Page 5 of Inexplicable
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “I was memorizing the details of the file. What did you say?”
“I didn’t really say anything important, and that’s total bullshit,” Nate scoffed. “Memorizing a file is second nature for all of us. Something is up with you today, and I don’t like it. You’re a little distracted. Talk.”
I let out a long breath.
There were times when being incredibly tight with the three men on my team could be annoying.
We could all read each other with very little effort.
Nate was right. I hadn’t been memorizing facts from this woman’s file.
I’d been studying her photo.
Get it together, Miller!
This woman was just another rescue, one of countless missions we’d done over the years.
The rescues were never personal, but there was something about this one that made me feel a little unsettled.
And it wasn’t the fact that this woman was pretty, even though she was definitely attractive with her deep-red curls, emerald-green eyes, and curvy body.
It was the solemn and vulnerable look in those brilliant green eyes that had captured my attention.
Since I didn’t want to admit that her background and her pictures had rattled me a little, I asked Nate, “When in the hell did the Mexican cartel start taking American women prisoner for trafficking? It’s unusual.”
Nate shrugged. “Wrong place at the right time to get kidnapped?” he questioned drily. “Hell, it’s not normal, but Marshall said women have been disappearing from the Rosarito area at an alarming rate for months now. Granted, she’s the first American woman to be captured, but the trafficking situation is obviously ramping up there. There’s been no contact and no ransom demands, so it isn’t surprising that they snagged her for trafficking.”
It made sense, but I hated that thought.
Marshall’s intel was always right, and this woman was being held in some kind of holding facility for human trafficking. They hadn’t moved her yet, but that didn’t mean that she hadn’t been hurt.
It wasn’t unusual for trafficking victims to be severely mistreated by their captors.
My gut twisted a little at the thought of a woman with Jenna’s history being abused by traffickers.
Christ! She deserved better than this bullshit.
“Jenna Moran isn’t the kind of woman who wouldn’t be missed at some point,” I commented. “Maybe she doesn’t have family, but she’s a well-known astrophysicist with millions of followers on her blog.”
According to her bio, she already had a stellar career at the age of thirty-two. She was gifted, and she’d flown through her bachelor’s degree and graduate school in record time. She’d done a quality dissertation and her postdoctoral research. She’d then taken a permanent position in an observatory in California, but she’d left that position very recently. A book offer had prompted her to pursue more writing than just her blog.
She didn’t really have hobbies.
She just…worked.
Almost everything she did had something to do with her love of science and space.
She was young to have that kind of background and a blog with millions of followers, so maybe that intrigued me a little, too.
I’d still been in Delta at the age of thirty-two.
She’d been through fourteen years of higher education and learning. She commanded a ton of respect for her expertise on the behavior of the universe.
Meteoritics appeared to be one of her specialty areas, which explained why she’d hightailed it to Mexico after a rare meteorite had hit that area.
Nate nodded. “She’s accomplished and high profile, but they probably don’t know that. Hell, even I follow her blog because she makes space mysteries easy to understand for a lay person. Honestly, I’m surprised that Last Hope ended up with this rescue mission instead of active special forces, but it makes sense that the government wants this woman recovered as quietly as possible. We don’t exist, which makes us less detectable than the military.”
Marshall, who operated Last Hope via a very high-tech secret headquarters in San Diego, had always told us that the government knew about Last Hope but chose to ignore our volunteer operations.
