ady. The lame helping the lame—he limping on his left leg, Molly on her right. He hadn’t even been able to carry her to his car. Some hero.
Not that he’d ever wanted to be a hero, he reminded himself. All he’d ever aspired to was to do his job, earn his promotions while serving his country, hang out with a few good friends, enjoy the present and let the unhappy past fade into oblivion. A deadly explosion had turned those vaguely pleasant daydreams into a pile of ashes.
He had just opened his mouth to speak to Molly when he saw that she had fallen asleep on the couch. Holding the towel-covered ice pack, he stared at her, wondering if he should wake her or let her sleep. She looked so relaxed. The medications she had tried to refuse at the hospital had obviously knocked her for a loop.
“Let her sleep,” Jewel said softly from behind him, looking around him toward the couch. “She’s obviously tuckered out. I can heat up her lunch when she wakes up.”
“Maybe she’d rather I wake her.” Kyle knew he wouldn’t like being in her position, sound asleep while others made decisions on her behalf. But maybe Molly wasn’t as much of a control freak as he was.
“The rest will be good for her. Come on into the kitchen and have some…”
A sudden, muffled ringing interrupted her words. Kyle and Jewel both looked around in confusion for the source of the sound. Jewel found it first. She snatched up Molly’s soft leather handbag, which Kyle had carried in from the car for her, and held it out to him. “I think it’s her cell phone.”
He glanced toward the couch. Molly hadn’t stirred. Guessing the caller was her brother, and figuring Shane would worry if he couldn’t reach his sister, Kyle handed Jewel the ice pack, then stepped into the hallway. He dug into the purse and pulled out the phone.
Maybe he was overstepping his bounds here, but he couldn’t just let the phone keep ringing. “Hello?”
“Is this Molly Walker’s phone?” a man’s voice asked. Kyle leaned against a wall of the hallway, recogni zing the distinctive drawl even after so many years. “Shane?”
“Yeah. Who’s this?”
He hesitated a moment before drawing a deep breath and saying, “It’s Kyle Reeves, Shane.”
“Kyle? Well, I’ll be— It’s good to hear your voice again. How are you? I heard you found yourself some trouble over in the Middle East.”
“Yeah, you could say that.” Kyle appreciated Shane’s matter-of-fact phrasing. “But I’m doing okay. Almost back to full speed again.”
He figured it wasn’t much of a lie.
“Glad to hear it. Uh-you mind telling me why you’re answering Molly’s cell phone? Where is she, anyway?”
“She’s here with me. In Tennessee.”
Shane groaned loudly. “I cannot believe this. You mean she flew all the way to Tennessee just to—” “She didn’t fly, Shane. She drove.”
There was an ominous silence on the other end of the line. “She drove?”
“Yeah. She spent Thursday night in a motel in Memphis and reached my place in the middle of a storm yesterday afternoon. The weather was too bad for her to go out again, so I talked her into bunking on my couch last night.”
Braced for a brother’s misgivings, Kyle was mildly surprised when Shane seemed more annoyed by Molly’s long drive than by the fact that she had spent the night in a near stranger’s house. “I appreciate you watching out for her. I can’t believe she took off like that without telling anyone. Dad would lock her in her room for a month if he heard about this stunt.”
Though he had chided her himself for what had seemed like a somewhat reckless trip for a young woman alone, Kyle found himself tempted to defend her now. Shane talked as though Molly were a teenager rather than a grown woman of almost twenty-four. If this was the way her family treated her, no wonder she’d gotten so defensive in asserting her right to make her own decisions.
Which made it even more awkward for him to have to tell Shane about the accident. “She handled the trip just fine. But there has been a, um, problem.”
“What sort of problem?” Shane asked in audible trepidation.
“Molly fell through a rotten board on my porch. She’s torn a ligament in her ankle. It was just a bad sprain—no broken bones or anything like that,” he added hastily, thinking of the hardware that held his own shattered leg in one piece. “She has to wear a Velcro brace and use crutches for a few weeks, but she’ll be fine.”
“Is she in much pain?” Shane’s voice was very quiet, a bit too controlled.
“She’s fine. She’s napping now. The medications they gave her made her drowsy.”
“Damn, I didn’t need this right now.”
Had Shane changed so much? “It isn’t as if Molly sprained her ankle just to inconvenience you,” Kyle said stiffly.
He could almost hear Shane wince at the other end of the line. “I know. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I’m sorry she was hurt—even if I’m still kind of annoyed with her for taking off on this harebrained trip in the first place. It’s just that everything is pretty hectic around here, with Dad and Cassie being away and my youngest kid down with a bad cold. I guess I’ll have to come get Molly—or maybe I can send one of the uncles. Or maybe our cousin—”