Out of Time Read online

  “Promise me,” he repeated more insistently.

  She met his gaze and nodded, but she wasn’t sure whether she would be able to keep that promise. She wouldn’t let him die. She couldn’t. She wasn’t done with him yet.

  She would never be done with him.

  But she did as he asked and ran out to the car to retrieve his gear bag—and blowout kit—from the trunk. After getting him a bottle of vodka, which he took a couple of long drinks from to dull the pain, he was able to talk her through the harrowing procedure of disinfecting the wounds—the smaller entry wound in his back and the larger exit wound in his front—and patching him up with the military clotting gauze that had a hemostatic agent on it to help stop bleeding, something he called Israeli bandages, and more gauze to wrap around him tightly to hold everything in place.

  He talked her through the whole thing, helping to calm her when her hands were shaking.

  But as soon as she’d finished, he was out cold. She curled up next to him with her head on his chest, too scared and tired to move. She needed to hear the beat of his heart against her ear.

  She couldn’t stop the shivering. She’d never been so scared in her life. She couldn’t delude herself anymore. Colt mattered just as much to her as he ever had; that was never going to change.

  But something would have to.

  “Why is a baby so important to you?”

  His question came back to her. But suddenly it clicked, and she realized what he was really asking: “Why am I not enough?” It wasn’t about the baby; maybe it never had been. Colt thought she wanted a child because loving him wasn’t enough. Somehow she had to make him see that he was.

  If she had a chance.

  Her heart squeezed with fear, trepidation, and uncertainty. After everything that had happened, how could she let him back in her life?

  She lifted her head long enough to look at the gray features of the man who still looked half-dead and knew that was a stupid question. It was too late. He was already in. He’d never really left.

  I can’t lose him.

  She had to do something.

  She got up to get her phone. She’d promised not to call the ambulance, but she hadn’t promised not to call Scott. He would know what to do to keep her stubborn, mean, tender, cruel, sweet, wounded, and scarred ex-husband alive.

  Twenty-two

  After the dead end with Baylor at Natalie’s parents’ house, Scott had been up much of the night waiting for news from Kate.

  Initially they’d been optimistic that Baylor’s guys—or more accurately, Baylor’s future father-in-law’s private contractors (i.e., private army)—would find something. Natalie’s parents thought they remembered seeing a laptop when they’d packed up her things from the apartment. But the guys had been through the boxes a dozen times and hadn’t been able to find anything.

  Scott had thought it was strange that Mick wouldn’t have sanitized the apartment, but he’d had them check again and the laptop was there on the inventory list of the things in her apartment. Tellingly, however, when Natalie asked them about her journals—journals Scott didn’t even know she kept—they weren’t on the list.

  Someone had sanitized the apartment before the police arrived.

  Mick had been an asshole, but he hadn’t been a stupid one. Would he have been sloppy enough to leave the laptop or was there another reason?

  When Scott voiced his suspicion to Natalie, she didn’t disagree. “It wouldn’t surprise me at all if Mick left some kind of insurance plan to cover his ass. You think it could be on my laptop?”

  “Maybe. I can’t think of another reason why he would leave it there. It could be just the proof we are looking for if it leads to the person he was working for.”

  To say that the news that someone on the inside had been involved—and that that person could be General Thomas Murray—had thrown Scott for a loop was putting it mildly. It seemed inconceivable that someone of the general’s stature and reputation could be involved. A hard-liner against Russia suddenly passing on top-secret information to them? What kind of warped thinking could justify that?

  But if the leak wasn’t Natalie—and Scott was convinced it wasn’t—someone else in that room had passed on information. And any way they looked at it, the general made the most sense, especially given how fast Scott had been tracked to Natalie.

  “I wish I knew what happened to it,” Natalie said.

  Scott did, too. The nine men who’d died deserved an answer, and he owed it to them to find out.

  After dinner with the senator, a much less awkward one than the night before, Scott and Natalie returned to the suite and tried to get some sleep. But Scott had been restless—even for him—and slipped out of Natalie’s bedroom and returned to his own so as not to disturb her.

  The deputy secretary’s computer would help exonerate Natalie and help prove that someone else in the room had passed on the information to Mick. But if they were going to accuse the general, they would need more than that. They would need proof.

  Proof could be on Natalie’s laptop, but what if they couldn’t find it?

  Scott had been going over every angle and he had a hunch that there might be another connection. He sent an e-mail to Donovan, asking him to have Brittany forward it to her friend Mac to have her look into it. He would have gone through Kate, but he didn’t want to bother her while she and Colt were working on the deputy secretary’s computer.

  He hoped to hell nothing went wrong.

  He had just slipped back into bed beside Natalie to try to get some sleep when the phone he’d put down on the bedside table buzzed.

  * * *

  • • •

  Natalie had been sleeping with Scott long enough to be used to his restlessness. It wasn’t the first time he’d gotten up multiple times in the night to deal with something that was on his mind. How he survived on so little sleep, she had no idea, but he seemed to not need more than four or five hours a night.

  Natalie would be comatose during the day if she did that.

  But when the phone rang at a little after five in the morning, Scott wasn’t the only one wide-awake. If it was Kate reporting back with news of Deputy Secretary Waters’s computer, Natalie wanted to hear it. She followed Scott into his room, where he’d gone presumably not to wake her, and sat on the edge of the bed while he stood in front of the window to take the call.

  He glanced toward her and she could tell from his expression, even in the predawn shadowed light, that whatever the person on the other side of the conversation was saying, it wasn’t good.

  Her impression was solidified when he swore. “Fuck. Tell me exactly what happened.” He was quiet for a couple of minutes as the person on the other end filled him in. “Did Waters see him?”

  Uh-oh. Definitely not good.

  Scott’s expression grew even more intense. “Where did the bullet hit?” Natalie gasped and Scott’s gaze met hers. She could see how worried he was. “You are sure it went through?” He waited. “Okay, good. He was lucky, as usual.” Another pause. “No, no, you did the right thing. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” From his tone, Natalie could tell he was obviously trying to calm her down. “Colt would know if it hit something vital, Kate. If he needed a hospital, he would have told you. But I’ll be there soon to make sure. He’s not going to die, okay? You have to calm down.”

  He had to repeat himself a few more times, but eventually Kate must have relaxed enough for Scott to hang up. Natalie already had an inkling of what had happened, but it was still a shock to hear that Deputy Secretary Waters had shot Colt.

  “I didn’t even think that Rich liked guns,” Natalie said, referring to her mild-mannered former boss. “Let alone knew how to use one. He never said a word.” She looked up at Scott apologetically. “I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “You have nothing to apologize for. A hom