Her fingers curled into fists as she shook her head. “To save me! He went to Matunisia to help those people, and the only reason he got involved with Le Roux was to save my life.”
“Everybody knows that, and he’ll get some kind of leniency, but the victims have loved ones, too.”
“I can’t let his life be ruined without a fight. And I’m going to fight for the people you had to leave behind, too. I’m going to shine a spotlight on Le Roux that’s so bright the world can’t ignore it anymore.”
“No.” Just the thought of Isabelle being further involved, even from a distance, with the horror show in Matunisia turned his stomach. “You’re young, Isabelle. You can still put this all behind you.”
“I’m not going to put it behind me, Jack. I’m going to splash this episode of my life on the front pages and tell anybody who’ll listen and do whatever I have to do to get to those who won’t.” The ring of conviction in her voice made him feel old and jaded. “Somebody has to help those people. Why not me?”
Why not somebody he hadn’t come to care about quite so damn much? “It’s too dangerous.”
“So was rescuing me, but you did it anyway. Because somebody had to.”
“If you give Le Roux a headache and he gets his hands on you again, I won’t be able to ask the Group to go after you. Not if you knowingly put yourself at risk.”
“I know. And I only have a few more minutes. I don’t want to spend it arguing with you.” She gave him a shaky smile and the fight went out of him.
Jack pulled her into his arms, telling himself it was okay to hold her because she was about to get on a plane and he’d probably never see her again.
“I don’t want to argue, either,” he said into her hair. “I just don’t want to imagine you waging a one-woman war against a terrorist. I want to picture you finding a good job, finding a nice…man to marry. Having a family.”
With the way her cheek pressed against his chest, he wondered if she could hear his heart thumping.
Her hands slid up his back, coming to rest just below his shoulder blades. “You make it sound like I’m never going to see you again.”
“You probably won’t.”
Her fingers curled against his back. “Why not? I…I want to see you, Jack.”
No, she was just afraid of facing the near, uncertain future without her so-called Obi-Wan. “My job was to get you out. I’ve done that, and now I’ll move on to the next job.”
“I know you care about me. I can feel it when you hold me, and I see it on your face.”
He’d hurt her before for her own good. He could do it again. “It’s not real, Isabelle. I was the first guy in a very long time who was nice to you—gentle when I touched you. You’ve attached yourself to me because I was your rescuer, but it’s not real.”
Jack felt her surrender. The tension went out of her with a shaky breath and she started to pull away. He resisted letting her go for one short, selfish moment, then dropped his arms.
“It’s time for me to go,” she whispered, and he used his thumb to wipe away the tear that escaped her eye.
“Isabelle, I…”
“You have a good life, Jack Donovan,” she said, and then she spun to walk away.
He grabbed her elbow and she stopped, but didn’t turn back. “Isabelle, if you ever need me, you call. Day or night. No matter what I’m doing or where you are, I’ll be there.”
“I needed you now,” she said, and then she walked away—out through the double doors to the plane waiting to take her home.
Jack Donovan let her go, the mistake burning his eyes and squeezing his throat.
The next time he surfaced, Gallagher toed the line. He talked about his pain—a four—and answered every other question asked of him.
He even kept a lid on his temper when they said he wouldn’t be getting out of bed anytime soon because of the bullet he’d taken to the thigh, the back of which wasn’t protected by the chaps. It had missed the femoral, but it had torn up the muscle and nicked the bone, and he’d lost a lot of blood. He’d also taken one in the back, just below the vest, but it wasn’t deep or especially problematic. His body was also a mass of bruises and cuts thanks to his warp speed exit through the treetops.
He just nodded along and gave them his best game face. But all the while he was thinking about Carmen. Why wouldn’t they at least tell him if she was alive? He watched enough TV to know they’d withhold bad news from a patient for his own good.
The worst case scenario—she was dead in the jungle. He couldn’t remember their last minutes on the ground, but there was no other way to explain how he’d come to be the one extracted.
He kept his voice deliberately calm. “Could somebody please tell me if Carmen Olivera is here?”
The doctor barely paused on his way out the door. “We don’t give patient information to anybody but immediate family and those with medical power of attorney.”
“Can you tell Alex Rossi to get his ass in here?”
“I’m not sure where he is at the moment, and you’re becoming agitated. I’m going to restrict your visitors until you calm down.” And then the asshole was gone.
When Gallagher’s nurse was finished her poking and prodding, he smiled at her. “Can you get a message to Alex Rossi for me?”
“Yes. Your friends have commandeered one of the waiting rooms and some cots, so I know I can find him. I don’t know if the doctor will let him in, though.”
“Here’s what I want you to say…”
Rossi was on the phone with Charlotte when a nurse knocked and poked her head in the door. “Mr. Rossi?”
“Call you back, Charlotte.” He snapped the phone closed, dread chewing up his stomach lining. “Come in.”
She did, closing the door behind her. “I’m Molly, Mr. McLaine’s day nurse.”
“He didn’t hurt anybody, did he?” They’d managed to put off giving Gallagher the news for several days, thanks to the drugs, but he was being weaned off. They were running out of time.
“No…well, not yet, anyway. But I’m supposed to ask you, when you had to rescue your son from Contadino’s men, who went back for your wife?”
Gallagher watched the minutes tick away on the ugly industrial clock. Only six passed.
“Straight up, Rossi,” he said, when his boss had closed the door behind him. “Eleven fucking years I’ve had your back, and you just fucking abandon me here, telling me nothing?”
“When a doctor tells me something’s in the best medical interests of my guy, I listen.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You don’t have the balls to come and talk to me like a man.”
Rossi had his laptop and he set it up on the rolling bedside cart. “She’s still in ICU.”
Tension not even the morphine had touched fell away. “So she’s not dead?”
“Oh Christ.” Rossi had been plugging in the power cord, but his head snapped up. “You gotta believe me, man. I thought they’d at least told you she was alive.”
Gallagher threw his arms over his eyes to hide the leak they were threatening to spring. “I want to see her.”
“See this first.”
Gallagher wiped his arm across his eyes and turned his head to face the monitor. He watched the video feed of their extraction up to the actual catching of the wire from the pilot’s point of view, which had almost no visibility of the ground. But there was a glimpse.
“Pause it. I know we hadn’t reached the clearing yet when I went down.”
“Judging by some of your bruising and the blood patterns on her clothes, we think she carried you over her shoulders.”
“No fucking way.” But he knew it had to be the truth. They hadn’t reached the extraction point when he went down, and she was the only person on the ground not trying to kill him. “I can’t believe it.”
“It gets worse, man.”
And it did. But Gallagher forced himself to watch every second Donovan’s camera had captured. By God
, if she could take it, he could watch it.
Until his dead weight ripped her arm out of its socket and he heard her scream.
Rossi got an empty bedpan in front of him, but it didn’t matter. His stomach had nothing in it to vomit up, and all he could do was dry heave, the wound in his back making itself known with a vengeance.
When that had passed, he watched the rest of the feed, right up until she finally passed out. Alex closed the laptop and sat in the visitor’s chair.
“Her shoulder was a fucking mess, but the surgery helped. Most of her fingernails are gone, and she broke three fingers holding your vest’s harness. She has a GSW to her left side, mostly a flesh wound. Judging by the bruising, the harness jarred the hell out of her ribs when it lifted her, but the scans didn’t show any breaks.”
Gallagher was aware of the tears making tracks down his face, but he was beyond giving a shit. “Why didn’t she fucking let me go?”
“Same reason you wouldn’t have let her go. If it had been any of us, she couldn’t have done it. Not wouldn’t have, but couldn’t have. Only one thing makes you superhuman, man.”
Love. “When can I see her? I mean, that’s some serious shit, but it’s not critical.”
Rossi stopped making eye contact and Gallagher got scared again. The man was holding something back—something not good.
Rossi scrubbed his hands over his face. “The doctor told me all this shit about adrenaline and endorphins and stuff. Basically, she pushed her body way beyond its limits and he wasn’t sure about her mind’s ability to cope with the physical aftermath. I signed off on a short-term medically-induced coma. Just so they could get her physically stabilized first.”
Gallagher knew all about the let down. He knew if you got a big enough rush, it was like tying on a bad drunk. You could beat the shit out of yourself and not feel it until the next day when the hangover took over.
“So…when the worst is past, he’ll just uninduce her or whatever, right?”
“He did that a few hours ago.” Rossi drew in a deep breath. “She hasn’t come out of it. She’s still nonresponsive.”
“Why?”
“They don’t know.”
“What do you mean they don’t fucking know?” He cursed the wounds and wires keeping him from beating the answers he wanted out of Rossi.
“The doctor said on some subconscious level Carmen might not be ready to face her physical trauma. As her body recovers, she may regain consciousness.”
May. The word stuck in Gallagher’s mind, cutting him off from rational thought and clogging his throat. Carmen may wake up.
Or she may already be gone and her body didn’t know it yet.
He wasn’t aware Rossi moved until the man gripped his shoulder. “She’s never alone, man. I can promise you that.”
Gallagher couldn’t get any words past the lump in his throat. All he could do was shake his head while more tears filmed over his eyes. Finally he swallowed past it. “I want to see her.”
“They don’t want you in the ICU right now.”
“I don’t give a flying fuck what they want.”
“Unfortunately you aren’t getting in there unless they let you in. But I’ll make sure you’re in the loop.”
He’d see about that.
“Next time you’re with Carmen, you tell her…” He tried clearing his throat, but it didn’t help. He just couldn’t say all the things he wanted Carmen to know.
Rossi’s fingers squeezed, then fell away. “She knows. Now I need to go make a few phone calls. There’s shit hitting fans all over the damn place. Anything you need before I go?”
Gallagher closed his eyes and nodded. “Carmen.”
And damn if it wasn’t Rossi who found him two hours later, army crawling his way down the hallway with his hospital johnny flapping and his ass hanging out in the breeze.
“For Christ’s sake, I don’t need to see that on an empty stomach,” his boss’s voice said.
“Then go get a fucking sandwich.” The pain meds were wearing off and his body was slick with sweat. “Anybody who gets in my way is dead, plain and simple.”
It was a slow and painful process. He put his hands out, then dragged his lower body forward. The sweat kept him from getting floor burn on his hip, but his hands were starting to slide a bit.
“How are you planning to get through the ICU doors?”
Gallagher gritted his teeth and hauled himself forward another two feet. “I’ll wait ’til somebody comes out and sneak in unnoticed on my stomach.”
“One thing you are not right now, man, is unnoticeable.”
Then Rossi’s hands were under his armpits. Gallagher must have been weaker than he’d thought because the other man had no problem propping him up against the wall like a rag doll. “I don’t even want to know how you unhooked yourself from everything you were hooked to, do I?”
“Lucky for me I’d already charmed the nurse into removing that fucking catheter or I’d still be crying.”
“If I can trust you to sit here for a few minutes without killing anybody or making the candy stripers cry, I’ll go find a wheelchair and take you to see her.”
It took every drop of testosterone in Gallagher’s body not to cry. He nodded, then rested his head against the wall.
Chapter Sixteen
As expected, they met resistance at the entrance to ICU. “Doctor Domoraud doesn’t want Mr. McLaine in the ICU. He’s shown signs of emotional instability and a potentially volatile personality.”
There was no potentially about it, and she was going to see that firsthand if she didn’t hit the button and let him in.
Rossi turned his chair so he couldn’t glare at the nurse in charge. “His emotional instability is a direct result of not being allowed to see Carmen. Give him five minutes with her and he’ll be stable again. More or less.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Rossi. I really am. But Doctor Domoraud has given orders and his authority here in the hospital is absolute.”
Rossi didn’t say anything right away, so Gallagher started building a scenario in his head, just in case.
If he reached down and set the brake on the chair, he might be able to use his arms to launch himself onto his good leg and then spring forward so he was against the nursing station desk. Hit the button. Then push himself back into the chair and—if it didn’t fly out from under him and leave him laid out on the floor with a concussion—release the brake and get to the door before it relocked.
It was a long shot, but he wasn’t turning back now. He started turning his chair back to face the desk.
“Is that right?” Rossi finally said. He pulled out his phone and hit two on the speed dial. “Charlotte, I’ve got a little problem. Doctor Domoraud is denying Gallagher entrance into the ICU and the nurse claims his authority here is absolute. Could you check on that for me? Thanks.”
He snapped the phone closed and looked at Nurse Ratched, who only rolled her eyes and walked away.
“If Charlotte gets me in there,” Gallagher said, “I’m going all out on her wedding gift.”
“Jesus, don’t say wedding. She’s already scheduling tux fittings. And Grace gets more emails from her with links to bridesmaid dresses than she does penis enlargement offers.”
“She sign you up for that yet?”
They both laughed, but it was half-hearted and short. Both men knew things would get ugly if Bridezilla didn’t come through.
The longest five minutes of his life passed before the station phone started ringing, drawing the nurse back. A second later Alex’s cell followed suit. The nurse’s eyes got wide. Alex chuckled at something his caller said. The nurse started stammering. Alex snapped his phone closed. The nurse hung up her line and hit the button to unlock the ICU doors.
Rossi rolled him in. “Charlotte told me to tell you she’s registered at Tiffany’s and she knows how much you make a year. But you’re fading fast man, and you’re sweating. Fifteen minutes, but if you’re good about it, I’
ll bring you back tomorrow.”
Damn, she was pale. The room, though empty but for Gallagher and Carmen, was a flurry of activity. Machines pumping. Monitor screens beeping and graphing. The blood pressure machine hissing.
But she was perfectly still, like a bruised and bandaged princess from some fairy tale. He rolled as close to the bed as he could and stretched painfully to kiss her cheek, but she didn’t stir. Prince Charming, he wasn’t.
He didn’t know what to do. He wanted to hold her hand, but they were both bandaged. The parts of her body not covered by a blanket or bandage were bruised or scraped, like his own. But her cheek was unmarred, so he settled for stroking it softly with the back of his knuckles.
“They told me you won’t wake up, babe,” he said, and even though his voice was barely more than a whisper, it sounded loud in the room. “You…you need to wake up. I promise I won’t yell at you for not listening to me.”
Well, that sounded stupid, so he was silent for a couple of minutes, just stroking her cheek and staring at her beautiful face.
Then he started talking again. He told her about his parents and his sister in San Diego. How he wanted her to meet them. He wanted to take her walking on the beach at twilight.
The minutes ticked by until he knew Rossi would return any time.
“Please wake up, babe. Rossi showed me the feed, so I know how hard you fought not to leave me behind. So don’t leave me behind now.”
The door opened and closed, and then he felt Rossi’s hand on his shoulder. “It’s time to go.”
“I love you, Carm.” He kissed his fingertips, then touched them to her face.
He took a deep breath, then nodded for Rossi to wheel him out. O’Brien slipped into the room behind them, ready to take his turn at the vigil.
“I’m sorry, John,” Rossi said in a heavy voice. “I was trying to do what they said was the best thing for her.”
“I would have done the same thing.” It would be easy to blame Rossi—to have somebody to take all his bottled up emotions out on. But he was a good guy and Gallagher wouldn’t do that to him.
No Surrender: The Devlin Group, Book 3 Page 14