The man groaned and half rolled to his right.
Apparently, not clear enough.
Her beam of light flickered across his upper chest, then stopped dead. His movement had shifted the fabric of the shirt bunched around his shoulders. What she saw there made her knees hit the pavement with a dull thwack.
A neat, black hole.
Her lips went numb. She snapped her eyes shut, inhaled sharply and braced a hand on the dew-slick asphalt. Fear – cold, puddling fear – gathered in her belly. The kind that had woken her in clammy sweats for the last two years.
Now it threatened to close her throat.
She gulped the cool night air as if she were about to plunge underwater. Calm, Tess, she told herself. Calm. You've seen worse. Much worse. But that did little to allay the rush of panic churning inside her.
Ironic, she thought, that a gunshot wound used to seem almost passé. Dozens, hundreds of them came through the ER where she'd worked. In fact, never once before that night had the sight of one sent her pitching headlong for a bedpan. All that, of course, had changed after Adam had died. And it was common knowledge in the rather insulated community of physicians that Tess Gordon had lost her nerve.
She closed her eyes and counted to five. Breathe, she told herself firmly. Just breathe. He needs your help. There is no one else.
She went down the automatic checklist in her head: D5W, Ringers, at least two units of o-neg, CT, CBC – none of which she could provide for him here. She had to get him to a hospital. And soon. He was leaking like a rusty pail.
Her hand was still shaking as she reached forward to lift his shirt away from the wound. The soaked fabric sucked at his skin as she peeled it back.
There it was, an inch and a half below the clavicle. Neat, probably a .38. She slid her hand under his shoulder to check for an exit wound. Nothing. The bullet was still inside him. She raised the heavy black flashlight higher. If he was very lucky, the bullet had missed his lung. If not, he'd—
The flicker of his eyelids was her only warning.
His hand closed around her wrist and jerked her toward him.
A squeak of tenor lodged in her throat. In the space of a heartbeat, her world shifted. Her flashlight and key chain went flying and the pavement slammed against her back.
His weight pinned her hard to the ground and he levered a steely forearm against her trachea. She gagged and gasped. Above her she heard him snarl something at her, but she couldn't comprehend it. He said it again, more demandingly this time, but his voice sounded even farther away.
Everything she'd learned in that stupid self-defense class she'd taken last year promptly exited her brain as white lights flashed behind her eyes. A pathetic gurgling sound issued from her throat. Pinned there helplessly with her wrists trapped above her head and the rest of her immobilized by his unyielding weight, she realized that she was about to die.
But inexplicably, as blackness circled in on her, an earthy epithet sounded from somewhere above her, followed by an unflattering observation about her gender. Then the pressure on her neck abruptly lifted.
Like water rushing into an empty vessel, her lungs sucked air past the fiery pain in her throat. She coughed and gagged and gulped more air. Blood pounded in her ears.
He was a shadow hovering above her, haloed by the moonlight behind him. He still had her trapped beneath him, but the brutal force he'd applied only moments ago was gone. He held his weight slightly off her with the concern of a misguided lover.
Anger flooded past the oxygen pumping through her veins. Her eyes burned and she clenched her teeth to keep from letting tears slide down her cheeks. He could kill her, but she wouldn't give him tears. She wouldn't!
He swore again. "Hold … still."
She bucked underneath him. "Let … me … go!"
"Who are you?" Violence simmered in his eyes and thickened his voice with all the finesse of a carpenter's rasp. "Who sent you?"
His iron-like grip hadn't relaxed, but for the first time, she felt his muscles quaking with the effort to hold her.
"Tell me, dammit!"
"Nobody sent me."
She'd be a fool to discount the force of will that had brought him this far against odds that would have crushed a weaker man. And a fool to think that luck would have the guts to rear its head tonight after deserting her so long ago.
The panic that had seized her only moments ago leaked away as years of training kicked in to some still-functioning part of her brain.
"So, what are you going to do?" she asked in a hoarse whisper. "Kill me? I'd say you've got another thirty seconds of strength left before your body gives out. So you better do it now."
His expression hardened dangerously. "It … would be a mistake … to underestimate me."
"I'm hardly in a position to underestimate anything, am I?" she replied, casting a glacial look at his hands clamped against her wrists.
"Then we … understand each other." His voice shook slightly, belying the steely set of his mouth.
"Oh, I wouldn't go that far."
Amusement flickered in his expression, before the deadly flatness returned to his eyes. "Just … how far would you go?"
She blinked. "What?"
"Club me while I'm unconscious? Maybe just—" he swallowed thickly "—run over me with that car? Make it look like an accident?"
She jerked angrily against his hands. "Make it…? You almost ran me off the road! I had to swerve to avoid you!"
"Give me a name, lady. You got three seconds." She felt the warmth of his blood seeping against her breasts. A name? What name? Who did he think she was? Someone hired to kill him?
His eyes rolled slightly with his half-lidded blink. "One."
She had mo doubt that he could, would kill her. That he had killed before. Every steely inch of him seared her flesh. He could crush her if he wanted to. Or worse.
She squeezed her eyes shut. Regrets flooded her: for the babies she'd never had; for the months that had gone by since she'd spent time with her mother; that she hadn't had the guts to listen to Adam's voice that night months after he'd died, when she'd imagined she'd heard him tell her everything was going to be okay.
It hadn't been. She hadn't let it.
"Two—"
The word sliced into her like a scalpel. Every nerve in her body tingled to life in reaction. "Tess," she blurted. "Tess Gordon."
He blinked down at her, his face only inches from her own. Confusion deepened the lines of pain bracketing his mouth.
"M-my name," she explained. "My name is Tess."
Sweat trickled past his eye and cut a path through the grime on his cheek. She could almost hear him rifle his memory banks in search of her name, coming up, naturally, empty. He shook his head slowly, his unfocused gaze circling in on her mouth. "Tha's … wrong."
"Wrong?"
His lips pulled back in a snarl. "No … more … games."
"I'm not – look, I can help you. I'm a doc—"
"Give me a name, dammit!"
"I don't have a—!"
"Two," he repeated through gritted teeth, weaving above her like a hissing balloon.
She rocked her head against the cold asphalt. "You already said two. You're losing it. Can't you see you're bleeding to death?"
He wiped his sweaty face against the shoulder of his shirt. "Okay." One side of his mouth lifted in a dangerous leer. "Three."
A sound of utter frustration wrenched from her. "Nobody sent me. That's what I've been trying to tell you." Her breath rasped against the sudden dryness in her throat. She had to make him understand. "Listen to me carefully. I was just driving by. I – only – stopped – to – help – you!"
* * *
The words slammed into him like a cold blast of water. Stopped to help you … help you … help you.
That's how muddled his brain was. That possibility hadn't even occurred to him.
Had she? Stopped to help?
The pain in his head intensified and he squee
zed his eyes shut to ease the throb. Gordon. Tess. The name lay like a stone in his memory – hard, cold, useless. He didn't even remember her face. And those eyes … he'd never have forgotten eyes like hers. But how was she connected to – ? His mind went blank. To whom? He cursed silently.
If only he could think. Turn down the rush of noise in his head. Nausea clawed at his gut and fire branded his shoulder with every breath.
Beneath him, the woman's soft curves molded against the hard angles of his body, which was doing a good imitation of a California aftershock. It crossed his mind to simply sink into her softness and disappear. Let the earthquake come. Roll over him.
But the woman's wrists felt fragile, bird-like in his hands. And warm. So warm. He inhaled her scent – the smell of summer rain – a distant memory flitting by him like the moon scudding behind the clouds.
Gone again.
Her eyes never left his face. They were wide with fear. Fear of him. With good reason. Suddenly, he knew she was telling the truth. She was too damned scared to be one of them. Whoever they were. Hell.
He glanced back at the car parked across the road, whose headlights still cut a swath of brilliance across the canyon. He turned back to her. "Your keys."
"M-my keys?"
"Give 'em to me."
She gestured with her chin toward the still-shining flashlight that lay some ten feet away. "Over there. I – I lost them when you grabbed me."
He saw the dull glint of them in the moonlight. The thought of moving that far made bile rise in his throat.
"What are you waiting for?" Her voice had gone flat and cool. "Go get them. They're right there. Easy to reach."
He pondered telling her to go get them, but discarded the idea as idiotic. The last he'd see of her would undoubtedly be her backside.
Pain shot through his temple as he crawled off her, ignoring the fire in his shoulder and the nausea in his gut. He heard her scramble to her knees behind him.
"How far do you think you'll get?" she taunted. "Even if you make it as far as the car, how long before you pass out again behind the wheel and go right over the edge of one of these cliffs?"
He ignored her, focused solely on the glint of metal in the dark.
"You're bleeding to death." Her voice shook as she spoke. "You are going to die."
Five feet. Only five more feet and he'd have them. The keys slipped in and out of focus. His left arm shook as he inched forward.
"You need a hospital."
No! he heard himself say. At least he thought he said it. Three feet. His head throbbed and his throat felt like ground-up glass.
Then a pair of scuffed white tennis shoes appeared where the keys had been an instant before. Despair rocked through him as he watched her stumble a few steps backward.
"Give'm to me, dammit!" he croaked at her.
She thrust something in his direction from above, with her finger poised above a trigger. "Don't come any closer," she warned. "I mean it! I've got pepper spray!"
He let his head dangle between his splayed arms, contemplating the ground below him and the mess his life had just become. He swallowed thickly. "I'd … appreciate it if you'd wait till I pass out again before you … use that on me. Don't think I could … handle … puking my guts outright now."
"Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you tried to kill the only person who's given a damn about you all night," she said, backing up. Peripherally, he was aware of the sound of tears in her voice.
Right. Should've. Would've. Ah, hell. Two of her swayed before him, making him feel oddly off balance. He had to get the hell out of here, get to some cover. But the ground rose up to meet him as he rolled onto his back in a boneless sprawl. Black spots swam through his vision. The cold asphalt stung his damp back and deepened the chill that had begun to work at his insides. "Go then. Get outta here."
The woman sent a helpless look around her, uncertain what to do next. "Go?"
He ran his tongue over his parched lips. Even breathing was getting harder. His gaze circled in on her and he could think of only one thing to say. With an effort, he lifted his head off the ground and looked right at her. "You got bad timing, cupcake," he said. "Amazing eyes … but … lousy timing."
"Don't call me cupcake."
"Get outta here," he said, dropping his head to the ground again. The pain in his shoulder stole his breath momentarily. At some gut level, he understood now why wolves crawled off to die alone, to spare themselves the humiliation of exposing the weakness that was settling over him like a two-ton shroud. And still she stood, waiting for some answer he couldn't give her.
"Go!" he barked in a voice that didn't seem to belong to him. "Get outta here!"
She stumbled backward a couple more steps. "Bastard." He wasn't sure if she'd said the word or it had simply echoed in his brain. Out of the corner of his vision, he watched her hesitate, then move toward her car.
The world began to spin in a slow, sickening spiral, like water being sucked down a drain.
Stars. Clouds. Him.
All but the nagging suspicion that there was something he'd needed to do. Something important. But down it went with everything else. Like bad water.
He could feel himself dying. And his last hope was backing away like a frightened cat. Go, he told her silently. Run. Before you get caught in the whirlpool.
But some other instinct, welling up from the depths of him, was stronger. The same force that had willed him up out of that canyon and onto the road, clawing back toward life.
He heard himself call her name.
She turned. The moonlight spilled over her stunned expression.
With the last of his strength, he spoke two words as foreign to him as surrender. "Help … me."
And then everything went black.
* * *
Chapter 2
«^»
Tess watched him sleep.
The overhead fluorescents cast stark shadows across his eyes. Eyes that moved beneath their lids, following some dream he wrestled with in silence. Beyond that, he was absolutely still, hauling himself steadily back from the precipice he'd nearly fallen off. Thin lines of fluids dripped into his veins with the steady rhythm of his breathing.
She had no idea what compelled her to sit here with him. By rights she should have dumped him in the lobby of the ER and walked – no, run – away. But her reasons for sitting beside him now had less to do with logic than with emotion. An emotion so foreign to her she couldn't even identify it. She told herself it was simple curiosity. That she'd never been one to let a mystery go. And this man was something more than a mystery. He was an enigma.
But it wasn't even that that held her here at his bedside. Nor, she had decided, was it simply the duty she felt as a physician to follow his case to its logical conclusion. It was something else. Something … stronger. It was the look in his eye when he'd called out to her back on that road. The loneliness she'd glimpsed. The desperation. She couldn't explain why, but she didn't want him to wake up here alone. For the first time in years, someone needed her.
"You got bad timing, cupcake. Amazing eyes, but lousy timing."
Tess dropped her head into her hands. Cupcake. What kind of a man called a woman like her cupcake? A doctor whose reputation was so by-the-book that residents had made jokes about her sensible earrings being screwed on a little too tight. And whose idea of fun for the last two years was staring at strands of DNA through an electron microscope.
And he was right about her timing. It was consistently, undisputably bad. But she couldn't help but wonder how he'd known that about her. And what he'd meant by it. That, had she come only a few minutes later, he would have been dead and none of this would have happened?
Tess moaned in self-reproach. That the question had even found a voice in her thoughts appalled her. This man was dangerous. Most likely a criminal. Certainly no one she had any desire to know. God only knew who he'd thought she was, who he'd been waiting for out there. No one
good, that was certain. And yet…
She found herself still here, long after his vital signs had stabilized. Why? Was it purely Hippocratic duty that kept her here? Or – and the thought actually frightened her – did she actually hope that he would look at her one more time the way he had out there on the road? Was she really so pathetic that a simple plea from a desperate stranger could leave her clinging to a feeling she'd thought she'd never have again?
It occurred to her then that Daniel may indeed have been right about her needing a vacation. She was definitely in trouble here.
"You all right, Dr. Gordon?" asked the plump RN holding the silver chart at the foot of the bed. "You wanna call somebody to come get you?"
"Thanks, Earline," she said, forcing a smile. "I'm fine." She stood, stretching the stiffness out of her back. "I should go."
"Yeah, you should," Earline agreed with a musical lilt to her earthy voice. "You're not doin' anybody any good stayin' here with him. You should be home in your own bed, gettin' some rest. It's been a bad night for you."
That, Tess thought, was something of an understatement. She'd contemplated calling Gil, but decided the hour was too late, and saw no point in upsetting him in the middle of the night when she was perfectly capable of—
"Don't you be worryin' about him, now," Earline continued, laying a hand against the arm of the man on the bed. Her dark skin was in sharp contrast to the pallor of his. "We'll take good care of him."
"And who's doing the surgery?" Tess asked, frowning.
Earline smiled patiently, moving toward the hallway. "Waltrip. He's on his way."
"Right," she said automatically. Earline had told her that ten minutes ago. Dean Waltrip was a perfectly capable surgeon. Thorough. Exacting.
And pompous as hell.
He'd overseen her surgical rotation in residency. Oh, he'd have a good laugh over her involvement in this whole thing. Tess, the chickenhearted, in over her head again.
What did that matter? After tonight, what happened to this stranger would be Waltrip's problem, not hers. And personally, she could think of no sweeter revenge.
I'LL REMEMBER YOU Page 2
