Perfect Paige

by Ines Saint

  “Oh! He’s coming to. Let’s give him a moment.” Paige . . . she sounded happy. Excited, even. He tried harder to open his eyes. Faces waded in and out. Grandma Hilda, Aunt Helga, Boyd, Ruby. Where was Paige?

  “Near-death experience. One for the gypsies!” Ruby declared, her smile too close to his face.

  “That very low,” Aunt Helga declared.

  “What? It wasn’t permanent.”

  “Enough. He needs to rest. Boyd?” It was Paige again. Her voice was beside him. He tried to move his head to look at her, but everything swam in and out. “Shhhh.” She smoothed his hair, and his eyes fluttered shut again.

  “They just got here. They’re worried. Let them stay for a bit. They’ll be good. Won’t you?” Boyd asked. A chorus of murmured promises reached his ears and made him want to smile.

  What seemed like an eternity later, he was able to fully open his eyes. After a few moments of pulling the room into focus, he tried to sit up. Dizziness made him shut his eyes for a moment, but he soon got it under control. He glanced around, as much as his limited movement allowed him to, and saw Paige asleep in a chair next to him.

  Her eyes opened and she shot up. “Alex! You’re awake.” She stood up and moved over next to him, then put her soft, soothing hand on his. “You sat up. You shouldn’t have attempted that. Do you feel dizzy?”

  “A little.”

  “Here. I’ll help you lie down again.”

  “No. Water. I’m parched.”

  “I can put some ice chips on your lips, but you shouldn’t try to swallow anything just yet.”

  Her fingers were on his lips, and there was a tenderness in her eyes that had his chest aching. The ice chips helped. So did her touch. It calmed him. “Where’s everybody else?” he asked. “Were they here? Or was I having nightmares?”

  She smiled. “They were here, but I made Boyd take them out. They weren’t following orders.”

  “I was shot,” he said, as the memories began rushing back.

  She nodded, and her eyes looked troubled.

  “You took care of me. You probably saved my life.”

  “No. I only applied pressure to the wound until the ambulance arrived. You risked your life and probably saved mine.”

  “It’s my job.”

  Her hand covered his. “No. It’s not. You’re not my personal secret service agent. And I’m grateful.”

  “My thigh hurts like the devil.”

  Paige nodded. “But you were lucky. The bullet went straight through, eight inches above your knee. It only hit muscle and tissue, but you’ve needed three minor surgeries.”

  “Is he awake?” Boyd’s voice reached them.

  “Yes, but the doctor wanted to be summoned as soon as he awoke,” Paige answered. “And he still needs to rest. No taxing his brain.”

  “No. I want to be briefed and then debriefed.” He tried to sit up straighter, but his head hurt like the devil.

  “You can’t. She’s right,” Boyd said. “I’ll get the doctor.”

  “I’m fine. I need to know what happened with the journal, Gerard, the immunity—”

  “What day is it, Alex?” Boyd interrupted him.

  “Tuesday.”

  “No, don’t—” Paige tried to stop Boyd.

  “It’s Saturday. You’ve—” Boyd continued.

  “Saturday!” Alex’s heart almost stopped.

  Paige glared at Boyd. “Too much, too soon.”

  “Why have I been out for so long? It’s only tissue and muscle!”

  “Strong pain meds, and one of them accidentally contained gluten, which made you sicker, and you also needed surgery.” Paige used a soothing voice to try to calm him down, but Alex began firing questions off at Boyd. He also tried to get up. Adrenaline could do wonders. He was sure he could find his clothes, put them on, and walk out the door.

  “Alex!” Paige’s hands came around his arms. “You’ve been floating in and out of consciousness for five days. You can’t just get up and go to work. If you promise to lie back down and take it easy, I’ll go get the doctor myself, and you two can talk about the case—but only until the doctor arrives.”

  Alex lay back. Mostly because a wave of nausea hit him. Not because he was keen on following her instructions. If anyone would’ve bothered to ask him, he’d have told them he didn’t do well with pain medication. He preferred never taking anything at all.

  “See?” she said, when he fell back onto the bed. But it was obvious she knew better than to try to get him to forget about the case, because she kept her promise and left.

  “She’s been here every day, between work and the kids. Glenn picked them up yesterday after school, and she’s been here ever since,” Boyd informed him.

  Alex’s chest began to hurt so much, he didn’t know what to do with the pain. “Let’s talk about the case.”

  “Do you want to hear my theory?”

  “About the case? Sure. I want to hear it all.”

  “About the woman you nicknamed ‘Perfect Paige.’ From the very beginning I knew your intense dislike stemmed from the fact that she showered everyone around her with everything you never had. It bugged you, because deep down inside, you wanted that.”

  Alex gritted his teeth. The effort hurt. “Boyd. Tell me about the case before my head explodes.”

  “Sure. I was gettin’ to it. Turns out, Gerard Galloway was the one who’d told Dr. Kumar that her bacteria could potentially be turned into a bioweapon. Dr. Kumar ran tests and was shocked to see that he was right. When her journal went missing, and he found out, she told him he’d been wrong, but he knew he’d been right. He knew it because he and Dr. Kumar have been having an affair for years and he knows her very well. He could tell she was lying.”

  Alex stared at Boyd. Unbelievable. How had they not figured that out? How had he not figured it out? “So Gerard knew Glenn had stolen the journal? Did Dr. Kumar know?”

  Boyd shook his head. “No. Gerard truly was worried about Dr. Kumar and her reputation. It seems she’s the only person he seems to love as much as he loves himself. He grilled Glenn hard and got him to admit he’d taken the journal, but he didn’t tell him the dangers associated with it. He warned him not to talk about it to us or to give it up, and he told him their best bet was to retrieve it and destroy it, so it couldn’t be used against him. Glenn had no choice but to agree, because his dad was paying the lawyer’s fees. They knew Glenn was being closely watched, so Gerard was going to use a neighbor’s car to make an attempt to get it back late at night, but Glenn learned the alarm was always set, and Gerard didn’t want to risk it. The next plan was for Glenn to try to get it back while he was picking up the kids, but he was never alone. Then you moved in, and Gerard decided to wait until the immunity session. The same neighbor helped him by lending him a car, and by pretending to want to buy Paige’s car and setting up the meeting to get her out of the house.”

  Alex closed his eyes. “It crossed my mind, you know. That it was strange the buyer of her car wanted to meet at the same day and time as the immunity session. I checked it out, but there was no real proof that it was anything other than a coincidence. And the meeting would be at a bank in a mall with a lot of foot traffic, her sister would be with her, and so I figured she’d be safe.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up. We had no way of knowing Gerard was involved, and even if we had, the danger was all back at the house, not at the bank.”

  “What about the immunity session? How did it go?”

  Boyd looked at him as if he was nuts. “It was canceled. You were shot, Alex. Everyone was worried sick. It’s been rescheduled, though, and it’ll be up to you as to whether the journal will be included or not. The fact that an agent was shot brought Headquarters into it. McGee is looking real bad. Gerard Galloway has been charged with accessory after the fact, and negligent discharge of a weapon is being looked into by the state. The media’s gotten wind of bits and pieces of it all, and they’re having a field day. Both state and federa
l agencies need your statement. That’s about it.”

  Alex took a moment to absorb it all before looking at Boyd again. He knew how the wheels turned. Gerard Galloway would most likely get off with a fine. “Did Glenn say why he hid the journal in Spinning Hills in the first place? And how he knew there was a hidden compartment under the sun medallion?” he wanted to know next.

  Boyd sat on the corner of the bed, shaking his head. “He said that Spinning Hills felt like his only option at the time, to get the journal as far away from him as possible. He thought about destroying it, but Dwight didn’t want to anger their buyer, in case they got through this whole thing, and Glenn didn’t want to anger Dwight. He tried Clyde Cupcake’s house, because it was the first story in the big fat smelly ghost book’s Spinning Hills chapter, but it was being renovated. He was short on time, so he flipped to the appendix, and everything else was there. Turns out, the Tudor was Mad Maddie’s sister’s house, built by the same builder. The appendix listed the secret compartments in both houses. Can you believe that Glenn found the expensive bottles of liquor there the day he hid the journal, and he took them home with him? He hid them in the liquor cabinet at his parents’ house. We didn’t even look twice at them during the raid.”

  “I believe it. It would have been impossible to know they were at all connected.”

  “Well, they rightfully belong to Sherry, Rosa, and Ruby, and they’ve decided to sell them and donate the proceeds to the rehab clinic where Paige works once they get them back.”

  Alex managed a smile at that. “How are they doing? It must’ve been shocking for them to learn that the journal had been there the whole time.”

  “Sherry was beating herself up, because she’d never bothered to read the appendix. Ruby now thinks Maddie haunts the sun medallion, too, because she knew her husband had hidden the most expensive liquor there and she didn’t want her sister to get in trouble. She held a séance. And Rosa beat Gerard and Glenn with her purse. We all looked the other way.”

  They both laughed at that, even though it hurt Alex to move.

  Boyd got up. “Anyway, we know why Paige went back to the Tudor, but we’ve been wanting to know how you figured it out. Sherry and Hope said you were already on your way back to the Tudor when they called.”

  “Stairway to the Stars.” The sun was the biggest star of them all. “Mad Madeline told me.” Alex didn’t believe in ghosts, but that would make for one hell of a story. “Inner knowledge leads to truth you seek,” Aunt Helga’s tarot reading had said. The answers had been there all along. One for the Russians.

  The doctor came in then, and Alex was now eager to talk to him. No more pain meds. He wanted out.

  * * *

  Early Sunday morning, sunlight streamed through the windows, wakening him from his slumber. He felt better, although it annoyed the hell out of him to know he’d need a wheelchair for a week, crutches for something like five weeks after that, and physical therapy for months. He didn’t have time for any of it. He assured the doctor that he’d recover in half the time.

  Paige was dozing off in the chair next to his bed, and he relaxed as he watched her. Glenn would bring Riley and Tyler home later that day, and she’d be gone. He’d be discharged tomorrow, and he’d be back to Cincinnati and his life before Spinning Hills.

  Glenn. That’s what he’d deal with next. The opportunity to choose the greater good in a judgment call, as Ruby had said. One for the gypsies.

  Glenn had never divulged the journal’s whereabouts, and he had, in fact, denied that he’d even had it until the very last moment, when he’d arrived at the session, minutes before word came in that Alex had been shot and Gerard had been caught with two smoking guns: the actual gun that shot him, and the journal.

  Alex’s life had been tied up for two weeks over that journal. Other pressing cases had taken a backseat. It wasn’t something he could easily dismiss.

  There was a whole lot more to it, though, and he couldn’t deny that Riley and Tyler would weigh in his decision. From now on, immediate family would always be part of the equation for him. It was what Boyd had tried to tell him. Ripple effects. Figuring out the greater good was messy and complicated; it involved weighing the reality of human nature, different personalities, the possibility of successful prosecution, and resources, and then pitting it all against justice; and it was often more than one lone man could take upon himself.

  But he knew what Boyd would do, and he now agreed.

  His thoughts turned to Paige. To Glenn’s wife. The idea made him clench his fist. It was something he kept struggling to remind himself of. Talk about justice and fairness.

  His thoughts kept getting away from him when it came to her, as if they were trying to get to something—something he kept resisting. But logic was beginning to fail him. It had no strength against emotion—always the stronger adversary. Something that had been missing in him had come alive and it could no longer be denied or suppressed.

  * * *

  Paige watched Alex. He was staring out into the distance, lost in thought, until she shifted and he looked her way. “Come here,” he said, reaching for her, and she got up to sit by him on the bed. Today was good-bye, but she didn’t know how this good-bye would go.

  Alex intertwined his fingers with hers, and they looked at each other for a long time. So much was happening under the surface. Her throat clogged with pain. Life was messed up. All these feelings for a good guy who was the most completely wrong guy.

  “This is good-bye, right?” he finally spoke.

  Paige nodded.

  “Why?”

  She looked down. “You know why . . . the case, the kids, what my ex did, who you are in all of this, your job, time . . .”

  “I know.” He sighed and lifted his free hand, wound it around the back of her neck, and kissed her lips once, softly. It was more emotional than physical. She felt it in her heart. “One last time,” he whispered. “We’ll say I was delirious.”

  If this was to be her last kiss in an Alex-free lifetime, it wasn’t enough. She lowered her mouth to his again. Alex’s fingers massaged her neck, pulling her closer in the most delicious way as he deepened the kiss. His lips parted, and she swept in. They breathed each other in, and sensations traveled everywhere. Alex delved deep with slow, drugging, intimate kisses, and she was lost for a while, until he pulled back and shocked her with the whispered words, “I love you.”

  “That’s impossible, Alex. You’re delirious again.” He held her eyes, and the knowledge of how much she’d miss that thoughtful gaze had her heart clenching hard. Confusing thoughts flitted in and out of her mind. He was delirious. Of course he was.

  He squeezed her hand. “I don’t expect you to say anything at all in return, or even to feel the same way. I know it’s only been two weeks, and there’s this whole mess around us, and it’s complicated as hell. But to me, all of that is irrelevant to how I feel about you. I’m not good with words, but the fact is, I’ve never connected with anyone like I connect with you. I’ll miss you like crazy. And I’ll miss Riley and Tyler. They’re good kids.” He smiled. “In fact, I’ll miss the whole lot of you. Even the town. And I can’t say good-bye without telling you that.”

  It hit her then, with such force that it filled her completely. She loved him, too. And he was right: Time and complications were irrelevant when it came to feelings. It made all the sense in the world that she’d fall in love with someone who cared so deeply and listened so fully, someone who’d opened himself up to her, and who had allowed her to open up, too, like she’d never opened up before. She’d had deeper and more meaningful conversations with him than she’d had with most people she’d known for years.

  And she could never have him. It was just too screwed up, even for her family.

  Chapter 16

  For the next six weeks, Alex threw his body and mind into everything he needed to accomplish. He wiped smug looks off of a few faces when he recovered in half the time, just like he’d said, and
was back at work in one week.

  Days were long and busy. Old cases were moving along at a satisfying clip, new cases were time-consuming and challenging, and his days were varied and always interesting.

  Problems only came at night, when he tried so hard not to think of Paige, her kids, and the entire damn town that he had trouble sleeping. It was Sherry, Ruby, and Rosa’s fault. They’d kept his number and texted him regularly with updates, always starting with “thought you might like to know . . .”

  News about Paige buying the house behind Sherry’s, a new, gluten-free section they were adding to the coffee shop, Riley joining a softball team, and news that went straight to his heart: Tyler’s youth football team had made it to the league championship.

  Silly thoughts about helping the ladies by taste-testing their new treats, teaching Riley a few team-building strategies, even though softball wasn’t his sport, and being there to watch Tyler’s last game from a distance didn’t help matters. It used to be he was able to ridicule warm and fuzzy thoughts and swat them away. Now he had to forcefully shove them away by filling his mind with all work all the time.

  Late one evening, Boyd sat on the corner of his desk, a file folder in his hand. “This pace you’re keeping isn’t reasonable or sustainable,” he said.

  “For you, it isn’t. You’ve got a wife and kids. I get that. But I’m free.”

  “Are you?”

  Alex tossed him a wary look, and Boyd stood up. “Go watch the kid’s championship game. If you leave now, you’ll make it.”

  “How do you know about the game?”

  “Alissa and I have had lunch at the café twice in the last six weeks. Alissa and the girls want their fortune told every which way, so we’ll likely be back for more.”

  Alex smiled, despite himself. “Go home, Boyd.”

  “Here. Read this over and tell me what you think, will you?” He threw the file folder onto the desk and left.

  Alex picked it up and opened it. The words, FBI Misconduct Relating to Informants, jumped out at him, and he cussed under his breath, not sure what Boyd was up to. He read the entire thing, and it lifted a burden he didn’t even know he had from his shoulders.