Danger in a Red Dress (24 page)

Aghast, she asked, “What are
you
doing up?”

“Daniel’s asleep, and I thought you’d want your pain medication.”

Before she’d gone to sleep at eight, after a meal of minestrone soup and whole-wheat bread sent up by the Italian restaurant downstairs, Daniel had given her her antibiotics and a single pain pill. With the assurance he’d be there for her if she needed him, he’d gone off to take care of Gabriel. Now . . . “Daniel’s
asleep
?”

“He hasn’t got a gunshot wound to keep him awake,” Gabriel said.

Maybe it was the wee hours of the morning, maybe it was being on Gabriel’s home turf, but he made her uneasy, as if he could touch her with his gaze . . . and had.

He was looking now. She was totally covered—the pajamas were too big, the sleeves dangled over her wrists, the legs bunched around her feet, and the drawstring knotted around her waist kept the pants up. Maybe he wasn’t, but
she
was totally respectable. Yet she had contracted to act as his nurse, and she might pretend to be untrained, but for her own peace of mind, she needed to see if he was all right. And to do that,
she
had to touch
him
. The last eleven months had been hard on her; she actually had to work up her nerve before she walked over and placed a hand on his forehead. “You don’t seem to have a fever. How do the dressings feel? Tight? Does the wound feel hot?”

“My leg hurts like a son of a bitch, but it’s a normal hurt—not infected. I think I dodged that bullet, if you’ll pardon the term.” He grinned, a sharp, white-toothed slash of amusement he asked her to share.

Startled, she smiled back and realized—this guy was good-looking. She’d recognized it before, of course, that first time she’d seen him, but her reaction then had been dominated by the wariness of a woman who had lived on the streets. Now she knew he was respectable, and wealthy, and felt an obligation to her. And it was the middle of the night, the lights were low, and he appeared—she didn’t know—almost Valentino-like in his looks and intensity. His eyes were deep-set, raw, wild. The skin on his face was stretched too thin across high-set cheeks and a proud, dominant nose.

She smoothed her hand across his forehead.

His lips . . . Well, his lips were perfect for kissing.

That
was a dangerous thought.

She stepped back.

“Grace.”

She turned back to him, expecting a request for something to eat or drink.

“How is your wound?” he asked.

She looked down at the bandage Zoe had put in place. The white edges were already dirty and damp; she’d tried to wash her fingers and splashed up too far. “It’s okay.”

“Let me see.” Reaching out, he gripped her good wrist and brought her close.

The warmth of his grip, the sense of being shackled, made her breathless. Yet he wasn’t doing anything, really. Invading her personal boundaries a bit, but probably he didn’t look at it that way. Some people had different definitions of what was acceptable and how soon. He made her wildly uncomfortable, and she didn’t understand, would never understand, how a man who was in such lousy shape could exude such a still, smoky danger.

Without an ounce of respect for Zoe’s work, he unwrapped the gauze, loosening it carefully from the wound. “Damn it!”

“I thought it looked pretty good.” She didn’t think any such thing, but the sight of her injury, inflamed, muddy with dried blood, seemed to anger him.

“I shouldn’t have taken you out of the hospital. But you wouldn’t have stayed, would you?” He assessed her silence correctly. “All right. Tomorrow we’ll get someone in to clean this up.” He lifted her other hand and lightly touched the scrapes on her palms. “You must have skidded across the sidewalk.”

“Honestly, I don’t remember. All I remember is being so scared that he’d keep shooting.” At the memory, her heartbeat accelerated.

He held each of her hands in each of his, and examined the damage as if he saw something more than scraped palms and swollen knuckles.

Prudently, she removed herself from his grip. “I was lucky. We were lucky. We’re alive and not seriously injured. That’s cool, right?”

“Right.” He picked the prescription bottle up off her table and read, “ ‘One tablet every four hours.’ Has it been four hours since your last one?”

She rolled the gauze back over her wrist. “It’s been at least six.”

He shook one out into his palm and offered it. “Then you’d better take this and climb back in bed.”

She picked it up carefully, without touching his skin.

He pointed to the water bottle—one she hadn’t noticed before—on the bedside table.

She put the pill to her mouth, then hesitated.

“What’s wrong? Do you think I will poison you?” He sounded smoothly dangerous, the purr of a lion before it pounced.

She blinked at him, startled. “No. No, I was wondering when you’re due for a pill, and if you want me to get it for you. I am supposed to be—”

“Caring for me. I know. But I’ve got about another hour to go before I can hit the drugs again.” The sharp lines around his mouth told too clearly how difficult that hour would be.

She swallowed the pill. She climbed into bed, lay down, and pulled up the covers.

“You don’t think I would poison you, then?” he insisted.

“I don’t know what you’d get out of it if you did.” She yawned, and turned on her side to face him. He was more than merely intense. He was weird. “Besides, isn’t that the bottle the pharmacist sent over? Sure looks like it.”

“It is.”

“That’s not poison—that’s pain relief.”

“Is that how you look at it?”

She lifted her head off the pillow and stared at him. “Huh?”

His expression twisted as if he were in anguish. As if he
were
in pain.

Okay. She knew what to do. “Where are you from?”

“Why?” He shot the question at her.

“I thought we’d chat for a while, distract ourselves from how lousy we feel.” It was a tactic she’d used before on her patients many times.

“Ah. Well.” He seemed to need to think about his answer. “I’m originally from South Texas.”

She didn’t think he was lying, but he was not being any too detailed. “You do have the slightest bit of an accent. Is your family still there?”

“I was in the foster system until I was about eleven. Then I got adopted. The parents were killed and I was alone again.” His recitation was dry.

“I’m so sorry!” That explained the harsh cast to his face; the body that was both solid and whipcord thin. This man was a fighter. “But look at you! Look at this place! You grew up and made something of yourself.”

“I suppose. How about you? Are you from Texas?”

“No, I’m from the East Coast, and like you, I have no family.” She meant to stop there, but he shifted uncomfortably, and the nursing directive
Distract the patient
kept her babbling on. “My mother raised me alone. She didn’t tell me much about my father, just that he was in the service when he met my mom, and that once she was pregnant with me, he took off.”

Gabriel had been composed as he told his story. Now his green eyes kindled with anger. “What an ass.”

“Yeah. We lived in a small town and the other kids made fun of me.”

“I can relate.”

She was starting to think her earlier alarm was simply the middle-of-the-night jitters, because Gabriel was really nice. Of course, as the pill kicked in, she was growing more gregarious and the world looked like a rosier place. . . . “So I used to imagine he was an international spy who’d had to go on a mission and was trapped behind enemy lines. I used to sit in social studies and dream that he would walk through the door, and all the mean kids would be in awe, and Mom and he and I would be a family.”

“Kids do have their imaginations.” Although he obviously didn’t know what to make of hers.

“I grew up and graduated from high school, and he never showed up. My mother died about that time. . . .” Hannah’s voice faltered. She cleared her throat and wished she hadn’t started this story, because she was embarrassing herself with memories she’d thought long forgotten and sentiments Gabriel didn’t want to share. But the drugs must have kicked in, because words kept burbling out of her like water out of a fountain. “I went to nursing school across the state. As far as I knew, my father was in a different universe. Then one day, I was training at the hospital, I walked into a Navy veteran’s room to talk to him about his physical therapy, and his wife and daughter both saw what I couldn’t. The guy in the bed, recovering from shoulder surgery—he was my father. Then I recognized the face. And the ears.” She laughed with almost no wobble. “It was my face, and my ears.”

“They couldn’t have been as pretty on him.” Gabriel leaned across and dimmed the bedside lamp.

That made it easier to keep talking. “His wife kept saying things like
How dare you?
, like I’d come in on purpose, and she pushed me out the room, while the patient—my
father
—looked embarrassed. Annoyed.” Hannah clamped her mouth shut. There. She was resolved. Not another word.

“Did you see him again?”

So much for her resolution. “After his wife went home, I hung around, expecting he’d call for me. He didn’t. He was born and raised two towns over, his parents still lived there, and he’d gone back to retire. He didn’t want to know me. My existence was nothing more than an inconvenience and all the bright imaginings of my childhood died that day.” Oh, my God, that sounded so poetic and pathetic, and worse, tears were trickling onto the pillow. “Could I be any stupider? Crying over a father who was never there and never wanted to be there.”

“You’re crying because it’s a tragedy.”

“Not a new tragedy by any means.”

“But it’s your tragedy.” He plucked a tissue out of the box on the nightstand and handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She blotted at her face and closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at him.

Gabriel Prescott was an interesting guy. His voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him. . . . If she only concentrated hard enough . . .

And she slid right into sleep.

Gabriel painfully came to his feet and looked at her. He supposed the story was true. That was the interesting thing about her—she didn’t lie or cheat. She didn’t have any faults except for a tendency to collect money unfairly. Oh, and to murder her patients.

Leaning closer, he listened to her breathing. He put his hand on her shoulder and rolled her over. The pain meds had put her under. Tucking his crutch under his arm, he limped to the backpack she guarded so jealously. Taking it into the living room, he dumped it out on the coffee table.

From the master bedroom doorway, Daniel asked, “Find anything interesting?”

“Not yet.” Gabriel cast him a sharp glance. “Did you catch forty winks?”

“My alarm just went off. You’re due for your meds in fifteen minutes.” Daniel walked over and examined the hodgepodge of stuff Hannah carried. “She should be a Boy Scout. She’s always prepared.”

A second pair of thread-bare jeans, three pairs of panties, five pairs of socks, twine, duct tape, a small pair of scissors, a canteen.

“What’s in it?” Daniel asked.

Gabriel unscrewed the cap and sniffed cautiously. “Water.”

Bandages, a tube of generic antibiotic ointment, a long, sharp knife—Gabriel handed that to Daniel. “Let’s keep that out of her hands.”

One worn, limp tennis shoe.

Gabriel held it and looked at Daniel, then stuck his hand inside. The cloth on the inner sole was pilled and worn, and when he pressed on it, he felt the outline of something underneath. He pulled out the liner—and found Hannah’s money card, the one she’d weaseled out of that idiot banker in Becket, Massachusetts. Gabriel weighed it in his hand. “What do you think?”

“Let her keep it,” Daniel said immediately. “If she gets away—”

“We can track her. Right.” Gabriel put it back, tucked the sole back in, and they finished the search.

A small, cheap notebook and a pen were stuck in an outside pocket.

Gabriel flipped through it. It was blank. All it held was a wedding photo, torn to remove the groom, leaving only a young Mrs. Manly, her face shining with hope and happiness.

Gabriel closed his eyes in pain.

“I’d say she was collecting souvenirs of her kills, except she doesn’t have anything from anyone else.”

In knee-jerk defensiveness, Gabriel said, “The Dresser family exhumed old Mr. Dresser’s body, and he died of nothing except old age.”

“I know. Except for that video, Miss Hannah Grey is clean as a whistle.” Daniel turned the backpack inside out and examined the canvas.

There was nothing here that gave information on where and how to access Manly’s lost fortune.

Daniel put the backpack back together. “Are you going to call your brother Carrick and tell him that you’ve got her?”

“No. He’d ask whether I had the code, and why not, and when I told him I’d been shot, he’d be blank, like he didn’t understand what that had to do with the situation.”

“You’re getting sort of skeptical about your brother.” Daniel’s voice was totally neutral, which in its way, said everything Gabriel needed to know.

“He’s just a boy.” Gabriel handed over the twine and the tape.

“He’s twenty-seven. What were you like at twenty-seven? How many jobs had you held? How many millions had you made?” As if he couldn’t be silent anymore, Daniel shot the questions at Gabriel.

“He’s had special challenges.”

“Your other brothers have all had to face the challenges of being illegitimate, and losing their father, and learning to become men in a world that would just as soon crush them under its heel. They’re all the kind of guys who make me proud to be a guy. They’ve got morals and self-respect and wives who adore them and who they adore.”