Shades of Grey(51)

The others laughed and P.J. smiled through the pain, her eyes stinging with those unshed tears.

“Thank you,” she said sincerely.

“Now you’re just pissing me off,” Steele said. “You don’t thank us for doing our job. We live as a team and we die as a team, and you thinking you walked away is bullshit. You don’t take a piss without my say-so, you got that, Rutherford?”

She smiled, and it felt like the first time she’d truly smiled in a lifetime. God it felt good to be surrounded by the people she considered family. She’d never been as alone as she had in the last months when she didn’t have her team around her.

Her team.

“Yes sir,” she said briskly.





CHAPTER 23



IT was two in the morning and P.J. was wide awake, her leg throbbing. She’d refused another dose of painkiller because she’d wanted to evaluate exactly what she was dealing with.

Though just a flesh wound, her leg still protested if she put any weight on it. She had a limited amount of time in which to heal because she wasn’t staying behind while her team went to Jakarta. The truth was, she didn’t want them involved even if they were determined to be. She didn’t want her sins to be their own.

She pushed herself awkwardly from the bed and eased her feet to the floor. She had no hope of sleeping. She’d been out most of the day, aided by the pain medication Donovan had administered. She imagined the rest of the crew was sleeping soundly.

Donovan had arranged for the jet to take off early the next morning. After a quick glance at the clock, she knew it was pointless to even try to go back to sleep. She only had three hours before they moved out again.

The little cottage that Donovan and Cole had finagled was barely big enough to fit two people, much less her entire team plus Donovan. They’d insisted she take the bedroom, and Cole had carried her from the front sitting room where she’d spent some of the afternoon on the couch and put her on the double bed.

If she’d had more courage, she would have invited Cole to share the comfort of the bed with her. He looked haggard and worn down. But she couldn’t make the words come out.

Tentatively she took a step, bracing herself for the pain that shot up her leg and into her belly. She waited several long seconds as she sucked in breath after breath in an attempt to steady herself.

She needed the bathroom in the worst way, and she wasn’t about to call for one of the guys to help her with that particular necessity.

The few feet to the bathroom took an eternity. At the door, she paused and glanced into the living room to see the guys draped all over the furniture. They looked horribly uncomfortable. Steele and Cole were lying on the floor with their backpacks shoved under their necks to cushion their heads.

Feeling about a hundred years old, she shuffled into the bathroom to do her business.

It took longer than she’d have liked. She examined the bulky bandages on her right thigh. She’d been lucky. The bullet could have shattered her femur or worse, hit her femoral artery and she could have bled out in minutes. As it was, it passed through a chunk of flesh less than half an inch from her bone.

Push past the pain.

It was a mantra that had been effective for the last six months. At times it was the only thing that kept her going.

Clad in her underwear and a clean T-shirt, she pulled the shirt farther down her legs before she opened the bathroom door. As she stepped into the hall, she came face-to-face with Cole.

He was leaning against the opposite wall, arms crossed, one leg pulled up so that his foot rested flat against the wall.

“You should have called for me,” he said tersely. “You don’t need to be up walking around. You’ll tear the stitches.”

“I’m fine,” she said, even as she gingerly took another step.

“The hell you are. Every step you take, you go even paler, and your forehead is so clammy I can see it from here.”

Without saying anything further, he pushed off the wall and wrapped a supporting arm around her.

“Wrap your arm around me and hold on. Put most of your weight on me.”

Relieved he hadn’t picked her up and carried her, she did as he instructed and limped forward into the bedroom. At least he seemed open to her trying to get around on her own. Or mostly on her own anyway.

When they got to the bed, he helped her sit on the edge and then he plumped all the pillows so she could scoot back and sit up in bed in comfort.

After she got situated, he sat on the edge of the bed facing her. He pulled one knee up and rested his forearm across his leg as he studied her.

“How are you feeling?”

The way he said it told her he wasn’t asking about her leg. She expelled a long sigh.