Page 52 of Call Sign: King
Ryder’s legs collapsed beneath him, sending his knees crashing to the carpeted floor. Unable to breathe, he fell forward onto his hands and knees, gasping for air as panic closed in.
They’d lost her tracker. It had been the one and only hope he’d been clinging to — that he’d be able to get a team to her as soon as she was back on the ground.
MacGyver knelt next to him. “You have to keep it together. She needs you.Theyneed you.”
A hand holding an odd test strip came into Ryder’s line of sight. It took a few seconds for the reality to sink in. There in the little display screen was one word.
Pregnant.
His heart lurched, thinking through the possible explanations for what the hell this meant. The only other woman who’d been in the suite was Arrow, but that didn’t make sense either.
“Where?” he ground out.
“Her private bathroom.”
Ryder couldn’t catch his breath.
A baby. They’d talked about it — dreamed about it — but he honestly hadn’t thought it would ever happen. Men like him didn’t deserve families. This debacle proved that.
He hadn’t thought he could feel any worse than he had minutes before.
He’d been wrong. He hadn’t just lost the love of his life; he’d lost the chance of becoming a father.
Chapter Fifteen
KHLOE
Time was a weird thing. Khloe was having trouble comprehending that it had only been a couple hours ago, max, that she’d been riding back to the hotel with her security detail. At the time, her biggest worry had been that the guys were ordering another heavy meal and she would have to wait three days before seeing her husband again. Now she had to wonder if she’d ever see Ryder again.
Her empty stomach growled, ridiculing her for constantly complaining about not wanting to eat. At least being hungry felt like normal. She’d grown used to working through hunger pangs in her effort to stay Hollywood slim.
But today was different because even if there was only a small chance she was pregnant, that meant her baby was hungry too. Of course, her brain knew that even if she had a baby inside her, at most he or she was tiny… the size of a pea… maybe a peanut. But even if they weren’t fully formed yet, she’d read enough to know this early part of a pregnancy was important to forming a healthy baby. In fact, it had only been as she’d been reading up on pre-natal care that she’d made real progress in fighting her ever-present eating disorder.
She may not have been able to start eating better for herself, but just the hope of having Ryder’s baby one day had helped her start taking better care of her body this last year. After her OBGYN had been brutally honest with her that her chances of getting pregnant were almost non-existent if she tried to stay at her pre-Ryder weight, she’d doubled down on her therapy sessions and even hired a nutritionist to make sure she was doing absolutely everything she could to give her the best chance of getting pregnant.
Fresh anger flared as she thought about the joyous celebration her kidnapper may have stolen from them. Had the test been positive? Would she even have an opportunity to find out … ?
Dying was not an option. Not only because of a possible baby, but she had way too much to live for.
The discussion her kidnappers had been having in Russian grew heated, pulling her attention away from her internal thoughts and back on the crisis in progress. Watching the men waving around dangerous looking weapons, noticing their scars… it had her reluctantly comparing them to her husband and the dozens of BSO team members she’d met over the years.
They had similar looking weapons and while she may not know about the nitty gritty details of the missions the BSO team went out on, she knew they often went into danger. Until today, that danger hadn’t been real to Khloe. Oh, she’d listened to Ryder and Trevor talking about the risks, but looking back, she’d never taken it seriously. She’d been so certain that Ryder had been overprotective. She’d even deluded herself into accepting that protectiveness as just one of the many ways he showed her he loved her.
What a jarring way to find out it was so much more than that.
Finally letting the exhaustion close in, Khloe closed her eyes, hoping to get her brain to stop long enough to get a little sleep. With any luck, maybe she’d wake up and find out this had all been some kind of fucked up nightmare. The aching pain in her cheek, hip, and knees throbbed, ridiculing her hope.
What was Ryder doing right now? Just thinking about the man she loved made her heart ache with homesickness. As someone who traveled almost nonstop, and who rarely got to spend more than a few weeks in one place in a row, Khloe had learned that for her, it wasn’t a physical location that made her feel like she was home. Her home was where Ryder was. As long as they were together, the rest didn’t matter.
The thought of never going home again terrified her. He wouldn’t recover. If Ryder wasn’t able to get to her before her kidnappers ended her, she knew that his life would be over too. That meant she had to keep focused on fighting, not just for herself, and her possible baby, but for her husband too.
Ryder would come for her. She just needed to hang on until then.
Chapter Sixteen
RYDER
“Thanks,” Ryder managed to get out to the uniformed police officer who’d given him an expedited ride to the airport.
