by Linda Ladd
Rocco placed a steady gaze on him and dropped his lowlife, I-can-kill-you-before-you-blink act like a hot rock. “I won’t get her shot. You don’t have to worry about that. And I’m not putting moves on her, either.”
That was all he was going to get out of Rocco, Nick was pretty sure, but he had gotten the answers he wanted, so he didn’t push it. He got up and headed to the steps, wondering what was taking Claire so damn long. He stopped at the top of the stairs and turned back when he heard the buzz of a motorboat, very loud in the quiet night. It seemed to be going fast and headed up the bayou toward them. As it neared, Rocco stood up, too, and watched it approach. The boat passed them on the opposite side of the bayou, about twenty yards distant, near a stand of flooded cypress trees.
It was dark, and all he could see was a figure in the stern, working a powerful outboard and wearing a dark hoodie against the chilly night. There was a single light in the prow, but it was too dark to see the driver clearly. The boater waved as he passed, a friendly Cajun out frog gigging, probably. Nick watched him a moment, and then glanced down below when he heard Claire come outside.
A low thud behind him told him something had hit the deck, and he spun and crouched quickly, his first thought that Rocco had come up fast behind him, perhaps more dangerous than Nick had thought. But it wasn’t Rocco. Rocco was staring at the object rolling across the deck toward where Nick had been sitting at the table. Both of them froze for the first second, until a second grenade was lobbed onto the boat and landed, not a yard in front of Nick.
“Grenade!” Rocco yelled and tried to jump over the rail into the bayou.
Nick took a flying leap down onto the lower deck. He landed wrong, fell down on his shoulder, rolled back up onto his feet, near where Claire was standing, three beer bottles in her hands, looking stunned by his gymnastics. He threw himself toward her and took her over the railing with him. They hit the water about the time the first grenade exploded. The boom rocked his eardrums, and he felt splintered wood and shattered shards of glass raining down in the water all around them.
The second grenade went off almost simultaneously as they plummeted deeper and hit hard against the layer of mud at the bottom of the bayou. Then they fought their way back to the surface, gasping, choking, just as the gas tank in the stern blew up with a thunderous boom and a fiery explosion that lit up the night sky as bright as day. The houseboat disintegrated into rubble and orange flames that shot high in the air like hellfire loosed on earth.
Claire was treading water. In the glow of the flames, she looked shocked but okay. She was bleeding from the nose, but she was still breathing and her arms and legs were functioning. Black looked out over the debris-littered surface for Rocco. He saw him about six feet out, floating face up in the water. Nick felt a little stunned himself, ears stopped up and vibrating, eyes aching, and he was blinking away blood from some kind of gash over his left eye. He headed out to Rocco, found him still alive but unconscious. He and Claire grabbed him and somehow fought their way back to shore.
After they’d dragged him out, they rolled onto their backs for a moment, panting with exertion. Claire appeared too dazed to speak. He got up on his knees and did a cursory check of her arms and legs and found a gash on the back of her head, but it wasn’t bad. He jerked off his shirt, ripped it up, and tried to wrap some of it around her head, well aware they’d both been extremely lucky they’d been blown off the boat or they’d have been caught in the fire of the explosion. Then he checked out Rocco, who had taken the brunt of the first blast, probably hit with debris before he made it down to the water. He was covered in shrapnel wounds. It looked like his left arm might be dislocated, maybe even broken, and he might have internal injuries as well. It was a good thing he was unconscious or he’d be in agony. Nick’s head was pounding, blood pouring down his forehead, and he checked himself over and found another fairly deep laceration on his right thigh. He bound it up with what was left of his shirt. He felt dizzy for a moment, like he was going to pass out, and got on all fours and hung his head down until it stopped spinning.
“Black, Black …” Claire tried to sit up, then groaned and dropped her head back into the mud.
“Don’t move yet. You might’ve hit your head. We’ve got to get an ambulance out here.”
“You’re bleeding,” she managed in a slurred voice, frowning and trying to focus her eyes on his face. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot, the shock of the blast wreaking havoc with the capillaries. His probably looked the same way.
“Yeah, a few cuts and bruises. Lie still. Does your head hurt?”
“It’s killing me. What happened?”
Nick glanced at Rocco again. He was still breathing, but he was in bad shape. “That boat that passed by? He tossed a couple of grenades in on us.”
That got her attention and she roused up big time. “What? Grenades?” She stopped and then remembered her friend. “Is Gabe all right?”
“Rocco’s in bad shape, if that’s who you’re talking about.”
She pushed herself up, and immediately cried out and grabbed her head with both hands. “Where is he? How bad is he?”
“He took the worst of the blast. I need to call an ambulance from the car.” Nick’s head was slamming against his skull as if trying to knock his brain stem loose, and it felt like it was about to get its way. He was weak, but he was the one in the best shape to get them to the hospital. Rocco, or Gabe, or whatever the hell his name was, needed medical attention and needed it fast. His left arm was not in good condition, and he was bleeding from both his nose and his ears. Nick used a shattered piece of plank off the boat to splint the arm as best he could, which wasn’t very well.
Still woozy, Claire managed to sit up and stare at the flickering flames, still roaring and crackling and consuming the houseboat, Nick watched her crawl on her hands and knees and cradle the other man’s head in her lap. At that point, he knew that this guy, whoever he was, meant a lot more to Claire than some casual old friend. But all that would have to wait. He staggered to his car, got the hospital in Thibodaux on his satellite phone, identified himself as a doctor, described their injuries, and instructed the ambulance to meet them on the highway to Thibodaux.
When he got back, he pulled Rocco up and onto his shoulder, trying to avoid further injuring Rocco’s bad arm and hoping to God Rocco didn’t have internal injuries bleeding out inside his head or chest. The ensuing pain was severe enough to bring Rocco half conscious, and he groaned in pain. Claire tried to help Nick with him, but stumbled herself and went down to her knees, still groggy and disoriented. He left her there and hurried ahead, got Rocco in the backseat of the Range Rover, and then went back for Claire and settled her in the passenger seat. She lay her head back and shut her eyes and lapsed into semiconsciousness.
More than anything, he feared she’d sustained a second concussion, and he knew all too well what that could do to her, right now, when she had only just recovered from a head-injury-induced coma. Cursing inside, angry at himself for not realizing the danger and getting her out of it before the blast, he turned the ignition, slammed the car into gear, and backed up, spinning gravel in a sliding one-eighty turn and driving hard for the highway and the dispatched ambulance. Because now he knew, and all too well, that the grenades that had hurt Claire and her friend might have been thrown onto that boat to kill him, not them.
Chapter Seventeen
Four hours later, all three of them were back inside Black’s walled mansion on Governor Nicholls Street in the French Quarter. They had been bandaged and checked out at the hospital in Thibodaux, and Gabe had indeed suffered the worst of the blast. At the moment, Claire stood alone beside Gabe’s bed in the largest and most elegant of their seven guest bedrooms. Gabe lay there in the ornate mahogany antique canopy bed with its magnificent royal blue velvet hangings, very still, very pale, looking like a corpse. She sank down into a cushioned gold-and-white-striped empire chair beside the bed and massaged her temples. Her heada
che felt like some kind of out-of-control jackhammer. Black had been wonderful, just like he always was when she needed him, and he still hadn’t asked her any questions about Gabriel LeFevres. But he would, and she would tell him everything he wanted to know. And there was no way that Gabe could ever go back undercover, not with the Skulls. It was completely out of the question.
Claire turned her head and watched Black where he stood across the room. He was giving orders to the private nurse he’d summoned. Julie Alvarez was an old friend of his from Charity Hospital, a pretty woman with short brown hair and green eyes and very good ER skills. At the moment, Black was swearing her to secrecy. The doctors had set Gabe’s arm, which turned out to be a severe dislocation of the shoulder as well as a cracked wrist and elbow. They’d also stitched up dozens of ugly shrapnel wounds on his arms and chest. But he was breathing fine and resting comfortably now. He would be all right, but he had not regained consciousness.
All three of them had been extremely lucky to escape the blast alive. Gabe was terribly wounded, and Black had a deep gash on both his forehead and leg. She had fared better because Black had shielded her from the blast with his body. He was fine, though. Even with his head and thigh bandaged, he was up and walking and talking and giving orders. Thank God. A wave of anger swept through her, and she sat very still and swore that she would get whoever had done this to them. No matter how long it took. Gabe shifted slightly and made painful grunts, but he was heavily sedated and quieted at once.
When she looked back across the room, Black was gone. Julie was sitting in a white easy chair beside the window watching Claire hover over Gabe. Claire had a feeling that Black had reached his limit. She didn’t blame him, either, but she was surprised he hadn’t demanded some answers out of her before now.
“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of him,” Julie said softly. “You probably need to get some rest. Nick’s beat, too. I suspect he’s waiting for you.”
“It’s very important that no one knows Gabe is here. You do understand that, don’t you, Julie?”
“Oh, yes. Nick made that crystal clear.”
Claire looked down at Gabe again. The ER nurses had washed off his eye makeup and cut off his braid when they were working on a laceration on his chin, and he looked more like he used to.
“He must be very special to you,” Julie whispered softly.
“He’s the closest thing I ever had to a brother.”
“That’s pretty much the way I feel about Nick. Please forgive me for saying this, but you might want to tell Nick that. He didn’t say so, but I sense he’s pretty upset about what happened tonight.”
Claire stared at her. Julie was right, of course. “You’ll come and get me if he wakes up and calls for me, won’t you?”
“Of course. Nick gave him quite a heavy sedative. I don’t think he’ll come around until morning. That’s a good thing. He’s going to suffer a lot of pain when he comes to.”
Claire took one last look at Gabriel, and then she walked down the long white marble hallway to the round master bedroom she shared with Black. She found him there, sitting in a large maroon leather wingchair in front of the fireplace. He still wore the green scrubs provided to both of them by the hospital staff after they’d showered and washed off the bayou mud and the blood from their stitched wounds. He was in profile to her, staring motionlessly into the fireplace grate, where a roaring fire was snapping and popping like crazy. He had a short glass of Chivas in his right hand and held it propped on the arm of the chair. It was almost empty. A little blood had seeped through the bandage over his eye, a tiny spot of scarlet, the size of a dime. He sat utterly still. If he had not shown up and come aboard when he had, she and Gabe would probably be dead. Or injured a lot more severely than they were.
She stood there in the threshold for a moment. Jules Verne was curled up asleep in the middle of the round canopy bed after having yapped incessantly when they’d rolled Gabe in on the gurney and settled him in the guestroom. Poodle stress. It was extremely quiet now, except for a bird chirping outside the open French doors and the breeze fluttering the sheer white curtains and filling the room with cool fresh air. She could hear the distant tinkling of the fountain in the middle of the large and private walled courtyard below their balcony. Juan and Maria had helped them situate Gabe in his room, but then Black had told them they should go back to bed and get some sleep. Dawn was beginning to break now. She could see the graying sky through the giant fanlights over the row of tall French doors leading onto the gallery, but there were few sounds yet of the city bustling awake in the French Quarter outside the tall walls.
She just stood there, head still aching, looking at Black, very glad he was home with her again, very sorry that he’d been injured, and because of her again. She wondered if he had about had it with her and the dangers of her job. But he hadn’t asked her to quit, and had even said he would never do that. He had saved her life, and Gabe’s. Moving across the room, she stopped in front of him. He looked up at her, his eyes bloodshot from the blast, a black five o’clock shadow darkening his cheeks. He looked so tired, so spent, that her heart clenched. She straddled his lap, careful to avoid his injuries, her knees on either side of his thighs, and encircled his head with her arms. She brought it up against her breasts and kissed his hair.
“I’m sorry, Black, I’m so sorry that you got hurt. I’m so sorry I involved you in all this.”
His next words were muffled against her, but they touched her heart. “No matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, I can’t seem to find a place where you’ll be safe.”
Claire put her palms on his cheeks and gently raised his face. “You are my safe place, Black. You are, right here, right now, always.”
His arms tightened around her, and he pulled her closer. She threaded her fingers through his thick hair and told him how much she loved him, something she did not say to him very often. They didn’t speak for a little while after that, just held each other, and then he pushed her back where he could look into her eyes. “We can’t keep doing this, Claire. You do know that, don’t you? Someday, if this keeps up, one of us is going to get killed. Do you even realize how close we came to dying in that blast?”
He was dead serious, sounded almost defeated. They had barely escaped a horrible death, and she knew it all too well. “I do know that. And I know that if you hadn’t come out there, Gabe and I would both likely be dead right now. What I don’t know is why this happened. I wasn’t expecting any kind of danger out there, I swear. But I think it’s got to do with Gabe, not me. I think you and I were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He’s been riding undercover with the Skulls. That’s a biker gang here in New Orleans.” She stopped and took a deep breath, shut her eyes a moment against the pounding in her temples. “They must’ve found him out and been suspicious enough to follow him or something. We didn’t expect it. He hadn’t even been there very long before you drove up. I swear it, Black. He was a friend to me a long time ago, when I was a child and really needed somebody I could depend on. That’s all, that’s all it is, all it ever was.”
Black nodded, just a bare shake of his head. “Okay, I don’t want to talk about it anymore right now. I want to get in bed and hold you and try to get some sleep. Tomorrow, when we’re rested and can think straight, we need to talk about what we’re going to do. Right now, let’s just go to sleep. It’s been a long day for both of us.”
“That sounds good to me.”
So they got up, undressed, and slipped under the soft sheets. He put his arm around her waist and pulled her in close against his chest, and then he fell asleep almost immediately, his cheek on the top of her head. Claire was not so lucky, and she lay there warm and content inside his arms, very glad to just be there with him, listening to his steady heartbeat, and feeling safe again. Finally, long after dawn peeked through the fanlights, she closed her eyes and slept like the dead, too, her dreams dark and disjointed and full of flames and falling glass and Gabe’
s groans of pain.
When she awoke again, it was early afternoon. They still lay entwined together in the bed, but her head no longer ached. She pulled back and raised herself on one elbow and studied Black. He was still sleeping, his right arm flung over his head as he was wont to do. But she vaguely remembered rousing up not too long ago when he’d left the bed and gone into the bathroom, and then down the hall, probably to check on Gabe. She had gone back to sleep before he returned, but now she eased quietly out of bed and tested her arms and legs and found out that her whole body felt as if she’d been stretched for hours on a torture rack. She made her way to the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth, thinking she should go ahead and take a shower and get dressed. But she didn’t really want to, not yet. She still felt sore and exhausted, and she didn’t want to face the day, or the serious conversation Black wanted to have.
Claire had a feeling he had reached his breaking point with what she unintentionally but repeatedly put him through. She didn’t know why terrible things happened to her so often, tried not to think about the reasons. But she did know that right now the idea of being without Black was the worst thing she could think of. She had let him in, let him get closer to her than anyone ever had. He was her life now, and she could finally admit that. So she slipped back under the covers and lay there close beside him and watched him breathe and tried not to think about anything.
After dozing awhile, she decided that it was time to shower and get dressed and check on Gabe’s condition but her efforts to slide out of bed were brought up short when Black’s fingers tightened around her arm. “Uh-uh,” he said, eyes still closed. “He’s fine. Julie’s with him. Come back here. I want us to pretend that last night was an extremely bad dream.”
Claire smiled and snuggled back in against him. His arms tightened around her, and he leaned his cheek against her hair. “So? You ready to tell me who the hell that guy is?”