They came unfolded when Nick picked them up, and she could easily read the headlines from where she stood. He had to see them, too.
“Oh, no.” Laura felt like crying again.
Nick’s back went ramrod straight. He unfolded the pieces of paper completely and stared at them without saying anything.
They were the newspaper clippings her friend had brought to the hospital that morning at Laura’s request. She never found the time to do more than glance at the headlines before the policeman arrived.
“Nick,” she began, but had no idea how to explain.
He shook his head and held up a hand to ward her off. “You don’t have to explain.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I told you to go find out about what happened last summer,” he said flatly.
And he had. But he needed her to believe in him, as well.
Nick handed her the papers, then turned his back to her, shutting her out completely. “Do you have something to sleep in? I pulled a shirt out of one of my drawers. It’s on the dresser in the other room.”
Laura waited. Again she searched for something she could say, and found nothing except “I’m sorry.”
Her apology only seemed to anger him more. Trust was such a fragile thing, and she’d broken what tittle had grown between them.
“Go to bed, Laura.”
With a heavy heart, she walked into the other room and found the shirt he’d left for her.
A well-worn basketball jersey that would no doubt swallow her whole.
His shirt.
She didn’t think it would be possible to be comfortable in Nick’s shirt, in his bed, all night through, all the while knowing he hated her at this minute. She couldn’t leave it like this. He had to understand. Laura walked back into the living room.
He wouldn’t look at her at all. He stared out the window through a gap in the blinds, and just the way he stood there was heartbreaking to her.
“Nick, you said it yourself. You told me to go find out about it. You said it wasn’t a secret.”
She got no response from him.
“I didn’t even get a chance to read the clippings yet, for God’s sake. You can have them. They’re right here. Just take them.”
She waited. He made no move to get them. Laura dropped them on the end table and waited.
“Go to bed, Laura,” he said, again without turning around.
So she did.
Chapter 9
Nick didn’t have a prayer of sleeping that night. Around midnight, he was sitting on the couch, thinking and trying not to look at the newspaper clippings that remained on the table where Laura had dropped them earlier.
Rationally, he knew he couldn’t blame her for being curious. He’d never tried to hide anything from her; he simply wasn’t willing to explain it to her himself.
Maybe he should have, though. He could think of it as a test—could he talk about it to someone after all this time?
After years of counseling his patients, getting them to voice the things that most bothered them and assuring them that it was the first step to dealing with those problems, could he take his own medicine?
Or would he choke on it?
He had let this thing fester inside him for nearly a year. He was a coward. Maybe he should just come right out and tell Laura Sandoval that and see what she thought of him then.
Trouble was, he now found himself in the unfortunate position of caring what she thought of him. If she didn’t want to have anything to do with him once she knew, he wasn’t sure how he would handle that.
Maybe he’d barricade himself inside this apartment for another year. Maybe he would see how much deeper he could sink into this hole of his, and when he crawled out next time, there might not be anything left of the man he once was. After all, the bottle of booze in back of the cabinet was growing more attractive with each passing minute.
Yet Nick couldn’t take another year of living like this. He couldn’t sink much lower and still dig himself out.
He stared down at the folded sheets of plain white paper, thinking of the story of his life, as seen through the eyes of Carter Barnes’s parents, printed on the inside of those sheets of paper.
Laura wasn’t the kind of person to believe everything she read. He searched for comfort in that belief, searched his heart for the reason she’d hurt him so much by simply finding those newspaper articles.
He wanted her to believe him, to take his word for everything that had happened and accept it, without a doubt. He wanted her to have faith in him.
And she did, he argued with himself. She’d shown tremendous faith in him, certainly more than he had in himself right now.
Nick couldn’t help but remind himself that he had goaded her into talking to the pediatrician, all in the hope of scaring Laura away from him before she came to mean something to him.
If only she hadn’t kissed him. If she hadn’t stood up to him, challenged him, believed in him when there was no logical reason for her to do so. Then it wouldn’t hurt to know she was finding out all the sordid details of his life from back issues of the newspapers.
Nick let it go. He had to. It was done; he couldn’t change it. Surely the last year had taught him that. He had no reason to get his feelings hurt by this. He should be glad to discover he could still feel, even if the feelings did hurt.
He would tell her he was sorry he had behaved irrationally, then ask her forgiveness.
She’d forgive him. Maybe she would show him how to forgive himself.
Meanwhile, he had a little boy to worry about. Rico’s problems should certainly take precedence over his own.
How was be was going to get through to him? Drew needed to know whom he was looking for, and Rico was probably the only person who could help him.
The sooner the man was caught, the sooner Nick could be sure Rico and Laura were safe. He could send them back to Laura’s house and turn Rico’s care over to another doctor. He’d have to face the fact that he might not see them again once the danger was over.
Shortly after midnight the phone rang, and he heard the voice he was waiting for on the answering machine.
“Hi, it’s me.”
Drew.
Nick pulled the receiver to his ear, then turned off the machine so it wouldn’t broadcast their conversation. “I’m here.”
“Any trouble getting to the apartment?”
“No.”
“Any trouble since?”
“No. We had a couple of phone calls, though, two from A.J. and two hang-ups.”
“Could have been someone selling something.”
“Could have been.” Nick was careful to avoid using Drew’s name, just as Drew wasn’t using his. The news must not be good. “What did you find out?”
“Damned near nothing, although I think that tells us a lot.”
“It’s bad,” Nick concluded.
“Yeah. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s something nasty and complicated, and something that has the bureau and the Chicago police very nervous. I haven’t been able to get to the information I need from the bureau, not without broadcasting the fact that I know where you and the boy are or that I know what happened to you both today. I don’t think you want me to do that.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I did watch the news tonight. They managed to hush up the fact that a man in a cop uniform with a police cruiser tried to kidnap a little boy and a young woman from the hospital at gunpoint, then fired a shot in the alley.”
“That’s interesting,” Nick said.
“Very interesting.”
“So what do we do now?”
“Sit tight. Let me dig some more tomorrow. I’m going to have to tell someone what you told me, but don’t worry. I’ll be careful.”
“I know you will. Have any ideas?”
“Seems like it has to be some kind of internal investigation. That always makes everyone nervous and makes it difficult to get information. We must have a
very bad cop on our hands.”
“Is the guy a cop?”
“The name he gave you was fake. I think I found the car. He must have taken it from the garage. It was in for repairs. No one was supposed to be using it.”
“Great,” Nick said. “We have a cop who steals cars and tries to take little boys out of hospitals with the help of his service revolver.”
“What can I say? It’s a crazy world we live in.”
Nick would never argue that point with him. “So, you want us to stay here?”
“For now, at least. Tomorrow we can reevaluate. I could always get you into an FBI safe house, if you want.”
“No,” Nick said. “I don’t think it’s going to come to that. Do you?”
“I think we can give it another day and see how it shakes out. Do you all have everything you need?”
Nick thought about it. Maybe something for Laura to sleep in, other than one of his shirts. Maybe another psychiatrist for Rico. Maybe another hole for Nick to crawl back into. Somehow he didn’t think Drew could supply all that, even if Nick was willing to ask.
“We’ll make do,” he said. “Did you speak to A.J.? Tell her what was going on? She sounded a little... impatient when she talked to the machine the second time.”
“I told her all she needs to know.”
Nick smiled. That meant just enough to make her incredibly curious. “I guess our mysterious missing bloody clothing didn’t turn up yet.”
“Not yet. If our man is a cop, how hard would it be for him to walk into the shelter and pick up those clothes?”
“It would be amazingly easy,” Nick said.
“That’s what I figured. You three hang tight. I’ll be in touch, hopefully first thing in the morning.”
Nick hung up the phone, then dropped his head, rolling it around on his neck in a vain effort to ease the tension in those muscles and maybe ease the pain in his head.
Lost in thought, he was unaware of the fact that he was no longer alone until Laura’s hands landed on his bare back, midway down and just to the left. He flinched, his head came up and he whirled around.
“You startled me,” he said, then fell silent once he caught sight of her in that shirt he’d dug out of a drawer for her to wear.
Obviously he should have taken more care in the choosing. He’d picked an old basketball jersey, and it was much too big. Anything he selected would have been, but he could have easily found something that covered more of her glorious skin than this. It had no sleeves, and big, rounded openings at her neck and her arms. When she moved, the shirt didn’t quite move at the same pace as her body. It dipped and swayed, showing him a little more one minute, a little less the next. Curves and mesmerizing hollows, the sensual interplay of muscles in her thighs as she walked, the rise and fall of her breasts as she took in air and slowly let it out—all combined to rob him of the power of speech and to remind him just how long it had been since he was this close to a barely clothed woman.
“I heard the phone a few minutes ago,” she said, meeting his eyes for a moment. “I thought... something might have happened.”
Nick found his voice with difficulty. “No, nothing. Drew is still digging. He’s going to call back in the morning.”
She nodded, then drew her bottom lip in, brought her teeth down in the center of it.
Nick had to look away. “How’s Rico?”
“Out cold. He hasn’t stirred in hours.”
If she knew that, it meant she hadn’t been asleep herself. It hadn’t been his imagination. She’d been in there, her mind racing, just as he’d been awake out here, each thought of her seemingly more treacherous than the last.
The shirt had been giving him fits earlier. She was sleeping in his bed, her soft, warm body encased in what he would bet was nothing but his shirt and a pair of panties. If she moved in just the right way, he’d be able to tell for sure.
They had a madman—a cop, in all probability – chasing them and the frightened little boy in the next room, and he was busy speculating about the various parts of her body.
It was insane. He wasn’t some desperate, hormone-crazy teenager. He was a man, one who’d always been able to control himself around a woman.
What was so different about this woman?
Nick couldn’t say how he knew, but he would swear she was just waiting for him to make the first move toward her, that she was just as intrigued by him as he was by her, that he could very easily have her in his arms, that shirt of his effortlessly pulled from her body.
He picked up an afghan off the chair in the corner and managed to wrap it around her without letting his hands actually touch her. It was a masterful feat of engineering, and he was proud of himself, until she looked at him questioningly.
He had no choice but to confess. “I thought you might be cold now that the air-conditioning kicked on.” It was a lame excuse, but his brain was functioning at maybe twenty-five percent. The sight of her short-circuited the rest.
Laura just smiled. She had him on the ropes, and she knew it.
“I owe you an apology,” he said, needing to get this part out of the way. “I had no right to be angry with you for digging into my past.”
“It’s all right. I wish I hadn’t done it. I wish...” She smiled weakly. “Never mind.”
But he knew what she wished.
“Laura,” he said, thinking that the name was every bit as beautiful as the woman, “is it me, or do you have a thing for lost causes?”
She smiled. He scored some sort of points for his directness. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I’ve never met a truly lost cause before.”
He whistled long and low, then laughed. God, she could make him laugh after the year he’d lived through. Surely that meant something.
“I don’t know what to do with you,” he said, being as honest as he could possibly be with her. “Whatever you want from me, I just don’t have it to give. I don’t have anything to give anyone right now. Laura, there’s just nothing left inside me. There’s next to nothing left of my life.”
“All I want you to do is be honest with me. Can you give me that?”
He considered, then shot with the first thought that came to his head. “I like what you do for that shirt. I like it a lot.”
She flushed from cheek to cheek. Obviously that wasn’t the kind of honesty she had expected.
But it was the absolute truth. He was staring now, thinking that the cream-colored fabric did wonders for the color of her skin. She caught him staring. But then, what was a man confronted with such a sight to do? He couldn’t look away if he bad to.
“You asked for the truth,” he reminded her.
That was the only defense he had right then. And he was in trouble. This conversation he’d started, intending to put her off, to push her away, seemed to be backfiring on him again.
Honesty? She wanted honesty? That was easy. “Laura, I haven’t been with a woman in a long time. I haven’t held one in my arms. I haven’t kissed one. So these things I’m feeling now, with you ... I can’t say how much of this is real and how much is ... the timing. And it wouldn’t be fair to you for me to...”
“To what? To do anything about what you’re feeling?” she asked.
Nick nodded cautiously.
“Let’s back up,” she suggested. “Why don’t you stop telling me about what happened in the past? Tell me what you’re thinking right now.”
She all but dared him to do it. Nick couldn’t resist. “I’m thinking that I want very much to kiss you.”
Laura felt like Dorothy, caught up in the fury of the cyclone that had swept her off her feet and into a whole other world. This was so far from the routine of her everyday life.
They were in danger. They didn’t know what was going to happen next or how they’d fare tomorrow. And despite all that, all she wanted to do was kiss him.
Okay, maybe that wasn’t all she wanted to do, but it was the only thing she could think about right now.
And he’d said he wanted to kiss her, too?
“I don’t see the problem in that,” she said, wishing the words hadn’t come out so breathlessly. But then, that’s what he did to her—left her breathless.
He looked thoroughly exasperated. “I don’t think you understand your role in this. I’m the man. I want to kiss you, Laura, and you’re supposed to stop me.”
She smiled and wished he’d come closer. “I am? I guess I’m not very good at this sort of thing. I don’t know my lines.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with knowing your lines. It’s called self-preservation. Didn’t anyone ever teach you about that?”
She took that first step for him. “I think I flunked self-preservation.”
“Lady, you damned well should repeat the course. I’m surprised that fancy Boston college of yours let you off so easily.”
The look he threw her way then sent a blush all the way down to her toes. She felt next to naked in this shirt of his, especially now that he was standing in front of her. He was nearly a foot taller than she was, and she thought he must be able to see all the way down to her belly button the way the shirt’s scooped-out neckline fell across her breasts.
Laura wasn’t the least bit ashamed or embarrassed. She was somewhat surprised at her wanton behavior where he was concerned. But the flush to her skin was from the heat—pure, physical heat. It must be ninety degrees in this room, and it was all his fault.
And he thought she was going to put a stop to this? She smiled again, dangerously.
“Don’t do that,” he warned.
She ignored him yet again, thinking he was much like the sleek, dangerous-looking, half-grown puppy who lived two doors down from her—all bark and no bite. And she upped the stakes by letting the afghan drop to the floor.
Nick’s jaw clenched. The muscles in his arms tensed. And suddenly, he looked as if he were carved in stone.
“What are you so afraid of?” she asked.
He flinched. She wondered if she could really gain some ground by going ahead and calling him a coward. “Nick?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt. That I’m the one who’s going to hurt you.”
Temporary Family Page 11