Protecting His Witness

by Marie Ferrarella

  "They tell me my kidneys don't want to obey me any longer. The doctor's doing what he can. My granddaughter was a doctor, you know. A general surgeon." Pride radiated from every pore. "She was really something. You would have liked her," she told him with a knowing nod of her head.

  The trouble was, Zack thought, he more than liked Kasey. And that fact had obviously blinded him to the truth.

  "I have a feeling you might be right." He began to back away. "Well, I've taken up too much of your time already—"

  "That's all right. I don't get many good-looking men visiting me, Detective..." Her voice trailed off expectantly.

  "McIntyre," he supplied.

  "McIntyre," she repeated with what he took to be an approving smile. "Take care of that friend of yours you were asking about."

  "I'll do my best."

  As he turned from the bed, he bumped into a nurse who was just entering the room. The photograph he'd been holding fell to the floor and the woman picked it up before he had a chance. She smiled at him as she returned it.

  And then she turned her attention to Delia. "And how are we this afternoon, Mrs. Delaney?"

  "We need to get out of this bed before we go crazy," he heard the woman answer.

  Zack caught himself smiling. If Delia Delaney wasn't Kasey's grandmother, she certainly should have been.

  * * *

  Chapter 12

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  Zu&ck. found that it was hard keeping his feelings of exasperation, of betrayal, under wraps. For the first time, he had trouble focusing on his work. Now that the tristate identity-theft ring had been smashed, a ton of paperwork had to be addressed. It was the downside of police work that he vehemently disliked. Usually, he could get through it.

  This time his mind insisted on going AWOL, returning to what he'd discovered with Brenda's help and what he'd wound up learning during his visit to Kasey's grandmother. That he had fallen—hook, line and sinker—for a fictitious woman.

  The funny thing was, he still thought of her as Kasey, even though Kasey Madigan had never existed.

  He'd been a chump right from the very start, he upbraided himself. His suspicions should have been aroused the moment he'd discovered that she had removed the bullet from his side and sewn him up with no problem. He didn't care how handy she was with a needle, that wasn't a skill you picked up from reading a book.

  While it was hard for him to control his thoughts at work, it was even harder off the job. Harder still to keep everything in check when he was with her.

  Zack had been with Kasey twice now since he'd discovered her true identity—and wasn't that ironic, he thought without a trace of humor. Here he was, just coming out of a clean takedown of a heretofore elusive gang that stole people's identities on a regular basis and the woman he was involved with had done the very same thing, taken on someone else's identity.

  Except that it wasn't the same thing, he reminded himself as he lay next to Kasey in her bed, holding her to him. The thieves who were now in custody had stolen real people's identities to enrich their bank accounts and live off someone else's labor. Presumably, Krystle Maller had become Kasey Madigan just to stay alive.

  Okay, giving her every benefit of the doubt—why hadn't she trusted him enough to tell him who she really was? Especially after he had told her that he was a police detective? That meant that he could protect her.

  Hell, he wanted to protect her.

  There in the dark beside her, it suddenly occurred to him that there actually was a good side to this. He'd come face-to-face with an entire spectrum of anger—shock, betrayal, rage, even fury—and not once had he fought the urge to lash out at her physically, or even to become verbally abusive. Which meant that while he might be his father's son, that didn't automatically mean that he had inherited his father's violent tendencies.

  The specter of fear he'd lived under for so long began to loosen its grip on him. If anything, his anger made him want to withdraw, to pull into himself and away from the source of his anger. The source of his pain.

  But withdrawing was the same as running and that wasn't going to solve anything. And waiting for her to come to him on her own was, at this point, pretty futile. It was up to him to initiate the conversation that would, hopefully, cause her to finally come clean. Zack wanted her to have every opportunity to tell him on her own who she was. Though tempted, he absolutely refused to hurl accusations at her.

  But waiting made him damn impatient.

  Maybe she just needed to be encouraged, he told himself.

  Tightening his arm around Kasey, Zack murmured against the top of her head, "You're awfully quiet tonight."

  There was a very simple reason for that, she thought. He made her happy. Was she wrong, trying to catch a little bit of happiness for herself? Or was she being naive? Was this just the calm before the storm, the moment of peace before the other shoe dropped? She'd let her guard down before, trusted before, and wound up at the center of an unnavigable storm.

  She desperately wanted to believe that history wouldn't repeat itself.

  "That's because I've used up every ounce of strength, every last drop of oxygen, just trying to keep up with you."

  She'd done more than try, he thought with a grin. Each time they came together was even better than the last.

  Would this be the last?

  If he started this, if he pursued the matter of her identity to its natural conclusion, would tonight be the last time they'd make love, lose themselves in each other's arms?

  Fear of losing her reared its head and for a second, he thought of abandoning the course he'd just plotted for himself. Abandon it because he didn't want to lose being with her like this. It was far too precious—

  But what did he have, really? A relationship with someone who didn't exist, someone who hadn't trusted him enough to give him her real name. Someone who could pick up and vanish the very next moment, moving on to be someone else.

  He played the game a moment longer. "I'll go slower next time, so you won't lose your breath," he promised her.

  "Don't you dare," Kasey laughed, turning her body to his. Her eyes swept over his face. "Don't you change anything about yourself."

  Her words took him aback for a second. He wondered if she realized how ironic her statement was. He skimmed his thumb along her lips, wondering just what irony tasted like on her tongue.

  It pushed him forward.

  "You know, Janelle told me something interesting about a case a friend of hers had been on a while back." A slight puzzled look came into her eyes. He assumed the name meant nothing to her. "You remember Janelle, right? You met her at the reception. She's Brian Cavanaugh's only daughter and an assistant district attorney."

  Kasey thought for a second, then nodded. "There were so many of them, it's still a little hard keeping everyone straight," she confessed.

  Zack could have sworn he heard a wistful note in her voice. She wasn't faking that. She did want a family the way she'd told him. Maybe there hadn't been as many lies as he thought.

  "Janelle said the case involved a doctor who had been the state's entire case against this wise guy kingpin, Carmine Pasquale. He killed the CEO of a stem-cell research firm late one night in a parking lot." He saw her eyes widen. Saw the light go out of them. He pushed on. "She and her fiance were eyewitnesses to the hit. But the fiance was killed soon afterward and, the story goes, the doctor died in the same fire that destroyed her house. The police determined that it was arson. No surprise there."

  Kasey went completely cold inside. It felt as if an anvil had been dropped on her chest. She couldn't breathe. Sitting up, she drew the comforter close as she hugged her knees to her.

  "Kasey?" Sitting up, Zack looked at her, concerned. He wanted to hold her, but for now, he refrained. Waiting.

  There was no escaping her life, Kasey thought miserably. She'd been so sure, so very sure, that this time she'd succeeded in completely covering up her trail. That she was finally safe, finally free. And although the
cost was a dear one—she could never see her grandmother again—at least she could gradually stop looking over her shoulder.

  Obviously, she'd been wrong. Dead wrong.

  "You know everything, don't you?" It was more a rhetorical statement giving voice to the terrible feeling that had taken her hostage.

  The awful realization that she was going to have to go on the run again left her sick inside. If this man, who wasn't even trying, could figure out who she was, Carmine Pasquale could find her. She'd been fooling herself, thinking that faking her own death would take the heat off. Men like Pasquale took nothing for granted. He, or his representative, would be at her doorstep soon enough, caressing his weapon like a well-loved mistress trained to do his bidding.

  It was only a matter of time before she was as dead as that CEO. As dead as Jim.

  Unless she ran again.

  She became aware that Zack still talked to her. His voice broke into her scrambled thoughts.

  "Why didn't you come to me?" he asked.

  He almost sounded hurt, she thought. Where did she begin? That initially she hadn't trusted him because she made it a rule not to trust anyone? And once she did trust him, it was too late, the lies she'd given him had been too convincing. Besides, why should she drag him into this? It wasn't his fight, it was hers.

  "And say what?" she finally asked incredulously. "That I was really supposed to be dead, except that I wasn't?"

  "No," he cut in impatiently. "Why didn't you come to me with the rest of it? That you were a witness to a murder? To two murders," he corrected himself, thinking of her fiance.

  Kasey shook her head adamantly. "No, Krystle Maller was a witness to a murder—an execution—and she died in a fire. That was supposed to be the end of it," she lamented.

  "Except that we both know that she didn't die. Look, I can take you in, protect you—nothing's going to happen to you," he insisted. "Janelle can be the initial liaison—"

  Protect her. She was not about to be taken in by those words again, not even if they were coming from Zack. Because she knew better.

  "That's what they said to us the first time around. That we'd be protected and everything was going to turn out fine. Except that it didn't turn out to be fine. The police detective assigned to protect us was on Pasquale's payroll. He was instructed to take us out the first chance that he got. Jim died midsentence, asking him a question."

  Zack watched as her eyes filled with tears. Reaching out, he tried to pull her to him, to comfort her as best he could. But Kasey pushed him back, keeping him at arm's length. She seemed determined to stand on her own as she recited the events.

  Tears were falling and she brushed them away with the back of her hand.

  "I couldn't even hold him one last time, couldn't tell him I loved him. Jim fell forward, blocking the detective's next shot with his own body while I ran out of the room. And I never looked back, I just kept on running." She looked at Zack pointedly. "I'm still running."

  Her story moved him and he almost felt jealous of the dead man, that she had loved this "Jim" so much that tears still came to her eyes when she talked about his death. "It's time to stop," he told her firmly.

  But Kasey shook her head. "Don't you understand?" she cried. Was the man made out of stone? Wasn't any of this penetrating? The moment they got wind of the fact that she was alive, there were people who would stop at nothing to kill her. "I can't."

  "What happened to your house?" He looked at her intently, not wanting to believe what was going through his head right now. "Who really burned it down?"

  Kasey didn't answer right away. Zack was smart, she thought. But then, she wouldn't have fallen for a dumb man. She loved his mind as much as she loved the way he made love with her.

  "I did."

  "And the body they found?" he pressed, his eyes never leaving hers. He refused to believe that she had deliberately killed someone to throw the killers off the scent. "Whose was it?"

  She wasn't proud of this. It hadn't been her finest moment. But she wasn't going to lie to make herself come off better. "Some homeless Jane Doe slated to be buried in Potter's Field." If there had been at least one ounce of possibility that the woman could have been identified, she would have never taken the corpse. "I snuck the body out of the hospital morgue and put it in my bedroom." She closed her eyes, remembering. "Then I took a few mementoes and torched the place.

  "I was pretty sure that the police would think that the so-called 'suspect' had someone set the fire to get rid of the only witness against him. I did it because I wanted to be free." She laughed shortly, shaking her head again. How could she have been so naive? "Instead, I'm more of a prisoner now than ever. The bars are just invisible."

  She still hadn't answered the crucial question. "And why didn't you tell me?" he asked. "After we made love, why didn't you tell me who you really were?"

  "It was a police detective who killed Jim. He was obviously on the killers' payroll."

  She'd stunned him. For a second, he could only stare at her in complete disbelief. "And you thought that I was part of that?"

  If she said yes, she knew it would really hurt him. But she couldn't deny it, either, because that would be lying. She glanced away for a second, addressing the air over his shoulder.

  "The thing about being paranoid, there is no off switch you can hit."

  Zack prided himself on his logic. If she felt one way, how could she then act in complete discord to her beliefs? It just didn't make sense. Had she been trying to use him? With every fiber of his being, he didn't want to believe that.

  "But if you didn't trust me," he persisted, "why did you sleep with me?"

  She spread her hands wide, as if the whole thing had been beyond her control. "Because you were—and are—just too irresistible," she answered simply. "And if I had made a mistake, if I was in fact 'sleeping with the enemy,' it was one hell of a way to go."

  He didn't know if she was being flippant or straight with him. It really didn't matter. He loved her. Zack drew her into his arms. Somehow, he had to convince her that they were going to get through this. Convince her that she no longer had to run. "I'm not the enemy, Kasey—Krystle."

  His effort touched her. She placed her finger to his lips to banish any further effort to use her real name. Her "other" name. She was his Kasey and she liked that. "You can call me Kasey. It's actually a nickname my grandmother gave me. It's from that old folk song about Casey Jones," she recalled fondly. Her grandmother had taught her all the words, then actually went out of her way to locate a CD of children's songs with that song on it. God, but she missed her grandmother. "I loved playing with model trains—like my father did— so she thought it was appropriate."

  Listening to her relate the story, it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that he'd gone to see her grandmother in the hospital. But something kept the words from forming. Instinct? He decided that he'd save that revelation for another time. Right now, there was too much coming at her at once. For the time being, he just wanted to make Kasey feel safe.

  He had never wanted anything so much in his life. And there was only one way to accomplish that. By getting rid of the threat against her. That meant putting the men who were after her permanently behind bars.

  He had a feeling they both knew that, but he said it out loud anyway. "You're going to have to testify, Kasey."

  To his surprise, she balked. "No," she said adamantly. "Look, I want to do what's right, but I'm not ready to die yet." Especially not now, when she'd found someone who was important to her. Someone she could love—did love.

  "The only way you can be sure that you won't be killed is by putting these men—and everyone who had a hand in your fiance's murder as well as the execution of that CEO—behind bars." He looked at her intently. "You know that. While they remain free, they can hurt you—they can kill you," he emphasized even as his stomach twisted at the very thought. "And the more time goes by, the more of a possibility it becomes."

  He heard her sigh and took
that to mean she was weakening. Zack pressed his advantage.

  "You're not alone in this anymore, Kasey. For one thing, you'll pretty much have the backing of a good portion of the Aurora police department. They'll be behind you—and in front of you," he added with an encouraging smile. "Between the Cavanaughs and the McIntyres, you've got a substantial part of the force in your corner. And one thing I've learned even before my mother married Brian is that the Cavanaughs always stick together. The fact that we McIntyres do goes without saying."

  "I'm not a Cavanaugh, or a McIntyre," she reminded him.

  "But I am," he told her solemnly. "And I want to keep you safe." He took her hands in his. "I will keep you safe."

  It was a sweet notion and she would have dearly loved to cling to it. But she had become a realist these last eighteen months, having made the jump rather abruptly that horrible evening.

  "You can't become my personal bodyguard." He had a job, a life, she couldn't expect him to give up everything just so that she wouldn't be shot at.

  "Who says?" he demanded. Before she could answer, he continued, "The captain owes me a slightly cushier assignment after the last bust."

  He made her smile despite herself. "And you think guarding me is a cushier assignment?"

  He pressed a kiss to her bare shoulder. "Well, right off the top of my head, I can think of a few nice perks that just might go along with this assignment."

  She shifted so that her body was touching his. The warmth began to spread through her, not slowly, like heated molasses drifting through her veins, but quickly, like a wildfire searing through a dried section of the forest.

  "Is this the way you conduct all your bodyguarding details?" she asked, humor curving the corners of her mouth.

  He pretended to think over her question. "Never actually had a bodyguarding assignment before." As he talked, he pressed small, stirring kisses along the hollow of her throat. "This would be my first, but yes, I think my way would have a lot to recommend it."

  He was doing it again. Making her pulse race, making her want him. Erasing anything and everything that existed beyond her four walls.