“I hope you always will,” Tanner said softly, taking his wife’s hand and bringing it to his lips.
Chay cleared his throat.
“Would one of you like to clue me in on what the hell you’re all talking about?”
Bianca hesitated. Then shrugged her shoulders. “I had a call from a man. A patient.”
“While you were away? Don’t you have somebody who covers for you?”
“I do. The thing is, I’m not sure how he got my private cell number.”
Chay frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Just that. I never give my personal number to patients.”
“And the call from this guy was upsetting?”
Upsetting wasn’t a good enough word to describe that call or the five that had followed, but Alessandra didn’t know about them—and she wasn’t going to.
“He was,” Bianca said carefully, “a little distraught.”
“Distraught,” Chay repeated in a grim tone.
“Look, I really don’t want to—”
“Does he have other personal information about you? Your address, maybe?”
“He had my cell number,” Bianca said emphatically. “That’s it.”
She hoped that was it, but she wasn’t going to say so. The conversation had already gone deeper than she wanted.
“Anyway,” she said lightly, “the worst part was that I had to change my phone number. And I’d barely memorized the first one!”
Alessandra laughed. “Thanks to Siri, nobody has to memorize phone numbers anymore.”
Everyone laughed, including Chay, but years in Special Ops had given his attitude a cynical spin.
A man who tracked down a woman’s private phone number wouldn’t be that easy to get rid of. Not if he really was determined. Besides, the guy knew where she worked. And hadn’t there been something in Bianca’s voice when she talked about him? A hint of—not fear, exactly. Concern.
Maybe yes. Maybe no. After all, what did he know of shrinks?
Nothing. And it was going to stay that way. Professionally—he’d ignored a couple of suggestions by Captain Blake, his CO, that he might benefit from seeing one about this last deployment.
And personally?
Chay reached for his glass of wine and took a sip.
After tonight, anything to do with Bianca Wilde would be history.
• • •
The conversation veered to movies. Then to books. Turned out the Tigress was quite a reader.
Well, he got that. So was he. He was into sea stories. What his English 101 instructor back in his university days had referred to as classics. Moby Dick. Twenty Years Before the Mast. All the Horatio Hornblower novels.
Nobody knew that that he was into that stuff and nobody was going to, but he was.
And she knew wine.