Bulletproof Hearts
Page 22
“You’re willing to give your life in exchange for hers?” Conroy mocked.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“It’s a tempting offer, but no. Now drop the gun.”
Dylan did so.
“I have some connections with the FBI,” he told Conroy. “They can get you money, transport out of the country. Just tell me what you want.”
“I want you to step away from the door, Lieutenant.”
With the blade of that lethal knife still pressed against Natalie’s throat, there was nothing else Dylan could do.
He’d tossed his gun to the floor, but had made sure it wasn’t within Conroy’s reach. There was no way he was going to let the bastard use his own gun against him. Or—God forbid—against Natalie.
“We’re going to take a little drive now.” Conroy was speaking to Natalie now. “Just you and me.” He looked at Dylan again. “If I even suspect anyone is following us, she dies.”
He didn’t think Conroy would get far. By now, the whole house would be surrounded by law-enforcement personnel. There would be snipers on neighboring rooftops—someone would take Conroy down. It was what he’d been waiting four long years for.
He got no satisfaction from the fact. Not when Natalie could get caught in the cross fire. He knew the snipers wouldn’t take a shot unless it was clear, but if Conroy’s blade slipped as he went down, she could still die.
No. He wouldn’t let that happen. Natalie dying was not an option.
“Move toward the door.” Conroy nudged her forward.
She glanced at Dylan helplessly.
“Wait.” Conroy stopped beside the discarded gun. “Slowly now, bend at the knees.”
Dylan cursed inwardly. If Conroy picked up that gun, there was nothing to stop him from taking out everyone in the room. Except maybe the backup in his ankle holster.
Natalie began to bend as directed, and Conroy moved with her, keeping one arm around her front, holding her against him. The knife was in his other hand, still at her throat. His attention, however, was on the weapon.
Dylan was reaching for his second gun when he saw Natalie move. Conroy had released his grip on her to reach for the discarded weapon and she pulled away from him. But as she did so, the hand holding the knife slashed downward.
Conroy grabbed the gun and swung back toward Natalie, knocking her against the desk. Then the bullets started to fly.
It was all over in less than a minute.
It was the longest minute of Dylan’s life.
When the shooting finally stopped, he didn’t even spare a glance for Conroy’s lifeless figure spilling blood all over the gleaming hardwood floor.
He was concerned only with Natalie’s blood, and there was an awful lot of it.
Too much blood.
Her face was stark white, a startling contrast to the crimson fluid pumping out of her. He knelt beside her and quickly began to unfasten the buttons of her blouse.
“What…happened…to foreplay?” she asked, her voice weak, fading.
Dylan appreciated her attempt at humor, but he couldn’t respond in kind when she was rapidly sliding toward unconsciousness. He peeled the soaked garment away to assess the damage.
The gash was nasty, across her shoulder and down her arm. Long and deep and still bleeding profusely.
“Am I…going…to die?” Her eyes were closed now, her head tipped back against the desk.
He took the towel Sandra Todd passed to him and pressed against the wound. “Not on my watch,” he promised.
She nodded, apparently accepting his word. “Good.” She swallowed. “What about…Conroy?”
“Dead,” he said flatly.
But Natalie had lost consciousness.
She was sleeping when he stepped into the room, but Dylan didn’t mind. He just wanted to sit with her for a while, until it was time to go to the airport. He wanted to hold her hand, to prove to himself that she was really going to be all right.
She had sixty-three stitches down her arm and a mild concussion from when she’d fallen against the desk, but the doctor had promised she’d make a complete recovery. Dylan pulled a plastic chair closer to her bed. The purplish bruise on the side of her face looked even more livid against the paleness of her skin. He brushed her hair gently away from her face, careful not to touch the tender skin, and noted that his hand was trembling. Hell, his whole body was trembling.
Her eyelids fluttered, opened. He watched as they tried to focus through the haze of drugs she’d been given, knew the moment reality—and panic—set in. “Jack?”
Relief flooded through him in a tidal wave. He curled his fingers around hers, careful to avoid the IV in the back of her hand. “He’s fine.”
“How do you know?”
“I talked to him myself just a little while ago.”
She closed her eyes again, exhaling an audible sigh of relief. “When I found out Conroy knew he was in Florida…”
“Don’t think about it,” he said. “Just concentrate on healing yourself so you can get out of here and Jack can come home.”
Her lips curved slightly, but she didn’t respond.
It hurt to see her like this, so worn out—physically and emotionally—and know that he was responsible. “I’m sorry.”
Her eyes opened again. “For what?”
“For charging into the house and putting you in danger.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she said.
But he knew that it was. He’d acted rashly and irrationally, and she’d almost paid for his mistake with her life. “I wasn’t thinking clearly,” he admitted. “I saw you in there and—”
Natalie frowned. “How did you see me in there?”
“The FBI had wired Todd’s house.”
“FBI?”
She reached for the glass of water beside her bed. Dylan picked it up, held the straw to her lips.
“It’s a long story. I’ll tell it to you some other time.”
“I couldn’t believe it when you offered to let Conroy go,” she admitted. “But it makes sense now.”
“What makes sense?”
“You knew he wouldn’t get away. You knew the FBI would nab him as soon as he walked out the door.”
“I would have made the offer anyway. I would have let him go even if there had been no one outside.”
“Why?”
“Because of you.” He took her hand again. “Because nothing matters to me as much as you.”
She didn’t say anything. He read the wariness in her eyes and knew he couldn’t blame her for being skeptical.
“I never should have forced you to choose between me and your job,” he admitted. “I should have trusted you to do what needed to be done.”
“I found the ledgers,” she said, as if only now remembering the fact.
Dylan nodded. “The FBI has them, and a ton of evidence they’ll never have to use against Zane Conroy.”
“What about Roger Merrick?” she asked. “Did you find out who killed him?”
“Ellis Todd.”
Natalie frowned. Her head was still spinning from the aftereffects of the concussion and she was having trouble focusing on the details.
“I thought he’d been set up.” She’d been convinced of it, argued with Dylan about it.
“And you were right—sort of. Todd was set up, but only after committing the crime. Conroy made him do it, promised to get rid of the evidence, then planted it so it would be found.”
She still couldn’t believe it. “Ellis Todd really shot Roger Merrick?”
“He gave a full written confession, and the murder itself is on tape. One of Conroy’s usual hired guns was there with him, giving instructions, taking the pictures. Todd cried like a baby when he pulled the trigger, but he did it.”
“Why?” It was the unanswered question that had bothered her from the beginning.
“Because Conroy had paid off a doctor to make Todd believe his son was still ill, that he’d need another bone
marrow transplant.”
“And if Todd didn’t do exactly what Conroy said, Conroy wouldn’t give his bone marrow,” she guessed.
Dylan nodded.
She closed her eyes, able to imagine all too clearly the dilemma Todd had faced—the impossible choice he’d been forced to make. “Who killed Conroy?” she asked at last.
“The ME hasn’t determined that yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were three different kinds of bullets in Conroy’s body,” he told her. “Sandra Todd’s, Kelly’s and mine.”
It was a fitting end for Conroy, she thought. More important, it was an end. “So it’s finally over?”
He nodded again. “I’m glad for that.”
“For Beth,” she said softly.
She could understand his feelings—he and Beth had been husband and wife, and the way he’d lost her wasn’t something she could expect him to ever get over. She knew what it was like to have loved and lost. She’d loved Dylan, and she’d lost him. If it hadn’t been their opposition on this case, it would have been something else. Because no matter how much she loved him, he was still in love with his wife. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—compete with that.
“Yes,” he agreed, then squeezed her hand gently. “And for us.”
Natalie’s heart stuttered.
Us.
What did that mean?
She didn’t dare speculate; she couldn’t let herself hope. Because if she was wrong, her heart would break all over again.
“I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as I walked out of your office that day,” Dylan continued. “But I was too stubborn to admit it. And because of my obstinacy, I almost didn’t get a chance to tell you that nothing in the world is as important to me as being with you.”
Was she dreaming? Or was this some kind of hallucination brought on by the bump of her head? Because only in her wildest fantasies had she imagined Dylan saying such things to her, and the last of those illusions had shattered into a billion pieces when he’d walked out of her office after his ultimatum.
But she wouldn’t think about that now. Now he was here, and if this was a dream, she didn’t want it to end. She smiled and let her eyes drift shut again.
Natalie slept restlessly through the night and awoke in the morning anxious to go home. After a bland breakfast and a cup of stale coffee, she sat staring out the window, impatiently waiting for the doctor to come and sign her release. After what seemed like an eternity, there was a knock on the door.
She glanced up expecting to see the doctor—and found Jack instead.
Her emotions, already raw from the experiences of the past few days, simply overwhelmed her. Surprise. Relief. Gratitude. Love. She didn’t know how or why he was here—she was only glad he was.
“Mom? Are you all right? Did you really get a hundred stitches?” Jack’s eyes were huge—wide with a mixture of fear and excitement and pride as he ventured cautiously into the room.
Somehow she managed to laugh through her tears. “I don’t think it was quite that many.”
“Dylan said I had to be really careful with you ’cause you’re hurt.”
Dylan?
Bits and pieces of what she thought was a dream filtered back into her consciousness. Dylan sitting by her bed, concern in his eyes, tenderness in his touch. She forced her attention back to her son.
“I have a concussion.” She pointed to the bump on her head. “And my arm—” hurts like hell “—is sore, but I’m okay.”
Jack climbed carefully onto the edge of the mattress, leaned over to kiss her cheek. “I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. But I’ll bet you had lots of fun at the beach with Aunt Shannon and Grandma.”
“It was okay.”
“Just okay?”
“Next time I want you to come. And I wanna go to Disney World.”
“Next time we’ll go to Disney World.” And soon, she promised herself. She wasn’t going to take anything for granted anymore.
“Maybe Dylan could come, too.”
Natalie’s heart sighed with longing. Yeah, she’d like that, too, but she had no idea what—if anything—the future held for her and Dylan. She still didn’t even know if her shadowy memories of a late-night visit were real or just a figment of her imagination. “I don’t know about that, Jack.”
He was silent for a long moment before finally saying, “He cried, you know.”
She pushed herself higher on the bed. “Who cried?”
“Dylan.”
“Oh.”
“When he told me what happened to you, he got tears in his eyes. He didn’t bawl or anything like that, but I know he was crying.”
She didn’t know what to make of this revelation, or the fact that while Dylan had gone to the trouble of bringing her son home, his own absence was conspicuous.
“I think he really likes you, Mom.”
She tried to smile. “I like him, too.”
“Enough to marry him?” a deeper voice asked from the doorway.
Natalie’s breath hitched again. When she looked up and saw him standing there, her pulse leaped and her heart hammered furiously against her ribs.
Dylan stepped into the room. “Jack said that you don’t wear much jewelry, but you might wear a ring if I gave it to you.”
Her chest tightened. “Jack said that?”
She glanced at her son, who was grinning and nodding vigorously.
“I looked at a lot of diamonds,” Dylan told her, “but nothing about out relationship has been traditional.” He took a velvet jeweler’s box out of his pocket and opened the lid.
Natalie gasped. The square-cut emerald was flanked by baguette diamonds and set on a twisted gold band. It was the most incredible, and most unusual, ring she’d ever seen.
“What do you think?”
“It’s…beautiful.”
“Does that mean you’re gonna get married?” Jack asked.
Dylan picked up her left hand, raised it to his lips and kissed the third finger. “For four years I went through the motions of living. I convinced myself I was searching for justice. Then you came into my life and I knew that what I’d really been searching for was you.”
Her eyes filled with tears at the heartfelt emotion in his words.
“I want to marry you, Natalie, to be with you every day for the rest of our lives. I’m hoping that will be the next seventy years or so, but I know there are no guarantees and so I will treasure every single minute that we have together.”
She had to swallow around the lump in her throat. “That’s quite a proposal.”
“But?”
“But you’re forgetting something.”
He shook his head, smiling. “Do you think I would have made it this far if I hadn’t already admitted, at least to myself, that I was head over heels in love with you?”
She released a breath she hadn’t even realized she was holding. “Tell me again, and not in the form of a question.”
“I love you, Natalie Vaughn. I love you and I love your son and I want us to be a family. I’ve already asked Jack, and he seems to be okay with the idea. So we’re just waiting for you. Say yes, Natalie.”
“Say yes, Mom.”
Natalie smiled. “Yes.”
Finally Dylan kissed her. It was a kiss filled with passion and promise and endless possibilities.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7354-6
BULLETPROOF HEARTS
Copyright © 2004 by Brenda Harlen
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