Scott's Summit, page 6
“Not very soon at all,” he stated calmly. “Not until we sort out this whole thing.”
“Well, that’s not for you to decide. So, as soon as the doctor releases me,” she stated, “I’m going home.” In reality, the hurt she felt was so acute that she wanted him to leave so she could bawl some more. She knew in her heart of hearts that this would be the end of any possibility of us, and she needed that good old British stiff upper lip to get through it. Too bad her British stiff upper lip syndrome had become very Americanized over the last many years.
“While you’re here,” Scott began, “are you planning on seeing any family?”
“No,” she declared in a harsh tone. “I don’t have any plans to see them at all.”
He nodded slowly. “That’s too bad. I could let you go, if you had a place to stay close by.”
“Doesn’t matter since it’s not up to you to let me go,” she argued, with more intensity than she’d expected. But then, seeing the look on his face and having him shutting her out, what did he expect?
“Terk can talk to you about it later,” Scott added.
“He might be your friend and your boss, but he’s not mine,” she snapped.
Just then the door opened, and another woman walked in. Looking at Naira, she said, “Hello. Remember me? Let’s have a look.”
“As soon as he’s gone,” Naira stated.
The doctor looked at Scott, and obediently he got up and walked out.
“You really don’t want him here?” the doc asked. “I’m surprised at that, since he’s been such a mainstay during your visit with us.”
The fact that the doc had used the term visit made Naira want to laugh. “Visit? Is that what this is?” she teased.
“Okay, well, either way, you ended up here in the hospital, and he’s been sitting at your side, worrying ever since.”
“Yet he just made it very clear that it’s not personal, and he’s feeling guilty,” she shared dismissively. “We had some problems between us, and I was hoping it would get resolved, but it doesn’t look like it. So all I really want to do is leave.”
The doctor pursed her lips, as she considered Naira for a long moment. “The thing is,” she explained, “we want you to stay for another few days, and I don’t want to release you if you don’t have somewhere local to go.”
“That’s my problem,” she declared. “I’ll be fine.” When the doctor hesitated, Naira looked at her and asked, “Do you have any reason to keep me?” And she knew that she was being overly harsh in tone, which wasn’t very polite to this woman who had quite possibly saved Naira’s life. “Otherwise I would just as soon go back to my hotel and rest and recover there.”
“Even at that,” the doc replied, “if you ran into trouble, nobody is there to help you.”
“I can come back in a few days to be checked, if that would make you feel any better.”
“You’d have to come to my office,” she stated.
“Fine, I can get there, I’m sure. I’ll get a cab or something.”
“Well, let’s see how you’re doing tomorrow.” And, with that, the doc was gone.
Frowning, not liking the fact that everybody seemed to want Naira to stay close, when she didn’t want to be here, just added to her frustration. When Scott walked back in again, she told him, “The doctor is releasing me tomorrow, and I’m going back to my hotel. I promised to stay in town for a few days for her to keep an eye on me.”
He looked at her and then nodded. “That’s fine. I’m sure we can set up some kind of security at a hotel for you.”
“I hardly think that’s necessary,” she suggested, trying to be friendly, but her stiff manner was something she wasn’t prepared to ease up on. They had no right to keep her here, and she would make sure they had no way to do so.
He gazed at her steadily. “You know we’re only doing this for your own good, right?”
“Wow,” she said in a mocking tone. “If I had a penny for every time somebody used that phrase on me … And, yeah, my father’s favorite comment was very similar. ‘This is for your own good,’” she repeated, rolling her eyes.
“Hey, I’m not your father.”
“No, you’re not,” she replied, “but you are just as manipulative.”
He glared at her. “I think it’s time I went and got a cup of coffee.”
“You do that,” she muttered, as he turned to walk out. After that, she settled back and waited for her coffee. She just wanted this to be over, so she could get back to some semblance of normality, whatever that would mean in her new world. It just seemed like everything was going wrong right now.
When Scott returned, he looked at her and frowned. “I don’t want us to fight.”
“Good.” She waved her hand at him. “Let me go then.”
“You know what?” he said, with just a tinge of sadness to his tone. “I don’t think I can.”
She opened her eyes and stared at him in shock. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s not as if we don’t have a lot of history to go through.”
“We have no history,” she argued, “at least none that’s worth bringing up anymore.”
He stared at her. “I guess if we wanted to start again,” he suggested, “we would both need to move on from the past.”
“Since you’re not prepared to do that,” she stated, “it’s really not an issue to bring up.”
“And yet,” he murmured, “you’re not there either.”
“In what way?”
He shrugged. “I think you still blame yourself.”
She stared at him, her eyebrows shooting up. “Did I say I blamed myself for something?”
“Yes,” he declared. “Maybe for not making it clear what it was you were looking for from me. Maybe for allowing your father to manipulate you into a sham marriage. Maybe for allowing yourself to decide to make the best of it. But, of course, making the best of something is not the same thing as having what you want.”
She stared at him, feeling something inside her trying hard to shut down the conversation, but, at the same time, she was fascinated because it was the first time Scott had broached anything about their history so directly. “Why are you even bringing this up?” she asked quietly. “You don’t want anything to do with me, and you’ve made that very clear.”
He snorted. “Well, just like you,” he replied, “sometimes we have to consider where we’re at and what we’re doing.”
“No,” she disagreed, “we really don’t.”
He frowned. “Are you happy to just leave?”
“That’s what I’m trying to do,” she said, with a note of humor, “but nobody seems to want to let me go.”
“No,” he agreed, “and for good reason. I don’t think this is a good way to end things between us.”
“Well, it’s probably better than the last time,” she muttered.
He winced at that. “You’re right there,” he confirmed, “but that was not an easy time for either of us. I was pretty angry.”
She snorted. “I was pretty devastated too. It was obvious that you didn’t give a shit and that I’d been pinning my hopes on a relationship that you didn’t give a crap about.”
“Hardly,” he murmured. Just then his phone buzzed with a text message, and he looked down and froze.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
He sighed. “There’s been another attack on one of the team members,” he replied, “when they were heading out for supplies.”
“Supplies?” she asked, with an eyebrow up. “What kind of supplies did they have to get?”
He rolled his eyes. “A lot of them are living and working together,” he murmured. “So, in theory, they need a lot of groceries to keep everybody fed, for one thing.”
“Is that why Terk came in and then left again?”
“Most likely. He didn’t tell me.”
“Well, it is what it is,” she muttered.
When the nurse walked in, she was carrying coffee. Naira looked at her, smiled, and said, “Thank you. You have no idea how much I appreciate this.” The nurse smiled in return, gave it to her, and left.
Naira sat here, sipping it, barely realizing when Scott got up and left. As soon as the door closed, she felt herself relaxing. It was hard to even be close to him, and she realized what kind of problems they had between them and the stress of not being able to resolve them. There was really no righting this. Was he correct? Was she feeling guilty? Probably, she had made life decisions that had a terminal effect on their relationship. Of course that’s not what she had wanted, but she’d also been younger in so many ways. And who knows? Maybe she needed to go through something like this. Maybe she needed to be such an idiot in order to realize that so much more was involved in life. Regardless it was just frustrating.
When Scott walked back in again, she saw from the look on his face that he needed to leave. She shooed him away. “Go on. I’m safe here,” she stated. “Go deal with whatever you’ve got to deal with.” He hesitated, as she shook her head. “There’s really no point in staying.”
He snorted at that. “You’ve already been attacked once,” he noted. “And we have no way to know if another attack’s coming. We have a shift change in your security guard, so I’m staying.”
“They have no reason to attack me again,” she replied. “Your friends, however, appear to be a bigger issue, so go and deal with it.”
He just glared at her.
She shrugged. “I’m just staying here and drinking coffee. The doctor won’t even let me out of here until tomorrow.” She saw that Scott was torn, but she didn’t know quite how to push him to get him to go. Finally she finished her coffee, put it on the table at her side, then slipped down lower in the bed, shuddering at the pain. “I’ll sleep, so do whatever you want. You always do.”
With that, she closed her eyes resolutely and let herself drift off into dreamland.
*
Scott almost growled. Naira was so damn frustrating when she got into a mood like this. The fact that Scott had shared as much as he had also showed him that he was dealing with some issues too. But she was right. He did want to go. He wanted to get back to his team, but he also wanted to take her with him. But he wasn’t sure that the team would be ready for that. Another stranger was a lot to absorb, especially when everybody was already on edge.
Terk had been here but had abruptly disappeared, and now Scott had no idea where his boss had gone. Scott had sent out a message, asking for information, but, so far, nobody had come back with an answer.
Being cut out like this was deadly. Scott kind of understood how she felt because, right now, he was in the same boat. Nobody was bringing him on board because he wasn’t up to snuff either. And that was damn frustrating.
Almost frustrating enough for him to take her advice and go, but he also knew that, if anything were to happen to her, there would be hell to pay all around. He was still getting his mind wrapped around the whole forced marriage mess that they’d been through before that led to their breakup. Back then Scott had just come off a job that had been very difficult, and he wasn’t even working with Terk’s group at that point in time. It had been a case where several men had been killed on a job, and Scott had been recovering, or perhaps not recovering, maybe just being totally morose about the whole thing and about his life in general. He’d been wondering what he was going to do next when she had dropped the marriage bomb on him.
And sure, it had been years ago, and they were both different people now. But were they different enough? He didn’t know. He only knew that whenever he made any attempt to leave her, he found himself still sitting here, doing nothing about her. And that didn’t bode well for his future. Especially since she didn’t appear to want to talk about anything that was important to them. But then, why would she?
Scott wished he hadn’t been so nonreceptive the first couple times they had spoken, before she had been so hurt from his lack of response. And that said something about him that he needed to consider. Did it really take somebody getting shot for him to realize what was important in his life? Or to see an olive branch when it was being offered? But still, he hadn’t offered one back, and that was the problem. And now that he was attempting to, she wasn’t exactly listening.
He groaned as he sat here, wishing that something would break. Something that would stop him from sitting here like an idiot, waiting for her to wake up again. Knowing that, even when she did wake up, nothing would be changed between them. It was a sad fact, but they were all in the middle of whatever nightmare was going on, and it wasn’t clear what the end of this would look like.
When his phone rang, he jumped on it. “Hey,” he whispered to Terk, as Scott stepped out into the hallway. “Everybody okay?”
“Yes,” he replied, “but MI6 is pissed. One of their guys caught a random bullet.”
“Is he dead?”
“No, he’s not. But, if these guys had wanted to keep anything quiet, they just blew that chance.”
“I’m surprised you even got MI6 in on the deal.”
“Not really sure we had much choice at this point, being on their turf,” Terk explained. “Plus we kept finding so many bodies that Merk couldn’t keep Jonas off the case anymore.”
“I get it,” Scott said.
After a moment of silence, Terk asked, “How is she?”
“Hurting, back asleep at the moment. Fine is what she’d say,” he huffed, with half a shrug. “It’s hard to say how she really is though.”
“Have you had a chance to talk to her?”
“Yes, but she’s not terribly receptive.”
Terk laughed. “So when she wakes up again, approach her again,” he suggested. “You guys need to sort this out.”
“She’s asked to leave the hospital and to go to a hotel for a few days,” he told Terk, “and then she wants to go home.”
“Of course she does,” Terk agreed. “Where is home now anyway?”
“I didn’t even ask,” Scott admitted, feeling like an idiot. “For all I know, home is England. That’s where her family was anyway.”
“So, that would make sense in some ways,” Terk said.
“Maybe. Except she doesn’t want anything to do with them. Nothing about this makes a whole lot of sense, if you ask me,” Scott replied.
“Maybe not, but stay the course for now,” Terk suggested. “There’s a good chance this could all work out in your favor.”
“It sure doesn’t feel like it,” Scott muttered. “It feels like I blew it.”
“If you did, only you can fix it,” Terk stated in that same calm and logical voice that he had for everything.
Scott glared at the phone. “It’s not that easy.”
“It’s never that easy,” Terk noted. “But it’s up to you to make your feelings clear. Then at least she’d have a chance to make a fully informed decision, one way or another.”
“What happened to my chance to make a fully informed decision?” he protested.
“You already made it,” Terk said. “Look where you are.” And, with that, he hung up.
Scott paced the hallway. It didn’t take him long to realize that Terk was right. Scott didn’t know what that said about him, except for the fact that it really did mean that, as far as he was concerned, if he had another chance with Naira, he would take it. But how could he convince her of that?
Listening to her explanation had been an eye opener, and it eased some of the long-held blame and resentment that he’d found himself holding close. It was much easier to hug blame than it was to look at his own behavior. He hadn’t been in great emotional shape back then. Hell, he hadn’t been in great emotional shape for a long time after that point.
Once he’d started working for Terk, Scott learned to open up his different skills to see how he could make a difference in his life. And he realized that even just opening up that much had made a huge impact on his mental abilities. He was sure the shrinks would have a lot to say about that; Scott just didn’t want to listen to it. Hell, he hadn’t wanted to listen to shrinks in a very long time. He wasn’t about to start now, though maybe he should. He cringed at the thought.
“Hell no,” he grumbled, as he pushed that thought out of his mind again. As he paced, he wandered down to the emergency room and cafeteria area, where he picked himself up another cup of coffee. As he came back out, an ambulance pulled in, with MI6 close behind. Apparently this was the agent who had been shot. Scott winced as he watched. He recognized a couple of the officers, but he stayed in the shadows. No point in getting them all riled up if they saw him, but it was too late.
One of them took one look at him and raced toward him. “Hey,” Sam said, with a big smile. “I had no idea you are alive and well.”
“Well, alive, yes. But well? I’m not so sure about,” he said.
“What are you doing here? Are you still in the hospital?”
“No, a friend of mine got shot yesterday—or maybe even the day before,” Scott said, shaking his head. “It seems like I’m losing my mind.”
“Jesus, you’re mixed up in that whole mess where Stoop here got shot, aren’t you?”
“If you mean the work you’ve been doing with Merk and his brother, Terk, then yes,” Scott said. “That’s one word for it.”
“What a nightmare that is.”
Scott nodded. “Did you guys catch the shooter?”
“No, but you can bet we’re after him now, once he starts going after our officers,” Sam declared, shaking his head.
“It’s a real shitstorm out there. Sorry you’re caught up in it.”
“Yeah, same here.” Sam hesitated, looking at the emergency room doors. “I want to stay and talk but …”
“Give me your number,” Scott said, “and I’ll let you know when he’s out. I can keep watch for you.” Sam hesitated, then he shrugged. “Look,” Scott began. “We’re all on the same side, and apparently you guys were brought in because of what’s going on in my world. So I can easily do you this much of a favor.”
