Nothing he could do could influence any of those outcomes either way.
It made him wild.
He paced a loop around the bed, and then stalked back, pausing every few steps to glare at the closed bathroom door.What’s taking so long?
It opened, revealing a pale Sloan.“Can you set a timer for three minutes, please?”
That, he could do.He set it on his phone and then dropped it onto the bed.Three minutes wasn’t very long in the grand scheme of things, but it seemed a small eternity.“Sit down before you pass out.”
She rolled her eyes, looking a little more like the woman he’d come to know.“There you are.I thought you were going soft on me.”
“Don’t know the meaning of the word.”He kept close as she walked to the bed, but she only weaved a little as she sat next to the rapidly decreasing timer on his phone.Had he thought three minutes was forever?
It wasn’t nearly long enough.
To distract himself, he crouched next to Sloan.“How are you doing?”
“About as well as can be expected.”
He didn’t know how to do this.Jude was so much better at destroying shit than comforting someone who was upset.And she was upset, even if she was doing a damn good job of hiding it.“You did well back at Sorcha’s—getting out without breaking down.”The second she frowned, he realized exactly how much of an asshole he sounded.“What I mean is—”
“That you fully expected me to curl up in a ball and require you to carry me out of there the same way you carried out my suitcase.”She twined her fingers together.“I’m not okay, Jude.I’m not even in the realm of okay.I’ve been hit by one thing after another, starting with realizing that the life I actually really love has been jeopardized and ending with a gun pointed at my face.I might not be as strong as my sisters—”
“Stop.”
She finally looked at him.“Excuse me?”
“That’s not the first time you’ve said that.”
“It’s the truth—”
He checked the phone—two minutes left—then focused on her.“You uprooted your entire life and walked away from everything you ever knew.Has either of your sisters done that?”
“Well—” She bit her lip.“Sort of?I see your point.”
“I don’t think you do.It takes guts to remove yourself from the equation instead of just going along with the current.Youdid that.That’s fucking impressive, let alone taking into account what you’ve done since.Marge wouldn’t put up with you at the diner if you didn’t work hard.Did you even have a job before you got to Callaway Rock?”
“No.”
“Sunshine, you’re a goddamn pillar of strength from where I’m sitting.”He took her hands because being so close to her without touching her was just fucking wrong, and apparently it was the right thing to do because she clutched him like a drowning woman would a life raft.
“I am very, very afraid.”
“Tell me who I need to kill.”
She laughed, and then abruptly stopped.“Oh God, you’re serious.”Sloan stroked the back of his hand with her thumb, the kind of mindless action he didn’t even think she realized she was doing.“I won’t lie and say I’m not worried about my family’s single worst enemy knowing my location.”
“Your former location.”He had no intention of projecting their whereabouts to Romanov again, though he couldn’t be sure how the other man knew their movements in the first place.No point in borrowing trouble.Even if Romanov had their current location, Jude doubted he’d make a move until he knew one way or another how Jude would jump when it came to the Sheridans.The Russian wasn’t the type to waste resources when it was likely Jude would do exactly as commanded.
She nodded, conceding the point.“But that’s not what’s freaking me out the most right now.”
The baby.“We’ll know shortly.”In thirty seconds, to be specific.
Sloan gave a sad smile that was like a punch to the gut.“Jude, I think we both know exactly what that test is going to say.”
Yeah, sometime in the last few hours, he’d let that knowledge settle within him.It was entirely possible that they would look at that test in the bathroom and it would be negative, but he didn’t think so.Apparently neither did she.And so he sat there, holding her hand and doing his damnedest not to say anything to make it worse.The timer went off before either of them could do anything resembling relaxing.
She blanched.“Jude, I can’t look.”
