Page 36 of Deadly Storms (Sunrise Lake #3)

She put her head back on top of her knees. Rainier. She was a sorry mess. He was the one person who always saw her at her very worst. She didn’t even care. There was nothing she could do about it. He knew what to expect. She’d told him not to come, but he hadn’t listened.

Rainier crouched beside her, lifted her into his arms, and sank down onto the floor, cradling her on his lap.

His arms tightened around her like a fortress, and she burrowed into him just the way she had when he’d taken her to his safe house because she’d begged him not to let anyone see her in the condition he had found her in.

He didn’t say anything at all at first, he just held her and let her sob.

For some reason, his presence made her tears increase, not lessen.

She always said Rainier treated her like a child, but at least he heard her when no one else did.

When she first was returned to her parents, she was terrified Scorpion would find a way to get her back.

She begged her father to allow her to learn to shoot a gun, to start some form of self-defense lessons.

He simply told her she was surrounded by security. Only Rainier heard her desperation.

Shabina didn’t know how he got away with defying her father’s decree, but Rainier insisted on teaching her self-defense.

He was the one who first started instructing her to shoot a gun.

He ignored the dictates of her parents and took her to a gym and taught her escape moves until she was proficient at them.

She rubbed her face against his chest. He had removed his jacket, dropping it on the bed as he made his way across the room to her so tears soaked his soft shirt.

He was armed to the teeth, holsters and sheaths over and under his clothing.

That was familiar to her, a part of Rainier.

She couldn’t imagine him without dozens of weapons.

She knew he was a weapon without guns and knives and whatever else he had on him.

His chest was dense, and when she rested her head there, it wasn’t as if she had a soft pillow, but that didn’t matter.

She was always comforted by his presence.

Rainier rocked her gently, his chin resting on top of her head. He murmured softly to her but made no attempt to get her to stop crying. That was another thing, he just let her feel whatever she was feeling when everyone else told her what she should be feeling. Or how to cope with her feelings.

When she had panic attacks and horrendous nightmares, and in the beginning, when she first returned home that was all the time, despite the heavy security in her parents’ home, he would suddenly appear in her bedroom and hold her, just as he was doing now.

Shabina tried to concentrate on his voice in the hopes she would find her control.

She felt him brush kisses in her hair and then down along her temple.

No one ever saw Rainier’s sweet side. They didn’t know he had one.

Most of the time, he didn’t even show it to her.

He was abrupt and bossy and bordered on rude.

But when he was like this, he stole her heart.

She ached for him. Needed him desperately.

“I’m being selfish.” She didn’t know how she managed to get her voice to be heard above the coughing, sobbing hysteria.

“No, you’re not,” he denied. “You’d be selfish if I jumped out of a plane in the dead of night and you refused to let me comfort you.”

There was just the slightest trace of emotion in his voice, but she couldn’t tell what he was feeling. She wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her wet face into his neck, taking in deep gulps of air, drawing his familiar scent into her lungs. “How did you get here so fast?”

“I have private planes and pilots ready to go at a moment’s notice. I just parachuted in with my three Belgian Malinois and my equipment.” He kept rocking her. “I’m always ready to get to you from wherever I am. I just happened to be closer this time than usual.”

“All three dogs?” Three? She knew his dogs were trained for military, security and protection purposes. They had far more training than her Dobermans. “How could you get them to the ground safely and still have the gear you do?”

“Practice. And friends.”

She didn’t know if that meant others had parachuted in with him and were somewhere out in the night guarding the house, but she wasn’t going to ask.

“Private planes and pilots?” She echoed his first statement, trying to figure out what he meant by always ready to get to her. “As in more than one?”

“Some time ago, I started my own security company. I hire men I know are good at their jobs yet have a difficult time fitting back into society. I have money and resources, sometimes more than I know what to do with. I still work with Blom but spend the majority of my time taking security jobs and training recruits.”

His chin settled on the top of her head and rubbed. She remembered him doing that each time he held her close. She found it comforting. She closed her eyes, breathing him in. His strength, his scent, everything Rainier.

“When was the last time you slept?”

She shook her head or tried to. Her head wanted to explode if she moved it. Her eyes burned from crying so much. “Days,” she managed to mumble.

“Qadri.” He whispered the endearment like a reprimand. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Nothing can happen to you.” Her lips were against his throat, the only time she dared to show him how she felt. Just the thought of putting him in danger brought a fresh flood of tears. “I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you, Rainier.”

As confessions went, it was rather silly. She wasn’t certain he could understand between the sobs still escaping, the hiccups and gasping for breath. Her voice sounded strangled.

His fingers fisted in her hair. “Has it occurred to you, Shabina, I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you? We agreed you’d talk to me when things start to go bad. What happened to that agreement?”

What was she going to say? That she’d ruined his life already? “I should have tried to escape from Salman Ahmad’s tribe,” she confessed in a low tone. Ashamed. That was where it had all started. “Even if they caught me, I doubt if he would have punished me severely, if at all.”

“This is the reason you didn’t call me?”

She nodded, wiping more tears on his neck. “My father’s security people told us not to resist if we were kidnapped, but looking back, I was very comfortable with Ahmad’s people. I grew to love them.”

A fresh flood of tears cascaded, and Rainier shifted her in his arms, careful to keep her close to his chest but where he could tip up her face to his. She tried to avoid his piercing gray eyes by burrowing tight against his chest.

“Keep going, baby. This sounds important.”

Rainier, willing to listen when it was too late. He would try to make sense of her garbled ramblings. Of her guilt. Of the reason she couldn’t call him.

“It didn’t occur to me to try to escape because I really grew to think of many of the women and children as family. I saw others leave when the ransom was paid and waited my turn. I honestly didn’t want to go. I was learning so many things. Not just that, I felt like I actually had a home.”

That confession would tell him too much about her home life with her parents. She felt as if she was betraying them all over again. She moaned and tried to cover her face, but Rainier caught her wrist and held her hand down.

“Don’t, Qadri . I need to see your face when you tell me this. It’s clearly important.”

Only Rainier would realize how important it really was. He would see her with those eyes that could see right into a person’s heart. She had too many sins to want him to see her so clearly.

“If I had just escaped then, Rainier, Salman Ahmad, Mama Ahmad and all the members of his tribe, men, women and children, all of them, would still be alive today. There would have been no reason for Scorpion to attack them.”

“Is that what you think?”

“I don’t think it, I know it,” she said decisively. “I can barely look at my parents, I’m so weighed down with guilt. They want me to live with them, and I just can’t do it. I can’t live in that environment with the two of them so sad and depressed. I’ve ruined their lives, Rainier.”

“I disagree that Scorpion wouldn’t have attacked them. They had money. He’s a sadist, and he targets smaller towns or villages. They were most likely on his radar.”

She shook her head. “He knew about the ransom my father tried to pay and he prevented that money from reaching the sheik. He didn’t stop any of the other ransoms. And the things he did to me were very personal.”

She knew she wasn’t the first teenage girl he had taken prisoner and tortured, but his hatred of her was far too acute to be anything but personal. She fell silent, biting her lip, not knowing how to convince him or even if it mattered.

His fingers began a slow massage of the nape of her neck. “Keep going, Shabina. You haven’t gotten to the part where you feel you can’t call me when you’re in trouble.”

“You’re a brilliant man, a brilliant doctor.

You could have done anything, but that night, when you came for me, I was such a mess.

You knew what I planned to do. You caught me crawling across the sand in the middle of the sandstorm.

They were giving me antibiotics and blood and even trying to feed me intravenously.

I’d pulled the tubes out because for the first time, Scorpion had made a mistake. ”

He remained silent, his fingers continuing that strong massage on the nape of her neck. She wiped her tears on his shirt.