"Soon. Very soon. Just a few more hours. And, hon, that pizza's on me." Monica's smile held firm, but her hands shook as she hooked her sister's hair behind her ear, eyes searching, sister and doctor in tandem seeking reassurance. "I need to check the three of you over while the rest of the medical team treats and loads up the wounded. And these folks need to check airfield security. Then we're out of this place."
Monica looped an arm around Sydney's shoulders and began retracing her path through the crowd. Closer to where Yasmine stood.
Would Monica gather her up with relief, as well? Before she could discover the answer, Sydney gasped. Locked eyes with Yasmine. "Oh, my God! You're here, too?" She bolted up the stairs and hugged Yasmine with typical Sydney openness. "This is too wonderful. I don't even care how it all happened. It's just so awesome to see you both."
Monica paused at the foot of the cement steps. Climbed up, peering at Yasmine with a more caged expression. "Are you all right?"
Yasmine stiffened for recriminations.
Monica reached. Yasmine waited for a rebuff after the frosty way they'd parted last. Instead, Monica straightened the trailing end of Yasmine's scarf.
Affection? Or restraint?
"We need to head over to the medivac." Monica's hand fell away. "See you there later? I'll need to check you over, as well."
The old Yasmine would have only heard the subtie nudge that Monica wanted a few more moments alone with Sydney. Now, Yasmine stuffed aside her pride and reminded herself the invitation to join them would not have been issued at all in the past.
Yasmine nodded. "I will be right with you."
She stared out over Drew's world while her sisters ambled down the steps. Monica's words from earlier washed back over her, caking the grit into her skin with more guilt as thick as sweat. She'd taken their protection and given nothing in return.
So what that she had not known Sydney in particular was being held hostage? She had known Ammar snatched people, and thought only of her own escape. Of a freedom she had not earned any more than she had earned her sisters' affection.
Drew, Monica, they were all correct. Freedom did come with a price—the responsibility to safeguard it for others.
Monica and Sydney walked away, both shadowed by the men in their lives. Yasmine's gaze landed back on Drew. His head dipped as he listened to one of his soldiers beside him while talking on his ever-present radio. What was her freedom worth if she had no one to share it with?
Drew had told her he did not really know her. She had been so quick to question how that could be possible when she knew him so well.
The answer unfolded clearly. Because her defensiveness and pride had kept her from showing her true self. Trust had to be earned. And love had to be nurtured.
She would not give up. Now was not the time to push him, but thanks to Drew she had forever in a new country to make the effort. Once she had her American nursing license, she would find a job close to his Ft. Benning Army post. There was no reason at all why she could not work in Georgia, and she would still be close enough to see her sisters in South Carolina and Virginia.
And her ride out of Rubistan waited a short stretch away.
Yasmine started down the first step. Stumbled. A hand steadied her from behind with a firm grip to the arm pulling her upright. Albeit a bit brusquely until she landed back in the doorway. She glanced over her shoulder to thank her rough savior.
Her blood iced in her veins. Ammar al-Khayr stared back at her.
Before she could do more than gasp, he yanked her inside, clapped a hand over her mouth. His other hand lifted to thrust a machine gun in her line of sight. "Not one word or I will open fire on the crowd outside and your colonel will be the first to fall."
Drew? Her heart stuttered like a machine gun already in motion as Ammar tugged her into darkness, deeper into the cement building that had been her prison. How could he know about her connection to Drew? And how in the world was he here...
Blinking, she noticed the pit waiting open in the comer of the floor. A trap door gaped.
Tunnels. Of course Ammar had secret rooms and tunnels out. Her memory even niggled with Drew's words into the radio to his men about how they had to take cover from the storm in places that had already been checked. Yet, she had led him right here, to the area that hadn't been cleared. Where Ammar had hidden just below them until the storm had passed.
He hauled her down into the pit. Shadowy. Full of cobwebs and Ammar's gross stench of garlic and body sweat. She gagged under his bruising grip over her mouth.
"Do not worry. We will not be in here long." His fanatical eyes bit into her through the hazy dark as sharply as his hands grinding into her skin. "Only long enough for me to plan. Since the Americans collapsed my escape route, I will need to devise an alternate means of getting away. And what better hostage than the Colonel's woman."
Her sister was pregnant.
Monica called upon every molecule of doctor calm. The toughest thing she'd ever done. But she would hang tough because, damn it, she'd come here to support her sister, not to curl up and cry like a baby.
Baby.
Oh, God. Monica rolled her latex gloves off while her sister adjusted her clothes. Military-green privacy curtains offered a modicum of isolation from the rest of the noise and bustle in the medivac aircraft, exams in progress, wounded being treated.