Hot Zone (Elite Force #2)(34)
Author: Catherine Mann

“B’ana?” Joshua tipped his head to the side, salt water still glinting off his dark hair from his tide pool bath. “No, no.”

He pointed to the mango.

“Yeah, right. Here.” Hugh peeled it with a knife, carved a slice and passed it to Joshua, so obviously careful to keep his distance.

She dropped down to sit beside them wearily and reached for the mango and knife to finish feeding Joshua. Hugh reached into his pocket and pulled out a fistful of plant stems. “Aloe. Just break each stem open and squeeze the liquid on your face. It’ll ease the burn. I’ve also got some bay geranium. It’s good for itching skin and even makes a decent tea. Let me know if you need it.”

“The aloe’s great. Thanks.” She snapped open the squishy stem and pinched the liquid onto her finger. She smeared it over Joshua’s cheeks before turning her attention to her own face. “You’re good at the whole shelter-building gig. After all we’ve been through, you’ve handled everything that’s come our way. You’re obviously in the right line of work. Was anyone else in your family in the military?”

“Not a one. I was a regular Middle America farm kid with dreams of traveling the world. I even got an appointment to the Air Force Academy…” His voice trailed off as he tossed aside a branch.

He’d been on the path to become an officer?

She passed another slice of mango to Joshua. “What happened?”

Hugh dropped to sit beside her, hands on his knees, watching the little guy eat, with eyes so full of… pain? “My girlfriend and I weren’t as careful as we should have been. We got married and became the parents of a beautiful baby girl.”

He said it so simply, so few words, but such a depth of emotion packed into each one. There could be no missing how very much he loved his family. And no married man with a love that deep had sex with another woman in a closet. Something had gone very wrong with his beloved family.

Waiting for him to talk seemed wisest, but her hands trembled as she offered the last of the fruit to Joshua. The little fella shook his head and crawled under the lean-to, testing out a stack of leaves in the corner. Amelia looked sideways quickly and realized Hugh was watching along with her.

“I had a daughter.”

Oh God. Please let this just be a divorce story, not what she feared was coming. “Had?”

“For five years… Then… She… They…” He swallowed hard, looking down.

But she didn’t need the words. She made her living reading the undercurrents in what people left unsaid. His wife and child had died somehow and the pain she saw in his eyes was beyond bearing.

She touched his foot lightly, uncertain how much comfort he would accept but unable to do nothing. How strange to know his body so intimately and his soul not at all.

Scraping a hand over his face, Hugh continued. “When my daughter was in preschool—about four years old—she woke us up one night in a panic because she’d forgotten to tell us she needed a rock for class.”

Waves pulled at the shore just as the tension radiating from him pulled at her while she listened, just let him talk.

“I promised her we would get one in the morning, but she couldn’t go back to sleep. So my wife and I went out to the backyard to see what we could find.” He looked at her for the first time, his raw eyes reflecting the moonbeams. “Did I mention we lived in Alaska and it was December?”

She smiled because he seemed to need that from her, but her insides burned with an ache for where he was going in his mind. Her hand fell to rest on Joshua’s back as he settled on the leaf bed, curling up with heavy eyes.

“My wife held the flashlight while I shoveled through the snow. I was determined my little girl would have the best rock in class. After tossing aside a half dozen ‘inferior’ stones, I found the perfect one—probably weighed about five pounds.”

Her hands circled on the baby’s back, the moment so quiet, and heavier than that five-pound rock.

“So the Christmas program rolled around. We walked in to find this table set up with a display of all the kids’ art-project gifts for their parents.” He cut his eyes at her, a smile tugging at his face so beyond perfect, it took her breath away. “They’d made pet rocks.”

“Oh, my,” she whispered, falling so hard into those eyes and that nostalgic grin from a world she’d never known.

“Yeah, the table was full of tiny painted cats and dogs and cows. And right there in the middle was my girl’s boulder, completely unrecognizable. It had glitter and feathers and blobs of paint. The label called it a pet gerbil.”

He laughed, shaking his head and she laughed with him, even though God help her…

Hugh Franco broke her heart.

He stirred up the sand at his feet, scooping and dumping, scooping again. “She and my wife died in a plane crash.” Sand drifted through his fingers. “Tilly… my daughter’s name was Matilda, and my wife’s name was Marissa.”

She looked into his eyes and for once hated the instincts that allowed her to perceive so fully what lurked under the surface. She’d thought of Hugh as Superman, going all the way to the edge, risking his life again and again for others.

And now she realized that he pushed himself to the limit out of a grief-filled need to chase his family to the other side.

Chapter 10

Throwing the Jeep into park beside the burned-out van, the Guardian leaped out from behind the wheel, engine idling in the crisp morning air. “What the hell?”

The utility vehicle was nothing more than a blackened hull against the palm tree, also charred. The pyre had offered a beacon to locate the missing van even when communications from Oliver and Tandi ended.

And speaking of Oliver and Tandi…

The Guardian sidestepped a log, work boots crunching along the foliage, and pressed a hand to the still-warm door frame and looked inside. A burned corpse was slumped in the front passenger seat, horridly disfigured. Unidentifiable. Nothing but melted flesh over bones remained.

The Guardian whispered a string of curses before walking around to the rear of the van. The back was empty, other than exploded glass from incinerated crates.

Damn it.

Informants had already clarified that there’d been a screwup at the hospital that resulted in the wrong child being taken. Something about the wrong file attached to the wrong basinet or playpen or whatever the hell they were using. The whole system was a hodgepodge mess, with patients dying, new arriving, faster than a makeshift, understaffed hospital could handle.