by Radclyffe
“You killed my brother, you fuck!” the boy screamed, focusing on the wounded, semicomatose boy that Deb Stein was struggling to save. He raised his gun in a trembling hand, and to Jude’s amazement, Deb leaned over her patient in an attempt to shield him.
“No!” Jude shouted, and the gunman hesitated, jerking involuntarily in her direction. She didn’t have time to register fear because the next thing she knew, she was flying through the air. Her shoulder struck a counter and her head bounced resoundingly off the floor as she landed. Dimly, she heard several more loud popping sounds, and then there was silence.
*
“Jude, Jude!”
Jude opened her eyes and looked up into Melissa’s frantic stare. “Stop shaking me, damn it. I’m awake.”
“Let me examine her, please, Mel.” Sax knelt down next to her and placed her hand gently on Jude’s shoulder, preventing her from rising. “Jude, just lie still for a minute.”
For the second time in her life, after awakening confused and disoriented, Jude stared up into Sax’s comforting deep blue gaze, but this time there was something in addition to reassurance and confidence in Sax’s eyes. This time there was fear.
“I’m fine,” Jude said quickly.
“Let me be the judge of that.” Sax flicked a penlight into each eye, watching the brisk, even pupillary constriction and feeling the tightness in her own chest lessen slightly. No intracranial injury. “Do you know where you are?” She was having trouble keeping her voice steady. Jesus, that’s never happened to me before.
“I know exactly where I am. I don’t think I was actually unconscious. I just had the wind knocked out of me. What the hell happened?”
“Just a minute.” Sax concentrated on getting her voice under control as she pressed her stethoscope to Jude’s chest. Once again, she was relieved to hear the sure, steady rhythm. Satisfied that there wasn’t any major organ dysfunction, she pressed her fingers slightly to the carotid artery in Jude’s neck, finally drawing her first full breath since she had seen the gun pointed in Jude’s direction. The pulse tripped rapidly under her fingers, but it was full and strong. Looking directly into Jude’s questioning green eyes, she stated with some urgency, “I have to go. Aaron’s been shot, and Deb is on her way to the operating room with him. I’m going to let one of the residents finish examining you, just to be sure, but I think everything is fine.”
Jude grasped Sax’s wrist. “There’s blood on your neck. Are you all right?”
“Yes.” Now that I know that you are.
“Go. I’ll see you later.”
Personal project log—Castle
August 4, 7:10 a.m.
DRM 20,172—22,350
Sax and Deb are still in the operating room working on Aaron. One of the surgery residents came out about an hour ago to give us an update. Apparently, it was a small caliber bullet from a Saturday night special, which is why Aaron is still alive. But it did a lot of local damage in his abdomen, and he lost a lot of blood. They’ve been working now for over five hours. I keep thinking how tired they must be and I wonder if they even notice. I keep seeing Deb reflexively shielding her patient, someone she doesn’t even know, someone who may have been responsible for killing someone else just moments before...I’m not sure I could have done that. I haven’t wanted to screen the videotape because I don’t want to see it again so soon.
The waiting is getting to me now...I can’t stand waiting and not knowing. At least if I’m working, I won’t have to think about what’s happening in there.
“Let’s go back to the on-call room and run the tape.”
“Sure,” Melissa agreed flatly. Anything to break the monotony of watching the slow crawl of the minute hand on the large, plain-faced clock visible in the operating room control center across the hall.
A few moments later, they were ensconced in their familiar location, settled into the routine, replaying Melissa’s footage of the previous night. Jude had her recorder out and was dictating notations as the counter on the tape measured out the moments to the critical scene. Her heart rate climbed as they approached the section where the gang members burst into the admitting area.
She wasn’t sure how much Mel had been able to get before everything erupted into chaos, but she steeled herself for what she knew was coming. She didn’t have much memory for those few moments because everything had happened so quickly. And for a good part of the time, she had apparently been lying on the floor.
“Here we go,” Melissa murmured, her voice tense with emotion.
Jude watched as the nightmare rolled. The three young men suddenly appeared almost simultaneously with the sound of the gunshot, and Aaron stumbled back as if he had been kicked.
Miraculously, Melissa had reacted immediately to the sounds of shouting in the hallway and had caught the entire sequence perfectly. There was a dizzying blur of movement as she swung the camera around to follow along the shooter’s sightline, and Deb came into view. Jude watched that amazing moment again as the young surgeon threw herself between the weapon and her patient.
“God, Mel, you are so good,” Jude said aloud reverently. “You just captured the one scene that’s going to mean more for this project than anything else.”
“Maybe.” Melissa wondered if she had gotten the rest of it.
“Oh, believe me, I’m right,” Jude said emphatically. “This is going...”
Her voice trailed off as the camera moved again, and this time Melissa had pulled the camera back enough to get almost the entire room in her lens. The shooter swung his arm, and Jude saw him point the gun right at her chest. Then Saxon Sinclair stepped directly into the line of fire, grabbed her by the shoulders, and pushed her violently out of the way. It happened so fast Jude hadn’t even been aware of it at that moment. Stunned, she watched herself thrown out of the bullet’s path as her body caromed off the back counter. Almost simultaneously, four armed security guards entered behind the gang members and rapidly subdued them.
Wordlessly, she pushed rewind. This time she watched Sax’s face. For the briefest instant, Sax’s stark features had been a study of ferocity and fury.
“I heard gunfire. I remember gunfire,” Jude stated numbly. “Did someone shoot?”
“That kid did. About a millisecond after Sinclair knocked you ass over teakettle.”
Jude swung her seat away from the tape and stared at her friend. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“I wasn’t sure we had it on tape, and...” Melissa shrugged. I was scared to death that you’d been shot, and I didn’t even want to think about it.
“How did he miss her?” Jude managed, her throat tight. She wasn’t even thinking about the danger to herself. The potential danger was meaningless to her now, because she was fine, and, besides, she had no memory of it. But she had a visceral image of Saxon Sinclair saving her life at certain peril of her own. What if he had shot her instead? The thought was terrifying.
“Just lucky.” Melissa shrugged. “He fired, but I think the bullet went high. Then the hospital police arrived and right behind them the city cops. Within moments, it was over. All I could think about then was you.”
“Hey,” Jude said softly, aware of the tremor in Mel’s voice. She rested her hand gently on the photographer’s forearm and squeezed lightly. “Thanks. You’re wonderful, Mel.”
Melissa nodded wordlessly. She’d seen the way Jude and Sinclair had looked at one another as they both frantically tried to determine if the other was all right. She’d never seen Jude look at anyone that way.
“Yeah, that’s me. Wonderful.”
August 4, 5:45 p.m.
Jude turned over on the narrow bed and sat up. A soft knock came again at the door. “Just a minute,” she called, searching at the foot of the bed for her T-shirt. She pulled it on and tugged her jeans closed as she walked toward the door.
Sax stood outside in the hall in sweat-stained scrubs, looking rumpled and weary. “I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner. I wanted to,
but I needed to stay with Aaron...”
Extraordinarily relieved to see her, Jude reached out impulsively and grasped her hand, pulling her into the room. She closed the door behind them and said, “Sit down. You must be exhausted.”
To Jude’s surprise, Sax complied, sinking down on Melissa’s unoccupied bed.
“How is he?”
“He’s stable,” Sax said dully, struggling with fatigue and the aftermath of controlling her emotions for hours. The entire time she had worked to repair the multiple holes blasted through fragile tissues, she had fought not to think about who lay on the table before her. She could not associate the torn and bleeding organs with the man she considered a friend and colleague. She had needed to separate her feelings for Aaron while she battled with death, but it had cost her. She was beyond tired. “If any of a dozen things don’t go wrong over the next few days, he should be fine.”
“Thank God,” Jude said with relief. She noticed a reddened area on Sax’s neck and leaned over her, turning the surgeon’s face toward the small bedside lamp. “You’ve got a cut here.”
Sax lifted her fingers and laid them gently on Jude’s. “It’s nothing. One of the instrument trays fell over when you and I ended in a heap on the floor.”
“Thank you for that,” Jude said, suddenly aware that her hand was still lightly cupping Sax’s jaw. In that moment, she sensed Sax stiffen at her touch and they both drew back.
Sax pushed herself to her feet and started toward the door, knowing that she should go, because she’d been up for over thirty-six hours, her emotions were stretched to breaking, and the light touch of Jude’s fingers drove her crazy. She couldn’t stay here, alone with her like this, but God, she didn’t want to say goodbye—not yet.
Maybe it was just because she was too damned tired to think clearly, but she turned at the last moment and regarded Jude steadily. “Do you know who Madeleine Lane is?”
“Of course.” The film icon had stopped making movies and pretty much disappeared from public view. Jude had heard occasional rumors about her reasons. “Why?”
“She wants to meet you.”
“What?” Jude was perplexed. One of them apparently did have a concussion, and she didn’t think it was her. “How do you know?”
“She told me.”
“I’m not following. When?”
“Tonight. Come on.”
Jude stared at the hand Sax extended, still uncomprehending, and then she did the only reasonable thing.
She took it.
Chapter Eighteen
August 4, 6:20 p.m.
“Just give me a minute to change,” Sax said as she unlocked the door to her on-call room and motioned Jude to follow.
Taking a few awkward steps just inside the threshold, she determinedly looked elsewhere as Sax began shedding her scrub shirt and pants. “Look, I should probably just go home. I didn’t even mean to fall asleep this afternoon, and the few hours I had didn’t help much. I still feel like I’ve been dragged through a keyhole. Plus”—she grinned sheepishly, indicating her own rumpled appearance—“I don’t have a change of clothes.”
Sax rummaged in a drawer built in under her bed and tossed a T-shirt in Jude’s direction. Pulling on her own tight black T, she said, “Now you do. I can’t help you with the jeans, though, because I don’t have a spare pair. You can shower when we get to the house and do laundry if you need to.”
“We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?” Jude’s familiar rational life was fast receding, and she was about to step through the looking glass. Probably, this bewilderment was due to fatigue, or maybe it was the result of the emotional assault that had started with the gunmen in the trauma admitting area and had culminated with the agonizing wait to find out if Aaron was going to survive. Whatever it was, she didn’t feel like herself, and yet, in a way, she had never felt more alive, nearly exhilarated. Seeing yourself almost shot in slow motion a few times did that to you, apparently. She was too shell-shocked to decide exactly what that meant, but watching the muscles flex in Sax’s arms, she didn’t care.
“Well, I’m going because right now I need to ride off some of the last twenty-four hours,” Sax said, tucking in her shirt and pulling on her boots. “And I’d like you to come.”
“All right.”
Jude supposed she should ask herself why, but she didn’t. And it didn’t really matter. She simply wanted to go, and the fact that it didn’t make sense just wasn’t important. Nothing much had made sense since the moment a bunch of teenagers with lethal weapons had threatened the lives of innocent people who were merely trying to do their jobs.
Come to think of it, not much of anything made sense if she really stopped to think about it. One morning five years ago, she’d nearly died riding the subway to work. Now, almost every day in the trauma bay, she saw individuals whose lives were altered forever by bad luck or whimsy or the ill winds of fate. Probably after a good night’s sleep, or maybe half a dozen, she’d feel like her sensible, balanced, grounded self again. But right now, the idea of riding on the back of Saxon Sinclair’s motorcycle seemed like the most reasonable thing around.
“I’ll be ready in a second,” Jude said, turning away and stripping off her T-shirt. When she pulled on the borrowed one, she had a quick thought of how intimate it was to wear someone else’s clothes. That musing was a bad idea, because instantly her skin began to tingle, and she knew what was coming next. Maybe if she didn’t think about anything, her body would behave.
Thankfully, Sax opened the door and stepped out into the hall. Keeping up with her took Jude’s mind off the steady pulse of arousal that had started with the first touch of soft cotton over her breasts. It didn’t help a bit that she wasn’t wearing a bra.
“Have you ever been on one of these before?” Sax asked, leading Jude through the small doctors’ parking lot to her bike in the far corner. She unlocked the helmets from the back and handed one to Jude.
“Not one this big,” Jude replied. “Only dirt bikes that we used to fool around on when we were kids at the shore.”
“All you have to do is hold on to me and let the rhythm carry you.”
As she spoke, Sax swung one leg over the leather seat and motioned for Jude to do the same. The seat was gently curved so that Jude would easily be able to sit behind her and reach around her waist. Sax grew very still as Jude settled against her hips and brought both hands around to gently clasp her stomach. With her arm halted in mid-motion, hand outstretched with the keys dangling from clenched fingers, Sax was suddenly, acutely, almost painfully aware of the firmly muscled thighs pressed against the outside of hers and the soft swell of breasts nestled provocatively against her back. She had to swallow before speaking, because her throat was tight.
“Ready?”
“Yes, I’m fine.” Jude’s chin was nearly resting on Sax’s shoulder. She hoped Sax couldn’t feel her heart thudding against the inside of her rib cage, but with only two thin layers of cotton separating their skin, she doubted the flimsy barrier was enough.
*
They were well out of the city and steadily heading north when the harbingers of a summer thunderstorm amassed out of nowhere. Dusk was at least an hour away, but the heavy clouds that gathered overhead obscured the setting sun, plunging them into premature darkness. Even at the speed they were going, the air practically crackled with static electricity that raised the hair on Jude’s arms.
Sax flicked on her turn signal and brought the bike to a stop on the shoulder of the highway. She reached up to pull off her helmet as she put a leg down on either side of the machine. As she half turned on the seat to look at her passenger, her bare arm inadvertently pressed against Jude’s breasts. All at once, she felt the firm curve of flesh and the hard peak of nipple, and she nearly shuddered.
Stomach clenching, she said huskily, “I don’t think this is going to blow over. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t mind, but with you on the bike...I don’t want to chance it. We can wait it out here, but
the roads will be treacherous right after it rains. We’d probably do better to get inside.”
What she didn’t add was that she wasn’t sure she was up to the challenge of a dark, wet highway in her present state. On the one hand, she was drained—emotionally perhaps more than physically—while at the same time, all she could think about was Jude. The heat of Jude’s body was like a furnace against her back, and the unconscious way Jude lightly ran her hands up and down her abdomen was making her so hard she couldn’t concentrate. She could have handled the huge bike if her only problem were fatigue, but not when her mind was clouded with lust, too.
“How do you feel about that Motel 6 up ahead?” Jude asked, hoping that the slight tremor in her voice wasn’t audible.
She’d been pressed up against Sax’s back for what felt like forever—a most pleasant eternity during which the vibration of the machine began to echo the building hum of excitement between her legs. If she wanted to delude herself, she could blame it on the powerful engine throbbing just under her, but she knew that wasn’t it. It had taken every ounce of her willpower not to slip her hands under Sax’s T-shirt and caress her skin. If she lifted her palms a mere fraction of an inch, she could cradle Sax’s breasts in her palms.
Mouth suddenly dry, she added, “We were probably insane to even try this.”
“Probably,” Sax agreed, and she wasn’t thinking about the storm or the danger. Nevertheless, when she glanced up the road to the large and brightly lit motel sign, she couldn’t for the life of her think of anything she would rather do more than spend a few hours sheltered from the night’s fury with Jude Castle.
