by Gayle Wilson
He made no response, and the smile faded. She just had time to wonder if that was because he didn’t like the sheriff, before the scent of something burning began to permeate the kitchen.
“Damn,” she said. She opened the oven door and black smoke billowed out. She shouldn’t have turned it on broil, she supposed. Or maybe she just shouldn’t have allowed herself to be distracted by Nick’s unexpected appearance.
“Can I help?” he asked.
“You can tell me you like your toast burned.”
“I like my toast burned,” he repeated obligingly.
“Like hell you do,” she said, taking the cookie sheet out of the oven with the help of one of Maggie’s pot holders. She carried it with her to stab the alarm’s deactivation button and then over to the door. Operating one-handed, she struggled with the lock before she managed to open it. She pushed the screen with her hip and threw the ruined toast out into the backyard.
She left the door open, and watched a moment as the smoke began to eddy toward it. Disgusted with herself, she walked across the kitchen and put the baking sheet back on the top of the stove. Then she turned off the oven
“You didn’t really want toast,” she advised, turning to look over her shoulder at Nick. Luckily, his lips were still, except for a minute twitch at one corner. His darkly rugged features were aligned, however, in a perfectly noncommittal arrangement.
“I guess not,” he said.
“Good,” Abby said. “There’s cereal and a banana. Will that tide you over until lunch? I can make sandwiches then.”
“That’s fine, Sterling. I eat anything.”
“How about take-out pizza for breakfast? That’s the normal extent of my culinary endeavors, but we’re probably too far out to get delivery. On second thought, I doubt Rob would approve.”
He laughed, and for some reason her stomach reacted again.
“Cheap date, Sterling,” he said.
That had been a standing joke between them. They couldn’t go out. Not together. Their options were extremely limited as to entertainment. Not that they had ever had any problem entertaining themselves. Not any problems at all, she thought, and realized she was remembering again.
She pushed those images from her mind. But even as she did, she acknowledged that successfully doing so was becoming increasingly difficult. This was Nick. Still Nick. And despite her fears and uncertainty about dealing with his blindness, he still made her knees weak.
“I’ll take your tray up,” she offered. She walked across to the table and took the handles of the wooden tray Maggie used.
“No,” Nick said. “Just…” He hesitated, and she could see the depth of the breath he took before he finished. “Just put whatever we’re having out on the table, Sterling.”
She waited a moment, eyes examining his face. What she could see of it. His mouth was set, almost rigid with tension.
“I can carry the damn tray upstairs,” she said. They had been over this last night. Pregnant, not disabled.
“I know,” Nick said softly, his voice still calm. “But if you don’t mind, I prefer to eat down here”
“Why the change of plans?” Abby asked, her fingers tightening around the wooden handles, ready to pounce on any you-need-to-take-it-easy spiel.
“Maggie gets paid to wait on me,” Nick said. “You don’t You’re a cop, Sterling, not a maid.”
She thought about it. He was right, of course. She hadn’t signed on to become chief cook and bottle washer. He was certainly capable of coming downstairs for his meals. It made sense in the circumstances, but somewhere in the back of her head Maggie’s words echoed. He don’t like eating ‘round other people.
And he still wouldn’t, of course, but she could manage to arrange that, even if he ate downstairs. “Okay,” she said. She put the tray back down on the table and set the items she had put on it in front of the chair nearest to where Nick was standing.
He began to walk toward the table and when he was within a foot or so, he put his hand out, accurately finding the high top of the ladder-back chair. She looked down, concentrating on what she was doing instead of watching him. She heard the scrape of the chair being pulled out, but still she refused to look up.
Then she realized he was near enough that she could smell the fragrance of his body, just as she had last night. Apparently Nick had just showered, and the pleasantly fresh aroma of soap and shampoo predominated. But the other scent was there as well, sensuously underlying them. The warm masculine scent of his skin. The fragrance of his body. Achingly familiar.
She turned back to the stove and picked up the baking sheet she had left there, intending to put it into the dishwater. It was still too hot to handle, but in her confusion she hadn’t even thought about using the pot holder this time. She dropped it to clatter with a metallic reverberation on the top of the stove.
“Damn it to hell,” she said softly, putting her burned fingers into her mouth.
“It’s probably time to clean up your language, Sterling.”
“Am I offending your virgin ears, Deandro?” she asked sarcastically. She turned and watched his fingers moving over the few items she had set out. They touched each carefully, examining and orienting. And their movement was just like the pictures she had in her mind when she heard the word blind.
Only, even moving slowly from one item to the next, they were still Nick’s fingers. Dark and hard and powerful. She had reason to know how powerful. The bruise she had known would be there had already formed along her wrist.
But there were, of course, all the other images of his hands. They, too, were evoked in her consciousness by the movement of his fingers. Once he had touched her just this carefully. Tenderly. Finding places on her body that responded with such joy to their caress. And it seemed, as she watched them now, she could almost feel them moving over her skin again. Eliciting sensations she had never felt before. Or since.
“Kids,” Nick said.
“What?” she said, thankfully drawn back from that echoing sensuality by the prosaic quality of his tone.
“Once you’ve got kids, you have to clean up your act.”
“My act’s already pretty clean, thank you.”
“Just trying to help. You’re the one who’ll get the ugly notes from the kindergarten teacher. Sugar?” he asked.
“Yes, dear,” she retorted.
He laughed, dark head tilted a little to the side. “I thought I was the one who was supposed to have the smart mouth.”
“You don’t have a monopoly.” She put the sugar bowl down on the table beside his coffee. She wasn’t sure whether he wanted it for that or for the cereal. She watched his hand move over it, checking to see that the lid was off.
“You want some help?” she asked.
She hadn’t meant for it to happen, but her voice had softened The banter was better, she knew, regretting her offer to help him as soon as the words left her mouth. They hung in the air between them.
“If I do, I’ll ask,” Nick said, but there was no anger. Just a simple statement of fact
She nodded, and then realized again that was pointless. “Okay,” she agreed. She went back to the stove and the baking sheet, picking it up with the pot holder this time.
“Sterling?”
She turned back to face him.
“Thanks for offering,” he said softly.
She inhaled, deeply enough to ensure that there was no breathless emotion creeping into her voice this time. “You’re welcome,” she said, realizing suddenly that none of that exchange had been half as painful, knowing the old Nick as she did, as she would have expected it to be. And realizing, surprisingly, that asking if he needed any help had not been painful for her at all.
“WE’RE SURVIVING,” Abby told Rob Andrews when he calléd that afternoon. He was checking up on the situation, of course. And calling to tell her that they didn’t have a place in New Orleans ready to move them to yet.
“It won’t be long,” he reassured. �
�Having any problems?”
Not any she planned to discuss with her supervisor, she thought. “Not really,” she said.
“Is Nick listening to this conversation right now?”
“He’s upstairs.”
“So what did he remember, Abby? You said it was nothing important.”
She had never clarified what Nick had meant by the comment. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. Only something he had dreamed about. A fragrance. Nothing that would help the case. She hadn’t meant to mislead Rob or to get his hopes up.
“Abby?” he prodded.
“I may have been wrong about that, Rob,” she admitted.
“About him remembering something?”
“He thought I was somebody else.”
“Somebody else?”
“Some woman. He said you knew about her. Someone who was involved with what happened to him Or at least involved with Deandro before it happened.”
She was surprised Rob had kept that from her. He hadn’t told her something that might be pertinent to the assignment she’d been given. She wondered if he’d had a reason not to tell her, or maybe just not had a good enough reason to tell her. Or maybe he didn’t think this had anything to do with what they were trying to accomplish. After all, Rob had no way of knowing that she and Nick had once shared much more than animosity.
“I guess he means our mystery woman.”
“Mystery woman?” Abby questioned
“Somebody kept calling the hospital to get information on Nick’s condition after he was shot.”
Abby worked at controlling her voice. “A woman?”
“She even knew the name we were hiding Deandro under. Knew way too much as far as I was concerned.”
“How could she have known that?” Abby asked.
She hadn’t realized at the time exactly how the department would interpret those calls. Or maybe she simply hadn’t cared. Her concerns had all been directed toward a very different objective. She needed to know how Nick was doing, but she had been reluctant to keep asking Rob for medical information. Maybe reluctant out of guilt, out of worry that she had somehow been responsible for what had happened to Nick, that their clandestine meetings had led to his cover being blown.
She knew that what they had done was a serious breach of security. Nick was critically injured, but she had hesitated to destroy his career, and maybe her own, when she couldn’t know for sure that their affair had had anything to do with the shooting.
“I don’t know,” Rob said. “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. You have any ideas, Abby?”
She examined his voice, trying to decide if there was any nuance of suspicion. “It’s a leaky department,” she suggested.
“That’s what scares me,” Rob agreed. “That’s what scares the hell out of me.”
“Nobody in the O.C. Unit is dirty, Rob. We were all too carefully screened. The commissioner himself picked us. Individually. Nobody who’d ever been on the take. No possible connection to the rackets or to the Old Guard.”
She waited a moment, listening for his agreement.
“I guess you’re right,” he said, but she sensed that his affirmation was hesitant.
“You worried about somebody specific?” she asked softly.
“What I’m worried about is the two of you. I don’t like what happened out there the other night.”
“A glitch,” she said. And it might have been. Or her mistake, caused by her distraction over being with Nick again.
“Maybe, but I want Deandro back in town. He needs to start working with the prosecutors. They’re eager to see if they can get anything for a corruption indictment.”
They both knew how unlikely that was now. “How soon?” she asked.
“A day or two. No more. That’s a promise, Abby. Just hold on for a couple of days.”
“You got it,” she said easily.
It couldn’t happen soon enough for her. The tension was building within her. The guilt. The need to confess the truth to Nick, and then to see where they would go from there. After all, that was the right thing to do. This was Nick Deandro’s baby she was carrying.
Even if he still didn’t remember her, she now knew that he did remember being involved with someone in the weeks before the shooting. If his memory of those weeks they had been together came back, he would sure as hell resent the fact that she hadn’t told him the truth. Her truth.
“You doing okay?” Rob asked. “Not having any trouble, are you? Baby-wise, I mean.”
“Not baby-wise or any other. Everything’s under control, Rob. Just get us a safe house with security that’s dependable.”
“I’m working on it. You want some backup?”
She thought about it. It might make sense, but she realized she didn’t really want anyone else out here right now. And she decided she’d think about her reasons for that later.
“I guess not. Unless you’re worried I can’t do the job”
“That’s not it, Abby, and you know it. I’d never have sent you out there if I hadn’t thought you could handle anything that happens. No matter what.”
“Okay,” Abby said, grateful for his vote of confidence, since she wasn’t sure she had handled everything as well as she thought it should be handled. “Let me know when you know something”
“You got it,” Rob agreed, and the connection was broken.
Abby held the phone for a moment, thinking about what she’d done. Assured Rob that everything was fine, despite her internal certainty that she’d armed the system that night. Denied the need for another cop out here, despite what was building between her and Nick. And left herself open for a whole lot of pain.
Heartache, Maggie had said. That was exactly what she was courting, of course, but she couldn’t leave now. Because Nick was here and because nothing that needed to be resolved between them had been. Including her own feelings.
“SIT DOWN and eat, Sterling,” Nick said.
She glanced over at him, pulling her eyes from their studied contemplation of the shadows that were beginning to drift in over the expanse of the bayou that was visible through the kitchen windows. The dying sun was reflected in the dark waters.
“I haven’t spilled anything during the two meals I’ve eaten down here,” he added. “I don’t plan on it tonight.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“That I promise not to offend your delicate sensibilities”
“What the—” she began.
“That is why you’re not eating with me, isn’t it? Afraid I’m going to do something you don’t want to see? Dribble food down my shirt or turn over my tea?”
“Maggie said you don’t like to eat around other people,” she defended. Damn him, he knew exactly how to get to her. How to make everything she did appear in the worst possible light.
“Sit down and eat,” he said again. He had put down his fork, and both hands were on the table, one on either side of his plate, apparently waiting for her to comply. “And I’ll wipe my mouth, I swear,” he added. “No disgusting table manners from the blind guy.”
“Damn you, Nick.” She said it aloud this time, but it didn’t matter because he’d succeeded. She had already been jerking out the ladder back opposite his
“Food, Sterling,” he suggested.
He was right, of course. It didn’t take her long to dip a plate and pour a glass of tea and return to set them down, way too hard, on the table, making her point she hoped. When she sat down, she realized that the meal didn’t look all that appetizing.
Most of what she’d fixed had come out of cans. The ham and the potato salad she’d found in the refrigerator. But she had also tried to think as she’d put the simple dinner together what would be easiest for Nick to handle. Although he was right, of course. He had had no trouble with breakfast or lunch.
“Satisfied?” she asked, when she was sitting across from him. She poked her fork into Maggie’s leftover potato salad.
“Y
ou talk to Rob today?” Nick asked, ignoring her question.
“This afternoon,” she said. Her voice was still tight with anger, a contrast to the calmness of his. She watched as he cut a piece of ham with his fork and carried it to his mouth.
“You gonna tell me what he said, or am I supposed to guess?” he asked after he’d chewed and swallowed it.
“He said it would be a couple of days before we could move.”
Nick nodded. His fingers wrapped around his glass of iced tea, and he took a sip before he spoke again. “Is that all?”
“He asked if I wanted some backup out here.”
His hand hesitated, the bottom of the glass hovering just above the surface of the table. “You accept?”
“No,” she admitted. “Maybe I should have.” It sounded like a question, and she hadn’t meant it to.
The glass descended to the table. “Why?” he asked.
“Because of what happened the other night, I guess.”
“I thought you and the sheriff had decided that was nothing. A glitch in the system.”
“Maybe,” she agreed. “But there’s always the possibility, I guess, that someone was really out here.”
“Someone looking for me?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said again.
“You worried, Sterling?”
“Are you?” she countered.
“I told you. I don’t worry.”
“Not even about…” Her voice faltered, the question she had been about to voice unspeakable.
“About this?” he asked, his hand lifting to touch the rim of the dark glasses that covered his eyes.
“Do you?” she said softly.
His lips moved, tightening fractionally. His hand fell to rest again beside his plate “Sometimes,” he said. “Ironically, mostly at night. I sometimes wonder what the hell I’m going to do with the rest of my life if they’re wrong.”
That was not something she had ever considered, not in all her agonizing over this situation. What a man like Nick Deandro would do for the next fifty years if this were permanent.
“Have you figured that out?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he admitted. “But I’m working on it Now that I’m at least forced to think about the possibility. And I’ll tell you, Sterling, it scares the hell out of me.”
