He hadn’t loved Maria, not really, and she hadn’t loved him. If they had been in love, she never would have left and he never would have let her. But she’d gone, perhaps because she’d loved the rebel leader, perhaps simply because she’d wanted to go. And he’d watched her go, angry more because she hadn’t listened to him than because she was leaving.
His grief at her death had been genuine, still was. But perhaps some of the decisions he’d made in her name hadn’t been. Like leaving Nia. Like staying away when Tony had tried to call him home.
The fear that he’d done it wrong hummed in his chest, and the question of what he could say to Nia now tightened his throat. I need you, he’d said. I’ve always needed you.
And though it might be the deep-down, gut-level truth, he sure as hell hadn’t meant to tell her. Not yet.
Maybe not ever.
“Sir? Dr. McKay?” The cop’s voice filtered in from the hall, putting Rathe on instant alert.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” His heart thundered in his ears. Nia!
“I’m not sure, but Detective Peters just called to say you’re needed at the hospital. Something’s happened.”
Rathe was out the door in an instant. Whether or not he was comfortable that they’d become lovers again, she was still his partner.
And it was his job to protect her.
“THIS ISN’T QUITE RIGHT.” Talking to herself, Nia paced the corridor for the tenth time, counting her steps. She passed the room where they’d found Short Whiny Guy’s body and suppressed the image of his blank face and the surgical slice that had been his throat.
The basement echoed with emptiness. After Rathe’s abduction and Marissa’s hit-and-run, the hospital administrators had agreed to close the floor and outsource the laundry for a few days. The official word was that the level was closed for routine maintenance, but the hospital buzzed with speculation, even at this late hour.
Hospitals this big never slept. Normally it was a comfort. Tonight it was a source of unease. Nia beat back the shiver with an effort and focused on the case.
“We’re missing something.” The detectives thought they had the mastermind in custody, in the person of Logan Hart. They were sure that when Marissa woke up—and mercifully, her injuries wouldn’t be fatal—she would identify her supervisor without hesitation. All that was left for them was to pick up Cadaver Man and pump him for information. The entire case would fall into place after that.
Or so they thought. Nia wasn’t convinced. Perhaps because she’d believed Logan’s claim of innocence. Perhaps because Marissa’s single word didn’t fit their hypothesis about a black-market trade in organs.
“Zero,” she said aloud as she paced the corridor for the dozenth time. She’d run through all the possibilities twice, and nothing had jumped out at her. But what if it wasn’t zero? What if it was something meant by the word zero. She listed alternatives. “Null, nothing, nada, zip, zilch…”
This was getting her nowhere. And, she acknowledged with a grimace, she wasn’t focused. Wasn’t centered. While the surface of her brain was counting steps and playing with words, the rest of her was thinking of Rathe, about what they’d done together. About what she’d done to him.
“Dr. French?” Nia jolted at the male voice, then forced herself to relax when she saw Francis, the middle-aged officer Peters had asked to accompany her to the basement. Francis grimaced. “Sorry I startled you. The detective just called—you’re needed upstairs. The HBC is awake.”
HBC. Hit by car. Marissa! The news lightened Nia’s mood a degree. “Good. Maybe she can tell us what ‘zero’ means.”
And thank goodness she was awake. Though the E.R. doctors and her own training had reassured Nia, she had worried after seeing the dark-haired nurse, wan and bruised, surrounded by IV bags and monitors. Her chart listed a sister as next of kin, and mentioned a son, a young boy who needed his mother alive.
“Come on.” The officer waved to the service elevator. “I’ll take you up.”
Nia followed him through the hospital, feeling a knot of uneasy excitement build in her stomach, in her chest. It wasn’t until she stepped into Marissa’s room that she identified the source.
Rathe.
He was propped against the wall with his arms folded across his chest. He stood more easily than before, and the swelling was gone from his face, though the scrapes and bruises remained. The sleep had evidently done him good.
Though she wasn’t sure he’d thank her for it.
Her eyes cataloged the minute details, from the sun lines fanning from his gray-blue eyes to the broad sweep of his shoulders. She memorized him, her mind supplying images of his naked torso, his long, lean legs. The feel of him atop her. Inside her. She flushed at the memory and at the warm wet rush between her legs, the insistent pulsing as her body begged for more.
Rathe scowled, and she glanced at his eyes, which were narrowed. Her heart cracked as vague unease crystallized to certainty.
He regretted their lovemaking, resented the things he’d said, the things they’d done.
And frankly, Nia didn’t blame him. It had gone against everything he stood for, everything he’d decided was important in his life.
Marissa’s nurse glanced between Nia and Rathe. “She woke up a few minutes ago, but she’s dropped back off. I don’t know when we’ll hear from her again.”
Nia glanced at the vaguely familiar honey-haired woman and tried to focus on the job. “Did she say anything?”
She felt a stir behind her as Detective Peters joined the little group.
The nurse nodded fractionally. “She tried, but it wasn’t very clear.”
“Could it have been ‘zero’?” Rathe asked. His voice was casual, but his eyes pinned Nia in place.
“No. Not zero. It sounded more like ‘pig,’ or maybe ‘fig.’”
Zero? Pig? Nia sighed. “She could be alexic—mixing her words up. It may mean nothing to the case. We need her all the way awake.”
“So do her sister and sick little boy.” The light-haired woman’s words were faintly chiding, and Nia flushed harder.
“You’re right. I’m sorry, that was thoughtless of me.” Was this part of the process of becoming an investigator? Learning to see patients as sources of evidence rather than living, breathing people with families and friends? Learning to work through personal problems as well as professional glitches? If so, she was learning Rathe’s lesson too late—she’d already mixed personal and professional too deeply.
Then the nurse’s words penetrated and Nia stiffened. “Her son is sick?”
Logan had said she’d lost a brother to organ failure, when a transplant hadn’t been found in time.
“That’s right. Harry has congenital liver failure. He’s twenty-fifth on the list right now.”
Bingo. Forgetting their problems for the moment, she glanced at Rathe and lifted an eyebrow. He nodded slightly in agreement. If Marissa had been bribed with a higher spot on the list, or worse, threatened with having her son’s name dropped entirely, she might have done just about anything.
Like pass them worthless information rather than telling them what she’d originally intended.
The three drug names echoed through Nia’s brain. FK506. Cyclophosphamide. Prostaglandin. They’d been written in, but what did that mean? Were the names deliberate disinformation from Cadaver Man, or were they a hint in Marissa’s voice?
“Come on. We need to talk.” Rathe touched her arm and Nia jumped. She glanced around and realized the others had left.
No. She wasn’t ready to talk to him. Didn’t want to. You can’t make me talk! she almost shouted, then flinched at the banality of it. Of course they would talk—she owed it to him.
But not here. Not in the Transplant Department, where nothing felt safe.
“Downstairs.” She jerked her head toward the elevators and he nodded, though there were questions in his eyes.
They didn’t speak as they descended to the lobby, switched t
o the service elevator and rode it down into the depths. When they stepped out into the basement, Rathe paused. “It’s quiet.”
As a tomb. The usual machine noise was gone, the bustle of unseen workers and the constant sense of motion was absent.
Nia rubbed the back of her neck and told the fine hairs to settle down when she realized they were alone except for a single guard. Detective Peters had seen to it. “The hospital sent the laundry staff home until this is over.”
“Sensible.” Rathe nodded shortly, his mind clearly elsewhere. “Listen, Nia…”
“Let’s walk.” Unable to stand still, she struck off down a less familiar corridor, one that paralleled the one she’d paced before. She needed the motion, the sense of freedom. Of not being trapped. The silence itched at her and Rathe’s presence at her side grated, inflamed, until she stopped and spun to face him. “Look. I’m sorry. I’m ashamed of myself and don’t blame you for being upset.”
She saw a flicker of surprise before he blanked his habitually guarded expression. “Why would I be upset?”
“I took advantage of you.” She spun away and stalked down the hall, not counting her paces but rather trying to burn off the energy that pulsed through her body at the knowledge that they were alone together and that the subject they had long avoided would be raised.
Their first night together.
He snorted. “That’s bull. I—”
“It’s not bull.” She glanced back, saw that his eyes were gleaming and felt a thrill of atavistic nerves. “Seven years ago you were delirious with fever. Last night you were stoned. I took advantage both times.”
He cursed, grabbed her chin and forced her eyes up to his. “Seven years ago you’d spent two days trying to break my fever and finally fell asleep beside me, exhausted. How did I thank you? By taking your virginity. The guilt is mine.”
She saw it in his eyes, in the savage line of his jaw and the deep grooves beside his mouth. “No.” She shook her head. “Never. I wanted you. I wanted it to be you.”
“You had a crush on me, nothing more. I took that and used it and—” He cursed again and turned into a nearby room. Full to the brim with clean white towels, folded sheets and soft stacks of other laundry, it exuded a pristine, fresh scent at odds with the conversation and the exquisite pain on his face. “You were Tony’s daughter.”
She followed him into the room, and he shut and locked the door behind him. She barely felt the floor beneath her feet. The shock was too great. All these years, she’d been ashamed by the knowledge that she’d taken advantage of his weakened state, his lowered inhibitions and delirium. To learn that he’d felt the same was staggering.
To learn that he still equated her with her father was aggravating. She fired back, “I’ll always be his daughter. But I’m also my own person. I’m allowed to make my own decisions. I made a decision back then, and I made one last night. But in both cases, you weren’t in any condition to make your own choices.”
“Baloney!” He squared off against her in an instant, eyes ablaze with fury. “I knew exactly what I was doing back then, and I sure as hell knew what I was doing last night. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
At the word heartbeat, hers drummed loud in her ears. “But you couldn’t have been in your right mind. You said you dreamed…you said you…”
“I said that I’ve dreamed about you for years. I said I needed you.” The words ripped into her heart like bullets, leaving her raw and bleeding. A rueful smile tipped up the corner of his mouth. “I might not have told you without the painkillers loosening my tongue, but I think I would’ve gotten around to it sooner or later. I’m so bloody tired of trying to fight this.”
He lifted a hand. She expected him to trace a gentle finger along her cheek, as he had before. She was braced for that, and for the warmth that would follow. Instead his fingers tangled in her hair and he brought his mouth down on hers with crushing, inciting force.
She wasn’t braced for that, or for the explosion that rocked her body at the touch. He bent her back over his arm, and the intimate play of tongue and lips was enough to smash past the tattered remainders of the barriers that had once guarded her heart.
She felt another stack of sheets topple behind her and fell back onto the soft, clean pile, taking him with her. An incongruous hint of perfume, of fabric softener, rose around them, blotting out the scent of damp, the harshness of the institutional cinder block wall beside them, the acoustic ceiling above.
And then she kissed him back, and all rational thought, all sense of their surroundings, vanished on a quick, exciting slide of tongue and the scrape of a palm.
Different. It was different.
Even as her mind grappled with the realization, his hand streaked beneath her shirt to possess her breast. He rolled her nipple between his fingers, mimicking the motion with his tongue, and with the press of his erection between her legs. Desire, pure and near painful, arrowed through her.
Fast. Too fast.
She must have spoken the words aloud. He paused and lifted off her, enough so she could escape if she needed to. “Too fast?”
His voice was tight. Strain was etched in his features. His arms, bare now, though she didn’t remember removing his shirt, were corded with strength and trembled slightly from the effort of holding himself away. Or maybe from the effort of holding himself back. There was a wildness in his eyes, a sexual fury she’d never seen before. It should have frightened her.
It thrilled her. Called to something deep inside her, to the thing that had driven her away from her father to far-off lands. Danger. Passion. Adventure. Rathe was all that and more.
“Should I slow down?” He sucked in a great lungful of air, and the motion nestled him more intimately be tween her legs in a pressure that sent a fury of edgy, spiky need through her. “Should I stop?”
“No.” Never. She would die if he did. “But it’s…it’s different. Hotter.”
His eyes flashed. He very deliberately shifted his pelvis away from her. Toward her. Away. Toward. Through layers of clothing, the rhythm was as old as time. But there was no frantic kissing now, no long, sweet caresses, only this, and the insistent pound of blood through her veins. “I know.”
She arched up against him mindlessly, yet acutely aware of her actions, of her body. “Why?”
Was it because of the love that chased through her heart, freed by his words? Or their shared experiences of—
His lips curved up in a rare, pure smile. “Because I’m fully conscious. No fever, no drugs. This is me.”
Her skin, already so hot, flamed another degree, from embarrassment, perhaps, or interest. “Oh.”
“Sometimes I like it slow and easy.” He leaned over her, pressing her back into the soft clean sheets, and took her lips in a soft, sweet kiss that reminded her of the night before, of seven years earlier. She curled her arms around his neck and kissed him back, tasting, questing, restless against him. It was lovely, but not enough. Not this time.
“And other times?” She scraped her fingernails down his chest, deliberately inciting, carefully avoiding the dark, angry bruises.
“I like it hard and fast.” Instead of suiting action to words, as her body demanded, he pushed himself away and stared down at her. His expression was open, vulnerable, a bit wary, as though he awaited her pleasure. “How do you like it?”
He was asking more than that, she knew. He was asking her to make the choice she hadn’t given him. They would become lovers for real, or not at all. So she gave him the truth that was in her heart. “I like it with you. We’ll figure out the rest later.”
His smile was blinding and boyish, shot through with the charm of the child he might have been had the foster system not closed him off, had HFH not shown him the darkness of humanity. He leaned in to kiss her, to take her into the fast, hard, burning-hot vortex she could feel spinning just beyond them, but she slapped a hand to his hard chest and neatly reversed their positions.
“Fast,
eh? I can do fast.” She trailed hot, open-mouthed kisses along his flat stomach while her fingers fumbled with his pants. She’d thought to tease him, to draw out their coupling until this new Rathe, the one with the open expression and joyous smile, trembled with wanting her.
But he was already hard and wanting, and she was the one trembling with need. Or maybe they both were.
On an oath, he yanked at her pants. He took her breast in his mouth and she arched against him, still working him free of his clothes. Then they were rolling, tumbling, fumbling with pants and underthings, no time for gentle words and sighs when the flames burst around them and the urgency sang through her blood.
Take me. Take me. The chant was wordless, mindless, assuaged only when he finally rose above her and thrust home with no preliminaries, none needed, because she was hot and wet and wanting.
There was flash and flame, heat and speed, but through it all was a sense of wonder, of tenderness. She skimmed her hands across his bruises when she wanted to grab. He thrust into her again and again, hard, fast, but when their struggles brought her up against the cool wall, he cushioned her head with a folded sheet.
This was it, Nia thought as her inner muscles grabbed on to him and squeezed. This was what she’d been seeking. Adventure. Passion. Excitement. Danger.
Need.
Then she was slammed by a wave of it all, a flurry of emotion that crested but didn’t break. It continued on and on and on. Even beyond the moment Rathe whispered her name and climaxed with such a look of heartbreaking joy on his face that she knew for certain she would never come back from this place.
Never regret what had come before or what would follow.
THE MOMENT STRETCHED into a minute, the minute into five. Eventually reality returned, and Nia started to notice the lumpy sheets tangled beneath her bare shoulders, the pants still twisted around her ankles. She craned her neck and glanced around the room, at the clothes strewn about and the mounds of sheets and towels that had formed a love nest.
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