He shook his head. “I’m so fucking sor—”
I covered his mouth with my hand. “Don’t you dare apologize to me, Jake,” I said. “This is not your fault.”
I really wasn’t even sure what this was, but fuck if I was going to let him take the blame for me getting shot. Only ones to blame were the assholes with guns.
Jake pressed a kiss into the palm of my hand, so I took that as a sign he wasn’t going to argue with me and removed my hand. He leaned in and kissed me. “I was so fucking scared, Oz,” he said in a strangled voice. “I saw you go down and then the blood…”
“Shhh, it’s okay,” I assured him with a kiss. “You saved me, Jake. You got us out of there and you saved me.”
He didn’t respond to my statement, which didn’t surprise me in the least. I let my fingers stroke back and forth over his cheekbone. “Jake, who are they?”
He was silent for a beat before he said, “God, Oz, it’s such a long, fucked-up story.” I wondered if that was his way of saying he wasn’t going to tell me, but then he added, “I don’t know where to start.”
“The person you lost,” I began. “Did they—”
“Yes,” Jake cut in. “They killed him when they were trying to get to me. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time. His name was Peter.” Jake shifted a little, then settled his hand on my hip. “I met him when I left Chicago and went to D.C. to do my residency. He was the Chief of Surgery in the hospital I was working at. I was… I was interested in him. He seemed interested in me too, but we never crossed that line. We agreed to just be friends, but my feelings for him were stronger than that.”
“You loved him,” I offered.
Jake nodded. “I did. But I was too afraid to tell him that I wanted more. The summer after my residency, I signed up for Doctors Without Borders. Have you heard of it?”
I nodded and then said, “Yes. Doctors and nurses travel to countries that don’t have adequate medical care, right?”
“Right. I was assigned to go to Colombia. Peter was really supportive of the whole thing. When I left, I got this feeling that… that maybe things would change when I got back. I’d accepted a job at another hospital in the D.C. area so Peter and I would no longer have a professional relationship. I thought…”
Jake’s voice dropped off. My heart broke for him because I could hear the regret in his voice.
“Did something happen in Colombia?” I asked.
Another nod. I was glad I had my hand on his cheek or I wouldn’t have been aware of the response. He was silent for several beats before he said, “I’d been there about two months when this nurse friend asked me to help out this local guy who ran a mercenary group that worked to provide security in the area. The nurse, Megan, told me one of the leader’s men got shot during a mission to save some American hostages… that’s a big thing down there–kidnapping foreigners and ransoming them for money. There weren’t a lot of medical resources in the area besides Doctors Without Borders, and I believed it when Megan told me the guy wasn’t stable enough to be brought to our clinic. So, I went with her.”
My heart thudded painfully in my chest.
“She took me to this really big house just outside the village, which was located along the Magdalena River. My gut was telling me something was off as soon as I met the leader, a man named Diego. But I trusted Megan, so I went to work on the guy who’d been shot. Megan assisted me with the procedure to remove the bullet from the guy, then left to go update Diego. After a good half hour, I went to find her because I was due back for my shift at the clinic. I eventually saw her through a window. She was in the back yard on the patio talking to Diego and another guy. I was about to call out to her when I heard her start yelling at the one guy... not Diego, but the other one. When I realized what they were fighting about, I knew she’d lied to me.”
“What were they fighting about?”
“Drugs,” Jake murmured. “I didn’t hear everything, but enough to know that Megan and Diego had some kind of plan to use Doctors Without Borders to smuggle drugs into the U.S. The third guy seemed pissed that Megan knew who he was because he kept yelling at Diego that they couldn’t have any witnesses. Then just like that, he pulled out a gun and shot Megan in the head.”