My heart sank.

  Shit!

  I really didn’t like thinking about Torie in any kind of pain, either.

  “Why is she out there alone? Doesn’t she have hiking buddies?” I questioned Chase.

  “Torie likes to do solo trips sometimes to clear her head, but it’s actually been quite a while since she’s been out on any trail,” he explained.

  “I’ll find her,” I promised Chase. “And I’ll get her injury checked out.”

  “Thanks, man,” Chase replied, sounding relieved. “Torie won’t be happy that I sent someone to check on her after she told me she was okay.”

  I finally hefted the pack over my shoulder and reached for the keys to my Range Rover. “I’ll do my best not to make it obvious that you sent me,” I told him.

  “She’ll know,” Chase said unhappily. “Her intuition is scary. I doubt she’ll believe it’s a coincidence that you just happened to show up in that park.”

  “You’re probably right,” I agreed. “She seems too damn smart to buy that, but I’ll do my best.”

  “So you two have obviously met now that she’s volunteering at Last Hope,” Chase surmised.

  I dropped my pack into the passenger seat and got into my vehicle. “We have,” I answered, hoping he wouldn’t ask more questions.

  Chase and Wyatt had arrived in Europe a month or so before Torie had decided to join Last Hope, a volunteer private rescue organization that we all belonged to now.

  Until very recently, Last Hope had consisted solely of guys who were previous special forces members. We took on foreign rescue operations that the government wouldn’t touch.

  Torie and my brother Jax’s girlfriend, Harlow, had been the first two women to join the secret organization because we’d needed the services they were offering.

  Harlow was a weather specialist.

  Torie was a linguist.

  My first meeting with Torie had happened at Last Hope headquarters in downtown San Diego nearly two weeks ago.

  I’d done my best to avoid her at headquarters ever since.

  It wasn’t like we hung out together, but yeah, we’d…met.

  “I always assumed you two would get along,” Chase mused.

  “Why?” I questioned dryly as I got on the freeway. “Just because our IQs are both so high that it makes us freaks of nature.”

  Torie was intellectually gifted, just like I was, but her talents obviously leaned more toward the languages, while mine were more generalized in reasoning abilities and logic.

  “It’s not just that,” Chase replied, ignoring my sarcasm. “You two actually have a lot in common. Torie likes the outdoors. You’re both hikers, and she shares your love of reading and history. Although I have to admit that you’re both so stubborn that you might just end up clashing.”

  “I’m not stubborn,” I grumbled.

  Chase chuckled. “Says the man who hasn’t gotten laid in over a year because his girlfriend was stupid enough to dump him so she could marry an idiot.”

  I wasn’t even going to argue about his assumption since it was true. For the most part, anyway. “Fuck off, Durand. You know nothing about my sex life.”

  And even if he did know that I was having a long dry spell, I doubted very much that he’d want Torie to be the woman who fixed that particular problem.

  No doubt Chase had hoped that Torie and I would become friends, not lovers.

  “I’ll let you get away with telling me to fuck off since you’re helping me out,” Chase answered with a chuckle. “How are things going at Last Hope? We’ve been an all-male organization for so long that it has to be strange to have women at the headquarters.”

  “Having Harlow and Torie on board helps a lot,” I admitted reluctantly. “It’s great as long as the two of them stay safe,” I replied. “It’s not the fact that they’re female that concerns me. It’s their lack of experience in rescue situations. Both Harlow and Torie have incredibly valuable skills, but I don’t want to see either one of them in a situation they aren’t trained to handle.”

  “They won’t be,” Chase assured me. “We’ll all be watching out for both of them, and they’re perfectly safe at headquarters. The place is harder to get into than Fort Knox. Neither one of them will ever be present on missions. Fuck knows that Jax isn’t about to see Harlow do anything that might harm a hair on her head.”

  “No, he definitely won’t,” I agreed. My brother practically lost his shit if his girlfriend got a hangnail. Not that I didn’t understand that—to a point—since Harlow had been a captive and put through hell and back during that kidnapping. Jax would give up his own life before he’d see Harlow in any kind of danger.

  The same with my brother Hudson when it came to his fiancée, Taylor, the second victim in the same kidnapping as Harlow’s.

  I shook my head as I got onto the freeway.

  My two older brothers were completely screwed when it came to the women in their lives.

  Honestly, I never thought I’d ever see Hudson or Jax fall so hard, but the two of them were thoroughly lost. Furthermore, they didn’t seem to give a damn if they never found their way back to sanity again.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Taylor and Harlow. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for two better women for my older brothers.

  I just wished Jax and Hudson weren’t so damn…obsessive and irrational when it came to Taylor and Harlow.

  Love had made both of them lose their minds, but they were such happy lunatics that it was hard not to be glad for both of them. Hell, if spending the rest of their lives half insane was what they really wanted, I wasn’t going to keep reminding them that they were completely illogical when it came to the women in their lives.

  “Since we rarely get out in the field anymore, we’ll all take turns making sure they’re safe while they’re helping out at headquarters,” Chase told me earnestly.

  “Do you ever miss it?” I asked Chase before I could stop myself.

  “What?”

  “Doing the missions ourselves?”

  Since Hudson, Jax, and I had pretty recognizable faces, we’d stopped running the actual rescue missions ourselves a few years ago.

  Even though we avoided the press as much as possible, three billionaire brothers had a very hard time dodging the media all the time.

  Wyatt and Chase had quit going into the field for the same reasons.

  We’d known that if anyone recognized our faces, even our victims, that Last Hope would lose that edge of secrecy that had helped us be so successful with so many missions over the years.

  It wasn’t like our skills at strategically planning the missions weren’t important, but sometimes it sucked to hand over a planned op to someone else to carry out. It definitely wasn’t something any of us had done when we’d been active duty in special forces.

  Sometimes, handing those missions over to someone else to execute still felt unnatural, even though we knew it was necessary, and we’d been doing it for years now.

  “I do miss it,” Chase confessed in a low, thoughtful voice. “But I have to have faith in the men we’ve taken on as volunteers. I don’t want my identity to jeopardize any current or future rescue operations.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Last Hope is the last organization of its kind, so I’m willing to do almost anything to make sure we’re not outed.”

  “I’m not gonna lie,” Chase confessed. “There have been plenty of times I’ve wished I could tag along instead of executing everything from headquarters.”

  “Me, too,” I admitted.

  Chase chuckled. “We need that brain of yours at headquarters, Coop. You’re a lot more valuable in mission problem solving at headquarters than you are in the field.” He hesitated for a moment before he added gruffly, “Thanks for doing this for me.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” I said, meaning every word.

  What Chase was asking me to do was a small favor.

  The only thing making it difficult was how badly I wanted to get Torie Durand naked.

  I kept my mouth shut. My difficulty keeping my dick under control when I saw Torie wasn’t an issue I ever planned on sharing with her older brother.

  Torie

  A little more than two miles.

  I’ve got this.

  It’s not all that far to get back to my vehicle.

  “God, I’m so full of shit,” I mumbled. Every damn step felt like a mile, and two more miles was going to feel like fifty in the condition I was in right now.

  I winced as I kept putting one foot in front of the other at a snail’s pace.

  Shit! Shit! Shit!

  I’d walked this hiking route dozens of times when I was younger, and it had never been this painful before.

  It had also never taken this damn long to hobble back to the parking lot, either.

  I sighed and took the last few sips of my water before placing the empty bottle back into a small day pack.

  I was still thirsty, but I wasn’t about to fall over from heat exhaustion.

  In fact, even though the day had been pleasantly warm for January, it was starting to cool off now that the sun was getting lower.

  I tried to console myself with the thought that the rest of the walk wasn’t too horrible. At least I was beyond the massive stairway on this particular trail. The terrain was a little rough in a few places, but the worst of the trail was over.

  What in the hell had I been thinking when I’d scrambled over that stupid boulder?

  It wasn’t like I’d had to get over it.

  It wasn’t in the middle of the trail.

  I’d just wanted a better vantage point, so I’d scrambled up, and hadn’t been careful enough when I’d decided to hop back down.

  Dammit! It wasn’t like I didn’t know better than to get too cocky on any hike, even one I’d done dozens of times here in San Diego before I’d gone off to college.

  Not to mention the fact that I hadn’t been out on any trail in over a year, so most of my hiking skills were rusty.

  That should have made me extra careful, right?

  Nope. It hadn’t. I’d managed to tweak my ankle on my first time out in ages on a fairly easy hike.

  I grimaced as I tried to pick up my pace, knowing if I didn’t start to hustle, I was going to end up out on this trail after dark.

  I tried not to allow panic to start taking over my brain at the thought of being alone in the dark.

  I was pretty much over that, right?

  I’d done plenty of nighttime walks to desensitize myself, but somehow, being alone and injured felt slightly…different.

  You’ll be fine, Torie. Just keep moving. Keep focused on getting to the parking lot right now.

  Since it was getting late and it did get dark pretty damn early this time of year, I wasn’t really encountering many other hikers on the trail, which was fine with me.

  I felt like a total idiot, and the fewer people who witnessed my humiliation, the better.

  I’d done some of the most hardcore hikes in the world, and here I was hobbling out of an urban regional park in San Diego like a damned novice.

  Worse yet, I’d worried my brother, and I hated that.

  I’d put Chase and Wyatt through enough over the last year or so. Not that either one of them had complained. They’d simply delayed going to Paris until they felt comfortable leaving me alone in San Diego.

  I sighed as I forced myself to keep moving. I’d traveled to Paris to spend Christmas with my brothers, but I still missed them.

  I probably shouldn’t have answered my cell phone when Chase had called earlier, but I’d been so damn miserable that I’d wanted to talk to someone.

  Unfortunately, I sucked at trying to hide anything from my brothers.

  Chase had recognized the fact that I was uncomfortable, and he’d nagged the hell out of me until I told him that I’d tweaked my ankle out here.

  I’ll call him once I get to the car, let him know I’m okay.

  I’d promised Chase he’d get a call the second I was in my vehicle, so the sooner I got there, the better.

  I pushed on, resigning myself to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to get out of the park by nightfall.

  There was just no possible way I could move fast enough to be in my car by the time it got dark.

  Beyond the fact that I still had a few irrational fears of being alone in the dark, there were other reasons I didn’t want to be out here once the sun had set.

  Yeah, I had the flashlight on my phone, so I had something I could use if I couldn’t see the trail, but I wasn’t exactly prepared for a night hike, and didn’t have the equipment I needed—even if I’d wanted to hike in the dark.

  Although this was a regional park in San Diego, there were coyotes, mountain lions, and other nocturnal wildlife I’d prefer not to encounter today.

  I sure as hell won’t be able to run or get away. Almost any animal out here—except for maybe a turtle—is faster than I am right now.

  I was so busy watching my step and wallowing in my pity party for one that I never noticed when someone else started keeping pace right beside me.

  “You really don’t look like you’re enjoying this particular hike,” Cooper Montgomery commented as he casually strolled along next to me with his hands in his pockets.

  My eyes shot up to his face and I stopped abruptly in the middle of the trail.

  I bit back a groan.

  Dammit!

  If there was one single person on Earth I didn’t want to talk to right now, it was Cooper. “What are you doing here?”

  He shrugged. “Just out for a little hike, same as you.”

  I snorted. “You’re a lousy liar. What you really mean is that my brother Chase called you because he was worried about me.”

  Really? Did he honestly think I’d fall for the I-just-happen-to-be-out-walking-in-this-park-too bullshit?

  I had to force back a sigh as I took in his appearance.

  God, he looked amazing in a long-sleeved, navy-blue Henley, jeans, and a pair hiking boots.

  He hadn’t even worked up a sweat.

  Cooper’s physical appearance was annoyingly perfect. He kept his blond hair clipped fairly short and it was always so neatly groomed that I was tempted to spear a hand into his hair and mess it all up a little. Just so he wasn’t quite so stunningly flawless.

  Problem was, I had no doubt that a disheveled, just-rolled-out-of-bed look would probably be even more appealing on him.

  Cooper had a pair of unusual, piercing, light blue eyes that appeared to look almost like they were lightly brushed with frost. Maybe that particular color should have made his eyes look bitterly cold, but strangely, it didn’t.

  His tall, muscular body was honed like it belonged to a guy who pushed himself to his physical limits. Cooper was tall and ridiculously muscular, just the type of guy who I could easily find intimidating, but for some reason, I never had.

  He frowned at me. “Is it that unbelievable that I just happened to be out for a hike? It actually is one of my hobbies. And I’ve also used this park to do daily runs more times than I can count.”

  I nearly snorted. I could buy that he took some runs here, but the idea that he walked or hiked here was ludicrous. There would be zero challenge for him on these paths.

  I nodded. “The whole idea is absolutely unbelievable. You’d never hike here, and it would be totally illogical to believe in a coincidence this big. Plus, I know my brother. He’s worried, and since he can’t be here, it’s logical for him to send someone who he considers the next best thing to being here himself.”

  In my mind, sending in a guy to rescue me who was previous Army Green Beret who packed a Glock at all times was probably overkill, but I doubted Chase thought the same way.

  Cooper didn’t confirm or deny before he instructed, “Sit down on that big rock over there. I want to look at your ankle.”

  “No need,” I assured him nervously. “It’s not broken. I’m walking on it.”

  Sure, I found Cooper attractive aesthetically, but I was still a little uncomfortable about being touched by a man I didn’t know.

  “Humor me,” he insisted in a no-nonsense baritone.

  I doubted that I was going to get rid of him until I did as he requested, so I sat. I was too disheartened to do anything else. “I’m not sure how easy it will be to get my boot back on after you’re done looking at this ankle.”

  My ankle had swelled nearly to the size of a grapefruit, and once it was out of the boot, I wasn’t confident it would go back in again.

  “Not a problem,” he answered gruffly as he squatted down and untied the laces on the hiking boot and started gingerly pulling it off my foot. “Christ! Your ankle really is swollen.”

  Hadn’t I just told him that?

  I flinched as he gently tugged my boot completely off. Not because Cooper was touching me, but because it freaking hurt. “It’s worse than it was a mile ago,” I admitted as I examined my ankle with a frown.

  He looked up at me and quirked a brow. “You think? That’s what usually happens when you put additional stress on an already injured ankle.”

  “It’s not like I had much choice unless I wanted to spend the night here,” I snipped.

  Crap! I got that Cooper had one of highest IQs in the world, but I wasn’t a complete idiot.

  I let out an exasperated breath. While I really appreciated the fact that he had responded when Chase had asked him to come check on my progress, I wasn’t in the mood for a lecture.

  Especially when that censure was coming from Cooper Montgomery.

  I doubted very much whether a guy as smart as Cooper would make such a stupid mistake.

  He was ridiculously…perfect.

  And for some reason I couldn’t explain, his opinion…mattered to me.

  Hell, I’d rather Chase had sent a complete stranger that I’d never have to see again.

  “I don’t have as much medical training as Jax does,” Cooper said as he palpated my ankle. “But I think you’re right. I don’t think it’s broken, but you definitely tore a ligament. It’s bruising. That usually means there’s some bleeding into the tissues from the torn ligament. You can’t keep walking on this, Torie. It may not be broken, but it’s a bad sprain.”