Do You Trust Me? (25 page)

“He’s right,” Sully told
him. “Drink it before I have to force feed it to you.”

McCall reached out
and took the cup with a hand not quite steady. He tasted the liquid, made a
face, but dutifully drank as much as he could. Then, consumed with
self-loathing, he looked at Sully again. “You should fire my ass and send me to
the worst hellhole you can find.”

“Damn it, McCall. We’re
done with the pity party. We got the bad guys plus an assassin we’ve been
trying to find for years.” His gaze was piercing, as if he was looking for
something, seeking clues to what was really behind what McCall was saying. “My
God. You’re in love with her.”

“For all the good it
will do me now. If she lives through this...” McCall pressed his lips together,
unwilling to contemplate the alternatives. “We gave each other everything but
trust. I’m more to blame than she is, because I could have told her at any
time. I wanted her to come to
me.
How do you build a relationship with
that?”

And that was the last
word he spoke, shielding himself in bitter silence. He paced, he cursed, he
burned his stomach with bad coffee. Sully sat quietly with two of his team
members, smart enough to know there was nothing he could say right now that
McCall wanted to hear.

They lost track of
how many hours passed while they waited. McCall continued to pace and curse
himself. Sully spent most of the time on his phone, talking to Noel, checking
with his men on the situation with Gage and Laurel. Finally, when McCall’s
patience had completely worn out and he looked ready to storm the surgery suite,
the tired doctor, still in his surgical scrubs, approached them.

“Mr. Raines?”

Sully walked over to
the doctor. “How is she?”

McCall stopped
pacing, doing his best to control the apprehension he felt.

“Much better than we
had any right to expect. Getting blood back into her right away helped a great
deal.” He paused. “She was hit twice and the bullets did a lot of damage. One
of them nicked two ribs and the fragments damaged her liver, a lung, and one
kidney. The other severed an artery, which explains the massive bleeding, but
we stitched it up.”

“She’s going to be
all right,” Sully said, making it a statement rather than a question.

“She’ll be with us here
for some time, but, yes, she’ll eventually make a full recovery.”

McCall listened to
every word, then turned away. Despite himself, tears burned his eyes.

“Can we see her?”
Sully asked.

“In about an hour, I’d
say. She’s still in recovery. Someone will come and get you when they move her.
We’re putting her in ICU for a few days. Just in case.”

“Thank you, Doctor.
Thank you very much.” He turned to McCall. “You heard?”

“Yes.” He turned and
headed for the elevators.

“Wait just a minute here.”
Sully’s heavy hand clamped on McCall’s shoulder. “Where the hell are you going?”

“What does it look
like? I’m leaving.”

“Leaving?” Sully
stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “The woman you love is miraculously
dragged back from the jaws of death, and you want to leave?”

McCall’s lips
thinned. “She won’t want to see me. I promise you that. If she doesn’t hate me
yet, by the time she starts to come around, she will. She probably wishes I was
the one who took the bullet.”

Sully fixed him with a
hard look. “You may have made some...errors in judgment, but you were always on
top of things. None of us expected what happened with Laurel and Gage. And in
the end, damage was minimal, and we got what we needed.”

“Let’s not forget Rina
nearly gave her life, trying to do the job I was supposed to do because I didn’t
question Gage’s message. Didn’t follow my instincts. So where should I start,
Sully? Which mistake should I drag out first? What could she and I possibly
have to say to each other after all this?”

“That’s bull,” the
older man said. “I will not let you leave it like this. If you walk out on her
now, without thrashing this thing out, you’ll regret it for the rest of your
life.”

McCall just shook his
head. Nothing Sully said was going to make a difference to him. He’d been an
ass. He’d fucked up and almost gotten Rina killed. He didn’t think he’d ever
forget that for the rest of his life. She deserved someone a lot better than
him. He turned away from Sully and nearly ran down the long corridor to the elevators.

Chapter Sixteen

The newspapers were
full of stories about the plot to kill the president, which involved not only
two congressmen and a billionaire but the vice president. Shots of Andrew and William
Brechtel, flanked by attorneys as they were led away by federal agents, played
over and over again on television and in print. Vice President Grant Heller
became the man the whole country loved to hate. And Patterson and Hanes?
Quietly processed by agents and just as quietly sequestered while their
attorneys sorted out their part in the plot.

And of course,
because the media loved ordinary people who became heroes, Rina’s picture was
plastered on every front page and every television screen in the country.

Gage and Laurel quite
literally faded from the landscape, hidden away while Sully worked to make them
disappear permanently. The media nearly drove itself crazy hunting for
information, but not even a whisper was heard. And all attempts to pry
something loose from the Secret Service were effectively stonewalled.

Rina lay in a
drug-induced fog during the initial frenzy. Her doctor ordered pain medication
on demand, whatever she needed, so she was kept as comfortable as morphine
could make her. When they moved her from the ICU and she did surface, it was to
see a nurse attending to her or Shar or Sully hovering over her.

Four days passed
before she opened her eyes and kept them open for more than a few minutes. She
could tell it was evening by the darkness outside her window and the glow of
the outside lights creating yellow halos. A lighted lamp beside her bed threw
the rest of the room into shadow, but she could sense someone moving.

“Who’s there?” Her
voice sounded like a croaking frog, and her throat felt as if someone had
sandpapered it.

Shar moved into her
line of vision. “Hello, sweetie. Glad to have you back with us. How’re you
doing?”

“Not so great. Where—”

“St. Luke’s Hospital.”

“Oh.” Rina ran her
tongue over her dry, cracked lips. “Drink?”

“Ice chips, and if
those stay down okay, some ice water.” Shar filled a teaspoon with chips from a
glass and slid them one at a time into Rina’s mouth.

“Hard...to swallow,” Rina
said when the chips had melted.

“That’s because they
had a tube down your throat for a few days to help you breathe. Dr. Redfield
said it might take a week or so, but the soreness will go away.” She fed
another spoonful of chips.

“What...what
happened?”

“You’re a heroine,”
Shar told her, a soft smile on her face. “I’m keeping your press clippings. Do
you remember anything?”

Rina shook her head
as much as pain would allow her movement.

“The president nearly
got killed,” Shar told her. “You got shot, and you gave the government a
computer chip with all the information they needed to catch the bad guys.” She
grinned. “You’re all over the papers. Book sales are through the roof.”

“You’re...kidding.”

“Not for a minute.”
Her face sobered. “Have they told you about Gage? And your dear friend Laurel?”

Rina nodded “I knew...that
day when it happened. I can’t believe it.” She closed her eyes briefly. “Sure
had me fooled.”

“They had all of us
fooled. Even people as sharp as Sully.”

“McCall?” She barely
managed to get the name out.

Shar smoothed Rina’s
hair back from her forehead. “Sully’s kept him pretty busy. You know, he was
the team leader on this, and he has a lot of debriefing and wrapping up to
attend to.”

Rina’s eyes searched
her friend’s face, then closed against what she saw. In her few moments of
lucidity, her first thought had been that McCall would turn away from her, hate
her for not trusting him enough to give him the precious chip. How could she
have shared such intimacy with him and not believed in him? An unexpected surge
of pain engulfed her.

“Hurts,” she mumbled.
“Real...bad.” But she couldn’t tell if it was her heart or her body.

“Time for more happy
stuff.” Shar pushed the button for the nurse.

The woman appeared
almost at once and carefully injected clear liquid into one of the IV tubes.

“I’m glad to see you
awake,” said a strange voice belonging to an unfamiliar person in the room. “I’m
Dr. Redfield. I’m afraid I’m the one who made the nasty cuts on your body.” He
smiled kindly.

“How...am I?”

“Well, there’s no
doubt you’ll be our guest for quite a while, although when they brought you in,
we weren’t so sure you’d be around at all. The bullets did some pretty nasty
damage.”

“Bullets?” She was
confused.

“You were shot, my
dear.”

“Shot.” Then she
remembered what Shar had said. “Bad?”
That was stupid
, her drugged mind
said. Of course being shot is bad.

“One bullet hit just
under your left arm. Thank god your ribs deflected it away from your heart, but
you still had a good bit of damage to your organs. The other one nicked an
artery, which led to some problems, but we got them under control. How are you
feeling now?”

“Hurt.” She tried to
swallow again. “Sore.”

“I’d expect that. I’ve
ordered maximum pain meds for you. That should help. Especially tomorrow when
we try to get you out of bed.” When she shook her head, he just patted her
hand. “Have to get you up as soon as we can. Just for a minute. Okay? All
right, then. I’ll check in once more before I leave the hospital tonight.”

She turned her head. “Shar?”

“Right here, honey.”
Shar picked up the ice chips and spooned a few more into Rina’s mouth.

The door to the room
opened, and Rina sensed a large presence.

“How is she?”
Sullivan Raines asked.

“In a lot of pain,”
Shar told him. “But better, I think.”

Sully took Rina’s
hand in both of his. “I am so very sorry this happened to you. You can’t know
how badly I feel about it.”

“Not...your fault.”
The hoarseness in her voice was becoming more pronounced.

“Oh, I think it is.
It was our job to make sure you were safe, and we didn’t do that very well.”

“Mine,” she rasped. “Locket.”

“Yes, we have the
locket. Thank you. We’ve rounded everyone up and put them away. Including the
vice president. Quite a scandal, too.” He smiled at her.

Rina motioned for
something to write with. She didn’t think her throat could take any more. Shar
dug a small notebook and pen from her purse.

All my fault,
she wrote.
If I’d
given it to you before, none of this would have happened. But John said...

“John was worried
about a mole. I know. And he was right. Just before he was killed, he may even
have wondered if
I
was the one who betrayed him. I don’t blame him for
being paranoid.”

John said trust no
one. I’d know who to give it to. But I didn’t.

“You did just fine,”
Sully said. “You kept the information safe, and that’s the important thing.”

McCall?

Sully averted his
eyes. “He’s been in debriefing for a long time, my dear. Plus he’s been
involved in all the clean up. He’s been quite a busy boy.”

Not coming.
A tear trickled down
her cheek as she wrote the last words.

Sully squeezed her
hand. “Give him a little time, Rina. He’s battling a lot of unfamiliar
emotions. McCall’s been a loner for such a long time. I think his feelings for
you scared him and made him treat you...in a less than sterling manner. Then...”

The locket. Didn’t
trust him. I know.

She threw the pen and
notebook down on the bed. She was exhausted, and the pain medication was
starting its pleasant journey through her veins.

“No, Rina, that’s not
it at all. He’s convinced he’s the reason you got shot. He let himself be
pulled away from you.”

She pointed to the
notebook and pen again, and Shar handed them to her.

Stupid!

She underlined it
three times.

“I agree.” Sully
sighed. “Go to sleep. Sleep is the great healer. And don’t fret about McCall.
Things will work out.”

Funeral?

“For John?”

She nodded.

“When you’ve fully
recovered, we’ll have a proper ceremony. We pried the location of his body from
Brechtel. We have time for that. We’ll do it right, I promise.”

“Thank you,” she
mouthed. Then her eyes closed again. She couldn’t tell when Sully and Shar left
the room. She was grateful for their concern and care, but they couldn’t heal
the hole in her heart. Tears ran freely, and she made no effort to wipe them
away. She just lay there, waiting for the medication to work, silently weeping
for the man who’d invaded her heart, the man she never expected to see again.