Wolver's Rescue (13 page)

“
Are you feeling brave,
spitfire?”

The way she was shaking, he didn’t think so,
but she nodded her head gamely and asked, “What are we going to
do?”

“
Not we. You. You’re going
to walk by that office and make sure they see you. Move fast, but
don’t run unless you have to. Let yourself in the room and lock the
door behind you, but don’t chain it. You don’t want to make it too
hard, but if you make it too easy they’ll be suspicious. Once
you’re inside, don’t stop. Head for the bathroom and lock that door
behind you. It won’t hold, but it’ll buy a few more seconds. Get
that skinny little ass of yours out just like you did before.” He
lifted her chin, the lover about to kiss his girl. “Can you do
it?”

She nodded again. “What do I do then?”

“
Nothing. Step back into the
bushes and wait there until I come and get you.”

“
You promise you won’t leave
me?”

“
I promise. I won’t leave
you behind.”

She nodded a third time. “Give me the bag,”
she said of the sack of leftovers.

“
We don’t need
it.”

He went to toss it away, but she stopped him.
“You don’t. I do.”

~*~

Don’t run, he’d said, but that was all her
legs wanted to do as she crossed the street, swinging the plastic
bag in a wide arc at her side; a girl in a very good mood having
just said goodbye to her lover. When she neared the car, her swing
continued up over her head, landing on the trunk with a thump. The
clerk and guards looked up at the noise.

“
Oops.” Tommie giggled the
word with a shrug of apology and continued on her way with a little
skip of pretended happiness. She knew they were watching her and
heard the office door open just as she reached her room. Her hand
shook as she inserted the key, but the door opened easily. Once
inside, she ran, grabbed the duffle, the backpack, and the few
plastic bags, and headed to the bathroom. Door locked, window open,
she scraped everything from the sink counter into one of the
smaller bags and threw it out first. The duffle was bigger than she
was and probably weighed as much. She wasted precious seconds
stuffing it through. The backpack and other small bags went
next.

Someone was at the door before she had time
to lower herself feet first. She had no choice but to dive through.
The door crashed open as her hands reached for the ground, but
before her legs had a chance to follow. She screamed as hands
grabbed her ankles and tried to pull her back. She kicked and
thrashed and screeched again when she collapsed on her head in the
dirt, her new boots left behind.

There was a frightening roar of anger from
inside the room and a curse right behind her as the guard pushed
his shoulders through the window in an attempt to grab her. Her
hairbrush had fallen from the bag to the ground and she grabbed the
handle. She scrambled to her feet and swung the brush, bristles
outward, into the guard’s face. His arms flailed and he cursed
again, this time with the pain.

Tommie kept swinging until a hand grabbed the
man by the collar and dragged him inside. There was more thumping
and grunting and then the small room boomed with the echoing sound
of a gunshot followed by another grunt and thud as a body fell.

“
Bull!” What if that sound
was Bull? What if he needed help?

Brush-weapon in hand, Tommie reached for the
window ledge and hoisted herself up with shaking arms. Head above
the sill, she was met by a familiar scowling face.

“
You need work on following
orders,” he said as he pried her fingers loose and let her fall
back to the ground. The boots landed next to her. The window
slammed shut.

“
Yes, sir!” she muttered, as
she saluted the closed window with her middle finger. “Next time
I’ll obediently watch while they shoot the crap out of you.” She
pulled on her boots and gathered up what had spilled from the bags
and waited impatiently for the truck to pull around and pick her
up.

When it did, Bull immediately jumped out and
began stowing things behind the seats. “When I tell you to do
something,” he told her with an angry tinge to his voice, “I expect
you to do it.”

“
I did,” she snapped back.
The smell of something coppery hit her, irritating her nose. “I got
their attention. I locked the door. I went out the
window.”

“
Then where did all this
shit come from?” He tossed in the last bag, then left the passenger
door open and rounded the hood to his own open door. “Get
in.”

“
Well excuse me. I thought
you might need it.” She reached across the seat to hoist herself
up.

“
I don’t.” Bull’s hand
grabbed hers. He grunted as he hauled her in. “Now buckle
up.”

She was about to make a snarky remark about
him having an endless supply of handcuffs somewhere when her foot
hit something solid on the floor. She pushed it aside, heard it
clunk against something else and looked down to see what was in her
way. There were two handguns on the floor. She worried about Bull
being shot, not Bull doing the shooting. “Did you...? Are
they...?”

“
No to both questions. We
don’t need any more dead bodies.” He pulled out onto the main road
and nodded in the direction of the guns. “Those belong to the
security guards.”

“
Guards don’t carry real
guns, only the stun kind.” She’d heard Stu and Buster complain
about it enough.

Bull gave her a look sour enough to curdle
cream. “They do now.”

“
But why?”

“
Gee, spitfire, let me see,”
he said, rather snidely Tommie thought. “Two dead orderlies, Nurse
Shitty, an escaped patient who’s been kept like an animal in a
cage,” he listed, “and one lethal new employee, but no cops or news
reports. Now we have goons with guns. Any thoughts circling in that
not-so-level head of yours?”

“
Yes, but they’re mostly
about you and they’re not very nice, so I’d prefer not repeat
them.” To think she’d actually been worried about him.

She folded her arms across her chest and
stared at nothing out the passenger window. It was killing her not
to, but she refused to show the least bit of curiosity when Bull
pulled into the largest shopping mall in town and circled around
the anchor stores to the back where the movie complex was located.
He found a space in the middle of the fourth row back and
parked.

“
Don’t move,” he said as he
reached for the door handle. “And see if you can grab another shirt
out of the duffle.”

“
Oh? You mean the bag I
remembered to bring?” she asked sweetly. She turned to rummage
through the bag. “Pretty difficult not to move and to look through
the bag at the same time. Hmmm, which order should I
obey?”

“
Fuck.”

Tommie’s head snapped up. “Listen, you
bullheaded...Oh my God, you’re hurt!”

“
No shit.” He’d already
thrown the denim jacket on the seat and was pulling off the bloody
tee.

Tommie was out of the cab and tearing open
the driver’s door before the shirt was over his head.

“
Didn’t I just tell you...”
he began.

“
Shut up and let me see.”
Heart hammering, Tommie slapped at the hand fingering the red and
swollen area around the wound. The flesh was torn in a straight
line, not deep, but still oozing blood. She grabbed the bloody tee
and pressed a clean section against the wound. “This needs to be
cleaned and bandaged.”

“
Just give me the damn
shirt,” he growled.

Tommie held the clean shirt away. “Why? So
you can get this one bloody, too? Stop being Mr. Macho and get in
the damn truck before someone sees you stripping down in the middle
of the parking lot and calls the police. Where’s your first aid
kit?”

He was hurt, he was hurt, he was hurt, and
all because she didn’t do what she was told.

“
Jesus, you are one fucking
pain in the ass,” he groused, but he sat back in the seat and
opened the console beside him. He passed her a couple of sterile
wrapped gauze pads and a roll of tape. “Happy now?”

“
No. I need antiseptic and
something to clean this black stuff away from the cut.” There were
tiny bits of thread from his tee shirt as well. “I don’t know where
it came from, but it can’t be good.”

Bull winced. “It’s gunshot residue, spitfire,
and it’s a good thing I paid for the room with cash. No credit card
to charge for the hole in the shower.”

“
That’s not
funny.”

“
It wasn’t at the time, but
now?” He shrugged and grinned. “He lost. I won.”

He expected surprise and thought it would be
followed by exasperated laughter. What he got made him feel like a
heel for opening his mouth.

She stared at him as if she couldn’t believe
what he was saying and then her eyes blinked as she refocused on
his face and his words. Her mouth opened and closed and opened
again emitting a strangled sound somewhere between a whine and a
growl.

What little color she’d regained, drained
from her face. She dropped her head, wet her thumb on her tongue,
and continued to clean the residue and blood from around the wound
with it. When he handed her a couple of alcohol wipes from the
console, her hands were shaking. She wiped the wound, applied the
gauze and tape, and when she looked up at him again, tears were
streaking down her cheeks. He kept her chin up with his knuckle
beneath it.

“
Hey now, it’s okay. I
lived,” he soothed with a false sounding chuckle.

Again, the reaction was not what he expected.
She hit him. Her jaw clenched and her bony little fist crashed into
his shoulder with surprising force. Twice.

“
You stupid, stupid man...
wolver... whatever the hell you are,” she seethed. “You could have
gotten yourself killed. Killed! And for what? What the hell were
you doing in that room?” She waved at the bags behind the seat.
“You didn’t even want this... this... this shit. Why didn’t you
just get in the truck and drive away?”

He stopped her hand before she hit him again.
“That was the plan, spitfire. I needed one minute with their eyes
on you so I could slash their tire, get the truck, get you, and
they couldn’t follow.”

“
Then why did you go in? Why
didn’t you stick to the plan?”

“
Because I heard a scream,”
he said quietly.

But it wasn’t just a scream. It was her
scream, and the sound of it tore something open in him. For one
brief moment his wolf had taken over, blinded by rage, and it was
all he could do not to kill the bastards for touching her, for
hurting her again, for making her scream in fear, for locking her
in that God damned cage.

She surprised him yet a third time when she
threw her arms around his neck and sobbed into the shoulder she’d
just hit.

“
Aw, Jesus, baby. It’s okay.
It’s a graze. It’ll bleed a little and then go away.” He slid the
seat back and hauled her onto his lap, closing the door and dousing
the truck cab’s interior light. “They paid. It’s all
good.”

“
It isn’t all good. You
could have been killed,” she wept into his neck, her breath coming
in short, sharp bursts. “This is my fault, my fault.”

It wasn’t the first time a female had cried
on his shoulder, but their tears never affected him like this.
Whatever Tommie’s scream had torn open and exposed, was now being
crushed by the sound of her weeping. He felt her pain and he
couldn’t stand it. He was in danger of making promises he couldn’t
keep just to make it stop.

His wolf, however, had other ideas. It was
looking for the source of her pain, ready to tear it to pieces.

Bull wrapped his arms around her to give his
hands something to do besides clench into fists. Stroking her hair
and rubbing her back had the added benefit of soothing both woman
and wolf. The sobs subside to snuffling and his wolf relaxed. Bull
let out a relieved breath and kept his voice even.

“
I wasn’t killed and this
wasn’t your fault. How did he find you? What does he
know?”

The crying stopped and her breathing calmed.
She was so still, so quiet, that for a minute he thought she wasn’t
going to answer. But he was wrong. His spitfire was only taking a
moment to pull her act together. She took a last breath, a deep
one, and leaned back. Grabbing his bloody shirt, she wiped her eyes
and nose with a clean spot.

“
Has to be washed anyway,”
she said and then she shrugged. “Sorry. I’m not usually a crybaby.”
She shrugged again and tried to smile. “Except for my people at
Harbor House. I cry for them a lot, but you don’t want to hear
about them.”

Actually, he did. He wanted to hear about
these people who earned her tears. He wanted to know what gave her
the strength to withstand the untamed wolf inside her that should
have rendered her incapable of that kind of compassion. “Another
time. For now, tell me about Gantnor.”

She nodded. “He’d been friends with my
parents since college. He’s the one who arranged my adoption.” She
told him about her childhood with ‘Uncle’ Ray. “Next to my parents,
he was the most important person in my life until I got older and
started having problems. He started coming around even more, asking
questions, wanting to take me places where he said we could talk,
privately. I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t know what was happening
to me, but I knew I didn’t want him near me.”