Page 5

Chapter Four

T he two thugs were bound, gagged and struggling in the living room of Lexi Stoltz’s log palace.

Romano had blown out the candles—didn’t want their thrashing around to knock one over and start a fire.

He’d turned on lights, instead, half-surprised they even had lights this far up in the middle of nowhere.

Lexi didn’t like the lights. She told him so without speaking a word.

The way she squinted and shielded her eyes, it seemed as if she’d rather scamper off into the woods, into the dark, away from him and every ugly human being ever to draw a breath.

To live out there, with her own kind, the wary woodland creatures.

The image fit. She seemed like something rarely seen by mortal eyes. Something that only came out of hiding when she was certain no one was near, afraid of being hurt or something.

She was definitely afraid of something.

The thugs most of all, at the moment. She wouldn’t walk by them, even though they were tied up. But she followed Romano as he walked through the house, questioning him once or twice. Her voice was deep and smoky. But when he passed the bad guys, she hung back.

He stopped halfway up the staircase, staring up at the seemingly endless hallway above, the countless doors lining it. “You couldn’t have lived in a quaint little cottage, could you?”

His shoulder raged and nagged for attention. It was only a matter of time before more guys-in-black showed up. And here he was with a search grid the size of Grand Central.

“You’re not going to get away with this, you know.” She sounded like some heroine in a murder mystery. “Someone will be coming along any minute now, and you?—”

“Someone will be coming along all right, but they won’t be much help.”

She stood just inside the archway, and though she’d been speaking to him, her eyes were glued to the two wriggling black bundles hog-tied on the floor. One of them was bleeding all over her hardwood. Her lower lip trembled. He told himself not to care.

Her wide brown eyes stayed right there in his mind’s eye, though. He couldn’t make them leave. Damn. There was something about her that made him want to reassure her, maybe take her by the hand and tell her it was going to be okay.

He walked away, ignored her, found her father’s room and wondered if the man was really dead, or if she’d made that up. The room looked as if he’d just left it this morning. Still …

He went through drawers, closets, checked under the bed.

There was a stack of papers in a shoebox under there, and he pawed through it, not finding much that stood out.

A couple of unremarkable bank statements, a safe deposit box receipt, some junk mail.

He shook his head, and headed back into the hallway. She was standing there waiting for him.

“Look, I don’t have time to search this whole place, so I’m gonna have to trust you. Where are your father’s notes?”

She blinked and her gaze finally met his. “Notes?”

“The project he was working on just before he dropped out of sight, Lexi. The biological weapon he developed. Where is it?”

Her eyes narrowed. She was either completely unaware of the mess her father had created or a very good actress. He hadn’t decided which.

“My father never worked on any kind of weapon. You’ve got the wrong man, or the wrong information. He was a virologist.”

“Yeah. That much I know.”

Romano pushed a hand through his hair, rolled his eyes, swore— none of which helped the situation. When he looked at her again, she was staring at the floor near his feet. He glanced down, saw the bloodstain on the carpet, and fresh drops raining down from his arm to add to the mess.

“You’re going to bleed to death.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if she couldn’t care less.

She had a point. He stuffed the handgun into his waistband and used his good arm to tear his shirt open. Then he shrugged out of it, balled it up and dropped it.

She gasped, which made him look at her instead of the bullet hole in his left shoulder. She was standing there with a hand pressed to her chest and it hit him that it wasn’t the first time. And suddenly, her breathlessness, the paleness of her skin, made sense.

“Is it your heart? Are you?—”

She avoided his touch, held up one hand. “It’s fine. It’s fine. It converted. Just … sore.”

He blinked because he didn’t know what the hell that meant.

It didn’t look like she was going to tell him, either.

She lifted her chin, fixed her gaze on the pulsing wound in his shoulder, and took his good arm in her hand.

Apparently she was no longer averse to touching him. Maybe just being touched by him.

Her hands were cold, but her grip was firm.

She led him back up the hallway and into a white bathroom, then nodded toward a pretty little chair he wasn’t sure would support his weight.

He sat down anyway in front of a makeup stand or a vanity or whatever with an oval mirror.

When he glanced at his own reflection, he figured it was no wonder she was afraid of him.

Shirtless, bloody, his eyes as dark blue and merciless as the depths of the ocean, betraying no hint of feeling.

His hair was too long. He’d abandoned the regulation cut he used to wear.

He’d let it grow out during his eighteen-month attempt at retirement, since Wendy and the boys …

Don’t go there.

He pulled his focus back to his reflection. Hair, right. Too long. He hadn’t bothered cutting it again for this job. It wasn’t official. It was off the books. He was freelancing for one reason and one reason only. To get the man who’d murdered his family.

He heard water, saw her pouring it from a bottle onto a wad of sterile pads. She reached out and he flinched away from her. He couldn’t believe it. He’d had a moment of inexplicable fear when she'd reached for him. Him, Molotov Romano, afraid of a skittish, colt-eyed woman.

He could have analyzed it, but he didn’t. The fact was, he didn’t want her touching him. He didn’t need to dig into the reasons why. Rather than admit that, though, he held still while she tended his wound.

With an efficient and steady hand, Lexi Stoltz washed the blood from his shoulder and arm and chest. He inhaled and smelled her soap or shampoo as she leaned over him, and her breasts were too close to his face. So close he could see them through the white cotton nightgown.

Not a moment too soon she turned away, rummaging in a tall, freestanding cabinet and coming back with plastic bottle of alcohol and fists full of bandages, tape, and a tube of ointment.

She used a syringe, sans needle, to suck alcohol from the bottle and spray it into the bullet hole, and it burned like a bastard.

“I’m surprised you didn’t just let me bleed out.” Maybe conversation would distract him from the pain.

“You wouldn’t have bled out from this little thing.”

“And yet you’re patching it up.”

“I’m a doctor. It’s what I do.” She used the syringe again, rinsing from the back this time. Then she plastered both entry and exit wounds with Neosporin and bandaged him up like a pro. “Besides, I don’t want you passing out before you tell me what’s going on here.”

She didn’t sound breathless and terrified anymore, he noticed.

He didn’t like her caring for his wound.

And he knew why. He tried not to think of Wendy, but he thought of her anyway, and those thoughts brought searing pain with them.

Wendy, small and soft and fair. She used to touch him this way, her hands gentle.

She would squeeze scented oil onto her fingers and rub it all over his back at the end of a stressful day.

Wendy. Gone now. Barely enough left of her to bury. Nothing at all left of his little boys. Their markers stood over empty graves. All because he’d failed.

He didn’t have any business noticing the shape of some other woman’s breasts. He closed his eyes against the pain of grief.

Lexi’s hand stilled on his chest. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” His voice came out like sandpaper.

She looked at him as if she knew better. “I can get you something for the pain.”

“I’m fine.”

She shrugged and taped the gauze in place. "So are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

She was nearly finished. She would step away from him in a minute, put some space between them and then he’d snap out of this morbid guilt-fest.

He said, “You really don’t know?”

She shook her head, her gaze pinned to his, too brown and too honest.

“Then why did you quit your job at the clinic and move up here with him?”

She shrugged. “How do you know all that?”

“It’s my job to know.” It wasn’t. Not anymore.

She inhaled nasally, nodded as if making a decision. “My father was suffering severe dementia. The onset was sudden, the progression rapid. I resigned from the clinic to take care of him. And when he got it into his head that he had to come up here, I didn’t have a choice but to come with him.”

Romano had no idea the elder Dr. Stoltz hadn’t been on solid mental ground. That hadn’t come up in the background research he’d been given.

“I didn’t know he was sick. Dementia? He got, what, forgetful, absent minded?”

“In his case, it manifested as extreme paranoia. He thought people were after him.” She glanced through the open door, toward the stairs, and shuddered a little.

“Yeah, well, all due respect to your medical expertise, Doc, but that wasn’t dementia.”

She blinked at him. “Yeah, I was just coming to the same conclusion.” Then she turned to wash her hands.

But he was too astute not to notice that she only turned on the cold tap, or that she held her wrists turned up to the flow to counteract the shock.

“What is it you think my father was working on? What are all you people after?”

He didn’t like her lumping him in with the others, and almost said so. But he stopped himself. He didn’t give a damn what she thought of him.