“I was online all night,” Hudson admitted.

Aidan knew Hud had been searching in earnest for his twin brother, Jacob. Not that they’d found hide nor hair of him.

More recently, and for more complicated reasons, Hudson had also been searching for their dad, much to Aidan’s frustration. He didn’t want that asshole within a thousand miles of here. “Please tell me you were up all night watching that cartoon porn again and not searching for Dad.”

In the way he’d been doing since he was a kid, Hudson set his jaw. And the big brother in Aidan sighed, knowing he’d come up against the brick wall that was Hudson’s stubbornness. “We’ve been over this, man. We don’t need him.”

“We do,” Hudson said. “And it’s not porn, it’s called anime. It’s an art form.”

Aidan shook his head. “Whatever. Just concentrate on finding Jacob. Forget Dad.”

“I can do both.”

“But you don’t need to,” Aidan insisted. “We don’t need Dad here right now.”

Or ever.

Hudson slid him a glance. “On a scale of one to goat-fuck, how stubborn are you going to be about this?” Hud asked.

Aidan just gave him a hard look.

“So goat-fuck then,” his brother muttered. “Perfect.”

They pulled up to the incident command center and joined the fray.

“Gonna be like hunting a needle in a haystack,” Hudson said, squinting at the fog.

No doubt. During the summer months they had more rescues than any other time of the year. With its sheer rock face for climbing, challenging trails for hiking, and some decent rapids, Colorado was a magnet for what they called weekend walkers—people who were office-dwellers during the week and adventure-seekers on the weekend. They were the main reason things stayed so busy for S&R and the fire department.

Depending on the runoff from the surrounding creeks and estuaries, the river rapids could go from an easy class two up to a class four in a blink, making it all too easy to run into trouble. And in spite of the carefully posted warnings, the signs were all too often ignored. It was as if people lost all common sense the moment they smelled fresh air and got onto a dirt trail.

Today’s trouble came courtesy of a group of six girlfriends who’d gone on an overnight hiking expedition to Eagle’s Cove. They’d decided to prank the sole single girl in their midst into thinking she was being tracked and stalked by Bigfoot because he could smell her virginity. Terrified, she’d run off, heading into the woods.

And had not been seen since.

This had been at midnight, but the girls hadn’t called it in until four a.m. because they thought she’d been playing a return trick on them by disappearing.

Plus, they hadn’t wanted to get in trouble.