Saving Andi: St. John Sibling Series: FRIENDS

by Raffin, Barbara

  He frowned, not looking the least appeased by her explanation.

  "So, what's your name?" she asked.

  He opened his mouth and…nothing came out for several beats. Then, "I don't know."

  If she hadn't seen the flash of panic in his eyes, his hesitation might have made her think he was having reservations about revealing his name.

  "That thump on your head scrambled your brain real good, didn't it?"

  "So it appears," he said, and motioned to the glass in her hand. "Could I have more of that, please?"

  Whatever trouble he was in, he was a polite troublemaker. She lifted the glass to his lips. He cupped her hand with both of his. They were steadier now, and not as rough against her skin as their calluses suggested they might be.

  When he'd emptied the glass, she asked if he wanted more. He shook his head and grimaced.

  "You gotta stop doing that," she said.

  "Yeah," he said, giving her a quick half-smile that creased his cheeks to either side of his mouth. In spite of his ashen color and the weariness in his eyes, those near dimples promised of a man capable of considerable laughter.

  Something stirred deep inside her. A want. A need.

  Laughter had never been abundant in her life. She used to watch other kids laughing, the kind of laughter that went on and on—that reached their eyes and lingered there. She'd known only moments of joy like that. Brief instances where she and her little brother would share in some secret joke—escape for a moment from the reality of their lives. But Theo was gone now, leaving her without anyone to laugh with.

  #

  A profound sadness pulled across his angel's features. If he'd had the strength to ponder it further, he'd have asked her what was wrong.

  But he was tired, so very tired, and he ached from head to toe.

  "Think you could help me up onto the couch?" he asked. "I could use a nap and, no offense, but this hard floor is a pain."

  She glanced at the door, the sadness drawn in her face shifting to concern.

  Oh yeah. That's right. Someone had shot him and he didn't know who or why. Good chance that someone was looking for him. But…

  "Whether I'm on the floor or the couch, if someone shows up at the door it won't make much difference."

  She met his gaze. "I'd rather you move to the bedroom."

  He eyed the stairway bisecting the back half of the room and climbing to a loft, a steep, narrow stairway. "I'll never make those steps."

  "There's a bedroom on this level below the loft."

  His head ached too much to look over his shoulder in the direction she nodded. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cushions. "Okay. Just give me a minute."

  "While you gather your strength," she said, rising, "I'll get you some aspirin for your head."

  "Yeah," he managed on a weary breath, wanting badly to clear his head and figure out what all was happening to him.

  He must have dozed off for a moment, as he started when she wedged her shoulder under his arm, the first half of what she said unheard. "…get you onto the couch and go from there."

  She rose, hoisting him with her. He bit back the pain ripping through his stiff muscles and pulling at his injuries. He fell back on the couch, the jarring making it feel like his brain was bouncing around inside his skull.

  "Open your mouth," she said.

  He squinted at the two white, round pills and odd oval tablet in the palm of her hand. "It's the aspirin for your head and an antibiotic for any infection."

  He looked into her face. "How'd you get antibiotics for me?"

  "Already had them."

  He frowned. "You keep antibiotics in supply?"

  She exhaled a heavy breath. "You've already had a couple and they didn't kill you, if that's what you're worried about."

  Suspicious was the more apt word. But why be suspicious, especially in regards to his angel of mercy?

  "Just take the pills," she said, bobbing her pill-laden palm in front of him.

  He started to nod, but caught himself, took the pills and glass of water from her and drank them down. By the time he handed the drained glass back to her, he'd noticed the chill of air against his skin. In getting onto the couch, the sleeping bag had slid down around his waist.

  "I won't be able to walk in this thing, let alone hold it up to get to the bedroom."

  She lifted a tee, sweatpants, and wool socks from the arm of the couch. "These should fit you okay."

  When she made to help him on with the tee, he waved her off. He got it on one arm and over his head before he realized lifting his arm on his wounded side pulled painfully. Conceding his limitations, he let her thread his arm through the sleeve and tug the shirt down to his waist.

  Her fingers lingered on the shirt hem, her hands balled between the tee and sleeping bag. Their eyes met.

  "You know you shouldn't even try bending over to put on the pants, given your wounds."

  He sighed, surrendering. As she pulled the sleeping bag off him, he tugged the tee low, cupping his hands over his genitals. Why he bothered, his befuddled mind couldn't fathom. Obviously she'd already seen him bare-ass naked.

  She bunched up one leg of the sweatpants, threading it over his foot, then the other. Just the sight of her hands working around his feet and ankles stirred something in him. As she drew the sweats up his legs, he knew exactly what the nearness of her hands to his skin was stirring—he knew exactly why he covered himself and it had nothing to do with modesty. Given all he didn't know about himself—given the suspicious nature he seemed to have, he had to question what kind of deviant might he be that he couldn't keep himself from being aroused by a woman who'd rescued him, and probably at great risk to herself.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He sat in the bed in the bedroom off the kitchen side of the living area, sipping an earthy- tasting broth from a mug.

  "Mushroom soup made from morels," his angel of mercy had said.

  Morels were expensive. How he knew that eluded him. Why he even thought about mushrooms eluded him.

  And why that enormous dog of hers sat at bedside, muzzle resting on the mattress at his hip, watching him, was beyond reasoning.

  The next thing he knew, his angel was changing his dressings. He didn't remember falling asleep, just the warmth of the mushroom broth spreading through his body and the inviting softness of the mattress. Hell, he barely remembered her rolling him back and forth as she tended his wounds.

  He woke enough at one point to prop himself up for another bowl of broth, the ever-vigilant Tuff Stuff watching from bedside. The next time he woke, it was to the urgings of a full bladder and a room striped with shadow and light.

  He swung his legs out from under the quilt and groaned as the movement tugged at his muscles and wounds. Tuff Stuff popped to her feet…at beside. When he looked up, his angel was standing in the doorway, the brightness of the great-room backlighting her like a full-body halo. Still daytime.

  But the intensity of the light haloing her suggested direct sunlight, like a setting sun shining through a westward-facing window. What troubled him, though, was that the bedroom door must have stood open while he'd slept. It made him feel vulnerable.

  "You standing guard?" he asked, in a voice gruffer than lack of use merited.

  "No," she said, approaching him where he sat on the edge of the bed willing his head to stop spinning. "I heard you move…and Tuff."

  "And listening for me is different from standing guard how?"

  She stopped in front of him, all legs and trim hips beneath her jeans. "I'd rather help you off the bed than have to scrape you off the floor. In case you haven't noticed, you're a lot bigger than I am."

  "I noticed."

  Something in her stance shifted, something too subtle to pinpoint. He blinked up at her— saw she'd crossed her arms. Had he caused that defensive pose?

  He grimaced. "Sorry to be such a grouch. Guess that's how I am when I wake up." He glanced at the open door. "Eith
er that or I'm not used to being watched while I'm sleeping."

  "Paranoia aside, the open door lets the heat from the wood stove and fireplace into the room. Saves on the cost of running the electric heater."

  He pulled in a long breath. "I'm really being a jerk of a houseguest, and after all you've done for me."

  She grunted. "Compared to the men who've passed through my life, you're far from jerk status."

  He studied her, searching for some sign in her posture that might explain how such a strong, capable woman could have allowed any man to use her.

  "So what are you getting up for?" she asked, breaking into his thoughts.

  "Need a bathroom. Think you can help me find one?"

  She perched on the edge of the bed beside him and wedged her shoulder under his. He draped an arm across her back, his hand settling on the crest of a lean, sinewy shoulder. She levered him onto his feet with ease, just like earlier when she'd helped him off the floor and again when she'd braced him into the bedroom. She might be slim, but she was strong.

  When he emerged from the bathroom, she and Tuff Stuff were waiting for him. A grin flexed across his lips. "Real motherly, aren't you?"

  Something flickered in her eyes, an emotion not entirely pleasant. But it was gone in the blink of an eye, her offer of a shoulder to lean on her only response.

  "Would you like to sit on the couch for a while?" she asked.

  "Sounds good."

  She settled him on the near end of the sofa facing the fireplace, Tuff Stuff plopping down on the rug at his feet. "Have you remembered anything yet?"

  He gave his head a shake before catching himself, though it didn't hurt as much as earlier.

  She picked up a glass of water and a couple aspirins from the end table and offered them to him.

  "Thanks," he said and drank down the pills.

  "Feel up to testing your memory a bit?" she asked, setting the empty glass aside.

  "Sure."

  She dropped onto the couch beside him, not so close that they touched, but not against the far armrest, either. She dug into a plastic shopping bag between her hip and the armrest and handed him a sliced-up wool shirt, presumably the shirt she'd cut off him.

  He turned the remnant of shirt around in his hands, willing it to reveal some memory to him. It gave him nothing. Even when his fingers skimmed the dried blood stiffening the fabric, all that came to him was the sickening sense that it was his blood and there was a lot of it.

  He stared at the hole where the bullet had burned through the cloth into his body. Somehow, he knew what the singeing and stippling around the hole meant. He rearranged the material so it hung in its original form and took note of the exit hole in proximity to the entry.

  "I was shot at a downward angle." He fingered the singed hole in the front of the shirt, adding, "Close range."

  "Very close," she said. "Are you remembering that?"

  He shook his head, only the faintest of aches rattling his brain, and tossed the remains of shirt back to her. "Evidence."

  "You talk like a cop or a lawyer," she said.

  He shrugged.

  "But you don't look like a lawyer," she said.

  He rubbed his chin and cracked a smile in her direction. "Maybe if I shaved and put on a suit."

  "You don't have the hands of lawyer."

  He looked at his scabbed knuckles. "You don't think lawyers throw a punch now and then?"

  "I'm talking about the calluses."

  He turned his hands up and stared at the thickened skin on the pads around his palm—on the trigger finger of his right hand. Had she noticed that last as well? She struck him as a woman who didn't miss much.

  "What else you got for me to look at?"

  She handed him a black-banded watch. Heavy duty. Shock resistant. Multi-purpose. He saw all that in its structure. But no matter how many times he turned it in his hands, it triggered nothing in his locked brain.

  "I get nothing," he said and started to hand it back to her.

  "You might as well keep it," she said. "It's yours."

  He strapped it on, muttering, "Next."

  A handgun appeared in front of him. His breath hitched. He lifted the Glock from her palm, felt its weight in his hand, tested its fit to his palm—to the calluses there.

  "Do you know this gun?"

  "I know guns," he said. "At least I sense I'm familiar with them. Is this mine?"

  "Questionable. It was in your hand when I found you, but you weren't wearing a holster."

  "A lot of cops use Glocks," he said, giving her a speculative look.

  She blinked, breaking eye contact, and said, "I think it was the gun you were shot with."

  His side twitched. At the suggestion a cop shot him or in memory of being shot, he couldn't say and he asked, "Why do you think that?"

  "It's the right caliber to match the hole going into you. Good thing it got you in the fleshy part of your side."

  He winced at the idea of how deadly his wound could have been and he murmured, "Bullet penetration was enough to have been deadly had I been shot closer to center body mass."

  "That sounds like cop talk," she said, not sounding at all reassured by the possibility. "You sure you're not a cop?"

  "I'm not sure of anything," he muttered, flipping the release latch for the bullet clip.

  But nothing happened. He turned the gun handgrip up and saw the clip was missing. He should have noticed the weight of the gun was off.

  He should have known his angel was too smart to hand him, a shot-up stranger, a loaded gun. But just how well did she know guns with clips?

  He snorted and grinned at her. "Did you empty the chamber as well?"

  A smug smile pulled at the corners of her mouth and he knew he didn't need to check the chamber for his answer. In fact, he found himself more intrigued by how that half-smile changed her face, lifted it, brightened it, even reaching her eyes and giving them a mischievous glint.

  Then she sobered. "There was only one casing missing from it."

  He handed the pistol back to her. "How come you know so much about guns?"

  "Michigan's Upper Peninsula is a hunters' haven. Everybody here knows guns."

  "I buy that hunters know rifles and shotguns. But handguns?"

  She set the pistol on the cushion beside her far hip, her gaze sliding away from him. "Guns are part of the culture here." She lifted shuttered eyes back to him. "Any kind of guns. Mostly hunting guns. But we have a high percentage of competition shooters and collectors."

  "And which are you?"

  "Let's just stick with trying to figure out who you are for now," she said.

  A loud pop sent him diving onto her, shouting, "Get down."

  She pushed him off. "It's just a knot popping in the fireplace."

  He slumped against the back of the couch, shaken by how instinctual the evasive maneuver had been to him. But before he could explore among the flames in the fireplace if that instinct came from more than being recently shot, a coal dislodged by the popping knot rolled off the fire grate.

  "Cole," he said.

  "What about the coals?" she asked, righting herself beside him.

  "Not coals. Cole. That's my name."

  "First or last?"

  He stared at the glowing ember, shaking his head. "I don't know. I just had this flash of someone calling me Cole."

  #

  Andi brushed her fingers over her breast pocket—over the lump made by the ring on the chain she'd been reaching for when her stranger flattened her to the couch. Maybe remembering his name was enough for one day.

  Or maybe she didn't want a man so ready to protect her remembering who that ring linked him to. And he had protected her. No man had done that for her other than her little brother.

  But this man was no kin to her. This man didn't even know her nor her him. A pipe dream to think he'd protected her. Clearly, he was just a man to whom protecting came instinctually.

  She picked up his bloody, cut-
up tee and shirt, carried them to the fireplace, and tossed them into the flames.

  "Why're you burning my clothes?" he asked.

  "They're useless," she said, closing the fire door and facing him. "Besides, you wouldn't want whoever shot you to see them in my garbage."

  He frowned. "My being here very likely is putting you in harm's way."

  There it was again, that protective nature of his. Would he be so quick to protect if he knew her history?

  "I've been in harm's way most of my life," she said, not sure why she revealed even that much of herself to him.

  He blinked, tipped his head to one side as though studying her. The last thing she needed was for yet someone else to judge her.

  "How about some stew? It should be ready." She headed for the kitchen side of the cabin.

  "You must be tired of broth by now," she went on as she ladled out a healthy portion of meat and vegetables from a pot on the stove.

  The scrape of table legs drew her around. The lamp on the end table was tottering and Cole was standing with one hand on the arm of the couch, Tuff on her feet beside him, peering up at him. All but dropping the bowl on the kitchen table, she hurried to his side. He waved her away.

  "I just got up a little too fast," he said.

  "You're anemic," she said, insisting he accept her support as she walked him to the table. "You're going to be weak until your body replenishes all the blood you lost."

  "How come you know so much about blood loss?"

  Because I had to nurse my father back from a chainsaw accident that nearly cut his leg off… the miserable son of a bitch.

  Because I watched my baby brother bleed out from a gunshot wound I couldn't stop, may he finally rest at peace.

  "I'm a hunter," she said, settling him on the nearest kitchen chair in front of which she'd dropped the bowl of stew on her way to him. "I've tracked plenty of wounded deer." At the stove, she filled a bowl of stew for herself and piled the baking powder biscuits she'd made in another. "You learn the signs of when they're bleeding out."