She snuggled her body deeper into mine. “Do you know how many other kids saw what they were doing and looked the other way?”
“I can guess.”
“I never went back to that school.”
“I wondered.” I’d spent four months looking for her every day, but never saw her again until a few days ago.
“It was a Thursday. By the following Thursday, we’d moved out of our house and had gone to live with my grandfather.”
“Where did you live before you moved?”
“Not that far from here. Maybe ten or fifteen miles to the west, right off Old Austin Highway.”
“Any idea who lives in that house now?”
“None. I haven’t thought about it in years.”
I made a mental note to do a property search. Ten or fifteen miles was a big stretch. Either way, it wasn’t that far from where I found her sister on the side of the road.
I heard the phone I’d left in the office ringing. Mila started to sit up, but I tightened my hold on her waist.
“Don’t you need to get that?”
“I’ll call whoever it is back. I’m not ready to let you go yet.”
“I have a confession to make.”
I smiled. “I like confessions. Especially naughty ones.” When she pinched my hand and squirmed against me, I held my breath, willing my cock to ignore her ass grinding against it. I was unsuccessful.
When she spoke again, it was in a whisper. “I’ve never done this, Decker.”
“What haven’t you done, baby?”
“This. Any of it.” She sighed, turned to her side, and nestled against me. “I worried that I would never be able to let someone touch me the way you do.”
I let her words sink in. She said never, but she didn’t say again. Did that mean that before her attack, she’d never been intimate with a man? She was seventeen when it happened, and while that wasn’t necessarily the norm these days, it certainly wasn’t unheard of for a woman or a man to still be a virgin at that age.
“I wish you’d say something.”
I put my fingers on her chin and tilted her head so I could look into her eyes. “Whatever happened or didn’t happen before this, doesn’t matter to me. The only concern I have is that you feel comfortable with me, want me, want to see where this thing between us goes. I’m in it for the long haul, Mila. I know that might be overwhelming for you, but I believe our souls connected the day our eyes met in the school hallway.”
“I feel the same way.”
I heard the phone in the office ring again. It stopped and within a minute, started again. Someone was obviously anxious to reach me.
“I better see who’s calling.” Mila sat up and moved so I could. “We aren’t done talking about this, though. Okay?”
She smiled. “Okay.”
I hurried into the office but didn’t catch the call in time. When I checked the call log, I saw that I’d missed one call from Rile, and two from the man researching Adler Livingston’s travel history.
I returned Rile’s call first.
“What’s up?”
“I’ve been able to confirm that Judd Knight filed for divorce from his wife before his daughter was even released from the hospital. It would be helpful to review her records.”
While my specialty was developing systems to securely protect and safeguard both real property and information, to be able to keep people out, I also needed to be an expert on how they got in. Hacking into something like medical records was child’s play compared to the hostile governments and terrorist organizations I’d had to find my way into.