Jose glanced at the backpack, then at the tusk again. “What did you expect to do with that?”
“I didn’t take this. Stella did.” He set it aside and scratched through his dirty curls. “I think she was planning to use it as a knife. She was a lot smarter in her choices than I was, wasn’t she? Fossil teeth and tusks. If I’d thought like her, I might have been out of there sooner.”
Jose just listened, trying to get a bead on this kid. “She’s a sharp girl. Her big brothers taught her to take care of herself.”
A benign enough answer.
Sutton pulled a small shield out of his backpack and tapped his head lightly. “I was thinking protection, like a bulletproof vest or whacking someone on the head. Not as clever or effective as a tusk or something sharp. Hell, I don’t know what I was thinking. When you’re a kid, you wanna be a cop or firefighter, the hero in a crisis. Real life is a lot more complicated.”
“It always is.” He scooped up a handful of pebbles.
Sutton looked sideways. “I was such a f**king basket case I was pretty much useless. Not Stella though.”
Of course she’d held it together. She was a highly trained Interpol operative who’d managed to send out a coded message that got everyone saved. She’d kept her head in a nightmare situation. And she’d done it all without once revealing her real identity to her captors or to the students she accompanied.
She was so damn amazing she took his breath away.
Jose funneled the pebbles through his fist into his other palm. “Sutton, you can’t beat yourself up over what’s in the past. You’re alive.”
“Not everybody made it out that way. Thing is, I don’t know if I could do any better now. I’m still so scared I could piss myself.”
“No shame in that.” He poured the pebbles back into his other hand.
“Easy for you to say. You’re a superhero.”
Superhero? Crap. Stella had called him that once. Too bad nothing could be further from the truth. “We all have our kryptonite.”
“What’s yours?”
Alcohol. Stella. Yeah, he had two great big weaknesses. He dumped the small stones onto the ground. “Enough sharing. Get some sleep. Your chatter’s distracting me from my job.”
“It’s Stella, isn’t it? She’s yours… but she’s living her dream to be a student abroad?”
He stayed silent. Was the kid digging? More than once he’d hinted that he knew she had a deeper reason for being here. Had her cover been blown?
“She’s smart. Pretty.”
His jaw clamped tight, possessive instincts roaring. Whoa. Wait. Was this kid going somewhere else with his questions? “Do you have a point?”
Sutton shook his head. “Not really. Just wondering what kind of guy lets a woman like her get away.”
Great. Now even the kid was calling him out on his idiocy. As if he didn’t already know. “Prop your ankle on the log. It’ll keep the swelling down.”
Sutton set aside the shield. “Are you dudes SEALs or what?”
“Special Operations involves a number of different branches—SEALs, Rangers, Green Berets, pararescuemen.”
“Which are you?”
“Pararescuemen—sometimes known as pararescue jumpers, PJs.”
“Were you all PJs?”
Nosy little dude. “Does it matter?”
“You’re not going to tell me, are you?”
“Do you really need to know?” Was the kid more than a student too? Government agencies kept secrets from each other all the time.