The cops introduced themselves as officers from Transit Borough One, or maybe it was Transit Bureau One; nothing seemed to be registering quite right. She couldn’t remember their names five seconds after they’d said them. Her brain appeared to be operating with a kind of underwater torpidity. She wondered if this was how it felt to be drunk or stoned. Nah. Who’d go out of their way to feel like this?
“You the one ended up on the tracks?” asked the Hader lookalike.
“Uh, yeah.”
“You jump down there yourself, or…?”
“What? No! No, of course not. I was pushed. Some guy snatched my bag and then just… just…”
Flipping open a notebook, Officer Rogen asked if anyone had gotten a good look at the assailant. He took down Kareem’s description, then dismissed him. Hader questioned Gage, while Rogen led Emma some distance away, to a bench in a relatively quiet corner of the platform. She sat down and wrapped her arms around herself.
“We came soon as we heard the long short,” said the cop, after taking her name and address.
Emma blinked at him. “The long...”
“It’s a series of three blasts from the motorman’s horn,” he explained. “He saw you get pushed onto the tracks and, gave the signal.”
“Oh.” The long short? Emma felt as if she were wading through one of those disturbing dreams where a vague sense of wrongness keeps intruding on otherwise normal events.
“You hurt?” he asked, giving her the once-over and squinting at her ravaged knees. “You need to go to the hospital?”
She shook her head violently. She hated hospitals, with their poking and prodding and lack of privacy. All those strangers, touching her. “No, it’s just a couple of skinned knees.”
“You could have other injuries you don’t know about yet. Sometimes things don’t show up till later. Happened to my sister, after she cracked up her car on the Whitestone Bridge. She walked away feeling fine. That night she goes to take out the garbage and faints dead away. Turned out she had a concussion, two cracked ribs, whiplash—”
“I’m okay, really.”
“You should let me call for an ambulance, just to check you out and make sure everything’s okay.”
“No, really, I’m fine.” Except that her throat felt as if it had been sandblasted; she must have screamed at some point, although she couldn’t remember it.
“Have it your way,” he conceded grudgingly. “But you pay attention. If you start getting any funny aches or pains, you hightail it to the emergency room pronto.”
She promised that she would.
“Do you know the perpetrator?” asked Rogen, scratching behind his ear with his pen.
“Know him?” Emma shook her head. “No, he was just... you know. A bum. Long, scraggly hair. Ratty clothes. He was filthy.”
“Probably a junkie.” He wrote something down. “You sure you never met him before?”
“No. I just moved here.”
At his urging, Emma described the assailant in as much detail as she could summon up. The only thing she remembered vividly was his eyes.
She related the entire encounter: how she’d seen the man for the first time outside Zara’s building, and then on the platform, and then how he’d snatched her bag and pushed her. No, she didn’t notice which way he went after that; she was too busy getting ready to die.
A bulky, red-nosed plainclothes officer showed up with his own notebook, introduced himself as Detective Boone, and asked her all the same questions. Gage and Officer Hader joined them. Boone had Gage repeat in detail his witnessing of the crime. While he was going over it all again, Emma started to shake.
It wasn’t so much a shivering as a sort of slow-motion trembling. Her arms and legs, and then her whole body, began to shudder uncontrollably. She willed it to stop, but it just got worse. She had no command whatsoever over her body; it had its own agenda.
By the time the officers had finished with Gage and returned their attention to her, still sitting with her arms locked around herself, she was quaking from head to toe. Her heart raced; her breath came in pants. Her stomach was a red-hot knot inside her, but the rest of her felt chilled to the bone.
All the men gaped at her, except for Gage, who whipped off his jacket and draped it over her, then sat next to her on the bench and rubbed her back and arms as best he could through all those layers. His touch should have unnerved her, but instead it actually made her feel safer... comforted. “Easy, now. It’s just adrenaline. A delayed reaction to a life-threatening situation—very common. Your brain perceived a crisis and started hollerin’ at your adrenal glands to pump out epinephrine—that’s adrenaline—and norepinephrine, or noradrenal—”
“H-h-how do you know a-all th-th—”
He grinned in a bemused way. “They made me learn that kind of stuff before they let me start cuttin’ folks open.”
She stared at him for a moment, her teeth chattering, while she tried to remember details of the author’s bio from the Incision jacket, which she’d hastily skimmed. “Y-you’re a s-s-surgeon.”
The grin faded; the light went out of his eyes. “Used to be.”
“That’s about it, Ms. Sutcliffe,” Detective Boone said without looking up from his notepad. “We’ll try and find the perp and recover your bag, but I gotta be honest with you—it’s a long shot. Slimeballs like that have a way of disappearing pretty good once they hit the street.”
Emma nodded dejectedly. “I h-had everything in that bag.”
Gage grunted. “I’d like to see the look on that clown’s face when he starts wadin’ through all that... Wait a minute. Your wallet was in there, right? And your house keys?”
“Sure.”
Gage turned to the detective. “This guy’s got her address and the keys to her house.”
Boone glanced up at her from his notepad. “Yeah, I was gonna say, it’s probably a good idea if you don’t go home.”
Don’t go home? Where else was she supposed to go?
“Not till you can get the locks changed,” he amended. “And I wouldn’t try to arrange that till tomorrow. I definitely wouldn’t go anywhere near there this evening, unless you’re in the mood to run into this guy again.”
“You’re kidding,” she groaned.
The detective shrugged and slid his notebook into his suit coat. “Could be this fella figures this’d be a good time to rip you off. You might show up at your house to find him still there. We already know he’s a homicidal lunatic. I don’t want to think about you being trapped in a house with him. What we’ll do is have the Queens police patrol your neighborhood. If he makes an appearance, we might have a chance of catching him.”
“This kind of thing never happened to me in Maine,” she murmured.
“Welcome to the Big Apple,” Gage said.
“You can call a locksmith tomorrow,” Boone said. “In the meantime, do you have anyplace you can go? Someplace you can spend the night?”
“Spend the night?”
“Friends you can stay with?” Gage prompted.
Friends? She’d only just moved here. She didn’t know a soul in New York, with the exception of Zara and her mother. She envisioned showing up at Zara’s apartment and trying to explain to her mom what she was doing there, battered and bruised and with the ray gun taped inside her raincoat. Candy wasn’t supposed to know about the sale; she’d be appalled—and hurt—that they’d gone behind her back.
And Zara! What if she called their mom and found out Emma was at her place? What was Emma supposed to say? She’d just blown a two-million-dollar sale? Granted, she had excuses out the wazoo, but two million bucks was two million bucks, and somehow she doubted her sister would view her failure to consummate this deal with anything approaching equanimity, No, she wasn’t eager to confront either her mother or her sister anytime soon.
“No,” Emma said, “there’s no one I can stay with.” Her trembling, which had diminished some, now reasserted itself.
“No one?
” Gage said incredulously. “That can’t be possible.”
“There’s no one I can stay with,” she repeated firmly, her voice cracking. For God’s sake, don’t start crying again; this is embarrassing enough. “No one.”
Gage regarded her curiously, then sighed. “I can get you a hotel room.”
She nodded, then shook her head. “I have no money, no credit cards. It was all in my bag.”
He waved a dismissive hand. “I’ll pay for it.”
“I couldn’t accept that.”
Rogen shook his head. “I don’t like the idea of it, anyway. She shouldn’t stay alone, not after what she’s been through. She could be hurt bad and not know it. Somebody should be there to keep an eye on her.”
Gage rubbed his chin and studied the concrete platform as if it were suddenly fascinating. “You, uh... you could stay with me tonight,” he said, without looking at her.
“You?”
He cleared his throat and hesitantly met her gaze. “Sure, I mean... I’ve got a room at the Plaza. It’s... well, right now it’s got just the one king bed, but I can switch it for a room with two queens.”
Separate beds. All fine and dandy, except Emma had never spent the night in the same room with a man in her life, and now she was supposed to sleep in close proximity to a near total stranger?
“I know you don’t know me very well,” Gage continued, “but it doesn’t sound like you’ve got a whole lot of options. And if you’re worried about your virtue,” he added, his good-ol’-boy drawl kicking into overdrive, “my momma brung me up to keep my hands to myself ’less I ask pretty please first.”
A smile yanked at the corner of her mouth, despite her apprehension.
“Plus which,” Rogen added, “he’s a doctor, isn’t that right?”
A muscle leapt in Gage’s jaw. “Ex-doctor.”
“He can keep an eye out for you,” the cop noted cheerfully, then clapped his hands together. “Sound like a plan?”
All four men stared raptly at her, waiting for her answer.
SOME PLAN, Gage thought as the cab he’d flagged down wove through traffic at about Mach 2, tossing its two passengers around like rag dolls. And it was my idea. Why did I have to volunteer to be the knight in shining armor?
He stole glances at Zara Sutcliffe, sitting stiffly with one white-knuckled fist clutching the door handle, the other gripping the back of the driver’s seat. For a fleeting moment a shaft of late afternoon sunlight played over her face, firing up the bronze in her eyes and lighting up her porcelain skin from within.
Whoa there, partner. Bronze? Porcelain? Best you keep your eyes on the trail. She was Trouble with a capital T. Big-time trouble. She’d proven that in spades.
Nevertheless, he snatched another quick peek as she gazed pensively out the side window at the buildings and cars and people streaking by. That ol’ damsel-in-distress thing always undid him. Whenever he encountered a woman in need, he felt a profound moral obligation to slay whatever dragons had to be slain in order to make things right again. At the same time, there was something about this particular damsel’s aura of loopy guilelessness that made him want to pop all the snaps on that hot little yellow getup of hers and find out what was underneath.
Guileless? Zara Sutcliffe?
Well... as a matter of fact, yes. Stripped as she was of all the war paint and attitude, she struck him as a different woman entirely from the one he’d thought he’d be dealing with. Beneath that slick facade lurked a sort of earnest artlessness he found all too compelling.
He thought about that big, silly, strangely appealing bag of hers—so incongruous in the possession of the Glamourpuss Dealmaker he’d expected. It seemed there was more to her than met the eye. There was apparently a different, more ingenuous, more real Zara that she preferred to keep under wraps.
The cab abruptly turned a corner, jostling them both. Gage put a hand out to steady himself, brushed her leg and apologized automatically. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and held it there, just for a second, then let it go. Her ripe mouth was suddenly suffused with a hot bloom of color that beat the pants off that Crayola red she’d had on before. He wondered if her lips would feel hot to the touch if he just—
Man, you are just consumed with dumb-ass. Don’t even think about this.
She fidgeted on the seat, her eyes alert and wary as she glanced at him, then abruptly looked away. He knew their little adventure in the subway station had unnerved her badly—how could it not?—but he sensed a different and deeper disquiet in her. It had to do with him; that was clear as Mississippi bottom mud. Every time he touched her—and he seemed to be having a hellaciously hard time keeping his paws off her—she went real still and wide-eyed, like a barn kitten that’s never been petted. Except this was Zara Sutcliffe. If the tabloids had it right, every stud duck in New York and L.A. was lining up to stroke her fur. What was it about him in particular that made her so nervous?
Zara noticed him looking at her. She held his gaze for a breathless nanosecond before looking away.
But then she looked back.
And smiled.
Ah. He returned her smile, new and intriguing possibilities crawling out from somewhere deep within his sensory cortex and marching up to the front door of his frontal lobes, candy and flowers in hand, grinning with goofy anticipation. She likes you. That’s why she’s nervous around you. And you like... her handbag. You even like her a little. Go ahead—ask pretty please and see what she says.
She leaned toward him, just slightly.
Yes!
“Gage, I... want to thank you. For jumping down on the tracks like that.”
He cleared his throat “You’re welcome.”
“You saved my life,” she said with quiet sincerity.
He poured a little syrup on the drawl and went for an engaging grin. “My pleasure, ma’am.”
“Really, it was incredibly brave of you, and selfless, and I can’t believe you did it. You have no idea how grateful I am.”
Her eyes were huge and had darkened to polished ebony. It was the result, he saw, of dilated pupils—the autonomic nervous system’s telltale indication of interest, emotional excitement... and sometimes sexual arousal. He was beginning to suspect that she might be very grateful, indeed.
Which was all well and good. Extremely good, in fact. Except for that little problem of mixing business and pleasure, never a bright idea, but particularly dumb in this situation. A quick, uncomplicated fling with a beautiful woman in tight yellow leather held a certain inescapable appeal to him right at present; if nothing else, it would salvage what was turning into a fairly pointless—not to mention life-threatening—excursion to his all-time least-favorite city. The fly in the ointment was this particular beautiful woman’s expectation of signing him on as a client. Somehow he suspected that a fling with his own agent was unlikely to turn out either quick or uncomplicated. On the contrary, there was every chance it would result in a disaster of titanic proportions, both personally and professionally.
He’d never been fond of titanic disasters.
She crossed her legs—crossed toward him, if you paid any heed to that body-language business, which he never had before, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a grain of truth in it—which caused the gold plastic raincoat to part and the yellow leather skirt to hitch up on her Rockette thighs, revealing just the narrowest little sliver of lace at the top of her mangled left stocking.
“Did you say something?” she asked.
“No, I just...” Moaned. “Cleared my throat.”
Gage regarded the tempting little strip of lace thoughtfully as he weighed his options in regard to the ever-more-provocative Zara Sutcliffe. The way he saw it, he had two decent and ethical choices. He could avoid such an assignation outright Or... he could simply eliminate the conflict with a little... preventive medicine, as it were. He could tell her up front—now, before anything happened—the truth: that he had no intention of taking her on as his agent.
At one point, while she was sweet-talking him over the phone about megadeals and movie sales and book displays in every superstore, he’d been tempted. But now, after seeing her in action, no way would he put his career in her hands. He didn’t know much about Zara Sutcliffe, but he knew in his bones she was no businesswoman. A surprisingly charming girl underneath it all, and way too sexy for her own good, but no businesswoman. How she’d gotten this far was a mystery to him.
The solution, therefore, was to break it to her, as kindly as possible, that she didn’t have a chance in hell of becoming his agent. He’d have to do it eventually; he might as well bite the bullet and do it now, to her face, rather than taking the chickenshit approach and calling her when he got back to Arkansas. She wouldn’t be happy about it. Incision continued to astound the industry with its sales figures, and if the advance reviews for his upcoming Open Heart were any indication, it would do as well or better. An agent’s cut of his book royalties alone would rack up into the six figures, and if you added film rights on top of it, well... you could kind of understand the feeding frenzy that had surrounded him for the past few months, as agents wooed him shamelessly.
The hungriest shark in the sea—the most doggedly eager—had been Zara Sutcliffe. She’d spent more time, money and energy courting him than had anyone else. His decision not to go with her—especially on the heels of the day’s traumatic events—could upset her. He hoped she wouldn’t cry again. He prided himself on never having been the cause of a woman’s tears, and he’d hate to start with this woman, after everything she’d been through.
He rehearsed in his mind the diplomatic words he’d use. He’d tell her he didn’t want her harboring any misconceptions—that he meant no offense, but he simply wasn’t interested in her as an agent. Not that she wasn’t a swell human being and all, but business was business. Surely they could still be friends. After all, he found her very attractive as a person.
Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1) Page 5