Justine Davis - His Personal Mission

“Do you have someone missing? I’m here, just tell me what you need.”

What you need… That gentle, soft urging note had come into her voice, the tone that Ryan remembered so well. She could get a guy to eat broken glass with that voice, he’d thought then.

It hadn’t changed.

“Yes,” he said suddenly, not exactly sure what he was saying yes to. With an effort he shook off the effects of that voice. Thought about addressing her as Ms. Tereschenko, but that sounded so weird even in his head he abandoned the idea as soon as it formed.

“Sasha, it’s Ryan. Ryan Barton.”

“Ryan?”

Well, at least she only sounded surprised, and not like she had no idea who he was. That was something, he supposed, that she hadn’t forgotten him completely.

“It’s been a while. How are you?” She sounded, he thought, annoyingly cheerful.

“Okay,” he answered, not quite able to sound the same.

“I heard about you helping with Gabe Taggert’s missing wife. That was a good thing you did.”

He was warmed by the words, but didn’t like the fact. He didn’t want to care at all. So he said, “I didn’t do it. Ian’s new metal detector did.”

“But you ran it,” she said. “If you hadn’t found that car, he might never have known what happened to her. And I heard there were a couple of other missing persons cases closed because of the other things you found. Definitely a good thing.”

“Yeah, well,” he muttered, not knowing what else to say when he was thinking, If I’m so great, why did you walk away?

“So what are you—” She stopped suddenly. Then, quickly, “Wait. You said yes when I asked if you had someone missing.”

Thankful she’d made the change, he shifted into the real reason he’d called. “Yes. My sister. For a week.”

“Ryan, no!”

She sounded genuinely appalled, and that enabled him to get going on the things he’d planned to say.

“Yes. I know the foundation deals with children mostly, and Trish is eighteen, but only by five days. So the principles of searching can’t be much different, can they?”

“It’s very different looking for a teenager than a child,” she said.

“I get that. Look, if you can’t help, at least tell me how to start.”

“Ryan, I never said that.”

Her voice had taken on that gentle, coaxing tone again. Only this time it stung, made him think she’d put him into the category of frantic-relative-to-be-calmed. That that’s exactly what he was didn’t help any.

“Let’s meet. Russ and I are just finishing up the paperwork on a case, but it should only take another half hour or so, then I’ll be free.”

Great, Ryan muttered to himself. Russell C. Langer, resident stud, GQ -handsome and so smooth he made Teflon seem like sandpaper.

And so hot for Sasha it was infuriating.

Or had been. He had no right to be infuriated anymore. And maybe Russ wasn’t hot for her anymore.

Maybe he’d gotten what he wanted.

That thought made Ryan’s stomach knot. Sasha’s lively vividness and the polished, slightly older Langer’s practiced charm made for…well, the perfect couple. Especially when contrasted with his own laid-back geekiness. Russ was all that, and he was none of it. At best, his sister’s sometimes irritating friends called him cute, which was something he associated with little kids and puppies again, and thus not particularly flattering. Trish just told him he should be glad he didn’t look like a typical geek, but he hadn’t found much comfort in that.

“Shall I come there, or can you come here?” Sasha was asking.

There? At the foundation, where she and Russ were cozily working together? No way, he thought. I so do not want to go there.

Ryan shook his head sharply.

Trish, he ordered himself. Get back to Trish, she’s what really matters here, not your stupidity.

“Ryan?”

“I…Let’s meet in between.”

“Okay.” She didn’t seem to find anything odd in the request. “It’s lunchtime, how about at The Grill in an hour?”

“Great.”

He wasn’t at all hungry, but at least at the popular restaurant—known to locals as The Grill despite it’s longer name involving the street it was on and the ethnicity of the owner—he could have some coffee, or a soda, something to do instead of staring at her like that pesky pup.

It would make it easier to hide the truth, that he’d never, ever forgotten her.

Ryan Barton, Sasha thought as she leaned back in her chair. She certainly hadn’t ever expected to hear from him again. She’d known that he’d been bewildered by her sudden withdrawal, although she’d tried to explain. It wasn’t that she hadn’t liked him, she had. A great deal. It wasn’t that she didn’t have fun with him, she did. A great deal.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t attracted to him, she was. An even greater deal. Almost too much; she’d been nearly ready for a move to the next level, a sexual relationship, far too quickly for her comfort. There had been something about him that had, unexpectedly, appealed mightily to her. It wasn’t his short, almost spiky hair that was nearly blond at the tips; that was hardly her style. More likely it was his obvious intelligence, his ready grin, his quick, energetic way of moving, and the simple fact that he’d made it clear he was strongly attracted to her.

But none of that changed the bottom line, the one difference between them that she simply couldn’t get around. Ryan was cheerful, happy and carefree. The first two she liked. The last…well, it annoyed her. Ryan didn’t worry about much of anything, even things that should be worried about. He seemed to have a blind faith that everything would work out the way it should.

And Sasha Tereschenko knew better.

But he’d called with something that seemed to have finally gotten through to him, she reminded herself. For the first time since she’d known him, Ryan had sounded…well, worried.

Maybe he would finally learn that life wasn’t always a lighthearted skateboard through the park.

Quickly, she turned back to the paperwork she’d been working on when he’d called. If she pushed, she’d just make the time frame she’d given Ryan. She finished entering the text section of her report, then tackled the checklist at the bottom that would enter the case into their ever-growing database of cases, details and MOs in the case of criminal connections and the thankfully rare kidnappings.

When she was finally done, she attached the routing command that would complete the process. The computer software linked up with databases across the country, both law enforcement and private, and gave them an incredibly vast and broad-based pool of knowledge, statistics and case information to draw on. It was, to her knowledge, unique in the field, although thanks to Redstone, which had funded its development, it was being put into use all over the country.

And it had been written by Ryan Barton.

And there she was, back to the big conundrum. Shouldn’t he get credit for that? Shouldn’t the fact that he was making it easier for places like the Westin Foundation to find missing and endangered children count as evidence he wasn’t utterly carefree?

She’d thought so. In fact it was one of the reasons she’d agreed to go out with him in the first place. But she’d learned early on it had been the challenge of making it work, not the desire to help, that had truly driven him. That was Ryan; he thought his blessed computers could do anything, if you just programmed them right. That his work often helped people was just a side effect.

Not that that didn’t please him, but his focus was the machines, not the people. And that—