“So she’s handling it?” Lucas asks, and I know he’s talking about Majid’s death. All of my men know about the way Nora gunned him down, and about her role in my rescue. They admire her for being so brave, whereas I’m battling a daily urge to throttle her for risking her life. And Peter—well, that’s a whole other matter. If he hadn’t disappeared promptly after bringing us to the clinic, I would’ve torn his head off for placing her in that kind of danger.
“She is,” I say in response to Lucas’s question. My concerns about Nora’s mental state are not something I want to share with him. “She’s handling it about as well as can be expected. The first kill is never easy, of course, but she’s tough. She’ll get through it.”
“Yes, I’m sure she will.” Reaching for his crutches, Lucas gets up and asks, “How soon do you want to head back to Colombia?”
“Goldberg says we can leave tomorrow. He wants me to stay here one more night, to make sure everything is healing properly, and then he’ll oversee my care back at the compound.”
“Excellent,” Lucas says. “I will make the arrangements then.”
He hobbles out of the room, and I reach for my laptop to check on Nora’s whereabouts. She went to get a snack from the cafe on the first floor of the clinic, but she’s already been gone longer than ten minutes, and I am beginning to get worried.
Logging in, I pull up the report from the trackers and see that she’s standing in the hallway, about fifty feet away from the room. The dot showing her location is stationary; she must be chatting with someone there.
Relieved, I close the laptop and place it back on the bedstand.
I know my fear for her is excessive, but I can’t control it. Seeing Majid’s knife at Nora’s throat had been the worst experience of my life. I had never been so terrified as when I saw the blood trickling down her smooth skin. I literally saw a wall of red at that moment, the rage pumping through me giving me a surge of strength I hadn’t known I possessed. Killing that terrorist hadn’t been a conscious decision; the need to protect Nora had overwhelmed both my instinct for self-preservation and common sense.
If I had been thinking more clearly, I would’ve come up with some other way to get Majid’s attention away from Nora until the reinforcements could arrive.
I had begun to suspect the rescue plan as soon as Majid mentioned shopping. It made a terrible kind of sense: Nora knew that my enemies would want her as leverage, and she knew that she had the trackers. I couldn’t believe that she would put herself out there like that—or that Peter would let her—but it was the only thing that could explain how Al-Quadar were able to lay their hands on her in my absence.
Instead of staying safe at the estate, Nora risked her life to save mine.
Knowing what Majid was capable of, she faced her nightmares to rescue me—the man she has every reason to hate.
I don’t know if I believed that she truly loved me until that moment . . . until I saw her standing there, scared, yet determined, her small body swathed in a man’s shirt ten sizes too big for her. Nobody had ever done anything like that for me before; even when I was a child, my mother would slink away at the first sign of my father’s temper, leaving me to his tender mercies. Other than the guards I hired, nobody had ever protected me. I had always been on my own.
Until her.
Until Nora.
As I’m remembering how fierce she looked with her gun pointed at Majid, the door to the room opens, and the subject of my musings walks in.
She’s wearing a pair of jeans and a brown long-sleeved top, her thick hair caught in a ponytail behind her back and her feet clad in ballet-type flats. The bruise on her cheekbone is still there, but she covered it up with some makeup today, probably so she could video-chat with her parents without worrying them. She’s been talking to them almost daily since our arrival at the clinic. I think she feels guilty about scaring them with her disappearance again.
She’s also munching on an apple, her white teeth biting into the juicy fruit with evident enjoyment.
My heart begins to thump heavily in my ribcage as my chest expands with joy and relief. It’s like that every time I see her now, my reaction the same whether she’s been gone fifteen minutes or several hours.
“Hi.” She walks over and gracefully perches on the right side of my bed. Leaning down, she presses her soft lips to my cheek in a brief kiss, then lifts her head to smile at me. “Want some apple?”
“No, thanks, baby.” My voice turns husky as her touch makes me painfully aware of the fact that I haven’t fucked her since leaving the estate. “It’s all yours.”
“All right.” She bites into the apple. “I ran into Dr. Goldberg in the hallway,” she says after swallowing. “He said you’re getting better, and we can go home tomorrow.”
“Yes, that’s right.” I watch her tongue flick out to clean up a tiny piece of fruit from her lower lip, and a bolt of heat tightens my balls. I am definitely getting better—or at least my cock believes that I am. “We’ll leave as soon as he okays it.”
Nora bites off another piece of apple and chews it slowly, studying me with a peculiar expression.
“What is it, baby?” Reaching for her free hand, I bring her delicate palm up to my face and rub the back of her hand against my cheek. I know I’m probably scratching her soft skin with my stubble—I haven’t shaved in over a week—but I can’t resist the lure of her touch. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”