“I don’t care,” Colleen mouthed back, but Bobby had already looked away.
Colleen sat on the bus in silence.
Wes and Jim Slade both paced. Bobby stood, across the aisle from her. He was still, but he was on the balls of his feet—as if he were ready to leap into action at the slightest provocation.
Colleen tried not to look at him. God forbid she distract him. Still, he was standing close, as if he wanted to be near her, too.
“How much longer?” Susan Fitzgerald finally asked.
“We don’t know, ma’am,” Wes answered from the back of the bus. He touched his radio headset. “They’ll open a channel we can receive at this distance only after they’ve got the place secure. Not until then.”
“Will we hear gunshots?” one of the men, Kurt Freidrichson, asked.
“No, sir,” Wes told him. “Because there’ll be no weapons discharged. Alpha Squad will take them down without a struggle. I can guarantee that as much as I can guarantee anything in this world.”
“This isn’t the time for conversation,” Bobby said quietly.
And once again there was silence.
“Jackpot,” Wes said, into his radio headset. “Affirmative, sir. We copy that.” He made an adjustment to his lip microphone. “We’ve been given the order to move toward the hospital. The building has been secured with no casualties.”
“Oh, thank God,” Colleen breathed. It was over. They were all safe—children, nuns, SEALs.
“Let’s move it out,” Spaceman—Jim Slade—said to the bus driver.
“No!” Wes shouted from the back of the bus. “Bobby!”
Colleen barely looked up, she barely had time to think, let alone react.
But the Tulgerian guard, the man who’d been hired by the bus driver to guide them to the hospital, had pulled a gun out of nowhere. He was sitting three rows up and across the aisle. She was the closest to him.
The closest target.
But Colleen got only a glimpse of the bottomless dark hole of the gun’s barrel before Bobby was on top of her, covering her, pushing her down.
The noise was tremendous. A gunshot. Was that really what it sounded like? It was deafening. Terrifying.
A second one, and then a third. But Colleen couldn’t see. She could only hear. Screaming. Was that her voice? Wes, cursing a blue storm. Spaceman. Shouting. For a helo. Man down.
Man down? Oh, God.
“Bobby?”
“Are we clear?” That was Bobby’s voice. Colleen could feel it rumbling in his chest.
But then she felt something else. Something wet and warm and…
“We’re clear.” Wes. “Jeezus!”
“Are you all right?” Bobby pulled back, off her and, thank God, she was. But she was covered with blood.
His blood.
“Oh, my God,” Colleen said, starting to shake. “Don’t die. Don’t you dare die on me!”
Bobby had been shot. Right now, right this minute, he was bleeding his life away onto the floor of the bus.
“Of all the stupid things you’ve done,” she said, “stepping in front of a loaded gun again—again—has to take the cake.”
“I’m okay,” he said. He touched her face, forced her to look into his eyes. They were still brown, still calm, still Bobby’s eyes. “Breathe,” he ordered her. “Stay with me, Colleen. Because I’m okay.”
She breathed because he wanted her to breathe, but she couldn’t keep her tears from spilling over. “You’re bleeding.” Maybe he didn’t know.
He didn’t. He looked down, looked amazed. “Oh, man.”
Wes was there, helping him into the seat next to Colleen, already working to try to stop the flow. “God damn, you’ve got a lot of blood. Bobby, I can’t get this to stop.”
Bobby squeezed Colleen’s hand. “You should get out of here.” His voice was tight. “Because you know, it didn’t hurt at first—probably from adrenaline, but God, oh my God, now it does, and you don’t need to be here to see this. I don’t want you here, Colleen. Please.”
“I love you,” she said, “and if you think I’m going anywhere right now—besides with you to a hospital—then you don’t know me very well.”
“He wants to marry you,” Wes told her.
“Oh, wonderful timing,” Bobby said, gritting his teeth. “Like this is the most romantic moment of my life.”
“Yeah?” Colleen said, trying to help Wes by keeping Bobby still, by holding him tightly. “Well, too bad, because I’m marrying you whether you ask me or not.”
“She said that she loved you,” Wes countered.
“Don’t die,” Colleen begged him. She looked at her brother. “Don’t you dare let him die!”
“How could I die?” Bobby asked. “I’m surrounded by Skellys. Death couldn’t get a word in edgewise.”
Wes shouted toward the driver. “Can we move this bus a little faster? I need a hospital corpsman and I need him now!”
Chapter 18
Bobby woke up in a U.S. Military hospital.
Someone was sitting beside his bed, holding his hand, and it took him a few fuzzy seconds to focus on…
Wes.
He squeezed his best friend’s fingers because his throat was too dry to speak.
“Hey.” Wes was on his feet almost immediately. “Welcome back.”
He grabbed a cup, aimed the straw for Bobby’s mouth. Hadn’t they just done this a few months ago?
“The news is good,” Wes told him. “You’re going to be okay. No permanent damage.”
“Colleen?” Bobby managed to say.
“She’s here.” Wes gave him another sip of water. “She went to get some coffee. Do you remember getting moved out of ICU?”
Bobby shook his head. He remembered…
Colleen. Tears in her beautiful eyes. I love you….
Had she really said that? Please, God, let it be true.
“You had us scared for a while there, but when they moved you into this room, you surfaced for a while. I was pretty sure you were zoned out on painkillers, but Colleen got a lot of mileage out of hearing your voice. She slept after that—first time in more than seventy-two hours. She really loves you, man.”
Bobby looked into his best friend’s eyes. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. Wes always did enough talking for both of them.
“And you know, I love you, too,” Wes told him. “And you know how I mean that, so no making any stupid jokes. I’m glad Colleen’s not here right now, because I need to tell you that I know I was wrong. She doesn’t need a doctor or a lawyer. That’s garbage. She doesn’t need an officer. She doesn’t need money. Of all the women in the world, Colleen doesn’t give a damn about money.
“What she needs, bro, is a man who loves her more than life itself. She needs you.”
I love her. Bobby didn’t have to say the words aloud. He knew Wes knew.
“The really stupid thing is,” Wes continued, “that I probably knew that right from the start. You and Colleen. I mean, she was made for you, man. And you’re going to make her really happy. She’s been crazy about you forever.
“See, my big problem is that I’m scared,” Wes admitted. “When I found out that you and she had—” He shook his head. “I knew right at that moment that you were going to marry her, and that things would never be the same. Because you’d be one of the guys who’d found what they were looking for, and I’d still be here, on the outside. Searching.
“You know, on that training op that you missed because of your shoulder, because you were in Cambridge—it was just me and a bunch of mostly married men. After the op, we had a night to kill before our flight back, and everyone went to bed early. Even Spaceman—he had to ice his knees, he’s really hurting these days. Thomas King—he’s worse than some of the married guys. He just goes and locks himself in his room. And Mike Lee’s got a girl somewhere. So that leaves Rio Rosetti. Can you picture me and Rosetti, out on the town?”
Actually, Bobby could.
<
br /> “Yeah, well, believe me, it sucked. He went home with some sweet young tourist that he should’ve stayed far away from, and I’m thinking about how that’s me ten years ago, and how I’m looking for something different now. Something you managed to find.
“Scared and jealous—it’s not a good combination. I hope someday you’ll forgive me for the things I said.”
“You know I already do,” Bobby whispered.
“So marry her,” Wes said. “If you don’t, I’ll beat you senseless.”
“Oh, this is just perfect.” Colleen. “Threatening to beat up the man who just saved your sister’s life.” She swept into the room, and everything was heightened. It was suddenly brighter, suddenly sharper, clearer. She smelled great. She looked gorgeous.
“I’m just telling him to marry you,” Wes said.
Bobby used every ounce of available energy to lift his hand and point to Wes and then to the door. “Privacy,” he whispered.
“Attaboy,” Wes said, as he went out the door.
Colleen sat beside him. Took his hand. Her fingers were cool and strong.
“Colleen—”
“Shhh. We have plenty of time. You don’t need to—”
It was such an effort to speak. “I want…now…”
“Bobby Taylor, will you marry me?” she asked. “Will you help me find a law school near San Diego, so I can transfer and be with you for the rest of my life?”
Bobby smiled. It was much easier to let a Skelly do the talking. “Yes.”
“I love you,” she said. “And I know you love me.”
“Yes.”
She kissed him, her mouth so sweet and cool against his.
“When you’re feeling better, do you want to…” She leaned forward and whispered into his ear.
Absolutely. Every day, for the rest of their lives. “Yes,” Bobby whispered, knowing from her beautiful smile that she knew damn well what he was thinking, glad that Wes wasn’t the only Skelly who could read his mind.
Epilogue
“What time does the movie start?” Bobby asked as he cleared the Chinese food containers off the kitchen table.
“Seven thirty-five. We have to leave in ten minutes.” Colleen was going through the mail, opening today’s responses to the wedding invitations. She looked tired—she’d been getting up early to meet with the administrators of a local San Diego women’s shelter who were in the process of buying a big old house. She was handling tomorrow morning’s closing—pro bono, of course.
“Are you sure you want to go?” he asked.
She looked up. Smiled. “Yes. Absolutely. You’ve wanted to see this movie for weeks. If we don’t go tonight…”
“We’ll go another night,” he told her. They were getting married. They had a lifetime to see movies together. The thought still made him a little dizzy. She loved him….
“No,” she said. “I definitely want to go tonight.”
Aside from her legal work, there were a million things to do, what with finding a new apartment big enough for the two of them and all the wedding plans.
They were getting married in four weeks, in Colleen’s mother’s hometown in Oklahoma. It was where the Skellys had settled after her dad had retired from the Navy. Colleen had only lived there her last few years of high school, but her grandparents and a whole pack of cousins were there. Besides, softhearted Colleen knew how important it was to her mother to see her daughter married in the same church in which she’d taken her own wedding vows.
But it made planning this wedding a real juggling act.
And no way was Bobby willingly going to let Colleen head back to Oklahoma for the next four weeks. No, he’d gotten real used to having her around, real fast. They were just going to have to get good at juggling.
She frowned down at the reply card she’d just opened. “Spaceman’s not coming to the wedding?”
“No, he told me he’s going in for surgery on his knees.”
“Oh, rats!”
Bobby tried to sound casual. “Is it really that big a deal?”
Colleen looked up at him. “Are you jealous?”
“No.”
“You are.” She laughed as she stood up and came toward him. “What, do you think I want him there so I can change my mind at the last minute and marry him instead of you?” She wrapped her arms around his neck as she twinkled her eyes at him.
Something tightened in his chest and he pulled her more tightly to him. “Just try it.”
“I was going to try to set him up with Ashley.”
Ashley? And Jim Slade? Bobby didn’t laugh. At least not aloud.
“Ashley DeWitt,” Colleen said. “My roommate from Boston?”
“I know who she is. And…I don’t think so, Colleen.” He tried to be tactful. “She’s not exactly his type. You know, icy blonde?”
“Ash is very warm.”
“Yeah, well…”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Her warmth has nothing to do with it. What you really mean is that she’s too skinny. She’s not stacked enough for Spaceman, is that what you’re trying to say?”
“Yes. Don’t you hate him now? Thank God he’s not coming to the wedding.”
She laughed and his chest got even tighter. He wanted to kiss her, but that would mean that he’d have to stop looking at her, and he loved looking at her.
“Didn’t he have that friend who started that camp—you know, mock SEAL training for corporate executives?” she asked. “Kind of an Outward Bound program for business geeks? Someone—Rio, I think—was telling me about it.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, settling on sliding his hand up beneath the edge of her T-shirt and running his fingers across the smooth skin of her back. “Randy Something—former SEAL from Team Two. Down in Florida. He’s doing really well—he’s constantly understaffed.”
“Ashley wants to do something like that,” Colleen told him. “Can you find out Randy’s phone number so I can give it to her?”
Ashley DeWitt, in her designer suits, would last about ten minutes in the kind of program Randy ran. But Bobby kept his mouth shut because, who knows? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe she’d kick butt.
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll call Spaceman first thing tomorrow.”
Colleen touched his face. “Thank you,” she said. And he knew she wasn’t talking about his promise to call Spaceman. She’d read his mind, and was thanking him for not discounting Ashley. “I love you so much.”
And that feeling in his chest got tighter than ever.
“I love you, too,” he told her. He’d started telling her that whenever he got this feeling. Not that it necessarily made his chest any less tight, but it made her eyes soften, made her smile, made her kiss him.
She kissed him now, and he closed his eyes as he kissed her back, losing himself in her sweetness, pulling her closer, igniting the fire he knew he’d feel for her until the end of time.
“We’ll be late for the movie,” she whispered, but then whooped as he swung her up into his arms and carried her down the hall to the bedroom.
“What movie?” Bobby asked, and kicked the bedroom door closed.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-5103-2
TAYLOR’S TEMPTATION
Copyright © 2001 by Suzanne Brockmann
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