He might have a number of questions, but on this he completely agreed. “Amen, lady.”
Rick tucked a knuckle under her chin and tipped her face up as he ducked to skim his mouth over hers. Thing was, though, that he couldn’t just taste. He always needed more when it came to this woman. The ride was never long enough, and he didn’t mean sex.
Pulling back, he stared down into her eyes and wondered what to do with that revelation. Luckily, he had time to ponder it a while longer since Lauren served as one helluva chaperone. “Let’s find Lauren.”
He took the steps slowly, arm looped over Nola’s shoulder as he made his way back to the bench. His crutches rested exactly where he’d left them…
But there was no sign of his daughter.
Chapter 12
Nola thanked God and more than a few saints that Lauren was sleeping soundly in her hotel roll-out bed, her long dark hair splashed out over the pillowcase. Rick would take one of the double beds, while Nola slept on the other.
The ten minutes spent looking for the teenager at the amusement park had been the longest in Nola’s life. She and Rick had notified the park authorities, called the police. Just as the all-out search kicked into high gear, they found Lauren walking out of one of the restrooms.
The cops and park officials gave Rick and Nola indulgent looks. Too protective, overreacting, hyper- vigilant. She’d heard them whispering the judgmental assessments.
They didn’t know the fear of being kidnapped. She did. And she’d been an adult. She couldn’t even bear the thought of that hell being lived out by a child. Rick’s child.
Nola’s hands trembled around her cup of instant hot cocoa from the hotel’s coffeepot as she sagged into one of the chairs in the kitchenette area of the upscale dive crowded with bags since they didn’t know how long they would be gone. She puffed cooling breaths into her mug while Rick adjusted the lighting, darkening the sleeping area and leaving only a small lamp on in the kitchen area.
“Are you okay?” he asked softly, dropping to sit in the chair beside her and propping his feet on the nearby mattress.
“Yeah.” She nudged a second mug of hot cocoa toward him, blown away anew by how much he’d accomplished in a short time. It would be so easy to lean on a fella like this. “No. I’m still freaked out from this afternoon. I know you’re the one who should have the corner on the market for that since you’re her father and I’ve only known her a day. But ohmigod, Rick, I was so afraid I’d caused something to happen to your precious child.”
He reached over to grip her shoulder, his finger slipping inside her tank top to caress her bare skin with a hint of intimacy, even if they couldn’t take things further with Lauren in the room. “She’s all right. You don’t need to worry. I won’t let anything happen to either one of you.”
She should be consoling him. His daughter had been missing. Still, she couldn’t stop the shakes and guilt over the danger she’d brought into his life. “I appreciate your presence and your dedication. But you can’t know that. Bad things can happen so quickly.”
“I know, babe. I know.” He stroked back her hair. “Is there something else going on here?”
“While we thought Lauren had been kidnapped… it brought back some bad memories, more fallout from the job.” She sipped a bracing drink from the generic black mug. “I was taken captive on a mission in South America.”
“Holy hell. When?”
“Not too long after you hurt yourself, actually. We were sent to Cartina to aid in a smash and grab, to bring out someone from a drug lord’s compound.”
“Not your usual trash-hauling mission.” He took the mug from the table and knocked back a swallow.
“Not by a long shot.”
“So what went wrong?”
She couldn’t miss the dual intent in his eyes, concern for her and assessment, a need to understand on a professional level what had gone wrong as if perhaps he could have saved her. Would she have been rescued right away if someone like Rick had been sent out? She felt the shift inside her, the tiny voice whispering, Trust him.
“Our squadron commander went for a walk and didn’t come back. I got worried, didn’t follow orders, went looking for him. Everything went to hell when a rival drug lord staged an attack. I was caught flat-footed there in the middle of a jungle war.”
She downed the rest of her cocoa. “Definitely not my finest judgment moment, but you would have to know this commander. He was one of those who…well, he wasn’t the warm fuzzy type. He micromanaged the hell out of us. Then all of sudden we hear he had this wife who died, except maybe she was alive after all. Suddenly he had this vulnerable chink like the rest of us.”
“So you worried when he didn’t come back and went searching.”
“Right. And got caught in the middle of a turf war between two of the biggest badasses in Cartina.”
The horror of it washed over her again.
“Which group caught you?”
“It wasn’t a group, but rather the leader of one group fleeing after his compound was overrun. Luckily, he didn’t know I was military. I ditched my flight suit and just kept on my running shorts and the tank top I was wearing underneath. The last thing I wanted was to be identified as military to these guys.”