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“I remember you now,” he said, unwilling to have her move away quite yet. “Once I saw you in your doctor clothes, the night we met came back to me.”
She stopped still, and looked at him.
“I’d been drinking.”
“I noticed.”
He shrugged. “I was Eddie at the time, and the people Eddie MacReady was hanging out with didn’t understand abstinence.” If he hadn’t been slightly fuzzed by alcohol, he wouldn’t have needed the twelve stitches she’d put in his arm. Normally he managed to avoid bar fights—or at least avoid getting cut in one.
She hesitated. “Being undercover...I guess you have to blend in.”
Only if you wanted to stay alive. “One way to avoid doing the hard drugs yet stay in character is to have a reputation for being real fond of the legal ones. Like bourbon. That’s Eddie’s preferred poison.” Raz might have blamed his failure to recognize Sara on the alcohol that had hazed his mind when he first saw her over six months ago, but he couldn’t afford the smallest self-deception anymore. The fact was, he hadn’t remembered her because she seemed like a different person here at work.
The change in her intrigued him even more than it bothered him, and he didn’t know why he had either reaction.
A small smile touched her lips. “Do you often talk about yourself in the third person?”
“Eddie isn’t me.” But thinking about a night when he was being Eddie helped him block memories of another hospital on another night. He remembered Sara’s hands best. She had graceful hands, the palms narrow and elegant, with long fingers ending in the short, scrubbed nails of a hairdresser or a surgeon. He remembered watching those deft fingers as they sewed him up. He’d been convinced there was something unique about her hands. Something magical.
An alcoholic fancy, of course. And yet he was surprised he hadn’t recognized her hands as soon as he saw them again.
She started to speak, but he never found out what she would have said. An ambulance crew called to say they were coming in with two of the victims of a three-car collision, and she hurried away as if she’d forgotten he existed.
He’d already noticed how unmouselike she was when she wore her doctor clothes. The woman he saw in action when the first victims were brought in was even more of a revelation. For the next several hours he watched his subject, the nurses, the halls and the patients. He flirted when he got the chance, and he considered ways Javiero might try to get to his target and how to counter those attempts. And some of the time, when the memories of another emergency room rose too near the surface, he distracted himself with other questions.
Who was Sara Grace, really? And what would her hands feel like if she touched him as a man instead of a patient?
Having company on the ride home from work felt strange to Sara, and there was something alarmingly intimate about riding in Raz’s low-slung muscle car. Christmas lights jeweled the darkness outside the car and reflected off the windows. Music, low and bluesy, throbbed from the speakers. It was not the sort of music she would have expected him to pick, yet somehow it fit. The car itself smelled of leather and cigarettes.
He hadn’t spoken since she slid in next to him at the ambulance entrance.
The silence worked to make her more conscious of him, not less. After a few blocks she had to break it. “Do you smoke?”
“I used to.”
“What made you decide to quit?”
He didn’t even look at her as he signaled, then turned smoothly onto Highpoint. “Health reasons.”
Her fingers drummed once on her thigh. Twice. Irritation made it easier to speak. “Look, you did suggest we’d deal with the situation better if we got to know each other.”
His voice was low and husky. “That wasn’t the only thing I suggested, as I recall. Though I didn’t exactly put the rest of it into words.” He glanced over at her, his expression impossible to read in the shadowy interior. “I had the impression you turned me down. Was I wrong?”
Her hands clenched in her lap. He was doing this on purpose. He wanted to rattle her, she was sure of it, even if she couldn’t imagine why. “As I recall,” she managed to say in a cool little voice, “your only other suggestion was that I not go to work. I did turn that down, yes.”
He chuckled. “You know, before going in to work with you tonight, I had the idea you were shy. Now I’ve seen you in action, and, honey, ‘shy’ is not the word I’d use to describe a woman who straddles a 250-pound man on a crash cart.”
“The patient was epileptic. He went into convulsions.”
“Yeah, and you were just doing your job, right? Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with the suggestion you made to me tonight, either.” He grinned.
“I didn’t—I haven’t—we hardly spoke.”
“Oh, talking isn’t necessary for this kind of suggestion. Did you think I wouldn’t notice the way you kept sneaking peeks at me? If there’s anything particular you want to see, honey, you let me know. I’ll be glad to show you.”
Mortification swept over Sara in a red tide. He’d noticed? Oh, no. Why hadn’t she tried harder to control her eyes? He just looked so good to her. Her eyes had been drawn to him over and over, but she hadn’t thought he’d caught her at it.
“Hey,” he said more gently, “I’m not—hell!”
She had time to blink. That was it. The next second he tramped on the gas and spun the steering wheel, flinging her sideways and sending the car into a wide, crazy turn. The terrible thunder from her nightmares mingled with the explosive sound of the back window shattering. Glass pebbles rained over her head and shoulders.
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