In His Protective Custody

by Marie Ferrarella

  He didn’t want to waste any more time. Nodding at his arm, he said, “Do your worst.”

  She had a feeling that he only respected confidence. So she displayed it. “Have no fear, Officer. Even my ‘worst’ is damn good.”

  Stepping back, she called to a nearby nurse and requested a surgical extraction tray with a full complement of instruments, plus a local anesthetic and a needle and thread. The nurse returned quickly, bringing the tray and syringe with her. Setting everything down before Alyx, the older woman went to fetch the needle and thread.

  Zane watched as she picked up the syringe. Although able to take a bullet—this wasn’t his first—he’d never been very fond of needles. He blew out a breath, bracing himself. “You don’t have to hang around,” he told Ryan. “Go back to the precinct.”

  “You kidding?” Ryan cried. He had every intention of remaining to the bitter end. “I’m not about to leave you.”

  Zane didn’t particularly want his partner hovering about, watching him trying not to wince. “Isn’t he supposed to wait outside?” Zane asked Alyx.

  “Not if he doesn’t want to,” she answered. She saw right through the man. “You afraid that you might show a little emotion, Officer Calloway?” she guessed.

  He seemed to withdraw even further into himself right before her eyes. “Get on with it,” he ordered.

  The man would never run the risk of being voted Mr. Congeniality by his peers.

  “Yes, sir,” she retorted crisply as if she were a soldier and he the high-ranking commanding officer. “This won’t take too long,” she assured him. “We’ll be done before you know it.”

  Alyx unwrapped the tray and left it positioned on a small, adjustable hospital table. Reaching for a small, rectangular packet, she tore it open and removed the antiseptic wipe from inside. Unfolding it, she liberally applied the wipe to his wound, making sure she got the entire area and beyond. The officer stiffened as if he’d been shot again. The antiseptic packed quite a sting.

  Heaven forgive her, she felt a fleeting surge of satisfaction.

  “Hurt?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Alyx was fairly certain that Officer Calloway would deny feeling any pain even if he had a bayonet sticking into him. Her father had been that kind of a man, refusing to acknowledge pain because real men didn’t complain.

  Gritting his teeth, trying to think of other things, Zane allowed his eyes to slide over her scrubs. “So I guess you really are a doctor.”

  She widened her tolerant smile. The man was not the smoothest talker. Finished, she tossed the wipe into a wastebasket. “Yup. Got my diploma from the back of a comic book and everything.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “You didn’t.” She spread out the instruments on the tray, wanting to make sure she had everything she needed before she got started. “But you did rub me the wrong way the other night.”

  “You rubbed her?” Ryan blurted out, his eyes wide. He’d been silently listening all this time, trying not to get on Zane’s nerves. The bullet in his partner’s arm had been meant for him. If Zane hadn’t pushed him aside, he’d be the one on the hospital bed now—or a slab in the morgue. “And you didn’t say anything? Damn it, Zane, you’ve really gotta learn how to share and tell me things. I’m your partner.”

  Zane fixed him with a cold look. “That can be changed.”

  Alyx glanced at Calloway’s partner, who came across a great deal more affable than the man she was about to work on. “So I take it that he’s this surly with everyone?” she asked the officer.

  Ryan nodded and allowed a sigh to escape. “For the most part.”

  “Again, my condolences,” she said. Reaching for the syringe, she held it up and pressed the plunger just enough to release the tiniest drop of solution to make sure that there wasn’t an air bubble going into his arm. “This’ll numb your arm so that you won’t feel anything while I’m working,” she explained.

  “Too late,” he bit off, his arm still stung from the antiseptic she’d applied.

  For some reason, he could almost feel her smile across his lips as it slid over hers. “Then I guess in this situation we can say better late than never,” she countered.

  Alyx paused just before she gave him the injection, pretending that she was trying to recall the steps to the procedure.

  “Now, how much of this do I give you?” she murmured under her breath.

  “You don’t know?” Zane exclaimed, suddenly alert.

  The next second, Alyx jabbed the needle just above his wound.

  “It just came back to me,” she informed him cheerfully, then did it again, this time injecting him just below the wound.

  Zane gritted his teeth and stared straight ahead. He could feel moisture gathering in his eyes. Damn it, now she would think he was crying.

  In all honesty, Zane couldn’t remember the last time he had cried. Maybe never. He hadn’t even cried at his father’s funeral.

  The day his heart officially broke.

  Chapter 4

  T he ER doctor was right, Zane thought. His arm had gone numb. Completely and utterly numb. He was vaguely aware of having an appendage, but that was it. He was nervous.

  “This is just temporary, right?” Zane asked the woman working over him. “The feeling in my arm, it’s going to come back, right?”

  Alyx raised her eyes to his for a split second and was surprised to detect a glimmer of anxiety in the deep blue orbs. He didn’t strike her as the type to be anxious about anything.

  “All too soon,” she assured him, resuming what she was doing. “You’re going to need a prescription for painkillers. I’ll write it up for you once I get this bullet out and get you all sewn up.”

  “Dunno about his needing painkillers,” Ryan interjected. He stood leaning against the back wall, his arms crossed before his chest, an all but silent witness to the procedure. “Calloway bends steel in his bare hands.”

  This was not the time to try to talk him up, Zane thought. “Shut up, Lukkas,” he muttered.

  Her eyes, he noticed, were laughing as she raised them to his. He also noticed that they were a brilliant shade of blue. The kind of blue that stayed with you after you walked away.

  “No bending steel for at least a week,” she instructed.

  He knew she was kidding, but there was a note of restriction in her voice. Restrictions always made him chafe. “But I’ll still be cleared to go back to work, right?”

  “That all depends.” She stopped for a moment to look at him. “Does ‘work’ mean sitting behind a desk?”

  “Only if they duct taped him to a chair,” Ryan volunteered with a laugh. “And even then it would be touch and go.”

  Zane really didn’t need Ryan’s “helpful” comments. Nor did he want a witness to his having the bullet dug out of the fleshy part of his shoulder.

  “Why don’t you get back to the precinct, Lukkas?” Zane suggested again, this time more forcefully. “The captain’s probably looking for you.”

  It was getting late and Ryan knew he’d feel better making his own report to the captain. McKenzie was an annoying glory hound and he liked nothing better than taking credit for something positive—even if it didn’t belong to him.

  Still, there was a loose end to consider. “What are you going to use for transportation?” Ryan asked Zane.

  Transportation was the last thing on his mind right now. “When the time comes, I’ll improvise,” Zane answered. “Maybe I’ll even give you a call,” he added, knowing that was what the other man was hoping to hear. For some reason, to Lukkas that would mean that they were bonding.

  But rather than take off, Ryan hesitated. He slanted a look in the doctor’s direction to see if she gave her blessings to his departure.

  Zane caught the small, almost imperceptible nod she gave his partner. And felt the more positive attitude that Lukkas assumed.

  “Okay, then,” Ryan declared. “I’m off. But you call me the s
econd the doctor’s done patching you up and they let you leave here, understand?” Ryan instructed.

  Zane said nothing. Instead, his partner gave him a penetrating look. Ryan realized that he had overstepped his boundaries. He’d dictated rather than merely put the suggestion out there. Zane didn’t appreciate being dictated to.

  Changing his tone, Ryan asked brightly, “Okay?”

  It cost him nothing to be agreeable, even if he didn’t mean it. “Okay,” Zane replied.

  Ryan blew out a breath, suddenly looking as if he was at loose ends. “Okay then,” he murmured, flashed an unsteady grin at the sexy surgeon and ambled out of the small area.

  The man had muscles like a rock, Alyx thought, slowly probing around the wound for the bullet that had caused it.

  “You like intimidating him?” she asked mildly.

  “I’m not intimidating him,” Zane contradicted. “Just not letting him act as if he’s in charge.”

  Again he saw that smile, the one he found unnervingly seductive. There was also amusement. “Because you are.”

  Was she mocking him? Or just trying to bait him? He couldn’t tell.

  “I have seniority,” Zane said, neither agreeing or disagreeing with her assumption.

  Amusement curved her mouth and he decided that she had a nice smile. A really nice smile. Something vaguely familiar stirred within him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was. These days, his work took up all his available time. When he wasn’t working, he was usually asleep. It kept him from thinking, or remembering.

  Or noticing the emptiness in his belly that had nothing to do with food.

  “Which makes you in charge,” Alyx concluded.

  This would go faster if the man had slacked off and skipped a few workouts. She held her breath as she continued probing, waiting until she heard the sound of metal on metal: her scalpel hitting the bullet. And then there it was, the point of her scalpel touching the lethal part of the bullet. They were in business.

  “Okay, we’re almost past the worst part,” she told him. He was being very quiet. She didn’t even hear him breathing. Sparing him a glance as she worked the bullet out of his flesh, she asked, “How are you doing?”

  He watched her work in utter fascination. “Don’t feel a thing.”

  She detected a note of frustration in his voice. He had no idea how lucky he was not to “feel a thing.” “Good.”

  But it wasn’t, he thought. Not feeling anything made you hollow and that was how he felt, had felt for a lot of years. As if he was hollow. Unable to reach out, unable to forge any sort of a relationship with a woman. He had nothing to draw on as an example. All he remembered was shouting. Words of recrimination would bounce back and forth between his parents with frightening regularity. No words of endearment counterbalanced that, no warmth at all, other than the type that came from a heater in the garage.

  “If you say so,” Zane commented on the doctor’s pronouncement.

  Finally coaxing her quarry out into the open, Alyx deposited the bullet into the corner of the tray with no small feeling of triumph.

  She glanced at her patient. His expression was completely neutral. He neither looked happy to be done with it or grimacing in anticipation of the pain.

  “You are a very complex human being, Officer Calloway,” she commented.

  He said nothing.

  Alyx began to clean the wound again, making it as sterile as possible before she started sewing up the hole. The ensuing silence made her uncomfortable.

  “So, are you a Yankees fan, or do you like to root for the underdog and cheer for the Mets?” she asked him as she prepared the sutures and needle.

  Zane lifted his other shoulder and let it drop dismissively. He’d never watched more than a part of a game and those instances only occurred when he was at someone else’s place and they were watching the event. He had no use for watching grown men swinging a stick at a ball.

  “Neither.”

  There was finality in his voice. She raised an eyebrow in his direction. “You don’t follow baseball?” she concluded.

  Zane moved his head from side to side only once. “No.”

  She tried to remember if she’d ever met anyone who didn’t root for their home team. “How about football?”

  The answer was the same. “No.”

  “Basketball?” she guessed. “Soccer?”

  “No and no.”

  She wasn’t about to give up. There had to be some sport he enjoyed watching if not playing. He didn’t make her think of someone who liked being on the sidelines. “Bowling? The poker channel?”

  Each question drew out the same answer. His “no” grew a little firmer each time.

  He completely fascinated her. “A man not into sports. I didn’t know there was such a creature.” Her smile raced straight into his insides, pureeing them before he could think to sideline it. “Maybe you’re not so complex after all.”

  His reasons sounded completely plausible to him. “I don’t have time to follow sports.”

  What did he do that fired his imagination so much it kept him away from vegging out before his set at least once a week? she wondered. “What do you have time for?”

  He tossed the word at her carelessly. “Work.”

  “I bet that goes over big with your wife.”

  Zane made an unintelligible noise. Then, because she continued to look at him as if waiting for an answer, he said, “I’m not married.”

  “Divorced?” she guessed. That was what half the people she knew were. “Widowed?” she tossed in for good measure when he made no answer.

  “Does any of this have any kind of bearing on you getting the bullet out of my arm?”

  “No,” she answered simply. “But it makes the time go by that much faster.” She punctuated her statement by slipping the needle beneath his skin and taking another stitch.

  That one pinched a little. Or maybe it was his imagination. He tried to think of something else. “Your neighbors giving you any more trouble?” he asked before she could fire off another round of questions he had no intentions of answering.

  “They weren’t giving me trouble in the first place,” Alyx countered. “I called 911 because I was afraid that Harry was beating his wife. There was a lot of yelling and things crashing. I was worried about Abby’s safety.”

  In other words, he thought cynically, the doctor used that as an excuse to butt in. “Have you heard them fighting lately?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I haven’t.” She didn’t know if that was a good thing or just the calm before another storm. She completely distrusted Abby’s husband. “I guess you must have the magic touch,” she said. Finished, she knotted her surgical thread and then cut it off.

  Not a bad job, Alyx, even if I do have to say so myself.

  “Okay,” she told him, packing up the tray, “you’re all done.” She smiled at him, her eyes sweeping over the police officer. “You can go back to being the city’s Dark Knight.”

  He frowned at her words. “That’s a fictional character.”

  “Then it won’t be that hard to take his place,” she informed him cheerfully, stripping off her gloves and dropping them into the trash can. She’d already tucked away the syringe into the hazardous waste container with its one-way-only slot. All that was left to do was to write out his prescriptions. “You should like that.”

  “I don’t mind competition.” His eyes swept over her slowly. So slowly that she could feel the touch of his gaze. Feel it warming her from the outside in. “I’d like to buy you a cup of coffee to say thanks, Doc. When’s your next break?”

  Okay, so this man utterly defied being pegged. The invitation for coffee was the very last thing she would have expected from him. She had him down as being a loner. Loners didn’t offer to buy a woman a cup of coffee. Even if she had taken a bullet out of his shoulder.

  “Oddly enough, now,” she told him. “But it’s not a long break.”

  “Wasn’t p
lanning on going to Paris for it. Just to the hospital cafeteria.”

  She realized that she was nodding her head before responding. She supposed there was nothing wrong in having a cup of coffee together. She’d rather make a friend out of him than think of him as “that surly policeman.”

  “All right,” she agreed. “Just let me get your discharge papers together along with a list of instructions.”

  “Instructions?” he repeated quizzically.

  She nodded. “On how to take care of your wound once you leave here.”

  “This isn’t the first time I’ve been shot,” he told her. “I know what to do.”

  Good for you. The man was cocky, no doubt about it. “First order of business is not to get shot again.”

  He wasn’t aware of the corners of his mouth curving, but she was. “Don’t remember that being on the list the last ER doctor gave me.”

  He didn’t look nearly as forbidding with that half-smile, she thought. “It’s my own personal touch,” she told him.

  His eyes seemed to pin her in place—and then strip her down to the bare flesh. “You like being unique?”

  Had someone suddenly turned up the heat in here? Alyx wondered. Because she could have sworn the temperature had gone up by a good ten degrees. She struggled to keep any of this from showing on her face.

  “Never knew any other way,” Alyx quipped. Gathering up the tray she’d just used, she pulled open the curtain on her side. “Stay put. I’ll be back with your discharge papers in a couple of minutes.”

  He nodded in response.

  True to her word, Alyx was back in a couple of minutes.

  Untrue to his, he wasn’t there.

  When Alyx returned, Zane was nowhere to be seen. Surprised—the coffee had been his idea, not hers—she stared at the empty bed for a moment, as if she expected him to somehow just reappear. And then she turned around and stopped an orderly who was passing by.

  “Did you see the man who was in this bed?” she asked. “He’s a police officer and he was supposed to wait for his discharge papers.”

  “Sorry, doctor, I didn’t notice anyone here. I’m working on the other side of the ER today. I just came over to see if you have any extra sheets over here. We’ve run out.” With that, he went to look in the closet where the sheets and extra blankets for this side of the ER were kept.