by Lucy Monroe
“Thank you for calling to check on m…the house. As I said, everything is fine.”
“Sugar—”
“I’ll try not to inconvenience you again. Good-bye.”
The phone went dead in his ear and he swore pungently, glad his mama wasn’t there to hear him. His army drill sergeant had never intimidated him like her five-feet-nothing of southern belle charm.
He hadn’t meant to hurt Claire, and he had not called to check on the damn house. His jaw ached from clenching it as he reset the alarm. He checked his messages and e-mail, but couldn’t get the hurt tone of Claire’s voice out of his head. Finally, he gave in and called her again.
She didn’t pick up, and he checked her schedule only to realize she had a class and would be working later that night. He left a message telling her he had re-armed the system, but didn’t know what to say to undo the damage he’d done to her feelings, or even if it was a good idea to try.
Choking back tears, Claire unlocked her front door.
Lester was dead. She couldn’t believe it. He’d been at Belmont Manor practically since she started working there three years ago. There had been other deaths over that time. How could there not be, with the average age of the residents seventy-five years? But Lester was different. Lester was special. She’d loved him like family.
For a woman who had known as little family as she had, that meant something.
Just the night before, they had sat talking for over two hours and he had been mostly lucid. He’d told her more about his life as a paid assassin and she was convinced now that most of what he told her was real. He’d only started telling her about it this last year, since his senility had worsened, so it had taken a while to sort truth from hallucination. Unless he hallucinated the same things consistently, the stuff about his dark alter ego was real.
She’d told him she was surprised he’d lived so long, considering what he did, but he said he’d kept his real identity a strict secret. The government and clients for his private jobs had only known him by the name Arwan…Celtic god of the dead. It was fitting for what he had done.
Only she didn’t care what he’d been in his past; he had been an important part of her life now and it hurt so much that he was gone. He was the closest thing she’d ever known to a father figure she could respect, which was pretty darn pathetic, but there it was.
She shut the door as the tears started to fall. She swiped at them and belatedly remembered the alarm. Saying a word she rarely used, she rushed across the room to its hidden keypad and coded in her entry before it went off again. She made it just in time and disarmed the system through the veil of moisture blurring her vision.
It was a good thing she really did plan to move, because she hated having to remember the alarm. She would miss this house, but just like everywhere she had ever lived…it wasn’t her home. It wasn’t permanent. She was just a renter.
She’d lived a lot of places in her life, some of them scarier than others, but they’d all had one thing in common…they had been temporary stops, and this house was, too.
She wasn’t hungry and she couldn’t face studying. She was exhausted from grief over Lester and working after almost no sleep for the second weekend in a row. She stumbled down the hall to her bedroom, stopping along the way to reset the alarm.
That should make Hotwire happy.
Claire was dreaming. She was sleeping in the front seat of the old Buick she and her mom had called home for a few months when she was twelve. Part of her knew it was a dream, that she was a grown-up woman now, living in a house, not a car, but everything felt so real. She could even smell the must of the perpetually wet floor carpets.
She could hear her mom’s slow breathing from where she slept in the backseat and she could hear a siren’s wail. It was really close. The cops were coming…they would arrest her mom and put her in jail, too. Or maybe juvenile hall. Wasn’t it illegal to live in someone else’s abandoned car? She didn’t want to go to jail.
She started to whimper, fear clawing through her insides like an angry cat. Something came flying over the seat and landed against her face. Her mom’s pillow? Why had she thrown it? Claire tried to push it away, but it wouldn’t budge.
She struggled, desperation choking her.
She came awake with a jolt. She couldn’t breathe. There was something against her face and she could still hear the siren’s wail from her dream.
It was the alarm.
Someone had broken in. Someone who was holding a pillow over her face.
She opened her mouth to scream, but the pillow blocked it.
She thrashed, but couldn’t get any leverage.
The person was saying something. Counting. Her hands flailed and her right one hit a hard object. Then she remembered.
Hotwire had made her put a can of mace at the head of her bed. Weak from lack of oxygen, she grappled for it. There…got it. She fumbled with the safety, terrified she wouldn’t get it undone in time. Then, she directed it above the pillow over her face and pressed the button. And kept pressing while she waved it back and forth.
Vicious swearing. No more weight against the pillow. She pushed it up and sucked in air while terror-induced adrenaline caused her body to buck under her assailant. She managed to knock him sideways. She rolled off the other side of the bed and hit the hardwood floor with a thump.
The phone was ringing, but she couldn’t move to answer it. She was too busy trying to breathe. She pushed up onto her knees and sucked in one shuddering, noisy breath and then another. Her lungs were still starving, but she had to get out of there.
Her assailant lurched to his feet and lunged for her with a clumsy movement. She brought the mace up and sprayed again, this time aiming directly for the eye holes in his dark ski mask. He reared back, screaming. She ran for the door, but her oxygen-deprived body was clumsy.
She made it to the hallway, the house alarm screaming around her. Disoriented, it took her a fraction of a second to decide which way to go. She rushed for the front door, but she was only halfway across the living room when something grabbed her hair and yanked. She went backward and landed with a painful jarring flat on her back.
She saw the foot coming toward her head, but couldn’t do more than try to roll out of the way. She didn’t make it. Pain exploded in the back of her head and then everything went black.
Her head hurt like someone had used it for hitting practice with a brick bat. She groaned.
“Miss Sharp, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” came out a husky slur.
“Can you open your eyes?”
“Can try…” She willed her eyelids to peel back and winced when they did. “Too bright.” She shut them again.
“Please, Miss Sharp, I need you to open your eyes and keep them open.”
“Hurts…”
“I’m sorry.” The voice was kind.
She would try to do what it wanted.
She opened her eyes again, this time blinking at the brightness and trying to let her vision adjust. A light flicked in her left eye and then her right. She flinched from it. “No.”
“I won’t do it again.”
“Okay. Thank…you…” Her voice trailed off when she found it impossible to finish the thought.
He touched her head all over and her neck, asking questions. She tried to answer, but she cried out in pain when he probed the back of her skull.
“You’ve got a nasty bump here.”
Memories were flooding back. “Kicked me.”
The man made a disgusted sound and then asked, “You remember what happened?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good news.”
“Really?” She didn’t particularly enjoy remembering those terrifying moments.
“A concussion is usually accompanied by retrograde amnesia, the inability to remember what happened just prior to passing out.”
“Don’t have a concussion?” she asked, confused.
“I’m not sure, but
your ability to remember is a good sign that if you do have one, it is not severe.”
“Who did this to you?” Another voice. Male.
She turned her head toward the voice and tears sprang into her eyes when excruciating pain shot through her head.
The voice belonged to a uniformed policeman.
Old conditioning died hard, and she cringed at the sight of the blue-clad officer standing so close. “Don’t know,” she croaked. “Wore a mask.”
“I’d like to finish my examination before you interview her.” The first voice belonged to a white-coated doctor, she now realized.
The policeman nodded.
She looked around her without moving her head. She was in an emergency room cubicle. How long had she been out? She didn’t remember leaving her home.
“How did I…”
“How did you get here?”
“Yes,” she sighed.
“A neighbor came to check on your alarm. He saw you lying on the floor of your living room through the open drapes. He called 911.”
“I know the neighbor…used to be a SEAL.”
“Yes, I believe the older gentleman is former military,” the policeman said.
“Not so bad…guess.”
The officer laughed, but she didn’t know why.
A nurse joined the doctor and they gently examined her, checking her reflexes and responses, asking lots of questions.
Finally, the doctor sent the nurse out of the cubicle for a pain reliever and he straightened to stand beside her bed. “I’d like you to have an MRI, but from my initial examination, you appear to be a very lucky young woman. You appear to have no more than a mild concussion. It could have been a lot worse.”
She blinked. “Yeah. I think he wanted to kill me.”
“Why do you say that?” the policeman asked.
That began the interrogation.
Chapter 4
I t was hard to focus, and she just wanted to go to sleep, not to mention that talking to the authorities always made her tense. She had no good memories connected with the police. A state policeman had come to tell her and her mom that her dad was dead. After that, her encounters with the police had always been full of fear…both hers and her mother’s. Unless Mom had been too drunk to be afraid. Then she’d been belligerent and that had only increased Claire’s fear.
It had been years since Claire had had a negative run-in with a cop, but old habits died hard. No matter how irrational they were. But she tried to answer the officer’s questions the best she could. Finally, when her words were slurring, the doctor shooed the officer out of her cubicle.
“Can I go home now?” she asked the doctor.
“I would still like to do an MRI.”
She shuddered inwardly at what that kind of test would cost. “No.”
“You need it.”
“You said…concussion not so bad.” It was hard to concentrate after answering so many questions for the officer. She was so tired and her head still hurt.
“I would like to confirm that diagnosis with the test.”
“Not good enough reason…” She drew in a shallow breath. “I want to go home now.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“You aren’t going to like hearing this, but in that case, with your symptoms, I would rather keep you overnight for observation than send you home.”
“No.” She didn’t have medical insurance. No way was she going to stay overnight in the hospital. The bill from the ambulance and her emergency room visit would be high enough.
“You will be taking an unnecessary risk with your health.”
“But not a big risk.” And it was necessary, even if he couldn’t see it.
“That depends on how you look at it,” he said.
“Not staying.”
The doctor nodded his head curtly, as if he could tell it would be useless to argue further.
“You’ll need to call someone. You cannot go home alone, and you’ll have to sign a release form saying you are denying the prescribed medical treatment.”
“I’ll sign the form.” But there was no one she could call.
When she told him that, he would try again to insist she stay overnight.
She opened her mouth, prepared to argue her case despite her aching head and weakened state. The doctor got called to another patient before she could start, and she breathed a sigh of relief. If she could get up and get dressed before he got back, she would have a stronger case for discharging herself.
She gingerly slid her legs over the side of the bed and pulled herself into a sitting position with the handbar on the bed. Then she stayed where she was until her head stopped spinning. Slowly, moving her head as little as possible, she stood up and then shuffled, one slow step at a time, to the cupboard where she figured they had stored her clothes.
She searched it gingerly, careful not to jar her head with her movements. She hit pay dirt on the third drawer. She couldn’t stifle a groan of frustration when she realized what she was looking at. She’d been brought in to the hospital in her pajamas.
A spaghetti strap tank top and white cotton bikini panties were hardly appropriate for her trip home. Especially on public transport. Maybe she could wear a hospital gown over them and splurge on a taxi. It would cost less than staying the night in the hospital.
It took forever to get her clothes on. She was sliding the gown back on like a robe when the curtain swept back with a series of metallic clicks.
“What are you doing out of bed?”
She looked up and stared, not able to comprehend the vision before her. It was Hotwire, and his eyes were blazing blue fire at her.
“I’m getting dressed.” She paused and took a deep breath, then let it out. “So I can go home.”
“Have you lost your mind?”
“It feels like it got knocked out of my head,” she admitted.
“Claire, damn it to hell.”
She’d never heard Hotwire swear. It sounded strange and gave the impression he was really rattled. He didn’t stop with one word, either, but let out a string of obscenities that would have made any dockworker proud.
He bit off a final four-letter utterance and glared at her. “You were going to go back to the house where you were attacked…by yourself…in this condition?”
“I can’t afford a night in the hospital.”
“Can you afford to die?”
She didn’t answer. There was nothing to say to that. He wouldn’t understand the mentality that came from going where you had to when you knew you had no options. Most people took their personal safety for granted, assuming it was theirs by right. She knew it was a luxury a person could not always afford.
For no reason she could understand, her eyes filled with tears. And it made her mad. She never cried, darn it. Tears were for the weak and she was not weak. Not like her parents. She’d proven that time and again. And she’d keep proving it until she believed it.
He said something under his breath and then strong hands gently helped her pull the gown on. He tugged it close and tied the dangling strings to keep it that way.
When he was done, he carefully lifted her into his arms. “It’ll be okay, sugar.”
The doctor came back in. He took in the sight of Hotwire standing there, holding her in his arms like a small child, though even in her awful condition she felt one hundred percent female, being held like this.
He smiled wryly. “I take it she’ll be going home with you.”
“Why isn’t she staying for overnight observation?”
“She refused. She also refused the MRI I recommended.” Evidently, the doctor believed he’d found an ally in Hotwire.
Hotwire looked down at her. “Why not?”
“I don’t have medical insurance.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t blast her like she expected. “I’ll take her home with me.”
She smiled, relieved. “Thank you.”
“Af
ter the MRI,” he said grimly.
Now it was the doctor’s turn to smile.
Claire was almost asleep when they got to Hotwire’s hotel, and she let him pick her up out of the car and carry her to the elevator without so much as a murmur.
Once inside, she stirred in his arms. “Are you sure you won’t get in trouble for having an extra person in your room?”
“It’s not a problem.”
She sighed. “I’m surprised no one said anything when you carried me through the lobby. The desk clerk sure looked hard.”
“I’m positive he’s seen stranger.”
“Than a guest dressed like a hospital patient reject?”
“Sure. This is downtown Portland, not Mayberry. I’ve been here less than a week and I’ve seen no less than a dozen heavily pierced punk rockers, a group of Goth vampire wannabes, and a woman who was at least sixty wearing a pair of pink satin hot pants and a studded black leather jacket.”
Claire’s head snuggled trustingly against his shoulder. “If you say so.”
He let them into his room and carried her through to the bedroom. It was hard to force himself to lay her down on the bed when they got there, but he did it.
He pulled back the covers and then moved her under them. “I’ll get you something to drink.”
When he came back with a glass of juice from the minibar, she was fighting to keep her eyes open. “I don’t have any clothes.”
“I’ll go to the house and get some for you.”
“Thanks…” She sighed. “Need my backpack, too,” she slurred.
If she thought he was going to let her study in this condition, she was nuts, but he could get the backpack and even her laptop if having them with her made her feel better.
“I’ll get it.”
She picked fretfully at the hospital gown. “Don’t like this.”
Neither did he, not nearly as much as what was underneath, but he didn’t relish helping her take it off, either. Seeing her practically naked wasn’t going to do much for his self-control. The only thing saving them both was her obvious physical frailty. Stifling a sigh and making it a point not to look at her body, he helped her untie the gown and pull it off.