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“She’s going to worry me into a stroke,” Davis predicted, glancing at the door to her room once again before glaring back at him and Shane, his expression darkening again with anger. “The two of you should leave—”
“No, sir.” They spoke at once.
“Oh dear,” Landra whispered, her eyes rounding at the phenomenon. “Davis, shall we discuss this later, when we’re not all so upset? Perhaps after we know Alyssa’s doing well?”
He wasn’t upset, Sebastian thought, staring back at the senator in determination. He simply had no intention of going anywhere, anymore than Shane did.
“You’ll destroy her,” Davis accused them, his gaze filled with grief. “God help me, I feel like all that child’s done is fight to live since she returned from Spain. Because of the two of you.”
“Senator, whatever you might think you know about her relationship with us—”
“Relationship?” he growled, his gray eyes, so like his daughter’s, darkening dangerously. “An eighteen-year-old child doesn’t have a relationship with two twenty-four-year-old men before she’s even had her first real date.”
From the corners of his eyes Shane glimpsed the dark look Khalid shot him and Sebastian. Just what he needed, that son of a bitch to hear his business and draw his own conclusions.
“The two of you shattered her,” he accused them. “And now, the minute you show up in her life again, someone’s trying to kill her. You should step away from her now, before there’s nothing left of her but a gravestone.”
Like hell they would step away from her.
“We took that advice the first time it was given,” Shane reminded him with a sneer. “It hasn’t worked out well for any of us. I’ll be damned if I’ll trust it again. This time, we’ll face whatever the hell is going on together. We’ll stand with her. And she’ll stand with us. No one will separate us again.”
18
Shane and Sebastian were confusion and chaos.
Alyssa had made that claim, albeit laughingly, in Spain. She wasn’t laughing forty-eight hours and some odd minutes later when Nurse Lisa Shaw pushed her electronic pad into her purse, gave a cheery wave, and stepped from the sitting room into the office beyond.
Forty-eight hours of that woman watching her with eagle eyes, refusing to let her do more than lie on the couch rather than in the bed. No work, no laptop, no e-pad, no news on the television. Quiet, rest.
She hated just lying around. It gave her far too much time to think and to remember. She’d learned years ago to stay busy. Put one foot in front
of the other and push back as many memories as possible.
And she was learning how to do it, she assured herself. She wasn’t perfect, but she’d been learning, until Barcelona decided to visit Alexandria.
She was kicking Shane’s and Sebastian’s asses first chance she had, dammit.
“Thank God she’s gone.” The door Nurse Shaw had exited through opened again and Alyssa’s father slid inside as though he were still sneaking past the prison guard of a nurse. “I’m convinced that woman missed a hell of a career as a dragon trainer.”
Dressed in a white shirt, sleeves rolled back, perfectly creased slacks, and his favorite leather shoes, her father took a seat in the chair across from her while giving her one of his quiet smiles and far too perceptive looks.
“Bitching about your best buddy, Father?” she finally accused him, glowering as she flipped the blanket the nurse insisted she keep on her legs. “Shame on you.”
His lips tilted in a small grin, his expression becoming playful. “Playing with SUVs in the street, sweetheart? Shame on you, I thought I taught you better.”
Swinging her legs to the floor, Alyssa blew out a hard breath. She heard that little undertone in his voice. The one that assured her he wasn’t as calm and relaxed as he appeared to be.
“You did teach me better, Dad,” she said, shaking her head at the hazy memory of that damned SUV bearing down on her. “It just doesn’t stop, does it?”
How many more near misses was she going to survive?
“If you were a cat, I’d start worrying,” he admitted before his lips tilted in an ironic grin. “Hell, you passed a cat’s lives when you were ten. Between your own reckless nature and those two men, there’s not going to be much left of you in another six months or so.”
She rolled her eyes at the comment concerning her recklessness. She wasn’t reckless at all. Things just seemed to happen, that was all.
As for Shane and Sebastian, well, they just kind of seemed to happen as well. At the most inopportune times.
“They do have a way of completely screwing up a plan,” she admitted.
