Page 114 of Protected By Duval
Duval didn’t know what to expect.
Ciela put her little hands on both sides of his face and looked into his eyes in a way that he saw Noelle in her.
But the grief looking back at him, the sadness in her gaze?
That was the little girl who’d lost her father.
“Come back safe.”
Those words.
Fuck.
What was he going to say to that?
“Baby? I’m going to do everything I can to do that and bring Mommy back, too.”
When she hugged him, her arms around his neck, he felt like there was nothing else he could do than exactly that.
Come back safe.
* * *
NOELLE
She watched the manager struggling to hold his hand against his bloody wound. The children and their mother were huddledtogether behind the tables with the plant displays and were still irritating everyone in the garden center.
She wanted to be kind, but she was scared, on the verge of terrified.
The only thing holding her together was the fact that her family and friends were outside.
This she could face alone.
She wouldn’t risk exposing her daughter to the pain of watching her mother…
“What are you doing?”
Noelle turned her head toward Tony, frowning at his words.
He was looking at her.
“Doing what?”
He turned his gaze to her hands. She looked down and realized that she’d been inching closer to the manager.
She didn’t have much in the way of first aid skills.
She doubted that the baby CPR class would have much effect on a full-grown man.
A man who wasn’t suffering from a heart attack.
“He needs help. Medical help.”
“Bastard deserves worse,” Tony snarled. “Thinks he’s so much better than everyone else.”
Well,she grumbled in her head,he is the manager.
She kept it to herself but couldn’t keep her thoughts from running together. She was fighting down the panic rushing through her veins.
