Out of Nowhere
Page 22
Fox stood. “I’m going home.”
“Idiot.”
He jerked around again to look at his partner. “You know, you’re getting real close to stepping over a line here.” Then a sudden, hot headache kicked him right between the eyes. The dog was in Rafe’s lap. The Chihuahua. Belle?
Her little black eyes were narrowed and she was growling at him. Fox rubbed his eyes. The dog was gone.
He was hallucinating. He was exhausted.
“You didn’t learn a thing from four sisters, did you?” Rafe challenged.
Fox was getting genuinely angry. “What, you’re some kind of expert Don Juan all of a sudden?”
“I’m happily married. You, on the other hand, are about to go home and sleep alone. You had Tara all figured out, didn’t you, except when it really mattered.”
Fox held up both hands. “That’s it. I’m going to leave before you say something that’s going to make me want to hit you.”
Rafe and Kate watched him go. “Is he going to be all right?” Kate asked worriedly.
“Sure. We were.”
“But maybe…I don’t know. Maybe we were wrong. Maybe this wasn’t one of Belle’s love matches.” Then her eyes widened. “I know how to find out.”
“You’re not going to start with that archangel thing again.” Rafe’s eyes went wary.
“Gabriel…Raphael,” Kate mused. “Belle has a definite preference for men named after angels.”
“I never heard of an angel named Fox.”
“Well, the C has to stand for something.” Kate hurried to the door.
Fox saw her yank it open and step out onto the porch just as he finished backing out of their driveway. He hit the brakes and lowered his window. “What?”
“What does the C in your name stand for?” she called.
Something inside his head snapped with a loud twanging sound. “Chamuel, damn it! It stands for Chamuel!”
Kate’s jaw dropped open. “What kind of name is that?”
“It was an angel or some such thing. My mother was in a car accident while she was pregnant with me. She said she had one sitting on her shoulder!”
Kate grinned and nodded.
“Is that it?” Fox growled. “Can I go home now?”
“Sure. Absolutely. Go right ahead. Have a good night!” She turned back to her husband, just inside the door, and smiled. “He’s going to her apartment.”
Fox was past the college and nearly home before he saw something very small and brown and fast dart across the street in front of him. The Chihuahua? He stepped on the brake hard, looking the way he thought the dog had gone, his jaw slack. And in the same instant, Rafe’s parting shot finally hit him in the gut.
You had Tara all figured out, didn’t you, except when it really mattered.
Fox brought his gaze back to the street ahead of him. What the hell had he done?
She’d thrown her ruby away to save his life. She’d opened her arms to him and had let him in like she had done with no other man. And when she’d asked him why he wanted her to come to his place tonight, he’d told her it would be more comfortable, more convenient.
She ran, always ran, from hurt. Cool, clever, cosmopolitan, no one watching her would ever know. She tossed that hair back and narrowed her eyes. Just like she had done four hours ago when she’d gotten out of his car.
Fox turned the Mustang around. He drove back to Poplar and flashed his badge at the concerned doorman again. Then he took the elevator upstairs and went to her door, hammering it hard.
Tara was curled on her side, the ruby still in her hand, when she woke. She sat up, disoriented and confused by the steady thumping. She’d been dreaming of the time he’d woken her because he’d thought she would go to the art gallery.
She scraped her hair out of her face as she had that night…and then she knew she wasn’t dreaming. Someone was whaling the hell out of her door. And she knew, with a kick in her chest and a sudden loss of her breath, that it was him again. It was Fox. Which was fine, because she had a few more things to say to him after all.
Tara jumped from bed and ran into the other room, rapping her shin solidly against the leaning hulk of a coffee table. She swore and limped to the door, flinging it open. “Let’s get one thing straight here, okay? I took perfectly good care of myself for twenty-seven years before you came along!”
He had just raised his hand to knock again. He lowered it slowly. His eyes, she thought, were the most incredible blue.
“Come home with me,” he said softly.
Tara’s heart rolled over. “I can get through one night in this disaster area before I call in a clean-up crew in the morning. I don’t need your help.”
“Please.”
The single word somehow got inside her and wrapped around her heart. “I don’t need you to chase away monsters in the night or…or make me tea with brandy and…and hold me when I hurt!”
“Forever.”
“What?”
He leaned one easy shoulder against her doorjamb, unperturbed by her outburst. “You’re strong. You’re courageous. You’re no hothouse flower. I need you in my life.”
“Don’t do this.”
That was another thing she said a lot when the feelings were bubbling up inside her, he thought. “Your only weakness, as far as I can tell, is that you can’t recognize a man in love with you when you see one.”
“I…you…oh.”
This, Fox thought, was definitely going better the second time around. “I want you to come home with me tonight and to stay there. Not so I can take care of you—though I will. I mean, you’ve got to give me that, darlin’. It’s in my blood. But I really want you there so I can grow old with you, so I can go to sleep with you in my arms and wake up with you in the morning.”
Her mind was whirling. “And feed me eggs.”
“After I carry you to the kitchen table. There again, it’s a genes thing.” He reached for her and this time she didn’t push him away. He framed her face in his hands. “You drive my blood pressure up but I can’t go back to a world without you in it. So…please, come home.”
His eyes were taking on that devil’s blue again, she thought.
“There will be coffee there in the morning,” he promised.
She was going to cry again. Just when she’d thought she had no more tears to spend. “That’s…bribery.”
“Yes.” Then he waited. And he thought it might well have been the longest heartbeat of his life.
“I love you,” she whispered, then she threw herself into his arms.
Shaken, he caught her. “I love you, too, darlin’. That’s what I’ve been trying to say. Marry me.”
“Yes!” She threw her arms around his neck and hit him squarely in the back of the head with something hard.
“What the hell?” He set her away from him gently to rub at the spot.
“Oh!” She opened her palm.
Fox stared. And for a wild moment he thought he saw something move inside the stone, a deeper crimson inside the red, like a heart beating. Then he blinked and it was just a ruby—a magnificent ruby—after all.
“Where did it come from?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“An angel. It had to be an angel. That’s all I can figure. There was someone else in Stephen’s house that night.”
He thought about it and figured it out. “The dog?”
“She must have picked it up in her mouth when I took off. What I can’t figure out is why she put it in my coat.” She closed her fist around it again. “It was in my coat, the one she was trying to destroy the day that guy got me in the elevator. I have it back. And I have my deepest wish.”
“Tell me.” His eyes narrowed. “I coughed up what the C meant. Fair’s fair, darlin’. What’s your heart’s desire?”
“You.”
Twenty minutes later, they waited for the elevator. Fox dropped her bags—three this time—and pushed the button, then he pulled her into his arms. And over her shoulder, h
e thought he saw the leaves move in a potted plant in the hallway. He thought he saw…a long brown nose poke through the fronds.
The elevator came and he picked up Tara’s bags again. He stepped into the car, looking back once.
“What is it?” Tara asked, concerned by the expression on his face.
Fox hesitated then shook his head. “I thought I saw the dog again. I must be really tired.”
The elevator doors closed and they went down. Tara frowned. “You never did finish telling me why Rafe’s wife thinks Belle’s an angel.”
“Because love, murder and mayhem follow her wherever she goes.”
“Murder and mayhem hardly seem like the work of heaven, but…” She looked down at the ruby still clutched in her hand. She still wasn’t quite willing to put it away. Then she looked up at him quickly. “The love was my heart’s desire. It was the work of the Rose.”
“Sure. Kate’s goofy.” Fox found he was much more inclined to believe in mystical rocks than heavensent dogs. And he didn’t care why it had happened…as long as he’d found her.
On the seventh floor, Belle yawned hugely and stepped out from behind the fern. Now that she’d given the ruby back, she had a mind for some sleep herself. She’d only kept it long enough to allow for divine intervention. If she’d given the rock back too soon, Tara and Fox would have parted ways before they realized they were in love.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-0507-9
OUT OF NOWHERE
Copyright © 2001 by Beverly Bird
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*Wounded Warriors
†The Wedding Ring