Page 4 of Tracing Her Stolen Identity
Passcode, he mouthed, and she took the paper, scribbling the numbers down before handing it back to him. If he realized the significance of them, he didn’t say. Instead, he tore the paper off the pad and tossed the phone and the paper into the drawer.
“I’ll let my guys know where to find it, and they’ll take it to my boss.”
“Mina Jacobs?” Skylar asked, not surprised when he lifted a brow. That was always his “explain” action when they were kids. “Secure One and Secure Watch have made the national news multiple times, Reece. I don’t live in a cave. The Spiderweb site your friends pulled down still terrifies me when I think about it.”
Last year, the company he worked for might have saved the world in a roundabout way. They were involved in a situation on the dark web where one bad actor wrote a program that would slowly give him control over every camera in the world and the ability to collect all that data. The idea of that information in one person’s hands was terrifying, and she had looked at security cameras in a whole new light ever since.
“Fair. I suppose that’s why you called me?”
“No.” She glanced down at her lap rather than meet his eyes. The last thing Skylar wanted to see was his reaction to her following statement. “I called you because even though it’s been a decade since we’ve seen each other, I still trust you.”
In a blink, he was kneeling in front of her again, his hands on her wheels. “You can trust me, Sky.” His gazedarted left and right, maybe out of nervousness about the situation or because he kept using her childhood nickname despite his apparent desire not to. “Tell me what you need and I’ll gather it. I don’t want you to roll over any glass and get it stuck in your wheels. Remember what happened that one time?”
Her palm burned at the memory, and she held it up—a long, jagged scar puckered the skin even now, nearly a dozen years later. Reece ran his finger across the scar, sending a shiver of familiarity through her. He had always done that to her, and she was disappointed to know he still could. She’d thought she had Reece Palmer out of her head forever, but it turned out to be more of an out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing. “I suppose a trip to the emergency room for stitches would be inconvenient.” Her wink told him she was teasing when she dropped her hand to her lap. “That suitcase is packed,” she explained, pointing at the rolling suitcase in the hallway. “I just got back from a trip, but I need more meds.”
“Tell me where they are and I’ll grab them.”
“Lower kitchen cabinet to the left of the sink. But you don’t know what I need.”
Before she finished speaking, he was already walking to the kitchen. When he returned, he had a baggie full of pill bottles. He grabbed the one she’d set on top of the suitcase, stuffed it in and then unzipped the top of her bag to stash them. It wasn’t orderly, but it got the job done.
“Stay here while I take the bag to my truck, then I’ll return for you.”
“What if we’re overreacting?” she asked, rolling aside so he could get to the door with her suitcase.
“Do you want to find out?” Slowly, he raised his brow again as he waited for her answer.
Binate’s voice stuttered through her mind, and she shook her head as her heart rate picked up.
“I didn’t think so. Wait right there.”
Reece disappeared out the door, and she let out a breath for the first time since he’d walked through it. She’d done many hard things in life, but spending the next few days with grown-up Reece Palmer would be the hardest thing she’d ever done.
Chapter Four
Reece slowed the truck and turned left into an area where the houses were separated by acres of land. Each property butted up to Paul Bunyan State Forest on one side and Leech Lake on the other. It was an area of anonymity if he’d ever seen one.
It had been a two-hour drive he’d done in near silence. A glance to his left told him Sky was still asleep. He’d pretended not to notice when she pulled straps from her bag and placed them around her thighs and calves. Without looking at him, she explained it kept her legs from falling open, which was uncomfortable on her hips, and then she’d promptly leaned against the window and gone to sleep. At least she pretended to, but she’d been awake for the first half hour. He knew, because he’d often notice her eyes pop open to see what he was doing.
It was probably the same thing she was doing: trying to forget all the time they’d spent together as kids but unable to stop the memories—both the good and bad. They had been thick as thieves growing up. Not only did they live next door to each other, but all four of their parents were coworkers at a large manufacturing firm in town. They ran, biked and played together. He was an only child, andSky was the younger of two, but her brother, Silas, was already six by the time she was born, so they didn’t have a lot in common.
Skylar was younger than Reece by three months and three days, but you’d never know it by how she bossed him around when they were kids. Her bossiness had always embarrassed her mom, but Reece loved it. He always said she wasn’t bossy. She just knew what she wanted and how she would get it. There was something to be said about a girl with gumption, as far as he was concerned, and it had paid off for her. She had built an art empire, even if she didn’t see it, and knowing Skylar the way he did, she didn’t see it. She had always been driven to be better than she was the day before, which had kept her motivated to perfect her art.
Reece always thought it was strange that he’d had such a close relationship with Skylar as a kid. Their interests were so vastly different, but it never seemed to matter. Sky loved art—any art, from nature paintings to clay pottery. He loved playing cops and robbers, always fascinated by anything true crime-related. He loved comic books that told crime stories, and Sky, being who she was, loved to draw a choose-your-own-ending for the books just in case he didn’t like how the original one ended. A smile lifted his lips at the memory. Everyone had always said they were as close as brother and sister, but Reece never agreed. His feelings for Sky had never been brotherly. They’d been something else. Something deeper that he couldn’t explain. And then the accident happened, and everything changed.
Skylar had always been a sweet, beautiful, talented young girl, but now, she was a knockout. When he laid eyes on her holding that door open, her ice-blue eyes terrified, he’d lost the ability to breathe for a split second. Attwenty-one, she had been thin and sickly, still recovering from the accident at seventeen, but the last decade had changed all of that. She had curves now, and he wanted to run his hands down them to feel her again. To connect with her again in a way that would settle his soul for the first time in a decade.
She wore her blond hair in a ponytail, swinging side to side as she moved the chair around. She had always worn her hair up, and the few times he’d seen her with it down as a teenager always did something to his lower half that gave him internal embarrassment. He shouldn’t feel that way about the girl he’d grown up with, right? He’d asked himself that question almost daily in high school, but the answer had never been that simple.
A mailbox came into view, and Reece slowed the truck as he counted off the numbers until he found 1993 Cherry Hill Lane. 1993. That jogged his memory to earlier when she’d written down her phone passcode.
1 1 1993.
He’d been a New Year’s baby as 1993 dawned, making his birthday January 1. He hadn’t registered it then, but now the number hit him right in the gut. Did she purposely use his birthday as her passcode?
She shifted as though she knew he was thinking about her and blinked her eyes several times. “Where are we?”
“At a safe house owned by Secure Watch.”
