Perhaps, she admitted, she was even feeling a little guilty for dismissing him as a useless worrier—because this time he’d so obviously been right.
She looked around, feeling as if she was beginning to come out of a daze. “Where’s Mother?”
“Emily took her home a couple of hours ago,” Sloan said. “That was the other time you refused to leave. They took Joel’s car, in case you’re wondering where it went.”
“Are you sure you’re okay to drive, Sloan?” Jack asked. “Morganna’s right about you being in shock. I’ll take you if you like.”
Sloan shook his head. “I’d rather you stay here and keep an eye on things a little longer—if you can. Where’d you park my car?”
Jack pointed. “About three blocks that way. I figured if I took it any further, you’d probably come back to find the wheels gone, but if I stayed any closer the embers might fry the paint.”
“Good thinking. The last thing I need is to have to deal with the car insurance people, too.” Sloan glanced down at Morganna’s high-heeled shoes. “It’s going to be a hike.”
Morganna shrugged. “So? If I’d known the evening’s entertainment included a barbecue, I’d have dressed more appropriately. But since I’ve already been standing for hours, what’s a few blocks to walk?”
She didn’t realize until she started walking that she was cold to the bone, so chilled that her muscles were stiff. She even stumbled a couple of times on uneven spots in the sidewalk. They’d gone less than half a block when Sloan muttered something under his breath, then reached for her hand and tucked it tightly into the bend of his elbow. Automatically Morganna drew as far away as his grip would allow her to.
Sloan’s voice was chilly. “If you think I’m making some kind of move on you, Morganna, let me assure you that right now, I couldn’t possibly be less in the mood for making love.”
She bit her tongue hard, and when she regained her self-control she said acidly, “And here I thought that all the girls would be wearing eau de smoke next season because men find it such a turn-on.”
“I’ll keep the possibility in mind. Since it’s apparent that I’m not going to be making furniture again anytime soon, I may be looking for another line of work, and a hot new perfume might be just the ticket. We’ve certainly got the raw materials to work with.”
Even though she had stood and watched the factory burn, she hadn’t yet considered the possibility that the fire might actually put him out of business. “But the insurance…you can rebuild, Sloan.”
“Eventually, yes. But it’s not going to be any quick process.” He helped her into the Jaguar. “You don’t have to come into the trauma unit with me.”
“I want to be there.”
He started the car. “I didn’t realize you were so attached to Joel.”
She didn’t bother to answer. If he didn’t understand her reasons, she couldn’t possibly explain them. And they were both so tired now that a single misspoken word could lead to a massive quarrel.
Except, of course, for the fact that they had never quarreled.
Morganna hadn’t really thought about that before. If anything, she had considered the absence of arguments as one of the few blessings of her marriage. But once she stopped to consider the situation, the reason quickly became clear. There had to be a certain level of communication—the desire to express a conviction or share a concern or change the other person’s mind—in order to quarrel. Without that, a couple might snipe sarcastically at each other, but they couldn’t work up a good verbal battle.
She was definitely worn out, she told herself, if she was actually wishing for an old-fashioned argument. A rousing, roof-raising, clear-the-air kind of fight…
In the brightly lit hospital corridor, staff members wrinkled their noses or drew aside as they passed. Morganna happened to glance down at her once-white wool coat, and for the first time saw the streaks of soot which had turned it a mangy-looking gray. If the two of them smelled as bad as she must look, no wonder people were going out of their way to avoid encountering them.
Just inside the trauma unit, she stood a few steps from the desk and waited while Sloan talked to the staff. The nurse who seemed to be in charge shook her head firmly and raised her voice. “We can let you look through the window into his cubicle, Mr. Montgomery, but that’s all. There’s no point in going in, anyway.”
Morganna tried to swallow her horror. No point? Was he dying, then?
“Why?” Sloan asked baldly.
“Because though he’s stable for the moment, he’s unresponsive. Between the burns, the surgery he needed to set his broken leg, and the fall he took, he’s on massive doses of painkillers, and it’ll probably be several days before anyone can talk to him. Even then, he won’t be talking back right away. He’s on a ventilator to assist his breathing, because of the hot gases he inhaled.”
“But he’s going to be all right eventually?”
The nurse hesitated. “You should talk to his doctors to get the official word. But he’ll definitely be scarred. And it could be days before we know exactly how much damage the fire did to his lungs.”
Sloan rubbed the back of his neck as if it hurt. “He’s to have everything he needs.”
The nurse’s voice gentled. “If you’ll leave your phone number, I’ll ask his staff doctor to call you after rounds in the morning.” She showed them to the window, and they stood there for a few minutes, looking at the almost-unrecognizable form in the bed. It wasn’t until Morganna started to turn away from the window that she realized her hand was cupped in Sloan’s, and she wasted a moment wondering how it had gotten there.
“Save his clothes,” Sloan told the nurse. “The fire investigator will want them.”
In the corridor once more, Morganna said, “What’s important about his clothes? They must have destroyed everything, just getting it off him.”
“It’s not the fabric, it’s what’s on it.”
She frowned.
“Gasoline,” Sloan said softly. “It splashed on Joel’s jacket, but—thank heaven—it didn’t all burn, or he’d be a great deal worse off right now.”
“Gasoline?” Her voice felt very small.
He stopped in the center of the hall and looked down at her. Something in his gaze was oddly gentle. “You don’t think my office exploded for no reason, do you? Morganna, that room was laced with gasoline. And it was intended for me.”
CHAPTER FIVE
MORGANNA had held up through the initial horror of the fire because the shock had numbed her to what she was watching. She’d held up through the long smoky hours that followed because at any given time she’d simply refused to look beyond the next minute. She’d held up outside Joel’s hospital room, looking at a very badly injured man, because she’d forced herself to believe that he would be absolutely all right.
She wasn’t sure she was going to make it through Sloan’s announcement.
It was intended for me, he had said very matter-of-factly. Someone had filled his office with gasoline as a booby trap for him. Someone had intended it to blow up in his face. Someone had intended it to be Sloan who was lying in the trauma unit now.
Or in the morgue.
She saw the air around her start to turn faintly orange, and with her last shred of self-control she grabbed for Sloan’s arm. He pushed her into the nearest waiting area and into a chair, forcing her head down till the blood flowed back where it belonged. She sat there taking deep breaths for several minutes. “I’m all right,” she said finally, and though he looked as if he had his doubts, he offered his arm. This time she leaned gratefully on him as they walked across the pedestrian bridge from the hospital complex to the parking garage.
“Thanks,” she said gruffly without looking at him. “You’ve got enough to deal with right now without me going woozy on you. I suppose I should have gone home the first time you asked me to.”
“Not much point in fussing about it now,” he said. He unlocked the car and opened h
er door. “But I’m glad you didn’t.”
He said it so quietly that she wasn’t even certain she’d heard right, and by the time he’d walked around the car and gotten behind the wheel, any trace of sentiment was gone from his voice. “Why were you even there, Morganna? I thought you’d be at the restaurant for another hour.”
She shrugged. “Nobody seemed in any mood to linger. When you hadn’t come back by the time we finished dinner, I asked Jack to drive by Sticks & Stones, just to see if you were still there and if there was anything we could do.” And how carefully casual she had been with that request, she recalled. She had phrased it as nothing more than idle curiosity, for she’d rather have had her fingernails pulled out than admit to what had seemed at the time to be completely irrational concern for Sloan. She even remembered wondering if Sloan might think she was trying to spy on him. “We must have still been too far away to hear the blast.”
“There wasn’t one, really. At least, not a blast like a bomb going off. It was more like a dull thud than a sharp crack.”
“Oh. I would have thought…Then when we pulled up in front, you were stumbling out the door, and there was fire behind you—” She had started to shiver again. “And Joel’s clothes were smoldering—”
He didn’t look at her. “I’ll do everything I can for him, Morganna.”
She was startled. Did he honestly think she needed reassurance on that point? Of course he wouldn’t do anything less.
At this hour of the morning, the six square blocks which formed Pemberton Place, Lakemont’s most exclusive neighborhood, were almost entirely quiet and dark. The exception was the Georgian mansion which sat almost squarely in the center of the district. There, the main-floor lights blazed in brilliant contrast to the still-faint glow of daylight, and the front door opened as the car pulled into the circular driveway.
Morganna got out. She was startled when Sloan killed the engine and followed her up the front steps instead of taking the Jaguar around to the garage.
Selby was at the door. “I’m so sorry, sir,” he murmured. “Mrs. Ashworth told the staff what happened. What can I get for you?”
Sloan glanced at Morganna. “A little brandy wouldn’t be a bad idea. Mrs. Montgomery has had a shock.”
“Indeed, sir.” The butler silently vanished down the hall.
Sloan glanced into the silent drawing room. “I suppose Selby thought it would be a bit redundant to greet us with a fire, but you’re still shivering.”
Morganna shook her head. “Don’t light it for me. All I want is to have a shower and fall into bed. Besides, if we sit down in there, the smoke will get into the upholstery—and if you’re not going to be building furniture for a while, then we need to take very good care of what we already have.”
The joke felt as feeble as it must have sounded; Sloan didn’t laugh.
“Sorry. I was only trying…Never mind.” She turned toward the stairway just as Selby came from the back of the house with a decanter and two glasses on a tray. “Is my mother asleep, Selby?”
“I doubt it, Miss Morganna. She asked me to let her know when you got home.”
“Don’t bother. I’ll tap on her door.” She stopped at the base of the stairs, looking back at Sloan. Somewhere inside the tired and half-empty pit where her brain used to be, a thought nudged at her. He had lost so much tonight, she told herself. She should do something to comfort him. The problem was, she didn’t even know how to begin. Her mother would have simply walked over and put her arms around him….
Before she could act, Sloan picked up one of the glasses from Selby’s tray and went into the drawing room, closing the door behind him.
Morganna climbed the stairs.
Sloan had scrubbed till his skin ached, trying to wash away the stink of the fire. But the smoke must have crept deep into his lungs where he couldn’t wash, for he could still smell it after his shower.
And as long as the smell was there, he couldn’t put the rest of the evening’s events out of his mind, either.
As soon as he closed his eyes, he relived it all in slow motion. The first brilliant flash of light, the feeling of being shoved hard, the secondary explosion of the dust which had been shaken loose by the initial tremor.
And then, inevitably, seeing Joel fall. Sloan had no doubt that he’d be watching that scene in his nightmares for years to come.
Abruptly he sat up and tapped the bedside lamp to turn it on, and piled the pillows into a stack against his back.
What made the memory of that fall even worse was the knowledge that Joel had been only a bystander, not the intended target. But it wasn’t some sick sense of relief for himself that Sloan was feeling. Instead there was an irrational whisper in the back of his mind, saying that Joel should not have been there at all, that Sloan should have been doing his own checking.
It was a completely illogical accusation, of course, for he’d very specifically told Joel to wait for him outside. But logic—and even truth—were seldom effective at banishing guilt.
Who hates me enough to do that?
The workers he’d fired that morning, of course. The answer was just about as obvious as it could be. There had been a gleam of satisfaction in the fire investigator’s eyes when he’d heard the details about those workers. The job termination, the threat, the fact that Joel had seen at least one of them on the premises just minutes before the fire started. Open-and-shut case.
They’d gotten even all right, exactly as they’d intended. Sloan would be paying the price for a long time to come. But what they obviously hadn’t considered was that their friends and fellow workers would pay as well, by being put out of work. And in the end, the arsonists themselves wouldn’t feel much glee over their triumph when they ended up sitting in a jail cell, as they surely would, with nothing to do but think.
Burning down the factory had been a useless, pointless, stupid thing to do. Obviously, Sloan thought, we aren’t dealing with a pair of Rhodes scholars here.
But the reasons didn’t matter now; that was the job of the fire investigator. The damage was done and now the problem lay in how best to fix it. First thing tomorrow, he’d have to call the insurance company. And then the next task would be to find a construction engineer who could tell him whether the building could be salvaged, and an architect who could take on the job of reconstructing the old factory or designing a new one. Then he might be able to tell his workers how long they could expect to be idle….
But all those things would have to wait until after he’d checked on Joel and talked to the doctors.
He slapped at the lamp to turn it off and closed his eyes, fully expecting to see the explosion again. But this time it was Morganna’s face he saw in the darkness instead, her eyes wide with dread as she stared through the trauma unit window at Joel’s motionless body. He wondered what, exactly, she had been thinking right then. She’d been so absorbed she hadn’t even noticed when he’d taken her hand. Not that the horror of Joel’s injuries wouldn’t have been enough to shock her—but had she been picturing Sloan himself lying in that bed?
Probably not, he told himself. At that point, she might not even have considered the possibility that it could have been Sloan who was injured.
He had to hand it to her, because she’d taken the whole thing like a trouper—at least, right up until he’d told her about the gasoline trap. He hadn’t been thinking clearly himself by then, or he’d have realized it was just a little too much, expecting her to take that in stride. Still, he hadn’t anticipated that she’d faint. She wasn’t the fainting sort; she’d only done it a couple of times in her life.
At least, that was all he knew about. And of course he’d been the cause of both those episodes….
Had she simply reached the end of her rope at that point? Or had she been truly shaken at the thought that he might have been seriously—even fatally—hurt?
Wishful thinking, Montgomery. You’ve just got Morganna on your mind tonight—for all the usual reasons.
>
What would have happened if he’d asked her to come upstairs with him? To spend what remained of the night with him?
Why was he even wasting time thinking about it? She’d have given him the sharp side of her tongue, that was for sure. And with good reason, for he’d told her himself he wasn’t in the mood for making love.
At the instant he’d said it, it had been true enough. But then she’d snapped at him about the aroma of smoke being an aphrodisiac, and damned if he hadn’t looked down at her—streaked with soot, hair falling down, eyes reddened by fumes and unshed tears, smelling of fire—and almost staggered under the sudden desire to take her straight to bed.
And he still wanted her now—there was no doubt about that. But the truth was, whether they made love or not, he’d give anything not to have to face the night alone.
If he were to cross the hall and tap on her door and tell her that…
“She’d hand you a teddy bear,” he told himself crossly. He scattered the stack of pillows and let his head drop back against his favorite one.
And saw his office explode into flame once more.
He wondered if he would ever again close his eyes and not see it.
Morganna was scarcely awake the next morning before her feet were on the floor and she was reaching for a sweater and a pair of jeans. There were too many questions in her mind to allow her to stay quietly in bed, and the mere thought of a solitary breakfast tray made her feel ill.
The butler was just laying a hand on the dining-room doorknob when she reached the bottom of the stairs. “Selby,” she called, “is my mother in there?”
He turned hastily, looking horrified to see her already dressed and downstairs. “Miss Morganna, I didn’t realize you’d be awake so early. You should have rung for your tray.”
“I don’t want it.”
“I see,” he said. “Yes, Mrs. Ashworth is in the dining room. There’s an assortment of food on the sideboard, but would you like me to bring your usual breakfast in?”
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