“Alexander,” she called to him as he turned to leave the room. “Thank you for rescuing me, and for saving my life.”
He smiled. “I thought you were content to stay in that village for the rest of your days.”
She laughed as much as she could given her current level of pain. “If I had stayed there I probably would have had to marry the chief’s son, walk around topless like all the other women and give him seven sons.”
“Only seven?”
“Seven’s a lot; trust me on that.”
He looked at her and she wondered what he was thinking. She didn’t have to wait long to find out. “Well if you’d like to walk around topless you are more than welcome to do it as much as you want. I won’t mind at all,” he winked at her before leaving the room. She was sure her mouth was probably still hanging open. He was flirting with her—at least she thought he was flirting with her.
She realized after he had left the room that she had forgotten to ask him if he had contacted Garrison yet. She had gotten her into this mess so she should find a way to get her out of it. Well, maybe she couldn’t blame Garrison. Had she not decided to alert somebody to what her father was doing then Carissa wouldn’t be dealing with this right now. Of course she would then be dealing with guilt of astronomical proportions because people would have died and she would have known that she could have done something to stop it. Her father had teased her when she was younger because she was always trying to save things that she didn’t think could save themselves. Birds, rabbits, even the baby wolf cubs whose mother had died just outside their property. She was the one who had begged her father to help her save them. She was sad when the guy from the conservation came and took them away, but at the same time she was happy they were safe. Her father had told her she had too much heart for such a little girl. He had told her she would grow out of it, but she hadn’t. She still wanted to save everything, but she just knew as an adult that she couldn’t.
She donated money to various conservation charities, and to homeless shelters; those was her biggest projects. She had grown up to be the responsible woman her father had said she should be. She had used him as her guide, her model for what she should be like in business, in charitable donations, in life. She trusted him enough to build her business and life motto based on his. She was good in business just like her father. Her designs were taking off substantially and her stores were selling products so well that she was getting ready to open a store in New York and one in Miami…that is she was going to do that before she got mixed up with the feds.
She still had the store openings in progress, but there was no way she could go through with it now. All that hard work on getting permits and paying out fee after fee just to build or refurbish buildings to hold products and she was going to have to walk away because her father was trying to kill her. Not just that, who would want to shop at her store if they found out what her father had done? Whenever she was able to make a call she was going to have to ask her business attorney to pull out on the store openings. She would lose money now, but she would lose a lot more if she opened those stores and then had to shut them down because people wouldn’t come to shop at the store of a domestic terrorist’s daughter.
She closed her eyes. Thinking about the chaos that was going to follow the revealing of the truth had her stomach churning with fear. She had to survive first. Survival wasn’t guaranteed right now. She had been shot twice, and stitched up on the fly by a rescuer, not a doctor, so maybe she shouldn’t be thinking about what was going to come next. For all she knew her dad could know where they were right now and have somebody on their way to kill her.
She didn’t know what was going to happen, but she did know one thing; she now had no trouble testifying against her father. The guilt she felt for betraying him was absolved the minute he ordered a hit on her. She had felt guilty because she loved her dad, but clearly he didn’t love her. If he loved her he wouldn’t have tried to have her killed. He was her only surviving parent and in an instant she had lost him too, not to death, like her mother when she was just six years old, but to his life—to the criminal life he seemed to love more than he would ever love her. She had no place in his heart; well fine, she thought, because he no longer had a place in hers either.
Carissa felt the tears streaming from her eyes. No matter how much she tried to tell herself that it would be easy to stop loving her dad she just couldn’t. But she wasn’t sure she could ever forgive him either.
Chapter Three
Alex couldn’t say much of anything right now. He didn’t have the best relationship with his family either, but at least none of them had ever put a hit out on him. He could only imagine what pain Carissa had to be feeling now. He knew how it made him feel when his family treated him as if he wasn’t there. Sometimes he would swear his mother and father forgot they had more than one son. They loved Kevin. He was their football hero who had made a name for himself, while Alex was just a military man. He laughed at that thought. He had gone off to war, fought for this country, fought to keep them safe and they acted as if it meant nothing. Sports were everything to them.
He shrugged. Until Kevin inked the contract with the Cowboys, Alex hadn’t been home for a family event in seven months and nobody had missed him. As long as Kevin made it to the party nothing else mattered. Now that Kevin was situated in Dallas his parents expected him to leave Austin and attend every event they decided to throw in Kevin’s honor. He had tried to stay away, and for some of the events he actually had managed to have the good fortune of being too busy to attend. His family wasn’t exactly full of the friendliest people when it came to him and he figured why bother putting himself through hell just to be a good son. It wasn’t as if either of his parents would appreciate his efforts. But avoidance only took him so far. Eventually he had to man-up and show his face at some of their events.
He wasn’t close to his family and probably never would be. But for all the crazy that was his family, never would any of them cross that line—the line that was so final that there was no going back. Never would any of them try to kill each other.
“I thought my family was screwed up,” he mumbled.
“It could be,” he heard her voice from behind him and he turned to find her propped against the wall. “But as long as you don’t try to kill each other I think you’ll live.” She chuckled. “Live…wouldn’t that be nice?”
“You’re going to live too,” he felt angry with her already. “You’re supposed to be in bed. What are you doing up?”
“I had to go potty,” she said so sweetly he was finding it difficult to hold on to his anger. She could injure herself more by trying to move around on her leg.
“Potty?”
“My best friend had a little girl. I helped potty train for a while and now the word is stuck in my head.”
“Had a little girl?”
“She died of cancer two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too. That was the sweetest, most loving child ever. She was only five. Anyway, Jasmine, my friend, she and her husband sold everything and moved to London. They couldn’t take being in Texas with her gone. I knew they were going to leave the city, but I had no idea they were going to leave the country too.”
“I thought maybe she was single since you helped potty…train,” he shook his head. Now the word was going to be stuck with him too.
“No, her husband was just real busy and she had all these social obligations to tend to, so I would let Yasline come to the office with me while I worked. I potty trained her while we were in the office. I left her little portable pot on the floor of my office so she could go.” She laughed. “It took a while. I kept telling her to tell me when she had to go, but would she do it? No,” she drew out the word. “She would walk up to me, those big green eyes smiling up at me and say, I pottied.” He couldn’t help but laugh too. “She was supposed to tell me before she went in the pull-ups. When she got sick I think I took it ju
st as hard as they did because she was kind of like my little girl too. I taught her how to count, say her ABCs, read, and use the potty. I had her at my office nearly every day unless her mother had to take her to a function. And when there was a doctor’s appointment, I took her to that too.”
Sounded to him like Yasline was more Carissa’s child than not. “Why were you doing all of this and not them?”
“They were busy I guess. Besides I loved doing it. I always wanted kids, or pets,” she hobbled on over to him and he rushed to help her sit down with greater ease than she would have done on her own.
“Never had either, huh?”
“I had a few pets growing up; they all died very unhappy deaths and I cried for days. I gave up after that. And as far as kids go I…I can’t have any. I wanted them. I was even going to do IVF, but…my eggs aren’t viable.” She sighed. “I could always use donor eggs I guess, but I wanted my own.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
“Doctors said there’s only a fifteen percent chance I’ll ever be able to get pregnant.”
“Fifteen percent doesn’t sound like never to me.”
He watched her face closely. She was thinking about what he said, he could tell from the way her eyes focused on the empty wall as if there was something of interest there to be studied. Finally, she smiled and looked at him. “You’re right. Fifteen percent is still a possibility. Maybe one day—if I live.”
“You’re going to live. Trust me when I tell you that I won’t let anybody kill you.”
She nodded. “I feel safer with you. The Feds promised me I would be safe, but with you I actually believe it.” She turned her head and looked at the wall again. “I don’t know what hurts more; my leg or my arm…maybe they hurt about the same.”
“Getting shot is not something I’d wish on any good person. The bad guys I couldn’t say the same for. You’ll be okay. It’s going to scar. I couldn’t stitch you up perfectly.”
“You saved my life. A scar seems like nothing when it comes to the fact that I could be dead. Besides, I have other scars…I’ll just add these two to the list.”
“Yeah, about that. I saw one on your leg that I…I have to ask you about.”
“The iron print?”
He had seen it while he was dressing the wound on her leg. It was a faint impression, but there was no mistaking that a hot iron had touched her leg.
“My parents were fighting over something. I don’t even remember what really. I just know that my dad tried to touch my mom’s hand. She jumped back to move away from him. She brushed up against the ironing board and the iron fell. Because I loved being pretty much right under my mother I was sitting on the floor by the ironing board so when the iron fell it fell on me. I was wearing shorts and…well…at least it made them stop fighting.” She shrugged. “It’s kind of hard to fight when your little girl is screaming to the top of her lungs.”
“They shouldn’t have been fighting around you.”
“About a month after that, my mother…died. Her plane crashed while she was on the way to see her parents. I think it broke my dad’s heart. He looked after me a lot more after that. We were all each other had. I think knowing he almost lost me too probably made him care more.”
“You were supposed to be on that plane.”
She nodded. “He says I wasn’t, but I remember my mom telling me we were going to see my grand ma-ma, as I always called her. I remember her telling me that, but when the day came for my mom to leave she didn’t take me with her. Dad says I remember it wrong, but I know I’m not wrong.”
“We’ll get this sorted out, Carissa. You won’t have to be in hiding forever, but I can’t take you back right now. I need to know what’s going on before I take you back.”
She smiled at him, relief flickering in her eyes. “Thank you, not just for saving my life, but for keeping me safe. But in order to find out everything you are going to have to take me back to Texas at some point.”
“Yeah, I know,” he admitted reluctantly. He had already talked to Preston and they had nothing at this point. He was still trying to find out some information, and he was going to look into Special Agent Garrison, but right now they were at a great disadvantage when it came to having information on the enemy. They all agreed he and Carissa should stay in the Keys a little longer. He would love to keep her there until she healed completely, but he knew that wasn’t an option. They didn’t have long enough to wait for that. They would have to go back. Whatever she was hiding was important and they needed it to see just who they could trust here and where they were going. OTG was a stable domestic terrorist group. No agency had gotten close enough to take them down. By way of terrorists, this group was full of geniuses. He figured they had the best hackers money could buy, a militia trained in the art of war, maybe some of them were former military themselves, and they definitely had enough money to buy weapons and their secure compound. He figured Carissa’s father is where the money part came into play. He didn’t know how long Ronald had been mixed up with this cell, but he knew if the man was funneling money to them then they had deep pockets.
When he got his rescue mission assignment he didn’t bank on things getting this complicated. He thought a simple in and out mission was all he had coming his way, but now he had something just as important—now he needed to help stop Carissa’s father from killing her. He needed to try to help take down one of the biggest domestic terrorist cells in history and he needed to do it sooner rather than later. Maybe the most unsettling part was that he didn’t think he could accomplish the last part of the equation. OTG had been on the government watch list for the past fifteen years from what he had heard. In those years they had grown stronger, starting with a small handful of devoted followers and growing to over three hundred thousand strong. At least that’s the information he had been able to get from Preston.
“So how long are we staying here?”
“A couple weeks probably. Preston wants to gather more information, see who we can trust and get some things sorted out before I take you back to Austin. At least it will give you a little time to heal. You need that.”
“I’m feeling better than before…or is that just the pain killers you gave me?”
He chuckled. “The pain killers,” he assured her. She wasn’t anywhere near healed yet. It had been a little over twenty-four hours since she got shot. There was no way she was going to be doing cartwheels this soon. Although he could say that she was healing faster than he thought she would. Any other civilian and he would have expected a bedridden patient for at least a week, but she was already up and finding things to hold on to just to make her way to the places she needed or wanted to go. He shouldn’t be surprised. He had seen that fire in her down in Central America. She wasn’t the kind of woman to sit back and wait for somebody to do something for her. She was the type who would find a way to get things done on her own if she had to. She wasn’t alone any longer. She wouldn’t have to do this alone. He would make sure he helped her, even if that meant stepping outside the role he played in the Squadron. He would not leave it to the Feds because clearly they had already messed this one up. She would be dead in less than twenty-four hours if he entrusted her to them.
“Did anybody speak English in that village? I saw you fussing with those women when you came out of the tent.” He had to admit that curiosity was getting the best of him. Did they speak English or did she just speak another language?
She laughed. “No, and I don’t speak anything else. I sign, but that’s not really spoken you know…anyway, they were trying to get my shirt off and that’s what I was fussing about.”
“Your shirt?”
“They wanted me to fit in I guess. In case you didn’t notice the people there didn’t wear much clothing.”
“I noticed,” he admitted. “So they wanted you to get naked.”
“Mostly naked,” she admitted. “Well, just the top part. They didn’t seem to have a huge problem with my cargo p
ants. Although they did like to pull on them. They were really nice, but I have no idea what they were actually saying. I learned a few words, but just when it came to food. Whenever they tried to offer me something to eat I picked up on the words they used. I can’t believe they saved me and sheltered me.”
They probably had her picked out to become a wife for one of the men, at least that’s what he thought, but he wouldn’t tell her that. He could have been wrong. Maybe there were still some good people out there who would help without wanting something in return. Speaking of food, he thought about the fact that she hadn’t eaten since he rescued her. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” she nodded quickly. “Starving.”
“I’ll fix something.”
“You have food here? Of course you do,” she sighed. “You wouldn’t have offered if you didn’t have food.”
“Julian brought some essentials over before he took the plane back to Texas.”
“Who’s Julian?”
Sworn to Secrecy (Special Ops) Page 4
