Page 41 of Stolen By the Billionaire
“Are you a doctor?”
“No.”
“Then it’s not ordered by a doctor, just a bossy ex-SEAL who thinks he should be running my life. And I still think I’m going to end up with my head in a freezer.” She wiggled in the ropes some more.
Blaze lowered his voice. “I’m not a doctor, but I was a commanding officer. I am Lieutenant Commander Robinson, DEVGRU, and I’ve watched over personnel as stressed as you are. You are heading for a major burnout.”
“Am not!”
“And if you don’t change your life, you aren’t going to make it.”
“You just dang well watch me! I’ll be fine!”
“While I respect your initiative and grit, you operate as if every day is a breaking point. Yes, when SEALs train, we train like rabid dogs. While we’re in the field, we give our operation everything we have, and then we dig down and find another hundred percent. But even SEAL operations end, and we go home, decompress, and heal. You’re not doing that.”
“You said you only watched me for a week.”
“I can see the weariness in your step. You don’t look like a SEAL on a mission. You look like a POW in a prison cell.”
Sarah was quiet after that, occasionally wiggling in her bonds but mostly frowning and gazing out the windows as Blaze raced toward Chicago.
14
Threshold
Sarah
Not a soldier on a mission, but a POW in a prison cell.
Sarah stared at the green swath of the lush rolling hills of Iowa and then the drier grasses of Illinois outside the smoked windows of Blaze Robinson’s zippy little car. The plastic ties scratched her wrists and ankles, but Sarah could feel her fingers against the car seat’s buttery leather behind her back and her toes in her boots.
She’d hoped that maybe, after they’d gotten off the freeway and onto normal roads, she’d be able to attract the attention of a police officer or even just a person who would rescue her, but Blaze’s black car was so murdered out that no one would be able to really see her through those heavily tinted windows.
Blaze had said she looked like a prisoner of war in a prison cell.
But Sarah wasn’t a prisoner on her farm. She loved her land and the tradition that came with it. She loved that she was producing the food that fed America and the world and that the farm had been passed down to her because her father had given up worldly things.
She liked getting up early and seeing to the chickens and the vegetables in her garden and watching the corn get high in the Midwestern sunshine every year until harvest. She didn’t too much mind the setbacks, like a hawk swooping in and killing half of her chickens, which she had to replace or go without because the farm stand made less egg money until she could raise up some more brooding hens.
She understood that rain and drought and cloudy days, and heat domes and tornadoes and derechos, could happen at any time, and at least one of them usually did.
Chicken hawks and Bovine Viral Diarrhea and crop failures were just part of the gamble of farming.
And the long days of unrelenting chores that sometimes were useless in a hopeless situation.
And the loneliness of living out in the countryside, too far to regularly visit busy friends, and no one in the house except Muffintop when she came home for the night.
Sarah dealt with the problems. She did what she could to minimize the damage, like saving up to buy Remi, her trained livestock guardian dog, to protect her chickens. She arranged for irrigation if the drought was killing her corn, though paying for irrigation cut her margins to the bone.
And the margins were already so close to her bones.
Her parents had protected Sarah from the financial realities of farming as much as they could when she was a kid, not arguing about money in front of her and making do, using up, and wearing out everything they owned.
Frugality was in her blood, her home-grown food, and her hand-me-down clothes.
Farmers weren’t billionaires, as her father had often told her and screamed at Logan before he left, but farmers were important.
The world would get along just fine if there were no billionaires.
