Her Daring SEAL (Midnight Delta Book 5) Page 13

  “I’ll have to ask her.”

  “Who would be this new mysterious buyer?”

  “Jack?” Lydia suggested.

  “Too much of an Eagle Scout, nobody would buy it.” Darius dismissed the idea.

  “Mason?” Clint suggested.

  “Nope, he’s another one who screams knight in shining armor.” Lydia nixed the idea.

  “Aiden,” Clint said decisively. Darius chuckled.

  “That man has some years on him. Nobody would ever guess he’s one of the good guys if he didn’t want them to,” Darius agreed.

  “He’s a teddy bear,” Lydia said in his defense.

  “You sure didn’t think so when you first met him, sweetheart. You thought he was mean,” Clint reminded his fiancée.

  “Well, he was mean in the beginning. But he was always on Jack’s side, so that was good.”

  “Okay, arrange it. In the meantime, I’m going to go check out the clinic a little more thoroughly. I want to see if I can get a patient records list as well. It would be great if we could find out how many babies have already been sold, and to whom, and who their mothers are. We need to get them reunited.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful.” He could hear the tears and steel in Lydia’s voice.

  “You better get back to Rylie before she wakes up,” Clint said.

  “You’re right about that. I don’t want her to wake up alone. That woman has been alone too much in this life.”

  “How can you say that?” Lydia asked. “She’s surrounded by a huge family.”

  “Yeah but, all of that responsibility for the family rests on her shoulders alone. I’m amazed she stays upright. I want to be there for her.”

  “How does she feel about that?” Clint asked.

  “She’s coming around to my way of thinking.”

  “If anyone can wear down a stone with drops of water, that’d be you. Go get her, man.”

  “I plan to.” Darius hung up the phone and quietly opened the bathroom door. Rylie was still sleeping quietly. Her form barely made a lump in the bed, she was so small. But still, she was a perfect size to fit in his arms. He walked around the bed and crawled in beside her. She immediately cuddled up against him. Darius loved the fact that in her sleep she came to him for comfort.

  ***

  Rylie woke with a start. How she had managed to sleep was beyond her. She had come into this bedroom chased by the hounds of hell and managed to find heaven in Dare’s arms.

  Someone was knocking at the door. All the warmth left the bed, and Rylie realized Darius had just gotten up. She heard some murmuring and then smelled something heavenly.

  “You awake?”

  “God, yes. What’s that smell?”

  “Smells like meat and potatoes.”

  “I didn’t know they could do just good plain food.” Rylie sat up in bed, and Darius wheeled in a serving cart like they used in hotels. She looked out the window and saw the moon was up high in the sky. “What time is it?”

  “Nine p.m., that’s what time I told Carver to bring up dinner. You needed your sleep. Apparently you get to skip the evening meal with his Lordship when you get beaten up.” Rylie bounded out of bed and headed for the closet and found some leggings to put on with Darius’ T-shirt so she could sit down and eat.

  By the time she got to the little table, he had all of the covers removed, and she found beef stroganoff and mashed potatoes. “Sylvia’s cover must be blown if Carver knew to bring this for dinner,” Rylie said around a forkful of food.

  “Nah, I put in the food order. I said Sylvia would eat the asparagus.”

  Rylie wrinkled her nose. “That’s all yours, buddy.”

  “Score!”

  “You even arranged for ginger ale instead of wine. You are a God!”

  “Again, it was for Dare.”

  “Well, I really like Dare’s selections.” Rylie took a long sip.

  Darius doled out the food and laughed when Rylie insisted on even more potatoes.

  “I’m from Oklahoma, we live on this stuff.” At that moment her stomach grumbled to back up her statement, so he piled the food even higher. When she finally set down her fork, she saw he had cleaned his plate.

  “How could you have already finished?”

  “I’m a growing boy, and I had an incentive, I wanted to hear more about you. I want to get to know Rylie Jones, the woman from Oklahoma, not the superspy extraordinaire.”

  “She’s boring,” Rylie answered, and he snorted.

  “No seriously, I’m boring. I do computer tech work from home. I mostly stay at home and do laundry, and sometimes pick up the house. The kids say I’m a terrible cook, which I am. I play a mean game of Candyland. That’s me in a nutshell.”

  “How old are you? Twenty-one, right?”

  “I turned twenty-two last month.”

  “How did someone who is twenty-two end up with three kids in her care?”

  “I don’t suppose you would let me tell you it was complicated and leave it at that?” Rylie looked at Darius’ face and saw it wasn’t going to work.

  “Seriously, honey, I’m amazed. I was in the system, somehow you worked a miracle, and I want to know how. Not just with Sawyer and Charlotte, but how in the hell did you end up with custody of Georgie?”

  “Georgie was the easiest.” Darius’ expression was priceless.

  “Now you have to tell me.”

  “After I was no longer with the Edwards, I had to keep my promise to Char and Sawyer that they could come and live with me. I had wanted them to come and live with me at the foster home I had been taken to, but that would never have worked out.”

  “Tell me about the Edwards, were they nice?”

  “Can we save that story for some other time?” She saw him struggle with himself, but finally, he relented and nodded.

  “Sure, you don’t have to tell me about your time with them, at least not now,” he qualified.

  “I was seventeen when I left the Edwards.”

  “That was when the house burned down, and everyone thought you were in it, and you died?”

  “You read about that?” her voice was hoarse as she asked the question. Rylie still remembered the flames as she escaped through her bedroom window. That night had been hell on Earth, for so many reasons.

  “How did you manage to fake your death? They found a body.”

  “Please, Dare, don’t ask me questions about that...not tonight.”

  “Okay, you tell whatever story you want, but can I ask a favor?” She wasn’t sure. She really didn’t want to talk anymore about the foster home she had lived in for three years, and hoped he wouldn’t press her for more information.

  “What is your favor?”

  “Can I hold you?”

  “What?”

  “Can we go back to bed, and I just hold you in my arms? I already miss not touching you.” How could a woman resist Darius Stanton? The idea of being held in his strong arms made her shiver.

  “I miss touching you too.” He came around the table and held out a hand. She took it, and he pulled her against him.

  “You fit perfectly in my arms. Have I told you that? You rest right under my chin, I can feel your breath on my neck, and it drives me crazy.” Rylie cuddled closer. He led her to the bed, and tucked them under the covers, and arranged the pillows so she could continue to breathe him in.

  “You were telling me how you had to keep your promise to Charlotte and Sawyer. I don’t understand. You were either seventeen or eighteen, and you managed to convince authorities Sawyer and Charlotte were your brother and sister and they needed to be under your care. Fuck Rylie, they were in the same God damn orphanage, and they didn’t even have the same last name, how in the hell did you pull that stunt off?”

  Rylie giggled. It had been quite the piece of work. She had manufactured quite the computer backstory.

  “Apparently I’m an idiot savant when it comes to the computer. The teachers in my high school were amazed what
I could accomplish. Mrs. Pearsall was the one who took me under her wing. She didn’t seem to care when I could do things she couldn’t. She brought in more books to teach me more programming languages. Looking back, I could see a lot of adults who would have been intimidated by the student surpassing the teacher, but she just continued to encourage me. She was fantastic.”

  “You went to her after the fire, didn’t you?” Rylie’s head shot up.

  “How’d you know?”

  “She was your mentor.”

  “I stayed with her for almost a year. She had a little apartment above her garage that her son had lived in before he died overseas. I told her what I was going to do about Sawyer and Charlotte, and she was the one who had the idea that we all could have had the same deadbeat father. I went into all of our online records and changed our birth certificates to show our father as this man who had died. I stated that the mother’s had used their names as the children’s last names, including mine, and petitioned the courts to gain custody of my brother and sister.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I already had bought a house. At that time, I was more willing to use the money I had stolen from criminals for me. I had enough to take care of me and them.”

  “But why did you go to all of that trouble to get custody?”

  “I promised them I wouldn’t leave them behind in the orphanage.”

  “But you were just a child yourself. How old were you?”

  “I was eighteen. But I was a really old eighteen by then. And I needed them, as much as they needed me. After losing Pammy, I needed them.”

  “That’s your sister, right? Your deaf sister?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me about her?” A wave of sadness overwhelmed her, and she gripped Darius tighter.

  “Not now. I can’t talk about her, okay?”

  He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Okay, so now you have a house, and two children living with you. That had to have been a handful.”

  “Actually, it was pretty easy. Sawyer and Charlotte were a lot like me. They had been in the system so long they knew a good thing when they had it. They worked as hard as I did at staying under the radar of the social workers, did well in school, and helped make our family work. Char mothered us, and Sawyer, even at twelve acted like the man of the family. He scared the hell out of me. He kept trying to take on too much responsibility.”

  “I get that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I got taken in by Henry Shoemaker, my friend Steve and I worked hard to act like the men of the house. Finally, Henry had to knock our heads together and tell us we were kids, and it was all right to act like kids.”

  “How old were you when you went to stay with him?

  “Thirteen. We’d been in different homes, but that was our forever home.”

  “Do you stay in touch with him?”

  “Yeah, Old Henry is still meddling in our lives. He’s great. He took in three of us, I don’t know how or why he did but thank God he did. So I get the fact Sawyer was trying to act like the man of the family because you were acting like the mom. So how did you end up with Georgie?”

  “Georgie is Char’s biological brother. Somehow, and to this day, we don’t know how but their mom ended up tracking down Charlotte. She knocked on our door, and there she was with three-year-old Georgie. She hardly had any teeth from all the meth she had been doing. Char barely recognized her, and when she did, she burst into tears. I wasn’t home at the time. Sawyer physically forced her into our house. By the time I got there, the woman was incoherent. She kept talking about having left Georgie at a friend’s house, but how the friend had found her, and she was stuck with the little bastard again.”

  Rylie started to shiver at the memory, and Darius pulled up the covers and wrapped her up in a cocoon. “We were stunned. Georgie was literally catatonic. He was in a diaper, and he stank to high heaven. He wasn’t wearing anything else, and it was winter. Of course, Char had him swaddled in a blanket when I got there.”

  “What happened then?”

  “When the bitch saw me, the babbling stopped. She demanded money. Big surprise. I promised her money, if she left Georgie with Charlotte got into my car. I drove her into downtown Oklahoma City. I have no fucking idea how she got to our place, and I didn’t care. I just drove her ass to OKC, and dropped her off, and gave her every last dime in my purse and told her to never come back.”

  “How often has she been back?” Darius asked knowingly.

  “Probably ten times.”

  “Do the kids know?”

  “Sawyer does, Charlotte doesn’t.”

  “How do you handle Georgie’s learning disability?”

  “He’s on the autism spectrum. Some days he’s low functioning, sometimes he’s high functioning. It depends on how comfortable he feels with the person doing the testing. We’re so lucky, we have a woman named Mrs. Whitehawk who comes in on the weekdays and helps care for Georgie. She adores him, and he thinks of her as a second mother.”

  “You’re his first mother, right?” Rylie nodded slowly.

  “He’s actually come further than they originally thought he would.”

  “I don’t know a lot about autism. But I’ll learn.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Rylie, we’re going to be together for a very long time. You need to start wrapping your head around it now.”

  The Earth shifted on its axis. The man was crazy—either that or she needed her hearing checked.

  “You don’t know me. In total we’ve been together maybe,” she counted in her head, “twenty hours.”

  “Five dates. Five really intense dates, two of which we ended up in bed together.”

  “With no sex.”

  “With intimacy,” he reminded her.

  “We should have sex.”

  “We need sleep.”

  “Sex,” she insisted. “I’ve been ogling your chest.” She grabbed at the hem of the shirt she was wearing. He stayed her hand.

  “Sleep, Rylie. You have to be Sylvia tomorrow.” She yawned. Then yawned again.

  “Dammit. I think you might be right.” He chuckled.

  “I’m a medic. You’re the patient. Of course, I’m right. Now snuggle down so I can hold you.” God, didn’t that sound wonderful?

  In moments, with that strength of his, he had her positioned under the covers and safe in his embrace.

  “Aren’t you going to undress?” she asked sleepily.

  “Not tonight. Go to sleep, baby.” And she did, her head resting on his chest listening to his heart beat.

  ***

  It was one a.m. Darius hated to wake her, she looked like an angel lying in the bed, but he didn’t want her waking and finding him gone. He leaned down and placed a gentle kiss on her lips. He watched as she stretched like a kitten.

  “Dare?” Her eyes fluttered open.

  “We need to talk, then I have to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “That’s what we need to talk about.”

  Rylie sat up on her elbows and Darius arranged the pillows behind her so she could sit up properly.

  “Honey, I’m going to take a little jaunt tonight. I want to do a little more investigating on the other side of the island.”

  “You’ve already been over there? What did you find before?” He paused. She’d already been through and seen so much.

  “Dare, don’t try to protect me. I can handle whatever it is.”

  “Actually, it might be good news.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “There are girls over there. Pregnant girls–”

  “Those motherfuckers!” She pushed up from the bed and was on her feet in the wink of an eye. “Are they selling babies? Are they Dare? Are they?”

  “I think so. Actually, I know so. I overheard them.”

  “It just keeps getting worse, and worse, and worse. Just when I think I’ve seen the depths of this hell, I find
a new layer.”

  He watched fascinated, as she dragged out his suitcase and started pawing through his things.

  “Whatchya doing?” he asked in a soothing tone of voice.

  “Finding something of yours to wear. If you think you’re going alone, you’ve got another think coming.” She held up a pair of sweatpants to her waist and threw them on the floor in disgust. She finally found one of his sweatshirts, and she drew that on over his T-shirt.

  “Good thing this sucker is so long. It’ll keep me warm with my leggings.” She found a pair of his thick socks and pulled those on, and then went to the boots she’d left lying by the door.

  “Rylie, I need you to hold up. I don’t think you going with me is the right use of your time.”

  “You are not going to stop me. I need to see these girls. I need to see if Ursula is there.”

  Rylie sat on the floor and started to squeeze the boot on around the thick sock. She looked like a little girl, which made his protective instincts kick in even higher gear. He hunkered down beside her.

  “I talked to Clint and Lydia while you were asleep.”

  “How are they?”

  “They’re fine, but that’s not what we need to talk about. We have a tentative plan, but it depends on you. Can you get off the floor so we can discuss it?”

  “Let me get my boots on.”

  “You’re not going with me.”

  “Who’s going to stop me?”

  “The big bad Navy SEAL.” She paused and looked him up and down. Funny, she didn’t feel the least bit threatened by his size. She felt nothing but concern and protection emanating from him, and this was after a man tried to kill her. God, she had it bad.

  “Okay, SEAL boy, help me up.” She held out her hand, and he took her other as well and set her on her feet.

  “Shit, this is your fault,” he all but groaned. He framed her face, and his thumbs tenderly traced her cheekbones, his mouth came down hard on hers, and she lit up. He bit softly at her lower lip, until she opened, and then he thrust his tongue in, he was demanding every response she had.

  Rylie kissed him back, needing everything he had to give, and more. He was ruthless, and she needed him to be. She grabbed his shoulders so she could press against his hard body, she ground her tummy against his erect flesh and this time he did groan. Darius eased them apart, and they were both breathing heavy.