Searching for Cate

by Marie Ferrarella

  With a start, Cate realized that her anger over the sin of omission that had been committed against her was beginning to abate in the face of all the happy times she’d spent, believing herself to be Cate Kowalski.

  What was in a name, anyway?

  The name on the chart by the girl’s bed had dubbed her “Jane Doe.”

  “Not a very original name,” Cate said softly to the unconscious girl. “You don’t look like a Jane.” Her features looked too exotic for such a mundane name. “Why don’t you wake up, honey, and tell me who you are?” Cate coaxed.

  Chapter 21

  “On another quest?”

  Cate swung around, her hand instantly going to the hilt of the gun holstered inside her jacket.

  Blowing out a breath, she silently upbraided herself for letting her guard down as she made eye contact with Christian. She hadn’t even heard him open the door or come up behind her. If he’d been someone who meant the girl harm, he could have gotten the drop on her. What was the matter with her? She was getting sloppy and there was no excuse for it.

  Withdrawing her hand from inside her jacket, Cate looked at him grudgingly. “That’s a good way to get yourself shot.”

  “Making my rounds?” he deadpanned. Taking the girl’s limp wrist in his hand, he glanced at his watch and took her pulse. “Haven’t you heard? Bedford is supposed to be one of the safest cities in the country.”

  Yes, she’d heard that. She also knew that this girl had been found in a Bedford warehouse. “There are always exceptions to everything and nothing ever stays constant.”

  “I know.”

  Was that sadness she heard in his voice? Cate told herself she was imagining things.

  She stepped to the side as Christian slipped in to take her place beside the girl’s bed. After taking his stethoscope from around his neck, he began to listen to his patient’s heart. His methods struck Cate as almost old-fashioned in the face of all the state-of-the-art monitors jammed into the small intensive care unit.

  “Don’t trust the monitors?” she asked, nodding at the gaggle of technological marvels.

  The smile that crossed his lips was fleeting, but she found it potent nonetheless.

  “I’m hands-on,” he explained.

  She couldn’t have said why the term made her think of those same hands on her, other than it had been a long time since she’d been with a man. A long time since she’d wanted to be with a man.

  She didn’t want to now, she insisted silently.

  “I like checking things out for myself,” he added, taking up Jane Doe’s chart.

  Looking at the entries on the bottom of the second page, he nodded to himself. Everything was going along the normal postsurgical path. Except that the girl still hadn’t woken up, not even once. At least, not during any of the nurses’ interactions with her. She’d remained unresponsive even after prodding. That bothered him.

  Christian returned the chart to the foot of her bed and sighed. And then he looked at the woman standing here. “It’s late. What are you doing here?”

  A little on the defensive, she lobbed the question back at him. “I could ask you the same thing. I have it on the best authority that doctors do go home.”

  There was nothing at home for him except time to think. Sometimes he spent nights right here in the hospital, stretched out on the sofa in his office, because he didn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. “I don’t keep banker’s hours.”

  “Neither do I.”

  He laughed shortly. “I guess that gives us something in common.”

  “That,” she conceded, “and knowing Lydia.”

  Cate tried not to stare at him.

  What’s your story, Doctor? What is it about you that keeps getting to me? Was something inside of me ready to crack and you were just there at the right time?

  God, she felt as if she was losing her mind.

  He didn’t notice the change in her expression. His attention had been drawn back to his patient. By rights, the girl belonged to Reese now. Bendenetti had performed the surgery and was best suited to care for his patient from here on in. But there’d been something about the child-woman that reminded him of Alma. And made him want to save her.

  As if that could somehow atone for his having failed to save Alma. And Dana.

  He realized that Lydia’s partner was looking at him and that he’d lapsed into silence. “Speaking of Lydia, I’m surprised she’s not here instead of you.”

  “I headed her off.” It was his turn to look puzzled. “She seemed really wiped out,” Cate told him, “so I told her I’d look in on Jane here.”

  Wiped out. Yeah, he just bet she was. One of the classic signs of pregnancy. God, he hoped that she’d come to her senses soon and tell Lukas that she was pregnant. Lukas worshipped the ground his wife walked on, but he wouldn’t let her be foolish. He’d make her take a desk job.

  Christian realized he’d lapsed into silence again and that Cate was regarding him curiously. He grasped at the last thing she’d said. “Jane?”

  “Jane Doe,” she explained. “At least according to her chart.” She frowned, shaking her head. “The name seems so cold, so impersonal.”

  There was a solution to that. “If it bothers you, why don’t you give her a name?” he suggested mildly. “Although you know what Shakespeare said.”

  She told herself that she’d made a mistake in coming back tonight. She told herself that she should be leaving. She told herself a lot of things she didn’t seem to be paying attention to because she was still here, sharing the small space with a collection of machines, an unconscious girl and a man who, just by breathing, made her come alive again, inch by unfreezing inch.

  And that, she knew, could be dangerous.

  “No, I’ll bite,” she said gamely. “What did Shakespeare say?”

  “A rose by any other name—”

  From somewhere amid all the trivia she’d collected in her lifetime, the line came back to her. “Would smell as sweet.” Romeo and Juliet. It figured. “A doctor who quotes Shakespeare?”

  He could recite entire passages, and had. To Alma. On long, hot, still nights that stretched out into oblivion. She’d liked listening to the sound of the words she didn’t quite grasp. He’d loved seeing the wonder in her eyes when she looked at him.

  Christian shrugged evasively, not knowing if she was amused or amazed or how he should respond to either set of circumstances.

  “We all have our guilty pleasures. When I was a kid, I’d read anything I could get my hands on. We didn’t have much of a library on the reservation, so I’d wind up rereading a lot of what was there.” He watched her face for her reaction, but the mention of where he’d lived out his childhood had garnered no particular response from her. No covert disdain the way he’d seen mark so many other faces. “Care to hear Marc Antony’s speech from Julius Caesar?”

  The suggestion made her laugh and for that she was grateful. A little of the tension she’d felt building up since he’d walked into the room drained away. “Maybe some other time.”

  His grin was fast, guileless and lethal. “Don’t know what you’re missing.”

  The words felt as if they were dancing along her skin long after they faded from the air.

  He was standing too close, she thought.

  Or maybe just close enough.

  Close enough for her to feel something humming between them. Something she hadn’t really felt for a very long time. Chemistry? Electricity?

  A physical craving?

  She wasn’t really sure what to call it, only that she’d missed feeling it. And that it frightened her at the same time that it enticed her.

  Her smile faded just a little, growing serious. “No,” she agreed quietly. “I guess I don’t.”

  He was unprepared for the jolt he felt, looking into her eyes. Unprepared for the sudden longing that came out of the recesses of his being where it had dwelled, unattended, far too long.

  For one insane moment, he
felt like…

  Christian shook himself free, clinging to the one word that had burst upon his brain with clarity.

  Insane.

  It was utterly insane to feel this pull, this need that was even now gnawing away at his gut. Desire, with its accompanying passions, had left him the day Alma had died. As if all those feelings had been surgically excised out of him. At the very least, all the nerve endings connecting him to that part of his being had been ruthlessly severed.

  Nerves that were cut never regained their feeling. He believed this to be true until a moment ago.

  She needed to leave, Cate thought urgently. She needed to get some air to clear her head of all the strange thoughts that were crashing into one another.

  Cate took a step toward the door. “I’d better be going. I just stopped by here because…because she has no one.” Why did she feel she had to continue to justify her actions to him? She’d already said she was here instead of Lydia. That should have been enough. “At least, no one we can contact. And I didn’t want her to be alone.” Cate willed her mouth to stop moving, but for some reason, she kept on talking. “Stupid, isn’t it? I mean, she doesn’t know I’m here. She probably wouldn’t even recognize me if she did open her eyes.”

  Cate’s last words caught his attention. “Should she recognize you?”

  Who knows if she’d even been processing any information that one split second back in the warehouse? Cate shrugged. “I was the last person she saw before she blacked out. She clutched my hand and cried. I couldn’t make out any of the words, they were badly garbled, but the meaning was crystal clear. She was terrified and she wanted to be saved.”

  His eyes met hers and she felt another tidal wave coming on, navel level. “Well, you saved her.”

  “Maybe.” She was the one who’d found the girl. That wasn’t quite the same thing. “No, I didn’t,” Cate amended abruptly. “You did. You and that surgeon you called in.”

  “Reese Bendenetti,” he told her. “But I wasn’t talking about that. There’s saving the body and then there’s saving the soul.” That much he had picked up from his mother and the old ways. “She probably saw something in your eyes that helped her hang on.”

  That was almost spiritual. Cate stared at him. Graywolf was definitely a hard person to pigeonhole. She supposed that wasn’t such a bad thing. In her line of work, she had a tendency to want to file everything and everyone neatly under a heading. Some people, the interesting ones, defied that.

  “I thought you said that you didn’t believe in prayer.”

  “Not prayer, but something. Sheer force of will.” Christian shrugged. Some things just defied being labeled. “Something,” he repeated, leaving it at that.

  She studied him in silence for a moment. “You’re a very complex man, Doctor.” And I’m letting myself get sidetracked much too much. With renewed energy she headed toward the door. “Well, good night.”

  Cate had every intention of leaving the hospital. But as she placed her hand on the doorknob, she found herself pausing. Wrestling. Finally, she looked at him over her shoulder. “Would you like to go somewhere for a cup of coffee or something?”

  His first impulse was to say no. He’d turned down a great many invitations from women in the past three years. In that time, he’d grown almost reclusive except for his frequent trips to the reservation. But now, for reasons he could not fathom, a tiny slit of light had opened up inside of him. Warmed him. He didn’t want it to close just yet.

  “That depends.”

  Her eyes met his. The soft hum of the machines faded into oblivion. “On what?”

  She saw his mouth curve. Felt her pulse rise in direct proportion. “On whether or not you’re going to pump me for information.”

  Cate shook her head. “No pumping. Not tonight. Just coffee.”

  He’d had next to nothing to eat since breakfast. Lunch had been nonexistent and dinner had been a sandwich of some kind of mystery meat from the cafeteria. He’d forced half down before giving the rest of it away to some birds outside the cafeteria. The birds had enjoyed the sandwich far more than he had.

  Coffee sounded pretty good right about now. Something to fill the gnawing emptiness in his belly. “All right. There’s a coffee shop down the block. I think it’s still open if you want to give it a try.”

  She didn’t want him thinking this was any big deal. Part of her was already regretting having asked. Because it might lead somewhere? She didn’t even try to answer that. “The cafeteria’ll do. I’m easy.”

  He glanced at his watch. “The cafeteria’s closed at this hour.”

  “There’s always a vending machine.” She vaguely remembered passing one that touted coffee, hot chocolate and chicken soup.

  He’d never met anyone who would have opted for vending-machine fare over something from a coffee shop, especially since the former usually tasted like lukewarm, murky-colored water.

  “You really are easy, aren’t you?” he asked.

  The response was on her lips automatically. “I’m a cop’s daughter. My father taught me to roll with the punches.” Abruptly, her expression changed. “I mean, I thought I was a cop’s daughter—”

  He could see in her eyes that she’d made no peace with this yet. “Biology doesn’t make a person a parent. Being there for the scraped knees, the heartaches and the small joys, that’s what makes a parent.”

  “Yeah, well I’m still having a little trouble sorting all that out.” She eyed him. It had been a mistake to act on impulse. She needed to back off. “Maybe we’d better take a rain check on that coffee.”

  He paused for a long moment. She had no idea if she’d just insulted him, or taken him off the hook.

  “Maybe,” he finally said.

  Cate left the room before she changed her mind again and ruined her retreat. As she hurried out of the building and to her car, a wave of disappointment assaulted her, mixing with the cooling night air.

  Chapter 22

  Lukas walked into the kitchen and came up behind his wife as she stood at the stove. He could see she was frowning as she stirred a large pot of her version of marinara sauce. He wrapped his arms about her waist, pulling her against him.

  Pressing a kiss to her neck, he inhaled the light fragrance he always associated with her. A feeling of contentment wafted through him and he nuzzled her, thinking how perfect his life had become these past few years.

  The only thing that would make it even more so was if they had a child. They’d talked about having children, several times in the last few months, and Lydia was open to the idea.

  She’d said, “Soon.”

  The thought about making babies was on his mind a great deal lately. He wanted to be young enough to enjoy them, to run with them and be their companion in every sense of the word.

  “You know,” he proposed, his voice low and husky, “we still have time for a quickie.”

  He was outlining the shell of her ear with his tongue and Lydia found it really hard not to melt against him. He had this drugging, hypnotic effect about him that always got to her.

  “A very quick quickie,” she pointed out, struggling to keep stirring. Their guests were due soon.

  Raising her hair, Lukas brushed his lips against the other side of her neck. “I do some of my best work under pressure.”

  Any second now, her eyes were going to drift shut and she was going to be a goner. Lydia gripped the stirring spoon harder. “Luke, what if one of them comes early?”

  “Then they’ll just have to entertain themselves for a while by ringing the doorbell.” He turned her around so that she faced him, his arms still resting around her waist. Something was wrong, he’d sensed it for a while now, but he just couldn’t put his finger on it. “I thought a little lovemaking might help relieve your tension.”

  It took everything for her not to stiffen and give credence to his words. Instead, she just laughed lightly. “What tension?”

  “The tension that brings out the faint l
ittle line between your eyes.” To illustrate, he traced the line with his fingertip.

  Lydia curtailed her impulse to pull her head away. She didn’t want him delving too hard. Their marriage wasn’t about lies and she didn’t want to begin now. Besides, she always felt that he could see right through her. With a mighty effort, she rallied, gave him a quick kiss on the mouth, wiggled free of her confinement and went back to stirring the temperamental sauce.

  “The tension’s not going to go away until I close up this case.” That much was true, she consoled her conscience.

  “And if you don’t close it?”

  He saw her shoulders stiffen with determination. “I will,” she insisted.

  “Never let it be said that you lack confidence.”

  Lukas stepped back from her and leaned his hip against the sink. His eyes on her profile, he studied her in that quiet way of his that always got under the layers of her skin and saw straight into her heart. Every time.

  Except that this time, she made very sure she kept the barriers up.

  “Lyd, is that all that’s bothering you?”

  She’d known this was coming. With all her heart, she hoped she sounded convincing.

  A little more time, I just need a little more time. She flashed a quick smile at him. “Sure, what else could there be?”

  He spread his hands wide, frustrated. “I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking. It’s just that lately, you’ve seemed preoccupied, as if there was something else on your mind.”

  “I have a lot of things on my mind.” She reached for the container of Parmesan cheese and shook out some more to thicken the sauce. She had the heat on low, but even so, tiny bubbles burst along the surface of the sauce like miniature erupting volcanoes. Lydia turned the heat down another notch to avoid having tiny streams of sauce shoot out like lava. “Carrying off this dinner without a hitch, for one.” She slanted him a look. Diversion had always been her best asset. “Wondering if some hussy is after my husband, for another.” That had hit the mark. There was a look of surprise on his face. “Lots of women fall in love with their doctors.”