She shook her head. “New York. I just can’t imagine you there.”
“Why?” he asked, leaning closer.
Her eyes ran over him and narrowed ever so slightly. “You’re a cowboy. You can’t hide it. Even with all this…”—she waved her finger up and down, motioning to him—“slickness.”
He swallowed. No one had ever guessed what was at his core before. How long had he worked to hide his roots? Every time he went undercover, he worked hard to become who he needed to be.
Wyatt Stokes was a slick bartender who had worked in a posh New York nightclub. A man born in an upper-class family and raised in the big Apple, by Bob and Mary Stokes. A spoiled man who had been given everything, much like the woman sitting in front of him now.
Instead of Wyatt Nicholas, born on a ranch in West Texas, raised by a single dad, who would willingly give up his last dollar to help a stranger. A man who had lost his first wife to a sniper rifle shortly after Wyatt had been born. His mother had willingly given her life to her country. His father had then had to suffer two more losses. His only daughter had been taken from him in a horrific way and, shortly after, he would lose his second wife to cancer.
Wyatt’s mother was the main reason he had joined up shortly after graduation. His sister had been the reason he’d joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Now, after five years of working for the FBI, Wyatt had no issue portraying whomever he needed to do his job and protect strangers. Or so he’d thought.
“Cowboy?” He chuckled. “I’ve been called a lot of things before, but never a cowboy,” he joked, hoping it would detour Jade.
Thankfully, she was quiet for a moment before turning back to her computer. “Is there anything else?” she asked as she typed.
He thought about prolonging his time with her. He told himself that it was so he could better assess who Jade was. But in truth, he too was fighting a hint of attraction.
“Why are you here?” he heard himself asking her.
She stopped typing and turned back towards him. “Pardon me?”
“Why are you here?” he asked again. “Why here? Why not stay in Miami? From what your father has told me, you’ve never really liked this place.” He motioned around the room.
She shifted until she was almost leaning on the desk. “There were times I couldn’t stand the Emerald,” she said after a moment of silence.
“And now?” he asked.
She smiled after a moment. “Now, I’m here.” She turned back to her computer. “I’ll see you later this evening.”
He’d been dismissed, yet he sat there, watching her for another heartbeat before finally getting up and walking slowly out of the room.
Leaving the upper floors, he headed to the basement level of the massive building. Here, he stepped into his small office, a space where he knew he wouldn’t be watched or interrupted.
For the next hour, he worked on his secure laptop and once more went over everything they had on Jade Oswald.
He’d read all about how her twin, Amber, who had been born five minutes behind Jade, had gone missing from the family’s home on June tenth, twenty-three years earlier.
There were pictures of the happy family, of the twins, and then pictures of only Jade, sitting on a sofa dressed in swimming attire, clutching a doll to her chest, looking sad and lost.
He read and then reread the police report about when Jade had lost her twin before heading up to work.
A four-year-old goes missing from her very own home. Wasn’t that why he was in the Bahamas now? Missing children?
Kids, four of them to be exact, had gone missing from this very resort in the past year and a half. Thankfully, three of them had been found less than six months after they’d disappeared. The older kids had no recollection of how they’d gotten off the island or what they had been doing prior to being taken. It was assumed that they had been drugged.
One of the teens had been found thanks to a large bust in Texas that had seen more than four hundred upstanding citizens arrested on child pornography charges. The other had been found just outside of Vegas in a motel where she’d stabbed her captor after suffering acts that no sixteen-year-old—or any person, for that matter—should be forced into.
The third, a child of only two, had been sold to a young couple who couldn’t have children. They’d been told the child was an orphan and that the channels in which they had adopted the little boy were legit. They’d been heartbroken at first, then relieved that the child had been returned to his rightful family.
The fourth, a fifteen-year-old boy, was still missing. The boy’s parents were sure their son had run off on his own since the last time they’d seen him was in the resort bar, flirting with a hot redhead in a short skirt.
Which is where he came in and why he was currently standing behind a bar serving drinks to a slew of tourist.
The main bar was just to the side of the largest restaurant in the resort. By day, there were thick white columns and a high-top, L-shaped granite bar with high-back stools. By night, hanging purple neon lights changed the environment from family friendly environment to a sleek and sexy nightclub atmosphere.