Was she dead?
Where was the light everyone had always talked about? The light that was supposed to lead her to a better place. Or was that just a lie, a myth like unconditional parental love?
She thought she heard a male voice.
St. Peter?
Lucifer?
Batman?
Her mind jumped around from topic to topic like a frog attempting to reach safe ground using lily pads that kept sinking beneath his weight.
The male voice spoke again. This time she heard real words. A question. “How are you feeling?”
Was he talking to her?
With one last massive effort, London concentrated on pushing her lids open. This time she succeeded and saw—a man.
Not Batman, Superman, she amended. No cape, no blue tights that showed off rows of muscles, but definitely Superman. Right down to the chiseled chin and blue-black hair falling into brilliant blue eyes.
She swallowed. Her throat felt like rawhide. He’d asked her something. What? London searched the vacant caverns that comprised her mind and finally found the words, then laced them together.
Feelings, he’d asked something about feelings. No, wait, he’d asked her how was she feeling, yes, that was it.
It was a damn stupid question. How did she look? If she looked half as bad as she felt, Superman had his answer without her saying a word.
“How are you feeling?” Reese repeated for the third time.
He bent over close to her so she could hear him. He had been in twice before, only to find her still sleeping. This time, as he’d checked her chart, he saw her eyes flutter slightly. She was trying to come to.
London took a breath before answering. It felt like someone had shot an arrow into her ribs. “Like…I’ve been…run over…by…a…truck.”
Was that breathy, scratchy voice coming out of her? It didn’t sound like her, London thought. She tried to read Superman’s face and see his reaction to the pitiful noise. Was he recoiling in horror?
No, his eyes were kind. They were smiling.
She liked that. Smiling eyes.
“Not quite a truck,” Reese told her. “They tell me a pole did this.”
The single word brought with it a scene from somewhere within her brain. She and her parents, sitting at a long, white table, watching blond girls in native costumes with wide skirts, black corsets, red boots and wreaths of flowers in their hair, dancing.
Poland, her parents and she had been in Poland.
Poland, the last place her mother had been before she couldn’t be anyplace at all.
“Pole?” she echoed. She didn’t remember hitting a Polish national.
Reese saw the confusion in her face and wondered if she was suffering a bout of amnesia. Her airbag had failed to deploy and she’d hit her head against the steering wheel. Amnesia wasn’t unheard of.
“The one you tried to transplant by running into,” he told her gently, taking her pulse. The rhythm was strong. She had a good constitution. Lucky for her. “The paramedic almost wept over your Jaguar.”
The words were filtering into her brain without encountering matching images. Her jaguar. A pet cat? No, car, her car. The man was talking about her car.
Oh God, now she remembered. It all came rushing back at her as fast as she had raced her car to get away from Wallace.
She’d lost control and totaled her beautiful car.
London groaned, the loss hitting her between the eyes—the only spot on her body that didn’t hurt.
She raised her eyes to look at him as he released her wrist. “Is it totaled?”
“Like an accordion.”
The paramedic, Jaime, was still shaking his head and talking about the colossal waste of metal to anyone within earshot. He drove a small, secondhand foreign car whose odometer had gone full circle twice, and he looked upon the other vehicle as if it was a gift bestowed by the gods. He periodically drooled over Reese’s Corvette.
Reese studied London’s pale complexion for a moment. There was a bandage on her forehead where flesh had met wheel, but apart from that, she was a gorgeous woman, possibly the most perfect specimen he had ever seen. She could have been forever disfigured. Why had she risked losing all that in the blink of an eye?
“What were you trying to prove?”
“Nothing,” she answered quietly. She would have turned her head away if the effort hadn’t hurt so much. So she just looked at him steadily, meeting his probing gaze. “Just looking for space.”
He laughed shortly under his breath. The woman had intelligent eyes, and she certainly didn’t look stupid, but then, looks could be deceiving.
“You very nearly got it. Six feet by six by six,” Reese told her, pausing to write a notation in her chart. “A final space in the family plot.”
Beside her mother, she couldn’t help thinking. Maybe it would be peaceful there and she could finally find out who she was.
A flicker of rebellion rose from some faraway quarter that hadn’t been banged around relentlessly, and London looked at her intrusive surgeon with as much defiance as she could muster.
“A lecture? Save your…breath, doctor…I’ve heard…it all.”
She’d certainly heard more than her share. From her father, from Wallace, although she preferred the latter because at least Wallace was her friend. Her father, well, she didn’t really know what Ambassador Mason Merriweather was or how he figured into her life, other than to impose restrictions on her for as long as she could remember. Even Wallace and the other two bodyguards, Kelly and Andrews were part of her life because of him.
“Not a lecture, a fact,” Reese told her mildly. He slipped her chart back into its slot at the foot of her bed.
She was tired, very tired and there was this wide, soft, inviting region just waiting for her to slip into it. Its pull was becoming irresistible, but London struggled to ask one more question.
“Did you do it?”
The question caught him off guard. Reese looked at her. She appeared to be drifting off again. In another moment she’d be asleep, and the keeper at the gate would have to continue to wait before he would have the opportunity to talk with her.
“Do what?” Reese asked.
Every word was a struggle. Her mind was shutting down again. “Save…my…life.”
What he had done was utilize his training, his education and his instincts, not to mention the up-to-date technology that a hospital like Blair Memorial had to offer. There was no doubt in his mind that twenty years ago she would already have been dead. But even now, with all this at his disposal, there remained at bottom the x-factor. That tiny bit of will that somehow triumphs over death.
He allowed himself a small smile, though he doubted she could even detect it. “You saved your own life. I just put the pieces together.”
“Modest.” The single word came out on a labored breath. “Unusual…for…a…man.”
He began to say something in rebuttal, but it seemed that at least for now, his side wasn’t to be heard. His patient had fallen asleep again.
Just as well, Reese thought, standing at the foot of the bed and regarding her for one long moment. He didn’t feel like getting embroiled in a debate right now.
Not even if the opposing team looked like an angel. An angel, he mused, slipping out of the room, who had gotten banged up falling to Earth.
Very quietly he closed the door behind him.
Chapter 3
The moment Reese stepped out of the ICU, he found himself accosted by the big man who had stood vigil in the hallway all this time. He’d been told that Wallace Grant had been hovering around the nurses’ station ever since London had been brought out of recovery. To his credit, he had tried not to get in anyone’s way.
The question in the man’s eyes telegraphed itself instantly to Reese.
“She’s asleep,” Reese told him.
Wallace frowned as he sighed, frustration getting the better of him. He’d already put in a call to London’
s father. The ambassador was scheduled for a meeting with a highly placed official in the Spanish government, but he’d canceled it and was catching the first flight from Madrid to LAX that his secretary could book for him. Wallace wanted to have some good news to give the man who signed his paychecks when he arrived.
Laying a large paw on Reese’s shoulder to hold him in place, Wallace blocked his exit.
“Is that normal?” he wanted to know. “I mean, shouldn’t she be waking up around now?”
Reese knew for a fact that the man had been looking in on London for his allotted five minutes every hour on the hour. The day nurse had told him so. But it was obvious that each time he did, he’d found the young woman unconscious.
“She did,” Reese told him. Surprise and relief washed over the other man’s face, followed by a look of suspicion. Wallace was a man who took nothing at face value. “For about five minutes,” Reese elaborated. “She’s going to be in and out like that for most of the day and part of tomorrow.” Very deliberately he removed Reese’s hand from his shoulder. “Maybe you should go home.”
Wallace looked at him sharply. “And maybe you should do your job and I’ll do mine.” Wallace didn’t appreciate being told what to do by a man who knew nothing about the situation they were in. “Her father pays me to be her bodyguard. I can’t exactly accomplish that from my apartment.”
Reese didn’t care for the man’s tone or his attitude. “Seems to me you didn’t ‘exactly’ accomplish it earlier, either, and you were a lot closer then.”
To his surprise he saw the anger on the other man’s face give way to a flush of embarrassment. His remark had been uncalled for. Reese chastised himself; he was civilized now, at least moderately so, and was supposed to know better.
He chalked it up to his being tired. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was a reason.
“Sorry,” Reese said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” He wasn’t up on his celebrities, but it seemed to him that someone so young wouldn’t normally need to have her own bodyguard. Her name didn’t ring a bell for him, but that, too, was nothing new. For the most part, except for his small circle of friends or his mother, he tended to live and breathe his vocation. “Why does she need a bodyguard?”
The wide shoulders beneath the rumpled brown jacket straightened just a fraction. That was all there was room for. The man had the straightest posture he’d ever seen outside of a military parade, Reese thought. He’d had Grant pegged as a former military man.
“You can ask her father that when he gets here,” Wallace told him, his tone formal. “It’s not my place to tell you.”
Guarded secrets. Definitely a former military man, Reese decided. He shrugged. Whether she had a bodyguard or not didn’t really matter to him, as long as the man stayed out of the way.
“Just an idle question. Don’t have time for many of those,” Reese confessed, more to himself than to the man in front of him. Before he left, he stopped at the nurses’ station and looked at the middle-aged woman sitting behind the bank of monitors, each of which represented a patient on the floor. “Page me if the patient in room seven wakes up.” He leaned in closer to her and lowered his voice. “And don’t forget to tell our semifriendly green giant here, too.”
Slanting a glance at the man who had resumed his vigil in the hallway, the strawberry blonde raised a silent brow in Reese’s direction.
He grinned. “Call it a mercy summoning,” he told her just before he left.
Reese was in the doctor’s lounge, stretched out in a chair before a television set showing a program that had been popular in the late eighties. He must have seen that particular episode five times, even though he’d rarely watched the show when it was originally on. Murphy’s Law.
He wasn’t really watching now, either. The program was just so much white noise in the background, as were the voices of the two other doctors in the room who were caught up on opposite sides of a political argument that held no interest for Reese.
For his part, Reese was contemplating the benefits of catching a quick catnap, when his pager went off.
Checking it, he recognized the number. He was being summoned to the ICU. He wondered if the nurse was just responding to his instructions, or if London had taken a turn for the worse.
“No rest for the wicked,” he murmured under his breath. Rising, he absently nodded at the two physicians, who abruptly terminated their heated discussion as they turned toward him in unison.
“Hey, Reese, you up for a party tonight?” Chick Montgomery, an anesthesiologist who knew his craft far better than he knew his politics in Reese’s opinion, asked him enthusiastically. “Joe Albright’s application to New York Hospital finally came through, and he’s throwing a big bash at his beach house tonight to celebrate.”
His hand already on the door, Reese shook his head. He didn’t feel like being lost in a crowd tonight. He had some serious sleeping to catch up on. “I’m not planning to be upright at all tonight.”
The other doctor, an up-and-coming pediatrician, leered comically. “Got a hot date? Bring her along, the more the merrier is Joe’s motto, remember?”
Reese didn’t even feel remotely tempted. “No hot date,” he told them. “I’m booking passage for one to dreamland tonight. Maybe I’ll actually manage to start catching up on all the sleep I lost while I was in med school,” he cracked.
That was the one thing he missed most of all in this career he’d chosen for himself. Sleep. When he was a kid, weekends were always his favorite days. He’d sleep in until ten or eleven, choosing sleep over watching early Saturday-morning cartoon programs the way all his friends did. Sleep had been far more alluring.
It still was.
Trouble was, he didn’t get nearly enough anymore. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten a full night’s sleep. If anything, life after medical school had gotten even more hectic for him. There was always some emergency to keep him at the hospital or to drag him out of bed early.
You asked for it, he thought, walking down the first-floor corridor toward the front of the building.
The ICU was located just beyond the gift shop. As he passed through the electronic doors that isolated the intensive care unit from the rest of the hospital, Reese absently noted that the hulking guardian wasn’t hovering around in the vicinity.
He wondered if the man had finally decided to take a break and go home for a few hours. Diligence could only be stretched so far.
“Jolly green giant on a break?” he asked Mona, the strawberry blonde who’d paged him.
The woman shook her head and pointed toward room seven.
Apparently, Reese thought, diligence could always be stretched just a wee bit further. The man he’d just asked about was now hovering over London Merriweather’s bed. To his surprise the booming voice the bodyguard had earlier used on him had been replaced by a voice that was soft and pleading.
A gentle giant, Reese mused. Who would have thought it?
“Promise me you won’t do that again, London,” he was saying. “I’m only here to look out for you. I’m the good guy.”
London only sighed in response, but to Reese it sounded like a repentant sigh. But then, maybe he was reading things into it. He didn’t really know the woman. She might just be placating the big guy.
Sensing his presence, Wallace glanced toward the door. The look he gave Reese clearly labeled him as the intruder, rather than the other way around.
Since only five minutes at an ICU patient’s bedside was allowed, Wallace had taken to peering periodically into London’s room when the nurse’s back was turned. Each time he did, he saw that London was still sleeping. His agitation grew with each unfruitful visitation. As did his concern.
So when he’d looked in this time and found that her eyes were open, his heart had leaped up like a newly released dove at a wedding celebration. He’d lost no time in coming in and peppering the young woman for whose safety he was responsible with questions and admonishme
nts.
“You gave me some scare,” he’d freely confessed, saying to her what he would never have admitted to another man. “When I saw your car hit that pole, I thought my heart stopped.” A small smile had curved his lips. “I found out I still remembered how to pray.”
She’d looked at him ruefully then and he could see that she was sorry. When she had that look on her face, he couldn’t bring himself to be angry with her, even though they both knew that she’d pulled a stupid stunt by taking off at top speed like that, trying to lose him. London was alive, and that was the bottom line. That was all that counted. The rest could be worked out somehow. He’d make sure of it.
Wallace had said his piece and didn’t want London to be upset, with him or with herself so he’d smiled shyly at her and added, “Bet the Big Man Upstairs was surprised to hear from me after all this time.” He’d placed his hand over hers, dwarfing it. Letting her know that he would always be there for her. That there was nothing to be afraid of. “But you’re going to be okay. The doc who operated on you told me so.”
She’d nodded, as if she knew she was going to be all right. Because Wallace had told her so. “Sorry. I just wanted to get away.”
And he’d looked at her, his dark eyes pleading once more. The next time could prove fatal. “Not from me, London. Not ever from me. I’m not just your bodyguard, I’m your friend. I’m the guy who’s supposed to keep you safe, remember?”
She’d bitten her lip and nodded. He’d almost gotten her to promise never to take off like that again when the doctor had walked in on them.
Self-conscious about his lapse in protocol, Wallace quickly lifted his hand from London’s.
“She woke up,” the bodyguard told him. There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice, and the soft tone Reese had heard just a moment earlier was completely gone, vanishing as if it had never existed.
Reese nodded as he approached the bed. “So I see.”
His eyes shifted to the woman in the bed. He looked at her with a discerning eye. London still looked very pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes that had been absent earlier. She was definitely coming around, he thought.
M.D. Most Wanted Page 3