Page 310

Love. He had always called her love. She smiled at him, a beautiful radiant smile that lit up her entire face. The smile that always made him go weak in the knees.

“See ye at home,” she said. Blowing him a kiss, she moved to her father and took his arm, walking leisurely with him across the sweet English grass toward the distant fortress of Questing.

Home.

EPILOGUE

San Diego, California

San Diego Naval Base

Base Hospital

Present Day

The waiting room, plus the two additional smaller ‘family’ waiting rooms were jammed full of more naval brass than Jeremy Scatler had ever seen in her five-and-a-half year naval career as a nurse. She’d never seen the waiting room of the emergency ward so full. Period. Men wearing Pentagon security badges scrutinized her closely as if she were Saddam Hussein in drag.

A little awestruck, she pushed her way through the sea of uniforms and noticed that, outside the emergency room doors, reporters were jockeying for positions as military police kept them at bay. It was a chaotic scene and she found her irritation blossoming at the pushy officers and staff. They looked at her as if she didn’t belong; hell, she worked here. She gave a snotty young ensign a piece of her elbow when he didn’t move out of her way fast enough.

She finally reached the nurse’s station, letting out an irritated sigh. The other nurses at the station were busy with their own cases as she took a seat and logged on to the computer.

“This is unbelievable.” she exclaimed softly.

The Asian nurse next to her shook her head. “Can you believe this? You’d think the President was here.”

Jeremy tossed her long blond hair over her shoulder and re-secured the rubber band. When it wasn’t being contained or pulled back, she had a head full of soft spiral waves.

“What is all this about, anyway?” Jeremy asked as she began to review some of the current patient charts. “I heard they brought in a cabinet member with chest pains.”

“No,” the other woman said firmly. “They brought in a CIA bigwig.”

Jeremy looked confused and finally just shook her head. They would never get a straight answer from the Navy and they knew it.

“Jeremy, can you take Room Three? Got a clean leg wound there.” A harried young doctor approached the station.

“Sure, Al,” she said, standing up from the computer and slinging her stethoscope around her neck. “What kind of a leg wound?”

“Bullet,” he replied, obviously in a rush. “Passed clean through his thigh. He just needs it cleaned and a stitch or two. I am prescribing him antibiotics and a painkiller right now.”

Jeremy left the station, pushing through the naval personnel and wishing somebody would explode a bomb in the middle of them; anything to be rid of their presence. She may have been in the Navy, but she didn’t like the haughty brass that went with it and she really hated it when they invaded her quiet hospital sanctuary like they owned the place.

The hallway behind the nurse’s station was relatively quiet and she fought her irritation down as she went to Room Three. It was not strange to be tending a bullet wound on a naval base and she didn’t give it a second thought. Unconcerned with her impending duty, she looked forward to being done with it and getting off shift in a couple of hours.

At Room Three, she took a sharp turn and yanked back the shielding curtain. There was a body on the gurney, but she didn’t look up as she went to the sink and washed her hands. Her manner very brisk and business-like because those fools in the waiting room had pissed her off and she still wasn’t entirely calm. She was usually much more friendly when she first entered an examining room.

Drying her hands, she slipped on a pair of latex gloves and read the patient chart on the computer monitor before turning around.

There was a man on the gurney. But not just any man; it was a very large man dressed in filthy fatigues. He was dirty and smeared with grime and blood, and there was a huge patch of gauze over his left thigh. He looked as if he had seen the wrong end of a fight.

Sighing, she assumed she was looking at another victim of an enlisted barroom brawl.

Jeremy did everything but look at his face, her eyes roving over the massive body that was almost too big to believe. But as her gaze trailed up the length of him and came to rest on his hazel-gold eyes, it was as if she had been kicked in the guts. In spite of his disheveled appearance and torn clothing, he was positively gorgeous. The kind of man who makes your jaw drop before you can control it. As her cousin, Jennifer, would say, Yeah, I’d have his baby.

The power of speech actually left her for a moment as he gazed back openly, yet it was not a leering sort of stare. It was honest and friendly and…deeply embarrassed, Jeremy hoped her shock didn’t show.

“Hi,” he smiled weakly.

“Hi yourself,” she managed to squeeze out. “What in the hell happened to you?”