A Case of You

by Pamela Burford

  Scowling, Kit examined the tiny puncture mark on her deltoid. She took note of the fact that she was still breathing. Had she really gone through all that agony for nothing?

  “I’d carry you into the house to rest in comfort, but...” He touched a hand to his chest.

  “You seem to be doing all right for a man with two cracked ribs.”

  His eyebrows rose fractionally. “How did you—”

  “He told me.” She watched comprehension dawn on his face. “He told me something else. Tried to, anyway.” How easily she’d slipped into calling Noah’s alter ego “he,” as if the alternate personality really were a separate person.

  “Tried to?”

  “He says he can’t talk to you, but I can, so he wanted to give you a message through me.”

  “And...?”

  “And he never got the chance. You came back,” she said simply.

  He looked haunted, as if he were peering inside himself. “I didn’t think I’d be able to. It was only when he got distracted...”

  “The fireworks.”

  “Right. That’s when I was able to pull him back.” He stroked her face, brushed a lingering teardrop from the inside corner of her eye. “I didn’t think he could do that, Kit. Get away from me like that. Please forgive me. If I’d known, I’d never have...”

  “What?”

  She saw him struggle to put it into words. “I can control him, except when I’m with you. It must have something to do with... my feelings for you. How much you mean to me.” She was astounded. Humbled. After the ugly accusation implied by her refusal to let him give her a shot, here he was telling her he still cared for her. She remembered how he’d tried to talk to her at the cemetery, tried to explain who “he” was... and she hadn’t wanted to listen. Well, maybe the time had come to listen. Before she could voice the thought, sharp raps sounded at the door.

  “Hey, you guys still alive? You won’t believe what I made out here, man!”

  “We’ll be out in a minute, Bryan.” Noah reached for her jeans and sized them up. Taking his scissors, he cut right through both legs, above the blood-soaked tear. He stuffed the excess fabric into the garbage can. “Voilà. Cutoffs. Short ones!”

  He helped her slide off the table and then squatted to let her step into them. The sheer lace triangle of her string bikini was right in front of his face, and he openly stared at it as he slowly pulled the shorts up her legs and past the large white bandage. He rose, smiling suggestively, and slid them over her hips.

  “Don’t say it,” she warned, her face flaming. She felt his fingers graze her belly as he started buttoning her fly. His warm breath stirred her disheveled hair. If he stood any closer, her breasts would brush his chest.

  His eyebrows rose, all innocence. “Don’t say what?”

  “Whatever it is you were going to say about my panties, dammit!”

  “I’m a southern gentleman, remember? We southern gentlemen do not make rude comments about teeny-weeny little drawers you can see right through.” The fingers that had recently displayed such remarkable dexterity with the healing arts now took an inordinately long time buttoning her fly. “I figure I’ll let Bryan speak for both of us on the matter of the panties.”

  Lace. Yum. Kit dragged in a deep breath then, and sure enough, their chests collided. Noah’s eyes were dark... intense. He leaned forward fractionally, tormenting her tingling nipples, his fingers still poised on the top button of her fly. Slowly he lowered his head, angled his mouth to hers—

  The door shook under renewed blows. “Are you guys, like, doing it in there or what?”

  His lips a hairbreadth from hers, Noah swore quietly and stepped back. “Come on in, Bryan.”

  Chapter Ten

  KIT’S PALMS WERE slick on the steering wheel as she peered into the rearview mirror for the hundredth time. Even in the dark she knew it was the same car, same driver.

  Someone was following her. Again.

  She’d first noticed the nondescript gray Pontiac almost a week ago, after leaving Noah’s. He’d done a quick wound check two days after sewing her up. She was in and out of his busy office in about two minutes. When she’d driven down the gravel driveway and turned onto the road, she’d heard a car engine start. In hindsight she realized she must have caught him by surprise. He probably expected her doctor’s visit to take a lot longer.

  In her rearview she’d seen the car pull out from behind some overgrown foliage on the shoulder. Curious, she’d taken note of the driver, a burly youngish man with dark hair and an impressive tan. The Pontiac had stayed a healthy distance behind her on the hilly, twisting roads, allowing other vehicles to come between them. But it had always been there, if she looked hard enough. Only when she got close to Etta’s had he vanished.

  Then came her first exhilarating, exhausting week teaching at the Powell School, and she’d managed to convince herself the Pontiac was the product of her overactive imagination. Until last Wednesday, that is, when she’d stayed late to give one of her students extra help. Her shadow must have wondered what was keeping her the extra forty-five minutes. Maybe he was afraid he’d somehow missed her.

  When she was about to leave the building she looked out Hannah’s office window and saw the gray Pontiac, with Tan Man behind the wheel, enter the parking lot behind the school. Kit’s Corolla and Hannah’s Camry were the only cars still in the lot.

  “Hannah, do you know this guy?” Kit asked.

  Hannah joined her at the window. “Never seen him. Why?”

  Tan Man was already beating a hasty retreat. Had he been checking to see if her car was still there? The hairs on her nape stood at attention. “Well, I’ve seen him before, in Pratte.”

  “Is he bothering you? Do you want me to call the police?”

  “No... I’m probably just being paranoid. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Kit kept her eyes open as she drove toward Pratte. No sign of him. Still, something told her she wasn’t alone. When a concealing curve in the road loomed just ahead, she followed it around, then abruptly turned onto a private driveway obscured by dense shrubbery, pulled a U-turn, and waited. It wasn’t long before Tan Man passed in a blur of gray steel, clearly oblivious to Kit in her impromptu observation post. But she was under no illusion that she’d lost him for good. In the days since, he’d faded into the background once more, but she knew he was there.

  She didn’t even consider going to Chief Jordon with this. He hadn’t taken her seriously so far. He wasn’t about to start now. No, her only option at this point was to gather what evidence she could, on her own, then drop it in the arrogant cretin’s lap as if it were all his idea.

  There was no way to know how long Tan Man had been following her. For all she knew, it could have started with her arrival in Pratte three weeks earlier. She could almost deal with having her belongings searched. This was a far more intimate invasion, to her way of thinking, an encroachment on her personal space, her privacy. On her sense of security, dammit.

  And as bad as it had been to notice this guy in broad daylight, it was infinitely worse to be driving home at one in the morning, on deserted, unlit roads, and suddenly realize she wasn’t as alone as she’d thought. Not that he’d been that obvious. But she’d been wary and watchful for so many days, it had become second nature to look for him.

  Tonight she’d attended a bachelorette party in a neighboring town for one of the other teachers, after having gone to Noah’s to have her stitches removed earlier in the day. That visit, like the wound check, had been a perfunctory, no-nonsense affair. She’d been one of many patients in the waiting room. Other than those two office visits, they hadn’t seen each other during the past hectic week.

  Absently she reached for her thigh, and had to force herself not to scratch the healing wound. Instead she wiped her clammy palm on the skirt of her gauzy dress, one eye on the rearview mirror. As she entered the outer limits of Pratte at last, she commanded herself to relax. Her escort would probably disa
ppear as soon as she got near Etta’s, just like that last time. Then she’d be home and safe and...

  All alone in that rambling old boardinghouse. She groaned, remembering the house was empty. Etta was visiting her daughter in Boston for the weekend. She’d taken Malcolm, her surrogate son, with her. In the landlady’s absence, there were no other boarders aside from Kit. She barked out a string of curses, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the dark interior of her car, further rattling her.

  She lowered her speed as she neared Etta’s, her eyes more on the mirror than the road. True, she couldn’t see his headlights at the moment, so she supposed she should be breathing a sigh of relief, but she couldn’t ignore a prickling sense of unease.

  As she crested the last hill before Etta’s place, she decided to test her instincts with a variation on that little trick she’d pulled last Wednesday. Instead of driving another hundred yards and turning right at the boardinghouse, she swung left at the bottom of the hill, onto a private road leading to a neighbor’s farm. An immediate right onto a narrow dirt driveway put her behind a small storage building set close to the road.

  She cut the motor and the lights, then stepped out of the car and walked to the end of the shed, where she could observe the road. There were no street lamps, but a fat gibbous moon provided adequate light. Night sounds surrounded her—crickets trilling, leaves murmuring in the breeze, an unseen creature darting out of her path—but she barely heard them over the roar of her pulse. From her concealed location she could see Etta’s driveway farther down the road, and just make out the house behind the trees. She’d left the outside lights on.

  After a couple of minutes that seemed like a mosquito-slapping, ankle-scratching eternity, she started to turn back to her car when slowly approaching headlights froze her to the spot. She squinted at the vehicle. Yep, it was the gray Pontiac, all right. The car passed her hiding place, then slowed to a crawl when it came abreast of Etta’s. Red brake lights glowed, telling her Tan Man was peering into the parking area. The empty parking area. The car stopped. Now he knew she wasn’t home.

  She’d given him the slip—again—and he wouldn’t know what to make of that. She had to be careful. She didn’t want him to realize he’d been “made.” Somehow she figured she was safer that way.

  The Pontiac drove away, and she couldn’t tell whether he kept on driving or turned off the road somewhere to keep an eye on the house. How was she supposed to go home now, to Etta’s, knowing this guy was probably lying in wait somewhere, watching for her arrival?

  He knew she was alone in the house.

  She slid back into her car. Locked the doors. Rolled up the windows against the night sounds and the cool, damp night air, and the suntanned man in the gray Pontiac. Her decision made in a heartbeat, she turned the key in the ignition.

  *

  ANITA STARED UP at him from where she sat hunched on the kitchen floor, her face unnaturally flushed, her eyes glazed with pain and terror. Hideous wheezing filled his ears.

  “Noah...”

  He knelt next to her and opened his medical bag. “I’m here, honey. Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon “ From his bag he quickly extracted what he’d need: syringe, needle, a vial of clear liquid labeled Adrenalin, the trade name for epinephrine.

  “Noah, hurry... please...”

  An alien sensation tugged at the edges of his awareness as he prepared the needle and began to fill the syringe. Something wasn’t right. He looked at Anita.

  “I need you, Noah,” she said, her voice strangely distant. “Wake up. Come to the window.”

  His eyes shot open as his chest expanded on a deep, reviving lungful of air. Then he was breathing like a sprinter, hard and fast, blinking at the familiar murky shadows of his bedroom. He started to drag all ten fingers through his hair and stopped short. Anita had called him—

  “Noah...”

  He jerked upright in bed, his heartbeat drumming in his ears. It was Kit! He threw off the sheet and lunged to the window. There she was, on the back lawn, hugging herself, peering up at him. Her face and dress seemed to glow in the moonlight, like an angel. Only, this angel’s voice shook, and her wide eyes darted at every noise.

  “Thank God,” she said. “I need you, Noah.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  Since he slept in the nude, he hastily pulled on the pair of running shorts he’d tossed on a chair last night and raced downstairs. Within seconds he was through the back door and the porch and then she was in his arms, trembling violently. He wrapped himself around her in a bone-crushing hug. Her body felt immeasurably delicate pressed against his own, enclosed in the haven of his embrace. It didn’t matter at that moment what had frightened Kit. It only mattered that she’d come to him. That she needed him. Him. Never in his life had he felt this way, ferociously protective. The impact of it awed him, shook him to the core.

  He buried his face in the fragrant cloud of her hair and whispered a soothing litany of reassurance. She began to apologize. “Shh...” he said, stroking her hair, her back. She seemed to sag against him, as if giving herself over to his care, and his chest swelled painfully with the need to keep her safe.

  And with the knowledge that as long as she was with him, she could never be safe.

  “Come on,” he murmured, steering her toward the porch steps. Max greeted them as they entered the house, tail wagging excitedly, and Noah shooed him away. Kit clung to his hand with both of hers as they made their way through the dark interior of the house to the cozy back parlor with its enormous bay window. Not wanting to turn on a lamp, he led her to the long, wide window seat, now awash in cool moonlight. He propped a couple of tasseled pillows in one corner and leaned back, pulling her down, urging her to curl up next to him. She did, kicking off her shoes and tucking her bare feet under her, her arm sliding around his waist, her head settling on his bare chest.

  It felt so natural, so right, holding her like this, feeling the warmth of her body tucked against his, the teasing caress of her breath on his skin. He could almost believe they could stay like this forever. That she could belong to him forever. It was a bittersweet fantasy.

  “What happened?” he said at last.

  She shivered and pressed closer to him. “Someone’s following me.”

  His breath snagged in his throat. “Are you sure?”

  She nodded against his chest, and he didn’t grill her further. If this smart, levelheaded woman said she was being followed, she was being followed.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “I first noticed him a week ago. I don’t know when it started.”

  Probably about the same time her room was searched, he surmised. “Someone’s waiting for you to locate Jo’s computer disk,” he said. “They hired a goon to keep tabs on you.”

  “That’s what I figure.”

  His arms tightened around her. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “What would you have done?” She lifted her head to look up at him.

  Make you go back to Chicago, where you’re safe. He said nothing.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, reading his mind. She dropped her head back to his chest.

  A low growl of exasperation escaped him. Arguing was pointless. He’d have to gag and hog-tie her to get her back to Chicago before this thing was cleared up.

  She said, “If all they want is the disk, I don’t think I’m in any danger, really.”

  Until you find it, he thought. “What happened tonight?”

  “I was at a party for Sandy, the first-grade teacher. She’s getting married next week. I left there a little after twelve-thirty.”

  “And you realized the guy was following you.”

  “Right.”

  He heard her swallow hard. He thought about her all alone on those dark, lonely roads with some creep after her, and he had to restrain the urge to put his fist through something.

  “Who is this guy?” he asked. “What kind of car does he drive?”
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  “A gray Pontiac. Grand Am. He’s kinda young. Dark hair. Deep suntan. That’s all I know. I drove straight to Etta’s and he was still with me and... and it’s empty. The house, I mean. It’s just me there this weekend.”

  “You did the right thing coming here. Did he follow you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He almost wished he had. Noah itched to drag the bastard out of his car and sic Ray on him. On purpose. Like that time in New York.

  He couldn’t see her face, but he felt her take a deep breath. “Can I stay here tonight?” she asked.

  “You think I’d let you leave?” He was about to tell her she was safe here, in his home, but the words wouldn’t come. And she, of all people, would know it for the lie it was. Reluctantly he acknowledged that Kit’s seeking sanctuary here, with him, was an act of desperation. An act she probably already regretted.

  “I’ll give you my room,” he said. When she began to object, he cut her off. “It’s the only bedroom that’s made up. And there’s no way in hell I’d let a woman crash on some dusty old mattress or sofa while I sleep in comfort.”

  He felt her smile against his bare chest. “The southern gentleman in you is showing.” She raised her head and turned that smile on him. Dear God, she took his breath away. Had she always been this beautiful? Or was it a trick of the moon... of this magic night when she’d come to him and said, I need you, Noah? Tenderly he brushed a strand of hair from her face, letting the silk of it whisper through his fingers.

  “I can sleep anywhere,” she assured him. “When I was growing up, I had to make do with a rump-sprung sofa and a moth-eaten afghan.”

  “Till you moved in with Jo.”

  Her bottomless dark eyes softened. “Yeah,” she whispered. “Till Jo.”

  His gaze was drawn to her wide, soft mouth and that fragile smile, fading too quickly under the lash of her memories. So he did the only thing he could. He bent his head and took that smile. Captured it with his mouth and drew it into himself and held it close. And paid homage to her gift with the cherishing caress of his lips on hers. Only when he felt her tentative response did awareness slam into him.