Some kind of inner instinct had her envisioning the next move. The shorter of the two men spun around, his gun still in hand, except that this time, the weapon was pointed toward Sam.
His eyes looked crazy enough for him to use it.
With a guttural scream, Riley launched herself at the man with the gun, grabbing his arm and trying to point it up in the air. The distinct odor of garlic assaulted her nose. The gun discharged, the bullet going wild and hitting the overhead chandelier just as the sound of sirens filled the air.
Backup, she thought, a tidal wave of relief washing over her. Sam had called for backup. God love ’im.
“I give up, man, I give up!” the taller of the two cried, raising his hands in the air. They were trembling. “I don’t have a gun. The gun’s Jason’s. It’s not mine.”
“You don’t have the guts to even hold a gun,” the one called Jason retorted in disgust, taunting his partner. “You’d be nowhere without me.”
“And now you’ll be in jail because of him,” Sam chimed in sarcastically.
Quickly stuffing Jason’s weapon into his belt, he handcuffed the man and turned toward Riley. He was about to ask her where her handcuffs were when he saw her pallor.
Pointing his gun at both the men, he glanced at her again, concerned. “Are you all right?”
“Just fine,” she answered before she sank to her knees and everything went black.
Her eyelids felt as if they were being weighed down by anvils as she struggled to lift them and open her eyes.
It took her several tries before she succeeded. As she fought, she heard voices, felt the presence of bodies moving around her, surrounding her.
What was going on?
Oh, right, the invasion.
Two men in black, they’d broken into her house. One of them had grabbed her and hit her from behind.
Sam.
Sam!
That was when Riley finally opened her eyes. The first face she saw was Sam’s.
“You’re all right.” She thought she shouted the words, but all she heard was a raspy whisper.
It was her own.
“Don’t talk,” Sam cautioned. He had his hands on her shoulders, restraining her as she tried to get up. “We’re going to take you to the hospital.”
There was a gurney beside the sofa. When had she laid down on the sofa? A gurney meant paramedics and an ambulance. Where had that come from? More importantly, why was it here? Her mother would have heart failure if she heard that an ambulance had been summoned for her.
“No, no hospital. I’m fine,” she insisted. “Really.”
The words carried no weight for Sam. “That’s what you said before you passed out.”
“I didn’t pass out,” she protested with as much indignation as she could muster under the circumstances.
“Okay,” Sam allowed tersely. “You took a short nap. Either way, you sank to the floor and there’s a nasty bump on the back of your head along with a nastier gash. You’re bleeding. I want that gash looked at,” he told her sternly.
“So look at it.” She tried to raise her head to allow him to do just that, but the room began to spin. She fell back against the sofa again.
He saw the split second of weakness. “Damn it, woman, you’re going to the hospital and that’s that. I’ve had enough of a scare tonight. Do I make myself clear?” he demanded.
Riley stared at him as she tried to focus on what was going on. “The robbers?”
He assumed she was asking about the fact that the two were no longer in the room. “On their way to the precinct.”
A lot of police personnel crowded into the room and most likely, beyond. Crime scene investigators? When had they gotten here? “How long was I out?”
“Too long,” was all that Sam would tell her.
In reality, he’d spent a harrowing, endless fifteen minutes staring at her unconscious face, terrified and wondering if she would come to or wind up in a coma.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she realized. When had he come back? And why? “You went home.”
Sam shrugged, as if his appearance on the scene was of no great consequence. “I hung around for another forty-five minutes or so, thinking they might show up late. I was on my way out of your development when I passed a car with two guys sitting in the front. They looked like they had on black pullovers. It’s too hot for black pullovers,” he pointed out. “So I doubled back—just in case my hunch was right. And it was.”
Riley began to nod, then stopped. The waves of pain crowding into her head made the motion impossible to complete.
“Good thing you did. I was already in bed, asleep. They caught me off guard.”
Sam glanced toward the pile of books scattered on the floor near the door. “I’m guessing not entirely.” He laughed, nodding toward the books. “First-class security alarm you have there.”
“But it did the trick,” she pointed out. “When they hit the books, the sound of them falling woke me up.”
He should have stuck around, Sam admonished himself silently. If he had, they would have never gotten to her, never roughed her up. “Good thing.”
She took a deep breath, letting it go again. It was over. They’d gotten the home invaders and she was incredibly relieved.
“You’d better go home to Lisa. I can handle the paperwork,” she added in case that was on his mind.
Sam looked at her as if she was crazy. “You’re not handling anything. What you’re doing is going to the ER to get a once-over.”
Riley huffed impatiently. “Wyatt, I already said that I’m—”
“Don’t care what you said. I’m primary on this,” he reminded her, “and what I say goes. Besides, I called your mother to tell her that we caught the robbers—”
Riley looked at him, horrified. “You didn’t tell her I was hurt, did you?”
Wyatt made no attempt to hem and haw. “Your mother asked for details and I had to tell her. She’s sending the chief to the hospital to see you so you’d better make an appearance there.”
Riley closed her eyes, sighing. “I hate you,” she said with no feeling.
“Yeah, I hate you, too,” he told her with a grin. “Now get on the damn gurney before these paramedics grow old.”
With another plaintive sigh—and help from Sam—Riley grudgingly got off the sofa and onto the gurney.
“I told you I was all right.” A note of triumph registered in her voice as she turned toward Sam after receiving her discharge papers at the hospital some four hours later.
The woman was incorrigible. “They had to stitch up the gash in back of your head. Fifteen stitches is not ‘all right,’” Sam pointed out, helping her off the hospital bed. He pulled back the curtain for her.
Her shrug was dismissive. “I had worse when Frank tackled me for taunting him when I was ten,” she informed him.
Tonight was an education. If she’d ever doubted it, she now had undeniable proof that word spread fast in the Cavanaugh network. She and Wyatt had barely gotten there when the first wave appeared. For a while, the hospital turned into a hotbed of activity as her siblings, stepbrothers, mother and stepfather came to the hospital to see how she was doing. It wasn’t long before the rest of them turned up, as well. Only Zack’s wife didn’t come, but she had been pressed into service to remain with a sleeping Lisa so that Lila could come and see for herself that her youngest daughter was really all right the way she claimed.
“A hospital is a hell of a place to hold a family reunion,” Riley had quipped at the height of the Cavanaugh influx. She felt absolutely awful about being the cause of concern for her mother and all the others who had abandoned their beds to come to the hospital in the middle of the night.
Satisfied that only “Riley’s hard head,” as Frank put it, was involved and that she would be all right, it had still taken a while for everyone to finally leave the premises.
“So how’s your head?” Sam asked as he took her arm.
Riley hated to admit that she felt wobbly at first. But with each step, she became a little more sure-footed, a little stronger.
“Fine. Really,” she underscored, knowing the last time she’d said that, it hadn’t been true. But the bleeding had stopped and the wound sewn up, so by tomorrow, it would be business as usual. Except for maybe a headache.
Instead of going outside, Sam sat her down in the outer waiting area. For the time being, it was empty, but that was subject to change. “Clear enough to understand things?”
Why were they sitting here? She wanted to go home and put all this behind her. But she wasn’t up to struggling with him, so she stayed where she was and humored him. “As long as you don’t lapse into a foreign language, yes.”
“Now that the cases are solved, I’m thinking of taking a couple of weeks off to spend some quality time with Lisa.”
Why did he feel he had to sit her down to tell her this? “Good idea,” she agreed. “I highly approve.” But as she began to get up, he surprised her by gently pushing her back down.
“I’m not finished yet,” he told her. “What do you think of taking some time off yourself—to spend with us?” Sam added when she made no response at first.
It took her only a second to roll the suggestion over in her head. Riley smiled. “I think that I’d like that.”
Still, he made no attempt to get up.
“You know,” Sam continued, “I’m really glad this is finally over—in large part thanks to you—and we can go back to the way things were.”
He was buttering her up and it was working, she thought, suppressing a smile. “And what things are those?”
“Having you in my bed.” Sam took a breath before continuing, taking her hands into his. “I’d never thought I’d hear myself saying this—hell, I never thought I’d catch myself feeling this way—but I’ve missed you, Riley. Missed being with you.”
She felt herself melting. Still she wasn’t sure where he was going with this. She only knew where she wished he’d go. “We were together every day.”
“Not the way I wanted to be.” Again, he paused and took a deep breath, as if that helped him get the rest of it out. He’d never been nervous around a woman before and it wasn’t a feeling he welcomed. But this woman mattered more than any other ever had. “I love you, Riley.”
She blinked. “Maybe my head isn’t as fine as I thought,” she confessed, her heart suddenly tap dancing in her chest. “I could have sworn I just heard you say you loved me.”
“You did. I do.” He watched the way surprise bloomed in her eyes. That made two of them. He never thought he would ever say those words to a woman. Love was something that happened to other men, not him. “I’ve suspected it for a while but wouldn’t let myself think about it until tonight. Tonight, when I came in and that bastard had his gun on you, I thought I’d lost you. It was like having my gut ripped out with a jagged piece of glass.”
Now there was an image to win over a woman’s heart. “Very poetic,” she said wryly.
“You want poetic?” he asked, then nodded. “I can try that. Might not be for a while, but I can try.” His eyes held hers. “If you marry me.”
She felt as if someone had just jumped on her stomach, making all the air come rushing out. “Did you just ask me to—”
“I did.” He sat there, waiting for her answer.
He was serious, she thought. Actually serious. A myriad of fireflies suddenly materialized inside of her, filling her with light. She smiled at him. “You do drive a hard bargain, Wyatt, but I guess it’ll be worth the trade.”
“So is that a yes?”
An impish smile curved the corners of her mouth. “You need it spelled out?”
“Yes. Definitely. In big block letters.”
She’d hire a skywriter if necessary. “All right. Yes, I’ll marry you.”
“Is that because you love me?”
Now there was a dumb question, she thought. “No, it’s because I like doing penance. Yes, it’s because I love you, idiot.”
He finally rose, bringing her up with him. “Try it again without the idiot part.”
Riley laughed as she entwined her arms around his neck. Her head didn’t hurt anymore. Nothing hurt when there was this euphoria taking hold.
“Maybe later.” She raised her lips to his. “Got something more important to do right now.”
They both did.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-4835-3
IN BED WITH THE BADGE
Copyright © 2010 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 233 Broadway, New York, NY 10279 U.S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
**Capturing the Crown
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
‡The Doctors Pulaski
‡The Doctors Pulaski
‡‡Mission: Impassioned
‡The Doctors Pulaski
*Cavanaugh Justice
‡The Doctors Pulaski
‡The Doctors Pulaski
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
*Cavanaugh Justice
§The Fortunes of Texas: Reunion
†The Cameo
§§Most Likely To…
†The Cameo
†The Cameo
***The Alaskans
‡‡‡Talk of the Neighborhood
††The Sons of Lily Moreau
††The Sons of Lily Moreau
††The Sons of Lily Moreau
†††The Wilder Family
§§§Kate’s Boys
§§§Kate’s Boys
§§§Kate’s Boys
§The Fortunes of Texas: Reunion
§§§Kate’s Boys
***The Alaskans
§§§Kate’s Boys
‡‡‡‡The Baby Chase
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
In Bed with the Badge Page 16