Chapter 4 #3
“Do you recall the last forty-eight hours?” Dr. Lopez asked. When Roman merely nodded, the doctor pressed, “All of it?”
Roman pinned the doc with a cold stare and hoped he wouldn’t quiz him for details.
Dr. Lopez sighed. “Well, since you’re resistant to further examination, I’m going to go check on your client.” He shot A.J. a quick look that read, keep an eye on him, then went into Harper’s room.
“Only you would get hit by a car after a bomb detonates and walk away. Thank God you’re so lucky.” A.J. shook his head in surprise. “But are you sure you feel—”
“I protected my head when I fell,” Roman interrupted him, not in the mood to worry about his injuries when Harper was in a hospital bed.
A.J. pointed to the side of Roman’s head. “Clearly, not well enough.”
“And a hip tear? Back pain? Like we haven’t dealt with that five hundred times before,” Roman complained.
“Yeah, well, I’m not as worried about that as I am about your head,” A.J.
grumbled. “Remember when I hit my thick skull on a rock while we were paintballing, and I saw Marcus’s ghost?
” He grimaced. “Not the same thing, but concussions can play tricks on ya, brother. You don’t need to act okay if you’re not. ”
Roman’s focus went to the black band on A.J.’s wrist. Marcus had believed in luck. He’d always worn that black band on operations as Bravo Three. Except once, of course. The day he died.
Marcus was now buried in Alabama. Well, his empty casket was there since his body was never recovered. He’d left behind a widow.
They tried to keep in touch with her. It wasn’t always easy for Savanna to see them, though. A reminder of her loss. She’d insisted the teams keep Marcus’s black band, and the guys on the teams rotated wearing it in his honor.
Roman pulled his attention back to the hallway, finding himself grateful he wouldn’t be attending another funeral after yesterday’s car bomb.
A.J. let go of Roman’s arm to stand before him now, setting a hand over his shoulder as if he were about to have a man-to-man talk, the kind a father gave a son about ensuring he wrapped up before having sex.
“At least you don’t have full-blown amnesia like Emily’s brother Jake had to deal with,” A.J. commented a moment later.
Another memory Roman had misplaced and now remembered.
Liam’s wife’s brother had temporarily lost his memories a few years back, and it’d been a lot worse for Jake.
And eerily, Jake Summers had knowledge of an imminent terrorist attack that he had to stop, and yet, due to his amnesia, he’d been unable to remember the details.
At least this situation with Harper was a little different.
But chills still rolled over his skin at the thought.
“You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?” Why was A.J. pushing this?
Ever since they all began seeing a therapist every so often to support Chris’s PTSD, A.J. was more of an open book than ever, and Roman wasn’t used to it yet. Roman, on the other hand, wasn’t any kind of book. Open or closed.
Whenever Roman went into his therapy sessions, he pretty much sat on the couch and counted the minutes until it was over.
He’d felt like a dick doing that since the therapist was Riley Logan, wife to the former Marine, Ben Logan, who’d operated with Jake Summers back in the day. Ben had helped Jake stop that terrorist attack in 2017, too.
“Hey, man, you okay?” A.J. snapped his fingers with his free hand, and Roman blinked a few times. “You look like you’re about to get bucked off a horse. Never saw fear in your eyes unless it’s about . . .”
Harper. “Maybe I did hit my head harder than I thought,” Roman confessed, and before he knew it, A.J. was supporting his weight before he collapsed.
“Or it’s a combination of the head injury and the older scars the doc saw. I’m pretty sure we all have quite a bit of scarring. How many guys have undiagnosed TBIs that the service wrote off as PTSD?” A.J. asked under his breath as he helped Roman head back to Harper’s room.
Facts about why special operators notoriously had a lot more brain scars and not from actual combat were on the tip of his tongue, but he was drawing a blank. Misfiring.
When they entered the room, the doctor was in the process of flashing a light into each of Harper’s pupils.
Roman dropped into the chair closest to her bed, swapping spots with Finn. “How are you?” he asked her once the doctor moved to the other side of the bed and pulled up her chart on a laptop.
Harper looked over at him, her eyes tired. “Like someone shoved me out of the path of an oncoming car.” She attempted a smile, then frowned as if it hurt to do so. “But you look like you actually did get hit by one. Thank you for saving me.”
He wasn’t looking for a thank-you. He just wanted to get her the hell out of Barcelona and away from any potential danger. But they were stuck there now until given orders to leave.
“The heavy gear. Diving and . . .” Roman blurted out the facts suddenly popping in his head.
Diving with heavy equipment, helmets with NODs, jumping from planes, even firing too many rounds—all of that led to too much pressure on the brain and resulted in minor scarring for special operators like SEALs.
“What?” Finn rose a brow.
“Nothing.” Roman palmed his jaw, remembering he was the only one who had a clue what in the hell he’d been thinking about.
“Excuse me.” A nurse came into the room a moment later, saving Roman from having to explain his weird comment. “You have a visitor.”
Roman turned to see Carmen Riviera entering the room, and he hung his head at the sight of her. He’d forgotten she was at the hotel when the car exploded.
What else had he forgotten?
“Roman,” Carmen began, starting their way, her heels clicking on the floor. She was speaking in rapid Spanish, and he was slow on the translation since it wasn’t his native language.
“Demasiado rápido,” he told her. “You’re talking too fast.”
“Ah, lo siento. Sometimes I forget you were born and raised in America and away from your true family.” Carmen nodded hello to A.J. and Finn, then set a hand to his shoulder as if she felt like that was okay to do.
True family? If it weren’t for the drugs, he might not have been able to bite his tongue at his severe dislike for his cousin’s widow.
“My co-workers,” Roman said while opening his palm to the room.
The doctor set eyes on Carmen, obviously recognizing her as the former mayor’s wife. “Give you some space,” he said with a small bow and left the room.
“Hello.” Carmen looked to A.J., then Finn, lastly to Harper. “I heard the blast, and when I looked out the window, I was shocked to see you were all there. So lucky you’re okay.”
Luck. No, it wasn’t luck. If someone wanted them all dead, they would be.
Carmen focused back on Roman. “Wrong time, wrong place, I suppose.”
Hardly. More like bad timing for Carmen to have been there.
“I already have one of the Riviera residences being prepped for you and your co-workers. You will stay there and recover.” Carmen sat on the edge of Harper’s bed as if she had any business being there.
“No, definitely not,” Roman quickly answered.
“I insist,” she countered, and A.J. and Finn rounded Harper’s bed to stand opposite her.
“We’re all set, thank you,” Finn said with a polite nod.
“If not at one of our homes, then one of our hotels,” she added with a defiant lift of the chin, eyes pointed Roman’s way. “You can’t stay at the hotel you were just at after that explosion. You need to be somewhere safer.”
“We’ll be—”
“I won’t take no as an answer,” Carmen cut off A.J., zipping her focus to Roman, and he knew this shit storm they’d walked into in Spain had only just begun.
Roman may have had a terrorist attack to stop, but if they were going to stay in Spain for much longer, he now had a secondary mission. Guarding his secrets closer than ever and making sure they stayed hidden so none of the people he cared about died because of them.