by Kylie Brant
“Hey.” Her voice was weak, but she still sounded like his aunt Meggie. “You should be in bed.”
He just clung tighter, barely hearing the murmured explanation Callie offered. He’d felt something was wrong, long before he’d heard the phone ring in Callie’s apartment, before he’d ever seen the worry on her face.
“Your aunt needs to go to bed. Bet that’s never happened before, huh? Your aunt going to bed before you?”
Danny loosened his arms a little bit and tipped his face up to the detective’s. “Is she gonna die?”
“Of course not. I bumped my head and Detective Connally made me have a doctor look at it.” Danny stepped back now, so he could see his aunt’s face. Her voice sounded kinda funny. Maybe she didn’t like doctors. Maybe one gave her a shot. He didn’t like shots, either.
He stepped back and watched as the detective walked Aunt Meggie through the living room to the bedrooms. Callie tried to convince him to let her help him into bed, but he’d refused, and finally, after a whispered conversation with his aunt, she left.
Danny sat on the edge of the couch, thinking what to do next. He was glad, real glad, Aunt Meggie was all right. She had a big white bandage on her head, and her hair looked like there was blood in it. Once he’d bumped his head, really hard, but it hadn’t bled. He didn’t think Aunt Meggie could have bumped hers hard enough to make it bleed.
He thought about that for a while, then slipped from the couch and walked to her bedroom. His aunt and Raina said it was wrong to peek into people’s minds. Even a little bit. But if he didn’t, how could he know if Aunt Meggie was gonna be all right?
Standing in the doorway, he thought how the detective looked funny in her room, like he was too big to be in there with Aunt Meggie’s things. Her things broke real easy, Danny knew. He hoped the detective wouldn’t break anything.
He watched Meghan hard, letting the sensations that were pouring off her wash through him. Her head hurt. He winced in sympathy. And she was kinda mad and kinda tired. And a little scared. He wondered what had made her afraid, and knew that if he asked she wouldn’t tell him. But sensing her fear made him afraid, too.
“Best thing for her now is sleep,” Gabe said. He pulled the covers up to Aunt Meggie’s chin and joined Danny in the doorway. “Whaddya think, champ? Lights out for her?”
Danny cocked his head, pleased to be consulted. “She’ll feel better in the morning.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“This conversation is not over, Connally.” The words sounded as though Meghan was uttering them from between clenched teeth.
“It is for tonight.” He reached out, flipped off the light switch. “We’ll talk in the morning.”
With a hand on the boy’s shoulder, Gabe guided him from the room, pulling the door shut behind him, pretending he didn’t hear the words she was muttering in the darkened room. He knew women well enough to know when he should play deaf.
It wasn’t until he and Danny were standing in the middle of the living room that the full weight of responsibility hit him. Meghan needed someone to watch over her tonight. He didn’t care what that quack intern had said. Head injuries could be funny. He looked at the boy, who was regarding him somberly. There was the kid, too. No way was Meghan in any condition to care for her nephew.
“So.” Because he could think of nothing else to do with his hands, he jammed them in his pockets. “I guess you should be next in bed, huh?”
“You got blood on your shirt.”
“What?” Gabe looked down, for the first time fully aware of the scarlet stain across his shirt front. Meghan’s blood. His stomach clenched, and it was too easy to recall his terror when he’d found her, unconscious and bleeding, near the storage compartment. Too easy to remember cradling her limp body while he punched in the emergency number on his cell phone.
Undoing the buttons, he shed the shirt and wadded it in one hand. Blood wasn’t something that normally got to him, but under the circumstances it was having a decided effect. He looked at the boy. “Where can I go and wash up?”
Danny turned on his heel and led him down the hallway to a bathroom and then watched silently while Gabe rummaged for a washcloth, wet it, then swiped it across his torso. Abandoning it in the sink, he found a towel and dried himself, his brisk actions gradually growing slower before finally stopping altogether. Silent disapproval was coming off the kid in waves. “What?”
“You gotta hang up your washcloth or it won’t get dry. You don’t want Aunt Meggie to get more mad at you, do you?”
Fighting an uncustomary smile, Gabe murmured, “God forbid.”
Obediently he hung up the cloth and towel and turned back to the boy. “Okay, let’s get you to bed.”
Danny shook his head. “I have to stay up and take care of Aunt Meggie.”
Something in the boy’s manner caught at Gabe, held. The tone, the sentiment, seemed oddly adult. For just a moment he had an unsettling flash of déja` vu. Shaking off old memories, he steered the boy out of the bathroom. “That’s not your job, kid.”
“Then who’s gonna do it?”
After a brief inner battle, one too weak to even constitute a struggle, he hauled in a breath. “Me, I guess.”
“Oh.” The boy considered the prospect for a moment and then seemed to approve it. “You could sleep on my other bunk. Alex sleeps there sometimes when he stays over.”
Gabe had a brief mental image of trying to fit his large frame in the child-size bed. “The couch will do fine.” Under the circumstances it was definitely the most appealing option. Well, he mentally amended, that wasn’t quite right. The most appealing option would be to curl up beside Meghan where he could keep watch over her during the night. Somehow he didn’t think she’d be too pleased with the prospect of finding him in her bed in the morning. He, on the other hand, found the image all too tempting.
Given his vastly limited experience with kids, he thought later, as he leaned against the kitchen counter, he’d had no idea what he’d been volunteering for. Meghan, despite the running litany of protests she’d put up since she’d regained consciousness, had been easier to get to bed than the five-year-old boy. Danny was seated at the table, legs swinging, as he enjoyed a double scoop of fudge ripple ice cream.
“Are you sure your aunt lets you eat ice cream before bed?”
“I eat ice cream most every night,” the boy assured him.
Gabe stared hard at the kid, figuring he was being scammed, unable to be sure.
“You could have some ice cream, too,” Danny offered, not for the first time. “Aunt Meggie eats some with me sometimes.”
“Yeah?” Gabe tried to imagine Meghan sharing a bowl with her nephew. She didn’t look as though she indulged in many caloric vices. She was slender, almost too much so. In his arms tonight her body had seemed slight, weightless. Although she’d stirred before the ambulance had arrived, he’d forced her to stay still. And suffered for it, he recalled, when her verbal ability had made a remarkable recovery.
“Now I have to wash my face.” Danny slid down from the chair and went to the sink, scrubbing his face on a towel hanging from a drawer handle. Gabe watched, brows raised.
“I can go to bed now,” he pronounced, turning to consider Gabe. “But first you have to read me a book.”
“You’re out of luck, pal,” Gabe replied, trailing behind the boy down the hall and to his bedroom. “I don’t do bedtime stories.” When the boy had crawled into bed, Gabe flicked off the light. “G’night.” He started out the door, pulling it closed behind him.
“Don’t close the door!”
The very real panic in the boy’s voice froze Gabe in his tracks. “Aunt Meggie always keeps it open. With the hall light on.”
Gabe pushed the door ajar. “Hey, it’s no problem.” He didn’t move; he was listening to the sound of strangled breathing trying to smooth out. Long moments passed.
“I wasn’t scared.”
Without really thinking about
it, Gabe approached the bed. “I didn’t think you were.”
“Really?” A healthy dose of skepticism mingled with the alarm that was still apparent in Danny’s tone. “Alex says only babies sleep with lights on.”
“Yeah?” Gabe sat on the foot of the boy’s bed, met his solemn regard. “Well, Alex is full of—” almost too late he caught himself “—misinformation,” he concluded.
“Lots of people sleep with the light on. If you get up in the middle of the night, you have to be able to see where you’re going, right?”
“Yeah.” It was clear that the explanation appealed to the boy. “Detective?”
Gabe crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the footboard. “Under the circumstances, I think you should just call me Gabe.”
“Is that what Aunt Meggie calls you?”
“No, she mostly calls me…other things.” She had been quite inventive with some of those things earlier this evening, when she discovered he was determined that she go to the hospital and be checked out by a doctor. Her creativity had been further stoked by the fact that she’d been forced to ride in the ambulance. His quick grin at the memory faded just as swiftly. No, he couldn’t remember a time when Meghan had called him by name. As a matter of fact, she seemed to go out of her way to avoid addressing him at all, as if by failing to do so she could keep a greater distance between them.
It shouldn’t matter. And it certainly shouldn’t make him long, quite violently, to rectify that situation. To hear his name on her lips, uttered in impatience. In anger. In desire.
“Are you sure you don’t know any bedtime stories?”
Danny’s question shattered the wholly inappropriate train of thought, and probably none too soon. “None suitable to tell you.”
“Well, what do you know?”
Gabe pursed his lips. What did he know about that could be shared in the middle of the night with a scared little kid?
“I know about trains,” he said finally.
That seemed to spark some interest. “What kind of trains?”
“All kinds. Mostly model trains, though, the kind you run in your house. Haven’t you ever had a train set?”
The light spilling into the room from the hallway was enough for Gabe to see the boy shake his head. “Well, you’d probably like them. You hook a bunch of train cars together, see, and lay the track on a big piece of plywood. You fix the plywood up so it looks like the train is running through a city or country scene.”
The topic of conversation managed to leech the last bit of tension from Gabe’s limbs, and he settled more comfortably against the footboard. And as the minutes ticked away he found himself explaining his passion to a willing audience. He talked about prototypes and drive units and constant lighting circuits. When he was midway through a comparison between 1:32 and 1:22 scales, he realized the boy’s breathing had grown slow and even. He stopped, more than a little amazed at his own verbosity. He’d talked more in the last hour than he usually did in an entire evening. It seemed to be a night of firsts for him.
He reached up and grabbed the pillow off the top bunk. Leaving the room, he was careful to leave the door open. It was late. After the events of the night he was suddenly dog tired. But instead of making his way to the couch, he found himself instead going to Meghan’s door. Entering silently, he approached her bed, more than a little relieved to find her breathing as deeply and steadily as her nephew.
A sliver of moonlight graced her cheek, highlighted her lips. Because the opportunity rarely arose, Gabe stared his fill. Sleep freed her face of that careful guard she normally wore. Except for a few glimpses, Gabe had rarely seen her without it. Now, stripped of reserve, she seemed vulnerable. Certainly she’d already raised his fiercest protective instincts.
It was unusual for a woman to elicit much emotion from him at all, outside the most obvious one. And because he wasn’t completely comfortable with the unfamiliar feelings, he turned and exited the room, with undeniable haste. Away from that bed and away from the woman lying in it.
The wind whipped whitecaps over the darkened lake and sprayed an icy mist across the deserted wharf. The man in the shadows cursed, pulled his collar up to protect his neck. His clothes would be ruined. The fretted suede coat and leather pants had been manufactured more for style than practicality. He hadn’t planned on being here this long; hadn’t figured on being kept waiting an hour beyond the agreed upon time. The slight rankled him, but his pride wasn’t a factor when dealing with his superior. Staying alive was.
A black limo rolled out of the darkness without lights to herald its approach and pulled to a soundless stop on the wharf. Familiar with the drill, the man remained where he was while the front passenger door opened and a hulking figure emerged.
“Raise your arms, Shadrach.” The man obeyed, submitting to a body frisk that was professional and insultingly familiar.
“You’re pretty good at that.” He would never have dared address the boss in such a tone, but his bruised self-respect demanded some type of retribution. “You get to feel guys up all day, I bet. Bet you like it, too.” His snicker turned into a wheezing gasp when a hamlike fist plowed into his stomach and doubled him over.
Before he’d recovered, one huge paw grabbed his hair and pushed him toward the vehicle. He sprawled to his knees on the wet boards, his breath sawing in and out of his lungs like a jagged blade.
The back door of the limo opened, but no tell-tale light went on inside. Their business was the kind best conducted in shadows.
“That display was unfortunate, Shadrach.” The cultured voice inside the limo was reproving. “A man at the mercy of his impulses will certainly be destroyed by them.” As if to prove the truth of the words, the huge figure moved closer, and Shadrach huddled into a protective crouch.
“Sor…ry,” he wheezed. In misery he registered the contemptuous snort, before the threat moved slowly away.
“You continue to disappoint me.”
The dispassionate words cut through the pain and humiliation with razored precision. “No, sir, I don’t think—”
“Thinking isn’t something you do especially well. Your thinking has a way of calling unwanted attention. Tell me that attention is going to dissipate.”
Shadrach straightened but remained kneeling. The position of supplication wasn’t lost on the man in the limousine. “I think I got it taken care of.” Nerves stretched in the resulting silence, encouraging a looser tongue. “I mean I know I do. I been watching that spook’s sister on the sly. She don’t know nothing.”
“Your logic is as poor as your grammar. She must know something. You told me she’s been seen with a cop.”
His life seemed to dangle by one precarious thread. “Won’t do her no good. There’s nothing can link me and Chafe to Barton.”
“You’ve taken care of the loose ends?”
He thought of his mission a few hours earlier and felt a measure of relief that he could answer truthfully. He’d had an incredible bit of luck tonight that just might end up saving his life. “Yessir. I got the pictures back.”
“Give them to Peter.”
The large man loomed over him, and Shadrach crouched protectively, holding the photos in the air. He didn’t breathe until Peter had taken the pictures and stepped away again.
“That’s all of them?”
He hesitated for a moment. He didn’t remember how many pictures there were, but it made sense that they’d all be in one place, wouldn’t it? “Yeah. Yeah, that’s all of them.”
“And there are no more loose ends?”
Forgetting the darkness for a moment, Shadrach shook his head vigorously.
“I hope, for your sake, that you’re a better judge of these things than your friend, Chafe. He sent you a message, by the way.” As if on cue, the hulking figure reached into the car, withdrew a bundle and tossed it on the wharf. It skittered across the boards to bump up against Shadrach’s knee.
“You may open it.”
; With trembling fingers he unwrapped the damp cloth, straining to see in the darkness. He identified the item by touch first, a palm, five ragged digits, before horror and revulsion overtook him. He thrust the item away and turned to the side, retching.
“I’m afraid Chafe won’t be around to give you a hand anymore. Pity. But he did a little too much thinking on his own when he chose to involve that Barton woman in our business. Only a fool would make the same mistake.”
Car doors slammed, and the limo glided away, leaving the huddled man to empty the contents of his stomach on the water-slicked boards.
The driver of the vehicle was well away from the dock before he turned on the headlights. “Home, sir?”
“Not quite yet. I promised to join some friends, and I’m frightfully late already.”
“Did you enjoy the opera, sir?”
The man in the limo straightened his cuffs and ran a meticulous hand over the satin lapel of his tux. “The tenor was a bit pretentious, I thought, but one can hardly expect more from an American production.” He turned on a light and checked his appearance in the fold-down mirror. Every silver hair was in place. “Peter?”
The large man riding with the driver answered. “Sir?”
“I think we need to be looking for a replacement for Shadrach. He’s outlived his usefulness.”
Meghan opened her eyes in the darkness with an odd sense of disorientation. Her head was pounding. Her hand went to investigate and encountered the bandage. Snippets of memory floated across her mind. Gabe had forced her to go to the hospital, despite her vehement protests. Traveling there in an ambulance had heaped mortification on reluctance. There had been no reasoning with the man. She hadn’t been surprised to discover that he was as unrelenting as a brick wall when he’d made up his mind.
Carefully she sat up, relieved when the throbbing in her temples didn’t intensify. Gabe had refused to discuss her attacker; he’d been oddly intent on her well-being. He had, in fact, been giving orders in a terse, hard voice unlike any she’d heard from him before.
And then the events of the night dimmed in importance as she thought about Danny. She remembered how tightly he’d grasped her legs, and she knew he’d been thinking of his mother. And how one night she hadn’t come home. Meghan hadn’t been able to spend much time reassuring him before Gabe had bullied her into bed.