Page 7 of Securing Jane

“One of your employees in the hall let me in.”

“He was supposed to—”

Whatever she was going to say got cut off midsentence when the door to the mail room opened, and three men wearing full decontamination suits were standing there. The clear shower curtain was the only thing separating her and Storm from the rest of the room.

“Oh shit,” she said, then coughed even as she hunched her shoulders inward, trying to hide herself from them.

Without thought, Storm pulled her into his body, something inside him softening when he felt her melt against him, as if she were invisible to the newcomers simply by standing in his arms.

One of the men had a device in his hand that would measure the air for contaminates. It would tell him what materials they were dealing with, and the percentages. The other two held what looked like long-handled brushes.

Storm stiffened and turned sideways, trying to shield Jane from their eyes.

“Step away from her, Sir,” one of the men said, his voice muffled from the head-to-toe protection suit he was wearing.

“Not a chance,” Storm retorted fiercely, ruining his command with a hard, hacking cough.

“Sir, you both need to be decontaminated before we can get you to medical.”

Storm knew the protocol. Hell, he’d help write the damn manual once upon a time, but back then it had seemed very clinical. Scrubbing down a contaminated person so they didn’t spread particulates to innocents in a hospital setting was the right thing to do. But holding a shivering and traumatized Jane in his arms made it very clear that being hosed down and scrubbed as if she were a dirty piece of flesh wasn’t exactly ethical or humane.

Fuck.

He tightened his arms around her just before she took a deep breath and pulled away from him. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. She was squinting, and it was obviously still painful for her to open her eyes. “It’s protocol.”

She was right, but that didn’t make it any easier to let her go.

He watched as Jane bravely stepped out of the decon shower and held her arms out from her sides. Her white underwear was completely soaked and see-through from the back. Storm could only imagine what she looked like from the front.

His teeth clenched, and he wanted to pound the seaman holding the scrubber.

But instead, he did the only thing he could to make Jane feel less awkward in that moment. He stripped off his own clothes until he stood next to her wearing nothing but his own pair of white underwear.

Chapter Three

Jane wanted to die. Hours earlier, she’d been giddy about her conversation with Storm, and now she wanted to sink into the ground and disappear. Knowing he’d been the one who’d found her on her hands and knees, puking her guts out and covered in CS gas, was already embarrassing as hell. And if that wasn’t enough, he’d stripped off her clothes and seen her in all her fifty-one-year-old glory.

She didn’t expect herself to look like she had at twenty, but she wasn’t sure being practically naked in front of the man she’d been crushing on before they’d even enjoyed more than small talk was the way to catch his attention. And she certainly didn’t want to be scrubbed down like she was in a car wash, but protocol was protocol.

She’d almost had a heart attack when she’d looked to her left and saw Storm standing next to her in nothing but his underwear. He’d given her a lopsided smile and shrugged…and something inside her had melted in that moment. He didn’t have to strip, and they’d both known that. He wasn’t there when the box had exploded, and any pepper spray on him was secondary transfer from her own clothes and hands. But he’d done it anyway.

That right there had been enough to earn her loyalty and undying support from here to eternity.

Now she was sitting in the medical clinic on base, wrapped in a huge blanket and wearing a pair of scrubs someone had scrounged up for her, waiting to be discharged.

Her eyes still burned, and she hadn’t been able to stop coughing, but at least she didn’t feel as if she were going to bring up her lungs with every cough anymore.

Naval Criminal Investigative Services was looking into the package and trying to figure out who’d sent it. Rear Admiral Creasy and his wife had been alerted that he’d been the target of a mail bomb, and they were taking precautions until the sender could be identified and apprehended.

The mail room was under quarantine until further notice, and Jane knew she’d have a ton of extra work to do to get things up and running in the temporary room they’d been given. She was extremely proud of her staff for acting immediately and doing exactly what they were trained to do. Namely, leaving her in the room and going to get help. The last thing anyone wanted was for a contaminant to spread and hurt or kill more people. This time the bomb only held pepper spray, but next time it could be anthrax or sarin.

If she was being honest with herself…she was lucky. Still, everything about the last few hours had sucked. She literally thought that was it, she was dead. When the box exploded, she’d had a split second to regret all the things she hadn’t done in her life, and some of the things she had. Then, instead of dying, when she’d fallen to the ground in the most pain she’d ever felt in her life and couldn’t breathe, she’d wished she was dead.

And to make things worse, the man she admired more than anyone in the world, who she wanted to impress, had come in when she had snot running down her face and a pile of vomit in front of her and couldn’t do anything to help herself.

But…Storm had been amazing. Strong when she’d been weak. He’d taken over and done what needed to be done. It had been a very long time since she’d been able to rely on anyone. The only thing she’d had to think about when Storm had arrived was doing exactly as he said. She’d felt safe in his arms, and even though it had hurt like hell to open her eyes, she’d done it when he’d ordered her to, grateful to see him.

Of course, wishing she was about thirty pounds lighter now was useless, given the fact that she’d been almost naked in front of him. But she couldn’t be too upset when she recalled the look in his eyes when she’d last seen him. Respect and admiration.