Roan (4 page)

He looked up, alerted by something in her voice. “Yeah?”

“She needs more blood, O positive. The hospital had half the units she needs on hand, and it may be hours before we can get the rest here.”

Roan's type was O positive. He didn't hesitate, didn't bother to even think about it. “Why the hell didn't you say so?” he demanded as he turned in the direction of the lab and began to remove equipment from his belt. “Let's do it.”

 

“Donna? Donna, wake up.”

The voice was deep, quiet and masculine, the appeal urgent. Though it wasn't her name the man called, Tory felt she should respond. She lifted her eyelids a fraction, then
snapped them shut again as bright light from directly above her sent a stab of pain into her head.

“Donna?”

The light was snapped off. Her hand was taken in a warm grasp. The touch seemed to lend her strength. She lifted her lashes again with slow care.

A man stood over her. His face was strained and somber in the subdued glow from behind vertical window blinds. The tan uniform he wore was familiar, as was the shiny badge on his chest.

The sheriff. She stiffened, tried to drag her hand free.

“Careful. You don't want pull out your IV.”

It was a second before the words penetrated the drug-induced haze in her mind. Then she saw the plastic tubing that snaked from her hand up her arm and across the sheets to disappear somewhere above her. White sheets, pale-green walls, TV set placed high on the wall, faded cotton gown that smelled of bleach. She was in a hospital.

She returned her gaze to the man who stood next to the bed with his body partially blocking the light from the window. She moistened her parched lips, and began, “You. You're…”

“Sheriff Roan Benedict.” He inclined his head in a brief, almost courtly gesture. At the same time, he released her and backed away a step, as if he felt he might be too close.

Tory appreciated that retreat; his tall figure looming over her had been unsettling. She took a slow, deep breath against the raw heaviness of her lungs and chest while she stared at him in the light of day, measuring what she saw against her impressions from the night before.

He wasn't what she'd call devastatingly handsome; his face was rough-hewn and weathered to a deep bronze, his lips were a bit too firm, and a half-moon scar indenting the end of one brow gave him a quizzical look even in repose.
Still, there was strength and inherent attraction in the alignment of his features. Like some western actor from the late-night movies, his height, square jaw and piercing steel-gray eyes bracketed by smile lines made him look like a man it would be easy to trust but dangerous to cross.

Her gaze dropped past his broad shoulders, touched briefly on the silver star pinned to his shirt pocket, and then came to rest on the wide leather belt that supported his holstered weapon.

“You're the one who shot me,” she said in bald accusation.

The corners of his mouth tugged into a grim smile. “That has a familiar ring.”

He was right; she'd said something similar before. For a second she glimpsed, like a dream on first awakening, the events of the night. The van. Zits. The shot. She'd been angry and confused. There was pain followed by the comfort of a firm voice and life-giving warmth of enfolding arms.

No, the last had to be a figment of her imagination; it couldn't have happened. Here in broad daylight, she could not picture this man, with his stiff stance, muscle-corded jaw, and shiny image of authority pinned to his chest ever unbending enough take her in his arms.

She met his gaze with a troubled frown. He was watching her, his expression shuttered, though some dark and not quite official awareness lingered in the gray depths of his eyes. She was so startled by it that she lay perfectly still, barely breathing, while feverish heat moved over her in a slow wave.

The door of the room swished open. A dark-haired nurse clad in a scrub suit of lilac and green bustled toward her. “Well, so you're awake! How are you feeling?”

“She's fine, we're fine,” the sheriff responded smoothly, before Tory could marshal her thoughts enough to answer.

“Let's see she stays that way, shall we?” For all her cheerfulness, the glance the nurse turned on the sheriff seemed to hold a warning. She reached for the stethoscope looped across her neck. “While I'm here, I need to get her vital signs.”

It was a short drill without much entertainment value, but the sheriff seemed to find it interesting. He looked over the nurse's shoulder as she made notations on the bedside chart. When she turned to leave, he held the door for her, then stepped through it after her. It clicked shut behind them as if it had been given a firm push.

Tory could hear low-voiced conversation out in the hall. Since it was almost certainly about her and her condition, she strained to hear but could make no sense of it. She relaxed on the pillow again with a sigh.

This was the second time she'd been awake, she thought. She could remember being in recovery and parts of the gurney ride down long halls to this room. She looked around, taking stock in frowning concentration since she was half afraid that the hallway consultation meant she was more seriously injured than she seemed.

Both her wrists were wrapped in bandages to protect her duct tape injuries. Plastic tubes draped above her like Christmas garlands, including one connected to a machine that administered a high-powered painkiller in automatic doses. The bandaging that wrapped her shoulder and upper chest was bulky, but beneath it was only the natural soreness of any injury. She could flex the fingers of her hand and move her arm, a distinct improvement over the night before.

She was okay; she was going to survive pretty much
intact. That was a minor miracle, one she owed to first aid administered on a dark, gravel road.

But saving her life was the least Sheriff Roan Benedict could do after shooting her, wasn't it? No special gratitude was required. Anyway, he'd have done the same if she'd been a seven-foot-tall, three hundred pound male and guilty as sin.

She was innocent. She'd told the sheriff so and he hadn't believed her. That rankled. In fact, it made her even madder than being shot like a common criminal. The stiff-necked lawman out in the hall was so sure she was a desperado that he was standing guard over her. That had to be it. There was no other reason for him to be at her side.

Somehow, some way, she had to convince him. Surely there was some detail of what had happened that would prove her case? She let her mind drift back to be beginning, trying to find it.

She'd left the house on Sanibel for her run along the beach just as she did every evening. The sunset had been beautiful, with the last purple-and-crimson light of the day streaking down into the gulf. She'd passed well beyond the private Vandergraff beach area, racing past a hotel beach where tourists peered through cameras at the sunset, clicking off shots and rolling endless miles of videotape as they enjoyed their vacations vicariously through distancing lenses. She'd noticed the smell of frying conch scenting the wind, coming from a nearby restaurant. As the rustle of the breeze through the beachside palms and the deepening twilight soothed her frayed nerves, she'd run on and on, coming to a long stretch of winter homes whose owners had returned to cooler climes for the summer.

She hadn't been thinking, hadn't been watching. Her mind had been on her quarrel with Harrell. She'd given his ring back to him the weekend before, then he'd come
around that evening, just before she left the house. He'd been so certain, being a supersalesman, that he could talk himself back into her good graces. He hadn't taken her refusal to listen to his spiel at all well. The words they exchanged had left her rattled and upset.

That wasn't all. Her stepfather was also applying pressure, suggesting that she didn't know her own mind. He seemed to think she was irresponsible and needed a husband to ground her. Or maybe he just wanted to be relieved, finally, of responsibility for her.

Paul Vandergraff knew Harrell, had met him in passing at the yacht club and on the occasional putting green. The cheap furniture king of South Florida was an up-and-coming man, Paul said, eminently suitable, for whatever that was worth. That Harrell could be a new business ally had been an added plus.

The reason it was so hard to persuade Paul she really wanted out of the engagement, Tory thought, was because she'd been so vague about her reasons. That was deliberate. Harrell had been wheeling and dealing with his usual flamboyance, but this time he'd involved her. She had been so depressed at the discovery and the fact that she'd been taken in by him that she hadn't wanted to talk about it. She didn't want to think, much less admit, that Paul might be right about her since she'd drifted into the engagement with little idea of how it had happened.

That lack of decisiveness was a grim reminder of the pattern of her mother's life. Evelyn Molina, heiress to the Bridgeman Department Store fortune, had been married for her money so many times, beginning with Tory's titled playboy father, that she'd ceased to change her name with every wedding. She only added the current husband's surname to that of her first husband's with a hyphen, just as she had insisted be done for Tory when Paul Vandergraff
adopted her. Her stepfather seemed sure that Tory was just as flighty and irrational, had hinted for years that she would end up the same as her mother, fading away in an exclusive rest home for aging socialites dependent on prescription drugs. The broken engagement would give him more ammunition, make him even more positive that she was incapable of managing her own affairs.

The men came at her from the shadow of a stand of Australian pines. She ignored them at first, thinking they were just more tourists indulging in horseplay on the beach. They were close, too close, before she saw the danger.

The one she'd later dubbed Big Ears caught her with a flying tackle and dragged her down. Zits had hit her, a hard blow that sent her senses reeling. Before she could recover, she was flung onto her stomach with her nose pressed into the sand while her wrists were taped behind her back. She still had sand in her mouth when they gagged her. Within seconds, she was hoisted up and forced to walk to the stolen van. That short march over the sand with a gun to her head had been the longest of her life.

The click of the door dragged her back to the present. Tory turned her head as Roan stepped into the room again. Behind him was an older man wearing the white lab coat that marked him as a doctor, even before he stepped to the medication dispenser and began to adjust its flow.

“There now, Donna,” the older man said, smiling as he surveyed her through the lower halves of his bifocals. “How are you doing? Not too much pain?”

She shook her head by way of an answer, though she lifted a brow at the same time. Moistening her lips that were suddenly dry, she asked, “Donna?”

“That's your name, isn't it? Leastwise, it was on the chain they took off your ankle.” The doctor exchanged a
quick glance with Roan before he moved to the bedside table to pour water, then handed it to Tory.

Her anklet, she thought, shielding her gaze with her lashes as she drank. It was a treasured gift from her mother, one of the few that meant anything. An expensive trinket, it spelled out a nickname her parents had used when she was a baby, a shortened version of the affectionate title, Little Madonna, given her by the old-fashioned servants of her Italian grandparent when she visited with them as a child. Her grandfather had been a prince, as had her father before he died in a plane crash, which made her a princess under the expansive rules of European nobility. The title had no more than social significance in democratic Italy, still Harrell had enjoyed introducing her by it, to her embarrassment. As if such a thing mattered.

“Well, my dear?”

The elderly doctor's eyes twinkled with blue gleams under his bushy brows, but they were still shrewd. Tory was also aware of the sheriff's concentrated interest in her answer. She couldn't think with her usual clarity for the lingering drug fog in her mind, still an idea was flitting around in the haze like a fly in search of a landing spot.

Stalling for time, she frowned at the older man. “I'm sure you know it's totally non-PC to call patients honey and dear?”

“Politically correct, you mean? Now, you're got me there. I've been told a hundred times not to get familiar with females, but damn it all—excuse the language—I like 'em and the habit of showing it is so old it's hard to break. Being semiretired, I get away with it most of the time.” The grin he gave her was unrepentant.

“She wasn't happy about being my honey, either,” Roan drawled from where he lounged with a shoulder propped
against the corner wall of the private bathroom that jutted out into the room.

Heat rose in Tory's face, but she ignored it and the man who had caused it. “Semiretired,” she repeated with a quick glance toward her medication dispenser. “I thought it was a different doctor taking care of me last night.”

“That would be Simon Hargrove, a fine surgeon,” he returned with the quick inclination of his white head. “I'm Doc Watkins, but don't get yourself in a stew. I help out around here still, now and then, and I wouldn't harm a hair on your lovely head. Roan says he needs to talk to you, so it must be important. All I'm doing is arranging it so he gets what he wants.”

He had turned off her pain medication; it was there in his face, if not in his words. The most recent dose would wear off soon, then the heaviness in her chest and shoulder would become a consuming agony once more. Tory knew who to thank for this turn of events.

She shifted her head on the pillow to meet the steady gaze of the lawman. Her voice as cool and imperious as she could make it, she asked, “Torture, sheriff?”

“What I'm after is information. Torture will be a last resort.”