An Eye for Danger (28 page)

Whatever had been holding me upright let go. But as soon as I sat down on the chair, Sam drew me up and escorted me to the bathroom. He flipped on bright wall sconces, and mouthed 'fuck' to the mirror as his fingers traced blood streaks that had soaked through his sweatshirt onto his skin.

I tried not to envision the violence that left such stains. Still, my throat burned with the sensation of suffocating, and my ears pounded with Troy's voice as he choked me.
Fucking little whore. You'll pay. Then Sam.

"Hop up." Sam patted the marble countertop and I startled. "Need to check for open wounds."

I couldn't recall being sliced, let alone Troy having a knife. Just cold cement, cold eyes.

"Hey, wake up." Sam was patting my thigh. "Did he cut you? Any blood anywhere. No, don't speak, just show me."

My head shook no, yet my bloody fingers rose to affirm Sam's theory. Clawing into Troy had felt like digging into wet wax, the pressure building under my nails as his tissue took up more space.

Sam flashed a wry smile. "That's my girl. A fighter."

He exited, made a clatter in the kitchen, and returned with an ice pack, paper sacks, and sandwich baggies. Pulling open every drawer, he found nail clippers. "Like this," he said, holding my pinky and clipping the nail so it dropped in the baggie.

I nodded and set to work, while Sam unloaded his phone, keys, and quarters onto the marble in loud bursts that nearly jolted me off the counter.

"Swelling's gonna hurt for a couple days," he said, setting the ice pack to my throat, "but I don't want you to take pain meds. Need you to stay alert."

Alert, as in awake for an ambush. He'd told me we were safe, but that was never the whole truth in Sam's world. Troy had ambushed me. Stone had ambushed me. Even Sam.

"Whoa." Sam snatched the clippers from my hand as I started slicing into skin. "Jules, you can't— Damn it." He turned my fingers, examining them. "No open wounds, understand?"

My shoulders sank. I didn't understand a thing. Not the midnight nail job, not why I'd been attacked, not why they'd killed Raul, not what we were doing to ensure our safety by hiding in the Buckleys' bathroom.

"Jules," he snapped. Sam had been talking, but I hadn't registered a word. "You're drifting. Look at me. Focus. You're in shock. You're going to be fine, but you gotta breathe, baby."

His thumb rubbed the back of my hand as I took in deeper and deeper breaths.

"Better. Just that wall hitting you again. Remember?"

I nodded, but we both knew this wasn't a wall hitting. This was a goddamn skyscraper collapsing on me. Sam had to finish cutting my nails, and I felt like I was eight again, when Mom asked me to make the lemonade and I'd spilt sugar everywhere and Dad yelled at her for trusting me. Now Sam, too, could see I was a mess, a liability. I wanted to be useful, not incompetent; sturdy, not rickety. Yet I felt myself shutting down, pulling away from him, pulling away from me. A boat adrift. And I couldn't reel myself back.

Sam rested his forehead to mine. "Please, don't go away from me, baby."

"I'm not crazy," I whispered.

"No. No, you're not." He laughed and pulled back, brushing hair out of my eyes. "Sanest girl I know. Careless, but sane as dirt. And very, very brave."

Hell, this didn't feel like bravery. This felt like a drunken stupor I couldn't snap out of. Even tears wouldn't come.

Sam kissed my forehead, which stung so I pulled away. Sam frowned as he examined the swelling down the side of my face. Troy's slap had felt more fisted than flat-handed, and I expected a black eye to prove it.

He pulled his weapon. "We need to shower, get the blood off. I have to go first. You can stay here or with Max."

I leaned away from the door.

"I agree." He locked the door. "Max will alert if there's trouble."

Suddenly, Sam was in his boxer briefs, his musky, salty scent hovering near me, his forceful body glistening with sweat and blood, reminding me he'd just run a marathon and fought a savage to save my life.

"Take off your clothes." He reached, and I clutched my trench coat. "I gotta take them for evidence, baby. They're covered with blood. Understand? They're contaminated."

Contaminated?
I was so stiff with cold, he had to pry my arms from the coat, my last defense. Then went my sweater, my shoes, my pants—all contaminated. Sam shoved them into a sack, leaving me in my undergarments.
Had Sam kissed the blood into me?
I remembered the metallic taste of biting into Troy on my own, the warmth of his blood oozing down my chin. Max must have licked it off my face. All contaminated. My head pounded the message home.

"My head's killing me." When my fingers grazed the back of my skull, my scalp twinged with needlelike pain. I pulled wet fingers from my sticky hair, recalled how Troy had bounced me like a basketball off the wood siding. "He has a mean slam dunk."

The tendons in Sam's throat snapped wire-tight. He grabbed my hand and held it to the light to see my skin tinged with fresh blood. "Turn around." Sam examined the back of my head at length. "Cut's small. But if you have a concussion... Shit. Look up." He tilted my chin toward the lights, held his hand over my left eye then the right, testing dilation response times. "Good. Now follow my finger. Again." Up, down, left, right.

"Enough." I pushed away his hand.

Sam ducked under the cabinet and came up with a bottle of ibuprofen. "One at a time or you'll choke," he said.

"Thought you didn't want me to take anything."

"Yeah, well, now we need to keep the swelling down."

They were such little pills, I thought, drinking water straight from the faucet. But the pill hit the back of my throat like a bowling ball. I coughed, and it ricocheted off the mirror.

"Christ." Sam held his arm up as a shield. "Trying to kill me?"

But I wasn't laughing with him. Every cough felt like razors stripping the back of my throat, shredding the delicate tissue, so the next swallow felt like acid on raw flesh. When the spasms relented, I mashed the remaining pill with water and drank the bitter tonic slowly.

By then Sam had cranked the shower and the room sweltered with steam. He wrapped a towel over my shoulders, then stepped behind the curtain.

Alone, I sat on the counter, trying to warm myself under the hot lights. Despite the room's heat, a chill sank to my bones. An icy, deepening fear that we'd never make it out of this building alive. Against the mirror I curled, my chin quivering against my knees, my thoughts jagged with memories of soldiers and gunfire and being choked exploding like flashbulbs in my eyes. I wanted Sam's arms around my body to anchor me.

Sam's gun sat on the counter, aimed at the door, within reach if trouble hit.
Alert?
Hell, if anything happened, I couldn't move. I was an iceberg.

Sam secured a towel around his hips. "Your turn, baby." He rubbed my leg then stopped. "Jesus, you're freezing." He set his cheek to mine, felt my forehead and grimaced. "C'mon, let's go."

With Sam holding my arm, I reached a foot for the floor, but my mind's command to walk and my body's willingness to obey had long vanished, so I stumbled onto spongy legs.

"I got you," he said, scooping up my body before I hit the floor.

"I'm, I'm okay. Let me walk."

Without comment, Sam lifted me and carried me into the shower.

"I said I'm good. Let go of me." But my protest didn't detour him from dunking me under the spray, which rained acid onto my frozen skin. "Damn it, Sam."

He squeezed a shampoo bottle with a violent hiss over my head.

"Stop it." I choked and spat soap from my mouth as he worked lather into my hair, avoiding the wound at the back of my head by millimeters. "I don't need babying."

"Now you know how I felt." The towel at his waist soon soaked through but held, while I stood in my underwear, feeling as ridiculous as my dog getting shampooed at the groomers.

"Don't worry, you can hate me later." Sam pecked me on the lips.

I blew water into the bastard's face. "I've hated you since the day we met."

"There's my rock." He laughed and kept scrubbing.

CHAPTER 19

"We should be planning or preparing or doing something." I stood in the center of the candlelit living room, wrapped in Mrs. Buckley's cream silk robe, unsure whether to avoid the door or the window or the kitchen or the living room.

"
We
need to recover our energy and sit tight." Sam had reclined in a broad leather armchair in front of the fire, facing the doorway like a sentry, his Glock on the armrest. He wore clean blue jeans, which stretched tight as his legs kicked out, and his chest displayed fresh black marks where Troy's fist nearly drove a hole through his right lung.

A glance at me, then he continued leaning on his wrapped fist, steeped in thought. A warrior's body. A thinking man's pose.

Max reared his head, yawned, and dropped back into sleep on his bed, not a care in the world.

"I can't just wait around for the next attack, Sam." I sidled up to Sam's chair. He'd washed Troy's blood off my skin but couldn't scrub the thorns from my nerves.

Stretching his long arms, Sam cupped the back of my thighs and drew me into his lap. His touch released the taut chords holding me up, and I curled against his warm chest, careful of his bruises, grateful for his tenderness. He pulled a fuzzy throw from the back of the chair and tucked it around my torso.

"Who needs a blanket when you're a furnace." I burrowed deeper into his arms. "We should plug you into the grid."

"We handle stress differently. I burn it off." He raked back my wet hair with his fingers and smiled despite the contusions down the side of my face. "Looks like you're feeling better."

"Painkillers worked wonders on my head. Can't say the same for the bruising." I closed my eyes, but Sam jarred me.

"Hey. Need you to stay awake, baby. Until I'm positive you don't have a concussion." Stretching his long arm, he grabbed one of two mugs off the coffee table. "Drink. Slowly."

"Better be rotgut." Cautious, I sipped the milky, lukewarm coffee, which went down smoother than I'd expected considering my raw throat.

Max arched onto his back over his dog bed, legs splayed, and snored like a foghorn, exhausted after a night of hunting wild beast. Sam had hand-fed him a hamburger dinner as a reward, while I finished my shower, washed my linens, dried my undies with the hair dryer, and generally got my head together. Playing house seemed a strange way to be on the run, but the normalcy helped bring me closer to earth. Each moment of repose in Sam's arms, my breathing slowed a second more, my muscles twisted a millimeter less, my body warmed a degree higher.

"You clean up good for a thug." I fingered the line of Sam's clean-shaved jaw.

"Getting to be a habit around you."

My fingers spread over Sam's collar bone and slid down the curve of his pec, outlining the scalloped muscles that had fought for me.

With a sharp intake of breath, he stopped my hand from sliding further. "Keep that up, and we won't be sleeping at all tonight."

I withdrew my fingers. The idea of getting romantic after nearly getting murdered made my head spin. Yet almost losing Sam made me want to cling to him, body and soul. And I refused to be the needy type.

"Tell you a secret," said Sam, nuzzling my cheek. "Watched you at your apartment that first day. That wall hit you pretty hard then, too, but you tried to blaze through it. I wanted to pull you in my arms like this, whisper that you were safe." He chuckled. "Then I realized you'd kill me if I tried. But you're not the killing type. Thought everyone had a killer in them. Everyone but you, it seems."

"Why are we here, Sam?" I asked, desperate to change the subject. "Of all places."

"Because I want you, and I think you want me." Firelight flickered over the grooves of his cursed smile. "That or I met a very sexy stranger in the bistro bathroom."

"Seriously." I thumped his shoulder lightly.

"Seriously. This is the only safe house we've got till I can relocate us."

I sat up. "Wait, you've been in this apartment before." When he tucked his chin, I knew. "The whole time? Jesus, Sam."

 So he'd camped here since the day he left my apartment, hovering over my life, diving into my dreams. Somehow, I'd known.

"Hey, you gave me the idea. Ow," he said when I thumped his shoulder harder.

"I don't condone breaking and entering."

"No, just harboring fugitives." He jostled me till my scowl softened. "Just think, we were neighbors."

"That doesn't make it right."

"Us, or the apartment?" Taking my hand, he brushed my fingers with his lips, alluring me with eyes I could sink into. Lose myself.

"I should pack clothes and supplies if we're leaving." When I shifted, Sam gripped my shoulder.

"You can't go to your apartment."

"Well I can't walk around naked."

He paused and his brows rose with the idea.

I started to smack him again, but he caught my fist, laughing.

"Look, we think Troy acted alone," he said, "but we can't be sure. Someone tipped him off. They could be listening, waiting for us to surface. And I can't take that risk. Not again."

"The assignment, the rabbit. I get it." I rolled my eyes.

"No, you don't. You don't get it at all." My body tensed as Sam's fingers dug into my hand. Seeing his mistake, he released my hand. "Shit."

I eased off his lap. "Sometimes I don't know where the cop ends and Sam begins."

He brought his bandaged hand to his forehead, hiding his eyes. "Can't answer that for you. Hardly know myself anymore."

Shame didn't look any better on Sam than it felt in me. How could I hate this man? No matter how crazy or tense he made me, he'd risked his life to save mine more than once. Worse, he'd do it again.

I was about to let him off the hook when his cell phone buzzed. I almost threw the damn thing out the window.

Sam sucked in air and answered with an irritated "Yeah." So I turned my back to him, the binoculars, the window review, the whole secret agent routine.