The Doctor's Guardian

by Marie Ferrarella

  “If you say so,” he muttered.

  “I say so,” Nika responded with feeling.

  Her heart ached for him and she couldn’t even put into words why.

  Arriving at the hospital, Nika lost no time hurrying to the Geriatrics Unit. Her heart pounded all the way there.

  Mr. Peters was still in his room. When she walked in, at first glance, the old man looked as if he was just sleeping. But Death had a way of removing a victim’s personality, of making their features sink in just enough to announce that he had been by, and had taken their soul.

  Moved, Nika took the old man’s cold hand in hers, lacing her fingers through digits that were growing stiff. Rigor was setting in, she noted, which meant that he hadn’t been dead all that long.

  Could she have prevented it? If she’d come by, instead of making a note to get back to him when she could, would he be alive this moment?

  “Oh, Mr. Peters, I am so very sorry,” she whispered to the man who could no longer hear. “Sorry I didn’t get you out of here when I talked to you today.”

  Her mind continued to torture her. Had he died in that window of time when she should have been here, but was in the operating room instead? Right now, she didn’t know. All she knew was that she ached and felt horribly guilty.

  As if reading her thoughts, Cole stepped closer to her until he was all but her shadow. “It’s not your fault,” he told her firmly.

  “If I’d stayed, if I’d been in the room with him, whoever it was who did this wouldn’t have been able to get to him.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “And maybe whoever’s doing this would have waited for you to leave and then come in to end Mr. Peters’s life.” An idea came to him. “Was he suffering?”

  “Mr. Peters? Outside of regular aches and pains, I’d say that he was suffering emotionally more than physically.”

  She’d piqued his interest. “How so?”

  “He didn’t want to go back to the nursing home,” she repeated. “It made him feel as if he was useless, that he’d been thrown away by his family and society in general.” Maybe she’d call her mother tonight, Nika thought. Just to touch base and let the woman know that she was loved.

  Nika looked around the man’s bed to double-check. There were no IV drips. There never had been in his case. So death had to have been delivered to him via another method.

  Very gently, as if he could still feel her fingers, she spread the lids of one of his eyes apart just enough to examine the white region. There was no redness, no sign of broken blood vessels, which would have indicated that he’d been smothered or deprived of oxygen in some other fashion.

  “What are you doing?” Cole asked as she straightened up again and began to perform a quick examination of the victim’s skin.

  “Looking for marks.”

  She didn’t have to look long. There was a small, almost imperceptible hole in the old man’s right inner thigh. It was located directly at the site of a major artery.

  It was, she concluded, that exact site that Death had entered and found Joshua Peters.

  Chapter 11

  “What’s all the commotion out there?” Ericka Baker asked the moment Nika and Cole walked into her room.

  Since she was here, Nika had decided to look in on the woman right after she’d signed off on Joshua Peters. She was afraid that Cole’s grandmother might have heard about the latest death and grown apprehensive. Stress wasn’t going to help lower the woman’s blood pressure.

  Ericka’s question made it obvious that no one had told the elderly woman anything.

  “Just someone checking out of the hospital,” Nika replied evasively. Her eyes met Cole’s. She saw the all but imperceptible nod. He approved of her vague answer.

  Ericka frowned. Her eyes darted suspiciously from her doctor to her grandson. “At this hour?”

  “It just worked out that way,” Cole told her, relieved that the curtain to her room had been drawn all this time.

  “Wish someone would take me home,” Ericka grumbled. Her frown deepened as she looked expectantly at her grandson. “The food’s terrible here and the service—” She sighed deeply before continuing. “Sometimes I have to wait five, maybe ten minutes before anyone shows up when I press that damn buzzer.” She nodded at the nurse’s call button.

  Nika smiled at her. The nurses prided themselves on their quick response time at Patience Memorial. “That’s not waiting, that’s a blink of an eye.”

  “Easy for you to say.” Ericka waved a blue-veined hand at her. “You’ve got time. For all I know, all I’ve got left is ‘a blink of an eye.’”

  Nika patted Ericka’s bony shoulder lightly. “You’re going to live to see your great-grandchildren.”

  Ericka’s eyes shifted over toward her grandson. “Not if I have to wait for him to make a move.” And then, just like that, the woman’s eyes lit up. It was like watching the birth of an idea, Nika thought. Ericka’s eyes shifted back to her. “Didn’t you say that you weren’t with anyone?”

  A person with the IQ of a shoelace could see where this was going, but Nika played along. “Yes, I did.”

  “How about my grandson?” Ericka propositioned boldly.

  “G.” Cole didn’t raise his voice, but the warning note was nonetheless evident in his voice.

  Ericka waved her hand at him, dismissing his unspoken protest. She continued staring at Nika pointedly. “Do you think he’s good-looking?” she asked.

  Paraphrasing a line out of The Wizard of Oz, a movie both he and his late brother had watched countless times during their brief childhood, Cole intoned, “Pay no attention to the woman in the bed.”

  He was doing a masterful job hiding his embarrassment, but Nika could sense it and couldn’t help being just the slightest bit amused by his dilemma. She’d been on the receiving end of this kind of a scene more than once, listening to her mother despair about her ever getting married. She liked seeing this human side to Cole and she knew exactly how he had to be feeling.

  “Yes,” she replied, managing to keep a straight face, “I think he’s good-looking.”

  Cole’s grandmother nodded, pleased. It was obvious to Nika that she had just passed some kind of test and progressed to the next level.

  “You’re a not-bad-looking young woman,” Ericka continued. Her thin lips pulled back into a knowing smile. “You two would make very pretty babies.”

  Okay, he’d been the dutiful grandson long enough. He was drawing the line before G offered the doctor five horses and a mule to take him off her hands.

  “That’s enough, G,” he told her sternly.

  “Well, you would,” Ericka protested, annoyed at the interruption. “And at my age, I deserve to see my great-grandchild before I kick the bucket. You’re not getting any younger, either, you know, Coleman,” she declared tersely.

  Time to cut this short, Nika thought. “There’ll be no buckets kicked on my watch, young lady,” Nika informed Cole’s grandmother, then changed the subject. “I think that your blood pressure will be down sufficiently enough for Dr. Chase to operate on you in the next couple of days, and we can get back to addressing the reason why you’re here in the first place.” Finished, Nika offered the woman an encouraging smile.

  “Yeah, to make you and the other doctors all fat and rich,” Ericka grumbled.

  Cole looked at Nika and she could have sworn she saw an apology in his eyes. He came closer to his grandmother’s bed.

  “G, were you always this sunny and happy and I just didn’t notice, or is this behavior something new?” he asked the woman.

  “You try lying around in a hospital all day and see if you wind up being all smiles and happiness by the end of the day. Day? Hell, boy, you wouldn’t last until noon,” she pronounced with a quick, firm bob of her head.

  “No,” he agreed. He’d never done waiting well. It was a given. “You’re right, I wouldn’t. You’re definitely a better man than I am, G.”

  Ericka raised her chin, proud to
have won that round. “And don’t you forget it,” she retorted, crossing her arms before her as if to seal the argument. “What are you doing here anyway?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Did she call you and tell you to come? Am I dying?” she demanded. Throwing back her shoulders like a young recruit, she told him, “If I’m dying, I have a right to know.”

  Nika placed a calming hand on the woman’s wrist, drawing Ericka’s attention back to her. “Do you feel like you’re dying?”

  The question took some of the wind out of Ericka’s sails. “No.”

  “Then you’re not dying,” Nika assured her. “You’d be the first to know if you were. You know your body a lot better than anyone else does.”

  Ericka blew out a breath, clearly annoyed. “They pay you for that kind of advice?”

  “Yes,” Nika deadpanned.

  “Do they pay you well?” Ericka pressed, her sharp, hawklike eyes pinning her down.

  Nika smiled. “No, not really.” She was earning a mere forty thousand a year for working herself to the bone on twenty minutes sleep a night. At least, it felt as if she was only getting twenty minutes’ sleep. Maybe it was thirty-five.

  The answer pleased Ericka and she nodded her head. “I can understand why.”

  “Be nice, G,” Cole instructed.

  Her head snapped around in order for her to look at him. “This is nice.”

  “Right,” he agreed fondly. “I forgot.”

  Nika and Cole remained in his grandmother’s room for another fifteen minutes. Though she struggled to remain awake, Ericka lost that battle and dropped off to sleep. The moment she did, they slipped out of her room like two teenagers bent on breaking curfew without getting caught.

  When they were in the hallway, Cole struggled for a moment, searching for the words, before he apologized. “I’m sorry about my grandmother.”

  The apology surprised her. If asked, Nika would have said that the man didn’t know how to apologize. She found that she liked these softer traits that she was being allowed to glimpse. It meant that the man had more than looks and brains going for him. She found his affection for his grandmother incredibly appealing.

  As if he wasn’t already.

  “Don’t be,” Nika told him. “I’ve put up with a lot worse, trust me. Your grandmother’s kind of cute in her own unique way.” She was aware of Cole looking at her. More than looking, he seemed to be studying her. Her skin began to tingle. This was becoming a habit. “What?”

  He shook his head, shoving his hands into his pockets. “Nothing. Just trying to see if your nose was going to grow, that’s all.”

  He didn’t believe her, she thought, amused.

  “I really have connected with worse,” she assured him. “Your grandmother’s just frustrated. I can’t say I blame her. Most people hate being confined and restricted. She’s a feisty lady who likes calling her own shots. She can’t do that in the hospital. She feels as if she’s at the mercy of whoever’s on duty. That kind of thing makes her curt and abrupt.”

  “And you like dealing with people like that?”

  Nika never hesitated. “Yes.”

  That didn’t make any sense to him. He wasn’t a people person to begin with, but if he were, all things being equal, these wouldn’t be the kind of people he would have chosen to be around. “Why?”

  “For the most part, these people have worked all their lives, given of themselves and asked for little or nothing in return beyond a paycheck. That kind of sacrifice earns them the right to be treated with dignity and respect. They deserve to feel that their opinions still count, that they can have some kind of say when it comes to managing their own lives.”

  Her smile broadened. “And, like I said, I like hearing stories and they like telling them. That makes it a win-win relationship.”

  Not in his opinion, but it was obviously enough for her. There was a great deal more to this woman than met the eye at first. “Whatever you say.”

  They weren’t all that different, she thought. “You feel a little like I do.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because you worry about your grandmother,” she said simply. When he stared at her, a slight furrow forming between his eyes, she explained her reasoning. “You’re here for her, instead of just shrugging off the responsibility. You could easily just hide behind your work and tell her that you’re too busy to come by. But you don’t, because you care.”

  There was a reason for that. “I owe her,” he emphasized.

  Maybe that was the key to making him understand her position. “And maybe I feel like I’m taking the place of people who owe these people something.”

  Cole laughed shortly and shook his head. “I won’t even pretend that I understand what you just said.” And then he nodded toward the elevator. “You ready to go home?”

  She was more than ready at this point. “Yes.” She assumed from his question that he intended to take her to her apartment. “But don’t you have to go down to the precinct?”

  “I can drop you off on the way,” he told her. “Besides, there’s not all that much I can do about Mr. Peters’s less than timely demise tonight. The crime scene unit has to process his room first. If I go to the precinct, all I’m going to wind up doing is staring at a bulletin board, trying to make sense out of all these pieces that still haven’t come together.”

  She felt tired, but oddly restless at the same time. “I could help you,” she volunteered.

  He laughed, shaking his head. “I can’t bring you down to the station. Captain doesn’t like civilians wandering around his squad room.”

  “I wouldn’t be wandering, I’d be staring at the same bulletin board you were. Helping,” she repeated.

  “I appreciate the offer,” he told her. He still wasn’t going to bring her to the precinct. “How about we compromise and you can give me your thoughts while I drive you back to your apartment?”

  Did he think she was too tired to understand what he was doing? “That’s not a compromise, that’s you getting your way.”

  Taking her arm, Cole moved Nika along a little faster toward the elevator. “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

  Laughing, she said, “You have to work on learning to be more subtle.”

  “I’ll put it on my ‘to-do’ list.” He was also going to have to learn, Cole added silently, not to react to the sound of her laugh, which seemed to wrap itself around him like a warm embrace on a cold winter’s morning.

  Though she knew that it was unreasonable, because Cole had a boatload of work waiting for him no matter what he said, Nika found herself hoping that he would bring her up to her door again.

  And hoping for more than that.

  She quietly held her breath as they drew near her apartment building. This time, she kept the suggestion that was on the tip of her tongue to herself, waiting to see what Cole was going to do. Waiting to see if he would just pull up to the building’s entrance and merely let her out, or if he would drive his car into the parking structure the way he had last time.

  He passed the entrance and entered the parking garage.

  Nika held her breath until he parked his car.

  “I’d like to come up,” he told her quietly once he turned off the ignition. She realized that it was more a question than a statement. He was actually asking her if that was what she wanted as well.

  Nika made her choice—as if she could say anything else. “I’d like that.”

  Damn, what was he doing? Cole silently demanded, bewildered. Why was he putting himself into this kind of a position? It was like someone with a glass jaw leading with his chin in a boxing match. He was asking for trouble, for complications, for things he had no time for and didn’t want. Complications that inevitably aroused feelings.

  And yet…

  And yet, there was something about her, something that made him feel alive, that connected him to a world he’d long since walked away from.

  He’d forgotten h
e could actually feel anything.

  He’d voluntarily been on the outside for so long, he’d come to believe that was where he belonged. Being on the outside suited him. Allowed him to do his job with no interference. Until this latest development with his grandmother, he had just touched base with the woman on occasion, remembering her on days the greeting card companies declared were important. But beyond that, he lived and breathed in a rarified zone that allowed his heart to function, to beat and direct blood to all his vital organs. But feel? His heart wasn’t capable of doing that.

  At least, it couldn’t before.

  Now he wasn’t so sure.

  And a large part of him resisted things changing, resisted finding out that his heart could do anything beyond beat.

  But the temptation of Nika’s mouth drove his resolutions out of his head, propelling them into a zone that was packed away out of the light of day, a darkened no-man’s-land.

  The hallways of her apartment building were carpeted, yet Cole could almost hear his own footsteps as he came closer and closer to his undoing, all the while guiding her to her door.

  “I’d better go,” he heard himself saying as she took out her key.

  No, please don’t go. To come so close only to still be so far away isn’t fair. Nika raised her eyes to his. “Ever have a feeling of déjà vu?”

  He was having it right now. “Sometimes,” Cole allowed.

  She was on her toes, her mouth suddenly closer than his resolve. “I’m having that feeling now,” she told him, her voice a whisper, her breath a temptation.

  Self-preservation was a very finely honed instinct for a cop. His instincts told him that this was where he was supposed to turn around and walk away. It was called survival.

  Nowhere in the self-preservation bylaws did it say anything about his diving out of an airplane headfirst without a parachute strapped on.

  But that was exactly what he wound up doing when he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Not gently or slowly or with any sort of sense of exploration, the way he had last time. He kissed her hard, as if he was fully prepared to stick his arm into the fire and deal with all the consequences that were coming.