The Switch

by Sandra Brown

  "Melina?" Jem tapped on the bathroom door.

  "Be out in a sec."

  So much for the relaxing bath, she thought as she rinsed off and stepped from the tub. Of all Jem's suggestions, the bath was the only one that had appealed to her. She would have preferred to be alone tonight, but he'd poured his heart and soul into babying her.

  As promised, he'd made her sip a glass of wine and listen to soft music while he prepared dinner. The wine and music, combined with the hypnotic sound of the rain falling outside, had lulled her. She hadn't thought she was hungry, but the angel-hair pasta dish Jem served was delicious. After dinner, she'd offered to clean up, but he wouldn't hear of it and had insisted she soak in a bubble bath.

  But what should have been,, the most relaxing part of the evening had turned stressful with Lucy Myrick's phone call.

  When she left the bathroom, wrapped in a comfy flannel robe, Jem was waiting for her in the adjoining bedroom. To cover her anxiety over the call, she smiled. "You were right. That was just what I needed."

  "Who was that?"

  "Who?" she asked, playing innocent. Why weren't the lamps on? He'd turned them off and lit candles all around the room. She switched on the nightstand lamp.

  "On the telephone."

  "Oh. I didn't know her. A client of Gillian's. She'd been out of town and only heard the news this afternoon when she returned."

  She hadn't made a conscious decision to lie to him about the telephone call—there wasn't anything to decide. She wasn't going to tell anyone, not even Jem, about the FBI's interest in Gillian's murder until she knew the nature of their interest herself.

  "I should have grabbed the phone sooner so your bath wouldn't have been disturbed."

  "I was getting pruney anyway. It was time to get out." "Time now for the grand finale."

  "You've been busy," she remarked, taking in the candles and the turned-down bed.

  "As long as I was here," he said casually. "Some of the floral arrangements were getting stagnant. I carried them all to the kitchen and would have taken them out except for the rain."

  "Thanks. I'll put them in the outside trash can in the morning." After my visit with Tobias, special agent, FBI.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the space beside him.

  She hesitated. "Don't feel obligated to follow through on your promise, Jem. It's getting late."

  "Not that late."

  "But you must be as exhausted as I am."

  "I'm not going to argue with you, Melina. I said I was going to give you a neck and back rub, and that's what I'm going to do."

  Short of engaging in an argument that would create bad feelings and drain her of what small reserve of energy she had left, she sat down near him on the edge of the bed and turned her back. "Five minutes. Then you're outta here and I'm off to beddy-bye."

  "After five minutes, you'll be begging for more."

  She wasn't entirely comfortable with this situation. In fact, she wasn't comfortable with it at all. It felt wrong. Although he was keeping the mood platonic, he worked the collar of the robe down around her shoulders for better access to the back of her neck. When he laid his hands on her skin, she could tell that they had oil on them.

  "Still wearing the pendant, I see."

  He'd insisted that she accept it. "Gillian would want you to have it," he'd said.

  At first she had refused. But then she relented, and now she was glad she had. The piece of jewelry would serve to remind her of her vow for vengeance. If ever her resolve were to weaken, she could rub the red stones and be reminded of the words scrawled in blood on the bedroom walls. Thinking of them now made her muscles tense, and Jem felt it.

  "You need this. Your muscles are tied in knots."

  She angled her head away from his lips, which were uncomfortably close to her ear. "That shouldn't come as a surprise, considering."

  "You've had hell, all right." After a beat, he added, "But Gillian's dead, Melina. We must learn to deal with it. Relax." His thumbs dug deeply into the base of her neck. It felt good and she told him so.

  He chuckled. "Told you I was good." "Not a false claim at all."

  "Gillian loved my neck rubs." "I can see why."

  "They were often foreplay."

  To her mind, the statement was grossly inappropriate. But rather than make an issue of it, she turned it into a joke. "More information than I needed, Jem."

  He laughed with her. The kneading motion extended down onto her shoulders. "You know, it's funny, Melina." "What?"

  "That I could fall for the switch you and Gillian pulled the night before she was killed. As her fiancé, you'd think I would be able to tell the difference between you."

  "You never suspected it was me who answered the door with a towel on my head?"

  "Never had an inkling. Not even when I kissed you."

  "I stopped you when you tried to deep-kiss me. I wouldn't have let you deep-kiss me."

  "It was deep enough." His hands stopped massaging and rested on her shoulders. "Deep enough to get me excited." She bolted from the bed and spun around to face him, clutching her robe at her throat. "That's a revolting thing to say."

  He laughed. "I was teasing." Extending his hand, he appealed to her. "Melina, please. You didn't think I was serious, did you?"

  "What I think is that it's time for you to leave. Past time." "Melina. Come on. It was a joke."

  "It wasn't funny."

  He hung his head. "No, I guess it wasn't." When he looked

  up at her, he was trying to appear boyishly repentant, an expression she found precious and offensive. "I'm sorry."

  "Apology accepted. Now please say good night so I can go to bed."

  She turned and left the bedroom, her brisk footsteps and posture implying that he should follow. He did, pausing only to retrieve his suit jacket from the back of the sofa where he'd left it earlier. She opened the front door and held it for him. "Thanks again for making dinner," she said stiffly.

  "Why do I get the feeling that we're ending this sad day on a sour note?"

  "It is a sad day, Jem. A very sad day. I want to spend the remainder of it alone, basking in my sadness. Since those cops showed up on my doorstep, I haven't had a moment alone. I need to grieve."

  He nodded. "Some things are too private to share." "Thank you for understanding."

  When he pulled even with her at the door, he paused. "I'll come by in the morning to check on you."

  "I'm going to the gym tomorrow morning."

  "Are you sure you're up to a workout?"

  "The exercise will be good for me."

  "Then I'll catch you later in the day."

  "Call first." She was finding it increasingly difficult to tolerate him. She just wanted him to be gone. Now.

  He leaned forward and kissed her cheek. It was all she could do to keep from recoiling. "Good night."

  He stepped out into the rain and jogged to his car. She closed the door, bolted it, then leaned against it and took several deep cleansing breaths. They weren't good enough. Hastily returning to the bathroom, she frantically showered off his touch and the oil he'd used. She scrubbed until all traces of it were off her skin.

  "Famous neck rub, my ass," she muttered as she sprinkled body powder across her shoulders.

  Suddenly her movements were arrested. Either her ears were playing tricks on her or she had heard a noise coming from another part of the house. She strained to listen. When the scratching sound came again, she traced it into the bedroom, where she realized that the ominous sound she'd heard

  was only a tree limb moving against the window screen, driven by a rain-laden wind.

  Courtesy of the FBI, she had a bad case of the jitters. And wasn't she entitled? She'd seen more blood in the last few days than she had seen in the rest of her life added together, first her sister's blood at the murder scene, then at Dale Gordon's spooky, squalid apartment.

  She moved around her bedroom blowing out the candles that Jem had lit.
They reminded her of that horrid place with its hideous altar, threadbare curtain separating the bathroom, and the sick individual who had lived there.

  He had pictures, Lawson had said. Gordon had taken pictures of Gillian while she was at her most vulnerable at the Waters Clinic. It was too nauseating to think about. She broke out in gooseflesh and rubbed her arms through her robe.

  Sleep, long desired and stubbornly elusive, wouldn't come tonight, either, if she didn't calm down, and the only way she was going to do that was to shut her mind off. Contrary to what she had told Jem, she had no intention of taking a sleeping pill. She didn't want to medicate herself, especially since Tobias would be here at nine o'clock tomorrow morning. That was one meeting for which she wanted to be sharp. He was coming for answers to questions. Little did he know that she had questions of her own.

  Wine, she thought. Maybe it would relax her enough to sleep, but not leave her groggy in the morning. She and Jem hadn't emptied the bottle he'd served with dinner.

  Leaving the lights off, she moved into the kitchen and took the bottle of wine from the refrigerator. As she was closing the door with her hip and reaching for a wineglass with her free hand, her back door crashed open.

  At first all she saw was blood.

  More blood.

  CHAPTER 18

  She closed the refrigerator door to extinguish the light and at the same time slammed the wine bottle against the countertop. California chardonnay and glass sprayed her and the floor.

  She brandished the jagged bottleneck at the bloodied figure slumped against the doorjamb. "Get out of here or I'll hurt you. I'll call the police."

  He stumbled inside. Blood trickled from a nasty cut on his cheekbone and another above his eye. The eye was swollen and discolored. "I don't recommend Lawson the wonder cop."

  "Chief!"

  She dropped the broken bottle and, heedless of the glass on the floor, rushed toward him. First she closed the door to keep the rain outside, then guided him into a chair at the kitchen table. "What happened to you? Were you in an accident?"

  "Leave them off," he said as she reached for the light switch.

  "Why?"

  "Because I can't be sure that I wasn't followed here, and—"

  "You drove?" He could barely stand.

  "No. Witnesses packed me into a taxi. I had the driver drop me around the corner and walked the rest of the way." "Did you say witnesses? To what?"

  "Later. No lights. If they're after me, they're very possibly after you, and with the light on, we make a better target."

  "Target? For who? Who are `they'? What in the world are you talking about?"

  During this disjointed conversation she had been searching for a dish towel. She had momentarily forgotten where they were kept, but she finally found the correct drawer and took out several. A piece of glass had taken root in her bare heel, but she didn't stop to tend it. Instead, she pressed the dish towel against Christopher Hart's bleeding cheekbone.

  He winced as she applied pressure. "The son of a bitch reopened the cut Hennings gave me."

  "What son of a bitch? Start at the beginning and catch me up. Who did this to you?"

  "I was attacked outside a club on Greenville Avenue." "Attacked? Like a mugging? Did you report it to the police?"

  "No."

  "Why not?"

  "Have you got a pain pill?"

  "Uh..."

  "Anything?"

  "Wait here." Favoring the heel where the sliver of glass was embedded, she scurried from the kitchen.

  In the bathroom, she frantically searched the shallow medicine cabinet, knocking several over-the-counter medications and outdated prescriptions into the sink. Finally she found what she was looking for.

  When she turned with the bottle in her hand, Chief was standing in the open bathroom doorway, supporting himself with one bloody hand on the doorframe and holding the kitchen towel to his cheekbone with the other.

  She shook a tablet into her palm. "Root canal. Last year."

  "What is it?" When she told him, he nodded and pinched up the pill between two fingers. "I've taken it before. Also for dental work."

  "It's a mild dosage, but I don't know whether or not this drug loses its potency like vitamins." She filled the toothbrush glass with tap water and passed it to him.

  He swallowed the tablet and returned the glass to her. "Thanks."

  "Take off your jacket and sit here." She lowered the commode lid. Shrugging off his leather jacket, he indicated the bright overhead light. "This is an interior room," she explained. "No one can see the light. But I need to see your face."

  He sat down and angled his head back. The gash wasn't that long, but it was deep. "That needs stitches."

  "Got a Band-Aid?"

  "I think so."

  "That'll do. Pour some stuff on it first."

  "Are you sure? It could scar. I really think it needs—"

  "Just ..." He motioned toward the open medicine cabinet. "It'll be fine."

  There was a bottle of disinfectant in the medicine cabinet. She doused the gash with it, causing him to swear lavishly. "Do they teach you that language in astronaut school?" she asked.

  "It's a required course."

  "You must've passed with flying colors."

  "Aced every test."

  Once that wound was cleansed, she passed him a square of gauze soaked with the disinfectant. "For the cut above your eye. It doesn't look as bad, but it needs to be cleaned."

  She determined that a plain adhesive bandage would be insufficient for the cut on his cheek, so she assembled the makings of one on the dressing table.

  "Do you have a gun, Melina?"

  The astonishing question came as she was cutting a strip of

  adhesive tape off the roll. The metal spool fell from her hands, leaving her with a piece of white tape stuck to the pad of her finger. The spool swung like a pendulum. "Gun? Like a pistol?"

  "Do you?"

  "Why?

  "Do you?"

  "No."

  "Finish up. We need to talk."

  Working quickly, she dabbed both wounds with an antibiotic salve, then covered the one on his cheek with a gauze pad and tightly secured one side of it with tape. "It'll probably bleed through soon. I'll change it when it does."

  It didn't occur to her to ask if he would be there long enough to need a bandage change, or how long he planned on staying, or why, following an attack, he'd chosen to come to her. It seemed a foregone conclusion that she and Chief were in this together—whatever this was—and that he was going to be around for a while. Which left her feeling both comforted and conversely unsettled.

  Comforted because she welcomed having an ally, someone intelligent and self-controlled, someone who even when bruised and bleeding didn't panic but kept a cool head, and someone who shared her outrage, and possibly some of her guilt, over the murder.

  Unsettled because that someone was Chief Hart, whose mere presence in a room caused a tingling awareness within her. When near, as now, he generated other, more embarrassing physical reactions. Like having unsteady fingers that had to try twice before successfully placing an additional strip of tape over the bandage.

  This up close and personal, she became far too mindful of standing between his thighs, of bending close to his face, of nearly touching him, of wanting to.

  When the tape was secured, she hastily withdrew her hands and stepped away from him. It was all she could do to keep herself from wiping her damp palms on her robe, or clutching the neck of it, or any such nervous gesture that might have signaled her silly, adolescent reaction to him.

  "Try to keep some pressure on it," she said.

  He stood up and surveyed her handiwork in the mirror, touching the bandage gingerly. "Thanks."

  "What about your eye?"

  "Maybe some ice."

  "I'll be right back."

  She hobbled into the kitchen again, tiptoeing around the larger pieces of broken glass and hoping she missed the small
er ones she couldn't see in the dark. His comment about being a target had made her paranoid; she kept the overhead light off. She quickly filled a Ziploc baggie with ice chips from the dispenser in the fridge door and wrapped it in one of the few remaining dish towels that wasn't bloodstained.

  As soon as she reentered the bedroom, he said, "Here." He was sprawled in an easy chair in a dim corner of the room, one foot propped on the matching ottoman, the other still on the floor. His jacket was draped over his knee. He looked totally fatigued.

  "You feel like hell, right?"

  He grinned at her wryly as he reached for the makeshift ice pack and applied it to his eye. "I'd have to start feeling better to feel like hell."

  She lifted the jacket off his knee and shook raindrops off it, then hung it on the doorknob. Turning back to him, she asked, "Do you want a towel for your hair?"

  "It'll dry."

  "Any other injuries not apparent? Bruised or broken ribs? Knot on the head? Concussion? Internal bleeding?" He shook his head. "Only what's visible."

  "Shouldn't you go to the emergency room to make sure?" "You're tracking blood on your carpet."

  Looking down, she saw the spots that marked her path out of the bedroom and back. "I stepped on a piece of glass."

  "That's what you get for threatening me with that broken bottle."

  "I didn't know it was you. Ordinarily visitors ring my front doorbell, not come crashing through the back door." "What about your foot?"

  "The glass is still in my heel."

  "Better see to it."

  "But I want to hear…"

  He wasn't listening. He had closed his eyes. Maybe the pain pill was more potent than either of them thought. Or maybe he was simply exhausted.

  In the bathroom, she sat down on the lid of the commode and propped her foot on her knee to examine her heel. The piece of glass was large enough to be visible, and she was able to extract it with tweezers. To be fair, she bathed the bleeding spot with the same antiseptic she'd used on Chief, and it stung like crazy. She covered the puncture with a Band-Aid.

  Still favoring that foot, she went back into the bedroom. He was snoring softly. Quietly she sat down on the edge of the bed, near the spot where she had been sitting with Jem Hennings less than an hour ago. Much had happened in that brief period of time.