Page 47 of These Reckless Hearts

“It feels like the last time you marched off without me to stop Stone’s wedding.” Wyatt’s glare flickers with pain, temporarily shadowing his blue eyes.

Well, fuck. Yeah, I did do that. But.... “I told you I was going. I had to.”

“We didn’t want you to worry,” Lucas consoles, lips brushing my ear. “We didn’t know Stone was going to get himself shot.”

“Almostshot,” Stone clarifies. “It’s nothing.”

“So, what happened?” I break free of Lucas’ grip and stand at his side so I can watch the three of them. “Where’s Lance?”

Wyatt slumps back onto the couch. “Cole found out he was lying low in his Phoenix office. He’s had his people watching the building. All intel pointed to the fact that no one was going to be there, but evidently, Lance has more people than we figured because when we showed up, there was a slight scuffle and Stone got…injured. We naively believed that since Stone used to be a regular at the office that no one would bat an eye to him showing up. However, Lance let all of his old employees go. The whole floor has new personnel who didn’t recognize him.”

“We honestly didn’t think it would resort to any type of fighting whatsoever,” Lucas clarifies. “Stone was just going to search the office. We only took Cole and the Dragons as a precaution.”

I keep glancing at Stone. I don’t like his pallor, and my heart is dislodging my anger at this point. I finally relent and lean into him. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” he mumbles, avoiding my gaze.

“I’m fine, too. Thanks for asking, though I kind of hate you right now.”

“Lies,” he murmurs, his gray-blue eyes finally meeting my stare. “You don’t hate me.”

He’s so right about that. There’s no way I could hate him. “That doesn’t mean I like you at the present moment.”

“I gotta know…,” Wyatt starts, and from the tone of his voice, I know he’s about to say something ridiculous, “How did Lucas get his dick sucked but Stone took a bullet for your family’s stuff, and he hasn’t?”

“It was a graze,” I mimic. “Talk to me when he actually gets hit.”

“Harsh,” Wyatt quips.

Stone ignores the bantering, but I lean into it. Wyatt has a way of normalizing things. I’m still pissed beyond belief that they would come up with a plan to recover the ring and not tell me about it. I don’t care if they didn’t want me to worry. There may be a double standard in there somewhere since I also left Wyatt and Stone to confront Lance but, in these cases, a short memory is pardonable.

We’re all on edge.

Stone tangles his fingers with mine. “We need the piece of gold to confirm that your family’s vein matches whatever vein we find. It’s as important as the ring.”

“Once we find the treasure, we’ll know we’re in the right mining cave,” I tell him, trying to prove that we don’t need to take that many risks.

“We don’t know how many caves there are. What if there are several different tunnels? The mountains are filled with old shafts. It would be a lot easier to identify the right site if we could take core samples and match them up with the nugget. Since we’re going back into the mountains soon, hopefully to find the cave, I… it just felt really important to have that piece of gold, and now we don’t. My father does.”

I shrug because I get it. I fucking do, but I don’t think risking our lives to try to get that stuff is worth it. I have faith that one day it will be in my possession again, but until then, the treasure is the priority. “Are you even able to search with us now?” I ask, not liking the bright red on his bandage, but also realizing it’s pretty much dry. There’s no new blood, at least.

“It’s barely a scratch,” Stone remarks, giving the bandage a cursory once-over.

“He just wanted to be cool and have scars like us,” Wyatt playfully scoffs.

I bite my lip. He’s right, and I hadn’t thought about that. Each of them is now boasting scars because of this hunt. Wyatt’s knife wound. Lucas’s neck. Now Stone’s arm. “If you ask me, he got off too easy.”

Stone lifts his hand to flip his friend off.

“Plus, he’s now going to get all the attention instead of me,” Lucas teases.

“Yeah, I’m with Tits. We should hate him.”

I flick my gaze to the cowboy. “Your humor isn’t going to make me forget this happened, you know that, right?”

He shrugs. “It was worth a shot.”

“Try feeding her,” Lucas suggests. “She likes that.”

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