by Gayle Wilson
She turned and walked past Nick. He was wearing jeans, she realized, getting her first good look at him, and nothing else. She could see, despite the darkness of the hallway, a scar high on his chest, left by one of the bullets he’d taken in the New Orleans ambush six months ago.
Her eyes lifted from it to his face. There were no glasses tonight. Even in the shadows under the stairs where he was standing, she could see the clear blue of his eyes. And then she was past him, leading the way to the front door. She could hear the sheriff and the deputy following her, their booted feet echoing on the wooden floor.
“’Night, now,” Blanchard said to Nick as he passed. “Y’all get some sleep. Everything’s gonna be fine.”
When she had let them out, Abby turned to find Nick still standing in the hall, exactly where he had been before.
“I armed the system,” she said into the silence. She didn’t know why it was so important that she convince him of that. Maybe because she felt like a fool. Maybe because of the disbelief she had heard in Sheriff Blanchard’s voice.
Nick nodded, but he said nothing. She walked down the hall toward him, her bare feet making no sound. When she walked by him, he still didn’t move, so she wasn’t sure he knew she was there. She walked on toward the light of the kitchen.
What she found there was exactly what the sheriff had described There was garbage scattered over the tile floor and the sugar canister had been overturned on the counter. Her eyes circled the room. Nothing else appeared to be out of place.
She looked at the windows, but they, too, seemed to be secured. Then why the hell hadn’t the alarm gone off? She walked over to the box and realized, even before she reached it, that the light wasn’t blinking. Which meant, of course, it was not armed. Not operating. Because it hadn’t been turned on. Was it possible that she had forgotten?
“Tell me exactly what it looks like,” Nick said.
She turned and found that he had moved into the kitchen. The fluorescent light the sheriff had turned on over the sink put blue-black lights in the darkness of his hair. His chest was still powerful, dark and broad, the scar an ugly red star, high on the smooth bronze of his shoulder.
And there was another one at his temple, the more critical one, of course, although it was less visible because of its location. Maybe that’s why his hair was longer, Abby thought. To hide that mark. And it almost did. That and the glasses had made it far less obvious yesterday than it was tonight.
“Sterling?” he questioned, and she tried to pull her mind away from the memory of her hands moving against his strong body, which had been unmarred then. Away from that and back to the job at hand. Protecting Nick.
“The garbage can is turned over. And the sugar canister on the counter. The contents of both are scattered. Nothing else seems out of place. I guess the can falling over is what we heard. It’s metal.”
“And the windows?” he asked.
“They’re…I haven’t checked, but they appear to be closed.”
“Blanchard could have done that,” he suggested.
That was true. Maybe one of them had been open and she hadn’t noticed. But that still didn’t explain the alarms.
“The system isn’t on,” she said. She wasn’t sure why she had told him that, other than the fact that it only seemed fair. She was aware he would never have known if she hadn’t told him.
But that would be cheating. She was supposed to be protecting him, and if she had gone up without making sure the house’s security systems were all activated, then she hadn’t done her job. And he had a right to know that. Maybe he’d complain to Rob and get her replaced. Maybe she needed to be replaced.
“You said you armed it.” His voice wasn’t accusing, but she was doing enough of that for both of them.
“I did,” she said softly. And then a little more desperately, trying to remember. “I swear I did. I let Maggie out, and then I walked over to the box.”
“And turned on the system?”
She nodded and then realized her mistake. “I did. I promise you I did.”
“Okay,” he said calmly, perhaps hearing the increased agitation in her voice. “Then something or somebody turned it off later on.”
“The raccoon?” she asked sarcastically.
“Power outage,” he suggested.
“But it should come back up when the power did.”
“A short. Break in the line.”
“Cut?”
“Maybe,” he said.
She flicked the switch to test that hypothesis, and the arming light immediately winked at her. Mockingly. “It’s back up,” she said softly. Not cut. Which meant, she supposed…
“I turned it on,” she said again, trying to sound convincing. For his benefit or her own? “After Maggie left,” she said, replaying the scene in her head.
This time he said nothing in response. There was nothing to say. The system hadn’t been armed, and if their intruder had been someone other than the wildlife Sheriff Blanchard had suggested, then she and Nick might both be dead right now. He certainly understood that as well as she did.
“I’ll call Rob in the morning,” she said. Her job. She was the one who was responsible for the situation out here. Responsible for seeing that everything possible was done to protect Nick Deandro. Tonight it hadn’t been.
“He can send someone to check it out,” Nick said.
She nodded again, her eyes watching the slow blink of the arming light. There was nothing wrong with the system now Nothing wrong with the wiring. Maybe it was possible that she only thought she had tripped the switch.
“Sterling?” Nick said.
Her lips tightened, fighting the unforgivable urge to cry. Damned hormones, she thought. This reaction was ridiculous. So she had screwed up. There was no real harm done. Only to her pride. Her reputation.
“You still there?” Nick asked quietly.
“I’m here.” The words were too soft, maybe even touched with what she had been feeling. She would hate it if he heard despair in her voice, the threat of tears, too near the surface.
“You better get some sleep,” he said.
The concern in the quiet sentence was almost out of context. Almost, until she put it together with what he had said that night on the stairs. Something about her being sick. Or emotionally distraught. He apparently thought she was about to fall apart. And maybe, she admitted a little ruefully, she was.
“If you’re ready to go back upstairs…” she offered, strengthening her voice and turning away from the mocking blink of the light to face him.
Despite the scarring, Nick looked more like himself tonight than he had before. Maybe it was that he wasn’t wearing the glasses. Maybe it was the fact that he was asking questions. Police-type questions. And giving her orders—at least he had been, upstairs. Giving them in that familiar tone of confidence.
Cocky, she had thought at the beginning. That wasn’t exactly what she was hearing tonight. But whatever was in his voice was infinitely better than the dark bitterness that had been there the first day she’d arrived out here.
“If I’m ready?” he repeated, his tone questioning.
“I’ll take you up,” she said, remembering the feeling of his hand on her shoulder tonight, following her through the darkness of the upstairs hall.
“I can find my way upstairs, if that’s what you’re offering,” he said, his voice now hard and very cold. “I’ve lived in this house for more than five months. I don’t need or want your help, Sterling. Or your guidance.”
More humiliation. For him as well as for her, with her unthinking stupidity. But despite that, the sharpness of his tone sparked something defensive inside her. It always had.
He probably believed, as did Lannie Blanchard, that she had forgotten to set the alarms. Now, it seemed, he had also decided she was insulting and inept in dealing with his blindness. And none of it was fair.
“You needed me earlier. Upstairs,” she argued. She regretted reminding him of
that as soon as the words were out of her mouth. But she couldn’t take them back. After all, they were the truth.
He laughed. “Hell, Sterling, I just didn’t want to get shot. I wanted to make damn sure you knew exactly where I was at all times. Touching you seemed to be the simplest way to accomplish that.”
“Are you saying—”
“I’m saying that when people with guns play hide-andseek in a dark house, I don’t intend to be the one who gets blown away. It’s not a pleasant experience, I can tell you from experience.”
He turned, moving confidently across the kitchen floor on broad, bare feet. His hand reached for the door frame and touched it just before he stepped through into the hall.
“How did you know?” she asked. She couldn’t resist asking. How did he know that she was the one who had entered his room and not whoever had created the noise they had both heard down here? “How did you know it was me in your bedroom?”
He didn’t turn around to look at her, and of course, there was no need. But he told her. She couldn’t see his face, but his deep voice, coming to her out of the darkness, was again familiar. So damned evocative.
“Because you still smell the same,” Nick Deandro said softly.
Shock held her motionless, an incredible tightness ballooning in her chest, crowding her breathing. And as she watched, eyes widened in disbelief, Nick disappeared into the shadows.
Chapter Five
Nick had been trying to decide what he should do since he’d come back upstairs. He knew he wouldn’t sleep again. Too many things were happening. Things he didn’t understand.
And, locked in this endless nightmare of darkness, there wasn’t much he could do about any of them. The information he needed to sort them all out was probably inside his head. He just couldn’t get to it. Couldn’t break through the wall of amnesia, as black as the world that stretched before him now.
But he thought he understood the way Rob Andrews’s mind worked, because Andrews was supposed to be a good cop. Which meant there was more going on here than met the eye.
The soft snort of amusement when he thought about the wording of that phrase was as bitter as his comments to Abby Sterling had been. He hated hearing embarrassment in someone’s voice because they had used some perfectly innocent phrase referring to sight. Almost as much as he hated hearing pity. But he hated self-pity even more, he thought in disgust. Yet he had reacted with that very emotion tonight when Sterling had made her offer.
Why the hell shouldn’t she think he needed her guidance? How was she supposed to know that holding on to her shoulder had been his way of keeping them in contact in the face of an outside danger? Good cops always tried to stay in contact. Usually it was done by radio or visually, but in his case…
Good cops. The phrase echoed suddenly, bringing him back to the problem. Identifying the good guys. Figuring out if Abby Sterling was one of them. Was that why Andrews had sent her out here?
Or was it possible the police captain believed she was the woman who had been so interested in his condition after the shooting? Whoever it was who kept calling the hospital had known the name they had hidden him under, information that had been available to only a few highly trusted individuals. People who were members of the elite Organized Crime Special Unit within the department’s Public Integrity Division, for example. People like Abby Sterling.
Nick had already determined to his own satisfaction that they had some kind of shared background. He just couldn’t be sure what kind And he wasn’t sure what the rest of it meant, either.
Like Andrews’s cryptic reference to Sterling’s need for rest. The fact that she had come to his room tonight before she had called the sheriff. And the fact that she had apparently forgotten to arm the security system, leaving the way open for whoever wanted to enter this house unannounced.
All of those meant something, he knew. He sensed that those things were important, even beyond their obvious implications. Except he wasn’t sure exactly why.
Maybe if he could remember something about Abby Sterling, he could figure it all out. There was something he should be remembering, he knew instinctively. Something beyond the fragrance of her skin. Beyond the disturbing weariness he had heard in her voice. He knew there was something.
Only he just couldn’t remember what the hell it was.
“I ARMED THE SYSTEM,” Abby said again. She wondered how many times she was going to feel the need to reiterate that. And however many it was, she knew her avowals weren’t going to change what had happened last night.
“I believe you,” Rob said calmly. Reassuringly, even. Until he added, “That’s what bothers me the most, Abby.”
She read the truth of that in his voice, even over the phone line. Maybe it was good they had had this scare. Abby had thought that everyone was a little too relaxed about protecting Nick. Rob included. He didn’t sound relaxed now.
Maggie had shown up around 6:00 a.m., letting herself into the house, apparently without creating any problems with the alarm. She hadn’t mentioned hearing the sirens or being aware of the sheriff’s visit, so Abby had asked.
“I heard the sheriffs,” Maggie said, not meeting her eyes. “That don’t mean I’m gonna rush out to see what’s happening. That ain’t necessarily a healthy thing to do in the middle of the night ‘round about here.”
“Why not?” Abby asked, curious again about that seeming distrust of the local law.
“You live as long as I have in this parish, you learn to mind your own business. If you know what’s good for you,” Maggie added cryptically.
If Maggie had not been aware of the excitement here last night, there was, by the time she arrived, certainly nothing in the appearance of the kitchen that would have given away the fact that they had had an intruder.
That’s what Abby had done during the long hours before daybreak. Those hours she had spent alone down here after Nick had made his enigmatic pronouncement and disappeared. She had cleaned up the mess and then made herself a pot of coffee.
Of which she had been drinking entirely too much, she realized, deliberately putting her mug back on the table and pushing it away. This was a habit she had broken early in her pregnancy, and she didn’t need to get re-addicted now.
But somehow it had helped last night, she acknowledged, as she had sat there waiting for the sun to replace the moonlight filtering through the draping moss. Something about the familiar feel of a cup in her hand had helped her get through those long dark hours of thinking. Of remembering.
“Look,” she said to Rob, and she found that she was the one trying to be reassuring now, “the sheriff is satisfied that no one was out here. That nobody got into the house. Deandro doesn’t seem to be worried about it. So maybe…”
Her voice faltered as her mind again replayed the scene when Maggie had left yesterday. The actions she had taken were as clear in her mind as they had been before. Crystal clear.
Abby wondered if she had thought about this so much that she had now created the clarity of the memory she so desperately wanted to be inside her head. The memory of her hand throwing the switch and the arming light blinking in response.
“What did Deandro say about what happened?” Rob asked.
…you still smell the same. That’s what Nick had said. At least that’s what she remembered. She knew, however, that wasn’t what Rob meant. So she tried again to wipe those disturbing words out of her head, just as she had been trying to do all night.
“He suggested that maybe it was a short. A break in the line.” She waited for a response to that, but Rob didn’t articulate whatever he was thinking. “But it wasn’t,” Abby went on, trying to be fair in her assessment. “As soon as I flicked the switch, the thing came back on.”
“So what do you want to do?” Rob asked.
Run and hide suggested itself. Only, not just from the incident last night, she realized. She was beginning to accept that she was going to have to take the blame for that glitch in security, what
ever had happened. What she wanted to run from now were the emotions that had been stirred up by Nick’s words, but she resisted the impulse to cowardice.
“First of all, I want you to send someone to check out the system,” she suggested.
“You got it,” Rob said. “That’s probably not a bad idea anyway. I don’t know when it was last done.” There was another small silence before he asked, “You think I ought to talk to Nick? Get his take on things?”
“Why not?” Abby agreed, keeping her voice calm.
After all, she had nothing to hide She had done what she was supposed to do. She had reported the incident to her supervisor, including all the possibilities as she saw them At the same time she had asserted her surety that she’d turned on the alarm An assertion that she had mentally questioned each time she’d made it.
“He’s in his room. I can take the phone up to him,” she offered. She hoped Rob wouldn’t push this. That he would suggest that taking the phone upstairs was too much trouble for her. He didn’t.
“If you don’t mind,” he said instead.
“Of course. Hold on.”
She pushed up again from the kitchen table, its top a familiar landscape after a week in this house, and began the journey upstairs.
She hadn’t seen Nick since last night. Not since he had told her she still smelled the same. She found she wasn’t eager to see him now. That didn’t mean, however, that she hadn’t thought about what he had said. About what it had meant. And especially about whether or not she should mention the comment to Rob. She still hadn’t decided on the answer to that, despite how important she knew it might be.
The door at the top of the stairs was closed, and she knocked softly, ridiculously hoping she wouldn’t get an answer. Maybe Nick was making up for the sleep he’d lost last night. He responded immediately, however, his deep voice inviting her in.
When she opened the door, it was obvious he hadn’t been asleep. He was sitting at a desk that had been placed in front of the bedroom’s two windows. He was dressed, wearing the same pair of worn jeans he had thrown on last night and a white polo shirt that made his skin appear even darker, very tanned and healthy. Not at all like the invalid she had been imagining him to be before she’d come out here.