Page 34 of Stolen Hearts

* * * * *

Denver burst into his bedroom and shut the door behind him. For what he planned to do, he needed to be alone, away from prying eyes. In time, he would tell his family what Rhae told him.

Robert Ravencroft.He repeated the name to himself, carving it into his mind like a target.

This wasn’t just some asshole with a warped idea of family. Rhae had spent months hiding here on the ranch. And before that…hell, he didn’t know where she was.

Thinking of a strange man standing at the daycare window watching Denver’s child had him curling his hands into fists.

The man had been too involved in Rhae’s life, but no more. Denver was going to find him and put a stop to what he was doing.

Rhae had run long enough. Now it was Denver’s time to hunt.

His old childhood bedroom was like all the other rooms in the house, a mix of faded memories and new additions that reflected adult life. At some point in his absence, Willow had removed his rickety old bunkbeds and replaced them with a king-sized bed. The walls that were once gray had been transformed to a smokey blue the color of the mountain view through the window.

And there was a new desk butted against one wall. The first thing he’d done after his medical release was buy a laptop, and he opened it now, plunking into the desk chair to get to work.

He opened a privacy-focused web browser and got to work. First, he planned to find Rhae and then work backward to find the snake.

He sifted through social media, Google searches and made some deeper dives into the banks and city records. What he found…was nothing.

No checking accounts. No records on the car she drove. No networks with other professionals.

Essentially, Rhae had been a ghost until his sister added her to the Black Heart Therapy Ranch website. But now that he deleted that information, the link was dead.

Fuck. She was a dead woman walking. He was a dead man walking.

The sounds of the house faded into the back of his awareness as he continued to dig. When he found a bunch of search engine alerts set on her, a thread of certainty wove through him.

Leaning closer to the screen, he began tracing them, hacking them in reverse.

And tracked the alertsstraight tothe guy.

Denver rocked back in his seat, eyes fixed on the screen. One of his headaches was growing behind his eyes. Before long, it would spread to his vision and wipe it out in a blinding migraine, and the low ringing he always heard in his ears would increase.

That fucker was trying to find her, and recently too. The latest search alert was dated two weeks before.

Thank god Rhae never revealed her location.

The fact that she managed to hide herself without a trace filled him with a sense of pride. She’d always impressed the hellout of him with her quick brain and knowledge of people and the world, but this was next level.

One question continued popping up in his mind when they had their discussion about who she was running from. She said Robert Ravencroft sold the business. So where did her father’s portion go?

Ten minutes turned into twenty as he fell down rabbit hole after rabbit hole. He searched records of sale and tax records related to the business connected to Ravencroft.

“Ah.” He sat back in his chair again, staring at the words on the screen.

Rhae received an inheritance following her parents’ deaths. A sizable one.

No one could accuse her of being with him for money…not that she knew what his family had either.

After their old man died, he and his siblings sold the ranch in Texas and made a killing off it. That they then dumped into several lucrative investments and sank more into the ranch in Wyoming.

Carson took a portion of his dividends to start the security company, while Oaks funded the therapy program. Colt and Gray were busy working with government contracts to train military personnel on the ranch, and Willow had her horses and horse therapy.

Their money compounded so damn fast that they left it up to their financial advisor to tell them what they could or couldn’t spend when it came to high-priced items, such as the family jet that benefitted the security company.

He tapped a fingertip on the desk.

---