by Beverly Bird
“Hey, man, what’s this about? I didn’t do nothing. I been sleeping since I got home at six.”
“This isn’t about you,” Jake growled. The cop in him wondered what might have prompted Jimmy Su’s remark, but he had no time for it now. “Tell me about the guest in room 19 at the Shady Day.”
“What’d she do?”
“Tell me.”
“Not much to tell, man. I hardly ever see her. She like turns up once a week and just stays for a coupla hours. Then she goes again. Pays good, though. She’s had the room for like three weeks.”
Since Sam and Cait had been rescued and Hines was put away, Jake thought. “What’s she look like?”
“Kinda skinny, if you ask me. Short hair. Kinda brown. I don’t remember too much else.”
“If someone brings you a picture this afternoon, think you can ID her even if her hair looks different?”
“Maybe. Probably.”
“Okay, then. When a police officer knocks on your door later, don’t run and don’t shoot.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.” Jake hung up the phone. He looked at Tabitha. “Well?”
“No one’s home,” she said. “Not at Sam’s place or at Cait’s. I had to call the hospital to get Sam’s number, so I’m having them check to see if they’re around. Maybe there was an emergency and Sam got called in.”
“Good thinking.”
“Deena Hines,” Tabitha breathed. “I don’t believe it.”
“We don’t have anything concrete yet,” Jake cautioned her. “But I don’t like the looks of this at all.”
“Nobody’s seen Deena in Mission Creek, have they?”
“No, but I think Deena had long hair. Maybe she cut it all off and colored it. Maybe she wears a wig. We’ll know if this Jimmy Su can identify a picture. She’s just been using this place as a red herring, letting everyone believe she left the area. Why go to all that trouble unless she’s been in Mission Creek all along, up to no good?”
“I don’t know,” Tabitha said helplessly.
“We’re about to find out. Let’s go.”
Cait ducked around the counter and paused there. “Holly?”
There was no answer from the back room. Cait looked over her shoulder. Everyone in the cafeteria was staring at her. Small wonder. She plunged onward, through the door into the kitchen.
“Holly, I need to ask—” Cait broke off. “What are you doing? That’s not coffee.”
The woman’s head jerked up as she poured some white powder into the machine. Her eyes glinted, and a feeling of horror sped clear to Cait’s soul.
Something was wrong here. Something was very wrong.
Cait cleared her throat. “How did you know?” she asked hoarsely. “About my baby?”
Holly didn’t answer. She gave a howl of frustration and grabbed for something on the counter where she was working. Cait couldn’t see what it was. It was hidden behind another bag of coffee. Then Holly lifted it and Cait felt her legs start to fold.
It was a gun.
She shook her head helplessly. “I…I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re stupid!” Holly screeched. “Why did you have to come back here?”
Cait was lost. “Back where?”
“To the kitchen. Damn it, this changes everything!” The gun in her hand wobbled. “From the very beginning, you’ve messed with everything!”
Cait looked from the gun to the white powder again. “What are you doing with that? What is it?”
“It would have taken out this whole stupid hospital and all you perfect people in it!”
Holly’s gaze swung wildly about. That terrified Cait most of all. Then some of the mist of confusion in her brain cleared. And she had one sharp thought that turned her limbs to stone.
Her baby. If this woman shot her, her baby would surely die.
No! She had to think. She pressed her fingers to her temples.
Holly screamed again. “Keep your hands down!”
Cait dropped them fast. “Please. You’ve got to calm down.”
“Why? Tell me one good reason why! You people ruined my whole life!”
“I don’t even know you!” Cait cried.
“Yes, you do! You do!”
“No, I—”
“Shut up! Shut up or I’ll shoot you!”
Cait shut up. And prayed.
Could anyone out in the cafeteria hear this? They’d all seen her come back here. But there was always a buzz of conversation in that room. Unless someone was specifically listening, she couldn’t be sure Holly’s shouts would be overheard.
Holly was fumbling with the powder, still trying to pour it into the coffeemaker without taking the gun away from Cait’s direction.
Cait understood what Holly planned to do. Poison everyone who drank that coffee. Then kill her because she knew.
Someone in the cafeteria would surely hear the gunshot, she thought wildly. But then it would be too late.
“Get away from that door,” Holly yelled suddenly. “I’m not going to let you run.”
Cait quickly took a step forward and to the side, keeping her back against the wall. Then she felt a knob dig into her skin between her shoulder blades. She started to look over her shoulder, but Holly waved the gun at her. “Don’t move. Just stay there. I’m almost done here. Then I’ll take care of you. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll fix this coffee, then I’ll take care of you.”
No, you won’t. Cait was shaking, but she’d realized what that knob was. It was the hospital intercom. The loudspeaker.
She had to get Holly to look away so she could turn it on. If she could turn it on and if she screamed, then everyone in the hospital would hear this, not just those in the cafeteria.
Sam. Sam was out there somewhere. Unless he’d gone outside with Gil and his family. Please, God, she prayed, don’t let him have gone outside.
Cait stared at a spot on the far wall. She did it for so long while Holly started the coffee brewing that her eyes began to go dry and hurt. She was afraid to blink, afraid that even that motion would set the woman off. She stared until her head pounded, then, finally, Holly followed her gaze.
Cait used the moment to reach behind her quickly. She twisted the knob to full volume and she screamed.
“Hey!” Holly twisted around again violently. “What are you doing?”
Cait dove for cover behind a metal food cart just as the woman brought the gun up again and fired.
Sam was just stepping back into the lobby after seeing Gil off when a scream rent the air. For a crazy moment he only frowned and looked up at the ceiling, wondering where it had come from. Then he recognized the voice.
Cait. It was the same scream he’d heard the night Tabitha and Jake had rescued them.
The sound speared through him like a laser, shattering every plan he had ever made, anything he ever thought he knew about himself. He was going to lose her. Something was horribly wrong. He would lose her this time, and nothing else would ever matter again, nothing else in the world.
He started running, then skidded to a stop just as security officers fumbled for their weapons, and personnel and visitors all started talking at once, trying to figure out what was going on. A crashing metal sound filled the air. It finally dawned on Sam that he was listening to the hospital loudspeaker.
He had no idea where Cait was, but the intercom was on there.
Someone in the main office would know. The location would be lit up on the sound system. He couldn’t wait that long. She needed him.
He remembered her telling him she wanted a cup of tea, so he ran for the cafeteria. Halfway there, more sounds filled the air. Another woman’s voice, ranting, screaming, crying.
“I hate you!”
There was no answer, no response from Cait. Sam’s heart froze, but he kept running.
“And Jake! And that bitch he’s marrying! And your cat! I hate all of you who did this!”
Sam almost stumbled a little. Jake, Tabitha and Billy the Kid? What did that odd mix have to do with anything? Then understanding hit him hard.
“You destroyed my life when Branson went to jail!” the voice howled. “Look at me! Look at me! With some stupid, minimum-wage job while you all live your perfect little lives, and mine and Branson’s just keep going down the toilet! And all because I couldn’t get pregnant! I’m going to kill you and your precious little baby first, then I’ll get all the others! You’ll pay for what you did! I’ll make you!”
Sam reached the cafeteria door, then he stopped, stunned. Your precious little baby?
Images fast-forwarded through his mind, faster and faster, but all as clear and concise as if they were actually playing out in front of his eyes all over again. Cait in that restaurant, declaring that she didn’t drink anymore. Cait digging into food as though she’d just come off a hunger strike. Cait shrugging off his concerns about protection when they’d made love. Cait insisting that she needed a weekday off to do “errands.”
She’d never told him. He was going to kill her as soon as he saved her.
But first he was going to take apart the crazy woman who thought she was going to rob him of the woman he loved and their unborn child. Sam ran again. This time, unlike the ordeal when they were abducted, there was no semblance of sanity in his mind.
No one stopped him. He shoved people aside and went in the direction they were staring, the cafeteria counter. He pushed past them and ran into the kitchen at the back.
He had a split second—a heartbeat—to take in the scene. Cait was on the floor behind some sort of wheeled cart, moving it back and forth to keep it between her and the cafeteria worker who’d been so chatty with him earlier in the week. Holly somebody or other. But he knew now that her name wasn’t Holly.
He made a roaring sound and went after her. She looked his way sharply and brought the gun away from Cait’s cart. Then she fired.
The report was deafening. Sam never felt a thing. He lunged forward and tackled Deena Hines.
The woman crumpled and went down under his weight. She made a sound like all the demons in hell being spewed out from her throat. He rolled with her and found her hair in his hand.
A wig. He threw it aside.
She beat at him with her fists, fumbling, ineffectual blows. “I stayed here to make you all pay!” she sobbed.
Sam gritted his teeth and fought to restrain her. “Yeah, we all caught that part.”
“I was going to make you fall in love with me.”
That startled him so much he almost lost his grip on her. “Too late. I’m already in love with someone else.”
“If you had loved me, you would have given me a life. It would have been even better than with Branson.”
He was finally able to pin her hands to the floor. “Cait, call the police!”
“Who do you love?” Cait croaked.
“You. Now call the police!”
“I love you, too.”
He felt himself grinning even with the writhing woman beneath him. “Glad to hear it. Now get someone to take this woman off my hands so I can yell at you for not telling me you were pregnant.” Deena brought her knee up. Sam swore and evaded it. “Now!” He heard Cait run.
“You live because she lives,” Sam told her. “It’s as simple as that. Why did you go after Cait, damn it?” He shook her a little. “Why Cait?”
The woman twisted her head back and forth. “She was just one of you. Then I found out about the baby. I saw…I saw the pregnancy test in her trash.”
She was the one who’d broken in. For the first time Sam noticed the long scratch down her forearm. So Billy had made her pay for it.
“Then I thought if she was crazy enough, I could get the baby and it would be mine.”
Everything inside Sam tightened. It took all his control not to hurt her. “Over my dead body.”
“I would have had a baby! It didn’t matter if I couldn’t have you! We’d get Branson out of jail and we’d be a family! That’s what I told him on the phone when I taped his voice!”
Sam remembered that the woman’s inability to conceive was what had finally pushed Hines over the edge, aiming his fury at the hospital and its new maternity wing.
The woman was deranged, Sam thought just as he heard another voice shout behind him. He eased aside a little as a pair of female hands reached past him for Deena Hines. He looked up and recognized Molly Gates from previous encounters with her at the hospital.
“Jake just called me to be on the lookout for her,” the detective said, twisting the woman’s wrists together to throw handcuffs on her. “But I didn’t think it would be this easy to find her.”
When Deena was contained, Sam sat up. “Where’s Cait?” he asked hoarsely.
“You mean the heroine of the hour?” She grinned. “Holding court out there in the cafeteria.”
Sam stood and went that way on unsteady legs.
He found her at a table, encircled by a crowd. Sam pushed through them. “Excuse me. I need a moment with Super Mom here.”
Her eyes, stricken and swimming, flew to his. “I’m sorry.”
He hunkered down in front of her. “Just out of curiosity, when were you going to tell me?”
“Today.” Her voice was a wretched whisper, and she felt as if she couldn’t breathe.
She watched as he appeared to think about that, then nod. “Okay,” he said, “here’s the thing. I’m done trying to prove that I’m not the kind of man who won’t make you crazy.”
Cait’s heart turned to stone. He was dumping her.
“It didn’t work, anyway, and I’m not giving up Houdini. All I can give you is my love and a vow that I’ll always take care of you and this baby, even if occasionally it’s by some unorthodox means.”
She felt her eyes widen. “What are you saying?” she breathed.
“I’m asking you to marry me.” He looked affronted that she hadn’t understood that.
Cait shook her head fast and hard. “No.”
“No? I love you, and you said you loved me!”
“I do. I know. It’s just…” How could she say it? “You’ll get bored. I won’t do that to you.”
He stared at her for a moment, then to her amazement he laughed. “Not likely.”
“You said—”
“I know what I said. I got bored with Nancy. But it finally dawned on me when we were watching my parents last night that if I never gave my best to Nancy, if I couldn’t sustain things with Nancy, it was actually because I never had what they have. I never really loved her.” He paused. “Plus, this whole thing with Hines has sort of reshaped my priorities.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Yes? You’ll marry me?”
But Cait shook her head again. “No, I meant it reshaped mine, too. And this time when a gun was aimed at me, I did something to save myself.”
He grinned. “Too bad there were no pipes in that ceiling back in the kitchen. I never did get to see you fly through the air.”
Cait smiled shakily. Somehow she knew, without even talking to Jared, that this latest nightmare had finally and fully restored her to herself. No one could get through life without ever being a victim, without ever losing all control over things, but at least this time she had fought back.
Yes, she thought, she was restored. But she knew she would never be quite the same old Cait again. Because she had learned that her precious control was never foolproof and had only left her feeling isolated and alone.
She was also very tired of being polite and meek all the time, she decided. She reached out and grabbed Sam’s collar to pull him close.
“Yes. I’ll marry you. But that dog has to learn some manners.”
Then she kissed him. Hard. The onlookers cheered.
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to Beverly Bird for her contribution to the LONE STAR COUNTRY CLUB series.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-7221-1
DOCTOR SEDUCT
ION
Copyright © 2002 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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