Vital statistics were rattled off as the paramedics turned their patient over to the ER crew.
Josh felt helpless and in the way, but refused to step aside. He accompanied Leonor all the way to exam room one, at which time the room’s swinging doors closed, barring his access.
Frustrated, Josh stood guard right outside the doors, watching through the small windows as an ER team worked over her. He desperately wanted to be in there with her, holding her hand, bullying her into clinging to life, but he knew he’d only be in the way. He knew that right now, the important thing was to stabilize her and stop the bleeding.
Josh stood there, keeping vigil, for more than an hour. When the doors finally opened again, instead of the ER doctor coming out to give him an update on how everything had gone, Josh saw two nurses and an orderly guiding Leonor’s gurney toward the elevator. A doctor joined them.
His heart began to pound wildly as a sense of dread filled him. He followed behind the team. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“She has a lot of internal bleeding,” one of the nurses told him. “We need to operate.”
He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt sheer panic.
He felt it now.
“But she’s going to make it, right? Right?” he demanded.
“She’s young, she’s strong and her chances look favorable, but I’m not God—” the doctor accompanying the gurney told him.
Josh caught hold of the surgeon’s arm for just a moment, his eyes pinning the doctor’s. “Today you better hope you are,” he ordered. Regaining control, he released the surgeon’s arm.
One of the nurses took pity on him. “There’s a waiting room for family and friends right next to the operating room. You can wait for word there.”
Josh gave her a grateful look and got on just before the doors closed.
* * *
He’d never known time to move so slowly.
It felt as if every second had been dipped in molasses before it attempted to drag itself toward the next second.
Josh occupied himself by pacing the length of the empty waiting room. He thought about calling several of Leonor’s siblings, but he didn’t know any of their phone numbers and he couldn’t seem to pull his head together sufficiently enough to attempt to locate them.
Even if he had those phone numbers, what would he say to her brothers and sisters? “Leonor’s been shot and might very well be clinging to life, so get yourself down here ASAP?”
And then do what, he silently demanded. Pace around like helpless jackasses?
Like me?
There was only room for one jackass in the waiting room, he thought irritably, blowing out a deep, ragged breath.
It was better if he notified them after Leonor recovered.
And she was going to recover, he thought fiercely. He wasn’t about to let her do anything else. That wasn’t negotiable.
As if it’s up to you, he mocked himself.
Fury spiked through his veins. He couldn’t even manage to keep her safe, so how was he supposed to bully God into making her recover?
Damn, he’d never felt so helpless before in his life, he thought, pacing around the waiting room’s perimeter again.
He had no idea how long he walked.
Josh stopped looking at his watch. After that he completely lost track of time.
It felt as if he had put in at least ten miles pacing and he was exhausted. But he just couldn’t get himself to sit down. He knew if he did sit down, he was liable never to get up again.
Three and a half hours after Leonor had been wheeled into the third floor operating room someone finally came into the waiting room and called out Josh’s name.
Facing away from the doorway, Josh practically spun around on his heel to face the person who had said his name.
“I’m Joshua Howard,” he said, cutting across the room in the blink of an eye. “How is she?” The look on his face dared the doctor to tell him anything other than she was all right.
“It was touch and go for a while,” the cardiothoracic surgeon, Dr. Steven Mayer, told him with a grim expression. “But we stopped the bleeding and she looks pretty good.”
“She’s going to recover?” Josh pressed, needing to hear those words.
The surgeon nodded. “She’s going to recover. She’s going to hurt for a few weeks, but she most definitely will recover.” His grim expression gave way to a meager smile. “She’s a fighter, that one.”
“Yeah, I know,” Josh said, the words all but whooshing out of him. He had never experienced such an overwhelming sense of relief in his life. Grabbing the doctor’s hand, he shook it, hard. “Thank you!” he said, his voice cracking in the middle of the word.
“My pleasure,” Mayer replied with sincerity.
Dropping his hand to his side, Josh looked over the surgeon’s shoulder toward the operating room doors. “Can I see her?”
“She’s in recovery right now. They’ll move her to her room in about an hour or so. A nurse will take you to her there and you can be with Ms. Colton. Until then, I suggest that you get yourself something to eat.” The small, deep-set brown eyes swept over Josh. “And I’d also take off that jacket and maybe see about getting it to the cleaners. There’s a lot of blood on it,” Mayer pointed out. “I hear they work miracles these days.”
Josh looked down at his jacket for the first time since Leonor had been shot. It looked like hell. No wonder people had been giving him strange looks.
But the tuxedo jacket was the least of his concerns right now, although Mavis, the woman at the Bureau who ran the wardrobe area they were sometimes forced to turn to, was undoubtedly going to have a choice word or two to offer him when he brought the tuxedo back to her.
He’d pay for another one, he thought.
Stripping off the jacket, Josh turned it inside out, hiding the blood. He tossed it on the arm of the closest chair.
“I’ll take care of it later,” he murmured.
“Cafeteria’s in the basement,” Mayer told him as he began to walk away. “Vending machines are located in the middle hallway, just past the elevators.”
And with that, he was gone.
Josh toyed with the idea of the cafeteria and quickly discarded it. He wasn’t hungry. His stomach had closed up shop the instant that he’d realized Leonor had been shot. Thinking back, he vaguely recalled having a couple of things off the buffet tables at the museum, but that hadn’t been because he was hungry; it was more like a sense of boredom had propelled him to have something to do with his hands. Eating seemed like the logical choice at the time.
Now the thought of food had his stomach threatening to mutiny.
So he continued pacing, waiting for the nurse to come tell him that Leonor was being moved from recovery to her room.
Once he knew that Leonor was there and safe, he had a few things to tend to. But he didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone like that, not after what had just happened. He didn’t think there would be another attempt made on her life tonight, but he was taking no chances. Besides, he needed to have a few questions answered first. Questions like who the shooter had been and who had hired him to kill Leonor. Since she hadn’t recognized him, he was fairly certain that the shooter was a hit man. Until he knew who had hired the assassin, he wasn’t going to feel that Leonor was safe.
Maybe he should call Mac, he decided. He’d fill the man in on what had happened and ask him to stick around Leonor’s room until he got back. She’d definitely be safe with Mac watching over her.
Still too agitated to think clearly, Josh called the FBI tech back at the field office and asked Bailey to get Mac’s phone number for him.
Chapter 19
For the next two days, Leonor drifted in and out of consciousness, mostly out. She
was aware of people coming in and out of her room, moving like formless shadows in the background. There were people touching her, changing her dressings, taking out and putting in IVs. Voices droned on in her subconscious, saying things she couldn’t grasp.
She was aware of other people coming into her room, people whose voices sounded concerned. They blended with her dreams and faded away, as well.
There were times she thought she heard Josh talking to her, saying things she couldn’t really hear or understand, but she knew it was him. Knew because of the cadence of his voice.
Words would drift in and out of her head, leaving only the faintest impression, if they left any at all.
The one thing she was aware of was that every time she tried to open her eyes—only vaguely aware that she succeeded once in a while—there was always the feeling that there was someone in her room.
Trying to open her eyes was exhausting. Most of the time, she’d slip mercifully back into an inky darkness, a place where the radiating pain she’d felt exploding into her chest couldn’t find her.
This went on, Leonor was later able to piece together, for close to three days before she finally managed to anchor her brain to reality and began to take tentative steps toward pulling the world into perspective and to recover.
* * *
The tall, slender, solemn-looking blonde in the nurse’s uniform silently slipped into the hospital room, easing the door closed behind her.
She knew every inch of the hospital, so coming in undetected had been easy for her.
Her back against the door, the older woman carefully studied the pale face of the patient lying so still in the bed that was a few feet away from her.
She watched the eyes, waiting to see if they would open.
They remained closed.
After several beats had gone by, the woman ventured forward. Making her way to the window, she very quietly lowered the blinds until the room was submerged in darkness.
Again she looked at the patient’s eyes.
Satisfied that the other remained unconscious, the woman retraced her steps and paused by the bed. Giving in to a momentarily surge of sentiment, the woman in the nurse’s uniform moved the tray with its single glass of water out of the way. She wanted to get closer.
* * *
Leonor had sensed more than heard the door to her room opening and then softly closing again. And she felt rather than saw someone—a nurse?—draw close to her bed.
The light, familiar scent wove seductively around her, stirring her memory.
Reminding her.
Like so many times these last few days, Leonor struggled fiercely to open her eyes, to make some sort of noise to let the person in the room know that she knew she was there. But she couldn’t. Both tasks were completely out of the realm of her capabilities, at least for now.
But still she tried and she must have succeeded to some small degree because the person with her murmured, “Go on sleeping, kiddo. You need your strength.”
Kiddo.
Her mother used to call her that. Her mother wore that perfume.
Was she here? In the hospital room? Was Livia here with her?
Again Leonor struggled to lift her eyelids but it was as if they were glued shut with five-pound weights holding each in place.
Her eyelids refused to budge, no matter how hard she tried to pry them open.
And then, just for a fleeting second, she could have sworn she felt warm breath on the side of her face. On her cheek.
The next moment, that same voice whispered, “You won’t have to worry about him anymore, kiddo. I took care of him. He won’t be sending anyone else to try to kill you.” A low, guttural sound—a laugh?—separated the sentences. “You were the only one who was ever worth a damn.”
Livia.
It had to be Livia.
Why couldn’t she open her eyes? Why couldn’t she just wake up when she wanted to?
Exhausted, Leonor went on struggling, went on trying to open her eyes. Trying to surface from the deep, murky darkness that had such a hold on her.
And then, finally, after what seemed like forever, Leonor managed to open her eyelids.
Clutching the raised bed railings on either side of her, Leonor dragged herself up into a semisitting position, grunting in pain as she did so.
“Mother?”
* * *
Josh had been in her room for the last twenty minutes, getting back to her as soon as he had verified for himself what Arroyo had called to tell him.
Finding her asleep as always, he had gone to stand by the window. He was looking out now, wondering if Leonor was ever going to regain consciousness for more than a few seconds at a time.
When he heard her voice, he instantly swung around and crossed to her bed, half-afraid that he was imagining things again. It wouldn’t be the first time that he thought he heard her voice.
But this time, he actually had.
Thrilled, he could hardly believe it. “You’re awake!”
He wanted to hug her, but was afraid to at the same time. Leonor looked so fragile he was leery of hurting her.
Leonor was looking around wildly. “Where is she?” she cried.
He took hold of her shoulders, gently pushing her back down onto the bed. “Where’s who?”
She struggled to sit up again, frustrated. “Mother.” Her eyes were wide as she turned them to Josh. “She was right here, in this room,” Leonor insisted, “talking to me.”
“Honey.” Having succeeded in getting her to lie down again, he took her hand in his. Everything about her felt as if it could just break up into tiny pieces at the least bit of pressure. “You’re just imagining things.”
“No, she was here,” Leonor insisted. “She was wearing a nurse’s uniform, but it was her. She was wearing that perfume she always wears.”
Josh still believed that Leonor was imagining things. “You’ve been through a lot, Leonor. Your brain is playing tricks on you, combining bits and pieces from your memory,” he said soothingly.
“No, she was here. I know it,” Leonor cried adamantly. “She called me ‘kiddo.’ Nobody ever calls me that. I never liked it, but she called me that anyway.”
He’d insisted on having a guard posted right outside Leonor’s room around the clock. Could Livia have slipped in anyway? He was inclined to say no, but he’d learned that the woman was incredibly resourceful, so the possibility did exist.
Still, he tried to tell Leonor that it was only her imagination at work.
“Just some of the things that your brain was combining,” he told her gently, taking a seat next to her bed.
“No,” Leonor maintained, “she was here. I heard her moving things. Her prints have to be on something.” And then the blinds caught her eye. “Are the blinds usually closed like that?”
He looked at the far side now. That side faced a tall office building across the street. “No, as a matter of fact, they’re usually open.”
“Livia must have closed the blinds,” Leonor concluded excitedly. “And she said something to me.” Her head was hurting, and it was hard pulling her thoughts together, hard remembering. “She said...she said she ‘took care of him.’ That ‘he’ wouldn’t be paying anyone to hurt me again.” Almost exhausted, Leonor appealed to the man who had saved her life—in more ways than one. “She was here, I know Livia was here.”
Stunned, Josh could only look at her. He had just gotten back from the medical examiner’s office, back from viewing Leonor’s nephew, Barret, laid out on a slab, an apparent suicide. RJ’s oldest son had left a note confessing that he had been the one who had tried to have Leonor killed because he hated her, hated that she was connected to his family in any way and hated her for having stolen the money he felt rightfully belonged to his father becau
se she’d had, according to the suicide note he’d left, “the audacity to be born.”
“Did you see her close the blinds?” Josh asked. If Livia had closed them, then with any luck, she’d left her prints on them somewhere.
“No, but I know she had to.” She looked at Josh. “Then you do believe me?”
“Anything’s possible,” Josh allowed. “I believe that you believe you and from everything I’ve learned about Livia Colton, she could have very possibly disguised herself as a nurse and slipped by the guard I’ve got posted outside your door.” He just hoped that they wouldn’t find a dead nurse somewhere on the premises, missing her uniform.
Taking out his cell phone, he called the field office’s forensic team, telling them that he needed a hospital room dusted for prints—ASAP. He was rewarded with a deep, exaggerated sigh from the forensic team’s leader, then the resigned promise that the team would be there as soon as possible.
Putting away his phone, Josh looked at the woman he had come so close to losing. He could see that Leonor was agitated, but at the same time, she was obviously struggling to keep her eyes open. Fatigue was winning out.
“Why don’t you just get some sleep?” he suggested gently.
But Leonor was adamant. “No, I don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t know what I’ll dream about if I fall asleep. I don’t want to dream about Livia again,” she said with feeling.
“For what it’s worth,” Josh told her, taking her hand in his again, “I don’t think that was a dream.”
Her face lit up. “Then you do believe me?”
“The Bureau’s forensics team is coming to check it out, but yes, I believe you,” he told her. “You couldn’t have imagined that last part you told me she said to you. My guess is that wherever she was hiding out, Livia undoubtedly heard about what happened at the art museum—it’s been all over the news for the last three days—and put two and two together. She came here to tell you that she took care of the problem and to reassure you that you can feel safe again.”
Her brain just wasn’t processing this. She thought of what Livia had said to her.
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