Page 147 of At Her Pleasure
“I’ll see you at the hospital,” Weatherby told Mick.
Because Cyn was stable, the EMT shut the doors and joined his partner in the front. It was an open area where he could monitor Cyn from the passenger area, which gave Mick a little bit of privacy with her.
When he clasped her hands, the convulsive grip confirmed his assessment. “Let them give you some more pain meds,” he reiterated.
She shook her head. “I’m fine.”
“Yeah, you are. Draw one of those deep breaths with me, then. Let it out. Easy.”
She complied without protest, telling him how much she was hurting. Damn stubborn woman. “So you didn’t answer my question. How the hell do you know how to drive a semi?”
“Truck driving school, when I first came to NOLA and was looking at my employment options, beyond the car dealership. Ros also had Lawrence give me combat driving lessons for a birthday gift. How to ram barricades and squash people.” Her strained voice held a note of pride. “The police arrived before I could show off my skills.”
As she spoke, a shift happened. Her grip on him tightened, knuckles whitening. Her eyes went glassy, and she started to shake.
Shit. In a heartbeat, he was holding her. He didn’t care how mad she got. But she didn’t object, which told him two things. How deeply she was rattled, and how much she trusted him. She let herself be held as she tried her best not to hyperventilate.
"Been a while since I've done that," she muttered. "Fight for my life or someone else's. I'm out of practice."
"Hey, just like riding a bike. You did great."
She started laughing, and as she did, tears rolled out of her eyes. She didn’t notice until he brushed them away, and she looked mortified. Then pissed.
“If you tell anyone I cried, I'll shoot you and make it look like a suicide. I'll put you in women's underwear, too."
He touched her cheek with a knuckle. "Make it something frilly. You know I like to look pretty."
* * *
At the hospital, they took her away from him to work on her leg. When he was pacing the waiting room floor for the hundredth time, he got company.
Tyler looked the same in a hospital as he did at the flower festival, in a firefight, or anywhere else. A confident man who had enough money to wallpaper the planet, carrying a mantle of lethal calm developed from years of operating in worlds as grim as those Mick inhabited now.
He sat down in a chair, straightening his legs and crossing his ankles. “She going to be okay?”
“Yeah.” On his hundredth lap, some of it had caught up to Mick. All the things that could have gone wrong. How much of a fucking idiot he was, letting her do what she’d done. But if she hadn’t been along, not only would he be dead, but a lot of innocent people as well. Getting those people out had required two sets of hands.
“So what are you going to do now?”
Mick gave Tyler a puzzled look. “Wait for her to feel better, then get her back on a plane to New Orleans. This will take a while to sort itself out, but in a few weeks, they’ll have another shipment coming. In the meantime, I can head out to southern California to dig into the shit there, get some communication lines started.”
“You’re done, Mick.”
Mick’s gaze snapped to his handler. “What?”
Tyler’s amber eyes were steady. “Twenty cartel members saw you talking to border agents. Weatherby’s solid, but even he’d tell you to assume at least a couple of those agents are dirty. You were treated like an undercover on scene. Plus the victims will remember what you did for them and talk. Not to betray you, but it will get through the grapevine and the result will be the same.”
Mick had already been putting together ideas on how he’d cover that. He wasn’t worried about Cyn. Disguising her and not giving the cops her real identity had taken care of that. Mick had known some could be on the cartel’s payroll.
Once she was back in New Orleans, she was safe.
“I can work it out.”
“Not with me.” Tyler’s tone wasn’t unkind, but it was implacable enough to pull Mick’s attention out of his own head to focus on the man’s resolute expression. “You had a good run. You’ve accomplished more than anyone ever thought possible. You want to keep working in this field, there are other ways. Special investigation teams and agencies in the New Orleans area who work with the police and SBI could use someone with your knowledge.”
“I’m not done.” The panic that bloomed in his chest startled him. It felt like he was about to be pushed into a pitch black zero gravity place, no sense of up or down, walls or ceilings. No stars to light his way.
“Would it be easier if someone had put a bullet in your brain today?” Tyler asked pleasantly.