Death is Forever (15 page)

“Erin! Are you all right?”

“Yes. Just shaken.”

“Watch the pathway we came down.”

Cole picked up the gun and checked the load with a few swift motions before he sheathed his knife. Methodically he began inspecting the other four men for signs of consciousness.

“Anyone coming?” he asked Erin as he bent over the first man and made a swift, hard motion with his right hand. The man didn’t move in response.

“No. W-what are you doing?”

“Making sure they’re not faking it.”

Cole’s method was ruthless and effective—stiffened fingers driven into the groin. No conscious man could take it without a reflexive whimper and a convulsive movement to protect himself.

Numbly Erin watched. She was trembling in the aftermath of adrenaline, but she felt almost unnaturally calm. She’d been through sudden violence before, survived it, and adjusted to the reality that she would never again expect the world to be a safe place.

This time the violence had been much easier to bear. She’d managed to defend herself. She’d fought and she hadn’t even been injured. Her mind was safe, too. She no longer had any naïve belief in personal safety to be wrenched away by the attack. It was all old news. Later she might cry and shake, but not now. Now she was emotionally numb.

Surviving.

The fourth man groaned and curled up at Cole’s blow. Erin flinched.

“Still clear?” Cole asked her.

“Yes. Shouldn’t we get the police?”

“That would put us out of commission as effectively as these men tried to.”

Cole yanked the fourth man into a sitting position. “If you can hear me, open your eyes or you’ll get another shot to the balls.”

The man’s eyes opened.

“Who was the target, me or the girl?” Cole asked.

The man didn’t answer.

Cole’s hand moved once, hard. The man made an odd sound and jerked convulsively.

“Who was the target?” Cole repeated.

“You,” the man groaned.

Relief went through Cole. He couldn’t expect to protect Erin for long from outright assassination attempts. Mayhem was different. Especially if it was aimed at him.

He turned and threw the pistol into the sea. “A hit?”

The man made a hoarse sound. “Just a kneecapping.”

Erin’s breath came in harshly as she realized that the point of the attack had been to permanently maim Cole.

“Who hired you?” Cole asked.

“Don’t know.”

Cole believed him. It was typical of thugs not to know any more than the name of the target and how to get to him. Cole pressed his thumbs into the man’s neck until the carotid arteries closed down. Unconsciousness swiftly followed. Cole opened his hands, releasing the man.

“Anyone else coming?” Cole asked.

“No.”

“We’ll go up the other way just the same. There was somebody back on the first path, but he didn’t get in the fight.”

“Why?”

“He may be calling the cops. Let’s go.”

Cole got to his feet and bent to help Erin up. His normally smooth motions were marred by a slight hitch at every other step. She thought she saw the slick gleam of blood on the dark fabric above his left knee, on the inside of his thigh.

“Are you hurt?”

He grunted.

“Cole,” Erin said urgently.

“He didn’t kneecap me, thanks to you. I’ll only limp for a day or two instead of the rest of my life.”

“But—”

“Later. Shock is a good anesthetic, but it wears off fast. By then, I want us to be in a safe place.”

“Is there one?”

He turned away without answering, which told her more than she wanted to know.

“I still think you should let me take you to a doctor,” Erin said unhappily.

Cole walked into the hotel room, saying nothing. His leg ached and was bleeding, but he knew the wound itself was little more than a burn. All he needed was some help cleaning and bandaging his thigh.

She shut and locked the door behind her. The hotel room was small and modestly furnished. Her old camera bag and new duffel were on the bed, as was Cole’s new duffel.

“Let me help you to…” Her glance went to his thigh. “My God!”

“Don’t go all soft and useless on me now,” he said. “It’s just blood.”

Moisture shone darkly against his slacks. If the cloth had been any color but black, he couldn’t have concealed the fact that he was wounded. As she watched in horror, a bright scarlet rivulet slid from beneath his cuff onto his shoe.

“Unless you’re planning to leave tracks all over the carpet, you’d better go into the bathroom,” she said in a voice that was too high and thin.

He walked unevenly to the bathroom, lowered the toilet lid, and sat down to remove his shoes and socks. Silently she sank to her knees in front of him, pushed his hands away, and began pulling off his shoes. Blood dripped onto her fingers. She made a low sound of distress and tried to work faster.

“Relax, honey,” he said. “It’s not serious.”

“Just a scratch, right?” she shot back, angry because he was hurt and there was nothing she could do to change that. “I’ve got news for you, big man. Scratches don’t bleed this much.”

“Blood isn’t spurting with each heartbeat, so the bullet didn’t get anything important. As for the mess—hell, it’s not like you don’t see blood regularly.”

“I only hunted whales once.”

“I was talking about your period.”

Erin gave Cole a glittering look. He smiled. She let out a pent-up breath and shook her head.

“Has anyone ever told you that you’re impossible?” she asked, bending over his feet once more.

“Nope. Want to be the first?”

She made a sound that could have been exasperation or amusement, but her hands were much steadier now. Cole was right. She saw blood every month, like clockwork.

By the time Erin had his shoes and socks off, Cole had unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it beyond reach of the blood that was sticking to everything. With quick motions he unzipped his slacks and began removing them. At the scrape of cloth over the wound, his breath hissed between his teeth.

“You’re hurting yourself,” she said. “I’ll cut off the pant leg.”

“No. I don’t want to waste time shopping again. I’ll have to wear these pants on the airplane.”

She looked up. “Does that mean we’re going back to California?”

“No. We’re going to Derby. With luck, they’ll waste their time looking for us between Darwin and Abe’s station while we come in from the other side. Get a pillowcase, honey. I’ll rip it up for bandages.”

“I’ve got a first-aid kit in my camera bag.”

By the time she got back to the bathroom, Cole was standing in his jockey shorts, one hip propped against the washbasin as he tried to examine the red slash across his muscular inner thigh. To Erin’s adrenaline-heightened senses, the naked strength of his body was suddenly, violently attractive. She remembered the terrible feeling of rage and helplessness she’d known when she went down beneath the attackers. Then she’d heard Cole’s voice promising vengeance for her hurt, and she’d known—really
known
—that this time she wasn’t fighting alone. This time a man was going to use his strength to help her rather than to brutalize her.

Cole turned toward her. As he moved, light fell across him at a different angle, creating new shadows and highlights. For a crazy moment she wanted to grab her camera and catch the supple strength and masculine textures of his body. He was…beautiful.

The thought stunned her.

“Sit down,” she said huskily. “Let me help you.”

His eyes narrowed at the change in her voice, a softness where before there had been only the clipped irritation and anger of an adrenaline backlash. Now she was looking at him like she’d never seen him before, her extraordinary green eyes clear and wide, approving of him with an intensity that made his heart pound heavily.

Silently he sat down on the toilet seat.

She rinsed out a washcloth in cold water before she bent over him. The enforced intimacy of the contact made her feel weak. She tried to think of Cole as a man who needed help rather than as a powerful, nearly naked warrior whose thighs she was kneeling between. Then she saw his wound and forgot about what he was or wasn’t wearing.

“It always looks worse than it is,” Cole said, seeing the pallor of Erin’s cheeks.

“But the blood—”

“I saw your pictures of the whale hunt. You had to be ankle deep in blood to get those shots.”

She remembered shooting roll after roll of film and then being violently ill. Afterward she’d reloaded her camera and gone back to work.

“I threw up all over the place,” she said as she pressed a cold cloth against the wound, stopping the slow oozing of blood.

“You do and you clean it up, honey. Blackburn’s First Rule of Housekeeping.”

Glancing up, she saw his amused gray eyes and wondered how she had ever thought they were bleak or cold.

“Right,” she said. “No throwing up. Besides, you’re smaller than a whale. Barely.”

She caught the flash of his smile as she bent over him once more.

“Hurt?” she asked, increasing the pressure.

“What do you think?”

Her smile turned upside down. “It hurts.”

The back of his index finger brushed lightly down her cheek. “I’ve felt a lot worse.” His breath came in as she shifted the cloth. “I’ve felt better, too,” he admitted wryly. “Burns are the worst for pain.”

The pronounced tendency to tremble, which was the result of adrenaline and anxiety, faded from Erin’s hands as she worked. While Cole held the compress in place, she started cleaning up the muscular length of his leg.

“Well, no one can say you aren’t a red-blooded American male,” she muttered as she rinsed out the washcloth for the fifth time. “Hairy, too.”

He laughed.

She tried to smile, but it didn’t work. Soon she would have to clean the wound itself. No matter how gentle she was, it would hurt him.

“Just what I thought,” he said, lifting the compress to check. “Shallow and messy. No big deal.”

“How can you tell?” she asked through clenched teeth. “You can’t even see all of it.”

“I know how it feels when something cuts muscle and grates on bone. This didn’t. But if it bothers you that much, I’ll get in the shower and clean it up myself.”

She paused in the act of turning on the hot water in the sink and looked at Cole. The bathroom light poured over him, outlining every ridge of muscle, sinew, and bone. He literally filled the alcove where the toilet was.

“There’s no way something could draw blood on you and not cut muscle,” she said, wringing out a hand towel in the hot water with quick, angry motions, hating what she would have to do next.

“You slap that over my thigh and I’ll turn you over my knee,” he warned.

“Try it, big man, and you’ll end up on the floor.”

“Feeling feisty, are you?”

Her hands paused. He was right. The knowledge that she had come through violence intact was fizzing slowly through her, dissolving through years of fear, changing them, changing her. Part of her felt she could take on any man and throw him ten times out of ten. Common sense told her she was insane even to think about it. She let out a long sigh.

“First time on the winning side?” he asked.

She nodded.

He smiled crookedly. “Don’t let it go to your head. If a hit had been ordered, we’d be facedown in the sand. You should have run like hell when I told you to.”

Shaking her head in silent disagreement, she knelt between his powerful legs. Her hair gleamed in shades of mahogany and copper and gold as she moved. His breath came out in a rush as the warm towel draped tenderly over the wound. Her hands worked slowly, gently, carefully, cleaning the angry furrow.

“I mean it, honey. You should have run,” he said quietly, stroking her gleaming hair with his hand. “It’s the first rule of self-defense.”

“You should have taken your own advice.”

“It didn’t apply to me. I wasn’t defending myself.”

Her breath came in. “I know. You were defending me.”

Beneath his palm her head turned. He felt the warm touch of her kiss against his hand in the instant before she rose to rinse the towel under the faucet once more.

She wanted to thank Cole for defending her but didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound hopelessly naïve and foolish. He’d fought for her when she’d been helpless. She didn’t have any words to tell him how much that meant to her. She was still discovering it herself. But she was certain about one thing.

She couldn’t have left Cole Blackburn to die while she ran away unhurt.

She knelt once more and went back to cleaning the wound. Hot tears gathered at the back of her eyes when his breath hissed out and he began cursing in a low voice.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, hating the knowledge that she was hurting him. As gently as possible she blotted the wound, trying to see how deep it was and if any cloth from his slacks was imbedded in his flesh. “Can you turn more to the left?”

Cole’s leg bent. He braced his foot against the wash basin and wondered if Erin had the slightest idea what it was doing to him to feel her hair slide against his uninjured thigh, to feel her hands on his bare leg as she steadied herself, to feel her breath against his naked, sensitive skin. At least her unintentional seduction was taking his mind off the bruised, burning pain radiating from the shallow wound. He’d been lucky as hell to get away with such a minor injury and he knew it.

“How’s that?” he asked, shifting until light fell directly on his inner thigh.

“Good.”

She put her hand on Cole’s thigh to hold him in place. With an effort she forced herself to concentrate on his wound as though she was looking through a camera lens. She bent closer, peering at the scarlet furrow. No matter how she turned, a shadow still fell across the wound, concealing its depth.

Caged between his legs, she shifted awkwardly, almost leaning against his torso in order to see from a different angle. The motion sent first her shoulder and then her hair sliding across his groin.

A shaft of desire went through Cole, tensing his whole body.

“Does that hurt?” she asked anxiously.

“Not…quite.”

His voice was thick and his eyes were focused on her hair, not on her hands. He wondered if silk or satin or fire came in that particular color. Her hair felt like all three when it slid down over his skin, the strands cool and silky, yet somehow warm at the same time.

“Lift a bit higher if you can,” she said, pressing gently with both hands against his thigh. “That’s good.” She looked at the wound and let out a long sigh of relief. “You’re right. It isn’t serious. It must hurt, though.”

Cole didn’t bother to deny it. “Have any bandages in that kit?”

“In your size? I doubt it,” she said dryly, starting to get to her feet.

“Stay put, honey,” he said, holding her gently in place against his body. “I can reach it.”

When he leaned forward, he all but surrounded Erin. She felt the supple power of his leg beneath her hands, felt the soft abrasion of his body hair against her wrists, and sensed the living, quintessentially masculine heat brushing against her arm. Sensations shivered from her breastbone to her knees, shortening her breath. Carefully she drew in air, telling herself that she must be mistaken. She couldn’t have felt what she thought she’d felt.

Cole couldn’t be aroused.

A tube of antibiotic ointment appeared at Erin’s eye level. She took it, carefully blotted the wound again, and began smoothing ointment over raw flesh. Cole hissed a string of words in a foreign language. She didn’t ask for a translation.

With each light brush of Erin’s fingers against his body, Cole’s pulse leaped. The burning of the wound didn’t compare to the way she set fire to his blood. Because there was nothing he could do about either fire, he kept cursing in the kind of Portuguese used in the diamond fields of Brazil, blasphemies that could etch steel.

As he cursed, he told himself it was a simple case of the oldest aphrodisiac of all—adrenaline. He’d felt it before, the aftermath of ambush, the vivid, almost overwhelming rush when he knew that he’d survived, and then the sexual hunger that was his body’s way of celebrating being alive. If Erin had been any other woman he would have pulled her onto his lap, burying himself in her until he came with a violence that equaled his arousal.

But Erin wasn’t any other woman. She’d been raped and brutalized to the point that she might never invite a man into the hot, sleek depths of her body.

Grimly Cole tried not to think about the delicate hands that felt so tantalizing on his skin. Like Erin’s breath, warm and sweet. Like the scent of her. Like her breasts brushing against his leg when she bent even closer, trying to reach the back of his thigh. The soft resilience of her flesh was a brand against his naked skin. He flinched and swore, wondering why this one woman among all women aroused him to the point of pain.

“Whatever happened to the strong, silent type?” she muttered unhappily, biting her lower lip.

“Do you believe in the Easter Bunny too?” He hissed another curse between his teeth.

By the time Erin was finished, her lip had tooth marks in it, but there was almost no fresh bleeding along the wound. Two square bandage pads appeared at her eye level.

“Don’t believe the advertising on the wrapper,” she said. “These stick just like the old kind.”

As she shifted position to put the first bandage in place, she brushed intimately against Cole. He drew in his breath hard. She froze against him, thinking she had somehow hurt him again.

“You should put the bandages on yourself,” she said unhappily. “I’m too clumsy. I don’t want to hurt you any more.”

Cole looked down at the woman curled between his legs, her eyes haunted and yet so beautiful it came as a shock of pleasure each time she looked at him.