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She searched the room—the rigid hardwood chair, the gleaming sink, rolling tray with flowers. Her gaze finally landed on the broad-shouldered man standing at the window with his back to her. So familiar. So dear. Her breath hitched in her achy chest. At her slight gasp, the shoulders straightened, turned slowly.
Itwashim. “Hi, Dad.”
General Hank Renshaw strode across the room in three long strides. Six feet two inches of lanky uniformed paternal concern closed in on Darcy with suffocating speed.
“Darcy, baby, you scared the living spit out of me, unconscious all night like that.” He started to reach, then stopped. His arms hovered in midair, wide in wingspan like the bombers he’d once flown. “Are you okay? I don’t want to jostle you. I’m going to get that doctor back in here. Where is he, anyway?”
He reached for his phone as if already prepared to unleash the full power of the rows of ribbons across his chest and three stars decorating each shoulder all over the unsuspecting hospital staff.
“Stop, please, I’m fine.” Darcy took his hand and squeezed, then shoved herself upright. She fought the dizziness that would send him into ordering a battalion of physicians to poke and prod her. “Max. My diving partner. Where is he?”
Darcy’s throat closed on the rest of the words.
Her father’s face hardened.
A trembling started in her arms. She forced herself to swallow. “Dad, tell—”
“He’s outside the door talking to the security police standing guard.”
Darcy sagged back against her pillows. Forget about holding her emotions in check. She’d survived a hideous day, and her father would just have to chill out.
Then the rest of her father’s words trickled through her relief. SPs standing guard? Her mind swirled with too many questions.
She started with the most important one. “But he’s okay? Max?”
Her father nodded.
The rest could wait. She would ask about the SPs as soon as she wiped the worried frown off her father’s face.
Darcy pushed herself the rest of the way upright and held out her arms. “Come here, old man. I could use a hug.”
His arms opened wide as they’d done when he’d found her on top of the cliff twelve years ago. Just as he’d done then, he gathered her close and held on a little too hard as she inhaled the familiar scent of starch and Old Spice. The past hours waiting for her to wake must have been rough on his aging warrior heart.
“I’m okay, Daddy.” Darcy reassured herself as much as him. Willed the echoes of the past to dim. An almost impossible task right now with her emotions already raw.
The day resembled too closely the horror of captivity in a jungle bunker, alone except for the drip of water and thecrack, crack, crackas the guard outside ate sunflower seeds, pitching hulls into her sweltering cubicle.
Every sunflower seed she crunched open as an adult affirmed her freedom. Her strength over the memories. “It’s not twelve years ago. Everything’s all right.”
“I know, baby.”
Darcy pulled back, shoving aside thoughts of the past. “How did you get here so fast?”
He sank into a chair beside her bed. “I caught a hop in a cargo plane from Korea the minute I heard.”
She jammed a hand through her tousled hair. “I can’t believe my crew ratted me out.” Irritation stung like the pull of stitches in her arm. “I bet it was Bronco, that overprotective lug. I’m going to stuff his lunch full—”
“No one from your crew called me.”
And from the stern gleam in his eyes she suspected Bronco and Crusty would pay later. “Then who?”
“Max Keagan.”
“Max?” Betrayal swamped her with a power that made his rejection on the beach pale. He knew how she felt about her father’s influence encroaching into her world. Why would he have done that? “So you’ve met him.”
Her father nodded, strands of silver glinting through the brown. Most of those whitening strands had sprouted because of her.
“We’ve…talked.”
