Page 21 of Second Act
The flights seemed to get longer each of the five times she traveled up and down them during the night to check on the dogs and clean up both poop and vomit. However, at six the next morning, Jessica was rewarded when she found Khonsu sitting up on his towel.
Sure enough, his gums were pink and moist, and his skin snapped right back on his neck. She blew out a sigh of relief and removed the catheter. She wouldn’t have to tell Isaiah that his K-9 Angel hadn’t made it through the night.
She sat back on her heels and considered climbing the stairs to sleep until the staff came in. But the third floor seemed so far away, and in the corner, there was a big, soft dog bed that Diego must have been using to sit on. God knew she’d slept on dog beds before. She zipped up the hooded sweatshirt she’d commandeered from the nurse’s office and curled up on the bed, falling asleep as soon as her eyelids closed.
“Dr. Quillen is sound asleep downstairs in the quarantine room,” Emily Varela said after welcoming Hugh to the Carver Center. He liked the fact that she treated him with warm courtesy but no awe.
“The quarantine room?”
She smiled. “It’s a large storage closet that we put a couple of dog crates in to keep the sick ones from infecting the rest of the K-9 Angelz. Those are our rescue dogs.”
“She’s sleeping in a closet?” Painful flashbacks from his childhood rose up and clawed at his throat.
“It’s not as bad as it sounds.” Emily turned toward the stairs. “I’ll be happy to show you.”
“I don’t want to take up any more of your time. Please just point me in the right direction, and I’ll find her.” He wanted to talk with Jess privately, because he wasn’t sure how the conversation would go.
Emily hesitated a moment before she said, “At the bottom of the stairs, turn left and go into the hallway. The closet is the second door down.”
Playing a character who fought for the good guys had its perks. People tended to trust him without knowing why.
He jogged down the stairs. When the shooting schedule had changed unexpectedly, it had left him with the whole day free. All he could think about doing with that time was seeing Jessica again, so he’d taken a chance and arranged for a helicopter to New York from Boston.Of course, he hadn’t told Jess that the shoot had moved to Boston or that he was flying down early to see her. If he was already here, she couldn’t tell him not to come.
However, it had taken him most of the helicopter flight to track down her whereabouts. Fortunately, Aidan had proved helpful, but her brother had warned Hugh that Jess might refuse to leave the sick dogs.
Which was why Hugh preferred not to have Emily as a witness to their discussion.
A chorus of barking greeted him when he reached the foot of the staircase. Various-sized crates stood in a neat line down one side of a spare but immaculate room. These must be the K-9 Angelz Emily had referred to. He understood why an infectious dog would need to be separated from the pack.
The narrow hallway led into the bowels of the building, although it also was clean and well maintained. When he came to the second door down, he put his hand on the knob and lowered his head to listen. No sound emanated through the metal, so he cracked the door open.
The odor that wafted out made him jerk back a step and blow out a huff of disgust. If Jessica was in there, he couldn’t imagine how she was breathing. Bracing himself, he pushed the door farther ajar.
First he saw two crates with the sick dogs lying in them. Neither barked, he assumed because they didn’t feel well. Leaning farther in, he found Jessica, curled up in the corner on a faded brown dog bed, an overlarge gray hoodie zipped up over her hot-pink scrubs, her hair in a crazy tangle, and her hands tucked under her cheek.
The small, close space, her tightly curled body, the ill-fitting hoodie, all yanked him back to when he was eight years old. His new foster mother had taken him upstairs to show him his bedroom and opened the door to what had once been a walk-in closet but now held a cot and a plastic set of drawers. The hanging bars had been left in place, but they were too high for Hugh to reach back then. He had nothing that required hanging up, anyway.
His foster mother had told him he would be sleeping in there because he was small and didn’t need any more room than that. His meager clothing and few possessions, including his mother’s photo, had gone in and on the chest of drawers. Of course, when the social worker visited, his things got moved into the youngest son’s room, but the kid didn’t want Hugh sharing his space, so he went back to the closet as soon as the social worker left.
It wasn’t the worst place he’d ever slept, but his child’s soul had been shredded by this clear indication of how unimportant he was to his new family.
All those wounds gaped wide, pouring out the agony of being unwanted. He strode into the storage room with one goal—to get Jess out of there.
He shook her shoulder gently. “Jess, wake up. We need to go.”
Her eyelids fluttered open halfway, an expression of bewilderment on her face. “Hugh? No, it can’t be.” She closed her eyes and snuggled her cheek back against her palm.
Without further thought, he went down on his knee, snaking one arm under her shoulders and the other under her legs, and brought her up against his chest before he rose again. Thank God for all the muscle-building workouts his personal trainer put him through in order to be convincing as a secret agent.
Jessica woke up enough to grab his shoulder as he exited the stinking storage room and kicked the door shut behind him. “Hugh? What on earth? It can’t be six o’clock already!”
“I got the day off, so I came early,” he said, walking down the hallway. The fist that had clenched around his heart eased more and more the farther away he got from the closet. He filled his lungs with clean air.
“You can’t just scoop me up and whisk me away to wherever you think you’re going. I have sick dogs to tend.” She began to squirm, so he had to tighten his grip to keep her from falling.
“Emily said you texted someone named Diego that the dogs had pulled through fine.” He kept walking. “I promise to find another vet to come check on them.”
“Do you think some busy vet will just drop everything to make a house call to the Carver Center?” She sounded both annoyed and incredulous.
