owe him that, and so much more.
As I opened my eyes, and squeezed his cool hand lightly, I told myself that I didn’t need to grieve yet. Mac was still with me, and I was going to appreciate every second I had.
He’d been my rock in the past, so it was time for me to be his damn boulder.
That was exactly what I did for the next several days, until the night that Mac had quietly left me, comfortably passing away in the middle of the night while I slept, curled up in a recliner beside his bed.
I crumbled because I didn’t need to be his boulder or his rock anymore.
For a long time, I was simply a mass of tiny pebbles, scattered a million different directions, before I found the strength to move on.
Hudson
The Present…
“Something needs to happen right fucking now. Three of our geologists were captured nine days ago while they were on a short exploration mission that should have been completely safe,” I said in a low growl to the other three people sitting around the large conference table at Montgomery Mining headquarters. “Why the hell we didn’t hear about any of this until today is irrelevant at the moment. Our focus is to get our other two Montgomery Mining team members out of Lania alive, and the clock is ticking right now.”
Generally, I didn’t lose my cool because I knew it was counterproductive as the head of this company, but at the moment, I was sitting at the very edge of my patience.
Probably the only reason I wasn’t going off right now was because one of those three team members who had been captured by guerilla forces was sitting at the other side of the large conference table, and she was fragile at the moment.
In fact, Harlow Lewis looked like she was barely capable of sitting upright for much longer.
I’d already fired the people responsible for not contacting my brothers and me the second they’d gotten word about the fate of one of our exploration teams.
I’d been gone to Seattle for nine damn days to attend my cousin Mason’s wedding festivities with my two brothers. It was the only time all three of us had been away from our San Diego headquarters for that long since we’d saved the corporation from the brink of going under. Still, it was nine damn days, right?
What could possibly happen without one of the three of us here in such a short amount of time?
Those optimistic, comfortable thoughts had been completely obliterated when my brother Jax and I had come back to the office this morning.
I’d learned that some really bad shit could happen in a hurry, even in a monster company like mine that usually worked like a well-oiled machine on a day-to-day basis.
I’d returned to a goddamn nightmare situation.
“We did tell our upper management that we would be unavailable for nine days,” my brother Jax mused aloud from his seat beside me.
“For fuck’s sake, I didn’t tell our executives not to call me if three of our employees were taken hostage and in a dire situation. I would definitely classify that as an emergency, in which case, I did tell them to call us. This isn’t a small issue; it’s a damn crisis, and we should have been involved in the hostage negotiation from the very beginning. We own the company.”
I took a deep breath, knowing I had to contain my edginess. I’d spent the last fifteen minutes listening to Harlow Lewis spill out her story between anguished sobs, knowing that if we’d been involved from day one, we wouldn’t be in the situation we were facing right now.
The FBI negotiation process had been too damn slow.
Nine days was an eternity to waste when you had a hostage in the hands of Lanian guerillas. They weren’t exactly known for their humane treatment of captives.
Apparently, upper management had negotiated Harlow’s release with FBI assistance in our absence, but we still had one man missing, and an intern in captivity who had been doing a summer internship under Harlow’s supervision.
Son of a bitch! How had three of our geologists ended up being captives of Lanian rebels in the first place? It didn’t make any sense.
Number one…now that the previously war-torn country had been at peace for several years, and a new generation of leadership had taken control, Lania had been on its way to becoming a highly desirable tourist destination in the Mediterranean.
Number two…all of the rebels were supposed to