“There are those baby blues that torture my dreams.” He offered her a teasing wink.
Ever since she’d told him she only wanted to be friends, he’d cranked up the charm.We’re talking a magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale.The kind of charm that shook the ground beneath her feet until her knees felt as sturdy as jellyfish tentacles.
She acted like it annoyed her, but the truth was she secretly loved it.What hetero womanwouldn’twant that kind of laser-focused attention?
Although loving it felt masochistic since she couldn’t take him up on what his flirtation offered.
Once bitten, twice shy, baby.
“The part of hovercraft doesn’t suit you, Wolf.” Whoa. Was that her voice? It sounded like she’d been eating beach towels for dinner.
Dinner…
The warehouse.
Winston!
It all came back to her in a blinding flash. The truck. The men. The shooting. The blood. “Winston!” She bolted upright.
The sudden move brought a sharp pain to her shoulder that made her vision crackle around the edges and coated her tongue with a metallic taste.
She hadn’t realized she’d cried out until Wolf gently pressed her back into the mattress. Dragging in a shuddering breath, she nearly gagged at the combined scents of marina water, iodine, and blood. She realized she was smelling herself.
“I’ve reached the highest levels of krav maga,” Wolf said quietly. “I’m rated in every weapon that holds an edge or shoots a projectile. And I’ve done combat tours on just about every continent on the planet. But I’ve never found a way to handle a woman’s tears. So, darlin’, I’m askin’ you to do me a favor and stay still so you don’t hurt yourself.”
Slowly, without opening her eyes, she took a mental inventory of her body. Her left shoulder had a thick bandage taped across it, and her arm was secured in a sling.
Her memory came in fits and starts. There were vague images of a paramedic with a red ponytail bending over her. The harsh sound of a siren as she rode in the back of an ambulance. The bright lights of the emergency room.
The prick of a needle.
The hot rush of anesthesia.
The welcome embrace of darkness.
“The bullet missed anything vital,” Wolf’s assured her. “But you’ll be mighty sore for a week or so, I reckon.”
Her mind’s eye once more returned to the carnage inside the old warehouse. To Winston lying in a pool of his own blood.
Sore for a couple of weeks was nothing compared to being dead forever. Hewasdead, wasn’t he? Hehadto be dead.
A low, keening sounded inside her head.
No. Not inside her head. That terrible noise came from the back of her throat.
She covered her eyes with her good hand as scalding hot tears soaked her palm. She thought she heard Wolf curse long and low, but couldn’t be sure since her own sobs drowned out the world around her.
She had experienced grief plenty of times in her life. When her dog Charlie got hit by a speeding scooter. When Doug left. The year her mother got sick, and those first terrible, lost, lonely months after Josephine died.
She recognized this physical ache, the painful pounding at her breastbone.
Hello heartache, my old friend.
“Winston.” His name was barely a whisper, and she wasn’t sure if she said it as a prayer or in penitence.
Winston never would have gone into that stupid warehouse if it weren’t for her. If he hadn’t felt obliged to walk her to the bar because, no matter how many times she’d tried to tell him she didn’t need an escort, he hated for her to be out on her own after dark.
Oh, god! Winston’s dead! The little boy who’d taught her to ride a bike, the teenager who’d given her a bouquet of flowers on her twelfth birthday, the man who’d held her hand as she stood over her mother’s grave.
