His head kept whimsically winking in and out.
Coming to life, Walter elbowed Cate aside and quickly tore open Christian’s shirt.
“Looks like the bullet went clean through,” he announced as if he was still talking into the tape recorder he always employed during the autopsies he conducted. He looked first at the man who had come to their rescue, then at Cate. “But this needs to be cleansed and bandaged immediately.” He saw the incredulous look on Cate’s face. “What? I didn’t always just cut up corpses. I had to go through medical school first, just like every other doctor.” He looked back at the ring of security people. “You got anything like a first aid kit available?”
“Sawyer, go get the doctor a first-aid kit,” Bennett, the head of security, ordered. He had the voice of a retired cop and the bearing of a tired bloodhound.
Moving to the center, Bennett kept his service revolver trained on Sullivan. Sawyer returned with the kit almost immediately and handed it off to Walter, who quickly got started.
As the crowd of rubberneckers around them grew, Lydia took the opportunity to place a call to the regional office to report this latest strange twist of events. She still kept out her own gun, ready to use in case things turned ugly again.
She nodded at Cate, then held out the cell phone to her as the phone on the other end rang. “You want to do the honors?”
Cate barely glanced toward her partner. Her eyes were fixed on Walter’s hands as the M.E. swiftly cleaned up Christian’s wound.
“Not interested in honors,” she told Lydia. The next moment, Lydia was on the line with the regional director. Cate tuned her out. “You sure you know what you’re doing?” she asked Walter. After all, if he made a mistake in his regular line of work, it didn’t really matter. The subject was already dead.
It mattered a lot here.
Walter raised his eyes from his work long enough to give her an offended look. “This isn’t exactly a triple bypass I’m performing. I’m just cleaning up his wound.” He snorted dismissively as he applied a liberal dose of peroxide to the wound in Christian’s side. “Even you could do this.”
Cate drew in her breath as she watched Christian’s skin momentarily pucker in response to the pain. “Because you’re helping him, I’ll let that go.”
In her mind’s eye, the scenario replayed itself. It could have gone at least a dozen different ways. And she could envision Christian getting killed almost each and every time.
Fear and horror pushed words out of her mouth. “What the hell were you thinking?” she demanded heatedly. “Don’t you know better than to aim yourself like a baseball at a man with a gun?”
“Okay, break it up, nothing to see here,” the security personnel were saying to the crowd, dispersing them.
Cate was vaguely aware of flashes going off. Had the media been called in? She didn’t know. She didn’t care. She just wanted Christian to be all right.
“Usually, yes,” Christian replied. He measured out each word carefully as he bit back the desire to groan.
The hole left by the bullet hurt like a son of a gun, he thought. He’d never had so much as a hangnail before and heretofore had been unacquainted with physical pain beyond having the wind knocked out of him on several occasions when he boxed in Uncle Henry’s gym. He didn’t much like it.
“But the gun was aimed at you,” he pointed out. Christian left it at that, feeling he had no further need to explain.
He thought wrong.
“Having Sullivan shoot you wouldn’t have helped me any,” she cried. She threw her hands up, knowing she was just going to have to find a way to cope with this and block out the thought that he could have been killed. “Oh, damn it all, you’re the heroic type on top of everything else.”
“Wait until Lukas hears,” Lydia said to him fondly, covering the cell microphone opening with her hand. “He’ll really skin you.”
“He’ll have to catch me first.” The joke fell a little flat as another shaft of pain skewered its way through him. “He was never very fast on his feet.” He looked at Cate and told her, “As a boy, I used to beat him every time.”
“And I should be beating you.” Cate doubled her fists at her sides, struggling with the urge to swing at him at least once and drain the stress from her. He could have been killed, and it would have been your fault. “Never, ever do that again.”
She was serious, he thought. As if he’d had any other choice once he realized that she and Lydia were in danger. But he humored her. “I promise the next time I see someone hiding a gun under their coat and aiming it at you in the airport terminal, I won’t tackle him.”
Cate shook her head. Tears had come out of nowhere, stinging her eyes. She blinked several times to keep them from falling. Success was only minimal. She used the back of her hand to get the rest. “Your mother’s right. You should have been a lawyer.”
“That’s not what she said,” he reminded her. He’d pointed that out the last time.
“I’m done here,” Walter announced, lumbering back up to his feet. He left the first aid kit open on the bench, confident Security would see to it.
“Thanks,” Christian muttered, rebuttoning his shirt.
Walter looked at his only living patient in the past five years with not a little pride. To his surprise he realized that he missed the satisfaction this part of the job provided. Dead people never said thank you.
“But you need to go to a hospital to have that x-rayed—” Walter indicated his handiwork “—to make sure there’s no internal damage. I’d make that my next stop if I were you.”
“There’s no internal damage,” Christian told him evenly.
Cate laughed shortly. “So now he has X-ray vision, as well.” Her mind working rapidly, she turned to her partner. The latter slipped her cell phone back in her pocket after she concluded her conversation with the regional head of the bureau. “Lydia, if I give you Dr. Doolittle here, can you take Sullivan to the field office?”
The smile on her lips said that nothing would give her greater pleasure. “Even without Dr. Doolittle.”
Walter’s chest rose indignantly. “Who are you calling Dr. Doolittle?”
Cate flashed a wide grin at him. “It’s a term of affection, Walter. An endearment. Thanks for bandaging up the hero.” She nodded at Christian.
“You’re welcome,” Walter mumbled.
“You need anything from us?” Bennett asked once Lydia had her weapon trained again on the handcuffed Sullivan.
How the mighty have fallen, Lydia thought. And it didn’t have to be. Sullivan had been a good man once, or so she’d heard. Thirty years with the bureau. All of it down the drain now. And for what? Money? Vicarious excitement? Or was there something even more base at the bottom of all this?
She wasn’t sure if she even wanted to know.
Lydia smiled at Bennett. “An escort to my car wouldn’t be out of order.”
Walter moved over beside her as Bennett pointed to three of his people, selecting them to do the honors.
“See you at the field office later,” Lydia said to Cate before leaving. “Much later,” she underscored in a lower voice that just carried between the two of them.
“What about you?” Bennett asked Cate once the others had gone. “You need anything?”
She looked at Christian. His complexion was paler than she’d ever seen it. “Where’s your car?” It took him a moment to remember the lot number.
Cate looked at Bennett for clarification. “All the way in the back,” he told her.
In that case, it was much too far for Christian to walk in his present condition. But there was no way he’d consent to being taken to the hospital by ambulance. Besides, she knew he would undoubtedly prefer going somewhere he was familiar with. Which meant Blair, and that was more than forty-five miles from here. No ambulance would go that distance. They reported to the hospital closest to the point of pickup.
She thought of a solution. “One of those cute little tran
sport cars to drive us over to his vehicle.”
Christian bristled. “I can walk,” he protested. He rose from the chair, gaining his legs unsteadily.
If someone blew on him, he’d fall over, she thought. Cate quickly positioned herself beside him and slung his arm over her shoulder for leverage. She wrapped her free arm around his waist. “Of course you can.”
Christian did his best to glare at her. “You’re humoring me.”
She turned up her face to his and pasted a wide smile on her lips. “Yes, I am.”
He would have pulled away from her. If he could. “I don’t like being humored.”
Cate turned as the cart came into view. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“It’s true what they say,” Cate decided after having been a silent witness for the past two hours. “Doctors do make the worst patients.”
With no small sense of relief, Christian pulled the zipper up on his pants. It was nice to have them back on again after having endured being wrapped up in a smock for the past couple of hours. Stiffly, he reached for his bloodied shirt. Cate beat him to it and held it out to him.
He moved very carefully as he gingerly slipped first one arm and then the other into the sleeves. Taking possession of his shirt, he slowly began buttoning it. Over his protest, they’d given him something for the pain and he now felt as if he was moving in slow motion.
“You try sitting around in that abbreviated tablecloth and see how you like it.” He balled it up and tossed it into a container for dirty linens. “Don’t see why I couldn’t keep my clothes on.”
He knew the rules as well as anyone, had stood on the other side of them every time but now. She knew he was just blowing off steam. Maybe discovering his mortality had made him angry.
“Maybe because all the nurses wanted a thrill,” she cracked. He gave her a dark look. “Well, that bullet might have missed all your vital organs, but it certainly made a direct hit on your sense of humor.” She picked up his jacket for him and slung her purse strap over her shoulder. She gamely took hold of his arm. “C’mon, hero, I’ll take you home.”
They made their way out through the back entrance to the E.R. More than a few people called out to him as they went.
He acknowledged each one with a nod, then looked at Cate. He wasn’t sure if he was up to her continued ministering. It conflicted with his invulnerable self-image. “Don’t you have to go to work and make a report or something?”
“It’ll keep.” There was no hurry now. Especially since she’d heard from Lydia that she and the team had found the other girls and they were being taken care of. She kept her arm tucked through his until they reached his car. Cate made a point of opening up the passenger side, then waiting until he got in. “In light of the fact that we now have at least one of the key behind-the-scenes people, I think the powers that be can wait a little while for me to make my report.”
He fumbled with his seat belt, unaccustomed to having it at his right. “So, it was Sullivan all along?”
“Looks that way.” Cate started up his car and it purred to life. “That would explain how they were almost always one jump ahead of us. He was warning them.” She backed up slowly, knowing he was scrutinizing how she was handling his baby. “The funny thing was, he did some jumping of his own because he leaped to the conclusion that I’d discovered he was in on it. The truth was, I never had a chance to take a look at that disk. I was in too much of a hurry to get it out of the country. Since he was the one I was turning it over to, he could have just waited it out and dubbed a copy, leaving himself out of it.”
Everyone was fallible, he thought. It was all just a matter of time. “I guess when it’s your neck on the line, you don’t always stay clearheaded.”
She eased the car onto the main thoroughfare. “Speaking of clearheaded—” she spared him a look “—you never answered my question.”
He pointed to the road. Dutifully she looked back at it. “Which one? You’ve been firing questions all afternoon.”
“The original one. What were you doing at the airport?”
Cate flew through a light that was on its way to red. He wouldn’t have done that, he thought. That was the difference between them. He was more cautious than she was. Maybe that was one of the elements that made her so appealing. “I distinctly remember answering you. I said ‘bleeding.’”
She frowned. He was stalling again. Was that a good sign? “What were you doing there before then?”
“Saving your life,” he said simply.
Yeah, she thought. He had been. And maybe in more ways than one.
Chapter 38
“You don’t have anything in your refrigerator.”
Cate pushed the handle, letting the door close on its own. The inside of his refrigerator had been the picture of barrenness. There weren’t even any old, soggy take-out containers drooping sleepily in the recesses of the shelves. It was as if he’d just bought the appliance and plugged it in that afternoon.
She’d headed for the kitchen after settling him in the living room, determined to feed his body as well as his spirit. She’d struck out on the first count.
“Food is the last thing on my mind.”
Cate frowned. She’d left him in the living room, but he was standing behind her in the doorway. The man just didn’t know when to stay put.
She turned and faced him. “But you need to keep up your strength.”
Christian laughed, shaking his head. “Wow, that must be some kind of record. You just went from sounding like a crack FBI agent to my mother in less than two and a half seconds.”
“Special agent,” she corrected. Gently, she herded him back to the living room, where she discovered that she could lead an injured man to a sofa, but she couldn’t make him sit. “The term is special agent.”
The smile on his face was just the slightest bit lopsided and did not belong to a man who was in the kind of pain she knew he had to be in. She’d once caught a slug dead center in her bulletproof vest and it had hurt like hell. The impact had momentarily knocked her not only off her feet, but out cold.
And then she remembered, they’d given Christian something at the hospital for the pain.
Was that what that funny little smile on his lips was about? The one that was burrowing itself right into the pit of her stomach, upheaving absolutely everything in its path? It was obviously responsible for his lack of common sense, because every injured person knew one had to lie down after the ordeal he’d just gone through.
When she thought about the fact that the bullet could have hit something vital… She pushed the thought away as fast, as hard as she could. She couldn’t do the same with the man. Christian had somehow managed to eat up all the space, all the air between them, and suddenly she was the one on life support, not him.
“Special agent,” he repeated. His eyes were teasing her even as they seemed to touch her. “Tell me what’s so special about you.”
She lifted her chin, putting on one hell of a nonchalant performance. “I can press close to my own body weight and I can toss a man into bed.”
The lopsided smile spread—both across his lips and to her insides. “Sounds promising.”
She rolled her eyes and tried to keep from laughing. “What did they give you?”
He lightly feathered his fingertips along her cheek. Causing tidal waves of emotions to form. “Something to clear my head.”
Cate held her ground as best she could. “And suck out all the brain cells, obviously.”
From where he was not so steadily standing, it seemed to Christian that the painkiller had killed more than just the physical pain he’d been experiencing. It killed the other as well. The emotional pain he’d been dealing with all this time. Killed it so that he could allow himself to silently ask what he was running from in such a hurry.
Maybe just about the best thing that has happened to you in a long, long while.
He blinked and realized that Cate had left his side as he’d been exam
ining this new revelation. She was all the way across the room, on her way to the rear of the apartment. “Where are you going?”
She paused to answer. His head was spinning a little, but he caught up to her in less than a beat. Because he swayed slightly, Cate took hold of his arm. He saw a shade of alarm mixed with disapproval in her eyes.
Or was that desire?
Mirroring his own.
“To the bedroom,” she told him, “to turn down your bed.” If worse came to worse, Cate decided, she could push him down onto the bed. She doubted he’d offer much resistance in his present state. He’d probably be out within moments. Or, at least she hoped so.
She also wished he’d stop looking at her like that. He was making her forget all her good intentions. Instead, her thoughts kept reverting to something that had nothing to do with common sense and everything to do with fulfillment.
“Why?” he asked, his breath tantalizing her as he leaned in. “Did I proposition you?”
She wasn’t sure if he meant the question seriously. “No,” she laughed, moving the comforter back off the bed. One good flip, she thought, that was all it would take. Gently so as not to hurt him.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath, squaring his shoulders. “Then I will.”
Turning, she was about to put her plan into action when he surprised her by pulling her to the side. In less than a very hard heartbeat, she found herself against the wall with a muscular arm on each side of her, barring any chance for a quick getaway.
He looked at her for a long moment. So long that Cate felt that she was in imminent danger of completely losing herself. The last trace of laughter faded as a deep-seated longing came to claim every part of her.
It seemed to get worse, not better each time. Because each time built on the last, growing higher, stronger. Making her feel as if she were capable of touching the very sky. Damn, what had she allowed herself to get into? She was a virtual prisoner, held captive not just by his body, but by his eyes.
“Marry me.”
She saw his lips moving, thought she heard the words, except that she knew she couldn’t have. Was that just her inner thoughts projecting themselves? And even so, she couldn’t be thinking that. Not after what she’d been through. Her life wasn’t about strong, lasting intimate bonds any longer.
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