“I’ve a man checking,” Callum told Sonia and he watched her eyebrows rise before she visibly relaxed.
“Thank you,” she whispered with great feeling.
She was taking this too far.
“Sonia,” he called, regaining her attention which had unfocused from him in her apparent extreme relief. “I’m telling you right now, this turns out to be a game, I won’t like it.”
Her jaw tensed and she jerked her head so her hair shook about her shoulders.
“Call your man back,” she demanded. “Tell him it’s in the green box in the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. The needles in the blue box beside it. If we have to be here a week, I’ll need it all,” she started to turn but then jerked back and raised her angry gaze to his. “And the sharps container.”
Then she stomped, yes, stomped to the bathroom and slammed the door.
Callum stared at the door and, instead of feeling angry at her game, he felt aroused by her spirit.
“That’s more like it,” he muttered then turned to add a log to the fire.
* * * * *
Half an hour later, after Sonia had spent some time in the bathroom arranging her toiletries, his toiletries, rearranging the towels, maniacally cleaning the mirror and basin, if his hearing was correct (and it always was), she left the bathroom.
Then she paced.
Callum, at his laptop at the kitchen bar, ignored her.
Then his phone rang.
She stopped pacing, whirled and glared at him.
Callum studied her.
She looked glorious in her anger.
Yes, he liked this Sonia much better.
Not taking his eyes from her, he yanked the phone out of his pocket and put it to his ear.
“Callum.”
“She’s not lying,” Ryon told him and Callum didn’t know what to do with that information. It proved she wasn’t playing a game and further provided unwelcome information that his mate had a rare blood disorder that, if untreated, could lead to an agonizing death.
Something about this rattled him in a way he never felt before in his entire life.
“Have a man bring it to the cabin,” Callum ordered and he watched Sonia’s shoulders fall as her head tipped back and she looked at the ceiling with closed eyes and extreme relief washing over her face.
Fucking hell, if he’d called her bluff, he’d have killed her.
That rattled him further.
“I even talked to her doctor,” Ryon, always thorough, said in his ear as Sonia tramped to the kitchen and started to yank things from the fridge and cupboards. “She’s got a rare blood disorder. Never heard of it, it’s about seventeen syllables long. Inherited it from her father,” Ryon’s voice lowered. “It’s nasty, Cal. She could die from it.”
“How did you miss this?” Callum clipped.
Ryon chuckled and Callum’s hackles rose. “Mac, and you, I’ll remind you, forbid any of the brothers spying on her when she was inside her house. Follow her to stores. Monitor her purchases and expenses. Go through her trash but you never let us go through her house or watch her in it. She visited the doctor regularly but medical records are confidential, which, by the way, meant I had to talk fast to get the doctor to tell me anything. She has a monthly prescription for birth control, which we knew about from a light hack into her records some time ago. She picked those up monthly from her doc along with the injections we didn’t know about. But this disease she’s had since birth. The hack Caleb just did uncovered it but we had to go back years and, even so, it was buried, almost like it was hidden. The information about her condition and the prescription for the injections was protected behind so many passwords even Caleb had trouble unlocking it.”
Even though this made sense, Callum didn’t like it.
Not only that they missed it, and in missing it could have killed her, but also the fact that it made him feel a strange sense of unease that the information was hidden, protected, secret. Medical records were confidential but why would this life-threatening condition be guarded so thoroughly? In case of an emergency, wouldn’t that information need to be readily available?