The ground was hard beneath her shoulder and hip, but there was an intimacy between them she didn’t want to break.
“Have you seen Rodel?” Dean asked.
“He wasn’t in the truck with us.”
She’d come to trust Rodel, and the thought that he might have betrayed them stabbed her in the head, much like her headache. She reached up to rub her temples, but Dean brushed her hand away. His gentle fingers kneaded circles on her temples, moving around to the base of her neck. She closed her eyes as the pressure ebbed. His kneading hands felt so good against the pain of her headache that she let herself relax against him.
“Does this help?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “Thank you.” Riley almost fell back asleep until Dean spoke.
“I’m usually a good judge of character. I can’t believe I got it so wrong with Rodel. I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.” Dean hit a particularly sensitive spot in her neck, and she moaned.
“You’re really tight right here,” he told her, lightening the pressure of his fingers. “Stress.”
Her mouth twisted into a smile he probably couldn’t see. “I wonder why?”
“All I wanted was to come here for a quick trip. Prove to my family that this project was going to be successful. That I was successful.” He removed his hand from her neck, and she immediately missed its warmth.” “Instead, I’ve put you in danger, gotten myself shot, and am going to cost my family a ton of money—if we even make it out of this alive.”
“Dean. Stop. The only people whose fault this is are the terrorists.” She brought her hand up to his arm, realizing his sling was gone. It must have gotten lost somewhere in the transition. Or those people took it away from him. She clenched her fists in anger. She’d dedicated her entire life to helping people because she valued human life, while these men valued money and power over everything.
She’d once thought Dean was like that as well, but she’d judged him wrong, and was regretful of all the time she’d spent upset with him when he’d proven himself to be a thoughtful and generous person.
They could die. But they weren’t dead yet. Riley ran her fingers up and down Dean’s arm. They traveled over the sleeve of the worn cotton shirt, onto his warm skin, and then down to his callused hands. His breathing hitched when her finger ran over the calluses on his palm.
“Where did you get these?” she asked him.
“I went water skiing with some friends a few weeks ago.” His laugh sounded derisive.
“What?” she asked.
“I was just thinking. While I was out having fun, you were over here, probably saving someone’s life. Making a difference.”
“It’s not a bad thing to have fun,” she said, knowing she was a hypocrite.
“Really?” Riley could almost imagine his right eyebrow lifting. “When was the last time you went out and had fun?”
She wracked her brain for a time. “Malaya and I ate dinner on her front porch last week. We watched the sunset.”
“Eating doesn’t count. I’m talking adventure.”
“Does this count?”
“No.”
“Um … I went to Hawaii in college. Right after I finished my undergrad.”
He let out a long, pleasurable sigh. “I love Hawaii. What did you do there?”
“Went body surfing, snorkeling, hiking. We did a luau.” She’d felt so carefree then. So adult. She’d been heading to Harvard for medical school in the fall with visions of saving the world. Proving to everyone she was exceptional. Making a difference.
She soon learned there was more than one way to make a difference in someone’s life—and not all of them good.
“What about since you arrived in the Philippines?” he asked. “I was reading about all the fun things to do before I came.”
She shook her head. Her brother had sent her an email with links to adventures in the Philippines, but Riley hadn’t even clicked on one.
She focused on the feel of Dean’s fingers, tight around hers. “This wasn’t a pleasure trip.”
“Yeah, but you had to have taken some time off.”
Her silence answered for her.
“You’ve worked this entire six months?” His tone didn’t sound judgmental, but she still found herself getting defensive.
“There are a lot of people to care for.”
“Why are you here?” he asked.
She knew he wanted more than the answer she’d put on her résumé, the safe, skimming-the-surface answer. But she said, “It sounded rewarding.”
“Come on, Riley. Aren’t we past this?”
Her throat seized up at the thought of explaining to him why she’d run away from her entire life, everything she’d worked for, to come to the Philippines. Why she was so desperate to lengthen her stay so she wouldn’t have to face all the things she’d left. “Am I supposed to tell you all my secrets?”
They both jumped as the door flew open and banged against the wall. Immediately, Dean threw himself over Riley’s body. Her chest heaved beneath his as he shielded her. Light from the hallway cut through the room, backlighting a man who held a couple of bowls.
They thudded to the ground near their feet. The man grunted and then left.
Riley closed her eyes and tried to catch her breath. Her heart raced in her chest and sped up even faster when she looked up and saw Dean still hovering over her, an intense expression on his face.
“You have to stop doing this,” she said, not moving. She couldn’t muster any anger this time for his attempt at saving her.
“You’re so beautiful,” he replied.
She wanted to laugh it off, but found that she couldn’t. Men used to call her beautiful, back when she still had time to date, but it had been years since someone had said it to her sincerely. Not just as a way of questioning her skills. And with the way he was looking at her, she had a hard time thinking straight.
“I thought you had a talent for unique compliments,” she said teasingly.
His gaze remained intently on her. “What makes you beautiful is so much more than what everyone can see. It’s who you are, how you care for people, your strength and courage. All of it. Absolutely beautiful.”
His words left her breathless. “Okay, that was unique.”
He lowered his face closer to hers, just as his stomach emitted a loud growl that filled the room. A laugh burst from Riley before she could stop it.
“Should we see what he brought us?” she said.
Dean waited a moment before rolling to the side, landing on his good arm with a moan.
Riley sat up and scooted to the bowls. She held one up to the moonlight. “Looks like rice.”
“Big surprise,” he said. “I think I’ve had three meals since I arrived in this country, and they were all rice.”
“Should we trust it?” Riley’s stomach growled next. It had been at least twenty-four hours since her last meal. She sniffed the food. It smelled like normal rice. No chemicals. But she’d already been drugged twice.
“We have to eat. And if they plan on drugging us and we skip the meal, they’ll just come in with needles again,” Dean reasoned. “This way we at least have full stomachs.”
“Sounds good to me.” She handed him a bowl before using her fingers to dig into her own. Even cold and flecked with dirt, it tasted delicious. Still, she imagined a turkey sandwich and chips. Or lasagna. She hadn’t had a good lasagna since leaving home.
“Is your family going to be able to pay the ransom?” She regretted asking the question when Dean frowned.
“The terrorists want it in two days.” He picked at his rice.
“Can your family get the money here by then?” Riley’s heart pounded while she waited for his answer.
“If anyone can, it’s my father.”
“How long would it normally take?”
“At least a week.” His words weighed as heavy as her growing worry for Dean. He didn’t have a week.
<
br /> CHAPTER FIFTEEN
◆◆◆
“I need to check your shoulder,” Riley said in a tone that brooked no arguments. They’d finished their rice, and she stacked their bowls near the door before turning to him. Dean’s arm was feeling too stiff to move, and he didn’t tell Riley about the burning that had started radiating from his shoulder.
“It’s too dark,” he said, but she helped him lie on his back anyway.
“What time do you think it is?”
He shook his head. The terrorists had taken his watch, and if there was some way to read the time based on the position of the moon and stars, he didn’t know how.
Riley ran a gentle hand over the buttons of his shirt, stopping at the one closest to his neck. He froze.
“I’m going to unbutton your shirt so I can see your arm better.”
“Okay.” He cleared his tight throat.
Her hair brushed over his face as she leaned close to see in the darkness. He couldn’t resist reaching up to tug on the strands tickling his nose.
“Sorry,” she whispered, grabbing her hair, twisting it, and flipping it over her shoulder. “I didn’t think to grab a hair tie when we left.”
“Can’t imagine why,” he teased.
She finished unbuttoning his shirt and pulled it open. “I’m having a hard time seeing,” she confessed. She ran her hand lightly over the dressing, her fingers skimming the skin around it. He sucked in a breath at the feel of her fingers across the inside of his arm. “You feel a little warm.” Her hand flew to his cheek. “And clammy. Do you feel lightheaded?”
He did, but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. “Riley. Come rest. We’ll deal with this in the morning, okay?”
“I’m worried morning will be too late.”
“I’m not.” He took her hand from his cheek and rested their linked fingers on his chest.
“So you’re a doctor now?”
He smiled at the spunk in her tone. They could worry all night long about things they couldn’t control, but all that would do was make them miserable. “Dr. Matthias. Has a nice ring to it,” he mused.
To his relief, Riley settled down to lay beside him, not as close as he’d like, but keeping her hand in his. He’d take whatever he could get. Riley had walls around her that were difficult to breach, but every time she let him in a little, it felt like a precious reward.
“It does have a nice ring to it,” Riley said. “Did you ever consider going into anything but your family business?”
“No.” He’d known from the time he was a kid that he was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps. Maybe not as closely and as diligently as his brother had done, but he’d never wanted to do anything but work for the Matthias Foundation. “The thing about my father’s business is that it’s so large that there are a million different facets. I’ve never been interested in hotels, but he owns several other businesses I help run. I got my MBA and had some ideas on how to expand Dad’s restaurant into a chain, so that’s where he put me.”
“I’ve eaten at one of those restaurants. It was really good.”
Dean was more proud of this than he should have been. He wasn’t a cook, not anywhere close, but he took meticulous care in hiring only the best chefs to run his restaurants. At least, until he was asked to step down. “Thank you. I’m on hiatus right now.”
“For how long?”
“Maybe forever.”
She didn’t say anything for a while, and then: “When did you find out about your fiancée?”
Dean closed his eyes, his memory drifting back to nearly a year before. “The night before our wedding rehearsal. We were together at my house when the police showed up and arrested us. They’d been running an investigation on her for almost six months, and I had no idea.
“I thought we were both being falsely accused. They let me go, and I hired the best lawyer I could find to defend her. I denied all the evidence at first, but then it kept mounting and mounting until there was no way to ignore it.”
Riley’s thumb brushed against his hand. “Sounds awful.”
It was. There were no words to describe how it felt to be betrayed by someone he’d loved and trusted. And to have it blasted all over the news made it even more of a nightmare. He’d spent what was supposed to be his wedding day watching news station after news station speculate that there was no way he was innocent in this, and that his money had gotten him out of trouble, leaving his fiancée to take the fall. Once more evidence came out supporting his innocence, the narrative turned to Poor Dean, the jilted lover, except for a few people who still insisted he was a criminal mastermind. He honestly didn’t know which was worse.
“When I met Veronica, I was so drawn in by how attractive and happy she was.”
“You couldn’t have known,” Riley protested.
But she wasn’t there. Riley hadn’t seen how he ignored his brother’s words of caution when he’d started dating Veronica seriously. Cole’s concerns were because Veronica was a poor college dropout so far from their social circle she might as well have existed in a different universe. Maybe it was defiance against his brother’s narrow vision of anyone different than himself that made Dean continue to date her, even when his own warning bells went off occasionally. The harder he fell for her, the easier it was to justify the steady stream of unfamiliar people she spoke with and the vague family trips she took. He’d never know if some part of her did love him or if she’d been using him all along. They’d been together for two years. That was a long time to fake emotion. And yet, she’d used him, ruined his reputation, and made him question everyone around him.
“I remember hearing about it on the news,” Riley said quietly. “I was working eighty-hour weeks at the time, so I didn’t watch television very often, but the news was always rolling in the break room, and for a week, it was all I heard about.”
“What did you think?” he asked, even though part of him felt that maybe it was better not to know.
“I believed too much of what the news said.”
He winced. That partially explained her less-than-warm reception of him. “And now?”
“I trust you.” The words washed over him like a warm shower. He wasn’t sure if he even trusted his own judgment, but to hear Riley say that made him feel like he was someone worth taking a chance on again. In life and in business.
“If you believed I was so corrupt at first, why would you apply to work for me?”
“I was busy and exhausted at the hospital. So even though I saw that the Worldwide Care Project was being run by your family, I didn’t make the connection to you until I read the magazine article.”
He sighed. That magazine article would haunt him for the rest of his life. A PR attempt at restoring his reputation. Something he probably would have loved pre-Veronica, but at this point, he wanted to blend into the people around him and disappear until everyone forgot what had happened. “So what did you think when you heard it was me coming to check on you?”
She laughed softly. “I’d better not say.”
He poked her in the ribs, glad to hear her happy. His life had been so heavy in the last year, he needed joy. Even if it came in a dark room with terrorists standing guard. Especially if it came from this woman beside him. “Come on. I can take it.”
“I hate to add insult to injury.”
He groaned. “I knew it.”
“It was a nice picture, though,” she said, poking him back. He took her hand again, glad when she didn’t remove it this time. Holding her hand like this, tethered in the dark, helped keep his mind from drifting down a dark path where tomorrow might not exist. With Riley, they had right now. It was everything and not enough all at the same time.
“You liked my picture.”
“I like you,” she said, matter-of-fact. The words sparked an image right at the edge of his memory. He reached for it, repeating her words in his mind. She’d said that to him before. At the house. Right after he …
&nb
sp; “I told you I loved you.” He vaguely remembered feeling light and carefree from whatever narcotic painkillers Riley had given him. He’d been watching her move, thinking about how he’d never met anyone like her in his life, and love had filled him so full he’d had to say it.
“You did.” She patted his chest. “Don’t worry. I won’t hold you to your drugged-up confession.”
He laughed then, and it released some of the tension he’d been feeling after telling his story. Maybe he wouldn’t mind if she did hold him to his confession. Riley joined in with him, her shoulder pushing against his with her laughter. He scooted closer to her so their arms were flush against each other. She rested her head against the top of his good shoulder, and he gave in to the urge to lightly kiss her forehead.
“For the record, I like you too,” he said. “You remind me of someone. From the moment I met you.”
“Who?”
“An old high school teacher of mine.”
“That’s … interesting.”
He chuckled at her less-than-enthusiastic tone. “She used to come to the courthouse every Friday to see how I was holding up. At a time when I didn’t receive much kindness from everyone, she was a light.”
“You must have made quite an impression on her as a student.”
He shrugged. “Maybe. But I think she’s the kind of person who genuinely cares about people. I’d almost stopped believing those people existed. Until she proved me wrong. And then you.”
“I’m not that kind of person.”
“I don’t know how to break it to you, but you’re wrong.”
She let out a low, breathy laugh that made his heart pound harder. “Dean.”
“Nope. I see the glow as we speak.”
“Did you see it when we first met and I was chewing you out?”
He grinned. “Yep, even then. Because I totally deserved that. And a light as strong as yours is a permanent fixture.”
“You’re hopeless,” she said, but he could hear her smile.
He shifted toward her. “What are you going to do when you get home?”
Hearts In Peril (Billionaire Romance) Page 9
