Page 9 of Claimed
“And how did that practice go?” Emmaline asked. Her expression had also lightened, brimming with curiosity and the possibility of new romance. She among all of them was the most in love with being in love.
“For me—pretty damn well,” Nicki said. “I think he might have been going through the motions, but trust me, it’s been so long since I’ve been anywhere close to those kind of motions, I’ll take it.”
“I keep trying to fix you up, and you keep rejecting me.” Lauren protested. “How are you supposed to date if you never go out?”
“I’m too busy to mess with all of that.” Somewhat true, actually. She’d been a one-woman unstoppable force in college. Too small to play in most organized sports at any sort of elite level, and too worried about her possible heart condition, she’d known she’d needed to find something she could do solo.
To give herself a competitive chance, she’d set her heart on the outlier sports—windsurfing, adventure running, climbing. There she’d met an entirely new group of friends who knew nothing about her past, nothing about her possible heart disease. They only knew she sometimes got a little dizzy if she didn’t stay hydrated…and that despite said dizziness, she was usually the first to jump off the cliff into the water below, no matter how deep that water was.
But though there were plenty of men in that group Nicki could have pursued—she hadn’t. Because, despite the fact that she truly believed that she was okay, it was one thing to get your heart broken by a relationship…
It was something else to walk into a relationship with your heart already broken.
“Okay, well, let’s be smart about this.” Lauren recalled Nicki’s thoughts to the present as she settled into a chair. “What are the risks here? Let’s say you get stuck somewhere and you can’t take your meds.”
“What, my beta-blockers? Those aren’t that critical, really.” Nicki shook her head. “They’re for my migraines, and there’s some evidence they help with high blood pressure and all of that, so that’s a bonus. But if my heart is really going to go…” she shrugged. “It’s going to go.”
“And you never got tested for this?” Fran’s voice was incredulous. “That seems really reckless to me, I’m sorry.”
“Oh, I did once—twice, even, I think,” Nicki said, trying to keep her cool. She’d had this fight with her mother too many times. “The odds aren’t in my favor, and I know that. But I…couldn’t keep going back. Not in the end. I’d rather live with my heart condition as a maybe and actually live—than change my whole life because of some stupid test. I’ve seen what it’s done to my brother. He’s become as bad as my mom, sure that every cold is going to kill him. And my dad…” Nicki sighed. “I’m not going to get tested only to find out the worst. I’m not. As long as I don’t put anyone else in danger…”
“But what about putting yourself in danger?” Emmaline’s voice was soft. “We don’t want anything to happen to you.”
“It won’t. Especially if Stefan is on the boat.” She smiled. “If he had to rescue me, I’d never live it down.”
Lauren snorted. “Okay, but let’s say you have a dizzy spell or your heart starts to react to something scary or intense. Your pulse goes up, right? What happens then?”
“I faint,” Nicki shrugged. “That’s it, so far. If anything worse ever happened, I’d get tested—really, I would. But it’s never gone beyond a momentary blackout, I swear. No one’s even cracked out an AED around me.”
“That might not work anyway,” Fran put in. “A defibrillator is meant to restart a malfunctioning heart, not a dying one.”
Nicki let the shiver roll through her at the idea that her heart muscle could possibly be dying, but kept her expression strong and steady—like she needed to be. “There you go. So there’s no point in worrying about it. Besides, if Stefan gets a hint that I might not be a hundred percent physically fit, there’s no way he’d let me go along on this mission. None.”
Emmaline sighed. “And it’s that important for you to go?” Her question once more was quiet, but it drew the attention of all the girls to her.
Nicki hesitated. They couldn’t understand, she knew. They’d never had a fear that they were…fundamentally different. Fundamentally unreliable. Nicki’d overcome that fear with a college life and new career filled with solo adventures and livingon people’s couches, never attaching, never committing. But this…
“It is,” she finally said, and was surprised to find her words equally soft. “I just…I really want to be a part of this.” To be a part of something that mattered. Something that her body couldn’t hold her back from.
“Well, then you should go,” Fran said, her calm voice easing the tension again. “You’ll just have to be smart.”
“They’re meeting now, you know,” Emmaline said, pursing her lips as she glanced at her phone. “I’m sure they’ll be talking about you, Nicki. Making their final decisions.”
Nicki stood, eager for any reason to move again. “Well, then maybe I should go listen in.”
Six
“There is absolutely no chance I’m going to let her come with us.” Stefan placed the dossier on the table in front of him. He didn’t lean forward; he didn’t lean back. This wasn’t a negotiation; it was a simple point of fact. A point he’d made six times already, by his count.
Cyril turned from scanning the monitors. They were in the palace’s main conference room. He addressed Dimitri, the last person to deal with an American targeted by outside forces. “Had you to do it over again, would you have taken Lauren to Miranos?”
“No,” Dimitri rumbled. “We went there because we didn’t understand the lengths to which her insane ex would go. Had I known he was so deadly, and deranged, we wouldn’t have left the mainland. I would’ve put her in a safe house and sat on it.” He grimaced. “I agree with Stefan. It’s too dangerous to take an American into Turkey. Even one with a reason to be there.”
“A very good reason,” Cyril observed blandly. “Unlike any of us.” He pointed to the screens. “Nicole Clark was actually bylined last year at the Alaçati competition. She competed deep into the tournament before falling out of the running, then continued on in her journalistic role.”
“Adventure blogging is not journalism,” Stefan countered. “She has none of the training of an international correspondent, she simply has a laptop and a Wi-Fi connection.”
He scowled. “It is not her credentials, though they are nonexistent. I will grant you her experience in windsurfing and her presence at last year’s tournament are worthwhile considerations. But she’s an American, a guest in our country. She’s also untrained. We’ll be taking her into unmonitored territory, where the Turkish military will be the least of our concerns. She has already demonstrated that she does not follow orders well, and that is of paramount importance. Make no mistake—this is a military mission. I’m being asked to secure information or possibly recover Ari’s remains from a potentially hostile environment, with nationals who may not be willing to give up those remains. It could get ugly very quickly, and an American would be, at minimum, a liability, and, at worst, collateral damage from which we wouldn’t recover.”