by Gayle Wilson
He let her go, big fingers unlocking suddenly, but she was too drugged to move. How could she possibly want him to make love to her again, when only minutes before…
“Move it, Sterling,” he ordered. He rolled off her and lay back against the pillows, crossing his hands under his head, eyes closed, apparently preparing to wait out the food’s arrival.
Abby shook her head, but smiling, she awkwardly scrambled over him and got out of the bed. On her way to the hall she stooped to pick up the shirt she’d discarded last night.
The all-night pizza place, whose number was still written on the message board hanging by the kitchen phone, didn’t even ask her for directions. She wondered if the redheaded, freckle-faced delivery boy she had gotten to know so well in the weeks Nick had been part of her life still worked there. If so, she wondered if he’d be the one who would bring their order.
Smiling at the thought, she walked back into the bedroom to find Nick still stretched out, the back of his head resting comfortably in his locked fingers. The muscles in his arms and chest were cleanly delineated by their position. His eyes were open now, and he had pulled the sheet up to his waist.
“I’ve seen it all, Deandro. Way too late for modesty.”
“I miss seeing you, Abby,” he said softly. “I miss seeing the way you look when I make love to you.”
She nodded, her throat thick again with emotion “I would miss that, too,” she said. “Not being able to see your face.”
“That’s almost the first thing I remembered. How your face looks then.”
“You remembered?” she questioned.
“A lot of things now. The apartment. Glimpses of where I lived down here. A lot of unrelated stuff.”
“Anything about…the other?”
“The corruption thing?” He shook his head, lips pursing slightly. “Not yet. At least, I don’t think so. Some faces. Impressions. I don’t know what they mean. If anything.”
“Nothing you could testify to?”
He laughed, without humor.
“But if you begin to remember some things…”
She hesitated, and he finished for her. “Then eventually the rest of it will probably come. Almost all of it, anyway. That’s what they told me. Just relax and give it time. And when it starts to come…” He shrugged his shoulders. Because of his position, his entire upper body moved.
“Then it will all come back,” she whispered.
“That’s what they say.”
She took a deep breath, fighting reaction. She knew, of course, what that meant. The danger would begin again. The people she once believed had discounted Nick’s ability to testify against them would come after him again.
In the peaceful hours they’d spent together, she had even begun to believe again that Nick was wrong about the fire. It was an old house, with lots of opportunities for accidents. The fire didn’t have to mean someone was trying to kill him, although Nick had seemed so sure of that. If she had really thought so, she would never have allowed him to be here.
But if Nick began to remember, then it would all start over. All of it. And maybe this time…
“I think I’m going to grab a shower,” Nick said. Sitting up away from the pillows, his hands still locked by their joined fingers, he stretched his arms high above his head, knuckles cracking. “Think I’ll have time before the food arrives?”
“You should have,” she said, working to keep the fear out of her voice. “It’s the middle of the night, however, so they aren’t going to be exactly swamped with orders.”
She was congratulating herself on keeping her tone neutral, when Nick shattered that illusion.
“What’s wrong, Abby?”
He needed to hear the truth, she knew, selfish though it might be. “It just worries me that you’re remembering things.”
“Worries you?”
“They’ll come after you again, Nick, with everything they’ve got. We both know that. And they almost succeeded before.”
“Then we won’t tell anybody,” he said comfortingly. “Not for a while. Not until I’ve remembered something important. Besides making love to you,” he added.
She thought about that. There was no reason to report anything to the department. Nick had said that nothing was clear. Nothing that would do the prosecutors any good, that would help with any indictments. So he was right. They didn’t have to tell anyone about this—for the time being, at least.
He had swung his long legs off the bed and was sitting on the edge. Blatantly nude, beautifully male, and she couldn’t take her eyes off him. Maybe because she had been so afraid that he would never be here with her again. After the shooting, she’d been so afraid he wouldn’t make it. And then—
“Abby?”
“I’m right here,” she said. “You need some help?”
“Just head me in the right direction. The showering I can manage on my own. Unless you want to scrub my back?”
“And take a chance on missing that good-looking pizza boy?” she teased. She walked across the room and put her hand under his forearm. He didn’t stand up immediately, but his hand covered hers, tightening over her fingers
“Take me to the shower,” he said, “old faithful guide.” Nick stood up, his body tall and still strong, and put his lips against the top of her head. “Why’d you cut your hair, Abby?”
“Because I missed you,” she admitted.
He laughed. “That makes a hell of a lot of sense.”
“It did to me,” she said. “At the time.”
He shook his head. “That’s just—”
“Just like a woman?” she questioned, when he stopped abruptly. She had begun leading him toward her tiny bathroom.
“Uh-uh. I’m not touching that one with a—” His voice cut off again, but his grin told her what he had been thinking.
“In your dreams, Deandro,” she said sarcastically. But when he laughed, she couldn’t help laughing, too.
By that time they were in the black-and-white-tiled room. She led him to the tub and then released his arm to take a clean towel off the stack on the wicker shelf.
“Soap and shampoo are in the rack on the shower wall,” she instructed, trying to think of everything she needed to tell him. “Curtain’s on your right. Pull it to your left Be sure to check the hot water before you get under it. I keep meaning to cut the temperature down.”
“Okay, Mom,” Nick said.
“I’m putting a clean towel on the sink behind you,” she went on, ignoring his sarcasm. She laid the towel across the bowl of the lavatory. “Just yell if you need anything else.”
“I’ll be fine, Sterling. You’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’ve been bathing myself for some years now.”
“I’ll go get your jeans,” she said, knowing that he was right. She was being overprotective.
But he was handling that better than she could ever have expected him to. Maybe because he knew her well enough to know that her concern was only natural—because she loved him. And he was probably used to people trying to do too much for him.
“Thanks,” he said.
He reached upward, feeling for the shower curtain and finding it easily. He pulled it around the tub, and then he reached inside the enclosure it had made, turning on the water. She watched him adjust the mixture. She was hovering in the doorway, she realized, almost afraid to leave him alone.
“Jeans and then go away,” he ordered, apparently realizing the same thing. He didn’t even turn his head as he said it. “I’m not going to cook myself or fall down. And even if I do, Abby, you can’t do anything about it. Not all the time, anyway. So ..just get used to it,” he added softly.
“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry,” she added, turning away to retrieve his jeans from the bedroom.
“We’re considering the sorrys already said, remember?”
It was what he had told her during the fire. Something else to add to her list of things not to do. Not tell him she was sorry every t
ime she screwed up.
“You got it, hotshot,” she said instead, “but if you blister your tush, don’t you come crying for me to kiss it and make it better”
She turned and determinedly made her way to the bedroom, leaving him to figure out the idiosyncrasies of the plumbing on his own. Because she loved him and because she knew that was just what he wanted her to do.
NICK WAS ALMOST through drying his legs when he heard the doorbell. His stomach growled, right on cue, and so he hurried, perfunctorily wiping the moisture from his feet with the thick towel Abby had given him.
He spread it out across the lavatory to dry, locating the sink by feel, and pulled on his jeans. The odor of smoke clung to them, but he didn’t have anything else. He’d have to wear these, at least until after they’d eaten.
Despite his hunger, he felt better than he had in months. Six of them, to be exact. He had a lot to be thankful for, and he knew it. First of all for Abby’s acceptance of him, despite her natural fears about dealing with his blindness. For the baby. For the fact that they had escaped the fire last night.
That was something he knew he needed to think about, but not quite yet. They had bought themselves some time by coming here. No one knew that he and Abby had any past or even that she’d been assigned as his bodyguard, so there wasn’t much reason for anyone to look for him here.
“I’m getting it,” Abby said. Her voice, deliberately low, came from the hallway that led from the bedroom.
He wondered why she had gone back there after she’d brought him his jeans. Probably to put on some clothes. And maybe to do just what she’d promised—clear a path through the clutter. And that was going to be an adjustment for them both. One that would probably be a lot harder for Abby, to whom neatness didn’t come naturally.
He opened the door, and he could hear conversation from the living room. Abby and the friendly kid from the pizza place. Their voices were too indistinct for him to make out what they were saying. He hesitated on the threshold of the bathroom, trying to remember the layout of the apartment, examining the few pictures that had appeared in his head after he’d arrived here.
He didn’t think now would be such a great time for him to run into a wall and break his nose or to fall over some furniture whose location he hadn’t remembered. Not too auspicious a start to their renewed relationship. Despite Abby’s claim that she could live with this, he wasn’t eager to put her to that kind of test. Not yet, at any rate.
The sound from the front of the house was not loud enough for him to identify it. A bump of some kind. Front door closing? He waited a moment, still listening, but there was nothing else. No more conversation, so he guessed he was right.
“Abby,” he called, assuming from the silence that the kid had left. There was no answer, and all at once, the hair on the back of Nick’s head crawled upward and his stomach muscles tightened sickeningly.
Whenever he had spoken to Abby, she had always answered him. Immediately. Letting him know where she was. Understanding instinctively the importance of that. Which meant…
His hand felt quickly along the wall beside the door for the light switch. He flicked it downward, and stepped back inside the bathroom, trying to think.
A hundred emotions clamored inside his head. Primary among them was fear. Not for him, but for Abby. Wherever the hell she was, she hadn’t answered him. That could mean only one thing—that she couldn’t answer him.
Think, he demanded, pushing out of his head the image of Abby lying injured, maybe bleeding, on the floor beside the front door. It hadn’t been a gunshot he’d heard, thank God. Not even one fired with a silencer. He would have instantly recognized either of those sounds.
Think, his brain screamed at him again, but he seemed almost numb with fear. How the hell could he fight whoever this was? How the hell could a blind guy—
In all the old movies and TV shows he had ever seen about blind people in this kind of situation, they managed to arrange things so the final showdown was fought on their terms. In the darkness. In a world they were much more familiar with than their opponent.
Only, Nick thought in disgust, that was fantasy, and this was reality. The stark, unforgiving reality of hit men who would just as soon kill a pregnant woman and a blind guy as spit on the sidewalk. And he had no idea what lights were on in the apartment and no clear layout of its rooms in his mind. That was just another cute fantasy dreamed up by some Hollywood scriptwriter.
There was a gun in the bedroom, he remembered suddenly. The image of the small revolver Abby kept in the top drawer of the bedside table was just there in his head, like a miracle. It wasn’t department issue, and he had chided her about it not being big enough to stop somebody, but still it was a gun. She wouldn’t have taken it out to the safe house. She would have taken her .38 instead.
He stepped quickly out into the hall, holding his right arm in front of him. He found the open bedroom door easily enough, but he was hurrying too fast, forgetful of the obstacle course that Abby’s room would be. He couldn’t even know what he had stumbled over, but whatever it was hurt like hell when his bare toes connected with it. It didn’t slow him down, however, because the image of that revolver was uppermost in his mind.
He found the corner of the bed, thankfully pretty much where he’d expected it to be, and using his hand, running it along the top of the mattress, he found the bedside table. He eased out the drawer, aware for the first time that his hand was shaking. But he’d feel a lot better with a gun in his hands Any gun. Even if he couldn’t see what he was shooting at.
Except…it wasn’t there. His fingers searched the drawer from side to side and then all the way to the back. He did it twice, still hurrying, but moving more carefully the second time. Making sure. And then he was. There was no gun.
He turned, again fighting fear, and realized that someone was coming down the hall. Whoever it was was moving stealthily, but they were wearing shoes, and the bare wooden boards of the old apartment’s floor were unremittingly revealing.
It wasn’t Abby. She had been barefoot. Just out of bed and barefoot. As he was.
He moved quickly and silently, aiming himself toward the back of the bedroom door. He had tried to picture which way it opened, which way it was hung. To the right as you faced it. At least that’s what he thought, and if he was right…He put his hand out and found nothing.
The footsteps were getting closer, and his hands searched frantically, sweeping the emptiness before him until finally they encountered what he’d been looking for.
He slid the tips of his fingers around the surface, finally finding the knob. Then, holding that, he put his shoulder against the heavy door, thankful that it wasn’t one of the modern, hollow-core jobs. He didn’t have much to work with here, and he knew he had to make good use of what he did have or he and Abby were going to end up dead. Very permanently dead.
The footsteps had paused. Maybe looking into the bathroom? Or into this room because he had seen movement? Nick held his breath, waiting and listening. One chance. That’s all he’d have. One opportunity, and he knew he had to time it right.
As soon as the guy came through the opening, Nick and the door would both slam into him. Hopefully that would surprise him enough that Nick could get his hands on him And if he did.
The image he’d had earlier of Abby lying hurt, somewhere in the front of this apartment, was enough to guarantee that if he did get hold of this guy, they would have a chance. Because Nick would kill him with his bare hands. If, he thought, fighting fear again, if his hands could only find the intruder.
Just as Nick’s lungs had begun to burn from not allowing himself even to breathe, the quiet movement in the hall began again. Timing, Nick cautioned himself. Timing was everything. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
With the passing seconds his ears strained against the darkness. His familiar darkness. Feared and hated, but so familiar.
When the right second came, judged by every unwanted skill Nick Deandro h
ad been forced to learn in the last six months, he jammed the heavy door hard into whoever had just entered Abby’s bedroom. And behind that movement was every solid ounce of muscle in his six-foot-two-inch frame.
Chapter Thirteen
The body he hit with the door seemed just as solid. There was sound A grunt of reaction. Maybe breath released or a gasp of surprise. Nick hadn’t stopped to analyze what he’d heard. He had been thinking instead about his next target. Most people were right-handed, so that’s where a gun was most likely to be. In this guy’s right hand.
Nick knew he had to get hold of that hand. Grab that arm right away and hold on or he was going to get shot, and then he was going to be dead They both were. Both he and Abby.
It was up to him to do something to prevent that. All up to him He was the one who had led them here. He had led them straight to Abby and the baby. Because he couldn’t leave her alone. He had never been able to. Not from the first.
He charged around the door just as the gun exploded. It seemed to go off in his ear. Right beside his face. The smell was overpowering. As was the report which echoed shockingly in the small room.
The shot checked his forward momentum for a split second, but he hadn’t been hit. At least not yet, Nick realized in surprise, so he immediately began moving again. He plunged into the guy, hands flailing, trying to find that right wrist. Trying to connect before he could fire again, maybe with more success.
Nick pressed against the intruder, crowding him, deliberately denying him room to operate, not letting him get the gun between their bodies Suddenly his fingers found what they’d been looking for He closed them, around a wrist, thick and strong, and pushing it upward, he held on for dear life
Almost before he could secure his grip, however, the guy began twisting and jerking his arm, attempting to free it. Nick knew then that he’d gotten lucky. Gun hand. If this wasn’t the hand holding the gun, then the intruder would already have shoved the muzzle of whatever he was carrying against Nick’s side or head and pulled the trigger.
