It took everything she had to will the heat away from her cheeks. She knew her mother meant well, but she wished she would back off. At least until she had some kind of handle on the situation herself. Both of her parents were extremely protective. They never wanted their daughters to go through anything remotely resembling what they had personally endured while still in their native country, before democracy had been allowed to reenter the picture.
But this had nothing to do with escaping from a chaos-ridden country.
Magda’s observation drew everyone’s attention to her. Sasha looked sympathetic; the others, curious.
“Is she right, Marysia?” Natalya asked. “Is there someone new?”
Marja merely shrugged, hoping her sisters would pick up on the cue that she didn’t want to discuss it. She didn’t want to because she didn’t know if there was something to discuss. Kane had made the earth literally move for her, but she had no idea how she had affected him or even if he would return for more.
Lord, she hoped so.
She glanced toward the group on and around the sofa. You’d think they would remember what it felt like, being under Mama’s microscope, and just let the matter drop. They were here to be supportive of Mama’s culinary and entrepreneurial efforts, not her divining skills.
Her sisters actually might have slipped into conspiratorial silence had Tania not suddenly looked up as if she were on the receiving end of some earth-shaking revelation. Tania caught her arm. “Oh God, it’s not that guy, is it?”
“Of course it is a guy,” Josef answered for his youngest. “With Marysia, it’s always a guy.”
“No, not ‘a’ guy, Dad. The guy,” Tania corrected, then looked pointedly at Marja. “Is it?” she pressed.
“What the guy?” Josef asked, his father radar suddenly switched to high. He crossed his arms before him, waiting for an answer.
But instead of Marja, it was Tania who gave it to him. “The one she brought to the apartment. He was unconscious.”
It sounded like a scene out of a sitcom. Kady laughed. “Can’t you get a conscious one to come home with you anymore, Marja?”
“I can ask Mike to set you up with one of his friends, or better yet, one of his cousins,” Natalya volunteered, then looked over her shoulder at her husband for confirmation.
Detective Mike DiPalma nodded his head. “Just say the word, Marja.”
For the most part Natalya and Mike were ignored. By everyone. Both Magda and Josef seemed keen on getting to the bottom of this mysterious man in their youngest daughter’s life.
“This one she said she hit with her car,” Tania volunteered. Marja glared at her, even though deep in her heart she knew that Tania was only being concerned. If the tables were turned, she would no doubt do the same thing. However, the tables weren’t turned and she wasn’t feeling very magnanimous right now, not when she was the subject of a Pulaski interrogation.
“Marysia, is this true?” her mother demanded. “How am I supposed to be running a restaurant if you have some kind of a problem like this? That is it,” she declared like a royal monarch. “No restaurant.”
“Mama, there is no problem like ‘this,’” Marja assured her, siphoning the impatience she felt out of her voice. And then she sighed. “It’s a long story.”
Magda crossed her arms before her chest. “I am not going anywhere.”
Marja knew she wasn’t going anywhere, either, not until she “volunteered” the rest of the story. She did her best to summarize quickly. “He was mugged,” she said in no uncertain terms. “Someone shot him and he stumbled in front of my car. What was I supposed to do? Leave him there? So I brought him home—”
Josef interrupted, obviously horrified. “You are bringing home strange men?”
“Only the ones I hit with the car,” she told him wearily. “So far, he’s been the only one.”
“Cut to the chase,” Tania pleaded. These family things could drag on, especially when they involved their respective love lives. “Is that ‘someone’ in your life him?”
“What chase?” Magda asked. “We are not chasing anything.”
“Except for the truth,” Josef put in, his eyes shifting to Marja.
Time to wrap this up, Marja thought. “His name is Kane Dolan. He works at the hospital and we’re friends, okay?”
“Maybe not so okay,” Josef said. He looked over toward Byron, the son-in-law he had taken into the security firm he now ran. “But we can be having a background check on him, yes, Byron?” It wasn’t a question but an assignment. An assignment Marja was determined to stop on its tracks.
“No, Byron,” she was quick to veto. She appealed to her father for a little sanity. “Dad, I know you mean well, but there will be no background checks run on anyone I go out with. Not anymore.” She was fairly certain there probably had been background checks in the past. Most likely, on all the men she and her sisters had ever gone out with.
Josef didn’t try to argue with her. Instead he merely nodded. “Yes, dear.”
“Don’t use the same tone you use with Mama,” Marja pleaded. Essentially, she was just being yessed but the answer was really no.
“You are using a tone on me?” Magda asked, taking offense.
“Never, Magda,” Josef told her innocently. “Why do we not get back to making plans for the restaurant’s opening?” he suggested mildly. “And for now, we are forgetting about everything else.”
He didn’t fool anyone.
Chapter 10
From the time when, abandoned and out on the street, he’d taken control of his life at eighteen, Kane had never had any trouble keeping his mind on his work. Even after the most vigorous of sexual encounters, he was incredibly clearheaded and focused on what needed to be done. It wasn’t lovemaking to him, it was sex, pure and simple, and once it was over, it was over, relegated to a realm that rarely ever saw the light of day.
Women passed through his life and he through theirs. They were never a priority.
He moved on, the way he moved on from one day to the next. The way he’d moved on from his past. Out of sight, out of mind wasn’t just a clichéd saying, for him it was reality. Nothing ever interfered with his work. Not because of grand ambitions, but because what he did, what he was sworn to do, was the only thing that gave meaning to his existence. Doing a good job was as necessary to him as breathing.
So it bothered him to no end when thoughts of small, supple breasts, a sleek, firm body and her smile kept infiltrating his thought processes. Like someone whose eyes moved across the page without taking in any of the words, she made his mind drift.
This wasn’t why he was at Patience Memorial, to think about her, to wonder where she was as he relived the last time they were together—entirely against his will. He was here to observe, to surreptitiously collect as much information as possible about the people who worked here, and about the ins and outs of each level’s floor plans, things that could never be found on a city planner’s blueprints. He was supposed to be on the look out for any and all behavior that was even remotely suspicious, not concern himself with when Marja Pulaski made her appearance in the E.R.
Berating himself for his unprofessional behavior did no good. As he tried to observe the routines of orderlies, nurses and security personnel, Kane silently cursed the night she’d run into him. And cursed even more the night he’d had sex with her.
Because, while bone-jarringly good, it wasn’t just sex, no matter how much he pretended it was. And that was a problem.
The hospital staff being as large and diverse as it was, with an ongoing influx of new people to replace the ones who left, was exceedingly difficult to categorize. He could only skim the surface and remain vigilant. There wasn’t enough time for anything more.
Kane relied on his instincts to guide him, his gut to warn him if something seemed out of the ordinary. That was usually not a problem. But on this assignment, his gut was entertaining other feelings, as well, receiving signals that perversely jamm
ed his usually keen abilities to hone in on things that were out of place.
He knew he needed to purge her from his mind. A couple of times this week he actually thought he’d succeeded, only to see her hurry by, flash that smile of hers in his direction and feel himself reacting immediately, even if his expression never changed. He’d realized that he was only fooling himself. She was like a permanent marker, leaving her imprint on his very being.
He concentrated harder, worked faster and did his level best to block out as many thoughts about her as he could. In the long run, he knew that it was best for both of them. She’d weigh him down and he would only ruin her life. He had nothing to give her except a hollow shell of a man. That wasn’t the type of guy she deserved to have in her life.
Kane forced himself to get busy. There were lunch trays waiting to be collected on the second floor.
“I’ve been looking for you.”
He didn’t have to turn around. He recognized her voice immediately. His back to her, he continued depositing the tray he’d just retrieved from Room 214, sliding it into one of the empty slots on the large, metal delivery cart.
“One of the orderlies on this floor called in sick.” He addressed the comment to the cart rather than her. “You’ve got a lull down in the E.R., so I got volunteered.” The deliberately careless shrug he executed told her to connect the dots he’d provided.
A lull in the E.R. was a rare thing. In her short experience, she’d learned that, more often than not, it usually represented the calm before the storm. “It happens, every once in a while.”
She was stalling, she thought. Funny, she’d always thought of herself as fearless, and yet the tips of her fingers were tingling. Nerves. There shouldn’t be any and this shouldn’t matter. Hell, she shouldn’t even be asking. But she was. If she could ever get the words out of her mouth.
She took a breath and pushed forward, doing her best to sound nonchalant. “Are you on duty tomorrow afternoon?”
Tomorrow was Saturday. He hadn’t checked to see if she was on duty, but assumed by her question that she probably was. Tomorrow morning he was meeting his handler and some of the people who were working the case. Barring something unforeseen, the afternoon belonged to him.
“No.”
His answer brought a smile to her lips. “Good. Are you interested in having a good meal?”
Once social services had taken him away from Gideon and he’d finally had a sufficient amount to consume, eating never became a source of enjoyment. Eating presented the ingestion of fuel so that he could keep moving.
What he was “interested in” right now, to use her own words, Kane thought, as he watched her, had nothing to do with food.
“Are you offering to cook for me?” he guessed.
The question made her laugh. “I said, are you interested in a good meal, not are you interested in being poisoned.”
The corners of his mouth curved a little in amusement. “That bad?”
“Worse,” she told him. “My mother thinks the hospital gave her the wrong baby the last time around. She can’t understand how someone smart enough to become a doctor can still manage to burn water.”
“Interesting talent.”
“Take-out places thrive on it,” she assured him. Her sisters refused to let her near a stove. When it was her turn to cook, they ordered take-out. “But to get back to what I was saying, my mother’s having a grand opening tomorrow—”
The wording threw him. Kane eyed her uncertainly. “Your mother’s having a grand opening?” he repeated.
She’d left out the crucial part, taking it for granted that he already knew. But how could he if she hadn’t told him? “Of her restaurant. Magda’s Kitchen.” She’d thrown the restaurant’s name in for good measure.
“All right,” he allowed, waiting for her to get to the point.
“Then you’ll come?”
“Was that an invitation?”
She was getting ahead of herself again, hopscotching through things and assuming that her meaning was clear.
“Badly worded,” she confessed, “but yes, it was an invitation.”
If this was the grand opening, then there would be a lot of people there, some undoubtedly from the hospital. It afforded him a chance to mingle socially and possibly to pick up more information. But there would also be other people there. Specifically her relatives.
He looked at her for a long moment. “Is this where I meet the rest of your family?”
She heard the wary note in his voice and knew that she was losing him. The way he’d worded his question made the situation sound much too intimate, too much as if she thought she was navigating on the road to something permanent. Nothing made a guy more anxious to flee than the feel of a noose closing around his throat.
“This is where you think you’ve died and gone to heaven,” she corrected, downplaying the part about her family being there. “My mother is one hell of a fantastic chef.”
Fancy food was wasted on him. “I’m a meat and potatoes kind of guy.”
“No problem,” she assured him with a wink. “Just so happens that she knows how to make that, too.”
It was the wink that got to him. Went straight to his gut and disarmed him without his being able to get off a single round in his own self-defense.
He moved the cart to the side, out of the center of the corridor. “You’re not going to give up, are you?”
Marja didn’t bother to keep her mouth from curving. “How d’you guess?”
It definitely wasn’t hard. Of all the people in the hospital, she was the one he’d gotten to know best. Small wonder. “After a couple of weeks, I’m beginning to know the signs.”
She laughed. “Just think what you’ll learn in a month.” And then, as her words came back to her, she stopped. “Sorry, didn’t mean to imply that you’ll be around that long.”
He knew better. “Yes, you did.”
She rescinded her previous statement and nodded in agreement, augmenting her transgression with another smile that went straight to his gut. The same gut that was supposed to be dead-on when it came to divining terrorist activity on the premises. The gut that kept being diverted.
“Yes, I did,” she acknowledged. “You’re doing a good job.” Feeling partially responsible for his being at P.M., she made a point of keeping tabs on him. “God knows the nursing staff likes you and they’re not always the easiest ladies to get along with.” She had a suspicion that it had more to do with the man’s looks than his ability to handle a bedpan.
Kane had made a point to try to get along with as much of the staff as possible, always being within earshot of any free-flowing gossip. You never knew where the most important clue would come from. The smallest, seemingly most insignificant thing could prove to be the one useful piece that could bring someone down. The serial killer, Son of Sam, was caught because of a parking ticket. Al Capone, the biggest, most bulletproof mob boss in Chicago in the thirties, was brought down and sent to prison because he didn’t declare his illegal gains on his income tax form.
On the other hand, it could very well be that no insider in the hospital was helping coordinate terrorist horror. Moreover, there might not be anything going down and the ambassador’s daughter would just have her operation and leave, safely surrounded by her father’s security team.
In a perfect world.
But he had learned almost from the start that the world was definitely not perfect. Even though some parts of it, he thought, looking at Marja, could be perceived that way.
It might not be a bad idea to attend this thing. He might be able to pick something up, Kane told himself. “I guess I could save both of us a lot of time and effort if I just agreed to go.”
“Seems like the smart thing to do.” But she knew better than to count her chickens. Kane wasn’t the type to just surrender if he didn’t want to. She waited for the shoe to fall.
It didn’t. Exactly. “How long would we have to stay?”
; “Just long enough to swallow without choking.” She saw him raise an eyebrow in skepticism and realized that he thought she was making an honest comment on the quality of her mother’s cooking. “I meant, when you eat too fast, you’re liable to choke, so—”
He held up his hand. “I get the picture. What time do you want me to pick you up?”
A sense of victory rushed through her. She allowed herself to savor it for half a second before her thoughts turned to the fact that she was going to have to run interference between him and her family. “Then you’ll go?”
“I’ll go,” he conceded, then added, “But I decide when I leave.”
He’d said “I” not “we.” Was he telling her in not-so-subtle terms that she wasn’t to think of them as a couple, or was it simply that he felt he didn’t have the right to tell her when to leave?
Because she was an optimist, she gave him the benefit of the doubt and went with the latter explanation.
“Deal.” Marja thrust her hand out to him to seal the bargain.
After a beat, his took it in his own, shaking it. “Deal,” he murmured.
Her hand in his, she felt another one of those electrical charges he was prone to creating for her zipping through her veins. No matter which way she tried to slice it, Marja thought, there was definitely something going on between them.
The next moment both she and Kane’s cart had moved even farther to the side to get out of the way. A somber-looking delegation of five men appeared, almost all the same height and build, dressed in black suits and fitted with earpieces whose telltale coiled cords ran from their right ears to the collars of their suits. Each seemed to study the area around them as if they planned to reconstruct it upon request. There wasn’t a smile to be had among them.
They had the smell of bodyguards about them, Kane thought. Serious bodyguards. The kind that wouldn’t hesitate to use lethal force if necessary.
But he played his part and asked Marja innocently, “Who’s that?”
She sighed. She’d overheard one of the surgeons talking to a nurse earlier that the hospital was going to be inspected from top to bottom.
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