Free Dangerous Protector (Aegis Group Book 5) by Sidney Bristol Page B

her. And it sure as hell wasn’t in the background he’d dug up on her. Nothing about her mother or any of it. But now he had a timeline. At seventeen, everything had changed. What else happened to her? Who was Fiona really?
    “Why the SEALs? If you don’t mind me asking.” Fiona shifted, turning toward him.
    He checked the odometer and did some quick math. It was an easy three hundred and sixty miles from her place to his place. At least six hours, thanks to the summer construction in the mountains. And they hadn’t even been in the truck for an hour.
    It was going to be a very long trip.
    And the truck had no working radio.
    “Someone had to do something. I figured that someone could be me.” He shrugged. His cousin and his career history, two topics he’d rather not discuss, and here they were.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “I was a kid, doing nothing but having fun on the river. Then 9-11 happened and…it all changed. I figured, if we couldn’t save Daniel, I could save someone else. So I did.” And he’d gone, because someone had to do the right thing, and he had to get out of Moab.
    “Wow. I’m in awe of people like you. I couldn’t do that.”
    “You were—what? Twelve? Thirteen?”
    “Something like that. Eleven or twelve. My birthday’s in November.”
    “Exactly. You were a baby. You probably did the smartest thing you could. We had great intentions in the beginning but…” Marco shook his head. “Sometimes it feels like we lost sight of the real goal. I’m the last guy who should be in charge, but there were times I wasn’t sure what it was we were doing.” And then there was Ghost… Marco was pretty positive one or two of those missions with the shadow soldier had nothing to do with saving lives or making the world a safer place.
    “Doesn’t everything come back to money?”
    “A lot of times, yeah.” Hell, even with her it was money. NueEnergy wanted to bypass costly waste disposal requirements by pumping the gunk into the rock. Who knew how much money they were saving while making their waste someone else’s problem?
    “Money, the root of all evil.” She stared out the window at the mountains. “What’s Moab like? I’ve never been there before.”
    “It was mostly a mining town until the seventies. Then some smart people decided that, hey, we have a great stretch of river, lots of really cool rocks, let’s make something of it. And now life revolves around tourists, the salt mine, and a little farming here and there.” He glanced at her, and wished it was the spring. They could take an ATV up to one of the natural hot tubs, strip down on the warm rock and…yeah, he needed to stop thinking that way before he got a boner.
    “You must hate that.”
    “No, not at all. When I was an eighteen-year-old bum, tourists enabled me to be on the water seven days a week if I wanted to. I was, and am, grateful for tourism, the life it provides my family. Without it, I don’t know where we’d be. But there is a price to pay.” He shifted in his seat and focused on the road ahead of them.
    “Like what?”
    “We’re starting to see a lot of property bought up by vacationers. Drives the price of homes up, out of a lot of people’s budgets. I guess the rest of the country would probably say the average Moab resident is on the poor side of the economic line, but we’re rich in history, community and culture. My family, for example? We’ve had land there that goes back generations to when my great-great—I don’t know how many greats—grandparents left a Navajo reservation to do something different.”
    “Are there a lot of Navajo people there?”
    “Not really. My grandparents are gone, so it’s my parents, my uncle and his wife, then some of our grandparents’ brothers, sisters and their kids.”
    “Wow, that sounds like a lot of people.”
    “It probably is, but this has been our home and a lot of the family stays around.”
    “But not you?”
    “I have a