I should have grabbed that blanket for you. Come here.” He held out his arms.
She looked at his outspread hands, then met his gaze. Her eyes were wide and dilated with fright. “Is it safe?”
His embrace or the situation? “We’ve contained the attack.”
Her gaze held his for an instant, then she pushed past him and went up the stairs.
He turned to follow her, but the straight, stiff line of her back in the silk dressing gown spoke volumes. In fact, she couldn’t have been clearer if she’d shouted.
She didn’t want his help, nor his comfort. He couldn’t blame her. She’d managed for two years without it.
He was terrified that during that time she’d decided that being without him was easier than being with him.
He didn’t take his eyes off her until she disappeared through the door at the top of the stairs and closed it, quietly but firmly.
He couldn’t make it up to her for leaving her. All he could do was make sure that everything around her was safe. So he stepped through the metal door and looked around. She’d turned on the solar lights that were fed by panels on the roof of the cabin, so it was easy to see that this end of the basement was undamaged.
However, the smell of smoke and burned wood and rubber permeated the air, and forty feet away, at the other end of the room, he could see where the steel mesh that reinforced the basement walls was bare in several places. Whatever they’d use to blow up the barn, it had generated enough heat to incinerate the plywood.
The basement was slightly soundproofed by virtue of the reinforced walls and metal doors. Still, it must have been terrifying for her, down here alone, listening to the gunfire. He couldn’t imagine what she’d gone through as the explosion ripped the roof off the barn and burned through the walls he’d assured her were impenetrable.
For all his training and experience, in the Air Force and afterward, it occurred to him that beneath it all he was a naive idiot, thinking that because he thought he’d made her safe, she actually was.
Worse, he’d expected her to blindly accept his decisions—expected her to trust her life to them.
When had he become so arrogant and self-delusional?
The door behind him opened.
“Rook?”
He heard Deke’s voice in his ears and through the com unit at the same time.
“Yeah.”
“I saw Irina.” Deke’s footsteps were light on the wooden stairs. For his size, he could move almost without a sound. He stepped up beside Rook. “She didn’t seem to be hurt—”
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