The Velvet Ribbon

by Christie Adams

  “I’m going to take you to the ambulance now, angel,” he said softly. “They need to examine you and make sure you’re all right.” He started walking. “You’ve had a nasty bump to the head. There’s a couple of other injuries we need to take a look at, and you’re in danger of going into shock. Alex would kill me if I don’t take good care of you. You’ll be going to the same hospital where he is, and I’ll be in the car, right behind the ambulance, okay?”

  ~~*~~

  Hours later, Cam stood just inside the Intensive Care Unit, his purpose originally just to check on Alex. Beth was also an inpatient, under observation for a concussion. When he saw her sitting beside Alex’s bed, clad in the god-awful hospital-issue clothing they’d given her when admitted and with the plastic identity bracelet encircling her wrist, Cam decided to come back later. He was unwilling to break the intimacy of the moment but then Beth softly called his name. He turned back. “How are you doing, angel? I’m glad they kept you in—you need someone to keep an eye on you for a while.” He leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “I’m okay.” Her smile was weary, though—she was still badly shaken up. “Thanks to you and Alex.”

  “Hey, no thanks ever necessary. Taking care of you is what we do. How’s he doing?”

  The sadness in her eyes tugged at his heart. He loved her dearly as his best friend’s soul mate, and to see her like this, after all she’d been through, all her bravery through an ordeal that would test anyone to the extreme, left a solid lump in his throat.

  It also made him wonder what it would be like to have someone care so very much about him.

  Her lower lip trembled a little before she spoke. “They’ve been really good about letting me stay with him for a while. He hasn’t regained consciousness yet. They said the surgery went as well as can be expected, so now it’s just a matter of waiting.”

  Cam looked at the unconscious man, the wires, the tubes, the beeping monitors and the drips. They’d intimated that it could have been worse, and as a former medic, he knew that there could have been major organ damage. As it was…well, on balance Alex had been bloody lucky, even if it didn’t look that way right now. “Beth—he needs you now more than ever. You have no idea how good you’ve been for him.”

  Holding Alex’s hand in both of hers, Beth looked up at him, clearly puzzled by the gravity of his demeanour. “What do you mean? The nightmares?”

  “The nightmares he hasn’t had since you’ve been more than just his assistant. Until you, he hadn’t had a full night’s sleep in over ten years.”

  “Ten years?” She looked even more confused, if that were possible. “But the IED was fifteen years ago. What happened ten years ago?”

  “You mean he hasn’t told you yet? Shit.” He frowned and then sighed. “Beth, I really don’t think you should hear about it from me.”

  At that moment, the conversation was interrupted by the arrival of a nurse; the doctor was on his way, so would they mind leaving for a few minutes?

  “Certainly. Mr. Fraser was just going to take me for a cup of coffee, weren’t you?” Beth dropped the hint with all the subtlety of the Royal Tank Regiment on manoeuvres.

  The best thing that could be said about the coffee was that it was hot and wet, she thought ruefully as she faced Cam over a table in a quiet corner of the hospital coffee shop. “Right. You’d better start talking.”

  “And to think I kept telling Alex about your submissive tendencies.” He took his first sip of coffee and promptly glared at the mug. “Are you sure this stuff’s fit for human consumption?”

  “Stop trying to avoid the issue. What happened? Please.”

  Cam’s blue eyes became shadowed, as if he were recalling events that were best left in the past. “You aren’t going to take no for an answer, are you?”

  “No, I’m not. And don’t think,” she continued, her voice low but no less determined, “that using your Dom voice will work, because I’ll tell you now, it won’t. I want answers.”

  “Bloody subs. You don’t let a Dom get away with anything.” He sighed. “We left the service a couple of years after Alex was injured in the IED incident, and like a lot of people in that position, we went into the private sector.”

  “You started Spectrum Security together.”

  Cam nodded. “Some of the lads who left around the same time joined us, and then we went back.”

  “Back? To the Middle East? But why?”

  “Initially, it was a means to an end. There was a lot of money to be made, we figured we’d do it for a couple of years, then come back to the UK and start our real lives on Civvy Street.”

  “What did you do there?” Beth wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of asking the question or hearing the answer.

  “Security at high-profile installations, some personal protection, that sort of thing. There were—are—a lot of very wealthy, powerful people over there who like to feel secure as they go about their daily lives.”

  Cam’s eyes became a little bleaker. “After the IED incident, Alex changed; it was as if his life didn’t mean that much anymore. Oh, he never endangered anyone—in fact, he became more protective of everyone around him, but less protective of himself. I thought it would change once we left the Regiment and started the security business, but it didn’t. He insisted on taking on the riskier jobs.”

  He contemplated his coffee, took another drink and grimaced. “This crap doesn’t taste any better if you let it cool. This particular assignment was as escort to a foreign diplomat’s son. Several threats had been made against the family before we even got there, so that’s why Alex took that duty. Usually there’d be one of the other lads with him, but that particular day we were short-handed, so he was on his own. The job was usually pretty straightforward…he thought he could handle it.”

  Cam emerged from his plunge into the past. “Look, Beth, what happened to Alex isn’t good to remember, and it’s even less pleasant to hear. You should really let him tell you about it.”

  “So he can gloss over the details and make it sound like a walk in the park? You know he won’t tell me everything. I need to know what’s made him the man he is. I need to know why he asked me to…“

  She broke off and looked straight at him. “Tell me everything, Cam.”

  Cam drained his coffee, made another face at the taste. “God knows how they can sell this and call it coffee—yours is a thousand times better, Beth.”

  “Cam.”

  He heard the warning in her voice. There was nothing to stop him getting up and leaving without telling her a word. Nothing except the fact that he could never and would never do that to Beth. He deliberated for a moment more.

  “Alex and the boy were kidnapped by insurgents. For the first week, maybe ten days, we had no idea where they were being held. When they did make contact with their ransom demand, the boy’s father insisted on paying it—it was just petty cash to him, but the kidnappers didn’t leave the boy and Alex where they said we could find them.

  “Eventually, close to two weeks and several demands for more and more money later, we managed to get our hands on some intel that led us to an abandoned house. When we got them out, the boy was pretty much fine physically, but Alex was more dead than alive.”

  Beth's face drained of colour. “What happened?”

  “They hated the boy’s father. They wanted to get at him through his son, but the boy was their bargaining chip—no sense in torturing him to the point where he couldn’t plead with his father to comply with the ransom instructions, or risking going too far and losing their leverage. Instead, to make the boy’s pleas more desperate, they tortured him psychologically by physically abusing Alex in front of him, with the implication that they’d do the same to him.”

  Cam looked at his hands and forced his fingers to straighten—he hadn’t even been aware of clenching them into fists. “You see, during the time Alex had been the boy’s personal protection, they’d built u
p a really good relationship—I think the boy almost saw Alex as a surrogate father-figure.”

  He paused. Though he hadn’t thought about that dark period for a long time, he still hated remembering what had happened to Alex, hated even more that he was the one telling that story to the woman his friend loved. At that precise moment, knowing that Beth was smart enough to come to the correct conclusion from what he was about to say, he needed to gather his thoughts and get it over with as quickly as possible, for both their sakes.

  “God knows what goes on in the minds of bastards like that. Alex already had the scars from the explosion; when we got him out, his back was like raw meat. He’d been severely beaten, there were burns all over his body, and they’d broken half of his fingers. He was severely dehydrated and starving—of the little food and water they’d been given, he let the boy have pretty much all the food and most of the water. There were other injuries, too.”

  “What do you mean? What…other injuries?” Beth’s expression gradually changed to one of utter horror. “Oh, God, no. They didn’t…?”

  Cam bit back a curse. As he’d surmised, Beth put two and two together, but there was no way he could tell her that, had it gone on for much longer, Alex would most likely have been as good as emasculated.

  It seemed that his silence, however, was enough. She was crying silently, great tears of sorrow and grief rolling down her face. Cam would have given anything to protect her from the knowledge of what Alex had been through in the past, why he’d had such disturbing nightmares for so long. He knew only too well how much she loved the man. And now she had to face up to him being seriously wounded while trying to rescue her.

  “God, I’m sorry, Beth. I shouldn’t have told you.”

  Her expression told him he was wrong, and when she spoke, her voice betrayed her grief. “Yes, you should, and I’m glad you did. I just wish I could have been there for him then.”

  And that was Beth. As strong as Alex had told him she was. Now Cam understood why his friend loved this woman so much, and why he himself was finding it more and more difficult to believe that he was perfectly happy with his status as a confirmed bachelor. Could there be another woman like Beth out there for him?

  “You’re here for him now, that’s what counts. He’ll be all right, angel—keep the faith. He’s tough. He wouldn’t let us carry him out of there. His body and mind had been subjected to the worst hell you can imagine and then some, but he was determined to walk to the helicopter with as little assistance as possible. He survived everything they threw at him back then.” And the weeks in hospital while his damaged body recovered. As for his mind…Cam had learned long ago to let that sleeping dog well and truly lie. It was a reality that Alex flat-out refused to face.

  He watched the bewildered shake of her head, knowing that the small gesture reflected only the tip of the emotional iceberg she was struggling with. He saw the way her expression changed in the fight to find something to say, but Cam knew there were no words—not for a woman who felt about a man the way Beth felt about Alex. The pain Cam had seen his friend suffer was reflected right there, in his woman’s gentle gaze.

  He reached across to cover Beth’s hand with his, telling her silently that words were not necessary, because they both understood—they understood everything. She nodded in acknowledgement, but the revelation had left an older shadow in her eyes.

  “After all that, I can understand him wanting to move into something completely different, but how did he end up in this business? It’s light years away from security.”

  Cam took a deep breath. That was a tale and a half, and all this time later they’d still not got to the bottom of it. Again, it wasn’t Cam’s story to tell, but he didn’t see any harm in sharing it with Beth. She needed to hear something positive, to take away some of the distress caused by what he’d just imparted.

  “About a month after he left Spectrum, some money appeared in his bank account. It was a huge amount, Beth—seven figures, and neither of us could work out where it came from. He tried to get the bank to return it, but for reasons that to this day remain a mystery, it couldn’t be done.”

  Cam toyed with his empty coffee cup. What he was about to tell her still sounded totally unbelievable, even after all this time. Nevertheless, in his opinion, she was entitled to know.

  So he began the tale, with the arrival of the letter inviting Alex to a meeting at an exclusive hotel in London, with the wealthy foreign national who asked him to source a unique item of jewellery and provided him with the necessary contacts. Alex had been handsomely rewarded and more work of a similar nature had followed, from that source and other individuals of similar financial status.

  “Now, we’ve never been able to prove it, but we suspect that initial sum was linked to the foreign diplomat whose son Alex was escorting—quite how and why, we don’t know. Alex tried to send the money back time after time, but in the end he had to accept that he would never be able to return it, so he decided to donate it to ex-servicemen’s charities instead.”

  “The money didn’t come from that first client, then?”

  Cam shook his head. “The client paid for the necklace, and for Alex’s fees and expenses. The only thing that made the slightest sense was that there was some sort of connection between the deposit and the diplomat whose son Alex was escorting, and that diplomat was somehow connected to the first client. We even wondered if the money was intended as compensation for what Alex had suffered. If he hadn’t been there, they may well have had different ideas about hurting the boy.”

  Beth's eyes narrowed. “Alex would never willingly take compensation for that.”

  “Agreed. That’s why he tried to return it and when he couldn’t, he donated it to a number of forces charities instead. Anyway, further commissions followed, and it turned out he has a knack for sourcing high-end collectibles—the rest, as the saying goes, is history.”

  He knew it was a lot for Beth to take in, but as he watched her, Cam became aware of a change in her demeanour. He could see she was mulling everything over, analysing it, extracting what mattered most from it.

  “Cam, the nightmares. If he’s been having them for years…surely he should have had some sort of therapy, counselling…something?”

  “He was supposed to.” Cam’s tone was as cheerless as his memories of that time. “He did actually go to one session, but he didn’t stay.”

  Beth snorted. “I wish I could say I was surprised. No wonder he had nightmares. Just because they seem to have stopped, though, it doesn’t mean things are resolved.”

  Something that had concerned Cam for years, but even as he watched the shadows disappear from Beth’s eyes, he saw her straighten up, as if she were developing a spine of carbon steel. The fight that had disappeared when he first told her about Alex’s history was coming back with a vengeance. He could almost see her mind whirring with possibilities.

  “Cam, I don’t like loose ends. I like them even less when they affect Alex. I’ll find a way to get him to accept the help he needs.”

  Cam believed her. For the first time in years, he was cautiously optimistic that in due course his friend might finally be fully healed of all that he’d suffered so long ago.

  He checked his watch. “I hate to say this, but it’s ridiculously late—you should get some rest. They’re keeping you in here for a reason. I have to go now anyway, but remember—if there’s anything you need, or there’s anything I can do, call me, no matter what time, day or night.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to London. We’ve managed to keep a lid on this so far, but it’s taking some heavy hitters to keep it that way. Alex and I have good friends in high places as well as low—friends who owe us a lot. I’ve called in the favours, but I have to go and see a couple of these people tonight, before I see the others in the morning. The local police won’t bother you—I’ve already made the calls to take care of that—but once I’ve spoken to t
he right people, there’ll be no comeback for all of this.”

  Beth reached across the table to squeeze Cam’s hand. “Thank you—for everything.”

  “You’re most welcome, Beth.” He lifted her hand to press a brief kiss to the back of it. “Take good care of yourself—and him. He’s a lucky man. Now, let me escort you back upstairs before I go.”

  Having said goodbye to Cam, Beth returned to the ICU. In spite of feeling a little light-headed, she was determined to see Alex before she went off to her own bed, and apart from anything else, she wanted to know what the doctor had said.

  Having learned from the nurse on duty that his condition was officially classed as stable and that he was doing as well as could be expected in the circumstances, Beth resumed her place at his side, taking hold of the hand that lay so still on the sheets. She needed to talk to him—there was so much she needed to tell him.

  “Please, Sir. Come back to me. I need you so much. I need to tell you how much I love you, how much you mean to me. Please, Alex.”

  She also needed to tell him that she knew about his past now, that she understood and it changed nothing, apart from one thing—his struggle was now hers too.

  And then there was the simple fact that she couldn’t forget the horror of watching Alex fight to save both of them, how powerless she’d been, at the same time terrified of letting go of the switch that stood between both of them and oblivion.

  Most of all, though, what she couldn’t get out of her mind was how Alex had repeatedly put himself between her and Underwood as the two men struggled for control of the gun. She couldn’t even help by grabbing hold of the knife that Alex had dropped at the start of the fight, thanks to what Underwood had done to her hands—she could only watch until that dreadful moment when, with the gun between their two bodies, the trigger had been pulled, and with a final herculean effort Alex had dispatched their assailant by breaking his neck.