Page 27 of Defended By the SEAL
She narrowed her eyes. “You don’t believe he’d had an idealogical break with the PFP?”
“It’s not that I don’t believe it. It’s that I can’t afford to believe it.”
She crossed her arms. “If he’s selling weapons to terrorists overseas, this has to be a huge operation with multiple players. Guns don’t cross oceans unnoticed.”
Cowboy sat behind the desk and opened a drawer, rifling through its contents. This was a big house, and they had a lot of ground to cover if he was going to figure out all the answers. “Unless they’re being smuggled. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
Note pads. Thick black pencils. An ancient stapler. Heglanced up at Charlotte. She was staring at her phone, her alarmed face lit up by its screen. “Is your phone working?” he asked.
Quickly, she shook her head and tucked it in her pocket. “No.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
He didn’t buy that for a minute, but knew better than to argue with her—at least most of the time. He opened another drawer. A hole puncher. A few random tools. A small spool of wire.
He closed the drawer and moved to another. Several vials of amber glass with rubber dropper caps, each labeled in the same language from the filing cabinet. This drawer was more crowded, and he reached behind another spool of wire to bring the contents forward.
A small black timer appeared, three colored wires hanging from its back, and Cowboy’s nervous system sang like he’d just put his finger in a light socket. He took the timer out and examined it carefully in the light, the familiar mechanism screaming a warning in his brain. He was a trained explosives expert for the Navy SEALs, and the pieces before him were fitting together like a terrifying puzzle.
Charlotte cocked her head. “What is it?”
He reached back into the drawer and withdrew the amber bottles, carefully opening each one and smelling what was inside, his worst fears confirmed by the combination of scents. The barely there odor of pure glycerin. The familiar tang of diamine peroxide. The distinct aroma of nitromethane.
“Jesus Christ. These are bomb-making chemicals. You can use this stuff to make nitroglycerin and PLX. Bombsmore powerful than TNT.” He held up the clock. “And this timer, the wire, the high quality tools... This is the stuff of nightmares, right here.”
“Tom’smaking bombs?”
“Well, it’s either him or Grams.”
She clucked her tongue. “My grandmother isn’t making explosives.”
He sighed heavily, glad he’d called for more backup and wishing they’d get here a hell of a lot sooner than they would. “Then my money’s on Tom.” Their situation had just gone from bad to worse. “Looks like your future step-granddad’s putting the terror in terrorist, and we’re stuck on this island with him—and no backup—for the foreseeable future.”
13
Charlotte put a log on the fire and checked on Grams, who had finally stopped shivering and was resting comfortably after drinking a bit of tea Tom brought for her. Her face was warm to the touch, a marked improvement over the last time Charlotte had checked, and she sighed with relief that Grams was going to make it.
She sat at the far side of the couch, careful to avoid Grams’s feet as she tucked her own legs beneath the blankets. Hot coals glowed under a bed of fresh wood, flames licking at the bark of the logs with a crackling fervor.
She stared into the fire. Her period was nine days late. Nine fucking days. How had she missed that? Granted, she didn’t pay it a lot of attention, but still—nine days was a long time not to notice.
Figures she’d be on a goddamn island in the middle of a storm, cut off from the world and the endless boxes of pregnancy tests that lined drugstore shelves. There was no way to know for sure if she was pregnant, and all the wishing in the world wouldn’t give her a definitive answer.
She squeezed her boobs with her arms. They were tender, but that could be from pregnancy or her impending period. She would just have to let the question go unanswered for now, and patience was a virtue she most definitely did not possess.
I might be having a baby.
There was fear in her heart, for sure, but there was a thin slice of shiny joy she hadn’t expected. Children had been an open question for most of her adult life. When she’d first married Rick, she assumed they’d have kids in a few years, but long before then, their relationship had soured.
That was what happened, wasn’t it? Relationships were always changing. You couldn’t count on them to stay the same, so why did people try to guarantee the bond between them could be fixed in place, frozen in time like a rose in a magical glass jar?
She didn’t believe in fairy tales anymore.
And what if she was pregnant? What she knew about the world wouldn’t suddenly change if she became a parent. Cowboy’s promises to stay by her side and love her forever would be no more sound than they were today—she’d just have more at stake.
A baby would change everything between them, make him want to marry her even more than he already did, and the thought sent a bolt of pure terror through her body. She forced herself to take several slow, deep breaths. She probably wasn’t even pregnant. She was just perseverating on an idea that would never come to fruition.
