“Listen to me, love. Depending on how long this takes, there’ll have to be crew changes but there will be a full complement on board the plane throughout, ready for take-off. The captain will let you know when we’re on our way back and close to boarding. When he does that, I want you and Stacie to be in your seats, seatbelts fastened and ready to go by the time we board. I know you’ll both want to know about Cam, but that has to wait till we’re airborne. Will you do that for me?”
Her arms around him, Beth stood on tiptoe, so that she could whisper in his ear. “Yes, Master.”
When he heard the words, Alex knew that he would have her complete obedience in the matter. Oh, she teased him, tested him and provoked him, but when the chips were down he could count on her to do what he needed her to do.
“Master?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Bring him back. And please…be careful.” She looked at him with eyes full of love, and the fear she was trying so hard not to show. “Stay safe. I don’t know what I’d do—”
He placed a finger over her lips, silencing her immediately. “Don’t even think it, love. Everything’s going to be all right. Trust me.”
She did—he could see it in the absolute devotion with which she looked at him. He always saw it. How had it taken so long for them to truly find each other?
“I do.” She reached to touch a sweet, tender kiss to the corner of his mouth. “We’ll be ready.”
His eyes took in his sweet submissive, every detail of her from her glorious hair to her feet shod in practical boots, cataloguing her and committing her to memory for the hours that lay ahead. In all the time they’d been together, as employer and employee, Dom and submissive, husband and wife, she’d always had his back, just as he’d had hers. The fact that she was doing it now, under such testing circumstances, told him yet again how lucky he was to have such an incredible woman in his life.
“And don’t think I don’t know why you were so insistent on coming along on this jolly.”
He saw the memories in her eyes, the pain she’d felt then because of the pain he’d been in, knew that whatever happened in the future, she would always stand by him. He knew he wasn’t worthy, but he’d never stop trying to be.
“I couldn’t let you be here alone, Alex. Not here.”
He held her to him, awareness of her coursing through his body like a river in full flood. He had just one more thing to say, one more thing to do.
“Listen, Beth, and don’t argue with me—not about this. You and Stacie should be perfectly safe here, but if the shit hits the fan and I think there’s any danger to you, I’ll get a message to the captain. He’s under strict orders to get you out of here and back to England. No arguments, Beth.”
He could see that she didn’t like it, just as he expected, but he could also see that she accepted it. And that just left one more thing to do…
Alex looked at his left hand, at the wedding ring he’d never taken off since Beth had put it there—just months ago, but at that moment it felt like a lifetime, the lifetime he wanted with her. Slowly, reluctantly, not wanting to do it but knowing he had to, he removed it from his finger and pressed it into his wife’s palm.
“Look after this for me,” he told her, his voice husky with emotion. “I don’t want to risk losing it out there.”
Chapter 16
More days had passed, one blurring into the next, always the same routine…until the day they shackled him to the wall and it wasn’t a whip that streaked fire across his back but a baseball bat that slammed into his ribs. His only thought then, as he struggled to breathe, was to wonder how long he had before they graduated to something even harder.
And after that…Cam knew only too well what the possibilities were, just as he knew with ironclad certainty that his captors would have no reservations about using whatever they had access to. Metal, water and electricity could be a lethal combination.
There was only so much punishment that a body could take. When they returned him to his cell this time, Cam stretched out carefully on the straw-filled sacking that passed as a mattress. Every movement, every breath was agony now. His medical training, along with the previous firsthand experience of the aftermath of hand-to-hand combat, was telling him that he had a couple of cracked ribs to go with the lacerations, contusions and insect bites that peppered his body. Not that any of it mattered now.
The probability was that he was going to die in this hellhole, and it was going to be slow, bloody and painful. Their treatment of him was no longer about extracting information—they weren’t even going through the pretence of asking him questions. No, it was now simply about using him as a means of venting their hatred of all things Western…he was certain of it. He hadn’t been put in front of a video camera and ordered to read out a prepared piece of propaganda at gunpoint. There had been no ransom demand. He was there simply as their whipping boy, until they tired of their deadly game and took it to its inevitable conclusion.
And when he was finally released from this living hell—a release that would only come with death—it would be without seeing Stacie again, without making love to her again, without telling her how he felt about her and how much she meant to him. In spite of it all, though, he was still convinced he’d done the right thing in pushing her away—if he hadn’t, she’d only be wondering and worrying about him now…grieving for him eventually…wasting the best years of her life on a man who didn’t deserve her because he wasn’t good enough for her.
He’d done the right thing.
Cam had spent most of his life alone in the darkness, apart from the all-too-brief time that Stacie had been a part of his life, the centre of his universe. The darkness had claimed him again, and soon it would keep him forever.
~~*~~
“Talk about overkill, Cam—you didn’t have to go to these lengths to persuade me to come back.”
Cam gave a half-hearted laugh. He was crazy, hallucinating or dying, and he didn’t really care which one it was. If he had the choice, all things considered, he’d go for the last, then all this shit would be over and done with.
“Fuck off, Lombard—can’t you let a man die in peace?” he muttered darkly. With an effort he turned away from the annoying voice and the background cacophony of more shouting and intermittent gunfire, with the odd explosion thrown in for good measure. For a delusion, it was entirely too realistic.
“No, he can’t, numbnuts, and if you think I came all this way and put my career on the line to drag your sorry-arse corpse back to Blighty, you can damn well think again, Fraser. You die on me, and I’ll bloody well kill you myself.”
Ah, the barbed wit that was the business end of Ros Edwards. He was surely on the way to hell and no mistake—there was no way she’d be standing at the door, dressed in desert camouflage, providing cover with a lethal-looking assault rifle. Just as there was no way that Alex Lombard, in similar attire, was holstering his sidearm to deal with the shackle on Cam’s ankle. “And I love you too, Edwards.” He gave a short bark of humourless laughter that sent shards of agony through his chest. A man was liable to say anything when he was hallucinating.
Or dying.
“What the hell are you doing here, Alex?” He wondered if a hallucination would actually own up to being a hallucination.
“Rescuing you, you bloody idiot. It’s time to go home, Cam.”
Home. A stifled sob almost choked him. He’d had a home for a while. Her name was Stacie, but even if this delusion turned out to be reality and he really was going home, he still wouldn’t deserve her. She was far better off without him.
When Alex pulled him to his feet, the flames across his back banished the maudlin self-pity. The pain from that and his protesting ribs drove him to his knees.
“Christ, Cam, what the hell have they done to you?”
“What does it fucking look like?” he snarled, his breath catching again. Physical agony and good manners did not make natural bedfellows.
The world swam arou
nd him in giddying circles as he found himself draped across Alex’s shoulders in a somewhat inelegant but effective fireman’s lift. More pain exploded in his torso.
“We’re getting out of here right now.” Alex’s voice was harsh with determination.
“Then fucking well put me down, I can walk.”
The assertion proved to be the cue for Ros to join in, with a selection of profanities colourful enough to make a squaddie blush. “That’s great, Cam,” she added, “but right now, we need to run!”
Breathing through the torment, Cam was only vaguely aware of his changing surroundings—the rubble-strewn corridor with stone walls that was the route to the room where he’d been tortured and to which memory every muscle in his body contracted in Pavlovian response, the sounds of gunfire and explosions, now getting louder and louder…the acrid stench of conflict that fired up memories best left in the distant past. Then they were outside in the night, lit up by the flashes of more deafening blasts. There were more voices he recognised too—Bax and Conor, and members of the team he’d last seen boarding a helicopter and never expected to see again. All yelling, all fighting to be heard above the madness of violent combat.
“This is going to hurt, Cam.”
Not enough warning. Cam grunted sharply when, unprepared, he landed on his side in the back of one of three armoured Land Rovers. Pain from his grating ribs strafed his nervous system yet again, while the impact drove all the air from his lungs. Along with a couple of the other guys, Alex got in the back with him—he could only hope that Ros, being the miracle worker behind the wheel that she was, could get them out of there without any loss of life.
Oh God, if anyone had been hurt because of him…
The vehicle set off at speed, lurching roughly over the uneven ground, each jolt putting his body through more suffering. As he lost consciousness, the last thing Cam felt was Alex examining his injuries and the last thing he heard was his old friend telling him to hold on…
~~*~~
“They’re on their way.”
Stacie looked towards the front of the plane. Beth had just emerged from the flight deck behind the doctor, and she wasn’t smiling.
“Is everyone—”
“By some miracle they all got out. The team’s all pretty much unharmed, no serious injuries, although they’ve been banged up a bit, but they’re not out of the woods yet. It’s going to take them a good few hours to get back here.” Beth started towards her. “Stacie, Cam’s been hurt. They didn’t say how badly, just that he needs medical attention, and the sooner the better.”
Emotions all over the place, Stacie sat down in a state of shock. The fact that Cam was still alive was a huge source of relief and she was duly grateful, but then the pendulum swung in the opposite direction when the full impact of Beth’s words struck home. Her imagination went wild, and not in a good way.
All of a sudden, it was getting hard to breathe—Stacie closed her eyes and concentrated, breathing through the emotional pain as Cam had taught her to breathe through physical pain. She was not going to panic and get hysterical—that wasn’t her, and even if it were, it was the last thing anyone needed right now. She felt Beth’s arm go around her shoulders, giving support that she really needed at that point, just as she had comforted Beth before the team left.
“It’s going to be all right, Stacie,” Beth told her. “They’ll be here before we know it, so I think the best thing we can do is help to make sure everything’s ready.”
They’d already done that and several times over, but Stacie knew Beth was right. With something else to focus on, it would be easier to deal with the next few hours, because heaven knew, the last few had been in danger of sending her stir crazy. She managed a hesitant smile. “Beth, next time we go on one of these rescue missions, remind me to bring a good book.”
It felt good to laugh, even if only for a few moments.
On her way back from the bathroom, Stacie glanced through the bedroom door…and stopped dead in her tracks. The doctor—a handsome man of Middle Eastern appearance, who spoke impeccable English—and his assistant had finished setting the cabin up as a medical facility. Seeing it as such, knowing it would be needed for the man she loved, made Stacie’s blood run cold.
No, I am not going to panic. One thing she’d learned during her relationship with Cam was the value of self-control. She’d learned from his example and from what he’d taught her about herself. She drew in a slow, steady breath and squared her shoulders. She could do this…she would do this. She had her pride, and she’d show Cam, even though he didn’t want to see her again.
The time passed by painfully slowly. A new crew came on board for the return journey. The medical team moved around the cabin, talking quietly in Arabic, ensuring that access from the aircraft door to the bedroom was unimpeded.
Stacie and Beth tried not to think too much about what would soon happen. They tidied cushions that didn’t need tidying, drank what seemed like gallons of coffee, courtesy of the members of the cabin crew who came and went, wandered aimlessly through the jet, looking out of the windows at a view that never changed. Sleep was impossible. Stacie decided that when she arrived back home, she was going to take up yoga or meditation…something that would help her to relax better.
“Excuse me, ladies.” It was the captain. “Mr. Lombard left instructions that you were to be informed when their arrival was imminent. He and his party are approximately ten minutes away from the airfield.”
Beth and Stacie looked at one another: this was it. Stacie took a firm hold on her self-control and moved to take her seat. She chose one that would give her a good view of the route from the plane’s door through the cabin to the passageway that led to the rear of the jet. Beth sat next to her, and once they’d secured their seatbelts, she felt her friend cover her hand and give it a squeeze.
“Whatever you need,” Beth said, “I’m here.”
Stacie nodded, afraid to speak in case she betrayed too much of what she was feeling. It amazed her that Beth could be so concerned about her, when the other woman must surely be just as worried about her husband as Stacie was about Cam. She turned her hand palm uppermost and responded with a squeeze of her own.
A few minutes later, controlled chaos erupted through the door. Stacie’s breath froze in her throat as she watched Alex stride through cabin, half-carrying, half-dragging another man. He had one arm around the man’s waist, and was holding on to the arm that was draped limply around his neck.
Her brain was telling her it could only be Cam but she didn’t want it to be him…it couldn’t possibly be him. This man was barely conscious, had been to hell and beyond. No, Cam couldn’t have been through whatever this man had gone through. Body beset with sympathetic pain, expression giving away nothing of the horror she felt, Stacie could only stare after the two men as they disappeared down the passageway. She was scarcely aware of the way Beth was squeezing her hand, as if she were trying to force every last drop of blood from Stacie’s fingers.
The doctor was right behind Alex and Cam, followed closely by Ros. She looked as scruffy and unkempt as Alex did, with smears of dirt on her face and clothes, her hair—previously gathered up in a short practical style—was all over the place. It was plain to see that wherever they’d got to, whatever they’d done to get Cam out, it hadn’t been a walk in the park.
The plane began to move.
~~*~~
The jet quickly reached its cruising altitude. As soon as she could, Stacie unfastened her seatbelt and dashed for the bedroom to which Cam had been taken, leaving Ros sound asleep, and Alex and Beth to their emotional reunion. She was just about over the initial shock of seeing the condition Cam was in when he was brought on board. Now all she wanted to do was help.
“Get her the fuck out of here!”
Stacie froze in the doorway, a deer in the headlights of Cam’s undiluted anger and pain, his groan of agony and the sight of his dirty, bloodied chest and the cuts and bruises to his fac
e and torso. Naked, he was lying on his side on the bed with the doctor and his assistant by his side, and what was abundantly clear was that he didn’t want her there.
“Come with me.”
Her steps were stiff and wooden as she followed the lead of Beth’s quiet voice, the other woman’s hands gentle but firm on her arms as she shepherded Stacie away from the door. Stacie was only dimly aware of Alex passing them in the aisle, heading towards his friend, and had no real recollection of how she came to be sitting in the lounge with Beth pressing a glass of cognac into hands that were as numb as her bludgeoned emotions.
“Drink this,” Beth insisted. “Try not to let it get to you. He’s been through a lot, things we can’t imagine, he’s in pain and he doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
Stacie gulped down a mouthful of the fiery spirit. She barely felt the burn when it hit her stomach. “He knows,” she countered bleakly. “Alex was right. I shouldn’t have come. I just wanted to know…to be sure he was all right.”
“He will be, Stacie. Cam’s as tough as Alex—he wouldn’t let them get the better of him. I know it looks bad now, but once he’s been cleaned up and he’s rested, he’ll make a full recovery, I’m sure of it.”
Tears she couldn’t hold back began to fall down Stacie’s cheeks. Now that the numbness was starting to wear off, the memory of what she saw of Cam’s injuries was coming back. “What did they do to him? And why? What did they want?”
“I don’t know, but you saw—the doctor’s with him now. They’ll give him something for the pain, get him cleaned up and patched up, and then he’ll probably sleep for most of the flight. You should sleep too, try not to think about it.”
“How can I not think about…?” Her voice tailed off to a whisper under the scramble of disjointed thoughts going through her mind. “The baby. You didn’t tell Alex…?”
“No, I promised I wouldn’t. He won’t say anything to Cam because there’s nothing he can say.”
Love Is Danger (Club Aegis Book 3) Page 25
