Duty to Protect by Lisa Phillips

Author:Lisa Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-01-04T15:12:55+00:00

* * *

Cody drifted on the edge of consciousness. Something nagged at him, but trying to analyze what it was required too much effort. Where was he? He wasn’t at home. The sounds and scents around him were foreign. But he didn’t have the will to decipher those, either.

Awareness advanced, and with it, pain. Everything hurt. The worst of it was confined to his torso. And his head. Yeah, definitely his head.

His chest, too. No, his heart, as if someone had squeezed, shredded, then stomped on it. Pops was gone. It couldn’t be true. But the grief pressing down on him said it was. Cody opened his eyes with a groan.

A nurse stood with his back to him, facing the rolling bedside table. He spun and met Cody’s gaze for the briefest moment before stepping toward the back wall.

The man had brought lunch. A plate sat in the middle of a tray, a plastic cover hiding whatever was beneath. A packet holding a napkin and silverware lay to the side, along with a beverage. The lights were off, the natural light struggling in through the narrow window offering the only illumination in the room. On such a gray, dreary day, even that was minimal. But the shadows were fitting. Anything else would seem out of place, disrespectful to the memory of the man who had raised him.

Sometime this evening, Erin would return. She’d promised to check on him when she finished her day. At the thought, his spirits lifted just a little. She was the only person in the entire state who understood what Pops had meant to him.

Cody craned his neck backward to check out his visitor. Latex gloves covered his hands, but he wasn’t wearing a nurse’s uniform. With pants in a nondescript blue-gray color and a button-up shirt in a tiny plaid pattern, he was probably maintenance. His beard was neatly trimmed, and wavy blond hair flowed from beneath a baseball cap, almost touching his shoulders. Was a ball cap approved hospital working attire? More likely in maintenance than nursing.

The man fiddled with something on the wall, then hurried away, hitting the switch on his way out. The room brightened. Maybe someone had reported a problem with the lighting. The guy they’d sent wasn’t very personable. But Cody wasn’t in a talkative mood.

Pops had made it as far as the operating room, then died in surgery. Ruptured spleen. He’d spent four years in a Vietnamese POW camp, followed by dangerous military missions in places he couldn’t even talk about because the US was supposedly never there. And a hurricane took him out.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway, growing closer. Between the solid, rhythmic footfalls was another sound he tried to place, the more rapid click of something against the vinyl tile.

Erin stepped into the room holding a leash. Alcee walked next to her, toenails making little scrapes against the floor. Cody’s heart rolled over and his chest clenched. He really needed a hug. He squelched the irrational thought as quickly as it had come.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.