Chapter 7 #3
“Fuck. Me.” Ryan swore again when he finished reading, met Sebastian’s gaze. “She didn’t mention this to you?”
“No,” Sebastian remembered her cautious gaze when he’d asked her about her family. “Why would she?”
Ryan sank down to his haunches. “Do you think she’s a liability to the operation? Is that why you ran a search on her?”
An uncomfortable shiver stretched across Sebastian’s shoulders. “No.”
“Why did you—” Ryan cut himself off. “Ah...”
“No. Not that.” Dammit. Ryan’s mind always went in that direction.
“I wanted to check out someone who might be joining our squad for a stint in the wilderness. The last thing we need is some psycho.” He dragged his hand through his hair.
“I never expected anything like this.” His heart ached for Nora, but he had a job to do, teammates to protect. “Do I tell Novak?”
“Why? You think she became a ranger in the hopes she’d one day get the chance to avenge herself? It’s a little far-fetched to believe she put in a thousand hours of training on the off-chance.”
“Don’t be an ass,” Sebastian snapped, glancing at the comatose deputy. “She was sexually assaulted by that motherfucker, so who knows how this situation will affect her in the field.”
“Considering how many searches she must have conducted over the years and how many bad guys she’s probably arrested, it seems like a moot point.”
Sebastian twisted his mouth. Unconvinced.
“You think she’s going to, what, be overcome by circumstances and murder Eastman in cold blood?
“No.” Fuck. “I never said she wanted to kill him.” Sebastian thought about the woman he’d spent hours with yesterday morning.
“It doesn’t take a degree in clinical psychology to suspect she became a SAR volunteer to try to save the child she was and probably became law enforcement so someone like that asshole never had control over her again. ”
Ryan shrugged. “Sounds like a good reason to me.”
“What if she wants to save this little girl so badly that she pushes herself too far? Or endangers the team?” Sebastian had seen evidence of it already.
Ryan placed his hand on Sebastian’s shoulder and squeezed.
“Dude. She’s a professional law enforcement agent and a certified search-and-rescue volunteer.
She might screw up. She might get hurt. That’s the chance we all take every single day, and you don’t have to chase a dangerous fugitive to be at risk.
You can be sitting in your own home or driving down a road you have driven a thousand times before.
Shit happens. We can’t control everything. ”
Now Ryan was thinking about his dead wife.
Sebastian released a breath and leaned forward. “I don’t want to expose her to any more pain than she already experienced.”
Ryan laughed softly. “That’s her choice, buddy.”
“Fuck.” He knew that.
“Hey, I get that you feel protective of her, but that doesn’t mean she needs your protection. Or wants it.”
Sebastian released a breath. “I’m going to find it hard to look her in the eye and not let it show, you know?”
“Life is pain, my friend. She deserves our respect, and we owe her privacy. I say we keep this to ourselves and concentrate on the actual problem, finding that kid in an environment that will try to kill us in a thousand different ways.”
Sebastian looked at his friend. “You okay?”
Ryan grunted. “It’s weird being here with the guys,” he admitted. “Two worlds colliding, you know? I couldn’t sleep, but I’m going back to the house to try again. So should you. We won’t get a lot of rest once we deploy.”
“Must be nice to see your kid.”
“Yeah.” Ryan’s smile grew sad. “Always.”
The other man stood, turned, and walked out into the storm.
Sebastian cleared his search history and closed the program.
Pulled on his hat. Followed Ryan out into cold so fierce it pierced his clothes—next time he’d wear his jacket.
As he trudged through the snow, he couldn’t stop thinking about the woman he’d met yesterday.
He needed to keep an eye on her. To make sure she didn’t do anything rash.
And maybe that was an extra load he didn’t need to carry.
A distraction from a mission that would probably test them all to the limit.
Maybe he should ask for a different K9 SAR pair, but then Nora would be working with another of his teammates, and he’d feel duty bound to share what he’d discovered.
And that felt wrong too.
Like gossip.
Like he was questioning her character.
Doubting her integrity.
Re-victimizing the victim.
What she’d been through affected him on such a base level that he struggled to know how to deal with it. Which was his problem—not hers.
He blew out a long sigh as he entered the cabin and took off his hat and snow-covered boots. Cas woke up long enough to grunt and roll over on the pullout.
They’d decided to take turns in the bed.
Sebastian headed to the small bedroom and lay down, fully dressed. He stared at the ceiling and tried to get the image of that little girl out of his mind. Closed his eyes still thinking about a young Nora Deacon and the horror she’d survived.