In Graywolf’s Hands

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Sure I know.” Did he think she was born yesterday? “You’re afraid that I want to make something of last night.”

  He suddenly began to realize why she’d reacted the way she had. “And you don’t?”

  No. Yes. Maybe. The retorts all jumped out at her. She had no real answer to that, but she had only one response she was willing to give him: no.

  Seeing someone come through the electronic doors toward the CCU, she moved to the other side of the hall and lowered her voice.

  “We’re both adults here, both capable of enjoying ourselves, of having a good time without attaching any meaning to whatever happens. You obviously thought when I had you paged this afternoon that I just wanted to see you again or to ask when we could get together.” As she spoke, the ice in her voice dissolved, fueled by the heat of her barely suppressed anger. “Or something equally juvenile and clingy, using Conroy as a convenient excuse. And just as obviously, you don’t know me very well. That’s not my style.”

  Though it made no sense, there was something stirring about seeing her angry. When she finished, he crossed his arms in front of his chest, studying her. Amused for the first time that day. “Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you?”

  She didn’t like the superior attitude he’d assumed. Lydia wasn’t about to back away until she put this smug bastard in his place. “I’m generally right.”

  “And have you ever been juvenile and clingy?”

  “I already told you that isn’t my style.” Her eyes narrowed into glittering green slits. “Not a damn single time.”

  He hadn’t thought so. “Gives us something else in common—along with matching chips on our shoulders.” The curve of his mouth faded into a straight, stoic line. “Except the man who taught me how to get rid of mine walked into the hospital this morning looking for me. For my help.”

  She swallowed the impulse to deny the comparison, to crisply tell him that any chips he thought he saw were fabrications of his imagination, but there was something in his voice that made denial secondary to curiosity. Whoever had come looking for him was someone he felt something for.

  “Heart trouble?”

  Lukas nodded. His eyes said things to her that his lips hadn’t. He was talking about someone who mattered. A great deal. Someone who caused him to leave behind his stoic mask.

  This was going to take longer than the twenty minutes she had promised him. Lydia set aside her own wounded pride and took out her cell phone. When he looked at her curiously, she held up her hand to hold back his questions.

  “Give me a minute.” Within seconds of pressing the familiar number, she was talking to Elliot. She turned her back on Lukas, lowering her voice. “Elliot, I hate asking, but I need you to come down and stay with Conroy.”

  “You mean in addition to you?”

  “No.” It took a great deal for her to ask for a favor, even of Elliot, but right now the man she had allowed into her world for the briefest of interludes needed someone and though she wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing this, she had elected herself to that position. “I know I said I’d take the first baby-sitting shift but—” She bit her lip. “Trade shifts with me.”

  There was a pause on the other end. Just when she was about to ask if he had heard her, Elliot responded. “Sure.”

  She thought she heard Janice in the background, asking him what was wrong. Guilt nibbled away at her. “I wouldn’t ask—”

  “—if this wasn’t important. I already know that, Lyd.” He also knew what she was probably thinking. “Janice and I didn’t have anything planned for tonight except growing a little older together. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  “You can take longer than that. Rodriguez is on duty for another half hour.” She glanced over her shoulder to where Lukas was waiting for her. “I owe you,” she told her partner.

  There was a soft chuckle in her ear. “I already know that, too. See you, Lyd.”

  She snapped down the lid on her cell phone and slid it into her pocket. Elliot would be as good as his word. With Rodriguez still on for another half an hour acting as backup and with Conroy still unconscious, there was nothing to prevent her from leaving with Lukas.

  Crossing to him, she felt those same jumpy feelings skittering through her that she’d felt last night. She made a concerted effort to block them out.

  “All right,” she told him as he looked up at her, “we can go for that coffee now.”

  They elected to take his car to the small outdoor coffee shop located several blocks away. Nightfall darkened the perimeters of the landscape and the breeze rolling in from the ocean a scant mile and a half away made the evening chilly.

  Sitting across from Lukas at a small table that accommodated two, Lydia wrapped her hands around her coffee cup to warm herself. For a man who had wanted to talk, he was rather silent.

  She waited until the waiter who had brought them their coffees withdrew.

  “So tell me about this patient who walked in this morning. Is he the one they paged you about from the hospital?”

  Lukas nodded. “It’s my uncle Henry.”

  The words felt as if they each weighed several pounds as they emerged on his tongue. Why was it so hard for him to share anything personal? People did it all the time. The airwaves abounded with people who called radio talk shows, eager to spill their insides to any stranger with five minutes to spare who was even moderately willing to listen. Here was a woman with whom he had shared the most intimate of acts, and he was hanging back, reticent to say a single word that smacked even remotely of something private.

  She waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she coaxed softly, “Tell me about him.”

  “You mean his condition?” He’d reviewed the tests again just before coming to see her to assure himself that waiting until tomorrow wasn’t a mistake. He had a margin, but the surgery had to be performed tomorrow to remain on the safe side of that margin.

  “That, too.” But she was far more interested in his relationship with his uncle. Far more interested, she realized, in finding out things that she hadn’t uncovered in her cursory background check. “You had this look in your eyes when you referred to him in the hospital…” She let her voice trail off.

  He remembered referring to Henry only as a patient, not as a relative. “I didn’t say his name.”

  “You didn’t have to.” Cold, she took a long sip of her coffee and let it slide down her throat. She set the cup down as she studied his face. He had an incredible profile, she thought. Something she would have expected to see in a bronze sculpture by Remington. “The Young Warrior” it would have been called, she decided. “I could tell there was some kind of connection between you two even before you said a word. Did he raise you?”

  “How did you know—” And then he stopped as he remembered. “Oh, I forgot. You did a profile on me, or ran an APB or whatever it is you call it when you special agents dig things up on people.”

  She didn’t take offense at the crisp shift in tone. He was throwing up a smoke screen, most likely to protect something vulnerable.

  “You make it sound sleazy,” she said mildly. “I just wanted to know who I’m dealing with.”

  Lukas relented. There was no call for him to have said that. That was the private him reacting. But he’d been the one to invite her here, not the other way around, he reminded himself.

  “I suppose that’s fair. I just don’t like people prying.”

  He had the vague feeling that he was repeating himself. But his mind wasn’t on his words. It was on the woman in front of him. The one who had turned to liquid fire in his arms last night. The woman who, despite his best efforts to place this all in perspective and at a distance, made him want to repeat everything he’d done last night—and double it.

  Damn it, he should be thinking about the surgery tomorrow, not about making love with her tonight. Especially since the latter wasn’t going to happen.

  “So tell me about Uncle Henry.”

>   Toying with the remainder of his coffee, he raised his eyes to her. “What don’t you know?”

  “Pretend I don’t know anything.” She took another sip, then looked at him. “Start from the beginning.”

  The beginning. Had there been a beginning? Looking back now, it felt as if Henry had always been part of his life. But, of course, he hadn’t.

  “He’s my mother’s older brother. Henry Spotted Owl. She asked him to move in with us about a year after my father died. Told him I was too much for her to handle and that she was…” His voice trailed off as the right words didn’t come.

  “Afraid you’d come to no good?” Lydia guessed.

  He laughed shortly. That was the cleaned-up version, he supposed. “Something like that. I ran with a gang on the reservation. They believed in the old philosophy of might makes right.” As he spoke, it almost felt as if he was talking about someone else. Had he really been that wild young kid or had that all just been part of a bad dream?

  Her voice, soft, low, brought him back. “Did you get in trouble with the law?”

  He shrugged carelessly. “Just minor scrapes.” But they had been on their way to major ones. “Until the joyriding incident.”

  “Joyriding incident?” she prodded. His juvenile records were sealed, but she’d had her suspicions about what was in them.

  He nodded. In his mind’s eye, he could see it all again. His friends, the white Mustang they’d all crammed into. The exhilaration of speed as they had careened around corners, heading toward oblivion.

  But there was no reason to go into that. Or into the fact that for the first time in his life, driving around at almost one hundred miles an hour, he’d felt free. He gave her the short version.

  “I didn’t know the car was stolen. Got my behind thrown into the local jail. My mother called for Henry.” He laughed. “That was the first time I saw him. Big, old, ugly man, with a scar running down his cheek. Three inches.” He held his thumb and index finger apart to underscore the length. It had made Henry seem that much more menacing. “Said it was knife fight that made him find his way. Called it his Badge of Courage.” It saved him from dying in some alley, Henry had added. “Anyway, he came to the jail, bailed me out and took me back to my mother.

  “The whole ride back he said nothing.” Lukas remembered almost going crazy with the silence. “Just let my imagination run away with me.” He drained the remainder of his coffee and set the cup down on the saucer. “I figured once I got home, he’d pound me into the ground the way my father used to. But he didn’t.” That had been his first surprise.

  “What he did do was tell me that from now on, I was going to tow the line. First thing he did was get me to work at the gym he established on the reservation.” Lukas had found out later that because of him, his uncle had closed down the gym he’d been running in a neighboring town and brought all his resources to open the one on the reservation. “I was there every morning before school started, sweeping the place out, getting equipment ready for the day ahead. After school he had me training to be a boxer.”

  She looked at him in surprise. That hadn’t been in the background report. “You box?”

  There’d been competitions, prizes. He shrugged. “I can hold my own. Won second place in a tournament a couple of times.” The prizes weren’t important now, but they had been then. He’d wanted to win. And to make Henry proud of him. “He straightened me out, said that boxing saved his life and maybe it could do something for mine.” It was a simple approach, but effective. “He was right. I had a punching bag to work out my frustrations on instead of thumbing my nose at the world and seeing how far I could push everybody.”

  Lukas turned up his collar against the breeze that was becoming colder. She looked unfazed by it, he thought, her face a picture of rapt attention. He wanted to lean over and kiss her.

  “I love that old man. And he never asked anything from me.” He paused and sighed. “Until this morning.”

  She could feel his tension, guess what he was feeling. “Can you help him?”

  He had done the procedure enough times. But never on someone he cared so deeply about. “The hospital and I’d rather someone else do it.”

  “And he’d rather you do it.” It wasn’t a guess.

  “Yeah.” It was more than just a matter of preference. “He’s never cared much for doctors. I can’t remember his ever going to one. The only time he was inside a hospital was to take me to the emergency room when I was on the wrong end of a right hook. Caught me completely unaware. I went down hard, cutting open my head.” It had scared the hell out of him. A split second before his head had hit the canvas, he’d thought he was dead.

  Lukas lifted his hair and she saw a small, angry scar just above his ear. She resisted the urge to trace it with her fingertips.

  “There was blood everywhere. Uncle Henry drove his old pickup like it was a race car at the Indianapolis 500.” All he’d been aware of was the pain. And jostling from side to side as his uncle drove. “Did the thirty miles to the closest hospital in about twelve minutes.” Lukas laughed softly. “Only time I ever saw him look scared.” He sighed, looking at Lydia. “He won’t let me recommend anyone.”

  Lydia put himself in the older man’s position. “Why should he? He wants the best.”

  Did she have any idea how heavy a burden that was? “What makes you think I’m the best?”

  A smile slid slowly over her lips. “Research, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, this time I might not be the best.” The possibility of what might happen was already haunting him. “What if I slip—”

  His self-doubt surprised her. And made him human in her eyes. It also gave them something in common. She wasn’t the only one who had self-doubts in the wee hours of the night.

  “You won’t,” she said with more confidence than he felt. “And the important thing is, he trusts you. I’d say it’s a lucky thing that your specialty allows you to help someone you love. Stop resisting and be glad he came to you. The alternative,” she added, “is a hell of a lot grimmer.”

  He let out a deep sigh. “You’re right, it is.”

  She took a last sip of her coffee and made a face. It was cold. She pushed the cup away. “So when’s his surgery scheduled?”

  “Tomorrow at eleven. Triple bypass.” How many times had he written that into a chart without a qualm? But now it was his uncle who was going to go under his knife. Henry, who he loved far more than he had ever loved the man fate had made his father.

  Lukas had a lot on his mind. No wonder he’d exploded. She’d done it herself with far less crowding her thoughts. “I’m sorry I got in your face about Conroy this morning.”

  Her apology struck a raw chord, making him feel guilty again.

  “You were just doing your job. I’m the one who should be sorry. I’m supposed to be able to control my emotions better than I did.”

  His apology made her laugh. He looked at her quizzically for an explanation.

  “Sounds like we’re both a couple of sorry cases.” She felt him slip his hand over hers. This time, rather than stiffen, she held her breath. Waiting. Hoping. Slowly, she raised her eyes to his.

  “Come home with me, Lydia.”

  She felt her heart accelerating. “You don’t say my name very often.”

  “Kind of hard to spill your guts to someone you call ‘Special Agent.’” He paused, aware that he was tense, that he was needy even if he didn’t want to admit it to himself. “So, will you?”

  Lydia was already rising to her feet. “You didn’t have to ask.”

  Silence and small talk filled the interior of Lukas’s sedan as he drove her back to the hospital parking lot where she’d left her car.

  From there, Lydia followed his vehicle to Lukas’s apartment, all the while wondering if she had the slightest idea what she was doing.

  What she was doing was getting personally involved, which was against every rule she had ever laid out for herself. Granted, it wasn�
�t as if Lukas was related to her prisoner, but if not for Conroy—more to the point, if not for the shot she’d fired at Conroy, she would have never met Lukas.

  And that, she realized, would have been a waste. A waste no matter how this was all destined to end—tonight, tomorrow or a week from tonight. That she was in a finite situation she never questioned. What she questioned was whether or not it would ultimately affect her judgment and her performance on the job.

  She told herself it wouldn’t. That she was thinking as clearly as ever.

  And what she thought—clearly—was that what was happening here was too intense for her not to explore, not to sample. Yes, she was happy with her life, yes she was glad she was an FBI special agent, but being with Lukas made her aware that she needed more than work. It made her aware that there was another Lydia Wakefield, one who occasionally did need the touch of a man’s hand along her face. A Lydia who had needs that had not been addressed in a very long time. Hell, she thought, even cacti needed to be watered once in a while to continue growing.

  And this was her watering.

  Still, she felt unsure as she brought her car to a halt in the guest parking area adjacent to the carport where Lukas parked his own car.

  Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe she should just start her car up again and go home to devote herself to going over the case tonight. To get her mind back on her work and not on how a man who moved like a proud god could bring every one of her five senses alive.

  She wasn’t opening her car door, Lukas realized as he got out of his sedan. She’d slipped into a designated parking space before he’d pulled into his, but she hadn’t made a move since then.

  Was she having second thoughts? He’d had them himself as he’d led the way to his apartment complex, glancing every so often into the rearview mirror to make sure she was still following him. Each time he saw her, there’d been a sense of relief he couldn’t readily ignore.

  His second thoughts had melted away the instant he’d begun to replay the moments they’d shared together last night. Moments that made him want her with an intensity that he found unnerving.