Jax Read online

  Just then he caught Danny glancing at him with an appraising look in his eye.

  Jax raised an eyebrow and asked, “Problem?”

  “Nope.” Danny shook his head. “Just that you’re an interesting choice for her. … My husband, Ronald, is very different.”

  Jax smiled and nodded. “I look forward to meeting him. It can’t be easy to be partnered with a doctor.”

  “It’s even worse because,” Danny said, “Ronald is a musician. Lives in his own world. I don’t think he knows when I’m gone half the time.”

  “Oh, yes, he does,” Abby said, laughing. “I think his music helps him deal with missing you.”

  The conversation rolled on as the day passed in a blur of activity around the little boy. They ran more tests than Jax ever thought was even possible. They had specialists in and out, and, by the end of the normal workday, the little boy looked even more exhausted. They put him in a private room under a security guard with his mom at his side. And finally Abby walked over to Jax and asked, “Can we get some food?”

  “We can,” he said, “but it’ll be brought in. None of us are leaving the hospital until this is over with.”

  She stared at him and then slowly nodded. “I’ll be so glad to have this completely over.”

  He gave a small smile, not promising anything, and asked, “Any sign of your doctor?”

  She shook her head. “No, but I’m sure he’s here somewhere.”

  He nodded. “I’m sure he is too. Have you asked the mother?”

  “No, she appears to be stressed enough,” Abby said gently. “I didn’t want to add to it.”

  “And maybe it would make her feel better to know that her son’s doctor was here and cared enough to look after Abdul.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “But a part of me doesn’t think so. I can imagine that it’s beyond stressful for her. And maybe with Windberg being another male, that doesn’t help at all.”

  Jax winced at that. He couldn’t imagine just what the mother’s life was like if she was so under her husband’s thumb as she made it out to be. And he could well believe her words because it wasn’t an easy thing to deal with in Iraq. Dubai was very progressive compared to a lot of areas, but that didn’t mean that her particular family scenario was.

  “We’ll find a place for you to rest and to get some food,” he said. Then he hesitated, not sure how to tell her.

  She looked up at him in surprise. “What’s the deal?”

  “I’m not sure it’s safe to let Danny leave.”

  Her mouth circled into an O as she understood. “Well, that’s not good.”

  “I know. I was trying to figure out what to do about it.”

  “He won’t take it kindly if we keep him as a prisoner. He’s here as a favor.”

  “I know that,” he said.

  “Yes, so why would they hurt Danny?”

  “Maybe,” Jax spoke in a very low voice, “to keep you in line.”

  She winced. “These guys are really assholes, aren’t they?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “All we can do is presume, from what we’ve seen so far, and having done what they did on the cruise, I can’t imagine that they’ll care a whole lot about keeping Danny alive.”

  “No,” she said softly. “They’ll do everything they can to get their wishes met. And Danny is doing everything he can to save the boy.” But she paled at the thought. “I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to him.”

  “I know,” he said. “And obviously we’ll do everything we can to keep him safe. I just don’t know what that’ll look like.”

  “Right,” she said.

  Just then came a knock on the door. She looked at Jax, and he motioned for her to back away from the entrance as two men stepped in. One of them, she recognized. It was the head of security from the cruise ship. She immediately pointed a finger at him. “You,” she snapped. “What are you doing here?”

  He stiffened, glared at her, and said, “I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for you.”

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “And you’re welcome. You’re only alive because of me.”

  He didn’t like her saying that.

  Jax immediately put up his hand and motioned her to calm down. He looked at the other man with the security guard and assessed him carefully, then realized this was probably Nahim. Right behind him, all he could see was an empty room. “Where is the guard?” he asked.

  The head of security shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “It has nothing to do with us.”

  “Really?” she cried out. “Have you done anything to Beau?”

  “I’m here,” Beau said, stepping into her line of sight.

  Jax looked at him and studied his face, but nothing untoward about his positioning said he was being held prisoner on the other side. Jax nodded toward the two newcomers and asked Beau, “You let them in?”

  Beau said, “The father, yes. The security guard is staying here with me.”

  “No,” the father said. “I don’t go anywhere without my guard.”

  “Maybe,” Jax said calmly. “But, if you want to see your son, you leave your killer soldier behind.”

  The father glared at him. But then Nahim heard a voice in the distant background.

  “Papa?”

  Jax watched the emotions work on the father’s face, and then Jax stepped aside to let Nahim in. As soon as the security man stepped forward, Jax placed a hand against his chest and said, “Don’t push it.”

  He glared at him. “I’m here to look after the boy. Do you really think I’ll do anything to hurt him at this point?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jax said, “because the bottom line is, somebody has already hurt him deliberately.”

  The security guard looked at him in horror. “What are you talking about?”

  But Jax wouldn’t elaborate. It wasn’t the time or the place. “When we have all the answers, we’ll tell you,” he said. “In the meantime, we must ensure that our people are protected and that you don’t get a chance to kill any more people.”

  The head of security nodded stiffly, but he added, “Like you, I’m only following orders.”

  “And we’ll take that into account,” Jax said. “But sometimes people enjoy their work a little too much.” He referred to the killings on the cruise ship.

  The other man just shrugged. “By any means possible. Like you haven’t done whatever you needed to do to get the job done,” he snapped.

  “I have,” Jax said, “but taking a life to make a point is not a method I agree with.”

  “Maybe not but we didn’t all have choices.”

  Jax laughed at that. “If there’s one thing you do understand, it’s choice. We all had a lot of choices when it came to this.”

  He heard a gentle cry behind him. He turned to see the wife, held in her husband’s arms. Jax was glad to see that. He wasn’t sure at all if this was a happy family scenario or if she had been more of a prisoner herself. With Beau still standing in the doorway, Jax watched and waited at the tearful reunion between them all. When he looked back, he saw the head of security’s eyes overcome by emotion too.

  He studied them for a long moment. “You care, don’t you?”

  “He is my brother,” he said. “And his son is my family.”

  “Maybe,” Jax said. “But a lot of people have been killed for just that family relationship.”

  “Yes, quite true. But that is our way.”

  “It may be your way, but you killed a lot of other people’s brothers and sons with your casual disregard for human life.”

  “Again, it is our way.”

  Not an answer that Jax wanted to hear, but he understood. It was a terrible thing. These guys were hardly at war with Abby, but they wanted Jax to believe it was that. And maybe, if he lived in their country and dealt with the lifestyle that they lived, maybe he’d see it that way too. He didn’t know. It just seemed so wrong on so many levels.

 
; The mother turned around and said to the security guard, “Thank you for looking after my son.”

  Jax heard Abby snort, and he realized there would likely be trouble. He quickly shoved the security guard outside and told Beau, “Keep him there.” And then he shut the door quickly.

  “Thank you for looking at my son today,” the father said to Abby, like it pained him to do so.

  Jax turned to face Abby, who already had her arms across her chest and glared at the father. “It’s not like I was given any choice, when your pirates took over the ship just to get to me,” she snapped. “Or maybe I did, but I chose your son over everybody else.”

  His eyes were glacial, but he nodded. “It is only my son who matters.”

  “No,” she said. “Your wife matters. Your five daughters matter. The child your wife now carries matters.”

  The husband gasped and turned to look at his wife. The mother nodded tearfully. Immediately he enclosed her in his arms and turned to Abby. “What sex is the baby?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care,” she said adamantly. “We don’t live in a world where only men have value.”

  He glared at her. Again.

  She wasn’t giving an inch. Jax stepped up and said, “The sex of your unborn child is not the issue. Your son here is the issue.”

  The father nodded. Then he turned to look at Danny, who at this moment in time remained silent, standing off to the side. “Who are you?”

  Abby stepped forward. “A specialist who I called in to help me with my diagnosis.”

  “We already have a diagnosis,” he said with a wave of his hand. “It’s stomach cancer.”

  She caught Danny’s stifled response. “It’s not cancer,” she said to Nahim.

  He stared at her, and then hope entered his eyes. “If it’s not cancer, then you can cure it, can’t you?”

  Danny said, “Maybe, but in some ways, cancer might be easier to cure.”

  “Why? What’s wrong?” asked the father. There was a tick in his jawline, flickering back and forth, as he waited anxiously for the diagnosis.

  “It’s attempted murder,” Jax said flatly.

  Abby nodded. “Somebody’s been poisoning your son with arsenic for the last three months.”

  Chapter 13

  Alone in a waiting room off to the side, Abby sagged into one of the three chairs and eyed the couch along the opposite wall longingly.

  “Go lay down if you want,” Jax said.

  She shook her head. “No, I’ll sleep then.”

  “Maybe that’s the best thing for you,” Danny said. “I don’t understand all the nuances here, but obviously something pretty horrific happened for this to come about.”

  Jax filled him in, carefully leaving out a few details.

  When he was done, Danny sagged in his chair too, his face pale and sweat forming on his forehead. “So am I in danger?”

  “If you are, you have my eternal regrets,” Abby said. “But I don’t think you’re in any more danger than any other specialist in this hospital. And as long as Nahim’s son is alive, we’re all good. But, if his son doesn’t make it, then I don’t know what’ll happen.”

  “They shot four civilians on the cruise just to get a hold of Abby?”

  Jax nodded. “Worse than that, Dr. Benjamin Windberg is involved.” He glanced at Abby. “Does Danny know about him?”

  She turned toward Danny and said, “Remember in med school when I was having that problem with a stalker?”

  “And he attacked you, and you ended up in a hospital with a couple broken bones, a black eye, and a busted nose. Yeah. Hell, I remember that. Why? What’s that got to do with this?”

  Jax grabbed her in the meantime and said, “What? You didn’t tell me about that.”

  She waved both men off and said, “I’m feeling like a punching bag already right now, so don’t make this corner into a boxing ring. I’ll come out fighting.” She looked at Danny and said, “Yes, that’s him. He left the country while out on bail. He went on to do some other work, and I don’t know where or what, but apparently he kept watching what I was doing. Then planned that cruise ship bullshit, and I think he’s the one poisoning the boy to get me back into his clutches.”

  Danny stared at her with his jaw opened wide.

  “I know,” she said. “It makes no sense. But the father would do anything to save his son. I don’t doubt that he loves his boy very much. And when Benjamin said I was the only one who could save the boy, the die was cast.”

  “Holy shit,” Danny said. “I wonder about the sanity of Benjamin.”

  “He’s obsessed,” she said. “That’s all I can say.”

  “Have you had any contact with him?” Danny asked. “Since he left the country, have you had anything to do with him or seen him at all?”

  “Not until this nightmare. But, as you know, my name got into the media a little bit more, and I’m sure, if Benjamin had forgotten about me, that brought me back to his thoughts.”

  “As if you needed any of that,” Danny said. “He’s a whack job. Always has been.”

  “But do you have any proof of that?” Jax said.

  Danny shook his head. “Only what Abby’s told me.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “I had a lot of threatening phone calls, threatening mail, threatening emails, then he started to follow me home. The tires would be flat on my car when I was at work, and suddenly he’d be there offering me a ride, things like that. But when I was in the living room one night, I saw him with his face pressed against the glass outside my window. When I called the cops, he came back the next night and left me a note, saying I’d be sorry if I told anyone. And he just seemed to get worse at that point.

  “So whatever the cops said to him didn’t do a damn bit of good. He just carried on stalking me, and finally he entered my house one day. I knew that somebody had been inside. There were notes all over the table and the couch, and there was one on my bed. That was particularly creepy,” she said with a shudder. “And the bathtub had been filled, and rose petals were floating inside.”

  “Oh, my God,” Danny said. “I don’t know how you survived that.”

  “Well, I turned around and ran out of the house,” she said. “And that’s when he caught me. It probably would have been worse if I’d been inside, but, as it was, he caught me outside and was trying to subdue me to take me back inside, and I screamed at the top of my lungs, when he really pounded on me, telling me to shut up, to just shut up.” She shook as the memories crowded in on her.

  Jax picked her up. She’d been sitting with her knees tucked up against her chest, and he lifted her like a child and put her on his lap. He held her close, and she welcomed the heat radiating from his heavily muscled frame.

  “The beating was so bad,” she said, “I ended up unconscious and woke up in the hospital. I don’t know what he did after that beating. I hate to even think about it. The cops said that they got there and found no sign of anybody else, but I was lying on the sidewalk fully dressed, and the neighbors said that they’d called the cops once they heard me screaming, so everybody presumed he took off. But I wouldn’t go back into the house until the cops had been through it. Then I had all the locks changed and added security to all the windows on the lower floor, but I still couldn’t live there. I moved soon afterward.”

  “I don’t think I’d ever have gone back in there,” Danny said. “That’s just horrible.”

  “And sometimes, in the ensuing years, I looked over my shoulders constantly until I just stopped, and I forgot about it. That’s the thing. With the passage of some time, you forget. And then you see him again, and you realize there is just no forgetting some things.”

  “And he was never charged for the assault?” Danny asked.

  “He was released on bail,” she said, “and he skipped the country. No way I could get him back to the US because, of course, they’d have picked him up, and that would be it. I didn’t know if England would have an extradition treaty or n
ot. I mean, who knows about these things? But I figured just maybe we could do something with him in England if he tried anything.”

  “I’m sure we can,” Jax said quietly. “He shouldn’t be allowed to escape from something like that.”

  “No,” she said. “I do have the detective’s name, and I do have a copy of the police file and the medical records from his last assault, so, if he ever gets caught here and is sent back to the States, a lot of detectives want to talk to him. For all I know, it could be a case of only three or four months’ time in jail. And maybe he can buy his way out of it. Hell, his boss might pay the fine. But surely something like poisoning a child is even worse.”

  “Assaults like yours shouldn’t entail just a fine,” Danny said.

  She shrugged. “And yet, when he was stalking me, there wasn’t anything the authorities could do, they said. I got a court order to keep him away, but it wasn’t like anybody’ll enforce that. When he comes after you, he comes after you.” She sagged against Jax’s chest and said, “Women all over the world have had this problem since forever. Until it becomes bad enough, and we’re injured, nobody does anything about it.”

  At that, she could feel Jax’s arms tighten convulsively around her. “Well, that asshole will pay before he leaves the country,” he said.

  “And then you’ll get charged,” she said sadly. “I can’t have that on my conscience.”

  Danny gave a hoarse laugh. “That’s the way you are, isn’t it? You’re always after the underdog, trying to help the one who needs it the most and never looking after yourself.” He shook his head. “You used to do that all the time in med school.”

  “I know,” she said. “It’s a problem, and I get that, but it’s who I am. It’s also why I’m trying to help the boy.”

  “Well, the boy isn’t responsible for his father’s actions or for his doctor’s, who may very well have poisoned him,” Danny said in agreement. “My colleagues and I have some idea what might help Abdul out. But it’ll require stem cells and some blood transfusions and a whole lot of luck. He’s weak, so it might be too late.”