Chapter
20
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 past 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 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 for a few seconds. Not to mention 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 you 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 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, 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 maybe you could transfer to a department there. I’m sure there’s one in D.C. or somewhere around the 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 she no longer second guessed me. Or have doubts or fears I would leave her behind again. With the past 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, 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 this is going to work between us and we have more to worry about now than what happens between you and I. We have to think of Seth. I don’t want to get his hopes up this will work and then, one day down the road, you figure out 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 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 about the day their father tried to hit on her in our high school cafeteria. How could she not realize 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 kidnapping 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 lay under flesh and muscle beating 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, they’ve decided the only time they can unclench and relax is when they’re touching you, making sure 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 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 spiel, 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 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 the precious light of love and hope she’d shined on me 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 the thin, hospital mattress 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 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 stupor, trying to figure out what the hell I’d just done to us. A shrill alarm started to blare in the room, but I didn’t register 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 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 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 blood loss and wounds 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 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 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.