Page 38 of Operation Rescue
“Yeah.” Blaine flicked a glance toward the outside. Her car had fired up again, making what sounded like even more noise than before, but it shut down after a moment and he went on. “And now they’re on our side, Erin. The people who have done that small thing to taking down a sitting governor are on our side.”
“Thanks to you,” she said softly.
He half shrugged. “Thanks to me being in the right place at the right time and having a bird to fly.”
She studied him for a moment. “You never were comfortable with the hero hat, even when you’d earned it.”
The look he gave her then was so startled it startled her. What, did he think she’d forgotten what he’d done, how he’d served, the lives he’d protected and saved? She sighed.
“Just because I’m not hero material doesn’t mean I don’t recognize it when I see it,” she said. “Like in you two,” she added with a nod toward the door, which had opened again, just enough for Rafe to lean in.
“I’m going to pick up some parts. If Ty pops up again—” he gestured at the computer screen where they’d watched the video “—go ahead and answer him. I should be back in fifteen or less.”
Before she could even ask about how much this was going to cost, the man was gone.
“I can’t afford a big repair bill,” she said, hating how anxious she sounded.
“We’ll work it out,” Blaine said.
So, what, he was going to pay for this, too? He already gave so much that she wondered what he lived on himself. She couldn’t even look at him, her emotions were so tangled up. She buried her face in her hands.
She didn’t know how much time had passed before she heard Blaine say, very quietly, “You were wrong, you know.”
She nearly laughed out loud. She’d been wrong about so much. “You’re going to have to narrow that down a bit.”
“You were as much a hero as I ever was.”
She jerked her head up sharply. “What?”
“Don’t belittle what you went through. I don’t, because I know that if you hadn’t been there, fighting for me, I would probably have given up.”
“I doubt that,” she said, but she couldn’t deny the words pleased her. She’d wanted to be there for him, the way he’d always been for her, and Ethan.
It was the nights between the long days of pushing and trying that nearly did her in. Because every night she dreamed of them getting past this, of him getting back on his feet, and then…it happened again. And again. Endlessly, in her nightmares, he would heal, then get broken. Heal, get broken. Every night.
He hesitated, then added, “I know what you told everyone. That nobody was supposed to tell me how bad it was, just how many bones I’d broken, or that my left arm might never work right again. Dr. Hadley told me, right before he released me from rehab.”
“I just didn’t want you to think any damage or limitation was permanent, before you had to.”
“And because of that, because of the way you never let me hear what the staff, what the medics were saying, never let anyone tell me, I had no idea that I couldn’t be doing what I was doing.”
“I didn’t want to hear it, either,” she said honestly.
He smiled. “Because you did that, because I never knew how bad the prognostications were, I never lost hope. I just thought it was taking so long and hurting so much because I’d been so busted up, not because I was never going to get on my feet again.”
“And so you did,” she said softly.
If she was proud of anything she’d done in that long, hard battle they’d fought it was that. She believed in the power of the mind to convince the body to heal itself, and it had worked.
Too bad she hadn’t been able to power her mind into preparing to go through it all again someday.
Chapter 20
“How can you be so calm?” Erin knew how the words sounded, so she quickly added, “I don’t mean that as a jab, I just want to know how you do it. Because I’m a wreck, knowing there’s nothing we can do but wait.”
Which they had been doing, for a couple of hours now. Restlessly, on her part. Blaine was still where he’d been on the couch, so outwardly calm it had made her ask.
“Years of practice. Waiting for a mission. Waiting for a team to return. Waiting to hear if an operation was successful.”
