“Thank you. Have I said thank you?”
“Yes, you have.”
“Well, I knew I could count on you.”
She sensed his pause, but her eyes had already closed.
“You did?”
“Yeah. Like I said, I read your file. Plus, Sam raised you right. There was no doubt you would do everything to find me.”
There was a long moment of silence, but he didn’t leave her.
“What?” Lila asked without opening her eyes.
“Why didn’t you contact my father? When you went on the run?”
It took some effort, but she opened her eyes. The sun had started to set, and it cast the room in an orange glow. She liked the sunsets in Hawai’i. It always meant she’d survived another day.
“Your father was up for a transplant. I didn’t want to put him at risk. And just remember, I wouldn’t have contacted you now if I hadn’t been hurt. It seemed worse than the other times.”
With a sigh, she felt her eyes drift closed and she fell into a deep sleep.
Ian studied her for a long moment and tried to figure out if she was really asleep.
Lila was worming her way into his heart, and he didn’t know what to do about it. He wanted to shake her awake and ask her about those “other times.” How had this woman survived the last few years on the run with no one to help her? He knew the twins had helped to an extent, but…she was a solitary figure. He had never met another person who seemed to thrive when left alone. Well, other than him.
He hadn’t always been like that, but when you become a sniper, it sort of went with the job. This was different. She’d had little to no connections. No family. No backup. He ground his teeth together trying to work through the anger that pounded through him. Even so, he reached up with gentle hands to push the hair away from her face. Seeing that she was sleeping, and he had all the important things she would need to survive, he rose to go talk to his father.
After he closed the door to the bedroom, he joined his father and his two friends on the back lanai.
“How is she?” his father asked.
“Fine. Sleeping.”
“Should we keep an eye on her?” Jenner asked. “She got the slip on you once already.”
Irritation bled through him. “She didn’t get a slip on me.”
“If you say so,” he said.
“I mean, she sort of did, Ian,” El said.
“Sod off. Also, I hid all the things she would need to survive out in the world. But she is sleeping deeply.”
Both men looked at him as if they didn’t believe him. He decided to ignore them, at least for now.
“So,” he said looking at his father. “We need some more explanation about Sa…Lila.”
His father shoved a hand through his hair. “Not much more to tell but ask me anything. Now that she’s been found, I don’t think she would mind.”
“Did you know she was alive?”
Samuel sighed, sitting down on one of the cushioned chairs. “No. Actually, I worried that she had been disappeared by someone from her or her grandmother’s past.”
“She could run WITSEC with one hand tied behind her back and her eyes closed,” El said, admiration in his voice. “She offered to help me disappear after everything I went through, but I didn’t want that. Still, I know that she could have done the job.”
El had been tortured and nearly killed a few years ago. Both his sister and he had pretty much been shown the door after Eden broke protocol and went after him. Apparently, Lila helped.
