Love Me to Death (Underveil) (2 page)

Chapter Two

T
he lights were bright enough to shine pink through Elena’s closed eyelids.
No pain.
Certainly this was heaven.

“Miss Arcos?” It was a woman’s voice. Alto. Sweet.

Elena felt too good to open her eyes. The last thing she remembered was the searing pain of the gunshot wounds, and then his golden eyes. “Mmm hmm?” She remembered a sword…

“Miss Arcos, are you awake?”

“Mmm hmm.”
And the body of a god
.

“There are two investigators here to talk to you about the robbery.”

Nope. Not heaven.
She opened her eyes to find a woman staring at her from the end of the bed. She was in her midfifties, wearing cranberry medical scrubs with her short, brown hair pulled back with barrettes.

Elena shot bolt upright.
The hospital. Damn
. She marveled again that there was no pain as she reached behind her to pull the open back of the gown together.

Maybe she had dreamed the whole convenience store robbery—gorgeous, golden-eyed death angel and all.

When she reached up to run her hands through her hair, her fingers got tangled. She pulled her blood-matted curls over her shoulder to examine them. Her blonde hair was darkened with sticky, dried blood. She could hardly find her voice. “What happened?”

The nurse shifted nervously at the foot of the bed. “You’ve been unconscious for a while.”

“What happened to me?”

“Well, that’s what the investigators are trying to find out. May I bring them in? They’ve been waiting a long time to talk to you.”

Investigators?
The last thing she needed was to be interrogated
.
What in the world had happened anyway? If she wasn’t dead, then
she
was the one who needed answers, not them.

The nurse pushed a button on the side rail, raising the head of the bed so that Elena was sitting up. She pulled the covers up to her neck as the nurse left to summon the police investigators. As she replayed the robbery in her mind, she could find no explanation for what was happening.

She was dead.

There was no way she could have lived through the second shot. And if she had, she certainly wouldn’t be pain-free like this. But she was covered in blood—at least her hair was.

She had to get out of here. She looked around the room in an attempt to figure out which hospital she was in, but it was just a typical ER exam room. Could have been any one of the Houston Medical Center anchors.

Ah ha!
A Central Hospital OSHA protocol was plastered to the cabinet in the nurses’ station—just like the one that hung on her lab door at work. She could see the poster through the glass wall at the end of the room. So private—like a fish tank. At least she was in the hospital she worked for.

Elena jerked the rough sheet higher under her chin. Through the glass wall, she saw the nurse leading two men toward her room. They joked and laughed with each other until they reached the door, where they became somber and businesslike.

Both of them were somewhere between forty-five and fifty. As if they had planned their outfits in advance, they both wore short-sleeved button-downs and tan slacks. The shorter one with sandy-colored hair spoke first. “Miss Arcos, my name is Jack Knowles, and this is Edward Gonzalez. We’re investigators with the HPD Robbery/Homicide Division. May we ask you a couple of questions?”

Elena crossed her legs under the covers. “Um, sure.” Why, she wondered, did she feel like she’d done something wrong? She should be glad these guys were trying to find the asshole who had shot her and the store clerk. Instead, her instincts were screaming that she should be wary and guarded. She shook her head to clear it. These were the good guys, right?

Detective Gonzalez walked around to the other side of her bed, so that she was flanked on either side, like they were setting her up for a game of keep away. Her heart raced as Detective Knowles placed a laptop computer on a tray table near her bed and slid it in front of her.

“What happened to you in the store?” the dark, stocky Detective Gonzales asked as he flipped open a small notebook like something out of a dime-store detective novel. His brow furrowed as he studied her.

She got the distinct feeling these guys thought she was a part of the robbery. The instinct to remain guarded flared again.

“I don’t really know what happened. There was a guy with a gun,” she muttered, closing her eyes.

“Do you know the man with the gun?” Knowles asked.

The computer drive whirred to life. “No.”

Gonzalez’s voice came from the other side. “How did blood get in your hair and on your clothes?”

She kept her eyes closed. She was right; with one on each side, they were playing verbal keep away—or at this pace, ping-pong. She didn’t want to play. She was dead.

“Miss Arcos?” It was Knowles. “How did you get covered in blood?”

“I’ve no idea. I thought he had shot me, but I guess I was wrong.” Her answer was feeble, and she knew it. Telling these guys about the sexy death angel would guarantee her a trip to the funny farm—at the very least a heavy-duty psych evaluation, which would delay her discharge from the hospital. She kept her eyes closed in some kind of denial of reality

The nurse’s voice came from across the room. “Detectives, the test results are back. It is human blood on the patient’s body and clothes, and it matches her blood type.”

Elena assumed Gonzalez was speaking because the voice came from his side of the playing field. “Miss Arcos. We need to get some answers from you. Please open your eyes and cooperate.”

How did you explain the unexplainable? She had been shot.
Twice.
She should be dead. Maybe if she cooperated, they would go away.
These are the good guys
, she reminded herself. She opened her eyes and looked at the detective named Knowles. She gasped.

Sitting on the counter behind him was her angel of death from the convenience store. He was wearing black jeans and a black leather vest with no shirt. Strange markings covered his arms, neck, and chest, like tattoos in an alien language or something. The gold hilt of his sword peeked from over his shoulder. Maybe he had failed the first time and was here to claim her.

From his casual perch on the counter, the death angel gave her a smile. The impact was devastating. Elena’s heart ripped into hyperdrive. It wasn’t a “hey, good to see you” kind of smile. It was a devious, “I know something you don’t know” smile. He was dangerous—and she knew it. Dangerous and irresistible. Her body came to life as if electrified. She shifted uncomfortably on the hard hospital bed and recrossed her legs.

The detectives seemed oblivious to the sword-wielding man’s presence mere feet from them. In fact, Detective Knowles set his notepad on the counter inches from the death angel’s thigh. He was invisible to them.

I’m crazy
. There was no other explanation.

“Miss Arcos, why don’t we start with some basic information,” Detective Knowles suggested, clicking a ballpoint pen.

Elena answered questions about her age, address, contact numbers, and other personal information, while the detective scribbled on a form on a clipboard. “How are you feeling?” he asked as he flipped the page over.

“Like I want to go home.”

The man with the sword was no longer on the counter. She scanned the room and couldn’t find him. She chewed her bottom lip as Knowles inserted a disc in the laptop on the tray table in front of her. Out of nowhere, the death angel appeared at her shoulder, causing her to flinch and whack her knees on the table drawn across her bed. He leaned forward, studying her mouth, only inches from her face. She stopped chewing her lip and drew her mouth into a tight line. Oh God. What was that smell? It was
him.
He smelled as good as he looked, like leather and something else—some kind of cologne or soap.

She stared at the death angel’s scowling face. Gorgeous, angular, with a day’s growth of beard dusting his jaw line. “Who are you?” she whispered.

Detective Gonzalez patted her hand. “We’re investigators. We’re trying to figure out what happened to you in the store.”

She found herself unable to draw her eyes away from the dark stranger who had backed up and was now leaning against the wall. Why couldn’t they see him? He had a smirk on his face, which made her heart hammer. “I want to go home,” she whispered.

“After we watch the disc from the surveillance camera in the store, we’ll leave you alone. We’re hoping you’ll be able to clarify what’s happening as we watch it,” Detective Knowles said.

The man with the sword moved to the end of the bed. He appeared to be looking at her eyes. Not into them, like someone would if they were trying to communicate. No. He was looking
at
her eyes, as if he were studying a pinned bug specimen. Elena squirmed like that bug as she managed to pull her eyes away from the death angel.

Detective Knowles punched some keys on the laptop, and the disc began to play. There was no audio. On the screen, she watched herself enter the store. The camera had filmed from the corner where the mirror was mounted. She watched as she walked straight to the candy aisle. Detective Knowles paused the disc.

“It looks like you are familiar with the store. Why were you there?” Knowles asked.

“I was getting a Milky Way bar.”

Gonzalez smiled. “Do you do this often?”

It was obvious he thought she was lying. “Yes. I have hypoglycemia—low blood sugar—I need candy when it gets bad.”

It was Knowles’s turn to lob the ball across the court. “So, you’ve been to this store before?”

“Yes.”

“How many times?” Gonzalez seemed to enjoy the game more than Knowles. Grinning, he leaned against the bedrail, close enough for her to smell cigarette smoke clinging to his clothes.

“Um. Pretty much every day for the last three weeks.”

Knowles’s turn again. “Why for three weeks?”

She groaned. If only she knew. “My blood sugar has been out of whack since I started working at the hospital,” she explained, smoothing the top of the sheet into a neat, straight fold. “The store is the first place to buy chocolate on my way home.”

Gonzalez asked, “What do you do at the hospital?”

“I’m a research biologist in the hematology lab.”

Gonzalez must have forgotten it wasn’t his turn in the keep away game, because he continued the questioning. “What is your job in the lab?”

“I have a Ph.D. in Biology. I’m working as a research scientist on a cancer drug protocol. I study blood anomalies.”

Deep laughter filled the room. Elena had been so distracted by the detectives she’d forgotten the death angel, who had moved to the glass wall when the questioning began. “That’s perfect,” he said in his deep voice. “Absolutely perfect. The fox in the henhouse.”

What was that accent, she wondered. German? No, Russian, maybe. Whatever it was, the effect of his voice on her body was as profound as his smile. Her insides clenched.

Knowles spoke next. “So you’ve been going to this convenience store every day to get a candy bar after work.”

She nodded but continued to watch the death angel, who chuckled as he stared out the window into the ER hallway. Like something out of a really great dream, here stood a huge guy with sexy markings, deep voice, and a sword—and for some reason, she was the only one who could see him. Physically, he was too good to be real. Maybe he
was
a dream.
Don’t wake up, Elena
, she urged, trying to memorize every detail of his magnificent body. But she knew it wasn’t a dream. She had died and was stuck in some kind of freaky purgatory.

“Miss Arcos, are you okay?” Detective Knowles waved his hand in front of her face.

“Uh, sorry, yeah,” she mumbled, reluctantly drawing her eyes back to the computer as Knowles restarted the surveillance disc. On the screen, she watched herself pick up a Milky Way bar. The robber walked into the store and spread his hands out on the counter. The clerk behind the cash register dropped the tabloid he was reading and stood up. She watched the small laptop screen as the robber pulled a gun out of the front waist of his pants under the flannel shirt and shot the clerk, who collapsed behind the counter. Everything was exactly as she remembered it. The guy cleared out the cash register and then walked down the aisle beyond her to the back of the store. He turned on her aisle, and she bolted. He leveled the handgun and shot her in the back on the right shoulder. She hit the floor. The guy shoved her with his foot and then kicked her. Calmly, he aimed the gun at the middle of her back and fired. Blood spread out between her shoulder blades. As if he had not just shot two people, the guy strode nonchalantly out of the store.

Detective Gonzalez stopped the disc. “So, Miss Arcos, what happened next?”

Elena held her breath in an attempt to control her panic. No way was she going to talk about her imaginary death angel, who had disappeared from the exam room sometime during the review of the surveillance recording. More unnerving than his presence was his absence. “I don’t remember.”

Detective Gonzalez started the disc again. Neither he nor detective Knowles watched the computer; they watched Elena, who could feel their gazes as she concentrated on the black and white images on the screen. After the robber left the store, the death angel appeared out of thin air. She gasped, and then looked at the detectives, who were oblivious.