“Over there! The other side of the road!”
Nia hugged the earth and tasted bile and fear.
The lights flashed dizzying strobes of red, blue and white, picking out the cops’ movements, their attempts to flank the shooter.
The wounded officer writhed in pain, both hands clutched tightly to his side, grunting as he tried to bite back howls of pain.
“Come on.” Rathe shifted off her. “He needs help.”
Nia rolled over and saw Rathe crawling toward the wounded man. He looked back and shrugged. “It’s what we do.”
Surprise shimmered through her, and a strange joy.
Four days earlier he hadn’t wanted her down in the hospital basement alone. Now he was inviting her to belly crawl through a firefight. If she weren’t so terrified, she would’ve punched the air in victory. As it was, she had to force herself to move.
Don’t chicken out. Not now. Not when he’s finally ready to give you a chance.
She forced the fear into a deep, dark corner, along with the image of Rathe’s dead, bloated corpse curled in the trunk of a dark-blue sedan. She turned her head, spat out the nasty taste and began to crawl.
The gunfire grew more sporadic, the cops’ voices farther away. Still, she anticipated the sting of a bullet as she wormed her way toward the fallen man. Toward Rathe.
“He’s gone!” The shout from across the street was small consolation. The gunman had escaped. He could be fleeing the scene at any moment.
Or he could be working his way back around for another try. There was no doubt in Nia’s mind that the bullet had been meant for her. But why? What did she know that Cadaver Man—or his boss—feared?
“Help me take this off,” Rathe ordered the moment she reached him. He held out his bandaged wrist. “We’ll use it for a pressure pad.”
“I’m not sewing you back up,” she argued. “The cruisers have first-aid kits.”
“Fine. Get one while I keep pressure on.”
Nia scrambled to the nearest cruiser and hunkered down, though there was no guarantee a low profile would save her from a bullet. A middle-aged officer crouched beside the rear tire, sweating profusely.
“I need your first-aid kit.” When he only stared at her, she snapped, “Now!” The command sent him into motion. A stream of curses bled between his lips and Nia felt a flare of pity. The local rural cops hadn’t been prepared for a shootout.
Neither had she.
“Here.” He jammed the kit into her hands, then took a deep breath and glanced at his fallen comrade. “What can I do to help?”
“Make sure there’s an ambulance on the way. And keep your head down.”
She did the same as she scrambled back to Rathe. He was bent over the officer, pressing his bare hands into the man’s side and keeping up a steady stream of low, calming conversation. Their eyes were locked.
Nia paused. Over the years she’d seen Rathe as an adventurer and a grieving friend. As a lover and as the man who’d turned her away. More recently she’d seen him as a reluctant mentor and as the HFH superior who had the power to deny her dreams.
But she’d never before seen him as a doctor.
His voice was calming, his actions precise. And his attention was wholly focused on the fallen policeman, willing the patient to fight, to live.
A fist squeezed Nia’s chest, the air backed up in her lungs, and her heart cracked in two, letting Rathe in a little farther than she’d intended.
Much farther than was wise.
“I need all the four-by-fours you have.” Rathe’s eyes snapped to hers. “Nia! Stay with me!”
“Four-by-fours. Right.” She pawed through the first-aid kit, then shouldered him aside. “Let me. You shouldn’t stress your stitches.”
They worked side by side for the next fifteen minutes, stabilizing the young officer as best they could, alternately soothing him and chivvying him to stay awake. The tension level around them decreased by the moment, as the cops trickled back in, all with negative reports.
“Your gunman got away.” Peters crouched down beside Rathe. “How is he?”
“Still breathing,” Nia replied, “and he’s not ‘our gunman.’ If you’d found him back when—”
“Here’s the ambulance.” Rathe’s voice interrupted, and she bit back the irritation. The lingering fear.
“I’m sorry,” she said to the detective, “I know you’re trying.”
“Not hard enough, apparently.” Peters strode away, leaving Nia feeling small and mean. And scared.
They handed the wounded officer over to the paramedics. He was stable enough that they didn’t need to ride with him to the local hospital, so they were cleared to return to the apartment.
And do what?
In the back seat of the detective’s car, Nia let her head fall back and closed her eyes. They had two bodies. They had the scant information from Rathe’s abduction and a car that had been reported stolen two days earlier. And they had a few pieces of charred packaging. That was all.
Logan Hart claimed he was innocent. She almost believed him. He’d also claimed there was a tie to the nurse, Marissa. Nia wasn’t sure she believed that. But if not Logan or Marissa, then who was Cadaver Man’s inside contact?
“Let it go.” Rathe’s words seemed to come from faraway, and her sleepy brain acknowledged their worth. As she sagged toward unconsciousness, she barely felt her head nod in his direction. But when his bandaged arm curled around her shoulder and urged her against him, she knew she was safe.
For the moment.
THE FIRST THING that hit Rathe the next morning was the pain. The next was the realization that he wasn’t alone in bed. The first wasn’t all that unusual. The second was downright strange.
He lay still, tensing as it all came back in a rush. Being grabbed outside the hotel and stuffed in the trunk. Suffocating, straining, near panic when the zip ties proved stubborn. Convinced the car would stop any sec ond and it would be over. Freeing himself and rolling from the moving vehicle, slamming into the road and skidding on his face.
Worrying about Nia the whole time.
I can’t do this.
“Do what?”
He hadn’t realized he’d spoken aloud. Now, knowing she was awake, as well, he forced his eyes open and turned, gingerly, on his side to face her.
Her hair was tousled, her eyes slumberous. The faint smell of soap and toothpaste still clung to her from hours before, when she’d let them into the apartment and headed straight for the bathroom. Twenty minutes of showering had left her rosy-cheeked and, hopefully, feeling a few degrees distant from the body in the trunk. The gunman on the hill.
“What can’t you do?”
“The police are involved all the way now,” he answered without answering. “We can leave it to them.”
Her eyes darkened; her full lips formed a thin line. “Darn it, Rathe—”
He reached across, sore muscles screaming with the motion, and touched a finger to her lips to stop the words. “This has nothing to do with you being a woman or me being a man.” It did, but not in the way she was thinking. “It’s about danger, and what HFH can reasonably expect their investigators to endure. We’re beyond that point now. I think we should pull back and let the cops sort this out.”
She pushed his finger aside, seemingly not caring that they were lying nose to nose in a warm cocoon of blankets. The night before he’d been too sore and she’d been too tired to care, and together had seemed safer than alone.
Now he was still sore, but even injured, his body knew very well where he was. And who was lying opposite him.
Nia French. The woman who’d haunted his dreams for a long time after he’d sent her away, believing as her father did that she was better off taking another path. The woman whose memory had plagued him again when she’d called him to her father’s bedside and he’d refused.
And now? The woman he couldn’t imagine not wanting. Whose possible injury—or worse, death—terrified him s
o much he was willing to do the unthinkable.
Drop an assignment.
She frowned. “The detectives need our help, Rathe. They don’t know the hospital, don’t know medicine. We do.” She sat up, crossing her arms over her breasts when her oversize T-shirt drooped off her shoulder.
So she wasn’t unaware of their position, after all.
Emboldened, perhaps foolishly so, Rathe dragged himself up and leaned back against the wooden headboard, gritting his teeth against the stab of pain. The stitches in his wrist were a background complaint compared to the still oozing slices on his other arm and his ankles. The bruises on his torso throbbed with his heartbeat, his face was puffy and tender, and the road rash along his neck and shoulder flared quick insult at his slightest motion.
“I could’ve been killed last night.” He hadn’t meant to say it so baldly, but there it was. If he hadn’t escaped, he would’ve been sharing waterlogged space in the trunk with Pockmark—or worse. When Nia flinched, he pressed his advantage. “You could’ve been killed last night.”
The whine of the bullet and her doubling over had happened so quickly, for a moment he’d thought she’d been hit.
An echo of terror, of loss, pulsed through his veins. She was important to him. Too damn important to risk herself like that.
She held his eyes. “This is what HFH investigators do.”
“No, it’s not.” He grabbed her ankle, the only part of her he could reach without moving. “This is above and beyond. Jack would agree. He’ll pull us out if we both ask.” He took a breath. “What do you say, partner?”
Their eyes held for a heartbeat. Two. Then she slowly shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Please?” He tugged on her ankle, sliding her closer. “Nadia, if you ever—”
“Don’t.” This time it was her finger on his lips. “Just don’t, okay? You don’t understand. I have to see this one through.” Before he could ask again, before he had fully registered her soft touch, she slid away and stood by the side of the bed.
Her fingers touched the hem of her sleep shirt, and his breath caught. “Nia, I don’t think—”
“I’m not going to jump you. I want to show you something.” She slid the shirt up over one hip, then higher. Her panties were smooth, soft cotton—the sort she could rinse in a bucket of camp water and wring dry. Above them stretched a neat scar the length of her hand.
She touched the scar. “This is why I can’t leave the case.”
He stared at the narrow white line for a long moment while his brain supplied the information his consciousness didn’t want to accept. Finally he looked up into her eyes, his libido strangled by the guilt. “You donated a kidney to him.”
It wasn’t a question. The hints all added up.
She nodded and slid the shirt back down, to where it dangled across the tops of her thighs. As though noting her state of undress for the first time, she made a small noise of distress and pulled on last night’s jeans before returning to sit cross-legged on the bed, far away from him. Her eyes were shadowed with wariness.
“Wainwright doesn’t know, does he?” It wasn’t the first of Rathe’s thoughts, nor the most important, but it was the least personal question—and therefore the easiest.
And the most complicated. Though human kidneys were basically redundant, and a living donor could pass a normal, healthy life with only one, HFH fieldwork was far from a normal life. Candidates had to pass rigorous physical exams, or else be assigned to less dangerous aspects of the organization.
She lifted her chin. “He knows.”
“And he took you, anyway? He must’ve been desperate.” Rathe didn’t consider the words or how they might sound. His mind was locked into a replay of the past four days. She’d been in worse danger than he’d ever imagined. One knife stab in her remaining kidney, one bullet, one well-placed kick—
And she’d be dead. Or on dialysis until they found a transplant donor.
He and Tony had originally met at the field hospital because Tony had been wounded and needed a transfusion. The two shared the same rare blood type. And if Nia had been a match for Tony—
The connection clicked.
“You’re a rare type.” As was he. Rathe leaped from the bed and swayed as his wounds sang a thousand painful songs and his head spun. “Damn it, Nia. How could you risk yourself like that?”
He meant her pursuit of an Investigations position. She took it another way. Her eyes snapped and she sprang off the bed. “It was my choice. Yes, he was dying from the heart condition, but he wasn’t ready to die yet. I gave him fourteen more months of life, and you know what? I would’ve given him the other one if I’d thought it would help.”
He stretched out a hand. “Nia, I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you didn’t.” She paced the room with jerky strides. “You probably think you did him a favor by not coming back. But he needed you. He was scared and he needed you.”
What about you? Were you scared? Did you need me? The sick feeling he’d been carrying inside flared to nausea.
He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and nearly dropped when the pain grayed his vision. The smaller aches were fading with time and movement, but the larger injuries remained. Damn Cadaver Man. Damn whoever he was working for.
When had this gotten so complicated?
That was easy. The moment he’d opened an airport hotel door and found his best friend’s daughter outside. The moment he’d seen how much she’d matured—from brilliant young woman to the woman.
“I never should have let you in that hotel door.” Because he had, Tony had ordered him away from the family, away from Nia. For her own good. If it hadn’t happened that way, Rathe would’ve been there when Tony got sick.
But he’d opened the door and owned everything that had happened because of it.
Nia didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Surprisingly she blushed and crossed her arms over her chest. “No. That was my fault. You were sick and I took advantage of the situation. We both know you wouldn’t have touched me if you’d been in your right mind.”
“Bull.” Rathe crossed to her and slid his hands from her elbows to her shoulders, holding her still, not letting her look away. Forcing her to see the truth in his eyes. “The moment I saw you standing in my doorway, I knew I had to touch you.” He touched his sore lips to hers, didn’t deepen the kiss, but simply stayed there absorbing the buzz of contact. Knowing she felt it, too. He lifted his lips, but didn’t break the half embrace. “Fever or no, I knew exactly what I was doing.”
Making love to his best friend’s daughter, ten years his junior. Loving her.
“Yet you left. It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough.” She pushed away from him and stalked to the opposite side of the room.
“You were everything!” Rathe shouted, surprising himself as a backwash of emotion hit him, desires long denied, regrets long ignored. “But Tony was right. You were better off without me. What sort of life would it have been for you, Nia? Would you have waited at home for me to finish assignments, wondering if I would make it back or whether this would be the time I didn’t?” God knows, he’d wondered it often enough, though over time the answer had ceased to matter. “Or would you have followed me from country to country, living in a lousy tent with no running water, surviving on biscuits when the food ran out?” He spread his hands. “That’s no life for a woman.”
“You didn’t have the right to decide that for me.” She pressed her hands to the windowsill and looked out. “Neither of you did. It was bad enough Dad warned you off…” The sigh seemed to come from the depths of her soul, a tired, depressed sound. “I hated him for that. I was angry with him for a long, long time. Then he got sick and it didn’t seem so important anymore. In the end…in the end he understood why I made the choices I did. At least he tried to.” She glanced over at him. “But you didn’t even try, didn’t even give me a chance to explain when I called.”
Her shoulders slumped. Rathe
would’ve gone to her, would’ve embraced her, but she was a room away.
A world away.
“I left because it was the right thing to do. I left because of how much I cared about you and your father.” Why couldn’t she see the sacrifice for what it had been?
She snorted inelegantly, but her eyes held hurt. “Feel free to tell yourself that bull, but don’t waste it on me. You care about the job and yourself, in that order. It’s all about you, your feelings, and what’s easiest for you, Rathe. It had nothing to do with me or Dad.”
A fist of emotion gripped his heart and squeezed. “That’s not fair. I left you because it was in your best interest. And I didn’t come back to see Tony because I didn’t want him to die knowing he’d compromised at the end.”
Or so he’d told himself every day since Tony’s funeral, when he’d slipped into a back pew, said his goodbyes and left before Nia or her mother saw him.
“No, you did both of those things because they were easier. Because they meant you didn’t have to change your life or your opinion.” She gripped the windowsill until her fingertips whitened. “Dad was wrong to send you away, but you were equally wrong to go. And you should have come back when he asked you, Rathe. You shouldn’t have used that damn promise as an excuse. You should have cared enough. But you didn’t.”
Silence followed her final word. Neither of them breathed, neither of them moved.
In that quiet, Nia’s phone rang.
“Hello?” She didn’t look at Rathe as she listened, but he saw her eyes sharpen, her shoulders square. Her chin lifted, like it did before she went into each battle. “Fine. We’ll be right there.”
She hung up and strode into the bathroom.
“What? What happened?” Rathe tried to reassemble his HFH professionalism, tried to ignore the words still buzzing in his brain.
It wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. Denying Tony’s dying request had been torture, eclipsed only by the devastation he’d felt when he sent Nia away. Those had been the tough decisions. The right decisions.
Hadn’t they?
She emerged from the bathroom and tossed a bottle of ibuprofen at him. “Take some. We’re needed at the hospital.”
Covert M.D. Page 12
