Father Christmas (19 page)

“
I know.” Her gaze
journeyed to Mike, who wriggled out from under his father’s hand
and was bouncing around the curtained nook again. “What happens
now?”

“
Someone from my squad was
supposed to bring me my clothes.” He glanced down at his bare
chest. Those bruises
were
nasty.
No wonder she kept gaping at them.

“
There are a lot of
officers out there,” she said. “At least six of them.”

He eyed the clock hanging on the wall behind
the table. “They probably ended their shifts and came over. When
one of us gets hurt, we do that.”

“
That’s nice.” Her voice
sounded rusty. “Do you want me to see if one of them has your
clothes?”

What he wanted was for her to stay right
where she was, in his line of vision. Actually, no—he wanted her to
come closer, so he could hug her the way he couldn’t hug Mike. He
wanted to absorb her strength. He wanted her soft, warm curves to
remind him that he was alive.

Mike found the blood-pressure cuff dangling
from a wall rack and tore the Velcro with a loud rasp, jolting John
and clearing his mind. He glanced at his son, then back at Molly.
As he continued his descent from euphoria, he realized he was cold.
Cold and tired.

“
The doctor is getting my
clothing,” he said.

“
Even with clothes, John,
you can’t drive home like that.” She gestured toward his right
hand.

“
Shh.” He peered toward
the curtain, wondering if the doctor had overheard her. “If they
think I can’t drive home, they’ll make me spend the night
here.”

“
Maybe you
should
stay the night. Just in
case.”

“
No.” Arlington Memorial
was a fine facility, but John had heard enough stories about people
who went into hospitals to have a nose job and wound up paralyzed
for life, people who had the wrong leg amputated or the wrong
kidney removed, people who had gone in for routine tests, picked up
bacterial infections and died. Besides, if he had to spend the
night at Arlington Memorial, who would take care of
Mike?

Molly’s earnest gaze gave him his answer. Of
course she would take care of Mike, if necessary.

But John was too selfish
to want her to take care of his son. What he wanted was for her to
take care of
him
.

Cripes, where had that thought come from?
Maybe he was in shock, after all—or else he was still tripping on
adrenaline. He shouldn’t want Molly doing anything for him. She’d
already done too much, taking care of Mike for the past hour, and
then bringing him here.

“
What I was thinking,” she
said quietly, “was that maybe I could take you and Michael home. A
police officer could drive your car to your house, right? You
shouldn’t be driving tonight. The roads are still a little
slippery, and you...” Her gaze wandered to his chest again, to his
lap where his right hand rested, to the thick bandage taped around
his forearm. “You shouldn’t drive.”

“
Okay.” He told himself he
was agreeing to let her transport him and Mike because she was
right, he shouldn’t get behind the wheel. But there was that
selfish yearning again, that giddy defiance. He’d been stabbed. He
deserved to have his needs met. In his condition, stitched and
patched and dazed, he didn’t have to be responsible. If he
absolutely had to, he could let someone else take charge for a few
minutes.

Especially someone like Molly, who would do
the right thing. She would make sure Mike’s needs were met. She
might even fix that stiff drink for John. Hell, he couldn’t take
more than a drink from her right now, anyway. He was sore. His hand
was useless, and less than an hour ago his blood pressure had
plummeted low enough to freak out the ER nurse. Any woman who got
personal with him in the condition he was in would only wind up
disappointed.

And he must be delirious, thinking about
Molly in the context of disappointing her that way.

The doctor reappeared with Bud Schaefer,
John’s frequent partner. Carrying the apparel John had worn to the
station house that morning, Bud was a welcome sight. “Hey, Russo,
how’s it going?” Bud said almost shyly. It was bad form for fellow
officers to reveal anything too intimate to each other, like fear
or concern. Seeing a colleague hurt was one of the hardest things a
cop ever had to endure.

“
I’ve felt better,” John
responded, attempting a smile. His head had started to
throb.

Bud turned his gaze to Mike, who was still
playing with the Velcro fastening of the blood pressure cuff. “Hey,
Tiger, remember me?”

Mike raced over. “You’re a policeman
guy.”

“
That’s right. I work with
your dad.”

“
That means you’re a
policeman guy.”

“
Well, I’m going to help
your dad get into some real clothes. So maybe you might want to go
back out to the waiting room.” He eyed Molly, searching for
assistance.

“
Michael, come with me,”
she said, extending a hand and a warm grin. “Let’s go look at the
nurse’s computer again. Would you like that?”

“
Will she make the colors
change on the screen?”

“
Maybe she’ll do that
again, if you ask her nicely.”

Mike skipped over to Molly, took her hand
and dragged her past the curtain, out of sight.

Bud directed his inquiring gaze to John.
“Who’s the lady?” he asked as he shook the wrinkles out of John’s
shirt and held it up, positioning it so John could slide his left
arm into the sleeve.

John hated being assisted into his own
shirt, but he didn’t have much choice. Swallowing his anger—none of
this was Bud’s fault, after all—he thrust his good arm into the
left sleeve. “She runs Mike’s preschool.”

“
Yeah?” Bud’s tone left no
doubt that he sensed that more than just preschool was going on
between Molly and John. “She’s cute.”

“
Yeah.”

“
Very cute. On a scale of
one to ten, I’d give her an eight at the very least. Nine, if she
was taller.”

John said nothing. He didn’t like the idea
of Bud—or anyone—assigning Molly a score, but if he said so Bud
might guess that John had special feelings for her. Instead, he
concentrated on easing his injured arm into the other sleeve.
“Could you drive my car home for me?” he asked. “She’s going to
take me and Mike home. She’s got a kid seat in her car.” As if that
was why John wanted her instead of Bud to drive him home.

“
Yeah, sure.” He reached
into a pocket of the slacks he’d brought for John and pulled out
the key ring. John identified the car key and Bud manipulated it
off the ring. They collaborated to get him out of his Santa pants
and into his slacks. Closing the fly turned out to be not too
hard—he wasn’t too clumsy with his left hand—but buttoning his
shirt was a bitch. He wound up sitting helpless while Bud did the
buttons for him.

“
How are you going to do
this on your own?” Bud asked.

“
Unbuttoning it won’t be
so hard. After I get the shirt off, I’ll stick to
pull-overs.”

“
You taking tomorrow
off?”

“
I’ll see how I
feel.”

Bud tied the laces on John’s boots. It was
humiliating to be so dependent on someone for such rudimentary
tasks. He wondered if Mike ever felt this way when John helped him
in and out of his boots. “Do us all a favor and don’t come in,” Bud
said, kindly keeping his gaze on John’s feet. “You’ll be useless,
and you’ll have all the secretaries fussing over you and ignoring
the rest of us.”

John grunted. If he couldn’t even tie his
own shoes, he sure as hell wasn’t going to be worth much tomorrow.
But it wasn’t Bud’s privilege to decide for him. Nor was it
Coffey’s, or the doctor’s, or anyone else’s. It was John’s decision
alone.

He had to write up a report on today’s
arrest. He had to take the victim’s statement, if that hadn’t
already been done by someone else. And she’d have to do a visual ID
of the perp—but someone had probably taken care of that for John,
too. Anything he couldn’t do over the phone tomorrow could wait a
day, he supposed. Or one of those fussing secretaries could drive
over to his house with a laptop and get him through the
paperwork.

He didn’t want a department secretary at his
house. He didn’t want anyone...except Molly. Molly, whose eyes had
filled with tears for him.

He gave himself a quick inspection and found
himself fully attired. Moving his head made it ache. His chest
ached, too, on the bruised side. At least his arm and hand were
still numb from the anesthetic. But once that wore off...

Bottom line: he was a wreck, barely held
together by surgical thread and the ministrations of Bud Schaefer.
The high was gone and John was crashing.

He smiled weakly. “I’m going to try to stand
now.”

“
I’ll catch you if you
fall.” Bud took a half-step backward, giving John room to set his
feet on the floor.

He wobbled. Cymbals crashed inside his skull
and the muscles along his spine threatened to contract. His knees
felt liquid, and if there were anything in his stomach it would
have come back up. The room tilted slightly and he closed his
eyes.

He wasn’t going to fall. Not when the only
person around to catch him was Bud. If falling was his fate, he
wanted only one person to pick him back up. She was way too small
to lift him, but what she lacked in physical mass she made up in
inner strength. He had no doubt she could catch him if he went
tumbling.

“
Go get Molly,” he
said.

***

HIS HOUSE WAS EXACTLY what she would have
expected if she’d ever thought about it: a neat, nicely
proportioned ranch, not too big and not too small, sitting at the
center of a well-tended half-acre lot. The snow had stopped,
leaving a thin veneer of white blanketing the front yard and
driveway. “Let me open the garage,” he said, twisting in the
passenger seat to reach the door latch with his left hand.

She touched his shoulder to stop him.
Through the leather of his jacket she felt bone and muscle,
strength and stubbornness. He went still beneath her touch, but
didn’t turn back to her. “First of all,” she said, “you shouldn’t
be yanking on garage doors. Second, if I park in there, where will
your friend from work park your car?”

Slowly he relaxed under her hand, shaking
his head and smiling wanly. “If you pull in—” he waved toward the
garage door “—I’ll have less distance to walk.”

“
Okay. I’ll drive in and
drop you off, then pull back out and park on the street.” She let
go of him, only to extend her hand palm up for him to pass her his
keys. He was obviously reluctant to cede them, but he must have
realized he couldn’t hoist the hinged door up on its tracks with
only one functioning arm.

“
Dana says you push a
button and his garage opens,” Michael reported from the rear seat.
“Like magic.”

“
That’s called an
automatic garage-door opener,” Molly said, closing her fingers
around John’s key ring and yanking on the parking brake. “I’ll be
right back.”

The cold air slapped her cheeks as she
climbed out of the car. She needed its bracing refreshment to clear
her mind after the shock of seeing John sitting on the examining
table in the emergency room. That shock had lingered; maybe the
winter night would chill it out of her.

She’d been horrified by the bandages, of
course. The officers pacing the waiting area had told her about the
knife. In fact, they’d described its size with relish, until she’d
pointed out Michael and they’d realized that the gruesome details
of John’s injuries would frighten him—to say nothing of scaring the
hell out of her. Knowing the size of the knife, she could guess at
the wounds beneath the gauze. She could figure out how bad they
were.

But more than John’s injuries had affected
her. She’d been stunned by the sight of his chest, lean and
streamlined and utterly male. Her gaze had taken in the narrow
indentation of his navel, and his nipples, and the arch of his
collarbones, and his broad, bony shoulders, and his biceps, not
bulging with brawn but firm and sinewy, hinting at his strength
without bragging about it.

She’d seen his shaggy hair, his jaw shadowed
by a day’s growth of beard. She’d seen the odd shimmer in his eyes.
And then she’d seen the bruises discoloring one side of his
ribcage. She’d stared at the bandages again. And then his eyes. And
then his naked chest.

Myriad responses had buffeted her. She’d
been so afraid for him, and so relieved. She’d been appalled by his
wounds, and sympathetic about his pain. But underlying those
rational reactions, like a soft, pulsing bass riff almost drowned
out by the high notes, she’d been aroused by his profoundly male
beauty.

He hadn’t accepted her offer of a lift home
because he wanted to be ogled. If anything, he wanted to be
assisted into a comfortable chair and left alone. He wanted her to
take care of Michael so he could rest. That was the only reason she
was at his house.

She heaved the garage door open, got back
into the car, and coasted into the garage. Before John contorted
himself to reach the door latch, she was out of the car again,
racing around to his side and opening his door for him. He shot her
a look of resignation combined with annoyance. She knew he resented
his helplessness, but there wasn’t much she could do about it,
other than what she was doing.

Michael tumbled out of the car as soon as
she released him from his child seat. “Is it dinner? I’m hungry,
Daddy,” he announced, as if this were a night like any other.