by Diana Palmer
Ordinarily, she might go out to a movie with her friend Kit Morris, who worked nearby. But Kit’s boss was overseas for two months and Kit had had to go with him—even though she’d groaned about the trip. The older girl was a confidential secretary who got a huge salary for doing whatever the job demanded. Tess missed her. The agency did a lot of work for Kit’s boss, hunting down his madcap mother, who spent her life getting into trouble.
With Kit gone, Tess’s free time was really lonely. She had no one to talk to. She liked Helen, and they were friends, but she couldn’t really talk to Helen about the one big heartache of her life—Dane Lassiter.
She looped her shoulder bag over her arm and stuffed her hands into her pockets. Her life, she thought, was like this miserable night. Cold, empty and solitary.
Two expensively dressed men were standing under a streetlight as she appeared in the doorway of the office building. She stared at them curiously as one passed to the other an open briefcase full of packets of some white substance, and received a big wad of bills in return. She nodded to them and smiled absently, unaware of the shock on their faces as she walked toward the deserted parking lot.
“Did she see?” one asked the other.
“My God, of course she saw! Get her!”
Tess hadn’t heard the conversation, but the sound of running feet caught her attention. She turned, conscious of movement, to stand staring blankly at two approaching men. They looked as if they were chasing her. There were angry shouts, freezing her where she stood. She frowned as the gleam of metal in the streetlights caught her attention. Before she realized that it was the reflection of light on a gun barrel, something hot stung her arm and spun her around. Seconds later, a pop rang in her ears and she cried out as she fell to the ground, stunned.
“You killed her!” one man exclaimed. “You fool, now they’ll have us for murder instead of dealing coke!”
“Shut up! Let me think! Maybe she’s not dead—”
“Let’s get out of here! Somebody’s bound to have heard the shots!”
“She came out of that building, where the lights are on in that detective agency,” the other voice groaned.
“Great place you picked for the drop…. Run! That’s a siren!”
Sure enough, it was. A patrol car, alerted by one of the street people, came barreling down the side street where the office was located, its spotlight catching two men bending over a prostrate form in a dark parking lot.
“Oh, God!” one of the men exclaimed. “Run!”
The sound of running feet barely impinged on Tess’s fading consciousness. Funny, she couldn’t lift her face. The pavement was damp and cold under her cheek. Except for that, she felt numb all over.
“They shot somebody!” a different voice called. “Don’t let them get away!”
She heard more pops. Black shoes went past her face, as two policemen went tearing after the well-dressed men.
“Tess!”
She didn’t recognize the voice at first. Dane was always so calm and in command of himself that the harsh urgency of his tone didn’t sound familiar.
He rolled her gently onto her back. She stared up at him blankly, in shock. Her arm was beginning to feel wet and heavy and hot. She tried to speak and was surprised to find that she couldn’t make her tongue work.
He spotted the dark, wet stain on her arm immediately, because the bullet had penetrated the cloth of her coat and blood was pulsing under it. “My God!” he ground out. His expression was as hard as a statue’s, betraying nothing. Only his eyes, glittery with anger, were alive in that dark slate.
One of the policemen was running back toward them. He paused, his pistol in hand, kneeling beside Tess. “Was she hit?” the policeman asked curtly. “I saw one of them fire—”
“She’s hit. Get an ambulance,” Dane said, his black eyes meeting the other man’s for an instant. “Hurry. She’s bleeding badly.”
The policeman ran back down the alley.
Dane didn’t waste time. He eased Tess’s arm out of her coat and grimaced at the gaping tear in her blouse and the vivid flow of blood. He cursed under his breath, whipping out a handkerchief and holding it firmly over the wound, even when she cried out at the pain.
“Be still,” he said quietly. “Be still, little one. I’ll take care of you. You’re going to be all right.”
She shivered. Tears ran down her cheeks. It hadn’t hurt until he started pressing on it. Now the pain was terrible. She cried helplessly while he wound the handkerchief tightly around the wound and tied it. He shucked his topcoat and covered Tess with it. He took her purse and used it to elevate her feet. Then he turned his attention back to the wound. It was still bleeding copiously, and what Tess could see of it wasn’t reassuring. He seemed so capable and controlled that she wasn’t inclined to panic. He’d always had that effect on her, at least, when he wasn’t making her nervous.
“Am I going to bleed to death?” she asked very calmly.
“No.” He glanced over his shoulder as a car approached. He used words she’d never heard him use and abruptly stood as the squad car pulled up. “Help me get her in the car!” he called to the policeman. “She won’t make it until an ambulance gets here at the rate she’s losing blood.”
“I just raised my partner on the walkie-talkie. He’s on his way back with one of the perps,” the officer said as he helped Dane get Tess into the backseat. “If he isn’t here by the time I get the engine going, he’s walking back to the station.”
“I hear you.” Dane cradled Tess’s head in his lap. “Let’s go.”
Just as the officer got in behind the wheel, his partner came into view with a handcuffed man. Dane stiffened.
“M-20’s on his way,” the officer called to his partner. “I’ve got a wounded lady in here. Can you manage?”
“You bet! Get her to the hospital!” the other man called back.
The older man wheeled the squad car around with an expertise that Tess might have admired if she’d been less nauseated and hurt.
Minutes later, they pulled up at the municipal hospital emergency room, but Tess didn’t know it. She was unconscious….
Daylight was streaming through the window when her eyes opened again. She blinked. She was pleasantly dazed. Her upper arm felt swollen and hot. She looked at it, curious about the thick white bandage it was wrapped in. She stirred, only then aware that she was strapped to a tube.
“Don’t pull the IV out,” Dane drawled from the chair beside the bed. “Believe me, you won’t like having to have it put back in again.”
She turned her head toward him. She felt dizzy and disoriented. “It was dark,” she mumbled drowsily. “These men came after me and I think one of them shot me.”
“You were shot, all right,” he said grimly. “They were drug dealers. What happened? Did you get between them and the police, get caught in the crossfire?”
“No,” Tess groaned. “I saw them pass the stuff. They must have panicked, but I didn’t realize what I’d seen until they were after me.”
He stiffened. “You saw it? You witnessed a drug buy?”
She nodded wearily. “I’m afraid so.”
He whistled softly. “If they got a good look at you, and recognized the office building…”
“One got away.”
“The one who shot you,” Dane said flatly. “And they don’t have enough on the one they caught to hold him for long. They’ll charge him, but he’ll probably make bail as soon as he’s arraigned, and you’re the gal who can send him up for dealing.”
“His cohort shot me,” she pointed out. “But the one they arrested was there. Can’t he be arrested as an accessory?”
“Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know how these people think,” he said enigmatically, and he looked worried. Really worried.
“I’ll bet you do,” she murmured sleepily. “All those years, locking people up…”
“I know the criminal mind inside out,” he agreed. “But it’s differe
nt when things hit home.” His dark eyes narrowed on her wan face. “It’s very different.”
She must be half-asleep, she decided, because he actually sounded as if he minded that she’d been shot. That was ridiculous. He resented her, disliked her even if he had felt sorry enough for her to give her a job when her father had died. He was her worst enemy, so why would it matter to him if something happened to her?
Dane stretched wearily, his white shirt pulled taut over a broad chest. “How do you feel this morning?”
She touched the bandage. “Not as bad as I did last night. What did the doctors do to me?”
“Took the bullet out.” He pulled it from his shirt pocket and displayed it for her. “A thirty-eight caliber,” he explained. “A souvenir. I thought you might like it mounted and framed.”
She grimaced. “Suppose we frame and mount the man who shot me instead?”
His black eyebrow jerked up. “I’ll pass that thought along to the police,” he said dryly.
“Can I go home?”
“When you’re a little stronger. You lost a lot of blood and they had to put you under to get the bullet out.”
“Helen will be furious when she finds out,” she murmured with a smile. “She’s the private eye, and I got shot.”
“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be livid with jealousy,” he agreed. He paused beside the bed, his dark eyes narrow and intent on her face in its frame of soft, wavy blond hair. He looked at her for a long time.
“I’m all right, if it matters,” she said sleepily. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know why it should. You hate me.”
Her voice trailed off as she gave in to the need for rest. He didn’t answer her. But his eyes were stormy and his mind had already registered how much it would have mattered if her life had seeped out on that cold concrete.
He got up and went to the window, stretching again. He was tired. He hadn’t slept since they’d brought her in. All through the operation, he’d paced and waited for news. It had been the longest night he’d ever spent.
A soft sound from the bed caught his attention. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stood beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. The unbecoming hospital gown did nothing for her. She was too thin. He scowled as he looked at her, his mind on the coldness he’d shown her over the years, the unrelenting hostility that had, eventually, turned a shy, loving girl into a quiet, insecure woman. Tess had wanted to love him, and he’d slapped her down, hard. It hadn’t been cruelty so much as a raging desire that he’d started to satisfy in the only way he knew to satisfy it—roughly, savagely. But Tess had been a virgin, and he hadn’t known. She’d run from him, in tears, barely in time to save her honor. Afterward, she’d never come near him again. His pride hadn’t allowed him to go after her, to explain that tenderness wasn’t something he was used to showing women. Her frantic departure in tears had shattered him. She didn’t know that.
He’d been antagonistic to hide the hurt the experience had dealt him, so it wasn’t surprising that she thought he hated her. He’d even tried to convince himself he didn’t mind the fact that Tess avoided him like the plague. To save his pride, he’d even made it appear as if his actions had been premeditated, to make her leave him alone.
He thought back to those dark days after he’d been shot. Everyone had deserted him. His mother had always hated him, despite her pretense for the sake of appearances. Even Jane, his wife, had walked out on him and filed for divorce, after being blatantly unfaithful to him. But Tess had been with him every step of the way, making him live, making him fight. Tess had been the light that brought him out of the darkness. And he’d repaid her loving kindness with cruelty. It hurt him to remember that. It hurt him more to realize that she could have died last night.
A faint tap on the door announced the nurse’s entrance. She smiled at Dane and proceeded to check Tess’s vital signs.
“Lucky, wasn’t she?” the woman asked absently, as she waited for the thermometer to register. “Just a few inches to the side and she’d be dead.”
The impact of the idle remark was as sharp as a tack. He blinked, his dark gaze steady on Tess’s closed eyes. If she died, he’d be alone. He’d have no one.
The enormity of the thought drove him out of the room with a murmured excuse. He walked down the long corridor without seeing it, his mind humming all the way to the black Mercedes he’d had Helen drive to the parking lot for him while Tess was in surgery. He still had to call the office and tell them how she was. He checked his watch; it was time they were at work. He’d stop by on the way to his apartment to shower and change his clothes.
He unlocked the car, but he didn’t get in, his hand on the door handle as he stared up at the hospital. Tess wasn’t a relative in any sense at all. Their parents had never married. But they were both only children and their parents were dead.
With a rough sigh, he opened the car door and got in. He didn’t start it immediately. He stared at the blood on his sleeve. Tess’s blood. He’d watched it pulse out of her in the darkness as if it were his own. She could have died in his arms.
Once she’d been such a bright, happy girl, so eager to please him, so obviously in love with him. He closed his eyes. He’d killed that sweet feeling in her. He’d frightened it right out of her with his clumsy headlong rush at her that afternoon, when he’d given in finally to the need that had been tearing him apart. He’d never wanted anyone so much. But he knew nothing of tenderness, and he’d terrified her. It hadn’t been deliberate, but maybe, subconsciously, he’d wanted her to back away, before she became his world. A failed marriage made a man gun-shy, Dane thought bitterly, looking back to the time three years ago when Tess and he had first met….
From the evening that Tess and Dane had first met—so long ago, at a restaurant where their parents had invited them to get acquainted—they saw very little of each other except on holidays. Dane and his wife, Jane, were not getting along. And even his mother, Nita, had mentioned cattily that Jane had been seen with another man. It was almost as if it pleased Nita to know that Dane’s wife was being openly unfaithful to him….
Those days had not been good ones for Dane. Then, on the morning that Wyatt Meriwether and Nita Lassiter announced their engagement, Dane had walked into a shootout with some bank robbers and had wound up in the county emergency room fighting for his life.
Tess had rushed to the hospital as soon as she knew. Her father drove her, but when they discovered that Nita was still at home and that Jane couldn’t be found, he’d left.
But Tess stayed, that night and the next day. Once she convinced a floor nurse that he was going to be her stepbrother, and that he had no one else, they allowed her to see him in intensive care. She held his hand, smoothed his brow and cringed at the damage the bullets had done, because she’d had a look at the torn flesh of his shoulder, spine and leg where the bullets had penetrated.
“Will I walk?” he managed in a pain-laced voice when he regained consciousness.
“Of course,” Tess said with a gentle smile. She touched his lean face and pushed the hair away from his forehead with a possessive feeling.
His eyes closed and he groaned. “Where’s my mother?” he asked harshly. “Where’s Jane?”
She hesitated.
His black eyes opened again, fury in them. “She was sleeping with my partner,” he said harshly. “He told me….”
She grimaced.
He laughed coldly and went back to sleep.
In the weeks that followed, Dane’s life changed. Jane came to see him once, stiffly apologetic, only to inform him that she’d filed for divorce and was remarrying the minute the divorce was final. His mother peered in the door, remarked that he seemed prepared to live after all and went sailing with Wyatt.
Tess, infuriated with the rest of the family, devoted herself to Dane’s recovery.
God knew, he needed someone, she thought. What he’d found out about Jane had very likely distracted him enough to get hi
m shot. Then Jane walked out on him. His own mother had deserted him. Not only that, but he even lost his job, because the surgeons agreed that he might never be fit enough for full-time work again because of the damage to his spine.
When they told him the bad news, he almost gave up, he was so depressed.
“This won’t do,” Tess said gently, recognizing instinctively the lack of life in his lean face. She knelt beside the chair where he was sitting up for a few minutes and took his hand in hers, holding tightly. “You can’t give up, Dane,” she told him. “They only said that you might not be able to work—not that you will. You can’t let them do this to you.”
“Can’t? They already have,” he said tersely, averting his eyes. “Why don’t you get out, too?”
“You’re my almost-big-brother,” she said. “I want you to get well.”
He glared at her. “I don’t need a teenage sister.”
“You’ll get one, all the same, when our parents marry,” she said pleasantly. “Come on, cheer up. You’re tough. You were a ranger, after all.”
His face closed up. “Was is right.”
“So you won’t be in prime condition for a while. So what? Listen, Dane, there are plenty of things you can do with your law-enforcement background. God doesn’t close doors without opening windows. This can be an opportunity, if you’ll just look at it in that light.”
He didn’t speak. But he listened. His dark eyes narrowed as they searched hers. “I don’t like women,” he began.
“I guess not. With all due respect, your life hasn’t been blessed wtih nice ones.”
“I married Jane to spite my mother. Not that I didn’t want her at the time. She was all set to settle down and have children. That was all she wanted.” He averted his face, as if the memory of her desertion was killing him. “Get out, Tess. Go play nurse somewhere else.”
“Can’t.” She shrugged. “Who’ll keep you from wallowing in self-pity?”
“Damn you!” he snapped, his eyes flashing warning signals as they met hers.
