“Look, lady,” the driver cut in as he glared into the rearview, “you’re gettin’ out at the hospital. I ain’t goin’ this way because I wanna. What ya do once ya there, I don’t give a crap, but that’s where ya road ends.”
On that note, there wasn’t any more conversation. Then again, they didn’t have much farther to go. St. Francis Hospital appeared on the right, its blocky building surrounded by a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree parking lot. The ER was around to the far side, and Not-Danny DeVito cut off a station wagon to get onto the lane that went right up to its covered entrance.
“Now get outta my car,” he said as he hit the brakes.
Anne opened her mouth to argue, but not with him. Her problem was with her fellow backseater. Here was not the place, however—not that any debate was going to go much better out on the curb, but at least she could hope for a less hostile peanut gallery there.
Reaching for the door handle, she popped the thing and extended a bare foot. With a frown, she tried to remember…
“I’m missing a shoe.”
“Let’s just get you looked at.” The man next to her opened his side. “We’ll worry about shoes afterward.”
Before she could think of a response, he was standing in front of her and offering his hand. When she merely stared at his palm, the driver chimed in.
“Jesus, just get outta my car. Let him help ya already.”
“I don’t need to be here,” she muttered as she grabbed ahold of what was being put forward.
Anne was pulled out gently—and as she wobbled and fought another tide of pain, she thought, wow, the man was tall. And then, as he bent down to give some money to the grumbling Samaritan, she couldn’t stop her eyes from a quick review of his body.
Which pretty much proved there was no brain damage, right? If she was busy checking out the attributes of a perfect stranger, she had to be—
Okay. Well. The bottom half of him was just as good as the upper half, his thighs stretching the fabric of his black pants, his posterior region filling out the seat of those—
Anne snapped back to attention as the car she’d been rescued in took off with a squeal of rubber.
“I’m just going to get a taxi now,” she said as the man turned to her. “A real one, that is.”
“I thought you had no money.”
“At home, I have an emergency twenty tucked into my mother’s Fannie Farmer Cookbook.”
He blinked. Like he’d never heard of such a thing. Or maybe cookbooks in general.
Hard to imagine the confusion was about currency.
“Come on.” The man squeezed her hand and tucked her arm through his. “This won’t take any time at all—”
“It’s an emergency room. We’re going to be here forever. And I don’t—”
He looked into her eyes so deeply that everything stopped for her, including whatever argument she’d been making. As well as her lungs. And definitely her heart.
“Twenty minutes ago,” he said, “I had to pick you up from the middle of the road and put you in that backseat. I bet you don’t remember much of the trip here, and yes, I realize you don’t want me to pay for anything, but I cannot live with myself if I’ve left you on the side of the road to die.”
“You didn’t leave me and I’m not dying.”
“If I don’t get you through those revolving doors and into the hands of a doctor, you’re just going to go home. So it’s constructive abandonment.”
“I won’t go home, I promise.”
“You’re not a good liar.”
“Yes, I am.” As his left eyebrow arched, she cursed. “I mean, I’m not lying.”
“So where else will you find a doctor this time of night.”
As a long, tense moment gouged in between them, Anne was vaguely aware of people coming out of the ER’s entrance. Going in the entrance. Coming out. Going in. Like the universe was on his side and trying to provide her with a visual demonstration of how the place worked.
“Please.” His eyes roamed her face, and she wondered what he saw. “You need to do this for my peace of mind, okay?”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“That’s not how common decency works. Let’s just make sure nothing is broken and then we’ll go our separate ways. You’ll never have to see me again.”
Now why would that strike her as a loss, she wondered. He was a perfect stranger—
“Whoa! I got you,” he blurted.
“What—”
And that was when the world went around in circles, the concrete underfoot turning into decking on a boat in high seas.
As Anne weaved on her feet, strong arms shot around her, and she was back where she started, once again up on the solid wall of a chest that made her feel safe.
Even though she didn’t know this man from a hole in the wall.
Maybe she had been knocked senseless, after all.
“I’ve got you,” he said softly. “You can trust me.”
CHAPTER THREE
As Darius waited on the far side of a screen of privacy draping, he pulled at his jacket to make sure his autoloaders weren’t showing. Then he glanced around on a reflex that had developed over centuries of fighting. This part of the ER’s treatment area had a dozen or so examination bays, each station separated by these bolts of dull green curtains that were closed if the bed was occupied. The center aisle created by the layout was a highway for gurneys, medical staff, and equipment, and there were all kinds of patients and family members floating around the periphery.
Nothing threatening, anywhere, and no one paying much attention to him. He was just another kibitzer.
Things had to stay like that—
“Okay, you can come back in.”
Ducking through the drapes, he made sure that the part in the fall closed properly in his wake, and he found himself bracing his shoulders as he looked up.
Patricia Anne Wurster, or Anne, as she’d introduced herself, was back on the bed, but the thing had been jacked forward to a ninety-degree angle, so it was as if she were sitting up. She looked… well, like she’d been hit by a car. Her long, dark hair was tangled. There were bruises on her face and a nasty scrape over her left eye. And one arm was raw like it had been worked over with sandpaper.
God, he could have killed her.
Trying to forget all the might-have-happened’s, he glanced at her change of clothing. The blue-and-pink hospital gown she was now wearing dwarfed her, the collar hanging loose around the base of her throat, the sleeves billowing. Blankets had been pulled up to her waist, and she worried their hems with pale, blunt-nailed hands.
He thought of her lying in the middle of that road. Then he remembered when she’d come to in the back of that car. And finally he concluded… not for the first time… that she was captivating in a way that had nothing to do with being beautiful, and everything to do with being her.
Which, of course, didn’t make a lot of sense. But what part of this evening had anything to do with logic?
“I don’t know how we got this room so fast.” She tugged the thin covers higher. “Guess we hit things at just the right time.”