Page 80 of Her Reluctant Hero
Alex sat on the narrow cot in the emergency room and watched for the nurse he’d sent to get him a shirt. Bruised ribs, they said. Could have been worse. Thank God he kept the vest behind the seat of his truck, and had taken time to put it on. Also, a minor concussion, and eight stitches in his scalp. Still, the amount of blood on his shirt made it look like he’d been butchered.
Julian was coming to pick him up now. Why he couldn’t have attended to Alex in the field, Alex didn’t know. It wasn’t like he’d never gotten stitches without anesthetic, or continued on a mission with a concussion. The rest of the team probably wanted him out of the way while they made their plan, the bastards. Julian had better be here before the nurse returned—or Alex would walk back to DEA headquarters, find out what they’d learned from satellite and cell phones. He didn’t know if they were still tracking Bella or if they’d found Saldana. Goddamn, he hated being helpless.
He had to force himself not to think about what she was enduring, only what he could control.
Which wasn’t a hell of a lot.
The nurse returned with a shirt. Her lips pressed together matter-of-factly as he grimaced. He pushed her hands away to button it himself.
“You have my phone?” he asked.
“Your ride will be here soon enough,” she said shortly.
“I want to call my dad.” Tell him he’d killed his friend. Get absolution. Hear his voice.
The woman’s eyes softened marginally. “Yeah. I can get you your phone. I’ll be right back.”
For the first time he hoped Julian wouldn’t come just yet. He needed to talk to his father with the privacy of a confessional.
The nurse returned with his personal effects. He dug out his phone, and holding it reassured him. He hadn’t realized how out of touch he’d felt. He dialed with shaking fingers. “Dad.”
“Hello, son,” his foster father replied in his deep, calm voice.
“Dad, I—” He swallowed hard, shaking all over now. “I just killed Lionel Danes.”
He heard his dad’s intake of breath, could sense him controlling his questions, knowing as a former Ranger himself what he could and couldn’t ask.
“What happened?”
That question left it open to Alex to decide what to share.
“It’s my fault,” Alex said. “I went to him. I needed his help here and he got us out of town and gave us a place to stay, and then—he took the woman I’m trying to protect.”
“Took her?”
Alex swallowed against the burning in his throat. “Kidnapped her. I thought she was safe alone, he came and got her. He said she had a price on her head. He was holding a gun to her—” He broke off.
“You were assigned to keep this woman safe.” His father’s voice was calm, reasonable, as Alex had hoped it would be. Had feared it wouldn’t be.
“No. I was assigned to let her lead us back to the bad guy.”
“Ah.” The single syllable held a world of meaning.
“It’s not like that.” Damn, he never lied to his foster father. Not anymore. Usually his father could see through it. Alex had to hope the phone gave them enough distance. “She’s young, she’s looking for her child. He’s only three years old. A kid that young needs his mother, right?”
“He does.” His father dragged out the last word leadingly.
“I made a mistake.” Alex rubbed a hand down his face as if he could erase that fact. “More than one. Lionel Danes is dead because of it. She’s gone, taken by the man Lionel gave her to. Because I worried more about the woman than the job.”
“Alex, you’re a good soldier. Lionel Danes was a man who always had his own best interests at heart.”
Alex resisted the pull of those words, the hope that they were true. “He was a Ranger.”
“You know yourself not all Rangers are saints.”
He did know. “But if I hadn’t killed him, he could link us to Saldana, to the kid.”
“He still could. You just have to work backwards. If he was in that deep, he would have killed you to get what he wanted, Alex.”
