They had to stop by the apartment-complex office to pick up the keys to Lana’s new door, but Caleb was pleased by the sturdy steel barrier and deadbolt. At least this door would take some effort to break through. Her windows were another story, but he’d take what he could get.
Caleb pocketed the spare key, which Lana didn’t even notice. It was just one more sign how thinly she’d been stretched today. He waited for her to start the shower before he caled Monroe.
“We had an incident today,” he told the colonel.
“I heard. Seems Detective Jacob Hart has done a little snooping into your records.”
“What did you let him see?”
“The public stuff. The honors and commendations. I think he’s got a crush.”
Caleb gave an amused grunt. “I’m sure. Be careful with that one. He’s smart.”
Monroe offered a noise of acknowledgment. “I heard about the woman being shot. Did she make it?”
“Yes, sir. We’re going back to the hospital to see her soon.”
“Find out what happened. The police weren’t able to get much out of her.”
“I’l try. She took a blow to the head, so I don’t know how much she’l remember,” said Caleb. “One thing is for sure. That shooting was no coincidence.”
Monroe grunted in agreement. “There’s something else you should know.”
“What?”
“Her office was bugged.”
“What?” growled Caleb, feeling his muscles tighten.
“It wasn’t cheap tech, either. Professional stuff.”
“Ah, hel.”
“How do you want to proceed?” asked Monroe.
“I have some names of people she works with who need background checks. A list of license-plate numbers from cars that drove by her office too many times. I’d like to see if Stacie has any background of her own that might be to blame for her shooting.”
“Send the info via e-mail and I’l take care of it.”
Lana regretted losing the comfort of Caleb’s shirt, but it didn’t make sense for her to keep it now that she had her own clothes to wear. After she showered and dressed, she folded it back up, tossed her bloody jeans in the trash—no way was she ever wearing them again—and went out into the living room.
Caleb had rummaged in her fridge and thrown together some sandwiches. “I thought you might want to eat.”
“Thanks.” She grabbed a plate and went to the living room to sit down. There wasn’t enough room for a table in her kitchen, and she’d gotten so used to eating in front of the TV that she hardly thought about it anymore.
Caleb folowed her and sat on the other end of the couch. She placed his shirt between them. “Thanks for the loan.”
“One of those blasted cops should have done the same thing. Guess they just liked looking a little too much.”
His big body was sprawled out, his long legs crossed at the ankle. Tight denim covered his thick thighs, and it was al Lana could do not to stare.
She hadn’t so much as had a spark of attraction for anyone since Armenia. There was simply nothing left of her to spare on a relationship. But as she stared at him, she felt something long dead come back to life—some deeply feminine part of her that took notice of things like thick, powerful legs. She should have been too worried about Stacie to even think such thoughts, a realization that doused her little spurt of longing with a dose of guilt.
Lana finished eating. “I need to get back to the hospital. Can you take me to get my car? The police are probably finished blocking off the parking lot by now.”
“Are you sure you don’t want a nap or something? The doc said it would be a few hours.”
Lana looked up at him. “Is that what you did when I was in the hospital? Did you go home and sleep? Because to me, it felt like you were there the whole time.”
Caleb looked away and took a drink of water. It was a delay tactic, and she knew it.
“I didn’t realize you knew I’d been there,” he said.
“I heard you. Saw you.” She’d felt his hand stroke hers so she knew she wasn’t alone even when she’d been too weak to open her eyes.
“You saw me?”
She nodded. “Once. After you’d shaved.” Miles Gentry had a bushy beard that obscured much of his face, but Caleb’s jaw was smooth, only shadowed by the midnight stubble just beneath his skin. Just like it was right now.
“You remember seeing me even though you were ful of pain meds and barely conscious?”
She wished those drugs had done a better job of obscuring her memory. Her life would have been a lot easier if she didn’t have those memories of him caring about her to muddy the waters. Hatred was so much easier.
“I have a good memory for faces, and yours stuck, because at that moment, I hated you,” she admitted quietly.
Caleb’s mouth hardened and his voice went gruff. “That makes two of us.”
Lana heard the sound of self-loathing in his tone, and she knew he was thinking about the seven people that died beside her in that cave. She knew because she spent a lot of time thinking about them, too, wondering why she was stil alive and they weren’t. What made her so special?
“Survivor’s guilt” was what the doctors caled it, but naming it didn’t make it any easier to live with. Didn’t make it go away.
“Why didn’t you just let me die?” she asked in a whisper.
“Because I couldn’t. I’d lost everyone else in that cave. I didn’t want to lose you, too. You were al so young, trying to do good. I should have found a way to save everyone.”
What could she say to a confession like that? Words held no value, so she reached out her hand and placed it on his much larger one in an attempt to offer what comfort she could. The blind leading the blind, maybe, but it was al she had to offer.
His hand was deeply tanned, in contrast to her sun-deprived skin, and so incredibly warm. Little scars dotted the flesh here and there but didn’t detract from their masculine beauty. She imagined he’d earned every one of those scars fighting to protect others. Maybe there was even one there to mark the day he puled her out of that cave after kiling the man who had hurt her.
From the depth of his silence, she sensed his guilt, his suffering, and she didn’t want that for him. Maybe things hadn’t worked out so wel for her, but it wasn’t his fault.
She knew in her heart he was a good man. A noble hero. He’d saved countless others, and she couldn’t stand to watch him suffer, no matter how many bad memories his presence unearthed.
She had to swalow to relax her throat before she could speak. “There’s something I’ve been wondering for a long time, and whenever I asked, Monroe and his men dodged the question.”
“I’l tel you if I can,” he said. “There are a lot of things I can’t talk about, but I’l tel you the truth, even if it’s just that I can’t tel you anything.”
“Why us?” she asked him. “Why was my group targeted? We weren’t in hostile territory. We weren’t doing any antiterrorist work. We were just a group of young people trying to make a smal difference in the lives of a few women and children. I don’t understand why we were taken.”
Caleb puled in a deep breath and stayed silent as if trying to find the right words. “The people who took you were out to prove themselves. They were trying to gain entry into a terrorist group, and that video that they took of the torture and kiling was their audition tape, so to speak. It wouldn’t have made any difference to them what you were doing there. Al they wanted was an easy target—a group of several innocents they could use to earn their bones.”
“So we were just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“I’m afraid there’s not much more to it than that. It was bad luck that you were there, but if it hadn’t been you, it would have been someone else.”
“This group, are they the ones Monroe caled the Swarm?”
Caleb nodded. “I’m surprised he told you that much.”
“I think he thought I was going to die, so it wouldn’t realy matter,” she told him. “He never told me what they want, though.”
“Money. Power. There’s nothing altruistic about them. They aren’t fighting for some noble cause. They kil whoever they need to to get what they want. In much of the world, fear is power. People wil do nearly anything to protect those they love. The Swarm knew that and used it as they would any other tool.”
“You’re teling me they’re into torturing and kiling people for money?”
“In most cases, yes. In your case it was for status. Prestige. Acceptance.”
“So if they were al about money and power, then what were they doing targeting children?”
He paused as if deciding what to tel her, or maybe what not to tel her. “Sometimes the only way to get someone to cooperate—to give them information or help they need
—is to threaten to take away the only thing that means more to a person than their honor or integrity.”
“Their child,” guessed Lana.
Caleb nodded. “It happens more often than anyone would like to believe. Sometimes we get a chance to stop it, but most of the time, people take the safer route where their children are concerned.”
“They give in.”
“Wouldn’t you?” he asked.
She thought about her nephew, about her sister and her parents. There wasn’t much she wouldn’t do to protect them, be it honorable or not. “Your job . . . it’s a lot harder than anyone knows, isn’t it?”
He shrugged his wide shoulders as if it didn’t matter how he felt about it. It was his job.
“I’m glad you do it,” she said. “If you hadn’t been there, I’d have died, too.”
“I should have done a better job of protecting you and the others. I should have found a way to save them al.”
“I was there, remember. I know the kind of evil you were up against. You did the best you could—the only thing you could.”
She toyed with the soft fabric of his folded shirt, feeling restless and edgy. She didn’t like dealing with the past, but she knew there was something she had to tel him. She owed him that much. “For a long time, I hated you for what you did. I know it wasn’t fair, and that you were only doing your job, but you were an easy target, and I needed that anger to fuel my recovery—to give me the strength to keep going.”
His eyes closed as if he was in pain. “Lana, please. We don’t have to talk about this.”
“No. You need to know.” She had to get rid of this burden. Her life was too heavy to keep carrying it around, too. “I pushed myself to recover so that I could walk up to you one day and tel you how much I hated you for letting them hurt me. I thought about it al the time—how shocked you’d be. How humiliated and guilty you’d feel. Some days, it was the only thing that got me through physical therapy.”
Her anger was the only thing holding her together then. She could barely stand living like that, but if she hadn’t had that hatred and the goal it gave her, she was sure she would have given up. Her recovery had been nearly as painful as her torture.
