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"Let's get a salad, entrée, dessert, maybe an appetizer, too. And some wine."
"And some wine," she echoed with a laugh. Although as soon as she said the word wine, she remembered the last time she'd drunk a little too much wine with Tyler, but she wouldn't worry about that now. "Hey, do you mind waiting like twenty minutes to order the food? I'd like to try out the spa tub."
"That's fine." He grabbed a notepad from the counter. "Write down what you want. I'll put in the order in a half hour."
"You're not going to want to eat the furniture in the meantime?" she asked with a smile.
He grinned. "I think I can hold off until you take a bath. I'm actually going to do some work."
"What kind of work? Maybe I should help you and take the bath later."
"Get out of here," he told her. "I'm just going to compile all the information we have so far and check in with my team. We can go over it later." He put his hands on her shoulders and kneaded her tight muscles. "I want you to just relax, Rachel. Seriously. You've been through a lot today, and don't try to minimize what happened at the beginning. Nothing you could say or do is an overreaction."
She felt so touched by his words that her eyes grew a little teary. "Thanks," she said tightly, trying not to cry, although she had a feeling that there might be a few tears making it into the bathwater.
"I also don't want you to worry about the fact that there's only one bed in there. The sofa out here pulls out. I'm going to sleep there."
"I wasn't concerned about that."
"Good. Now, go."
He dropped his hands, and she grabbed the overnight bag she'd packed and headed into the bedroom.
She'd been about to cry, Tyler thought. But she hadn't wanted to let down in front of him. Or maybe couldn't even let down in front of herself. Rachel definitely had an insecurity about being seen as weak or emotional. He suspected that need had come from the way she was raised. With two parents fighting over custody but not really fighting for her, she had to be whoever they wanted her to be just to make her life bearable. She'd gotten used to controlling her emotions, to pushing problems away until she could solve them herself.
He wished he could tell each one of her parents what a shitty job they'd done, but he also recognized that he didn't know the whole story. But he was starting to know Rachel, and he'd read between the lines of the things she'd told him. He suspected she'd downplayed their behavior rather than exaggerated it. She rarely seemed to blame anyone for anything more than she blamed herself.
He took his laptop out of his backpack and set it up on the dining room table. While he started it up, his thoughts returned to Rachel, to the way she'd been pinned under Jack, struggling to breathe as his hands closed on her neck so hard she had deep purple bruises. Another minute, and it might have been too late.
He drew in a quick breath, realizing how close he'd come to losing her. He should have known better than to leave her alone with Jack. Yes, they'd been asleep. And yes, Jack hadn't seemed out of control, but he should have been more cautious. Instead, he'd taken a damned shower. And that choice could have cost Rachel her life.
She should have run away from all of them after that. She should have told him she was done. But instead, she'd gone to work, set up a meeting with Dr. Levitan, and tried to save the life of a woman she barely knew. To say he was impressed was an understatement. To say he'd completely misjudged her five years ago was also an understatement.
She wasn't perfect, but she was a fighter. Even after Jack had tried to kill her, she still wanted to fight for him. He ran a hand through his hair as he sat back in his chair, staring mindlessly at the window across the room. Maybe she'd been fighting for Evan all those years ago, too. He might have mistaken her concern for Evan as some kind of medical power trip when she was just fighting for a man she didn't think was ready to go back to duty.
He'd been wrong to get in the middle of that situation. He'd actually known it back then; he just hadn't been able to stop himself from interfering. He'd been so damned eager to get back in the fight, and his loyalty to Evan and his team had blinded him. He'd believed that the end justified the means, but that was wrong.
He'd definitely learned from that experience, but he'd hurt Rachel along the way, and that was his biggest regret. Not just that he'd hurt her with the kiss and the promise of something that hadn't turned out to be real, but also because he realized now that she'd never forgotten his criticism, that she'd probably been second-guessing herself for years.
She was doing it again with Jack, wondering what she'd done wrong. But Jack's decision to go to Waverly was not on her, and he needed to make her see that. He also needed to stop her from taking that meeting with Levitan. It was too dangerous, too risky.
She might be the only one who could get into Levitan's office, but that didn't mean she should do it.
With a frustrated sigh, he realized he wasn't getting much done, so he refocused. He opened a new chart that he'd created to put all the pieces of an investigation into a world of circles and connections. The first circle was Waverly Health. It overlapped with the second circle, East River Veterans Hospital. Jack's circle was in both. He put everyone from Waverly in the first circle: Levitan, Frank Conover, Megan Prescott, and Brett Young. Mr. Kimoko, like Jack, went through both circles. He added two circles within the Waverly circle with question marks instead of names. Megan had mentioned that Dr. Levitan was working for someone else. And Jack had said a woman had been questioning him while he was medicated. He added several more circles tagged with nurse at the warehouse, guys in the van, and Megan's attacker.
In the second circle at the East River hospital were Rachel, Rick Morgan, the other doctor who'd treated Jack in the ER, Ethan Hollander and his PA Naomi Randall, who had met with Jack. There was a nurse that worked with Rachel who had also talked to Jack; he couldn't remember her name, but he needed to ask Rachel who else needed to be put in the hospital circle.
And then he added a circle for Jack's classified intelligence. They knew Mei Zheng's name had come up. Jack had also talked about their team, and there could be other missions that had been discussed as well. As he was thinking about that, his phone vibrated with a text from Evan, with notes on his Q&A with Jack.
He ran through the notes and added three more of their missions to the intelligence circle, one involving the rescue of a defense contractor in Afghanistan, another about an operation on the border between South and North Korea, and the third about the raid of a terror cell in Malaysia. Each of those missions had been highly classified, and there were informants who were still alive. They could be in danger now.
Which brought him back to the fourth circle with the word Who and a big question mark. This wasn't a one- or two-man operation. He added Conover and Levitan in that circle. But it was the ghosts above them that made him the most nervous.
Was it a foreign agent running this scheme? Had Conover created the clinic to be more than just a veterans' medical facility. Or had the plan developed once the clinic was in operation? Perhaps Conover had no idea what was going on in the basement. Maybe it was all Dr. Levitan's idea.
He blew out another breath as he stared at the circles, which started to blur with the intensity and multitude of questions running through his head. He needed to take a break.
Pushing back his chair, he moved over to the counter and picked up the phone to call room service. He put in Rachel's order and his own, then added a few more items, because he was starving, and Rachel, in her usual Rachel way, had only ordered a salad and a chicken dish. She probably hadn't wanted to spend too much money. She put far too many restrictions on herself, so he would make sure she had all the food she wanted to eat. It was a small thing, but right now, he didn't have much more he could offer her.
