Down Range (Mills & Boon M&B) (Shadow Warriors - Book 2)

by Lindsay McKenna

  “Jim Boland speaking.”

  “Mr. Boland? I’m Lieutenant Jake Ramsey. I’m calling about your daughter, Morgan.” His heart started to pound, and tears threatened to overtake Jake. He heard the wariness and worry in the man’s voice at the other end. “I want to tell you your daughter is going to live. She’s going to make it.”

  “Thank God…”

  “Yes, sir. I know you were expecting to talk to the surgeon, but I wanted to call you myself.” Jake took in a shaky breath. “Sir, your daughter and I were out on an op I can’t discuss. She sustained a very bad leg injury, her left femur broken by a bullet.” The scenes played out behind Jake’s tightly shut eyes. And the tide of feelings roared up through him as he remembered the blood spurting out of a severed artery in her leg.

  Compressing his mouth into a thin line, Jake thickly added, “She’s critical but stable. The ortho surgeon said we’ll be flying by C-5 tomorrow morning to Landstuhl medical center in Germany. Morgan will undergo more surgery at that time.” He wouldn’t go into the details about how her leg had almost been amputated. They didn’t need to know it at this point.

  “Is she conscious, Lieutenant Ramsey?”

  “No, sir. They’re inducing her into a drug coma until they get her past the second surgery at Landstuhl. Once that is done, she’ll become conscious.”

  “I see….”

  “She’s going to live, sir. That’s what I wanted you and your wife to know.”

  “That’s very kind of you to call us, Lieutenant Ramsey.”

  Jake heard the silence grow on the line. He wondered if Morgan had ever talked to them about him. He took a chance. “Sir, you probably don’t know this, but I care very deeply for your daughter. We’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship for the past nine years.” His voice lowered with emotion. “I love her, sir. And I will do everything I can to be by her side through all of this.”

  Jake knew in his heart that he could never have the relationship he wanted with Morgan. Even if his heart wanted, his head knew better. They were fated to remain apart.

  “Lieutenant, my daughter has spoken a great deal about you to us.”

  Jake didn’t hear any censure in the man’s voice, and relief fled through him. “That’s good to know, sir.”

  “I don’t know if you knew this, Lieutenant Ramsey, but our daughter never stopped loving you. We know you two have had a rocky relationship.”

  Tears leaked out of his tightly shut eyes. Jake drew in a ragged breath. “Sir, if I could have given my life for hers, I’d have done it. I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t. You were in the Recon Marines. You know black ops.”

  “Yes, I do, Lieutenant. Listen, stay with Morgan. Can you call us after she comes out of surgery at Landstuhl? We’re trying to arrange flights to get there to be with her.”

  “Yes, sir, I will. I won’t leave her side, sir. Things are moving fast here.” Jake blinked, wiping the tears away with his hand. “I heard one ortho surgeon say that as soon as Morgan is stabilized in Germany, they’re looking at sending her home, to the U.S., to the Bethesda medical center on the East Coast. I’d hate for you to fly to Germany and she’s already gone. Let me see what I can find out as things unfold? In the meantime, I’ll be in touch with you.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Jim Boland said. His voice grew emotional. “Thank you for saving her life. Morgan couldn’t have had a better partner than you. I hope, someday, we can meet and I can thank you in person, shake your hand.”

  Jake tried to steady his voice, the exhaustion making him vulnerable to his normally suppressed feelings. “If it had been me who got hit, she’d have turned around and saved my sorry ass.”

  Jim Boland managed a chuckle. “Well said, Lieutenant. How are you doing?”

  Jake hadn’t expected such concern or care from Morgan’s father. It made him choke and pull the phone away for a moment. Desperately, he collected himself. “I’m good, sir.”

  “You’re a SEAL. Why would I expect any other answer?”

  It was Jake’s turn to grin a little. “Yes, sir, I guess that says it all.”

  “Just know Cathy and I will be forever in your debt and grateful to you. And thank you for calling us. You have no idea how much better we’ll feel now. We won’t be worrying and wondering. My wife, Cathy, is still sleeping, so I’ll tell her the good news when she wakes up.”

  “I’ll be in touch, sir. Goodbye.”

  Jake hung up the phone, rubbing his hands tiredly across his face. His beard was rough, and now he could shave it off. He slowly rose, feeling the stiffness and deep bruising his body had taken during combat. Maybe he could find the doctor and persuade him to give him a watertight bandage around his calf so he could stand under a hot shower and get rid of the bone aches and stiffness.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The world was full of sounds, but Morgan couldn’t identify any of them. Her consciousness came and went. She was vaguely aware of pain drifting up her left leg. Mouth dry, she moved her lips. They felt cracked and sore. Her throat, when she tried to swallow, hurt like hell. The only thing she could focus on, despite the sounds, smells and moments of nothingness, was a warm, strong hand holding hers.

  And sometimes, she’d feel him lace his fingers between hers. It was intimate. Tender. Morgan felt cold, and he felt so warm. Moving her head slowly, she wanted to open her eyes, but her lids were so heavy. Voices intruded. A man. A woman. No one she recognized. She recognized Jake’s low, deep voice. He was so close. People were talking around her.

  Their excitement was evident even though they were whispering to one another. Her attention remained on his hand as Morgan struggled to surface from the drug state. Jake’s fingers closed gently around her own, as if to silently reassure her. Her anxiety began to dissolve. Jake.

  Her mind wasn’t working. Just bits, pieces, but his hand was her only anchor.

  The voices left, and something squeaked, perhaps a chair? The hand would shift around hers, which made her panic. And then his fingers gently stroked her hair, moving strands away from her cheek. Her lashes fluttered; the gesture was one she knew so well. Jake was so close to her.

  Morgan thought she could feel his moist breath flowing across her brow. As he pressed a light kiss on her forehead, her anxiety ebbed even more. She sighed and relaxed, still unable to surface. But Jake was with her and nothing else mattered.

  Jake was sleeping, his head resting on his arms against the bed where Morgan slept. It was nearly three in the morning, and he was exhausted.

  They’d flown Morgan out of Bagram the next morning and he’d been on the flight with her. At Landstuhl medical center in Germany, she’d undergone another six more hours of surgery to repair her shattered femur. He’d been allowed to wait in the lounge until they’d wheeled her out of surgery. He’d been grateful that they’d had a chair waiting for him at her bedside in a private room at the military hospital. Morgan had been heavily drugged, and the doctors had assured him, she would slowly become conscious.

  Jake had paced the room for hours. Thinking. Remembering. Replaying the firefight. The terrible flight in the Black Hawk back to Bagram, never knowing from one moment to the next whether Morgan would go into cardiac arrest and die before his eyes or not. And there would be nothing he could do about it. Absolutely nothing. The emotional phone call to Morgan’s parents had gutted him in a new way. They did know about him and their relationship. Jake had heard no censure or judgment in Jim Boland’s voice toward him, which had been a huge relief for him.

  The hours in flight from Afghanistan to Germany had made Jake take a hard look at his life. At his love for Morgan that had been there from the very first time he’d laid eyes on her at Annapolis. He’d always loved her. He’d been too full of himself to realize it. Until it was almost too late. Finally, at two in the morning, he’d pulled the chair over to her bed. Jake had placed his arms on the bed near her right hip. The moment he laid his head down he’d fallen into a weary, tense sleep.
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  At one point, Jake had jerked awake. Like any SEAL, he awoke instantly, completely alert. Sitting up, he heard Morgan moan. She was moving her long fingers across her stomach. Taking a swift breath, Jake pushed the chair out of the way. He placed a hand on her shoulder. Her lashes fluttered. Her lips moved, incoherent sounds slipping from them. Looking over at the monitors on the other side of the bed, Jake noticed her blood pressure, pulse and temperature were all normal. A smile cracked his exhausted features. Morgan was becoming conscious. Finally…

  When Morgan’s lashes slowly opened, even with the bare light from the monitoring instruments, Jake could see her eyes were murky-looking. He gently massaged her right shoulder. “It’s all right, babe. It’s Jake. And you’re coming out of anesthesia. You’re all right. Just keep fighting to come back to me….”

  Jake’s words rang around in her head as if it were an echo chamber. Morgan released a sigh of relief. His hand resting on her shoulder oriented her. It became a focus to fight out of the cottony world that tugged at her. Finally, an hour later, Morgan lifted her lashes and looked up…up into Jake’s darkly shadowed face. It was his gray eyes, glittering with tears, that sheared through her world of morphine. He tried to smile but failed, his hand tightening on her shoulder.

  “Welcome back, babe. You gave us one hell of a scare….”

  By the time dawn arrived, Morgan was fully conscious and aware. There had been a parade of nurses and doctors coming in to check her, run the light across her eyes, monitor her heart, listen to her lungs. Jake remained quietly in the background as Morgan was informed by her ortho surgeon, Dr. Ruth Cramer, about the state of her broken femur.

  Morgan stared up into Dr. Cramer’s blue eyes. “What do you mean I won’t be able to do what I was doing?” Panic ate at her. The doctor’s eyes turned kind.

  Reaching out, she touched Morgan’s shoulder. “Captain, thirty percent of your femur is gone. It’s going to take it a while to regrow. And even if it does, it will never be strong like you need it to be to do what you were doing out there before this injury occurred.”

  Morgan digested the sentence. “But with physical therapy?”

  Dr. Cramer shook her head and patted her hand. “Morgan, your combat days are over. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but it doesn’t matter if you were a man or woman, it would be the same diagnosis. You’ll need physical therapy, for sure. And we’ll make sure you get it. For ninety-nine percent of whatever you choose to do with the rest of your life, your leg will be strong and reliable.” She lowered her voice, seeing Morgan’s face grow pale. “We’ll talk more about your recovery plan tomorrow. Right now, Lieutenant Ramsey is going to be your big, bad guard dog. He’s been with you every step of the way.”

  Morgan rested wearily against the slightly raised bed. Her left leg was beneath a tent. There were metal screws holding the bones together, and anything that touched the pins sent her through the roof with excruciating nerve pain. She gulped a few times, her breathing uneven as she considered the doctor’s diagnosis.

  “How are you doing?” Jake asked, coming over to her bed after the surgeon left. Morgan’s hair glinted with copper highlights in the early-morning sunlight lancing through the blinds at the window. The slats threw themselves across her bed. To Jake, they looked like symbolic prison bars after hearing Dr. Cramer’s diagnosis. He knew it had rocked Morgan’s world in a way she’d never expected.

  Morgan laced her fingers with his. “Not so good,” she whispered, trying to choke back her emotions.

  “I know….” Jake tried to put himself in her place. What if he’d been so badly wounded that he was told he could never be a SEAL again? It would devastate Jake because his ego, his whole life, was centered around being one. He squeezed her fingers, seeing the anguish deep in her shadowed green eyes. “I’m sorry, babe…so sorry….”

  Morgan lay there wrestling with this news. His voice quieted her, soothed her. Jake was steady when she was not. She loved him. She drowned in his softened gray gaze. “I never thought we’d get out of there alive, Jake. I really didn’t.”

  “Neither did I, babe.” Jake compressed his lips for a moment, watching her wrestle with the bad news. “You know what? You’re the bravest, most courageous fighter I’ve ever met. You saved my hide. You took out Khogani.” He squeezed her hand. “You’ve done so much, Morgan. The world will never know about it, but the Generals will know, and I’ll never forget what you did. Maybe—” Jake tried to smile but failed “—you’ve done enough? Other things are coming full circle in your life, and they should take on more importance now?”

  If he only knew the whole truth. Her mind and emotions clashed. How badly Morgan wanted to tell Jake about Emma, but she wasn’t thinking rationally. She needed to talk to her parents, whom she’d call for the first time in the afternoon. They would let Emma talk to her on the phone. Of course, her daughter couldn’t know how badly she’d been wounded. But just to hear their voices would ground her. Maybe Jake was right. Morgan felt incredibly weak and overwrought. The trauma had stolen her normal mental toughness and powerful physical endurance. Jake was her strength right now.

  “I think you’re right,” she whispered. And then Morgan ventured a bold request, understanding Jake would never be a permanent part of her life. “Kiss me? I’ve missed you so much, Jake.” She raised her hand, slipping it upward across his chest.

  Without a word, he leaned over, searching, finding her mouth as she raised her lips to meet his. Her lips brushed across his mouth. Morgan was very fragile. Jake eased his hand along the line of her jaw, gently angling her to deepen the contact.

  The warmth of Jake’s breath, his roughened hand against her cheek, made Morgan moan and hungrily kiss the man whom she loved with every cell in her body. She craved his closeness, his love. The trauma had broken her in a new way, one that she’d never experienced before. Jake had been wounded before. He knew the ups and downs a person went through after surviving intense combat. Jake was here for her in every way.

  He moved his mouth gently against hers, nothing rough or jolting. Just…tenderness. His fingers eased upward, caressing her clean hair, inhaling her scent as he continued to slowly worship her lips and welcome her back to the land of the living.

  As Jake eased his mouth from hers, he drowned in the green and gold of Morgan’s eyes. Moving his thumb across her eyebrow, he whispered unsteadily, “I never got to answer you out there on the ridge. You told me you’d never stopped loving me.” Jake smiled brokenly, holding her gaze. “I’ve never stopped loving you, either.” He laid his lips against her mouth and breathed his breath into her. “I love you, Morgan. I’ll love you until I take my last breath.” And that was the truth. Jake just didn’t know if they could ever, really, be together.

  His arms slid around Morgan, gently holding her. It was the first time they’d had time to be alone. He pressed her face against his chest, and his solidly beating heart saturated her with hope. “We have so much to talk about, Jake.”

  “I know, babe. I know….”

  The door opened.

  Jake released Morgan and instantly went on guard. It was his nature. His eyes widened.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude,” General Maya Stevenson said, quietly shutting the door. She stood in cammies, a cap in her left hand.

  Blinking twice, Morgan couldn’t believe the General had come to visit her. Yet, the tall, black-haired woman who stood before her smiled. “General Stevenson…”

  Jake came to attention, his hand leaving Morgan’s gowned shoulder.

  “At ease, Lieutenant Ramsey,” Maya murmured, coming over and standing on the other side of Morgan’s bed. “Officially, I’m not here.” She gave Jake a pointed look that spoke volumes.

  Jake relaxed. In a way, he wasn’t surprised the General had turned up because he was positive she was Morgan’s mentor. “Yes, ma’am,” he murmured.

  Maya reached out and gripped Morgan’s left hand. “You’ve had a tough haul. How are you doi
ng?”

  Morgan lay back, her heart beating hard in her chest from the interlude with Jake. “I’ll make it, ma’am.”

  As she released her hand, Maya’s smile disappeared and she looked across the bed to Jake. “And you, Lieutenant Ramsey?”

  He managed a sour smile. “I’m good. A bullet in my leg hasn’t slowed me down much at all, ma’am.”

  Nodding, Maya rested her hands on the side of the bed. She returned her attention to Morgan. “Has he told you what happened after you arrived at Bagram?”

  Confused, Morgan glanced over at Jake. His face went dark, his mouth becoming a thin line. Something was afoot. What?

  “I’ve said nothing to her, ma’am,” Jake growled. He worried about the timing and saw the General was going to tell Morgan anyway. “She’s fragile,” he warned the General in a low voice. Jake didn’t want Morgan thrown into another emotional storm.

  “Hmm, so I see.” Maya nodded. “Lieutenant Ramsey, I have your report. It’s very thorough, and I appreciate the time you took on it. You left no stone unturned on this op. Well done.” The woman’s green eyes glittered with warmth toward him.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Jake moved his head slightly in Morgan’s direction. “She saved my ass. Literally.”

  A smile pulled at Maya’s lips. “So she did. She’s saved a lot of people out there.” Maya held Morgan’s gaze. “I’m putting you in for a Silver Star, Morgan. You’ve earned it.” She pulled two small boxes out of her left pocket. Opening the first, she pinned the medal on Morgan’s pillow. “And you’ve also earned a Purple Heart.”

  Jake came to attention as the General moved around the bed. She pinned on his medal.

  “Lieutenant Ramsey, you’ve done your country a great service. Thank you.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Maya stepped away. “Lieutenant Ramsey, would you give us a few minutes alone? My two assistants are outside the door. Why not invite them down to the cafeteria for some coffee? They won’t want to leave, but make them. Use your SEAL persuasion?”