Page 43 of Her Captivated Hero

8

Miranda had said today,that tonight was the night. The men were going to be home. But still nothing. Riya felt like she was going to climb out of her skin. She reached for her moisturizer then set it back down on the nightstand with a thump. Einstein raised his head and blinked.

“Deal with it,” she told the cat.

She didn’t like this. She wasn’t happy, not at all.

She took a deep breath, then another. Better. Not good, but better. At least her skin wasn’t itching. It had been eight days since Gray had left on his mission with his team. The longest eight days of her life. She flung back the covers and shoved out of bed. Einstein gave out a half-hearted meow. He was getting used to her scattered sleep pattern.

And here she’d thought that work issues were problematic. She hadn’t had a clue. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this.

Riya padded to the bathroom and ran cold water into the sink. She pushed back her tousled braid and bathed her face. She looked at herself in the mirror. Yep, she still had the bruises under her eyes. It was the days of worry and being scared about something that she had no power over.

“You can’t do anything about it, so being upset is useless,” she told her reflection.

Yeah, like repeating that again would help.

Einstein rubbed his head against her calf. She blinked fast, her eyes gritty at the thought that her cat was trying to give her comfort.

“You’re a good kitty.” She looked down at him and wished he was young again so she could pick him up and cuddle him. But he didn’t like that anymore.

She continued to stare at Einstein, anything to stop her from looking at herself in the mirror. She didn’t want to witness herself falling apart. Riya closed her eyes and rested her hip against the bathroom counter, letting images of Gray float behind her eyelids. Gray’s smile, his intense looks, his arms around her, his kisses, him holding her, his breath against her temple, the comfort he provided.

Gray Richard Tyler.

Just Gray.

Please God, let him be safe.

She opened her eyes and stretched her neck, anything to release her tension, trying to figure out how she could be overreacting so badly. She’d been working with Miranda for seventeen months and met Griff more than a few times. She’d watched the two of them play with their daughter. Riya really liked the man. Sure, she’d been concerned when he’d been deployed, but that’d been the extent of it. What’s more, Miranda had seemed fine. Surely, Miranda hadn’t gone through this kind of torment. Not the bone-wrenching, trouble eating, not sleeping, poison-ivy-itching fear.

Riya leaned forward and rested her head against the mirror. Her breath created fog and she leaned back and watched as her finger drew a heart on the mirror.

“Finish it.”

She wrote G.R.T. and R.N.P. inside the heart. Yep, she was over the moon for this man. She was so far past the point of in love…was there a term that was more encompassing than love?

She rubbed her chest and tried to shove back the fear and the tears. This needed to stop. She bit her lip.

Please let him be as good as Miranda said, as good as I think he is, because I need him to come home. To me.

Riya left the bathroom depleted. She found herself scratching her elbow and plucked the moisturizer off her nightstand as she tried to think of a distraction. The only solution was work. It had helped her out just a little bit the first four days that Gray had been on his mission. She walked past the destroyed bed, and went downstairs.

She snagged her bag pack and considered her computer tablet, but then pulled out the new composition notebook she’d begun writing in when she’d returned to San Diego. She fished out a pencil then went and sat cross-legged on the love seat. Einstein deigned to jump up and push up beside her and lick himself.

“Still worried about me, huh?” Einstein just blinked and yawned.

Riya opened up the notebook and looked over what she’d documented the last three days since she’d come home from Washington. She thought about the argument she’d had with the Lieutenant General in charge of the project at the Pentagon right before he’d ousted her from the project.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, Sir. Someone has developed an airborne toxin that has the ability to affect only the Y chromosome. Obviously they’re intending to take it to the next logical stage.”

Riya could see the steam pouring out of her temporary boss’s ears. “English, explain this to me in English,” he’d said.

“Think of the applications. They’ve figured out a way to isolate a poison so it just impacts a man, while totally bypassing a woman. I can only imagine they’re going to try to pinpoint this down to other criteria like ethnicities, maybe even specific gene pools.”

“Got it, men versus women,” he’d glowered. “Are you trying to say they might be able to target actual families?”

“Yes! Can you imagine the application if it wasn’t an airborne poison, but an actual treatment for a disease? I’m sure we could do things like target those people who were carriers of the sickle cell anemia gene. This is amazing work. I need to talk to the person who developed this.”