Then he started his web searches from the beginning again, but with Jason Yasbit this time. An hour later he sat back in his chair sighing. Another dead-end. Jason, and the blonde whose name was Candie, seemed to have completely forgotten about his previous family. They were managing a bar down in the Florida Keys, and Candie’s Facebook page was littered with pictures of her leaning on the bar, her breasts falling out of a miniscule bikini, while holding a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other.