Chapter 1
Rocky Springs, Colorado – The Present
“Is she still out cold?” Tate Colter asked curiously as Jason walked back into the living room of one of the guesthouses in Tate’s Rocky Springs, Colorado resort.
Jason had met the obscenely wealthy Tate Colter at a charity event here in Rocky Springs, and he’d been here at the charity event Colter had hosted when he’d heard that Hope was getting married. Tate had been the one to come up with this whole crazy plan in the first place, and helped coordinate everything. As an ex-Special Forces guy, Colter was more precise at executing a plan and more calculating than Jason when it came to deception.
Jason looked over at Tate. He frowned as he noticed that Tate was on Hope’s laptop, his ass planted in a comfortable recliner. “What are you doing?”
“Getting all the dirt on your woman,” Tate replied unremorsefully. “It’s amazing how much a person can learn about someone by looking at their computer.”
Jason raised his eyebrows. “You hacked into her computer?”
Tate shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult. She needs better security. But that still wouldn’t have prevented me from getting in.” He grinned shamelessly at Jason.
Jason felt a twinge of guilt, but he shrugged it off. “Get out of her personal stuff,” he growled at Tate. It annoyed the hell out of him that Tate saw anything personal about Hope.
“Nothing’s personal if it’s on a computer. You gotta see some of this stuff.” Tate’s gaze went back to the computer screen. “Did you know she was a photographer? And not just any photographer. She does radical stuff.” His voice was slightly awed. “She might be crazier than I am.”
Jason doubted that, although he was pretty sure he needed his own head examined because of what had happened over the last twenty-four hours.
When Grady had told him that Hope was getting married and she was currently in Vegas for a bachelorette party, Jason had flown to Vegas to intentionally track her down, like some kind of mad stalker. She hadn’t been difficult to find, and after he’d gotten her room number in the hotel she was staying in, he’d followed her, pretended he was there on business. But the meeting had been far from accidental. He’d gritted his teeth as he congratulated her on her upcoming marriage—the words nearly killed him as he said them—and dragged her out for celebratory drinks. She’d fell right into his plan, became pretty damn intoxicated very quickly, and threw caution to the wind by the time she’d had just a couple of drinks. She’d just gotten more and more toasted with every subsequent drink. Obviously Hope didn’t hold her liquor well. She had passed out somewhere over Colorado on the flight back, and Jason had carried her into the bedroom of the guesthouse here in Rocky Springs. It was the same guesthouse he’d stayed in when he’d left for Vegas. It had been Colter’s idea to bring her here, to make it more difficult for her to leave. She was a good five-hour drive from Aspen, and she didn’t have a car. It was unlikely they’d encounter another person considering they were on private Colter land; the town of Rocky Springs was several miles away.
Tate’s whistle of appreciation drew Jason from his thoughts.
“Let me see that.” Jason grabbed the laptop from Tate and planted his butt in another recliner, determined to see what had Tate Colter so damn impressed. Not to mention the fact that he wanted to prevent Colter from looking at any more of Hope’s private life.
He looked through the photo gallery at some of the pictures Tate had ogled, stunned by what he saw. The pictures were raw and beautiful in a frightening kind of way. Quite a few of them were of large tornados, taken from close proximity. The rest were all of some kind of extreme forces of nature, everything from twisters to gale force winds that nearly bent trees in half, probably hurricanes. “These can’t be hers,” Jason denied. He shuddered at the thought of Hope being close enough to take photos of something so damn dangerous.
“They’re hers,” Tate said in a cocky voice. “If you check her email, she has travel confirmations that coincide with the pictures. And she has an entire portfolio with her luggage that we got at the hotel. The photos have her marking in the bottom right corner. I’m assuming she’s H.L. Sinclair. I did a search on the name. She’s idolized in the photography world as an extreme weather photographer. Hell, she sounds more like my kind of woman than yours.” Tate grinned at Jason. “She must have some balls to be traveling to every corner of the world for that kind of shit.”
“She doesn’t have balls,” Jason snarled as he looked through all of the pictures that Hope had apparently taken. “Jesus Christ. What in the hell has she been doing?”
“Taking photos, apparently. She got a degree in fine arts with an emphasis on photography. I saw it in her biography.”
Jason scowled at the computer screen. He’d known she’d gotten a degree in fine arts, but he hadn’t known she was a photographer, and now it pissed him off that Tate knew more about Hope than he did. Why hadn’t he known? Maybe it was because he’d spent years trying to control himself around her, used every ounce of willpower he had not to toss her over his shoulder and take her away somewhere, anywhere with him. “I guarantee her brothers don’t know. They would have locked her up and thrown away the key if they’d known she was doing this shit.”
“That’s probably why she never told them,” Tate mused philosophically. “She’s a grown adult, man. She can do whatever she wants.”
“Not this,” Jason replied angrily. “She can’t be traipsing around the world, throwing herself into danger.” Every hair on his body stood up in alarm as he viewed some pictures of what was a hurricane, typhoon, or cyclone. It was hard to tell where the photos had been taken. All Jason knew was that Hope had to have been sheltering there during the damn storm. She had captured the shot just as a roof was torn from a building, the picture horrifying evidence of the violence of the tempest she’d thrown herself into.
“Of course she can go. She’s a grown woman,” Tate argued reasonably.
Jason wasn’t feeling reasonable. “She’s mine now,” he snapped back at Tate.
“She wasn’t yours when she took the pictures, and you snatched her out of Vegas, not knowing who she really is now. You’ve seen her what—a handful of times as an adult? You can’t expect her to stop her life because she got drunk and followed you here willingly just because she was three sheets to the wind.”