AllFreeNovel
Share Us
I didn’t take my eyes off my son. “We will when he’s ready,” I said. “If I rush him, we’ll just be stopping again in forty-five minutes.”
“Nataliya—”
“It’s torture for him to sit in a car,” I explained, still refusing to look at him. “What would you like for me to do?”
“If Hayes has men after us?—”
“We’ll handle it,” I said and finally looked his way. “Right, Mr. SEAL?” I nodded my head in Elias’s direction—he was currently doing stretches to try and work out the stiffness in his arms and legs. “Isn’t that what you promised me? That you would protect us?”
Adrian scoffed. “Of course I will,” he said. “But we have to be practical here: what can we do so we don’t have to stop every hour like this?”
I had to give Adrian a little patience here; he had probably never been around a chronically sick child before. I could see that he was frustrated, but he hadn’t snapped or yelled at us—that was a point in his favor. Plus, from the way he watched the road around us, he was clearly on high alert for any more attackers. He wasn’t rushing us just to be a jerk. He was rushing us because he was worried about our safety…and possibly also because he was a jerk. I still hadn’t made my mind up about that. “If we don’t stop every so often, Elias is going to have a serious flare up, and then we’ll truly be stuck.”
“Well, can’t we wait until he says he needs a break?”
“No.” Adrian didn’t understand. He couldn’t unless he saw what Loorer’s actually did to a child. “He knows we’re in a hurry, so he won’t say he’s hurting. He hates to be a disappointment.”
Adrian nodded and settled back into his seat. Elias finished his stretches and came back to the car. “I feel better, Mama.”
I smiled and touched his face. His skin was always just a little cool to the touch, and the chill in the air wasn’t helping, but his little exercise had brought some pink to his cheeks. “I’m glad.”
We set off again, and the road stretched before us. Elias lasted longer, but we were getting closer to his scheduled medication time, so as we passed into Texas, I began looking for somewhere to stop for dinner. “Do you have a preference for what you’d like to eat?”
“You want to stop and eat?” Adrian asked.
“So Elias can take his medicine,” I said. “It has to be taken with food at the same time every day.”
“We can get a snack, eat in the car, and keep going, if Elias is up for it,” he suggested. “If we stop, we’re going to lose another hour, and we’ve got at least five more hours to get to Dallas without stops.”
“Mama—”
“No,” I said. “Look, we’ll be as fast as we can, but a gas station snack just isn’t going to cut it. He has to have a meal. Junk food will upset his stomach, and that becomes a whole other issue.” I didn’t want to push Adrian too far, but there were some points where I had to stand my ground. If he wasn’t happy about it, he’d just have to learn to deal.
Luckily, Adrian let it drop. He fell quiet again.
I found the first exit to a fast food restaurant and pulled off.Once the food was placed on the trays, we went to sit in a booth. Adrian, I noticed, put his back to the wall so he could see the entire restaurant and keep an eye on our parked car.
After Elias had eaten most of his dinner, I took out the medicine case from my bag. Elias accepted the palm full of pills with an ease that only came from taking multiple medications daily. “Do I have to finish?” he said, gesturing to his burger.
“At least the drink,” I said. “You know how dry your mouth gets.”
Elias sighed—the medication ruined his appetite, and some days, he ate and drank from sheer force of will alone—but did as I asked. Once Elias finished, we went back to the car. I held out the keys to Adrian. “I’ll work on decoding the message,” I said and hoped I could still remember the cipher key. “But if I say stop, we have to stop. All right?”
Adrian nodded. “Sure.”
Adrian
It was late when we finally arrived in Dallas and pulled up to my friend Drake Shepperton’s condo. Luckily, Drake was waiting for us; he buzzed us in after a text. “What the hell took you—?” Drake asked as he opened the door, but he cut himself off when he saw that my arms were full with Elias.
The boy had finally gone to sleep in the car, and while Nataliya insisted she could carry him, I knew we could move faster if I did it. Nataliya watched me like a hawk when I picked the kid up, but she seemed satisfied with how careful I was. As we were getting closer to the city, the kid’s discomfort from sitting for so long was getting worse. It was awful to see him in such pain…and Nataliya did this day-in and day-out. Finally, when even stopping to stretch wasn’t helping, she was forced to give him a pill from an orange prescription bottle in her bag, and he passed out.
Drake was standing in the doorway. “Can you—?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah.” He moved out of the way so we could come through. “There’s a guest room down the hall,” he said, pointing. “Second door on the left. Just please be quiet. The twins are sleeping, and Layla will murder me if you wake them up.”
It was still funny to think of Drake as such a family man, with a wife and kids. Settled in Dallas, no less—the hometown he’d always sworn he’d never return to. He’d never been one to talk much about background, and I hadn’t even realized he was one of those uber-wealthy Sheppertons until about a year ago, when his twin brother, Devon, died and Drake had to come home to settle the estate. Back then, the plan had been to divest himself of the family’s manufacturing business as fast as he could so he could get back to the team. But then he met Layla, who was pregnant with Devon’s twins after a brief fling, and who was worried someone might be after her. She ended up being right about that—and in the process of protecting her and his late brother’s babies-to-be, Drake had fallen in love.
As quietly as I could manage, I carried Elias down the hall, Nataliya on my heels. She opened the guest room door for me. It was spacious, and the bed looked comfortable enough. I held onto him as Nataliya removed his jacket and shoes before I deposited him on the mattress. “You think he’ll wake up?”
