Secret Maneuvers

by Jessie Lane

  So I did the only thing I could do while I knelt there, holding one of her hands, and helping Wyatt when he needed it.

  Prayed.

  Hoped.

  And murmured encouragement to my too brave girl as she laid there and dealt with her wounds better than I’d seen some highly-trained, special ops soldiers deal with injuries that weren’t half that bad. There would be no living if I lost her now and, as soon as we got her all bandaged up and on her way to healing back in San Antonio, I was going to do my best to convince her that she couldn’t live without me, either.

  Chapter Twenty

  Bobby

  Twelve hours later at San Antonio Regional Hospital…

  With all of the pain medication they’d given her, she’d been sleeping like the dead for the last eight hours after getting the last of her stitches and staples put in. Thankfully the dead thing was just an analogy and not reality. Although, it’d been a close call. By the time the chopper had landed on the top of the hospital’s rooftop landing zone, she’d lost entirely too much blood, gone deathly pale, lost consciousness and had a dangerous dip in her heart rate.

  It was hard to look at the staples down the top of her thigh and the seventy-some stitches on her chest between the laceration and the bullet wound, but they meant she was alive. That made those future scars some of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen because they were proof that she was living, breathing, and still with me.

  She gave a low moan and started to stir, so I sat forward in the chair I had positioned by her bed, and held my breath to see if she would wake up. I’d give a limb up, at this point, to see her gorgeous green eyes and sassy smile pointed in my direction, even if it was just for a few seconds. Not to mention that our son was practically out of his mind with worry and, I was pretty sure, the only thing that would comfort him right now was if he got to see his mother awake and okay. Her eyelashes fluttered as she moaned again.

  “Bobby?”

  Reaching out a hand to grasp hers, I gave it a gentle squeeze. “Right here, baby.”

  She turned her head in the direction of my voice and then reluctantly cracked open her eyelids. “God, I hurt. Tell me they killed all those sorry bastards in Mexico.”

  “We’re not sure. When you’re up to it later, Jaxon would like you to go through the photos they took of the ones they did take down. See if you can pinpoint Rivera in there.”

  “Ew... You guys take pictures of dead people?”

  Shrugging my shoulders, I asked her, “It works for identification purposes, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess so.” She looked around the room. “Where’s Seth?”

  “The Sheriff stayed with him overnight and then brought him in this morning to see you. I just gave him some money and talked him into going down to the cafeteria to get something to eat. I’m sure he’ll be back in thirty minutes or so, unless you want me to call him back up here.”

  She shook her head. “Let him get something to eat; put something in that bottomless pit of his.”

  Leaning closer to her, I used my free hand to reach up and cup the side of her face. “Does this mean when I look for a house for us in Virginia, that I should find one with a really big pantry?”

  I watched her body tense and felt the involuntary squeeze of my hand. “Virginia?”

  “Yeah, Virginia. I want us to be a family, babe. Can’t do that if you guys are in Texas and I’m in Virginia. I know it’s a bit highhanded of me to expect you guys to move, but I’m locked into a contract with Ex Ops for at least the next three years. You, on the other hand, are going to need some down time to recover and, after that, I thought that maybe you could transfer to a department there. I’m sure there’s one in D.C. or somewhere around that area.”

  If she hadn’t been weak from blood loss and trauma, I’m sure the hold she had on my hand now would have been a death grip that might have ended in loss of circulation to my hand and fingers. She looked scared, yet hopeful, and, although I understood why, I was looking forward to the day when she would no longer second guess our future together because that would mean that she no longer second guessed me. Or have doubts or fears that I would leave her behind again. With the past in between us, it might take a while to work beyond all of that, but I was certainly willing to try. The last twenty-four hours had made me realize, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that no matter how much she’d hurt me, I’d never want anyone except her.

  Her even, white teeth bit down into her bottom lip. She took a hesitant breath and then murmured, “Are you sure, Bobby? We haven’t had much time together to make sure that this is going to work between us and we have more to worry about now than just what happens between you and I. We have to think of Seth. I don’t want to get his hopes up that this will work and then, one day down the road, you figure out that all we have is some crazy chemistry between us, with no real future. That would break his heart.”

  She thought all I wanted from her was sex? That this was nothing but physical for me? I wasn’t looking for a body to fill my bed. I could have that anytime I wanted. No, what I was trying to do here was secure the one woman who was my perfect match in life. The one person that I could see loving, that I could see living with day in and day out for the rest of my time here on Earth. The one woman I wanted to see grow round with my children and watch as she told them the day that their father tried to hit on her in our high school cafeteria. How could she not realize that she’d owned me since the moment I’d truly noticed her as a woman, so long ago in Georgia? Sure, I’d fucked it all up by acting young and dumb, but dammit, nobody was perfect. Hadn’t I already suffered enough for my mistakes? Even with all of the pain between us—her secrets and my mistakes—she was still as fundamental to me as the air my body needed to live and breathe. Her kidnap and the rescue had finally sunken that into my thick skull.

  Taking the hand I was holding, I leaned over her bed until I could place it comfortably over the spot on my chest where my heart laid beating under flesh and muscle for her, without taking the chance of hurting her by straining her stitches.

  “This isn’t just chemistry that ignites between us. That’s a physical action and reaction stuff. What happens between you and I goes way beyond the physical. God! Don’t you get it? You’ve taken over my body! You own it just as much as you master your own. My brain belongs to you because all I ever do is think about you, wonder what you’re doing, or if you’re thinking about me, too. My arms belong around you in an embrace that conveys how much I wish to hold you until I breathe my last breath. My hands hurt when you’re not near. It’s like they have a will of their own, that they’ve decided the only time they can unclench and relax is when they’re touching you, making sure that you’re really here with me and not still missing, or one of the thousands of dreams I’ve had while we’ve been apart.

  “Ever since I met you, even my feet stopped belonging to me and became yours because all they ever seem to want to do is travel to wherever you are. My heart only lives and beats when you’re where I can see you. Touch you. Kiss your lips and show you the physical equivalent of how deeply I love you. My soul fucking died after I sent that stupid letter and you disappeared. I’ve spent the last fifteen years walking around as a shell. Not a living, breathing human, but a robot going through the everyday motions. You were, are, and will always be more than my life. More than my beating heart, or any other physical reaction my body has. You’re my everything, my fucking essence. I cease to exist unless I’m with you.”

  My body trembled. My rant had turned into a shout that had concluded with stinging eyes from the tears I was holding back, a hoarse voice, and a heart that was pounding so hard in my chest, you would have thought I’d just stepped off a battlefield of war instead of the battlefield of my emotions. The hope that was shining from Belle’s face made the complete dissection of my heart and soul worth it, however. Anything was worth seeing the light of love shining from those amazing, green eyes.

  I was so worked up from my spie
l, that when she asked me her next question, my brain didn’t stop to think, and I fired the honest answer back that would irrevocably change the tide of this emotionally soul sucking war that we’d been waging against each other for weeks. Or maybe years.

  “Does that mean you forgive me about not telling you about Seth?”

  “No.”

  It was out before I could stop it and I would have given anything to stop it. Anything at all, as I watched that precious light of love and hope she’d shined on me just seconds before distinguish as her face crumbled in despair. If she weren’t lying in a hospital bed, she would have recoiled from me bodily, but she was stuck and couldn’t move away. It didn’t stop her from shrinking back into that thin, hospital mattress just as far as she could to get away from me. It also didn’t stop her from pulling her hand free from my own, where I’d kept it trapped against my body this whole time. I’d literally shocked myself stupid because I couldn’t find the words to say in order to fix what I’d just done.

  She covered her face with her hands as sobs started to rock her body. She turned herself bodily away, as far as she could get from me. Her broken gasps and wailing cries grew louder as I sat there numbly, in a mental fog of stupor, trying to figure out what the hell I’d just done to us. A shrill alarm started to blare in the room, but it didn’t register that something was wrong until hands clamped down on my shoulders and wrenched me from my chair.

  Suddenly, Sheriff Jenkins’s angry face came into view and he shoved me across the room towards the door that nurses were currently rushing through. All I could hear was the woosh woosh woosh of my blood pounding in my ears while the Sheriff continued to push me out of Belle’s room and into the hallway. I finally became cognizant that something was wrong when I looked up to see the nurses surrounding her bed. One was injecting something into her IV while the other nurse had ripped off her bandages covering the stitches across her chest and was using clean ones to stop the fresh flow of blood. They were both crooning to her in soothing tones, encouraging her to try and take a deep breath and calm down.

  So preoccupied with what was happening at Belle’s bed, I completely missed the fist that came flying at my face until the punch landed and, the next thing I knew, I was sprawled on my ass in the middle of the floor. A shadow fell over me and I looked up to find Declan leaning down to grab my hand before hauling me up. The pounding in my ears turned into a manageable buzz after I shook my head a few times. Voices started to make sense again around me, and I heard Declan yelling at the Sheriff, who was now being bodily detained by Boyd.

  Jenkins’s face was mottled red as he roared back at Declan, “You get that motherfucker out of here right now or, I swear to God, I’m gonna kill him. Belle’s recovering from a gunshot wound that damn near killed her and that fuckhead went and said something that caused her to have an anxiety attack so bad she ripped her stitches open, and is bleeding out all over the place again, and she can’t even fucking breathe.”

  Jenkins tried to lunge for me again, but Boyd held him tightly in his straining arms. The look he was giving me was nothing less than a murderous rage, mixed with loathing and I deserved it all.

  “I heard what you said to her, you piece of shit, and I promise you that if you don’t get out of this hospital right this minute, the hospital security will be the last thing you have to worry about.”

  I glanced back to Belle’s room, which was the only one situated at the very end of the hall, as Declan began to tug me backwards. My eye was already starting to swell shut, but I was still able to see the nurses prepping a tray of sterile instruments so that they could stitch her wounds closed again. Her face was mostly slack from being knocked out by the medication, but I could still see the strained lines around her eyes and mouth that conveyed her pain and devastation. Bloody bandages littered the bed around her body as the nurse continued to clean up the devastating damage to her that, once again, I had caused.

  Declan tugged me further away down the hall as I watched the doctor scramble into the room. What had I done? I’d practically stabbed myself in the back while damn near killing—emotionally and physically—the love of my life and it was all my unforgiving brain’s fault.

  Teagan was right, I didn’t deserve her.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Bobby

  Two months later in Woodbridge, Virginia…

  “Yeah, suck it. That’s right. Suck. It. Suck it all up real good. Don’t miss a drop. Come on, come on, baby, you can do it, suck it dry already.”

  I instantly regretted letting myself into Declan’s house after no one answered the door. ‘Cause that kind of commentary was not generally something you wanted to hear coming out of another guy’s mouth as you were walking into the room where they were giving those kind of explicit instructions. Especially, when it was the home of one of the biggest manwhores I’d ever had the pleasure of knowing. My buddy’s only saving grace was the fact that: A) I could hear the buzz of the shop vac. B) I’d received a phone call from Declan, begging me to help with the clean-up from a flood on the main floor of his house. And C) upon coming into the occupied room where the shop vac buzzed in Declan’s hands, I was also able to witness the dumbass making ridiculous looking pelvic thrusts while giving his porno like instructions to an inanimate object all while listening to his IPod.

  Quickly whipping out my cell phone, I started video recording the big dummy before he noticed I was there. A few minutes later I had several more exaggerated pelvic thrusts coupled with the kind of lines you heard in cheesy porno movies saved for what would certainly be a laugh fest at the next meeting the Ex Ops team had. I felt my lips twitch in what was almost my first genuine grin in several weeks, as I pocketed my phone.

  Life had been pretty fucking miserable since coming home to Virginia, which was nobody’s fault but my own. The sad truth was, the only semi-good moment I’d had since coming home was the day Jaxon had called to let me know that Belle had identified her three kidnappers and Rivera in our pictures of the dead from the rescue in Mexico. The good part, not being that she’d managed to ID them, or that their deaths had officially closed her case, but knowing that her tormentors were dead and she was no longer in danger. I could care less that we’d temporarily managed to shut down a leg of the black market arms trade. Some other asshole would eventually pop up to take Rivera’s place. It was all about the knowledge that the woman I loved was safe. Belle was all that mattered.

  The movement of my lips finally caught numb nut’s attention and I watched my buddy study me like I was mold under a microscope. “Are you smiling? Holy shit. What finally broke you out of that self-inflicted funk of yours?”

  My lip twitch grew a little bigger. “Nothing.”

  Declan arched an eyebrow. “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.” Much. Just you acting like a first class moron and the fact that I get to post it on YouTube, I silently added in my head.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever, man. It’s good to see you smile anyways. Thanks for coming out to help me. You see this fuckin’ mess? It’s crazy. That’s what I get for letting some blonde babe with knockers the size of watermelons tell me she was an experienced plumber. The pipes under the kitchen sink blew out and this is what I came home to.”

  “Well, maybe if you picked up a phonebook and called a real plumber instead of trying to beg off a date using the pipes under your kitchen sink as an excuse, shit like this wouldn’t happen.”

  “Come on, man, give me a break. I was trying to get her out of my hair, but the minute she told me she would ‘fix my pipes’ my brain went into overdrive. That didn’t count all the things she said she would do to my ‘wrench’.” He gave a lascivious smile with his air quotes.

  “Yeah, well, I hope it was a helluva pipe cleaning because now you’ve got this mess.” I waved my hand around to encompass the soggy carpets.

  Declan sighed wistfully. “It most definitely was one bad ass pipe cleaning; nothing that could compare to Teagan, though. Damn
, man, I think I could fall in love with that woman if I ever got to have round two with her. There was this thing she did with her—”

  Throwing my hands up in the air in front of me, I yelled, “Oh, hell, no! Nope, don’t want to hear it. I played football with that girl. She went through freshman football’s high school hazing with me. She was one of the guys to me, not to mention, she’s my son’s godmother, so I sure as shit do not want to hear about what she can or cannot do. Ever.”

  Declan groused, “You take all my fun away.”

  Pointing back to the soggy carpet, I said, “Yeah, well, if this is an example of your kind of fun, then I’ll definitely pass on it, bro.”

  “Yeah, well, I’d pass on your version of fun, too. It involves a future prescription of Prozac.”

  Glowering back at Declan, I snapped, “What’s that supposed to mean, dipshit?”

  He gave a mirthless laugh. “You’re calling me a dipshit? You’re the man that had the American dream handed to him on a silver platter and managed to fuck it all up! All because you couldn’t pull your head out of your ass long enough to forgive a woman who you dicked over in the first place. If anyone’s the dipshit here, it’s you.”