Fatal Wild Child (16 page)

Ronny stood panting. Then he swore again, calling Seth names he'd heard more than once.

"That the best you can do?" Seth asked. He could feel blood trickling down his neck into the new sweater. Not much, not fast. Not a vital hit, then.

Cameron was back on his feet. "Ronny, you need to think this through," he said carefully, shuffling forward in the snow. "Put that damned thing down. This hasn't gone too far yet. We can still salvage this."

"Salvage
what
?" Ronny said viciously. "My place in your family? Yeah, like that's ever going to happen!" He looked at Seth. "Let go of my wrist, man. You're breaking it."

The direct appeal and the glimpse of long-term tiredness and defeat in Ronny's eyes allowed Seth to let go of the man's wrist and pluck the knife from it. He let his gun go and his coat dropped back into place.

Ronny rubbed his wrist, looking at Seth. "Two damned days," he said bitterly.

"What?"

"You've been here two days and you're already more of a real family member than I've ever been. Welcome to the club, Seth. I hope you rot in it." He turned and shuffled away through the virgin snow, holding his wrist in his other hand.

They watched him go. Seth took a deep breath, expelling sick tension.

"I guess every family has its less than charming aspects." Cameron was rubbing his chest.

"Did I hurt you?" Seth asked.

"My dignity, more than anything else." Cameron's eyes narrowed. "I'm not even going to ask you if that was a gun you were going for under your coat. You have astonishing reflexes." He shook his head. "Absurd thing to say, given your profession, but until one actually gets to see it at work, it's hard to appreciate true expertise. The results alone never reveal the true effort."

Seth could actually feel himself blushing and cleared his throat. "What do you want to do about Ronny?" he asked.

"For now, nothing, if you don't mind?"

"Why would I mind?" Seth asked.

"You're the one bleeding, Mr. O'Connor."

Seth touched his neck. "Damn. Does it look bad? I don't want to scare Ellie."

"'Ellie'?" Cameron repeated.

"Gabrielle," Seth amended, mentally wincing, but looking Cameron straight in the eye.

Cameron considered for a minute. "It looks like a shaving scratch," he said, his voice remote. "But she'll scream at you anyway. Gabrielle's movies were all action adventures. She knows a knife wound when she sees one."

Seth glanced along the messy trail Ronny had taken. "Will Ronny keep it away from the media?" He lifted the hem of his sweater and dabbed at his neck and felt the cold tendrils curl around his stomach. Now that his adrenaline was settling, the chill of the day was getting to him.

"If he knows what is good for him," Cameron said. He laid a hand on Seth's arm. "Go back, Seth. Reassure Gabrielle. She'll be worried by now."

Chapter Twelve

Gabrielle was too short to physically help Destiny back to her cabin so Madison and Sidney put an arm each around their sister and almost carried her back to her cabin. That left Gabrielle with the crutches and the boot her father had dropped.

Gabrielle looked at her mother, who was staring at Tyler.

"Oh, this is a friend, mother. Tyler, this is my mother, Elizabeth."

Her mother nodded at Tyler. "Hello."

Gabrielle bit her lip. How to explain Tyler?

Tyler said, "I'm a friend of Seth's. We were just having lunch when you guys all came along the path. I'd introduce Sam, my girlfriend, but she's inside, staying warm." He smiled at her mother, warm and friendly, and her mother unbent a little.

"I'm sorry we spoiled your lunch," she said. "Heaven knows, the day has been spoiled for enough people already."

"Mother," Gabrielle said chidingly.

Elizabeth smiled tiredly. "Gabrielle, why don't you stay with your guests? I'm sure Seth will be back in a few minutes."

Tyler nodded. "Sounds like a good idea," he murmured, looking at her. Gabrielle understood that Tyler wanted her to stay here and not wander off with her mother, where he would not be able to go.

She shrugged. "Okay," she said and shivered. The light coat she wore didn't offer much protection against the deep chill, not when she was standing still. That decided her. The cabin door was five feet away. "My cabin it is."

She gave her mother the boot and crutches and her mother hurried after the cluster of women shepherding Destiny to her cabin. Gabrielle hurried into the warmth of her own, Tyler right at her shoulder.

She breathed in the warmth, feeling it expand in her lungs.

"Your family is inclined to drama, aren't they?" Tyler said.

"That's what happens when you have too many super egos and leaders in close proximity for too long," Gabrielle told him. She hung up her coat and slipped off her boots and turned around to find Tyler looking at her. He was smiling a little.

"What?" she said.

"That's a...very clear-headed analysis," he said slowly.

She smiled. "I didn't say it first," she admitted. "That was Seth."

Tyler's smile broadened. "Now that sounds like something he would say."

She bit her lip. "What would he be doing with Ronny, do you think?"

Tyler shrugged. "Talking, probably." He seemed very disinterested.

Sam looked up from the table where she was still working over the camera and computer. "All settled?" she asked.

"Seth took Ronny for a talk."

"Ah." She dropped her gaze back to the borrowed laptop, moving the mouse gently. Neither seemed interested in following up on that, but Gabrielle dropped onto the sofa, her hands between her knees, wondering what that meant. Ronny had been pretty upset. What if he hit out? Wanted to fight Seth?

But Seth was a big guy, and more than capable of looking after himself, so why was she sitting here worrying about him? Neither Tyler nor Sam was sparing a second thought about Seth.

Gabrielle chewed at her lip. Tyler was munching on a cold piece of pizza and thumbing through the TV stations with the remote, looking for sports results, as far as she could tell, for he halted at each sports station, waiting for results summaries to be announced.

"Relax, Ellie," Sam said.

Gabrielle jumped, and looked over at Sam at the table. The blonde woman smiled a little. "If I snapped my fingers next to your ear, you'd go through the roof. Seth will be fine. Ronny will barely make him break sweat."

"I've known Ronny longer than you. You can't afford to underestimate him."

"I don't know Ronny at all," Sam pointed out. "My statement still stands." She went back to work.

Gabrielle plucked a book from the shelf and tried to read, but the words skittered about on the page. She put the book down, and watched the television screen, but couldn't concentrate on what the commentators were saying, and lost track of the score.

"Tyler," she said at last.

He glanced at her.

"How good is Seth? Really."

He muted the television. "Best I've ever seen, ma'am," he said softly. "It's a privilege serving under him."

"And as a person? You trust him as a person?"

Tyler's gaze raked over her face. He put the remote down. "You've seen the new scar on his back, Ellie. I know you have."

She nodded.

"We were in Afghanistan ten weeks ago," Tyler said, his voice soft.

"Tyler," Sam said warningly. Tyler held up his hand, waving her off. He didn't even look at her. "We were in Afghanistan. We got there because of bad orders that Seth argued against from the get-go, but he got told to suck up and march on. So he did, because that's what you do because of the chain of command. So we're in the mountains with no food, almost out of water and the bad guys are on our tails. We knew it was only a matter of hours before they'd catch up with us because we were too weak to go any faster because we hadn't eaten for three days and we didn't know the terrain. We'd all given up, except Seth made us keep going through sheer bloody will power. He'd just look at us and we'd find the strength to keep walking until we could maybe find a sweet spot where the radio would work and we could get out."

Sam had stopped working. Gabrielle saw her hand move away from the mouse from the corner of her eye. But she couldn't look away from Tyler, whose gaze had turned inwards.

"What happened?" Gabrielle asked softly.

"We got cornered in the maze of canyons," Tyler said. "And pretty much gave up. All except Seth, who literally grabbed us and shook us. I think he might have knocked our heads together if he'd had the physical strength left to do it, but he'd been going without food longer than any of us...but I only found out about that later. He made us climb. Out of the shaft. Up higher. Stroke of brilliance. It gave us the elevation we needed to get the radio working, and it let the helicopter reach us. It also landed us at the feet of a sacred temple that the bastards wouldn't sully with their own boots, so we got the breathing space we needed to haul ourselves into the chopper." Tyler smiled grimly. "But that didn't stop them from shooting at us as we shimmied up the rope. Seth covered us as we climbed, of course."

"Why 'of course'?" Gabrielle demanded, feeling sick as she mentally painted the scene in her head.

"The commanding officer of a troop or a platoon is the first one on the scene and the last one to leave," Sam explained. "It's kind of a stiff upper lip tradition."

"But Seth follows it," Gabrielle breathed.

Tyler's eyes grew somber. "He threw himself over me as I was getting into the helicopter," he said softly. "I was too damned weak to haul ass fast enough. So he did it for me. He took the bullet, Gabrielle. That's the sort of commanding officer, the sort of man he is. And I would die for him, plain and simple." He picked up the remote and turned on the television again. "Yeah, I trust him as a person," he added casually, answering her original question, lifting his voice above the sports scores.

About five minutes later, she heard Seth's heavy steps on the verandah. He stepped inside and leaned over, shedding snow from the knees down, brushing it off his coat and stamping his feet.

Then he straightened up and she clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in her cry. Blood smeared his neck from a cut that ran from his Adam's apple almost horizontally, two inches across his neck. It had run down into his sweater and soaked into the neck. The hem of his sweater was also blotched in red, where he had tried to wipe the stuff with his fingers.

"It's superficial," he said, looking straight at her. "A surface wound, Ellie. That's all. I've had deeper shaving cuts."

"Self-inflicted ones," Tyler said evenly. "Your razor turn on you in the last fifteen minutes?"

Gabrielle could feel hysteria beating at her chest, wanting to escape and explode all over the room. She wanted to give vent to her relief, her joy that Seth was all right, alive and standing there in one piece. She wanted to beat on his chest with her fists and flay him with her retrospective panic. It would express in a few heaven-sent selfish minutes all of the worry of the last fifteen.

But it wouldn't serve anyone except herself. It was what the old Gabrielle would have done.

She got to her feet and found her legs were trembling. But they held her up. She moved over to Seth and rested her hands on his shoulders. She wasn't surprised to find her hands were trembling. "Let me take your coat off. No point in getting blood on it and you've got blood on your fingers."

Seth let her take his coat off.

"Tyler," she said, as she hung it up. She fought hard for an even tone and calm expression. "In the bathroom, there's a small first aid kit. Swabs and disinfectant. Could you get that, please?"

"Yes, ma'am," he murmured.

"Anything I can do, Ellie?" Sam asked.

"No, I have it under control, thank you," Gabrielle told her. She tugged on Seth's arm. "Come and sit over here at the table. Let's clear the blood and see what you've got under there."

Now she was moving and speaking, the panic pushed back and she could hide it better. She led Seth to a chair and pushed on his shoulder. "Rest back so I can get at the wound."

He was watching her warily. Waiting for her to crumble.

She held her jaws together tightly, but she couldn't quite look him in the eye.

Tyler brought the kit and filled the lid with warm water and diluted disinfectant. Gabrielle used the solution to mop up the blood from Seth's neck, discarding cotton balls as they grew too bloody, until she drew nearer to the wound itself.

"Wipe over it," Seth said. "I can stand it and I don't know how clean Ronny's knife was. The wound has to be cleaned."

"It was a knife then," Gabrielle said. She had suspected it from the shape of the long, thin wound. Her gut clenched. "I'm going to kill him."

"Later, Ellie. For now, just clean," Seth said softly.

She wiped over the wound itself and Seth hissed. The thin wound showed shallow and clean for a moment, then thin dots of blood oozed.

"Barely a cat scratch," Tyler declared. "Couple of veins. I wouldn't even put a plaster on it."