Her Texas Rescue Doctor (8 page)

Chapter Eight

S
o this is what an exhausted angel looks like.

Alex was tired, but he was accustomed to functioning while he was tired. It was part of being a doctor, something he'd been doing since his first year of medical school. Even earlier—he'd studied until dawn to pass organic chemistry and the other undergrad courses required to be accepted to med school.

Grace hadn't had his training. She looked more than sleep deprived; she was under significant stress. She looked fragile. Alex was glad he'd come.

The officer on duty was Kent Grayson, a longtime acquaintance through Texas Rescue. He'd come into the ER just as Alex was leaving, looking for a woman who'd encountered Mr. Burns earlier in the day, according to the wife's account. Alex had known with a sinking feeling that the woman must be Grace Jackson. He'd flipped the gum wrapper with her phone number through his fingers for a few seconds, then decided to hell with it: if Kent was going to the Hotel Houston to see Grace, so was he. He'd put the wrapper back in his pocket and grabbed the key to his truck.

“If Mrs. Burns is safe at the women's shelter now, then where do I fit in?” Grace asked Kent, but the possibility obviously hit her before she finished her own question. “The children. Did he hurt the children?”

“We don't want to give him the chance. He's being processed at the jail now, so Mrs. Burns and her advocate went to pick up the children to take them to the women's shelter. Unfortunately, the children are with a relative of the husband's, and she's refusing to let Child Services take them.”

“The police can't take them?”

“If someone's in immediate danger, I don't need permission to go in and save them, but otherwise, I need a warrant. Since the husband's sister isn't actually harming the kids, we need a warrant to enter the home.”

“So that's why there's a judge waiting. You need me to explain that I overheard him say he'd kill the kids? Let me get a pen.”

She jumped up to help, but Alex stopped her with a hand on her upper arm, her soft sweater sliding over toned muscle beneath. “You didn't tell me that you and Mr. Burns spoke face-to-face.”

“He just opened the curtains and said, ‘Who are you?' and then I said we needed privacy and shut them. It was nothing, really. It took maybe two seconds.”

“He saw you, and if you volunteer to give this statement, your name will be in court documents.”

“I see where you're going with this.” She sank back down to her chair. “That could be bad for Sophia's career.”

“Grace, look at me. It could be bad for
you
, not Sophia. This man has a violent arrest history. He could decide to come after you for testifying against him. I wanted to be sure you know this is optional. You don't have to put yourself in harm's way.”

“Her name will be redacted from her statement, actually.” Kent took a blank form off his clipboard and slid it across the table to Grace.

Alex slapped his hand on it, stopping the motion. “Her name won't stay hidden if the case goes to trial and she faces him from the witness stand. Grace, it isn't mandatory for you to write a statement. We had a long discussion about this with the shelter's administrator before we came.”

“Let me do my job here,” Kent said.

“Grace can't make an informed decision if you don't give her all the information.”

“I can't give her all the information if you do all the talking.”

“Good one,” Sophia called from her sofa. No longer lounging horizontally, she'd sat up and propped her booted ankle on the coffee table, next to what Alex assumed was an obscenely expensive fruit arrangement. “Point for the hot cop. This could be so much more entertaining, though. When a cop and a doctor walk into my hotel room in their Village People costumes, I expect them to start stripping.”

A stupid grin broke Kent's serious cop expression, but Grace looked mortified.

Alex wanted to get this over with. Grace wasn't enjoying any of it. “Most states require medical personnel to report suspected child abuse, but Texas law requires all citizens to report what they know.”

“I did report it,” Grace said. “To you.”

Kent stopped grinning and returned to cop mode. “Specifically, Texas law requires a report to either law enforcement or Child Protective Services. Doctors, school teachers and the like aren't considered the proper authorities.”

Alex was impatient. “The shelter staff believes that you haven't broken any law. You aren't legally required to report anything in this case.”

Grace was sitting with her hands on the table, her fingers interlocked, her knuckles white.

Kent took over. “The consensus is that there was no way for you to determine if you overheard a credible threat. You don't know the couple involved, you don't even know if they have children and so on. ‘I'll kill you if you do this or that' is a pretty common threat that people make in the heat of the moment, and it usually means nothing. There's practically no chance that you'd be charged with failure to report child abuse. You still should be made aware of the law, though, and be given the opportunity. You never know if a judge might interpret the law differently in any particular instance.”

To Alex's surprise, Sophia spoke up from her sofa. “Passive aggressive much? You tell her she doesn't have to write a report, then you threaten her that if she doesn't write the report, there's a chance a judge could interpret the law differently than your posse does. Then you tell her it's totally up to her to decide whether or not to take that risk. Thanks for coming here to jerk my sister around.”

So, the movie star had some family loyalty, after all. Alex was glad, for Grace's sake.

“I think you've done nothing wrong and everything right, Miss Jackson.” Kent leaned to one side to glare across the room at Sophia. “
Grace
Jackson.”

Grace smoothed over her sister's interruption. “So what do you need from me, Officer Grayson? I'm worried about those children. I never doubted they existed.”

Alex felt that sloppy bit of tenderness for her again. She was brave, she was selfless, and her spirit fit that angelic appearance, but he'd wanted to be here to make sure she was down-to-earth. Good people got caught in bad situations even when they were only trying to help.

“Alex gave the judge all he needs to issue a warrant,” Kent said. “When he told the hotel staff the judge was waiting, he exaggerated. We'll have those kids safe with their mother before Burns can ask for bail, but as a police officer, it's my job to talk to every possible witness, even if I'm ninety-nine percent certain a prosecutor won't need the testimony.”

Alex watched Grace. “It's that one percent chance I wanted to make sure you're aware of.”

She twisted her fingers one more time, then lifted her chin and looked him in the eye—not Kent, but him. “This afternoon you thought I was brave. Now you don't want me to make a statement?”

“If this was the only way to help those children, it would be worth the risk. Sometimes, doing the right thing is dangerous.”

He was hit by an old memory—
his mother unlocking her office late at night, too afraid to turn on the lights. She'd been a structural engineer, wanting the town to know their factory was not safe. She was betting her life that glasnost had weakened the old Soviet regime enough so that the factory workers would strike once they knew the danger, but the remnants of the Communist Party had suppressed her report.
Doing the right thing can be risky,
she'd told him. She wanted to make copies of the report that would circulate from house to house, even if she was jailed. Her hand had trembled as she'd pressed the green button on the battered Xerox machine.

Grace's clenched hands trembled.

Alex placed one hand over hers. “But those kids are going to get picked up even if you don't agree to be a witness. To put yourself at personal risk for no reason is a waste. I don't want you to have even a one percent chance you'll get hurt.”

There it was. Something about Grace spoke to his soul. Whether he ought to care or not, whether he
wanted
to care or not, didn't matter. He didn't want to see Grace Jackson hurt.

Sophia's voice jarred him back to reality. “Is this Burns guy rich?”

Grace and Kent and Alex all looked at one another around the table. The question seemed irrelevant, but Kent answered her. “Their address isn't in a very affluent part of town.”

“Ours is.” She popped another strawberry in her mouth and kept talking around the fruit. “This loser isn't going to buy a plane ticket to come out to California, anyway, but if he did, he'd have to get past walls and gates and security guards. Hell, the paparazzi would make him the best photographed criminal you ever tried to ID. If you want to do this, Grace, then do it.”

Surprise, surprise. In her own obnoxious way, Sophia was supportive of her sister. Alex grudgingly revised his opinion of her up one notch.

Grace began to write. Her penmanship was neat, her movements quick and certain despite the fine tremor in her hand. In the end, it took less time for her to write the statement than it had taken for them to decide she should write it.

Kent filled out the rest of the form. Name, address, phone number, all asked with a smile, all given the same way. Alex wished he hadn't been such an ass when she'd tried to give him her phone number. What had he been afraid of? Violating patient privacy rules?

I'm not your patient. You can call me.

It had been hard to force that out of his mind while he'd dealt with the ambulance arrival.

“Thank you again for your help.” Kent was leaving, all smiles, his mission accomplished. Alex watched Grace smile, too, as she shook hands and wished Kent luck.

Hot cop
, Sophia had called Kent.

Alex rubbed his jaw, the scratch of his beard not helping his mood. Kent nodded a goodbye to him, looking like some kind of poster boy for the All-American clean-cut look. Alex looked like...

Aw, hell.

He looked like hell, and he knew it.

The door closed after Kent. Grace turned to Alex and held out her hand to shake his, too. “Thanks again for coming.”

Things felt stilted between them, as if they weren't on the same side. The whole reason he'd come tonight was to be sure she had someone on her side.

He didn't let go of her hand. “For what it's worth, I think you did the right thing.”

“Thank you.” Her polite smile relaxed into something more genuine; he felt rewarded. “You were playing devil's advocate for me.”

They let go of one another.

“So, is this goodbye again,” she said, “or am I going to see you in a couple of hours?”

“This is goodbye.” But he didn't like that feeling, either.

“Better start packing, Gracie.” Sophia tucked her hands behind her head and settled back, putting her good leg up on the coffee table, too. “That manager is going to be back the second he sees that cop leave.”

A knock on the door was immediately followed by the sound of a card unlocking it. In walked the same bellhops that had been here when he'd first arrived.

“Told you,” Sophia said. “Losers.”

The hotel had no respect for privacy. Alex waited, ready to chew out the manager, but the manager didn't walk in next. Instead, three maids pushed in a cleaning cart. Ignoring both him and Grace, the bellhop spoke to Sophia. “I'm sorry, Miss Jackson, but we got a call that the next guest has landed at the Austin airport, so we're to get the room ready immediately, and, uh...if you could...you know...”

Two maids disappeared into the bedroom, as the third maid began pushing in the dining room chairs they'd used. The sound of the shower being turned on in the bathroom jerked Sophia out of her lazy pose.

“Grace! Our stuff is in there.”

“Okay, okay.” Grace pressed her hands to her temples. Her fingers still had that fine tremor. “Let me think. I'll think of something. I just—maybe—maybe we could head out of town and start trying different exits. Once we are out of Austin, one of those interstate hotels is bound to have a room, right?”

“Go get our stuff.”

“Right. I need to call the front desk.”

“Go to the bedroom. Our stuff isn't at the front desk, Grace. Jeez.”

But Grace was almost talking to herself now, moving to the old-fashioned house phone beside the couch. “We can't use an app to get a lift if we can't type an address in first. No cab is going to want to go on a wild-goose chase out of town. We'll rent a car. I'll drive a car. It's been months, but— Hello?”

He swore he could hear a tremor in her voice as delicate as the one in her hands, but then a maid fired up a vacuum sweeper.

Grace turned to him suddenly, phone pressed to one ear, and raised her voice over the vacuum. “The main highway is I-35, right? I can't remember.”

It hit him that more than stress could make a person's hand tremble. For a doctor, he'd been slow to notice the signs. Shakiness, confusion—she was on the verge of a breakdown, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Grace, when's the last time you had something to eat?”

She held up a trembling finger, asking for one minute while she listened to someone on the other end of the line, then covered her ear with her hand. The maids were all making clatter of one type or another. A second later, she turned away from him, and he knew from the movement of her hand that she was dashing a tear from one eye.

“Yes, I know, I know. I'm calling to ask if you could arrange a car? Not a limo. I need a car that I could drive myself.”

“Grace.” He walked closer and took the phone away from her ear. She let it go without a fight. “When is the last time you had something to eat?”