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With her lips pressed against my chest, her words vibrated into the walls of my body. There was pain in her tone. A little misplaced guilt, too. I’d take it all from her if I could. Absorb whatever she was feeling and carry it instead.
“When I was growing up, and my parents used to fight, I always felt the need to do something that helped me reclaim control of the situation. Clean my room. Organize my closet. Balance chemical equations.” Her teeth were clicking together again. Nerves trying to get the best of her.
I had to get her focused before I lost her to the chaos the trauma and the drugs were creating in her mind. “Not strange at all.” I continued rubbing small circles on her back with my palm. “I did the same when my parents argued. Well, not science stuff, but I had to distract myself, so their fighting didn’t eat away at me. Usually hid in the woods out back and worked on building a fort. Never did finish one. Not much of an architect.”
My stomach squeezed at not only the memories, but the fact I’d shared them. That was something not even Rebecca had known.
Her cheek was no longer glued to my chest, and I dipped my chin to find her blues pointed up at me. She was probably as shocked as I was at my confession. “I’m sure you were great at a lot of other things, then,” she said so softly, so fucking earnestly, that a bit of the tension in my body managed to loosen up.
“Maybe.” I forced a smile, then rolled my lips inward to suppress that emotion, unsure how we’d gotten there.
She turned her cheek back to my chest again, maybe searching for her own strength in the strong and steady beat of my heart.
After a few quiet moments passed, she suddenly rasped, “Oh God. There were other people with me back there. We—we have to save them.”
At least I could give her some good news on that front. “My guys are on top of it. They’re freeing them now.” I reached between us, searching for her face, worried she was still concerned about something. “What is it?”
“My colleagues are out there somewhere, still in danger. I’m safe, and they’re not. I don’t know how to handle that.”
She hid her eyes from me, but I didn’t need to see them to know how she was feeling. The sting of her guilt punctured into me as she spoke, and it burned up into my throat as I remembered the times in the Army I’d survived while others hadn’t. It was a bitter pill I’d never learned to swallow.
“You have to believe they’ll be okay,” was the best I could give. Close enough to the truth without being overly optimistic or completely giving up hope. “No feeling bad. What’s important right now is that you’re safe, and my team will find the others. Got it?”
“I’ll try to think like that.”
I recognized that sentiment. And she was about as convincing as I’d been the first time I’d felt it. Took me right back to my first year in the Army, when I’d lost my first teammate. My CO had ordered, “You put one foot in front of the other, and you keep moving forward. Now get your ass up and do your job.”
What was it about this woman that had me reliving moments I’d kept locked away for so long?
“Do you know where you were before today? When was the last time you saw your colleagues? Anything you can share may help my guys locate them.” I hadn’t planned to break out those questions yet, but if it’d help her feel better to know we had every intention of rescuing the others, and that she had a hand in helping, we could do this now.
“Last I saw anyone else from the lab was yesterday. Well, last night. There were only a few of us that’d been kept together. They moved us from place to place every night since the lab was hit. I—I don’t know more than that.” Her shoulders collapsed from obvious guilt.
“I assume they drove you a few hours each time they moved you to keep your whereabouts unknown until you hit your final destination.” But why they suddenly separated Diana from her colleagues last night . . . that I didn’t understand.
“Remember Pierce Quaid?” More chills rocked through her body beneath my palms. “They took him away first. I was the second taken from our group.”
“We’ll find them all,” I reassured her. Even your coward ex if he was one of the ones with you.
“You think you’re ready to get out now? We need to get you somewhere safe.”
“You just said I was safe,” she reminded me, and shit, she caught me.
Fuck. “Safer.”
Her lips pursed in hesitation. “Can I rinse off the rest of my body first?”
Their filth. Your need to feel in control. Right. “I can’t leave you in here alone.” I wasn’t sure if staying was smart either. I’d need to become clinical, detach myself from this moment to survive the primal compulsion inside me to claim her as mine. To offer to protect and comfort her forever.
She’d already been through an ordeal and felt out of control.
Calm, comfort, control—that had to remain both my mantra and my mission.
“Okay, then can you help me get out of these clothes?” She shifted beneath the water, catching a drop on her lips that I had the ridiculous urge to suck free. “I’m sorry.” Eyes open and on me, she added, “That’d probably make you uncomfortable. I’ll stay like this.”
Uncomfortably hard, yes. Help her undress and rinse off? Really? That gave new meaning to control.
I glanced over at Dallas. “Out. Door,” I ordered, and he jumped to all fours. He took a few steps back and clamped down on the handle with his teeth, pulling the door closed to leave us alone.
