One Bride for Five Mountain Men

“Can I stay with you tonight?” I ask tentatively.

He presses a kiss against my hair and lingers there for a few moments.

“Of course you can stay. I'd like nothing better,” he murmurs.

“Thank you,” I sigh, “and in the morning, will figure out how to shut this all down, yes?”

“Absolutely.”

Chapter 20

Raleigh

When my cellphone buzzes on the nightstand, I instantly wake up, grabbing it and sliding carefully from the bed. I thumb the connect button to get it to stop ringing but I don't say anything until I'm a safe distance away. Jordan is sleeping so peacefully, I don't want to disturb her. After all the fretful nights she spent, I figure solid sleep is the least I can offer her.

“Hello? King?”

“Reggie,” I finally answer. “I'm here. What have you got for me?”

I hear him swallow and imagine the thirty-ounce coffee he traditionally keeps no more than three inches away from his face. It's the middle of the morning in New York, and I'm expecting good things from him. It's amazing to me that I can hear somebody swallow a half a world away.

“Well, boss, I’m not sure you're gonna like all of this.”

I scrub my hand over my face and fall into the sofa.

“I figure if it's important you will just put it in the report.”

“Yeah, it is,” he says.

“So just tell me, Reggie. Spit it out.”

“Okay. The site is registered to an LLC under the name ‘Head Monster.’ I checked the LLC filings and there's nothing there. Bunch of dead ends.”

“So keep digging,” I tell him, even though I don't have to. Nobody put their personal information in LLC filings. That’s why we have LLC filings, to conceal identities when the situation is sensitive.

“Yeah, of course. I'll get it, I just need to keep pinging every resource I can find until somebody cracks. Obviously they don't want us finding out who they are.”

I stifle a yawn. “Obviously.”

“But I got a lead on a couple of things…” he says.

I knew this part was coming. Reggie always likes to give me a little dollop of bad news at the beginning, to bring up the drama. That way, he thinks that when he gives me a little bit of good news, I am going to be super impressed. I'm impressed, but not super impressed. I figure this is what I'm paying him for, and he really needs to get on with the show here.

“What did you find out, Reggie?” I ask him, letting my irritation edge into my voice.

“See, all these streams that are coming from Head Monster’s site used to be in different places, on different sites. But the funny thing is, they're not that far apart. Like, geographically not that far apart. I tracked some of the IPs and they’re right in her back yard.”

“Really,” I scoff. Now, that is interesting.

“And always girls about the same age. So I started to wonder, do they maybe know each other? And after poking around a bit, asking around a bit, I got my answer. They all went to high school together. Maybe college too. But at least three of them went to high school together.

“So… are you saying that you think Kelsey set up a successor? She tapped somebody to run the site after she was gone?”

I can almost hear Reggie shrug, way on the other side of the world.

“Yeah, that's a possibility. Definitely. But every time I try to find out who it might be, I'm in a dead-end, boss. I don’t know what to tell you there.”

“Yeah okay, just keep at it… I'll talk to you later —”