Chapter 31
[ 465 words ]
Chapter 31:
Brenna, along with three other young nurses, surrounded her. The break room door clicked shut. The air in the small room instantly crackled with the electric, ravenous energy of pure gossip.
“Spill it,” Brenna demanded, her eyes burning with curiosity. “How do you know Colonel Romero?”
“Yeah,” another nurse chimed in, her voice breathless. “Stacy from admin said she saw him pin you against the wall in the hallway yesterday. She said it looked like he was going to eat you alive.”
Caroline’s heart hammered in her chest. Panic flared in her throat. She couldn’t tell them about the marriage. The secret was a matter of national security, and more importantly, it was a humiliating reality she wasn’t ready to share.
“It’s not what you think,” Caroline lied, forcing a nervous laugh. She rubbed her arm, avoiding their eyes. “It was just a misunderstanding. He was just… aggressively thanking me for saving his officer the other day. He’s very intense.”
A collective, disappointed groan echoed in the room. Nobody bought it.
Brenna stepped closer, her eyes narrowing with a mix of suspicion and an almost uncontainable desperation to uncover the massive secret she was hiding. “Aggressively thanking you? Caroline, the man brought the hospital’s Chief of Staff to his knees for you. Did you at least get his private number?”
Caroline’s mind flashed to the deep, intimate voice on the phone last night. Did I wake you?
She felt the heat rising in her cheeks. She looked down at her shoes. “No. We’re really not close. We’re practically strangers.”
The break room went dead silent.
𝖱𝘰𝘮а𝘯𝖼e ոo𝘃е𝗹𝘀 𝗼𝘯 𝘨𝖺𝗹𝗻𝘰𝗏e𝗹𝘴.𝘤о𝘮
Caroline looked up. The four nurses were exchanging long, meaningful glances. The friendly curiosity had vanished, replaced by a subtle, chilling wall of exclusion. They thought she was lying. They thought she was hoarding the ultimate prize and playing dumb.
In that suffocating silence, Caroline realized that Jarrod Romero hadn’t just saved her job. He had completely destroyed her normal life, isolating her on an island where only he existed.
The sky over Washington D.C. was the color of bruised iron. A cold, damp wind swept through the historic cobblestone streets of Georgetown, rattling the bare branches of the oak trees.
Inside the soundproofed cabin of the black SUV, the silence was absolute, save for the low hum of the encrypted comms array. K.C. Bell navigated the heavy vehicle with practiced precision, his eyes darting to the rearview mirror. “Sir, the situation at the embassy is fully contained. The asset is secure and the extraction team is en route to the designated safehouse,” Bell reported, his voice a steady, professional drone. Jarrod gave a single, curt nod, the adrenaline of the highest-level military emergency finally beginning to drain from his system, leaving only exhaustion and a dark, simmering irritation in its wake. The tires hummed softly against the pavement.
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