Page 68 of Her Wicked Hero

“So, do you have a plan?”

“I always have plans.” Zed shut his computer and set it on the coffee table. “I told you, tomorrow after physical therapy, we’re going to meet with the team. But tonight, I think I need to work on some repetitive movements to show Jackson I’ve made progress.”

“Really?” Marcia sighed disgustedly. “You’re a thirty-six-year-old Navy man, for God’s sake. That’s your best line to get sex?”

“Rumor has it, it’s fantastic sex.”

“Only because of all the effort I put it into it,” Marcia said as she flounced off the sofa. The T-shirt she was wearing had ridden up, but why pull it down? Instead, she swayed down the hall and gave herself a mental high five when Zed picked her up and carried her the rest of the way to the bed.

Zed had the phone to his ear before the first ring finished.

“Zaragoza.”

“The Brockman’s house was car bombed,” Kane said. He looked over at Marcia who was still asleep in the faint dawn light. He got up, shut the bedroom door, then went out to the living room. He turned on his computer with Kane continuing to relay information to him.

“Do we know survivors?” he whispered his question.

“It didn’t hit the house, only got as far as that massive front gate, but still, it was a huge payload. Killed the driver and three pedestrians, instantly. I’m not being coy about the family, the front of the house is caved in. I just don’t have answers on the family yet. Should know something any minute. Just stay away from the TV. I’ll call as soon as I get something.”

Zed didn’t have to stay away from the TV, he had aerial footage on his laptop.

He had to wake up Marcia.

He went back to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of clean shorts, and grabbed a clean tee and pajama bottoms for Marcia. The Brockman’s had to be all right. He didn’t know how Marcia could be expected to live with more loss in her life.

He kissed her healed cheek. “Querida?”

She smiled up at him. In an instant, she knew something was wrong.

“Just tell me.”

“There’s been a bomb. It’s still too early to know who’s injured or to what extent, but you need to know.”

Her eyes had adjusted, and she saw the clothes. Her hands trembled when she reached for them.

“Let me help you.”

Marcia nodded. Zed helped to thread her arms through the arm holes, then he held the pajama bottoms in place, so she could step into them, as if she were a child. He wrapped his arms around her, kissing the top of her head. He wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, but what would be the point if in five minutes her world would unravel?

He sat on the side of the bed with her in his lap, the phone on the bed beside them like the snake in the Garden of Eden, waiting to strike. It was supposed to take just minutes, but it felt like an hour Marcia had been trembling in his arms. Had he done the right thing waking her?

The phone rang, and he put it on speaker.

“Kane, it’s me and Marcia.”

She kept her head pressed into the crook of his neck. Her mouth was open in a wordless scream, just waiting to be set off.

“There are four people, all alive, being loaded onto ambulances. I don’t know their condition. Just that all four of them are alive.”

Marcia jerked up. “There should be five. Aunt Vi is there too.”

“I know,” Kane said. “I told them there should be five. Marcia it’s a goatfuck there. They haven’t even been able to tell me if it’s four women or three women and a man, how many of them are kids. Nothing.”

“I need to get there,” Marcia said, struggling to get out of his arms.

“We don’t know if this is a set-up,” Kane protested.

“So, fix it that I’m protected,” she shouted. “I have to be there.”