Page 66 of Arrogant Bastard

I don’t need a second prompt. I carefully pick Faith up and cradle her in my arms.

We tear across the courtyard and through a gated archway to emerge on a dirt road. My driver is behind the wheel. Shane, the analyst I tried to block from coming on this mission on account of his age, yanks open the back door. We pile in, Faith clutched tight in my arms, and the driver steps on the gas.

The team member in the passenger seat turns around. “Mr. Knight, what are your orders?”

I don’t raise my gaze from Faith’s face. Each blink, each puff of air she exhales is essential to my sanity. “Call the nearest hospital. Tell them we’re on our way. Call the extraction team, report what’s happened, and tell them to send a chopper to meet us at the nearest possible rendezvous point with a doctor on board. And tell them to send the authorities to get those kids out of there.”

He nods and gets on the phone immediately. The helicopter intercepts us five miles away.

At the private hospital in Cairo, the medical staff whisks Faith away from me and into surgery. And I endure the longest hours of my life. I’m ten paces from turning into a raving lunatic when the doctor enters the room. I listen to words fall from his lips but only two register.

She’s alive.

She’s alive.

I take my first full breath in forever. I must ask to see her because he leads me to a private room at the end of a long, quiet corridor. And beneath a jumble of tubes, intravenous needles, and blankets, my heart lies, pale and breathing and beautiful.

I make different, drastic plans in the four days she stays in her coma. On the fifth, the doctor updates me with news of her improvement. He thinks she should wake up in the next twelve to twenty-four hours. And she can go home in about a week. I leave her side and return to my hotel to make my report to a stone-faced Eric Biggins and to deliver the news that I’m leaving the agency.

Twenty-nine and retired sounds like the beginning of an excellent novel. Maybe that will be the title of my memoir. I make even more plans before I return to the hospital.

When I sit on the side of her bed and take her hand, her eyes flicker behind her lids. I sense that she’s awake. But she doesn’t answer me when I talk to her. She doesn’t open her eyes.

She’s not ready to face reality yet.

That’s fine. We have all the time in the world. When the doctor convinces me to go and get some sleep, I reluctantly take his advice.

I shouldn’t have. It was hands-down the worse move I ever made.

Because in those hours I was asleep in the hotel two blocks away, the reason for my heartbeat walked out of the hospital and left me behind.

Chapter Eighteen

Killian

It’s been five days. Betty is being unusually coy about spitting out any actionable intel. It’s either that or our enemies have covered their tracks better than we expected, because every bit of information she finds—from flight manifests to bank records—is over four years old. She’s not having any luck either with the surveillance. It almost seems like Galveston allowed himself to be picked up on camera at Dulles Airport as a silent fuck-you to us before disappearing.

I don’t want to think he’s that tech savvy, but the very real evidence that he’s alive shows he has the resilience of a cockroach. Add to that his substantial family money, and the guy could cause real problems if we’re not careful.

I watch Faith leaf through a coffee table magazine on bicycles—bicycles, for fuck’s sake—then drop it to pace the living room. I need to have a word with Linc about buying better reading material. The sunlight catches her raven hair as she pauses in front of the window. The combination of her hair, my long-sleeved white dress shirt she tugged on earlier, and her reddened lips gives her the look of a naughty angel. An angel who deserves to spread her wings, not be held captive in my gilded prison. Even if it’s for her own safety.

The roof garden has lost its appeal. There’s only so much fresh air you can inhale a quarter of a mile up on a rooftop before it becomes old. I toy with the idea of taking her back to bed. That never gets old.

But we finished fucking an hour ago—one of those epic marathons that reaffirms life but leaves you drained. For like five minutes when you haven’t had sex in four years.

I’m raring to go again but my baby needs a little recovery time. The cocky bastard in me hides a satisfied smirk when I catch her tiny wince as she changes direction. I like leaving a mark on her, but I love leaving one inside her even more. I love the thought that she feels me with every step she takes.

But right now, I hate the restlessness I sense in her. It’s not from waiting on Betty. It’s not from being thrown into limbo wondering what’s out there. It’s something else. That same something she wears like an invisible cloak. The secrets that shield her from me.

It pisses me off. But I suppress the need to pry the secret from her and rise to intercept her. “Want to watch a movie with me?”

She swivels on her heel and stares up at me, hands propped on her hips. “I love watching fast cars and things blowing up every two seconds, but I’ve had my fill of that for now, thanks.”

“Okay, you can pick the movie this time.”

“And have you grumble all the way through the subtitles?”

“If you can blow me while I eat your pussy, we can find a compromise between Swedish documentaries and high-octane car heist movies.”

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