No Strings Attached

Chapter Twenty Six

“Just Jayden – a man I’m proud to call a good friend. When he’s honest, and he lays things on the table and speaks to me, like a human being, rather than a fucking puppet.”

“I don’t treat you like a puppet!” He looked genuinely outraged, which was actually kind of farcical, how could a person live thirty years not knowing such a thing about themselves?

“You do, Jay!” pulling her turquoise trench coat over the pale pink mini dress she wore, she turned back to him on her heels, “You don’t mean to, I know that, but you do it anyway. I just don’t want you thinking that – because I’m a woman – I will be consoled to the fact that Nate is so far MIA with a couple of ginger nut biscuits and a girly catch up. I love that girl – I really do – but you will not use our relationship to pull the wool over my eyes, I still want answers. Let’s move, shall we?”

Jayden gritted her teeth together, staring at the beautiful young woman in front of him with new eyes.

“How the hell does Nate put up with you?” he sighed out huffily, before summoning her out of the front door.

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Two hours later, and Shannon had gnawed away at three quarters of the surface skin of each of her fingertips. There was still no word from Nate, and Jay was still dodging answers – even Tori was now clenching her teeth and shooting daggers at him.

“That’s it,” Shannon threw her arms in the air as she stood up from where Tori had been playing with her hair mindlessly trying to calm her obviously raging nerves, “Enough with this ‘privacy and confidentiality’ bullshit – you know how to get me onto that GPS tracker – now do it!”

“I swear to you Shannon, I don’t have a clue,” Jay said from the arm chair opposite – with his usual poker face and intense gaze on a very angry blonde woman that he happened to be ass over tit crazy in love with.

“Jayden!” Tori broke in quietly, “Do you have any idea of what’s at stake here? You expect us to believe that you don’t know the details for a GPS tracker that Nate had custom designed for that car. Who else would he have given the details to? What are we? Stupid?”

Jayden strained his neck against the cushions behind him in frustration, “I honestly don’t ...” suddenly he jumped to his feet, searching around for his iPad quickly, “I think I’ve got it. I think I know it ...”

As soon as he found it, he was tapping an address in for the garage’s server – very few people knew about Nate’s involvement with them, which made theirs the perfect server to run the system from. The wrong people would never look somewhere as small as their first venture for that kind of information.

“NSC250308,” Jay murmured quietly, “He uses it for everything, the idiot – I keep telling him it’s a fool idea, but he says it’s the only thing he can remember some days. Keep your fingers crossed that, as usual, he didn’t fucking listen to me...”

“250308,” Shannon whispered quietly, the only thing he could remember some days – for her too. It was the day he’d broken her heart, and shattered everything out of some idiotic notion of protecting her. Sobs rose in her throat quietly, and she fell back onto the sofa leaning into Tori – needing to feel that solid presence behind her, no matter how small and fragile the other girl was physically.