by Pamela Clare
CHAPTER
16
LAURA SAT ON the edge of her bathtub hugging her bathrobe around herself, fighting hard to hold herself together. “Was anyone else hurt . . . or killed?”
Javier knelt on the floor in front of her with a first-aid kit, dabbing antibiotic ointment on her skinned knee, his hands in white sterile gloves. “A reporter got creased by a ricochet, but he’s going to be fine. McBride says he’s already home.”
“So many people might have been killed. You might have been killed. Oh, God, Javi, if you’d been shot—” The thought stopped her breath cold.
“I wasn’t.” He looked up at her, his brown eyes warm. “Let’s stick with the positive, okay?”
“Okay.” She would try.
He studied the scratches and bruises on her knee. “I think you need to ice this. I didn’t mean for you to get scraped up.”
“Next time you shove me out of the path of a bullet, be gentle, okay?” She gave him a smile, fighting the urge to reach out and touch him. “You saved my life.”
“Walking in those damned shoes saved your life.”
“I’ve never been graceful in heels.”
“Thank God for that.”
From somewhere out in her bedroom, her cell phone rang.
“Who is calling this late? Did you talk to your folks?”
“Yes.” Her mother and grandmother had been asleep, so they’d gotten the news from her. They’d been very upset, of course, and had asked her again to come back to Sweden. “It’s probably Gary calling to apologize—or make excuses for himself. I should have known he wouldn’t keep his promise. I’ve seen him do that before. I just didn’t think he’d do it to me.”
“That bastard is lucky he was in D.C. and not in the station tonight.” Javier peeled the tabs off an oversized adhesive bandage and stuck it carefully over the wound. “He and I would have had a serious confrontation.”
Somehow Laura doubted the confrontation would have been verbal. It touched her that Javier cared that much about her. He cared so much that he’d put his life on the line for her today. But she didn’t want that.
If anything happened to him . . .
She said the words she’d been meaning to say since they got home, words she’d thought about in the shower. “It’s probably best for you to go back to the ranch tomorrow. You came here to visit Nate and so far—”
“Whoa! What did you just say?” Javier’s gaze shot to hers. He sat back on his heels, his dark brows bent in a frown. “You want me to leave?”
She nodded, struggling to keep her tears at bay. “I-I don’t want you to get hurt, Javi. I couldn’t live with myself if you were hurt or killed.”
“Looks like we’ve got a problem.” He reached out, ran a gloved thumb down her cheek. “I couldn’t live with myself if you were hurt or killed when I was here and had the power to do something about it. I’ve seen that footage of your abduction at least a dozen times. Every time, I wished I’d been there to stop them. When I heard you’d been killed . . . Shit.” He shook his head. “Nah, I’m not leaving you, Laura. I can’t.”
She closed her eyes, turned her face away, the guilt she felt for putting him in danger at odds with an overwhelming sense of relief to know he was staying.
He pulled off his gloves, twined his fingers with hers. “Hey, is my sweet bella worried about a big, bad operator?”
She nodded. “You’re not bulletproof, you know. I feel so selfish keeping you here. This is not why you came to Colorado.”
“I think maybe it is, even if I didn’t realize it. I . . . care about you.”
Something in the way he said it made her look at him, the concern in his eyes putting an ache in her chest. That ache grew sharper when she realized that she and Javier might have had a real chance if things had gone differently after Dubai.
He took her hand, turned it over, ran his finger over the deep scratches on her palm. “I wish you’d gone to the hospital. I’ve had training as a medic, but the doctors and nurses would have done a better job of this.”
“I hate hospitals.” They were desolate, lonely places. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m not really hurt. I’m not sick. I’m just . . . pathetic.”
She’d heard gunshots, and she’d fallen apart.
Javier came eye to eye with her. “Don’t say that about yourself. You’ve already lived through more shit than most people face in a lifetime, and you’ve overcome it. You’re one of the strongest women I know.”
She shook her head, tears finally spilling down her cheeks. “No. No, I’m not. I’m not nearly as strong as you think.”
As tonight had proven, she hadn’t overcome anything. She’d merely gathered the shards of herself together, plastered a façade over the ruins, and pretended to the world that she was whole again. Beneath the surface, she was shattered. Her weakness had cost a helpless little child her freedom.
Javier needed to know the truth. If he was going to be risking his life for her, he needed to know the truth.
Her pulse began to race at the thought of what she was about to do. She’d worked hard to keep this secret, but she wouldn’t keep it from Javier any longer.
She drew her hand away from him and stood. Trembling, she opened her bathrobe and exposed her naked body to his gaze—stretch marks and all.
* * *
JAVIER WAS HIT by two things at once—the sight of Laura’s beautiful body and the distress and fear on her pretty face. One sent a jolt of heat to his groin. The other set off alarm bells in his brain. The result was a short in his wiring.
“Uh . . .” he said.
He couldn’t keep his gaze from raking over her, taking in the sight of her full breasts with their light pink tips, the satiny curves of her hips, the soft golden curls between her thighs. The sight of her awakened memories of touching her, tasting her, losing himself inside her. He remembered her scent, the silky texture of her skin, the little mole on her right breast.
But she wasn’t trying to seduce him. Something was wrong.
He looked up to see tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why are you doing this?”
She took his hand, pressed it against her lower belly, drawing his gaze.
There on her skin he saw faint silver lines.
Not scars.
Stretch marks.
It took Javier a good long moment to understand, but when he did, it hit him like a body blow. His heart gave a hard knock, pain knotting his gut, one emotion colliding with the next—astonishment, rage, sadness. “Oh, God, Laura. No.”
Laura had been pregnant. She’d had a baby.
Al-Nassar’s baby.
Jesus!
A thousand questions chased through Javier’s mind, but now wasn’t the time. Laura was shaking uncontrollably, her arms now crossed over her breasts, her face turned away from him. He got to his feet, pulled her robe around her trembling body, and tied it in place, then drew her into his arms.
She stiffened as if she didn’t want to be touched. “I-I’m cold.”
He stepped back, his mind and emotions still reeling. “Want to sit by the fire? I can make some tea.”
“Okay.” She followed him out to the living room and sat on the sofa, her gaze far away, her eyes haunted.
He turned on the fire, grabbed a throw from her sofa, and wrapped it around her, then went to the kitchen, his gaze never wandering far from her while he heated water and steeped tea bags. She’d been in shock earlier, and she’d refused treatment. What she needed was rest, not more emotional turmoil. Why she’d chosen tonight to tell him about this he couldn’t say, but he wasn’t sure it was best for her.
God, Laura!
She’d had a baby in captivity.
The force of it hit him again.
When she’d been rescued, there’d been a few articles in the tabloids and some online chatter asking why she hadn’t gotten pregnant during the eighteen months she’d been Al-Nassar’s prisoner. The idea hadn’t even occurred to Javier,
maybe because he knew from their time together in Dubai that she was using some kind of long-term contraceptive—or maybe because the possibility was too terrible for him to imagine.
She’d suffered enough, damn it. But to get pregnant by that bastard?
He carried two mugs into the living room and set his down on the coffee table, placing hers in her hands. “It’s hot.”
She sipped, the tea seeming to bring her back to the moment. “Thanks.”
He sat down beside her, deliberately giving her space, doing his best to lock down his own emotions. “You should just take it easy, bella. We can talk in the morning.”
But she didn’t seem to want to wait. “That’s why I stopped you in the sauna, you know. If you’d seen me naked, if we’d had sex, you would have seen my stretch marks, and you would’ve known.”
“I wouldn’t have rejected you, if that’s what you’re thinking.” In fact, Javier doubted he would have noticed anything. Yeah, he’d been trained to be good with details, but once his dick started working, his brain generally shifted to standby. Still, this was an interesting revelation, one he tucked in the back of his mind.
But she wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes drifted shut, regret sharp on her face. “I . . . I didn’t know. Most women know. Most women see the signs.”
“You didn’t know you were pregnant?”
“I’m sure that seems strange to you, but I didn’t have periods when I was on Depo-Provera, so . . .” She opened her eyes and stared into the fire. “The shots last for four months, and it’s supposed to take a while for your body to go back to normal.”
Javier did the math and realized it couldn’t have taken too long for Laura to become fertile again. She’d spent half of her captivity pregnant.
If only they’d known she was still alive . . .
¡Carajo! Fuck!
“He was always so rough with me, even when I didn’t fight him. He didn’t want to have sex with me. He just wanted to hurt me. I was a symbol of something he hated, and he wanted me to suffer. Every time he . . .” She paused as if searching for the words. “It’s like he was stabbing me again and again and again.”
Javier tasted bile in the back of his throat, his stomach revolting at the horrific images her words brought to mind, hatred like venom in his veins. He swallowed, fought back his rage. “I’m so sorry.”
You’re sorry, bro? What the fuck good is that?
“After a while, some part of me tried to forget my physical body. I just . . . moved out, blocked it out.”
Javier could understand that.
“I never thought about getting pregnant. There was so much else to worry about—getting enough to eat, beatings, rape, being killed. Every day they told me they were going to execute me soon. Every day I woke up thinking I was going to die. I . . . I made them promise to shoot me instead of cutting off my head.”
Javier could only imagine what it was like to live each day in that kind of terror, unable to fight back, depending only on your wits to survive. He knew men who’d lived through it as prisoners of war. None of them had come back without emotional scars.
“I . . . I thought it was poison.”
He didn’t follow. “Poison?”
“The pain.” Laura opened her eyes, her hands pressing protectively against her lower belly as they had that night in the sauna. “I thought Zainab had poisoned me.”
It took Javier a second to understand what she was talking about, the knot in his gut tightening when it hit him.
“I . . . I didn’t know I was having a baby. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. If I had known what was happening . . . How could I not have known?” She looked up him through tear-filled eyes, as if she expected an answer, her expression of despair slowly turning to self-loathing. “I should have known.”
“After what you’d been through? Your mind was doing all it could to protect you, to keep you alive. You can’t blame yourself, bella.”
Laura didn’t seem to hear him. “It was terrible. The pain was tearing me apart. I was sure I was dying. I begged Zainab to help me. I asked her why she had poisoned me. She called me stupid.”
Javier didn’t know much about women having babies beyond what he’d heard his mother and sisters say. The thought of Laura going through that much pain without medical attention or so much as a loving hand to hold was horrible enough, but to know that she’d been so brutalized that she’d had no idea what was happening to her . . .
He wanted to hold her. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted somehow to take all of this away from her. But he couldn’t. Nothing could.
* * *
NAUSEATED, LAURA COULDN’T bring herself to look at Javier’s face, fighting to put her worst nightmare into words. “I felt like my insides were being torn apart . . . like everything inside of me was being ripped out. And then . . . I heard a cry. I lifted my head, saw Safiya holding something in a blanket. The blanket moved. Until that moment, I’d had no idea I was having a baby. It almost didn’t seem real.”
She could still remember her confusion, her shock, the rush of adrenaline that had jolted her to a momentary awareness.
Javier’s warm fingers stroked hers. “You can finish telling me about this tomorrow after you’ve had some sleep. You’ve been through—”
But Laura needed to get it out. “They took her from me. I tried to get up and follow, but there was so much blood. I . . . I fainted.”
Laura told Javier how she’d almost bled to death, how she’d lain there on that bloodstained blanket for days, desperately thirsty and barely able to hold her head up, how she’d asked about the baby, only to be ignored.
“My breasts swelled and ached and started to leak milk.” The discomfort had been almost unbearable. “When I asked to see the baby, to nurse it, they told me I was crazy, but I could hear it crying. Then they said my baby had been stillborn. After a while, I began to wonder whether I had just imagined it all. My doctor says it was traumatic amnesia. When I was strong enough to walk, I tried to get close to her, tried to see her, but they wouldn’t let me, saying she was Safiya’s child and that I was unfit to be a mother.”
“How do you know it was a girl?”
“Angeza told me. She was the only one of Al-Nassar’s wives who was ever kind to me. She was Afghan. Her father had given her to Al-Nassar to settle a debt when she was only fourteen. I think she hated the others as much as I did. She said Al-Nassar had named the baby Yasmina. I call her Klara.”
“What happened to the baby, Laura? What happened to Klara?”
Laura shook her head, her pulse ratcheting. She stood, crossed the room, and gazed unseeing through the window onto the rooftops of a sleeping city. Why had she started this? Why had she told him? “Oh, God.”
Javier came up behind her and rested his hands gently on her shoulders. “It’s okay, bella. I’m right here.”
But it wasn’t okay.
It wouldn’t be okay until Klara was free and safe.
And once Javier knew the truth . . .
“About two months after the birth, the SEALs rescued me. I heard them speaking American English, and something in me woke up, some part of me that remembered who I was and why I was there. I wanted to survive, to escape. I didn’t mean to forget her.”
Oh, Jesus!
“Your baby was left behind.”
Laura whirled about to face him, knowing what he must think of her. How could she explain it? There was no explanation, no excuse. “I didn’t think . . . I didn’t remember . . . Something inside me just snapped. I had to get away. I didn’t mean to leave her there. I didn’t mean to leave her. I didn’t even remember she was mine.”
“How soon before you remembered?”
She looked away. “The doctor at the hospital in Germany did an exam. Afterward, he told me that it looked like I’d recently given birth. And then it all crashed in on me—all the memories. But it was too late. It was too late.”
She looked up, expecting to see disgust or anger
on Javier’s face.
Instead, he drew her close, held her tight, whispered to her in Spanish, words she didn’t understand, his voice not angry but soothing.
She resisted. She didn’t deserve this. “What kind of mother leaves her baby with terrorists? What kind of mother does something like that?”
Javier drew back and caught her face between his palms, forcing her to meet his gaze, his expression fierce. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. You’d been brutalized, violated, terrorized. You had a baby alone and almost died. They never even let you hold her. Then some men with guns drop from the sky and offer you a way to survive and come home. How could you expect yourself to remember she was your baby in the middle of that chaos?”
Laura heard his words, saw beyond the intensity on his face to the sympathy in his eyes, but some part of her couldn’t accept the absolution he offered. “She was my baby, and I left her behind.”
“It’s not your fault, Laura. You didn’t leave her. She was taken from you.”
“You . . . really believe that?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“You forgive me?”
“There’s nothing to forgive.”
Tears Laura had held back for what seemed an eternity poured from her, grief and regret as sharp as pain cutting through her. Strong arms lifted her up, carried her to her bed, held her together until pain gave way to numbness and numbness to exhaustion—and sleep.
* * *
UNABLE TO SLEEP, Javier lay in the darkness, feeling gutted, torn between his need to do all he could to help and comfort Laura and a bitter rage that simmered in his chest. Memories of the night they’d raided Al-Nassar’s compound moved through his mind frame by frame. Al-Nassar lying almost naked in the dirt. Women huddling together with their children, some holding babies. Laura looking fragile and pale in the helo.
Now he knew why she’d seemed so weak. She’d been only about eight weeks away from having had a baby and hemorrhaging.
What he wouldn’t give to go back in time and have the presence of mind to ask her if anyone else was being held captive. He’d take Laura’s baby and get them both safely on that Hercules. But that was just a fantasy. He’d barely had time to rescue Laura as it was. Had he delayed any longer, the combatants who had fired those RPGs would probably have hit them and brought them down. But what kept him awake was wondering what had happened after they’d left.
