“Yeah? You would have just read him his rights tonight if you’d found him ducked down behind the tractor?”
The muscles in his police chief’s jaw spasmed. It took him a minute before he said tonelessly, “I’d have done my job.”
Fury and fear seething in him, Gray stepped forward until they were toe-to-toe. “Then do it,” he snapped. “So far, I’ve got to tell you, I’m disappointed in you.”
Wheeler’s eyes burned. After a minute he turned away, flattened both hands on the rough stucco wall of the hospital and bent his head, breathing hard.
Gray knew he wasn’t being fair, but fairness was beyond him tonight. He’d brought in a big-city cop to make his town safer, and that new police chief couldn’t even stop one stalker. Couldn’t keep two vulnerable women from being hurt.
No, fairness was beyond him.
He turned and walked back into the hospital, the doors whooshing open and then shut behind him.
The nurse let him through the inner doors. The mother and toddler were gone, he realized, and no other business had arrived. This was a quiet night in the E.R. He stepped into Charlotte’s cubicle to find that the doctor was already setting stitches in the long, ugly gash that ran from her upper arm to a place well below her collarbone.
Shallow? Gray thought, staring in unwilling horror. He couldn’t imagine it wouldn’t leave a scar to remind her of the terrifying encounter. If the knife had bit any deeper…
He clenched his teeth together and lifted his gaze to Charlotte’s battered face to find her watching him. Faith held her hand, but from that moment on Charlotte never looked away from Gray, standing at the foot of the bed. Not once, while Nolan applied stitches, not until he’d covered his work with dressings and let the nurse lift the hospital gown into place and tie it again behind her neck.
Gray scarcely breathed, holding that gaze, trying to send comfort and strength even though he wasn’t touching her. The anger he hid, knowing that wasn’t what she needed right now.
By the time Nolan was done, Gray could tell Charlotte was getting fuzzy. He was glad when an orderly arrived to wheel her upstairs to a room. Faith and Gray both followed. Gray didn’t know what had happened to Wheeler, or whether he’d brought Faith in, leaving her with no way to get home again.
He asked quietly, when they were instructed to wait in the hall while Charlotte was shifted to the new bed and settled.
“I drove myself,” Faith said. “Chief Wheeler followed me.”
“You look at the end of your rope.” He hadn’t noticed earlier, but now he saw the tremors and the shock in her eyes and the way she swayed on her feet. “You need to get some sleep.”
“I don’t know if I can.” She bit her lip so hard he was surprised she didn’t draw blood. “I’m going to get a gun and learn to shoot it. He is never, ever going to threaten us like that again.” The steel in her voice crumpled at the end. “I will never forgive myself for this….”
“Yourself?” Gray caught her upper arm. “What are you talking about? This isn’t your fault, Faith. You didn’t make that bastard what he is. He fooled you early on, and you were smart enough to get out. You’re not responsible for his craziness!”
“I married him.”
“Was he ever violent before the wedding?”
She let out a shaky breath and shook her head.
“Then tell me. How were you supposed to know?”
“I don’t know!” she all but screamed at him. “I don’t know! But I should have! I should have…”
He reached out to her, but Wheeler, appearing from nowhere, shouldered him aside with one angry look and wrapped her in his arms. Gray found himself staring at the police chief’s back. He could just hear Wheeler’s murmur, oddly gentle and rough at the same time.
“No, no. There was no way you could know. You can’t blame yourself, Faith. You can’t.”
The nurse stepped out of Charlotte’s room and said, “You can come in now,” but Faith didn’t seem to hear.
Gray left them in the hallway and went in. Once again his heart cramped at the sight of Charlotte looking defeated, the battered half of her face hidden under an ice pack. He pulled up the room’s one chair and took her hand.
She squinted at him from her good eye and mumbled, “Gray,” then sighed, “Oh, good.” He’d have sworn she was asleep a second later, as if she’d waited to let go until he was there.
He couldn’t avoid the knowledge that the attraction he’d felt for her, the frustration and fascination and hunger to protect her, had all coalesced into an emotion bigger than anything he’d ever experienced.
Love.
With a woman who refused to go out to dinner with him. Oh, yeah—he was permanently, deeply, foolishly in love with her, and he had no idea what would come of it.
What he did know was, he wouldn’t be leaving her side anytime soon.
CHARLOTTE HAD NO IDEA HOW long she’d been asleep, or what awakened her, only that the smell, the feel of the bed, jarred her with the awareness that she wasn’t anywhere familiar.
She jerked, then moaned as the St. Helens of all headaches threatened to blow open the top of her skull.
“Hey,” a man’s voice murmured. “Sshh. Lie still.”
Gentle fingers stroked her forehead, and despite the command she tipped her face toward that hand.
Oh, God. She could hardly see at all. What was wrong? Charlotte lifted a shaking hand to the explosion of pain at her cheekbone.
“Wha’ hap…pened?” she managed to ask.
“Rory.” The voice was still soft, but somehow grim at the same time. “He attacked you.”
It came back to her in Technicolor. The rage, the knife, the shock when her towel fell to the floor. Her own helpless inability, once he fled, to keep from slipping bonelessly to the floor herself.
“Gray,” she tried to say. Her tongue was sticking to the roof of her mouth. Her lips felt cracked.
“Would you like a drink of water?”
She started to nod and immediately regretted it.
Gray slid an arm behind her, lifting her just enough for her to sip. When she was done, he settled her back against the pillows as carefully, then pushed the button to summon the nurse.
She demonstrated her lucidity and was awarded more pain meds. Clinging to her last moments of wakefulness, Charlotte whispered, “You’re still here.”
She could just make him out, sitting up in the chair at the bedside, his elbows resting on his knees, one hand covering hers. It should bother her—shouldn’t it—that out of all the people she knew it was Gray Van Dusen who wouldn’t leave her to awaken alone in the hospital. Tomorrow she might let herself be alarmed by how right it felt to have him here.
“I told you I wasn’t going anywhere,” he said, his voice deep and slow and serious.
“Did they catch Rory?”
He was silent long enough to give away the answer before he admitted it aloud. “No. But they will. This time, he showed his face.”
Yes. Oh, yes, she’d seen his face.
She heard herself mumble, “Okay,” and felt his thumb moving on the back of her hand as she slid into sleep as if it were dark, still water.
Gray was there the next time she woke up, too, and the time after, when morning light let her see him better. Slouched low in the chair, he was asleep when she first opened her eyes—no, her eye. His sun-streaked hair was tousled and tending to spikiness. Dark blond stubble shadowed his jaw. He didn’t look as defenseless as he ought to in sleep, or as young, not with frown lines between his brows, and his mouth compressed.
She hadn’t moved at all, only lay studying him, but suddenly he was looking back at her, aware and alert with no seeming transition between sleep and wakefulness. Their gazes held, as if… She didn’t know. As if they were each searching for something.
“How’s the head?” he asked, after a minute.
“Like the Fourth of July finale. Complete with the 1812 Overture blaring out of cheap speakers
. I’m afraid to move.”
“You look…” He fumbled for a word. “Better.”
“You mean, like hell.”
A smile creased his cheeks. “That, too. But also completely in the here and now.”
“Umm.” She thought. “You did say that Rory got away.”
“Unfortunately.” The one word came out as a rumble. He didn’t let his expression change, but Charlotte heard his anger.
“Bastard.”
Gray’s mouth tilted up again. “I’d have said worse.” He paused. “Your sister says she’s going to buy that gun and learn how to use it.”
“Faith?” The surprise in her voice was tempered the instant she remembered the sight of her twin emerging from the bedroom with the baseball bat poised to swing. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said anyway. “But then…”
“Then?”
“She’s changed.”
“You probably have, too.”
“Since I came home…” She shifted, a kind of itch running under her skin. Discomfort. She was changing, hour by hour, and she didn’t know what to make of it or where it would end.
She must have looked fretful, because Gray rose to his feet and smoothed her hair back, then stroked her cheek. “Shall I call the nurse?”
“Not yet. As long as I don’t move my head…”
He chuckled, the honeyed rumble that had gotten her into trouble in the corn maze. “Does this hurt?” He massaged her temple, her cheekbone.
“No,” she whispered, letting her eye close. “It feels good.”
Almost unbearably good. He liked to touch, it seemed, and knew how. It had been so long since anyone had touched her like this, not with passion but rather with…caring.
Now his whole hand moved down to wrap and squeeze her nape, a rhythmic massage that dragged a throaty moan from her.
His fingers stilled briefly, then resumed the massage that would have had her arching her back to give him better access if only she hadn’t been too afraid to move.
She felt a light touch again on her face. His other hand, she supposed, as she savored the incredibly light brush of fingertips across her cheekbone, down along her jaw, up to her mouth.
Except she realized, then, that it was his lips skimming over her face. His lips, settling over hers. Not demanding, not expecting any response, just…soothing. Exploring, perhaps. No longer breathing, suspended in wonder at the sweetness of this kiss, Charlotte thought she felt the warm, damp flick of his tongue.
But then his mouth glided back to her jaw, and up to nuzzle her earlobe, then came to rest at her temple, where his breath stirred her hair.
“Ah, Charlotte,” he whispered. “I was so scared last night.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered back.
This chuckle was a warm puff against her skin. “Not your fault.”
“No.” Oh, this was probably a huge mistake, but she had to say it anyway. “I mean, that I said no.”
His stillness was absolute this time. She had to crack her eyelid open to see what he was thinking.
He’d lifted his head and was staring at her. “Does that mean you’ll have dinner with me?” he asked carefully.
“Yes. When I can appear in public without scaring people.”
After a minute, he said, “It’s a date.” He grinned at her. “You, Charlotte, have a gift for surprising me.”
She went for a snort, soft enough not to jar her head. “Despite having my life flashing before my eyes, I avoided any major epiphanies. This is the sum total.”
Now he was laughing. “Did your life flash before your eyes?”
“No, only deep regret that I wasn’t the one holding the baseball bat.”
Another delighted laugh, another gentle-as-air kiss, and he reached for the call button. “Time to rise and shine, sweetheart.”
He ended up getting shunted aside in the next hour or two, between Faith’s arrival and then the doctor’s. Not Dr. Nolan—he had presumably worked the graveyard shift and was now home sacked out. This was a Dr. Bjorback, the morning trauma specialist, a sturdy tank of a woman with a no-nonsense style that suited Charlotte. The doctor shone lights into her eyes, and established once again that she remembered what had happened, what day it was and where she was. She swallowed another pill, which muffled the pain enough to allow her to struggle upright and to shuffle to the bathroom. Dr. Bjorback decided she could go home, so long as she had family to hover over her.
Gray insisted on driving her. “My car actually has shock absorbers,” he told Faith.
Charlotte was alert enough to be amused. He must have seen Faith’s aging Blazer bounding over the potholes in their hard-packed dirt driveway.
Faith, bless her, had brought Charlotte some real clothes, including a bra and capri-length pants instead of the skimpy poplin boxer shorts she’d worn to bed last night.
She was taken to the curbside in a wheelchair, and placed so tenderly in Gray’s Prius that she had only one moment of swirling light-headedness. The door had already been closed, and the nurse was turning to go back into the hospital, but Gray noticed and was swearing when he got in behind the wheel.
“They should have kept you another day.”
“Just because my head hurts?”
“Because you look like you’re going to pass out any minute,” he snapped.
“The doctor said to expect some dizziness.”
Gray grumbled anyway.
Halfway home, Charlotte let out a pained laugh. “Oh, poor Faith! Now she has two invalids on her hands! Maybe I should just crawl in next to Daddy, so she can spoon-feed us in tandem.”
He shot her a quick look. “I can stay.”
“Don’t be silly. You hardly slept at all and you have two jobs waiting for you.”
“They can keep waiting.”
“Gray, I was kidding. You know I’ll do nothing but sleep. And Dad’s getting around better all the time. Besides, give me a couple of days and I’ll be as good as new. Except for—” she reached up and tentatively touched her swollen cheek “—some garish side effects.”
He made a sound in his throat that she couldn’t interpret.
A moment later, he was easing the Prius around and over the potholes and pulled up as close to the back door of the house as he could get. Faith had arrived ahead of them, and together they helped Charlotte from the car.
Her head swam again, and she came close to crumpling against Gray. With a wordless exclamation, he swung her up into his arms.
Charlotte clutched at him and squeaked a protest he ignored. Carrying her effortlessly, he strode up the back steps and through the door Faith held open, then upstairs.
“Which is your room?” he asked.
Cheek against his shoulder, she told him, “First on the left,” and tried to remember how much of a mess she’d left it. Faith had always been the neat one, while Charlotte was more inclined to drop her clothes where she shed them.
But she had done a load of laundry yesterday, so it couldn’t be too bad, she decided. And he’d hardly expect her bed to be made.
He laid her down as gently as he’d settled her into the Prius. His hands, she thought, lingered a little before he withdrew them. Still bent over, he touched his lips to hers, whispered, “I’ll be back in a few hours, Charlotte. Don’t you dare go farther than the bathroom,” and left after a few quiet words with Faith.
Faith turned on the fan to stir the warm air and kissed Charlotte’s cheek.
She tumbled, only a little disorientingly, into sleep again.
“I RECOMMEND A SEMIAUTOMATIC,” the gun dealer told Faith, reaching beneath the glass case for a horrifyingly lethal handgun. “Revolvers have some advantages, but generally they’re too big for a woman’s hand, and it takes too much force to pull the trigger. Now, a .38 like this with a short barrel…” He handed it over the counter to her, grip first.
She’d already told him she had never shot a gun in her life, so he didn’t do more than wince when she took ho
ld of the awful thing as if it were a bundle of nettles.
He selected a magazine, took the gun back and inserted it, then reached for earmuffs. “I want you to try half a dozen different guns, pick the one that’s most comfortable for you.”
Comfortable, she thought semihysterically. She could pretty well guarantee that no matter how much time she put in on the practice range, she was never going to be comfortable with a deadly weapon or with the idea of using it.
She steeled herself by remembering the sight of Charlotte clinging to the door frame, her shoulder blood-soaked and her face grotesquely swollen. Seeing Charlotte hurt was much worse than remembering her own broken bones at Rory’s hands.
Never again, she had vowed, and she’d meant it.
The owner of the gun shop in Everett had been very nice when she explained her needs. He’d had her fill out an application and explained that there would be a 24-hour period before she’d be approved and would be able to buy a gun. Then he’d talked about which weapons he recommended for women and why. Accuracy wasn’t her first priority, he’d told her; if she was ever to actually fire the weapon at a human being, it would be at close range. And the standard longer barrel that provided greater accuracy was actually a disadvantage in close quarters. It was easier for the assailant to grab or knock aside, harder for her to lift and aim.
She shuddered at the idea of Rory wrenching a gun from her hand while she hesitated. Any hesitation this time, she knew, could be fatal. His attacks were escalating. He had almost killed her that last time he’d beaten her, before she’d ended her marriage. If he broke into the house again, he surely would.
Charlotte, Faith knew, wouldn’t stay. How could she? And Dad would want to defend her, but she hated the idea of him being hurt on her behalf. That was one reason she’d never told her family that Rory was hurting her—she’d known what Dad would do.
The practice range was in the same building, visible through large windows from the shop area.
The owner walked her in and set her up in one of the lanes, showing her how to adjust the target distance and how to hold the gun.
The earmuffs on, both hands gripping the snub-nosed Colt .38, Faith lifted it and aimed at the human-shaped paper target. Her hands trembled. She closed her eyes, breathed slowly and steadied her hands.
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