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“You saw him, didn’t you?” Seamus asked softly, changing the subject. “The cop?”
“The first one,” I agreed. “He seemed jumpy and that’s why I flanked you. I’m sorry I didn’t see the one who shot you until it was too late. I wouldn’t have let that happen if I could have helped it.”
“I know,” he assured me. “We have our differences, but I have no problem trusting you with my life. If I did, you wouldn’t be here.”
“You know,” I said, shifting toward him and gently pressing the needle into his flesh. “You have a remarkable ability to make everything about you.”
“Thisisabout me,” he snapped. “I’ve been shot, I’m a wanted terror suspect, and I’m trapped in a rent-by-the-hour motel room with you for the foreseeable future.”
“Cry baby,” I teased, pulling the floss tightly through the wound before crossing it over itself and going back in with the needle. “You need a hug or something?”
“I need a deep cover extraction,” he groused, glancing down while I worked on his stitches. “Is that mint floss?”
“Why, would you prefer cinnamon?” I met his gaze for a moment before rolling my eyes. “I do actually know what I’m doing.”
“I know,” he said. “Thank you, by the way.”
“It’s no trouble,” I assured him. “I wouldn’t just let you bleed.”
“Not that.” He paused for a moment, watching me work again. “Well, yeah, for patching me up. But I mean for coming in.”
“Seamus, it was a direct order,” I reminded him, clipping the floss before dropping the needle back into the cup and refilling it with a fresh mini bottle of Canada’s finest. “It’s not like I could tell Zane no.”
That wasn’t entirely true, and we both knew it. Phoenix was volunteer only, always had been. It was the most dangerous ghost ops assignment you could get, and also one of the most prestigious…not that the people that would have mattered to even knew about the squad.
“You ready for me to start the other side?” I asked him, flicking a match and igniting the amber liquid around the needle to sanitize it again as best I could under the circumstances.
“Yeah,” he said through a yawn. “Ugh, adrenaline crash.”
“Bound to happen,” I said. “I’ll move as quickly as I can, then you can sleep for a few hours.”
“Talk to me about BIH,” Seamus insisted as he propped his chin on his free hand to watch me some more. “We were talking about how they’d benefit from the bridge blowings before we were so rudely interrupted.”
“Yeah, I still don’t know,” I reminded him, tugging the floss taut through the bullet wound. “I also don’t know how they’d profit from outing assets, or planting false bank deposits to terrorists, or killing a sitting president.” I cut the floss free and started tossing things into the trashcan next to the toilet. “Like I said, it’s just nagging at me.”
“It’s nagging at all of us,” he assured me. “Thewhyof it all has been my sticking point since I came in. And I swear to God, Max, the more we learn the less I fucking understand it.”
“Well, we’re not going to figure it out in a hotel bathroom,” I said, getting to my feet and stretching out the kink that had formed in my back from hunching over his arm. I gently pressed a bandage over the front of his arm, then slapped the second on the back, grinning as he hissed in pain and jerked his arm away. “So drink a couple of those bottles, hop in the shower and I’ll be out there watching the news.”
I exited the bathroom and shut the door behind myself. As I clicked on the television and dropped onto the bed, I realized that he was right. We were stuck in this room together for who knew how long. We’d managed to go this long without fighting, but it was really only a matter of time.
Or maybe not. Maybe we’d both managed to grow up enough in the last few years that we’d be able to weather this storm and come out of it as friends.
Yeah…and maybe monkeys would fly out of my butt.
Chapter Seven
~Seamus~
It actually hadn’t occurred to me that the room only had one bed in it until I’d gotten out of the shower and walked out of the bathroom to find Max sprawled on the king-sized mattress, a mini-bottle in one hand and the TV remote in the other.
Granted, when I’d first walked in, I was bleeding and desperate for information from Zane. My mind wasn’t really focused on the layout. But now that I knew we were going to be stuck here together…that bed seemed a little too small to have to share.
“You don’t have to stay,” I told Max as I settled into one of the chairs next to the bed. “In fact, you should probably head back to the White House and see what’s being done to clear my name.”
“I’ve been ordered to stay with you,” he said, motioning his head toward his phone. “Cell service is back up and I got a text from Zane promising to keep us in the loop. I’m sure it won’t be too long. The Secret Service knows you’re innocent. As does the president. It’s just a matter of time before your name is cleared.”
Great.
