“Pulse is strong,” Kelly reported.
“You should also know,” Joe continued, “that he was in the hospital for some kind of head injury not too long ago.”
Kelly looked at Joe. “It would probably be a good idea,” she agreed, “if Tom were to fill me in on the details of his previous injury, as well as exactly what happened tonight. But that’s up to him.” She turned to Tom. “Regardless of what you do or don’t decide to tell me, I’d like to talk to you privately. You feel up to tackling the stairs to the second floor?”
“No problem,” Tom lied. This was it. If he could stand up and walk up the stairs without falling on his face, all talk about dragging him to the ER would probably stop.
He stood and the world shifted slightly. “Mind if I take a quick shower first?” he asked Kelly, trying to draw her attention away from the fact that he wasn’t quite as steady as he’d thought, that he was holding on to the back of his chair.
“Nope.” She didn’t miss a thing. “As long as you think you’re up to it. I’ll be up in five minutes.”
She followed him out into the hall, as did Joe, and watched him every step up the stairs.
Finally, he reached the top and he looked down at her. He’d started to sweat again, but she was too far away to see that. “Ta da,” he said.
Or maybe she wasn’t too far away. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Don’t lock the bathroom door. You’ve got five minutes. Be out of the shower by then or I’m coming in after you.”
“That a threat—or a promise?” he asked.
God, what was he doing, saying something like that to Kelly? He’d meant to disarm her, to draw her attention away from the fact that climbing the stairs had damn near wrung the last of his energy from him. It was a tactic that had worked for him with female doctors and nurses in the past, designed to fluster and embarrass.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “That was . . . That wasn’t very nice. I beg your pardon.”
He beat a quick retreat before he could say or do anything else stupid.
Kelly took a deep breath as she stood outside of Tom’s bedroom door.
Mallory had described the way she’d found Tom staggering through the carnival, as if he were drunk or high. He’d started to come around as Joe had helped bring him into the cottage, and apparently his first coherent words once he was home were “No hospital, no doctors.”
When Tom realized Mal thought he was on drugs, he’d been quick to offer up the explanation of a relatively recent head injury and hospitalization, which had placated Mallory but sent Joe into a tizzy.
Throughout all this, at least after Kelly had made the scene, Charles hadn’t coughed once. His color was good and he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, the old sadist. Or maybe it was being needed. Apparently Joe had awakened Charles, asking for his help.
She’d have to keep that in mind. But right now she had to deal with Tom “No hospital, no doctors” Paoletti. She had to approach him as a friend, with the medical knowledge of a doctor, and convince him to go to a hospital. Not necessarily tonight—the fact that he was alert and coherent kept it from being a dire emergency—but certainly first thing tomorrow.
Kelly squared her shoulders and knocked on Tom’s door.
“It’s open.”
She turned the doorknob, and there she was, about to step inside, invited into Tom’s bedroom for the first time in her life.
There he was, too. Sitting on his bed in a pair of shorts and a fresh T-shirt, looking like a dream come true, all hard muscles and heavy-lidded eyes, his hair damp from his shower.
He watched expressionlessly as she came in and closed the door behind her.
Her heart was pounding as she glanced around the room she knew so well from her days of tree-house spying. It looked different from this perspective. Less exotic. Less mystical. His desk was small and bare. His dresser was freshly painted a gleaming white, his reading glasses, his wallet, a handful of change, and a comb on top. His closet door was tightly shut, his towel hanging on the outside knob. There was nothing on the floor besides his duffel bag in the corner—no clothes, no pile of books.
This wasn’t his room anymore. It was just a room he stayed in while he visited. She knew what that was like.
“Feel any better?” she asked.
He moved his head noncommittally.
God, she was nervous. She was used to patients she could charm with a stuffed animal or a funny hat. She was used to patients who didn’t have hair on their chests.
Patients she didn’t have a crush on.
She just had to be direct. To the point. “Who do you want me to be right now, Tom? Dr. Ashton? Or your friend Kelly?”
He smiled at that, a flash of those impossibly adorable dimples. “Are the two really separable?”
“No, not really. But while Dr. Ashton would politely pull up a chair and probably get nowhere in finding out what’s going on with you, Kelly would sit Indian style on the end of your bed and stay until she wrestled the truth from you.”
“That could take all night,” he said.
Kelly sat on the end of his bed. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
He looked over at her sharply as she flashed hot and then cold. Oh, God, had she really said that? What was she doing? Was she actually hitting on a man who’d barely been able to climb a flight of stairs on his own? Tom needed her, and this couldn’t be helping. She stood up again. “Sorry. Wow. Bad timing, huh?”
He was laughing incredulously. “Holy God. Are you, like . . .” He laughed again, shaking his head slightly. “You can’t be . . . serious, right?”
Kelly couldn’t stand the fact that he was laughing at her, and her embarrassment was replaced by a surge of indignation. “Why can’t I be serious? I’ve always found you . . .”
Oh, good grief, what was she saying? Her college roommate had had a word for men like Tom. Fuckable. Kelly and Evie had spent many nights near-hysterical with laughter, compiling a top ten list of men—mostly movie stars—who were one hundred percent fuckable. Which meant, they’d decided, that they’d fall into the arms and beds of any of those men without question, without comment, without objection. It was pure animal attraction, pure lust, pure sex.
Not that either of them had ever done such a thing. Not even close. Evie had been as cautious as Kelly when it came to men. But it had been fun to pretend to be so daring and bold.
And Tom Paoletti had been in Kelly’s top ten every single time. He wasn’t the kind of man a woman should dare to love. She’d learned that too well, all those years ago. But as far as that other verb went . . .
Kelly pretended to be engrossed in the view from his windows. She could see the tree that held her tree house from one, see her own bedroom balcony from the other. So this was what it looked like from here.
“You’ve always found me what?” Tom asked.
Oh, drat. “I suppose it’s too late to say never mind.”
He laughed. “Well, yeah. Unless this is a new doctoring technique. Giving the patient renewed will to live by increasing levels of curiosity and frustration.”
She turned to face him. “I’m here as your friend, not your doctor. I don’t want to be your doctor.”
“Great, then sit down.” When she started for the chair that was over by his desk, he added, “Over here. Friend.”
He was watching her with those incredible Paoletti eyes, those windows to that wild Paoletti soul. The heat she could see in them was off the chart and she nearly tripped on the throw rug.
It was like some kind of challenge, as if he were testing her to see just how real her vague, almost come-on had been.
So she sat on his bed. Not as far away from him as she could be, but not too close, either.
“You’ve always found me to be . . .” he said again.
“Extremely attractive,” she said briskly. “Big deal. You know what you look like. Let’s drop this, okay? Tell me about your injury. What happened? How’d you end up in the hospit
al?”
He was silent for a moment, just looking at her. But then he nodded as if he’d made up his mind to tell her the truth.
“All right. I was on an op with my Troubleshooters, the SO squad from Team Sixteen,” he said. “These guys are the best, the elite of an already elite organization. I can’t tell you where we were. I can’t tell you what we were doing. All I can say is, we ended up clusterfucked—if you’ll pardon the expression. Trust me, it’s exactly what it sounds like. And once things started going wrong, they kept going wrong.”
He told her about the helicopter going down, about the blast that had sent him flying.
“Actually,” he added with a smile, “that was the okay part. It was landing that caused the problem. Let’s just say my dismount needs work.”
God, he could actually joke about it. “Where did you hit?” she asked.
“Where didn’t I hit?” he countered, then relented. “Like I said, I don’t remember much of it, but apparently I came down pretty hard on the left front of my head. I fractured my left temporal bone.”
Kelly moved closer. “I know I did this downstairs, but . . . do you mind?”
Tom shook his head, and she reached up, gently touching his head, lightly at first then a little bit harder. Now that she was looking, she could see the tiny red scar from his surgery. It was so small, it was almost invisible. “Let me know if anything hurts,” she murmured.
“It’s mutual, you know,” he said suddenly. “This attraction thing.”
His face was about five inches from hers, his leg close enough for her to feel his body heat. His gaze dropped to her mouth for several long seconds, and Kelly knew it. This was it. After waiting for a lifetime, Tom Paoletti was finally going to kiss her again.
“It’s extremely mutual,” he said again. And then he pulled back, away from her. “But there’re a few more details you need to understand before this goes any further.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “I was in a coma for weeks, this injury could well be career ending, and I think I’m losing my mind, big time.”
For weeks he was in a coma? . . .
“I’ve been seeing this guy,” he said. “And I don’t know if he’s real or if he’s some paranoid figment caused by—” He choked on the words. “—brain damage from my injury. He’s called the Merchant. He’s a terrorist, Kelly.”
He was watching for her reaction, and she knew she gave him a big one there. “A terrorist. You mean, like, a terrorist?”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It sounds nuts.”
“Tom, are you—”
“I need to tell you all of it,” he said. “Just let me get it all out, and then if you have any questions . . .”
Kelly nodded. Fair enough. A terrorist . . .
She listened as he told her about the Merchant, a man who delivered death for money. The Paris embassy bombing in ’96 was apparently his handiwork. Tom had been part of a team sent to catch him.
“I lived and breathed him for months, preparing to go up against him. It was like a government approved obsession,” he told her. “My team studied the son of a bitch until we’d be able to recognize him in a dark room at midnight while wearing blindfolds. I knew him so well, Kelly, I swear, I could think like the bastard—anticipate his every move. When his cell—his team—was tracked to England, we moved in, ready to take him down. We would’ve, too, if we could have operated without the restrictions from the bureaucrats. Instead, it was a goatfuck. Again, excuse me.”
Kelly laughed despite herself, despite the seriousness of what he was telling her. “A goatfuck this time. Is that better or worse than a clusterfuck?”
“It’s messier.” Tom’s smile was rueful. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to offend you. That language just kind of slips out when I talk about this shit.” He winced. “Sorry.”
“Do I look offended?”
His gaze was almost palpable. “You look . . .” He shook his head, looking away, exhaling a burst of air. “I’ve got to tell you the rest of this before . . .” He cleared his throat. “We went in—badly—and the shooting started almost immediately. That’s my definition of a goat, you know, fuck. When the shooting starts. SEALs operate very quietly. We’re trained to insert and extract covertly. No one knows we’re there until long after we’re gone—if then. But once you start firing an MP4 submachine gun, people tend to notice you. Our plan was to go in and grab the Merchant silently. I don’t even know what went wrong—who started shooting first—but suddenly we were in the middle of a firefight. And the Merchant ran. The bastard escaped.
“According to allegedly reliable sources, he was seriously injured. And when he dropped out of sight—and it’s been years since anyone’s heard anything from him—a lot of people presumed he’d died.”
“But not you.”
“I try not to make a habit of ever presuming anything.” Tom rubbed his forehead as if his head was hurting badly again. “So okay. Here I am. Years later. In the middle of an entirely new clusterfuck. The helo goes down, and the blast knocks me on my head. I come to a few minutes later, and even though I’ve got a headache from hell, I figure everything’s cool, I can stand up, I remember my name—I’m going to be okay.”
“The lucid interval,” Kelly said softly. Even with extremely severe head injuries, there tended to be some amount of time, as much as an hour or two, before internal bleeding caused coma.
“Exactly. And right on schedule, a few hours later, my vision’s tunneling. I’m checking out. My XO, Jazz Jacquette, literally carries me to safety, but it’s fifteen hours before I hit the nearest ER, and by that time, I’m in a pretty deep coma. Apparently, there was both epidural and subdural hemorrhages putting pressure on my brain. The surgeon drills a little hole in my skull, drains whatever needs to be drained, ties off whatever needs to be tied off, monkeys around in there, doing God knows what. A few weeks later, I wake up.”
A few weeks? God, he was lucky.
“And I’m the miracle man, because everything still works. There’s no apparent brain damage. I can talk, I can walk, I can read and write. I remember just about everything—there’s no huge chunk of my life missing. I go through all the tests with flying colors. Except for one. And it wasn’t even a real test.”
He’d pushed himself back so that he was leaning against the headboard of his bed, and he sat there now, with his elbows on his knees, head in his hands.
“First day back on CONUS,” Tom told her, “that’s Continental United States, in Navyspeak—I have a little run-in with a rear admiral who was trying to downsize and eliminate Team Sixteen.” He shifted, resting his head back against the wall. “I got a little too angry.”
He told her evenly about the psych evaluations, the medical reports, the conclusion that his injury had caused his aggressive behavior, the required convalescent leave. Kelly knew it wasn’t easy for him to tell her any of this.
“When I go back, I’ve got to convince the Navy shrinks and doctors that I’m up to speed or else it’s thank you very much and welcome back to the civilian world, Mr. Paoletti,” he said. “I came here believing that my career is riding on my ability to get mentally healthy over the next thirty days.”
Tom sat forward, gazing directly into her eyes. “But now that I’ve started spotting international terrorists in Baldwin’s Bridge, I’m wondering if I’m suffering from some kind of weird injury-related paranoia. For the first time in my life, I’m doubting myself, Kelly.” His voice broke, and he faltered. “I need to know if I’m fit for command, or if my career’s over.”
Kelly didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to do. But he wasn’t finished.
“I’m telling you this for a couple of reasons,” he continued. “Obviously, I need to find a doctor I can trust—someone I can have faith in to be dead honest with me about what’s going on here. Also obviously, after tonight, I need another CAT scan, to find out if something’s started bleeding inside my head again. I doubt it, but I have to make sure. I need to f
ind out more about this paranoia crap, too. I need to know what the hell’s real and what’s not.”
He took a deep breath, letting it out in a rush. “Okay. Lecture’s over. Any questions from the captive audience?”
Questions. God. She had about four thousand.
“Terrorists,” Kelly said. “Plural. You said you’ve spotted terrorists—more than one?”
“Oh, yeah, tonight’s bullshit.” He winced. “Sorry.”
“I know the word,” she told him. “I’ve even used it upon occasion. I’ve used the other words, too, and . . . Just tell me what happened tonight.”
He did, in that matter-of-fact, reporter-dry manner, as if his career, his life weren’t on the verge of destruction. The convenience store. The man with the eyeball tattoo on his hand. It was pretty gutsy to mark his people so visibly on the hand, but that was always part of this Merchant’s deal. Apparently, just seeing that tattoo was enough to make most people scared to death.
As Tom went on, Kelly closed her eyes, picturing him running after a man on a bike, just a short time out of the hospital after a near-fatal head injury. He described the dizziness, the tunnel vision that had hit him at the carnival.
“All of a sudden, I realize I’m in a crowd of people who’ve all got the Merchant’s mark on the back of their hands. It was like a nightmare, Kelly. For a minute, I was sure I’d gone completely insane.”
His hands were shaking, just from recounting it, and Kelly couldn’t help herself. She reached out and held on to him.
“And then I realized,” he told her, his voice barely more than a whisper, “it wasn’t a tattoo. It was a hand stamp from the carnival. I can only assume that the guy in the Honey Farms—that the mark on his hand was from the carnival, too. I see one thing, and my mind turns it into something else. Something sinister. Sounds pretty goddamned paranoid, huh?” His voice shook. “If that’s the case, then Admiral Tucker’s right in wanting me gone. There’s no room for me in the SEAL teams.”
He’d been holding her hand tightly, but just like that, he loosened his grip. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to get all weird on you.”
The Unsung Hero Page 21
