She stared at him in outrage. “How is it not an issue?”
“Just look at how many men I have,” he said. “They usually work alone or in pairs, spread out all over the world. To have this many together is like having our own personal army.”
She groaned and tucked up close. “Are you sure?”
He realized, in that moment, that she wasn’t talking about anything but them. He leaned down and kissed her gently on the nose. Then on the lips and then on each cheek and her forehead, finally coming back to claim her lips in a deep soul-drugging kiss that had her sagging. When he finally lifted his head, he answered her question. “I’m sure.”
“I don’t want it to be about gratitude,” she muttered.
A great big belly laugh rolled from his chest. She was amazed, and he just smiled. “Honey, I don’t do things like that out of gratitude.”
“Not that, but it’s hard to know what else it could be,” she said. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know everything that matters,” he said and hugged her even closer. “Stop fighting it. This was ordained.”
She snorted. “That would mean everything that happened in the hospital and at my paradise island was ordained too, you know?”
“Sometimes it makes you wonder,” he said quietly. “Leia, I’m a different man than I was when that plane blew up. I was very driven back then and didn’t really care about looking after myself. I was out to be the champion and to take over the world. I was big and strong, you know?” He paused. “Now I feel very different,” he said. “I no longer have to have offices all over the world. I feel much more content at the idea of going home and making a new life for myself there.”
She tilted her head back. “But you already had a life there.”
“Yes, and it was a male-dominated, action-oriented life, but it lacked what I needed the most, which was a partner and that love to keep me centered and grounded.”
“Do you think you have that now?” she challenged.
Neither of them appeared to care about anybody else listening in, and, as Bullard looked around, he saw that the guys were trying to give them some privacy. They were all just damn happy that he’d moved on from Ice, which had just been an ongoing heartbreak for Bullard and his team.
Bullard had never moved on from Ice but he’d also never even sought out a partner, thinking none could ever equal what he felt for Ice. But he had found someone. Without even looking, he had. He looked down at her. “Absolutely.”
Chapter 14
It seemed like several hours, but it was probably less than two before Leia stood under a hot shower in a hotel room. Bullard was talking with his team in the common room linking several connected suites. They were all working on a plan for the next stage. She had no clue what the next stage was and was still desperately trying to get warm. She needed food, and she needed rest. The food they could probably get but the rest? She wasn’t so sure.
Everybody was wired now that they all had reconnected and were together, simply enjoying the fact that Bullard was alive. She had experienced the pain of dealing with the loss of having Bullard to herself, if only for a short time, and she saw that the months of loss and uncertainty had taken a toll, and the others just couldn’t seem to calm down. She got right away that they were a huge family; something she’d never had.
When she finally turned off the water, she wrapped herself up in a towel and sat on the edge of the bathtub. It just felt so strange to be here; yet, at the same time, it also felt right. Her island was where she wanted to be, and, while she could understand Bullard’s need to return to his life, she wondered if she could live wherever he needed her to. They were on their way to New York, and then they would fly back home to wherever his base was. In Africa, which she couldn’t even imagine.
But, according to the others, she would really like it. Particularly the surgery suite. She frowned at that, wondering if medicine was something she should even be working in anymore. Her skills were rusty. She sat here, looking down at her hands, wondering about that. Five years was a long time. And just like she had adjusted to being back at a hotel, she wondered if being back in an OR would feel exactly the same, as if she’d just had a short holiday away. When a knock came on the bathroom door, she called out a response, “Yes?”
“Are you okay?” Bullard asked, as he turned the knob and stepped in, without waiting for an invitation. She looked up at him, smiled, and said, “I’m fine. Outside of the fact that I have nothing to wear, that is.”
He nodded and held out her dress, which he had apparently managed to dry. But then it didn’t take much. It was the loose and flimsy island wear she had become so accustomed to. By the time they got it to her, it was 90 percent dry anyway. She looked at it and nodded, realized she had likely fared better in that department than the men. “That’ll be something, thank you.”
“I can send somebody back to the island to get the rest of your personal effects too,” he said, “if you need them right away. Otherwise we’ll ship them out.”
“I don’t need them right away,” she said, “but I will want them eventually.”
“Good,” he said. “We have flights booked for the States tomorrow morning.”
“Great,” she said, almost sadly. “You know that no part of me wants to go to New York.”
“If I thought we had any other way to deal with Leo, I wouldn’t ask you to,” he said. “It’s not like I want to put you through that.”
“Why would he even be in New York, when I was in the South Pacific?”
“Because we have confirmed a booked flight for him, returning to New York. If I thought we could stop it and face him in Australia or something, I would,” he said. “But he’s booked on a direct flight to New York, and it left about forty minutes ago.”
“Do we know for sure that he is on it?”
“In terms of electronic check-in data, yes,” he said.
She groaned. “So how did he find out so fast?”
“We figured that the third-party guy picking you up was giving him updates, and they probably had a rendezvous point, but, when everything blew up and when they didn’t show up with you, Leo ran.”
“It still seems too fast.”
“Well, maybe he planned to bring you back to New York. Or maybe instead of meeting you in person,” he said, “he would meet you over a video. Or maybe all he wanted was a video of your death,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“Anything is possible,” she said. “We need to get everything out of my safe deposit box anyway,” she said, “and I can arrange for a few other things while I’m in New York.”
“Is there anybody you want to visit?”
“No way,” she said. Then she groaned and said, “No, it’s all over with.”
“Actually it isn’t. Apparently a few doctors have been pushing for an investigation. There’s a lot of hard feelings over what happened and how you were treated.”
“It’s been five years,” she said. “Why would they care now?”