What He Explores (What He Wants, Book Twenty-One) by Hannah Ford Page B

told you assholes to leave me alone. When will you listen?”
    “Just wait a minute and—“
    “No, you wait a minute,” I said, and already my blood was boiling again. “I told you to stop bothering me. Stop calling me, stop trying to find me. And you better listen to me or else you’ll wish you’d never heard of me. Got it?”
    There was a long pause. “We’re not going to stop until we find you.”
    And then the line went dead.
    “Fuck you!” I shouted, slamming my already battered fist into the steering wheel so hard that the entire truck shuddered a little, swaying on its shocks.
    My shoulders were so tight that I was getting a tension headache. I shook my head, muttering to myself, then hit the gas and guided the car back onto the road, driving towards home.
    Tonight wasn’t going to be easy.
    Sleep wasn’t going to just happen, not after me blowing my stack like that. Not just once, but twice that night, I’d lost my shit and it had put me in a bad place.
    At the next stoplight I pulled up the contact list on my phone and began to cycle through all the women I had on tap. There were literally dozens of possibilities, but as I went through one after the other, I kept getting the strangest feeling.
    It was as if all of the fun and interest had gone out of my list, the list that I’d been cultivating ever since I got home from Afghanistan.
    How many times had I gone to that well, and how many times had it worked its magic for me?
    Some hot, ready little slut who’d come over at any time of the day or night to get what I had to give.
    I’d never failed to come up with at least one name to get my juices flowing, if not a few. Hell, there were some nights in recent memory when two or three of them were happy to come over at once and be in on it together.
    But suddenly I was bored, sick of it all.
    And I knew why, in flash.
    Because not a single one of them was her.
    I didn’t want any of them. I wanted Caeli.

    C AELI
    One of the worst parts about living in one place your whole life is that everyone knows you and you know everyone else. Even the cops.
    That’s what I was thinking as two officers questioned me while they carted my cousins away in three ambulances that had responded after the fight.
    We stood in the parking lot, caught between the headlights of the various vehicles that had pulled in and were idling now, the exhaust fumes heavy in the air.
    One of the cops questioning me was Jamie Grubbs, a guy I’d gone to grade school with. When we were little, we’d been friends. He’d always been a bit strange, even then, and his name seemed to suit him.
    Grubbs.
    His hands had always been dirty, especially under his fingernails, and as he took notes on a small, battered notepad, I couldn’t help but notice that his fingernails were still dirty.
    I started to smirk and he glanced up at me and frowned.
    “Something funny, Caeli?” he asked, looking perplexed.
    “Nope,” I said, shaking my head and showing him how serious I was taking this.
    And it was serious. My cousins weren’t that badly hurt, but they were busted up and angry. Even as they were being loaded into the ambulances, I heard them shouting and swearing about what they were going to do when they caught that guy.
    Zack Wild.
    Nobody knew his name but me.
    “So you say he was just sitting out here in the bed of his truck?” Jamie asked, while his partner, Rex McCallister looked on quietly, watching me through squinty eyes.
    “Yeah, just sitting there,” I nodded.
    “Why do you suppose he was doing that?” Jamie asked.
    “How should I know?” I said.
    “I mean, that seems a little strange,” Jamie replied. He scratched his cheek and sniffed, then wiped at his mustache, which was wispy, and strands of it hung over his upper lip.
    “I guess it was strange. Maybe he knew them or something…”
    “They said they’d never met him,” Jamie interrupted, watching me now with suspicion in his eyes. “All three of your cousins said