Dangerous Attraction Romantic Suspense Boxed Set (257 page)

She tried to grab the railing, but she was in the wrong position. Unable to save herself, she began to tumble down.

She had tended patients who had taken a fall down a flight of stairs. They had been badly injured. Some had broken arms, legs or shoulders. One had even broken his neck, and this flight was longer than normal—therefore deadlier. Frantically she made another grab for the banister, but she was moving too fast to clutch on, and she knew she was going all the way down.

Until someone caught her in his arms. A man’s solid body broke her fall, and she knew it was Jordan, knew it was the same man who had made love to her less than an hour before.

She felt him, but she couldn’t see him. All she knew was that he had stopped her tumble down the stairs.

“Jordan.”

He didn’t answer her as she stood struggling to catch her breath and assess her condition. She was all right. He had saved her, and she knew that she had to return the favor. Right now.

Chapter Eleven

Struggling to catch her breath, she charged back up the stairs and back into Jordan’s room, wishing she had the gun that had disappeared from her suitcase. The room was still darkened, and she strained hard to see through the shadows.

A form moved by the hospital bed, and her gaze shot to it.

It was a woman, Mrs. Fahrenhold. Hannah had thought she would find Richard here, but she’d been wrong.

The nurse was standing over Jordan. She had a hypodermic in her hand… and she was reaching for the IV line. But there was no medical reason for her to be doing it. All at once, the picture came into focus, and Hannah understood what had been happening over the past few weeks. Well, maybe Jordan had been in a coma right after the accident. But then he’d started to come out of it. And when he began to get better, his nurse put him under again. Only this time, intuition told Hannah that the dosage would do more than put him back into a deeper sleep. She’d come here and changed the equation, and whoever was giving Nurse Fahrenhold her orders had decided to end the drama tonight.

“No,” she screamed, flying toward the bed.

Fahrenhold whirled, astonishment on her features as she saw who was trying to interrupt her deadly mission.

“You’re supposed to be at the bottom of the stairs,” she spat, swatting Hannah away with a powerful blow.

She landed against the small bedside table, her back crashing into the carved wood and the air whooshing out of her lungs.

As she sprawled there, stunned, Fahrenhold turned back to Jordan, raising the needle once more.

“No!” Hannah screamed again. But it was clear she couldn’t fight the woman by herself.

“Help. Help me,” she shouted, praying someone would hear her. People had been coming into the sickroom unannounced since she’d arrived. Where were they now?

Fahrenhold fixed her with a pitying look. “Don’t count on any help showing up. I made sure they’d be sleeping. And you’re not going to get a chance to talk about what happened here, because you’re going to have another accident. You went down to see where Jordan slipped on the rocks. And you’re going to do the same thing he did.”

As Hannah tried to get up, Fahrenhold pulled a gun. “Stay there.”

Hannah watched her turn back toward the IV drip, keeping the gun on Hannah as she lifted the hypodermic in her other hand.

But she had to take her attention off of Hannah to plunge the needle in. That momentary lapse, gave her an opening. Scrambling to her feet, she ducked low and launched herself at the big nurse, knocking her to the side and away from Jordan.

“You interfering little twit!” Fahrenhold swung around, trying to get the gun into firing position.

Behind her, Hannah saw Jordan move. Wide-eyed, she watched him surge off the bed and lunge at the nurse, knocking the gun from her hand.

Hannah used the opportunity to leap up. Grabbing the bedside table, she raised it high with both hands, and brought it crashing down onto the woman’s head.

She dropped, unconscious, onto the rug.

Hannah scrambled over to her and scooped up the gun. Then ran to Jordan, who was leaning against the bed.

“You saved me on the stairs. Then you woke up!” she exclaimed, taking him in her arms.

“Yeah, how about that?” He gave a short laugh, slumping heavily against her.

For long moments, they simply clung together, with her supporting him as he breathed heavily against her neck. She could feel his entire body quivering with the strain of remaining upright, and she was about to insist he lie down when a scuffling noise made Jordan straighten and tense.

She turned to see Fahrenhold staggering from the room.

Hannah started to follow her, but Jordan’s hand closed around her arm. “Let her go for now,” he ordered. “I don’t want you hurt.”

“But she was drugging you, and she tried to
kill
you! I’m sure all those nice neat reports she was writing were false. We need to call the police.”

“Yeah,” he said wearily. “Call 911.”

“I’m putting you back to bed first.”

“Well then crank up the bed so I don’t have to lie flat. I’m damn tired of that.”

She did as he asked. He was pale and looked worn out, but after she’d called the police, she checked his vital signs and was pleased to see that they were normal. Then she folded the screen that separated his hospital bed from the rest of the room to make space for the cops.

In less than ten minutes, two uniformed officers walked into the room. They were escorted by Stephanie, who looked like she’d gotten up from a deep sleep. She crossed quickly to Jordan. The younger sister, June, trailed behind them.

“Jordan! Thank God, you’re awake!” Stephanie said. “But what’s going on? Who called the police?”

Hannah stepped forward “I did.”

Stephanie shot her a quick look, before leaning over to hug her brother.

Jordan managed to raise one hand briefly to pat Stephanie’s back.

She straightened. “I’m glad you’re awake.”

“So am I.” He looked toward June.

“Yes,” she echoed.

Hannah watched the uniformed officers observing the scene. One was a middle-aged man, a little thick around the middle and balding. His partner was, perhaps, ten years younger with dark hair cut military short.

“I thought you were in a coma,” the older man said. “And the word was that you weren’t going to come out of it.”

“As you can see, the news of my death was greatly exaggerated,” Jordan answered.

“It’s great to see you’re awake.” He shifted on his feet, looking uncomfortable.

“I’m really glad to see you, too, Tommy,” Jordan said, then included the other officer in his greeting.

“So what happened here?” the older one asked.

“It’s complicated,” Jordan answered. “It looks like one of my nurses, Mrs. Fahrenhold, was drugging me. I woke up and found her trying to inject something into my IV line.” He gestured toward the hypodermic that Hannah had set on the bedside table. “Ms. Andrews, my night nurse stopped her from injecting the drug, and I’m sure when your lab analyzes it, they’ll find a barbiturate overdose.” He paused and looked around the room. “But of course, she had no reason to come up with that plan on her own. One of my relatives was paying her to do it.”

Hannah heard a collective gasp in the room and saw the other people looking at each other.

“That was after someone arranged an accident that was supposed to kill me. When that didn’t work out, they starting paying the nurse to keep me asleep.”

“Who?” the older officer asked.

“My sister, June.” He nodded toward her. “Conveniently, she’s right over there.”

June turned and started to run, but the younger officer grabbed her and kept her in place.

“Hold up a minute until we get this straightened out,” he said.

The officer named Tommy looked at Jordan. “Uh, what makes you think your sister is involved?”

“She told me. She came into my room and talked to me about it when she thought I was unconscious, and I’d never wake up. She was so pleased that she’d finally gotten the better of me.”

“That’s a lie.” June spat out. “And you can’t prove a thing.”

“You’re right,” Jordan said. “I can’t prove it. But I can ask you to leave my house and never return.”

“You bastard,” June screamed. “You always had everything. And I got nothing. It wasn’t fair.”

“You know that’s not true,” Jordan said in a calm voice.

“It is. You went to better schools. You got more money.”

“I took what I inherited and made my own money,” Jordan countered.

June tried to yank away from the police officer. “Let me go. You can’t hold me on any charges.”

Stephanie cleared her throat. “Actually, I think we can prove what Jordan’s saying.”

Chapter Twelve

Everybody turned toward Stephanie.

“How?” Jordan asked.

Stephanie’s face hardened. “I was afraid something was going on between June and that nurse. They were having whispered conversations, and they’d stop talking whenever I came around. That’s why I took to hanging out in your room,” she said to Jordan, then looked at Hannah. “I’m sorry. I thought they might have gotten you in on the plot. I think they asked the nurse who left to cooperate with them, and she quit instead.”

Hannah nodded. “I can understand why you might have thought I was involved.”

Quickly, Stephanie walked over to Jordan’s four-poster bed and opened the drawer in the lamp table beside it. Removing what Hannah recognized immediately as a handheld tape recorder, she came back toward them.

“I was afraid for you,” Stephanie said to Jordan. “So I … I bugged your room. The tape is voice activated and extremely sensitive. It picks up even the slightest sounds. So you
do
have something on June.”

“I always knew you had a good head on your shoulders.” Jordan gave her a smile. “That tape will also let us hear Fahrenhold telling Hannah that she was going to kill me and then her.”

The police took the tapes.

“I take it you can’t come down to the station house to press charges,” Tommy said.

“Not a chance,” Hannah answered.

“I think we can send the State’s Attorney to you.”

“I appreciate that.”

Amid the uproar, Hannah called Dr. Stanford, who arrived an hour later.

“Good to meet you,” Hannah said. “I wondered why you hadn’t come earlier.”

“Because June said I wasn’t needed. She said that the nurses were doing a perfectly adequate job, and there was nothing I could do anyway.”

Hannah didn’t like the way he’d caved in, but she wasn’t going to waste her breath on getting into an argument with him. Instead she watched him check Jordan over.

“Well?” Jordan asked at the end of the exam.

“You’re on your way to making a full recovery, but it will take several weeks of physical therapy before you got your muscle tone back.” He hesitated for a moment, then said, “I didn’t approve of moving you home. But your family was adamant. Particularly June.”

Jordan nodded. “I think she worked hard to persuade everyone it was the right course.”

“I got an earful downstairs about the State’s Attorney coming here. How do you get special service from the authorities?” Dr. Stanford asked.

Jordan laughed. “I’m in a regular Tuesday poker game with the cops and the firemen. If I win, I donate the money to their local charities. And If I lose, I donate anyway.”

Before he would let the doctor leave, Jordan insisted that Hannah be checked out, too. She’d already decided she was fine, but she went with Dr. Stanford into her bedroom and let him examine her so that he could assure Jordan that she’d suffered no more from Fahrenhold’s violent attentions than a couple of bruised ribs.

When the doctor had departed, Hannah looked at Jordan, who returned her gaze with a tired smile. “Is that it? I’m hoping there aren’t any more people I have to talk to today.”

She shook her head. “Even if there were, I wouldn’t let you. You look exhausted.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

“Jordan…” She laid a hand on his arm as she asked the question she’d been dying to ask for hours. “How did you save me on the stairs?”

“I don’t know. I heard you scream, and I knew you needed my help.”

She kept her gaze on him. “But I didn’t scream. At least I don’t think so. Not out loud.”

“I guess I heard it in my mind.”

“Thank the Lord. And right after that, you woke up. How did you do
that?”

“I just… knew I had to,” he said simply. “When I heard Fahrenhold talking to you. Then I heard you fall, and…” His free hand covered hers. “There was no way in hell I was going to let the bitch hurt you again.”

“Oh, Jordan.” She wanted to hug him, but she felt suddenly shy. This was no dream—he was awake and on his way to being fully himself again. She had no idea what sort of relationship, if any, he would want to have with her in the real world.

And she wasn’t going to ask him now. Not when he had just awakened from a three-week coma.

“You need to rest,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” he agreed, his eyelids falling closed. “So do you.”

“I’ll see you later.”

“Hmm,” he acknowledged, already half asleep.

She stood watching him until his breathing grew even. His hand slipped off hers to lie motionless at his side. He was asleep. Normal sleep, thank goodness.

She removed her hand from his arm, still studying the relaxed features of the man whose life she’d saved that morning—and who’d saved hers in return.

She had been drawn to him from the moment Frank Decorah had shown her pictures and started to explain what had happened to him. And now she was even more involved. She wanted to have a real relationship with him. But what did they have together apart from an intense sexual attraction and gratitude?

Would she have the chance to find out?

Chapter Thirteen

When Hannah stepped into the hall, she found Mrs. Estes waiting for her.

“How is he?” the housekeeper asked.

“Tired. But I think he’s going to be fine.”

The woman shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “I have to apologize to you.”

“For what?”

“I was very suspicious of you when you first arrived.”