Eleven.
Rhett
I’ve been awake for the last hour. The same dream that’s been plaguing me for the past four nights.
Shea. Under me. On top of me. Beside me. Her taste. Her smell.
Right down to the softest, sexiest fucking moan you can imagine… My subconscious is an evil fuck, I’ll tell you that.
So, when the phone lights up beside me at 2:31 AM and her name shines back at me, I’ve got it to my ear before the first ring finishes. “Shea?”
“Rhett.” Her voice is high and hushed. “I’m so sorry. I know it’s the middle of the night, but…I didn’t know who else to call.”
I sit up, reaching for my jeans on the floor. “Talk to me.”
“It’s Tyler. He’s not here. He went down to the arcade earlier and I-I fell asleep, and when I went to check on him, he-he’s not in his room, and the arcade’s closed, and I-I don’t know where he is and his phone’s going to voicemail and I don’t—”
“Where are you right now?”
“The lower level. By the pool. It’s locked.”
“Did the front desk call security?”
She pauses. “I didn’t tell the front desk.”
I stop, one boot on, the other in hand.
“I can’t,” she says slowly through the panic. “I can’t explain it right now, I just—please. Please, I need your help.”
My chest tightens. “Okay.” I stand and grab my keys off the dresser.
“Listen to me. He’s fifteen and he’s bored.
He didn’t vanish, all right? Kids like him, they find the one door nobody locks.
” I’m moving down the dark hall, phone pinned to my shoulder, yanking a hoodie over my head.
“Stay by the pool. Keep trying his phone.”
“Rhett—”
“Breathe, baby. I’m on my way.”
The resort at almost 3 AM is a different animal than the one I’ve been measuring all week.
Grand and empty and lit up gold, the big timber lobby echoing my boots back at me as I come through the doors.
The night clerk nods in my direction. He knows my face, knows the truck in the lot with the logo on it, and doesn’t question why the contractor’s here this late—or early.
Shea’s exactly where I told her to stay, and the sight of her has my steps faltering. Her arms are wrapped around herself in an oversized shirt and sleep shorts, no makeup, curls loose and wild. Natural. Stunning.
“Rhett.” Her voice breaks clean in half as she hurries to meet me.
I close the distance and get my hands around her, steadying, ducking to catch her eyes. “Breathe. We’re gonna find him. Where did he say he was going?”
She nods fast. “The arcade, the pool, he mentioned a-a racing thing, there’s these kids, their parents work here.”
“They work here?” I latch onto it. “Then they’ve got the run of this place. Staff kids know every service hall, every storage room. If a door that doesn’t lock right, they’ll know about it.” I’m already scanning the dark corridor, the EMPLOYEES ONLY signs, the seams in the building. “Come on.”
“Where?”
“Kid probably found somewhere warm and out of the way to hang with his new friends. Somewhere no adults would bother them.” I try a door marked STAFF. Locked. I try the next. “If I were fifteen in this building, I know exactly where I’d go.”
I find it on the third try.
Down a service corridor off the rec level, past the pool’s mechanical room, there’s a door propped with a folded matchbook—courtesy of the lounge, the oldest trick there is—and behind it a break room the size of a shoebox, a vending machine hums in the corner throwing blue light over four teenagers sprawled across mismatched chairs around a card table.
Tyler’s mid-laugh when the door swings wide. I watch the laugh die on his face.
“Shea,” he starts.
But she’s already past me.
She doesn’t yell, even though I brace for it. She crosses that little room and pulls him half out of the chair into a hug he’s far ‘too cool’ to want, but she’s too shaken to let him refuse. I hear her say into his hair, low and wrecked, “I couldn’t find you.”
The three other kids look at me. I look at them. “Your parents know you’re down here?”
A chorus of guilty shrugs. Staff kids, all right—one of them I half-recognize, a housekeeper’s daughter. “Go home,” I tell them firmly. “Back doors, not the lobby. And find a better spot next time.”
They scatter like quail.
Tyler pulls back from Shea, ears red, doing the fifteen-year-old thing of trying to reassemble his cool out of the wreckage. “My phone died,” he mumbles. “It’s not a big deal, we were just—”
“It is a big deal,” Shea states. “What were you thinking?”
Tyler looks between us, and his brow furrows in defense. “No, it’s not a big deal. God, you’re not my mom, okay? You don’t get to freak out like you actually care.”
Her gaze widens at his outburst. “Ty.”
“No, this is so stupid.” He backs up now, chair scraping as he bumps into it.
All that teenage fury bubbling to the surface.
“You didn’t even want me here, remember?
You got stuck with me ‘cause my mom would rather be in Italy with your dad than deal with her own kid, and now you’re gonna stand here and pretend you were scared?
” His voice cracks on the last word, ruining the whole tough-guy performance.
Emotion seeping in. “You’re just like the rest of them.
Counting down the days until you can dump me on somebody else like your dad did to you. ”
Shea flinches like she’s been struck.
“That’s enough,” I snap, taking a step between them.
Tyler whips toward me, his chest heaving.
I hold his glare. “You want to be mad at somebody for leaving? Be mad at the ones who left. But don’t be mad at the one person who hasn’t.”
His jaw works. His eyes furious and wet, and for a second, he looks less like a mouthy teenager and more like a kid who’s been handed the wrong end of every deal he’s ever gotten. I wait for a comeback, but it doesn’t come. Instead, he shoves past me, out the door, and down the corridor.
Shea starts after him, but I catch her arm. “Let him go,” I say. “He’s not going far. Kid’s got nowhere to go but up.” I nod at the elevator down the hall. “Give him five minutes and go talk to him.”
She looks up at me, wrecked all over again for a completely different reason.
“Come on.” I put a hand at the small of her back and steer her out of that shoebox of a break room, down the dim service corridor, back toward the elevator. The elevator doors slide shut and then it’s just us.
Shea sags back against the nearest wall. “I lost him,” she says softly. “First week and I fell asleep drunk on a couch and I lost him.”
“You didn’t lose him. He wandered off. Kids tend to do that.”
“My father called and I lied to him.” Her words come out fast, spilling, like she’s been holding them for too long.
“I looked at an empty bed and I lied so I wouldn’t look like I couldn’t handle it, and then I couldn’t call the front desk because they’d tell him, and—god, listen to me!
” A broken laugh. “I’m more scared of my father finding out I’m not perfect than I was of not finding Tyler. What is wrong with me?”
“Hey,” I say it low, standing in front of her. I draw her into my arms and she follows my lead. Her head on my chest. “Nothing is wrong with you, you hear me. Not a goddamn thing.”
She sniffles. “I’m not so sure.”
I shift, then tip her chin up with one knuckle so she has to look at me. “I am.”
Her eyes are glassy and my heart aches at the very sight. My thumb moves along her jaw. We’re close now. Close like the dance floor, except there’s no music and my heart is pounding like a jackhammer with every reason in the world to step back.
I don’t.
“You should go,” she breathes. She doesn’t move either. Her hand has found the front of my hoodie, fisted in it, holding on. “It’s late.”
I hum. “Feels like it’s early.”
She huffs a light laugh, leaning back to face me. Her gaze drops to my mouth. The half-inch is back, and this time, there’s no crowd to hide in, just her breath going shallow and her grip going tight and the moment holding still around us.
“Rhett,” she says, one more time. Not a warning now.
A question.
And god help me, I lean in to answer it.