Wilder (The Renegades Book 1)

Madagascar

“Where the fuck is it?” I screamed at Bobby, tearing apart the file in Paxton’s room—our room. He was anal about one thing, the freaking permits, so I knew it had to be here.

“Leah, we’ve looked everywhere,” Bobby said softly.

“How is that possible? Where are the permits for the rest of the trip?” I asked.

Landon leaned against the wall, his arms folded against his chest. “He keeps the permits in his fire safe, and only puts out the ones for the next stunt. You watched me check the box, and it’s not in there.”

“What are we going to do?” They’d picked up Pax’s unconscious body, and when Landon had moved toward the officers, one had pulled a weapon on him, which I knew was the only reason he’d calmly handed over the other cameras.

There was no chance he’d endanger Penna’s life, or—as I was learning—mine.

But they had Paxton, God-knows-where, doing God-knows-what to him. I didn’t know what the punishment was here for hitting a police officer. Or what we could do to help him. “Do we call the embassy?”

“The ship is on it,” Penna promised, her knees tucked into her chest. “I hate feeling so goddamned useless.”

Brooke put her arm around Penna. “He’s going to be okay. He’s Paxton Wilder. They’d be insane to do anything to hurt him—not with who his dad is. When can we get in to see him? We’ve got to find that permit, and then all of this will be cleared up.”

“Until then, we’re dead in the water,” Landon said.

“We have until tomorrow night,” I added quietly.

“What do you mean?” Penna asked.

“Finals are during this leg between Madagascar and Abu Dhabi. If Pax isn’t back on board, he’ll miss finals, fail this term, and your funding is terminated.” I almost laughed. “The funny thing is that his grades are just another problem. I don’t honestly care about my scholarship. I’ll go home tomorrow if that would keep him safe.”

Landon wrapped his arm around my shoulders and pulled me into a hug, his taller, lankier frame comforting but only driving home how much I wanted Pax’s arms around me, his heartbeat against my ear.

“We’re going to do everything we can, Leah. There’s nothing we won’t do, no line we won’t cross to get him out of there. Okay?”

I nodded, the gears in my brain turning, looking for any solution, even the quasi-legal ones. He was Paxton Wilder, for crying out loud! His father was the head of a multibillion-dollar media company.

His father was going to kill him when he found out.

“You know…I think I’m going to lay down for a bit,” I said, forcing a smile.

“Yeah, of course,” Landon said, giving me a final squeeze before leaving, ushering everyone out but Penna.

“He’s going to be okay,” she promised. “You should see some of the stuff we’ve gotten into before.”

“In foreign countries?” I asked.

“Well, maybe it’s never been quite this bad.”

“I can’t imagine anything happening to him. I love him.” My voice broke.

Her eyes softened. “You know he feels the same, right?”

Did he? Even though he’d never said the words, I felt it every time he touched me, the way he told me that I was his everything. “Yeah, I think so. He’s never said it or anything. I’m not sure he’s capable of saying it.”

She nodded. “His parents’ divorce…what happened…” she trailed off.

“I know about the girl. About what happened the last time he tried to have a real relationship.”

Penna’s eyes flared in surprise and then she smiled. “I know he’s not perfect, but he cares about you in a way I’ve never seen him with anyone.”

“He loves me,” I said quietly. “He loves me.” I repeated with more conviction. “He doesn’t have to say the words for them to be true.”

“Just don’t give up on him, okay? Not in any sense.”

I forced a smile, knowing what I had to do, and what it might cost me. “We’ll figure it out. All of it.”

She hugged me. “I’m so glad he found you.”

I nodded, unable to say anything else for fear I’d tell her what I was about to do. With one final squeeze, she left me alone, closing the door behind her as she left.

Without hesitation, I opened Pax’s nightstand drawer first, pulling out his international cell phone, and then dug through my flex file of cruise papers to find the number I’d hidden. The card felt heavier now than it had when I’d taken it.

The bed sank under my weight as I sat down. My hand smoothed Paxton’s side, wishing he were here to leave the bed an unmade, rumpled mess, wishing I’d handed over the camera without a fight, done something to stop him from flying at the officer.

He might hate me for this, but like Landon said, there wasn’t a line they wouldn’t cross.

This was my line, Paxton’s line, and I crossed it with a simple press of my fingers to the numbers on the phone.

It rang twice before he picked up. “To what do I owe this honor?”

His voice…they were so similar, yet different enough to make my heart hurt.

“It’s Leah Baxter… You gave me your number—”

“I know who you are, Leah. What’s wrong?”

“Are you still in Paris? We’re in Madagascar, and Paxton’s in trouble. Big, scary trouble, and I don’t know how to get him out of it.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen hours, give or take the time it takes to locate the flight crew.”

A huge sigh of relief escaped me. In this, Paxton’s name could protect him. “Thank you, Brandon.”

“Don’t thank me, Leah. I can assure you that Paxton won’t.”

…

I dropped my bag on our bed the next day after spending the morning on the field-study trip for World Religion. Not that it had done me any good. My brain had been with Paxton, but at least the presence of my body gave me a check mark in the participation box for my grades.

There was a knock on the door and a two-second lull before it swung open, like it was a warning, not a request for entrance. “Good, you’re here,” Brandon said as he walked in, his suit ditched for jeans and a Henley, which made him look way more approachable, attractive, even.

“I’m so sorry, Leah,” Little John said from behind him.

“It’s okay, I called him,” I answered.

Little John’s eyes widened right before Brandon shut the door in his face.

“Okay, he keeps the permits in a fire-safe box…” Brandon muttered, throwing the cushion off the love seat by the window. “Here.” He lifted the box out of a cutout in the frame. “Paranoid son of a bitch, but I guess it’s working out in his favor.”

“We already checked the box, but how did you know about it?” I asked, walking over to where he placed it on the desk, working on opening it. Landon had been pretty clear that only the Originals knew where Paxton kept the permits, and Brandon didn’t seem the daredevil type.

“Because he told me when I saw him this morning,” Brandon answered as he popped the combination lock.

“Wait, you saw him?” I asked.

He looked up from the stack of manila envelopes. “Yeah. They let me in a few hours ago.”

“How does he look? Is he okay?” A thousand questions raced through my mind, but those were the most important.

“He looks like his face went a few rounds with an MMA fighter, but he’s okay. And funny, he asked me those exact questions about you.”

“They wouldn’t even tell me where they took him.” A surge of unwanted jealousy turned my words harsh.

“Well, your last name isn’t Wilder, and that changes things,” he said. “He’s going to be okay, Leah. We just have to find this permit. They’ll release him either way, our lawyers are seeing to that, but if he wants to keep his film, we have to find it.”

“We already looked through the box.”

His phone rang, and he cursed. “Shit. Looks like Dad knows. Leah, look through those files again and see if he stuck it in the wrong folder. He swears it was in there. I have to take this.”

He stepped out onto the balcony with his phone, and I pulled out the box, emptying its contents onto the dark blue comforter. There were files for each of our locations that looked exactly like the one Bobby had held while we were in the park yesterday, the same files I’d watched Landon search through earlier. I looked through every one from the start of the trip up through Abu Dhabi. One marked “Personal” caught my eye, so I opened the flap.

Please let him have misfiled it.

I pulled out the stack of papers and thumbed through. His birth certificate, his enrollment papers for Study at Sea, his contract with his father. For being as reckless as he was, Paxton had a better sense of organization than I gave him credit for. A smile ghosted my lips when I ran my thumb over his tutor assignment, my name standing in stark relief against the white paper.

Something so small as this sheet of paper had grown into this incredible love that pulsed so powerfully in my veins that my heart actually ached with the perfect weight of it.

A torn picture fell out of the stack as I lifted it, landing in my lap, photo-side down. On the back in Paxton’s handwriting was etched, “Don’t lose sight of the endgame.”

I flipped it over, and my stomach sank, my throat burning with bile as it rose.

No. No. No way. Not possible.

But that was Rachel. My Rachel…

Paxton’s Rachel.

His thumb brushed the tattoo of three ravens in flight under her right ear, and his mouth was on hers, the two smiling even mid-kiss.

He looked happy, adoring, like the woman he held was the sun in the sky.

He looked at her like he looked at me.

My heart cracked, the feeling so consuming that I could almost hear the rending, the strain as it finally snapped and broke apart.

I barely registered the sound of the sliding glass door opening and closing. “Okay, good news and bad. Good that the lawyers tracked down the permit in the appropriate system, so Pax’s cameras will be released. Also good that Dad got the charges dropped and they’re releasing Paxton now. Bad that my father knows— Hey, are you okay?” Brandon asked when I finally looked up to meet his eyes.

If they were as dead as I felt inside, he had every reason to worry. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I lied.

With a crease between his eyes, he walked over, gently taking the photo from my hand. “Rachel. Man, it’s been years.”

“They were together?” My voice sounded foreign to me.

“Yeah. She was always over at the house that summer after I graduated with my MBA,” he said.

“She’s my best friend,” I whispered.

His Paxton-like eyes widened, drifting between mine and the picture. “Oh, shit. That’s why…”

“Why what?” I demanded.

“Look, he cares for you. I knew that the minute I saw him with you in Barcelona, and I know you have feelings for him. Don’t do something irrational.”

“Why what?” I repeated, my voice louder, the ugly cry echoed in my hollow heart.

“Why he chose you as his tutor,” he said softly, damning Paxton with each word.

Every muscle in my body locked, unwilling to see how far the rabbit hole went. “I don’t understand.”

Brandon sighed, the asshole-ish look completely wiped off his face. “Why he had us offer a second full ride if you agreed to tutor him.”

So he could get Rachel on board.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said, bringing my knees to my chest.

“I’m going to get him. Do you want to come? Talk this out? I know there’s more to this. Like I said, Pax really cares about you.”

He cared about me, but I was wholeheartedly in love with him, and suddenly that difference, which hadn’t meant as much this morning, meant the world now.

My gaze dropped to the sheet I’d just been all swoony over, the tutor assignment, but this time, my eyes caught the sentence it had missed before.

“Dear Mr. Wilder, we’re happy to say that your request has been granted.”

I stumbled to my feet. All of it had been to get Rachel on board. Even my suite, which he’d been so adamant that I keep, was to keep her closer to him.

It was all for Rachel.

I was just the placeholder until she got here.

Barely making it to the toilet, I heaved up lunch, wishing the acid in my throat would burn the rest of me into ashes—wishing the hurt would simply cease. But I loved him, my whole heart was in, and now it felt like that heart was rebelling in the only way it could.

I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and leaned against the cabinet. Rachel.

Just the thought of Paxton kissing my best friend was enough to send my stomach into convulsions again.

She loved reckless boys, and Pax was the definition of reckless. God, it all fit together. I met her a few months after that picture had been taken—and she’d told me how wounded her soul had been by a guy she wouldn’t name.

The same way I couldn’t name him.

What lengths had he gone to get her on board? Screwing you, my shattered heart answered. He’d kept me close, tried to keep me happy to show me the trip of my life so I wouldn’t leave before she got here. He must have known that she wouldn’t come if I left.

Every moment had been carefully calculated to get my best friend here—to get her back into his arms.

I was nothing more than the means to his end.

My head rested against the smooth wood, and I closed my eyes against the bright bathroom lights that made everything all too clear.

I loved him.

He still clearly loved her if he’d gone through all of this to get her back. But he loved me, too, didn’t he? That look in his eyes, the way he touched me, how careful he was with me…that was love, whether or not he’d admit it. Or was I making that all up in my head, too?

What a fucking mess.

What was I going to do? Stand around and watch when Rachel showed up next week? Watch them fall back together while I slept in the room next door? I loved Rachel, I wanted the best for her, to see some spark of happiness in her eyes, but this…could I give up Paxton?

Was Paxton even mine to give up?

Stupid. I was so stupid. I’d let myself fall into him, his touch, his words…everything. Even our first kiss had been my initiation. Of course he’d gone for it, kept me happy. Kept me close. I’d slept with him, given him everything I had, while he what…pined for Rachel?

He’d used me, and it felt so dirty, so wrong, so opposite of how I’d felt when he touched me. Had he been thinking of her, his endgame, while he’d been with me? Kissing me? Inside me?

My stomach rolled again, and I heaved into the toilet.

“Leah…” Brandon said from the doorway.

“Just go,” I said.

I wanted nothing to do with any Wilder men. I was done, as empty as my stomach finally was.

“Is there anything you want me to tell him?”

“Take that picture with you. He’ll get the point.”