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Obviously her future was not in channeling. The stranger didn’t move. If anything, his expression grew darker. “No, thanks.”
He was about to go. Again, she moved so that she was in front of him, blocking his way out of the side street. He was breathing harder, she noted. It was getting more difficult for him to stand, she guessed.
Marja did her best to brazen him out. “That wasn’t an offer you were supposed to refuse.”
“I can’t go to the hospital.” He couldn’t afford for his cover to be blown, not when things were beginning to come together, however slowly.
“Why?” Marja demanded.
Even as she asked, she had a feeling she knew. Anyone who came into the hospital with a gunshot wound had to be reported to the police. The man she’d hit with her car was undoubtedly standing on the wrong side of the law and couldn’t risk it. Ordinarily she’d be tempted to back off. But part of this was her fault. She’d hit him with her car and that made her at least partially responsible for this man. Who knew what kind of damage he’d sustained from the impact, however slowly she’d been going?
She couldn’t let him just disappear into the night without trying to help. That wasn’t the way she had been raised, that wasn’t what her Hippocratic oath meant to her.
For one long moment Kane seriously debated just pushing this woman out of his way and making good his getaway.
But despite the fact that there’d been no one to teach him manners, no one to drill the difference between right and wrong into his head, not even when he’d been very, very young, it was second nature to him to rein in the explosive temper that dwelled inside of him. Women were the softer sex and should be treated with a measure of respect—even when they ran you down with their cars.
So rather than become physical, Kane decided to resort to his voice, a voice that had been known to make his handler, a fifteen-year veteran with the Company, cringe and look decidedly uncomfortable. He figured at the very least, that would make the woman back off and leave him alone.
“What the hell do you think you are, lady? My conscience?”
His manner was malevolent, but there was something in his eyes, something that told her she didn’t have anything to fear. He wasn’t going to hurt her, not for trying to help him at any rate.
“Why?” she asked, her voice mild, curious. “Do you need one?”
His eyebrows narrowed, his eyes looked like thunder. “Get out of my way, lady.”
Marja stood her ground and tried again. “I’m a doctor—”
Kane sucked in his breath, struggling to keep the pain at bay. It was distressingly close. “Okay, get out of my way, Doctor.”
Marja made a quick decision, not one her parents or her brothers-in-law, all three of whom were in some branch of law enforcement, would have praised, but one she knew she could live with. Hopefully. “If you don’t want to go to the hospital, I can still treat you.”
She saw suspicion rise into his eyes to replace the darkness.
“And just why would you do that?” Each word was carefully measured out.
“Because I hit you with my car and I owe you one.”
Kane found himself leaning against the hood, his knees growing watery. “If you ‘owe me one,’ get out of my way and we’ll call it even.”
The infuriating woman moved her head slowly from side to side. A hot breeze moved her hair independently about her face. “Can’t do that.”
“Sure you can.” Getting air into his lungs was becoming difficult. “There’s your car.” He tried to wave toward it and stopped. The effort to stand grew increasingly difficult. “Get in it, drive away and go hit someone else.”
She ignored his protest. “I don’t live far from here. I’ve got everything I need to treat you at my apartment. Please,” she pressed, taking a step toward him.
The air turned sweeter. Fruit? Perfume? His brain was scrambled.
“That could get infected.”
She was talking about his wound, he thought, his brain oddly feverish. Maybe she had hit him harder than he thought. “And that’s your concern how?”
“I’m a doctor,” the woman repeated for the third time. She was really getting on his nerves.
“You keep saying that,” he accused angrily.
To his surprise, he saw her smile. Or was that just a hallucination? “And I’ll keep repeating it until you let me treat you.”
He knew better, he really did. But he felt dangerously light-headed. Losing all that blood and then getting hit by a car, even if it wasn’t going all that fast, had conspired to wreck havoc on his stamina. He began to doubt he could make it back to the hotel room.
And there were cops out. It would be just his luck to attract the attention of one of them. Right now, he wasn’t at liberty to explain to one of New York’s finest why he was weaving through the streets like a drunken sailor with a gunshot wound.
Like it or not—and he didn’t—he was going to have to take a chance on this woman.
“Okay,” he growled in his most threatening voice. “But just so you know, I’m armed and dangerous.”
Her father had taught her that when she had her back up against a wall, she needed to tough it out and put on the bravest face she could, even if her insides were rapidly turning to jelly.
“Never thought anything else,” Marja replied matter-of-factly as she helped the wounded stranger into her car.
He passed out the moment she shut the door.
Chapter 2
Marja drove quickly, squeaking through amber lights about to turn red. She hoped all the police squad cars were in another part of the city. She’d deliberately left the radio off so that she could hear her passenger in case he suddenly came to and said something.
He didn’t.
The stranger was still out cold a few minutes later when she pulled into the underground parking garage located directly beneath her apartment building.
Zipping into the assigned parking space, she turned off the engine and eyed the man slumped over beside her.
“Okay, we’re here,” she announced. There was absolutely no indication that he’d heard her. Nudging him, first gently, then with feeling, accomplished nothing. Marja placed her fingertips to his throat and felt for his pulse. He was still alive. “Wake up,” she ordered loudly.
His eyes remained closed.
Okay, now what? she wondered.
Maybe he’d lost more blood than she’d thought. Marja chewed on her bottom lip, thinking. She needed to get him upstairs. No way could she get him out of the car and into the elevator by herself.
Marja looked at the stranger’s face. For a moment she entertained the idea of turning around and driving back to the hospital. Plenty of people could help her there.
But she’d told him that she wouldn’t and for some reason she couldn’t quite put into words, she felt that it was important that she not lie to the man.
With a sigh, she took out her cell phone. She pressed the keypad for Tania, the only one of her sisters who still lived in the apartment that had originally housed Sasha, Natalya and Kady before all three of them had gotten married. Pretty soon, she knew it would be only her living there. But right now, she shared the three-bedroom apartment with Tania—when her sister wasn’t staying over at her fiancé Jesse’s place.
The phone on the other end of the line stopped ringing.
“Where the hell are you?” Tania demanded with exasperation the moment she came on. “You were supposed to be here twenty minutes ago. I need the car. They called me in to cover for Michaelson. If I don’t get to the hospital in fifteen minutes, I’m going to be late for my shift.”
Marja picked her words carefully. She didn’t want to say any more over the phone than she absolutely had to. “I need you to come down, Tania.” She glanced toward the slumped figure to her right. “I’ve, um, got a slight problem.”
For a moment there was silence, then anger. “There better be nothing wrong with the car or you’re going to be facing more than just a ‘slight’ problem,” Tania warned her.
The next moment the connection was abruptly terminated.
Marja closed her cell phone, pocketing it along with her car keys. Squaring her shoulders, she braced herself for a lecture when Tania arrived. The car was really Tania’s, although they did share it. Her sister had bought it from Sasha after their oldest sister had purchased a new one, an SUV to accommodate her family increasing by one. In its time, the vehicle had ferried all five of the Pulaski women to and from the hospital, as well as the house in Queens where they all grew up and where their parents still resided.
Deciding to give it one more try, Marja shook her unconscious passenger’s shoulder again and wound up with the same results.
“If you know what’s good for you,” she murmured to the unconscious stranger, “you’ll come to—fast.”
The elevator leading up to the other floors was located on the far side of the garage. Marja watched as the doors opened. Her sister had arrived faster than she’d anticipated.
Tania, casually dressed in jeans and a blue pullover sweater, a giant purse slung over her shoulder, quickly cut the distance between the elevator and the parked vehicle to nothing.
It wasn’t until she was only about two feet away from her car that she saw Marja wasn’t alone in it. And it wasn’t until she’d reached the car that she noticed the passenger’s condition.
Marja was already out. Rounding the hood, she opened the passenger door. “I need your help to get him upstairs.”
Tania stared at her sister, stunned. She was accustomed to Marja bringing men home, but they were usually in a far better state than this one—and conscious. She looked back at the slumped passenger.
“Bringing home hospital overflow, Marysia?” she quipped.
This wasn’t the time to get into a discussion. She needed to take care of the stranger’s wound before it became infected.
“Just help me get him upstairs, Tania,” Marja said wearily. “It’s been a long night, not to mention a long day.”
Tania made no move to help. Instead she leaned over the passenger side and peered at the man.
“Scruffy, but definitely not bad-looking,” she pronounced. Straightening, she glanced at her sister, an incredulous expression on her face. “You were the one who always brought home strays,” she recalled. The habit had driven their mother crazy, despite the fact that Magda Pulaski found a way to house each and every wounded animal. “But this—” Tania gestured toward the stranger “—is over the top, even for you.”
Marja started to struggle with the man, trying to move him into position so that they could pull him out of the vehicle. If they both took hold of an arm, they could get him into the elevator.
“I hit him with the car, Tania.” It wasn’t something she’d wanted to admit, at least not yet. Not until Tania was at least a grandmother. But it was obvious that her sister needed to be coerced.
If she was shocked, Tania didn’t show it. Instead she placed her hands on Marja’s shoulders and moved her out of the way so that she could get a closer look at the man. After a quick assessment, she raised her eyes to Marja’s. “Since when does the car shoot bullets?” she asked. “Sasha never mentioned it could do that little trick.”
Annoyed, Marja shifted her out of the way and resumed trying to pull the stranger farther out of the vehicle. “Don’t get sarcastic, Tania.”
“Don’t get stupid, Marja,” Tania countered, her arms crossed before her chest. “We’re not bringing him upstairs.”
“Fine,” Marja snapped. She’d finally managed to get him to face out. It was like pushing a rock into position. “I’ll do it myself.”
Tania watched her continue to struggle for exactly five seconds, muttered a sharp oath and then grabbed the unconscious stranger by the other arm. Marja looked at her in surprise.
“You are the most stubborn woman on the face of the earth,” Tania declared angrily. Between the two of them, they hoisted the all but dead weight up to his feet.
“Blame Mama. I got it from her,” Marja gasped, struggling beneath the unconscious man’s weight and doing her best not to pitch forward or to fall backward as they slowly made their way to the elevator.
Tania held on to the man’s wrist, his arm slung across her shoulders as she took unsteady steps toward the elevator. “You know this is crazy, don’t you?”
Marja kept her eyes on the prize, silently counting off steps until they finally reached the steel doors. “We’re doctors,” she pointed out haltingly.
Leaning her forehead against the wall to help brace herself, Marja pressed for the elevator. When the doors opened almost immediately, she had to keep from falling forward. Breathing a huge sigh of relief—they were halfway there—she punched the button for their floor.
“We’re supposed to heal people,” she concluded, drawing in a lungful of air as she braced herself for the second half of the journey—getting the man to their apartment once they reached the fifth floor.
Tania craned her neck around the man they held up between them. “That doesn’t mean going out and trolling the streets for patients.”
“I wasn’t trolling. I told you, I hit him with the car.”
“How—?”
She’d braced herself for that same question. “One second he wasn’t there,” Marja answered. “Then he was. And I hit him.”
“But you didn’t shoot him,” Tania insisted. The elevator came to a stop and Tania shifted, getting what she hoped was a better hold on the man. “Why didn’t you just take him to P.M. or call the paramedics?”
Holding tightly on to his other hand, lodging her shoulders beneath his arm, Marja began to walk. “Because he wouldn’t let me.” Why hadn’t she ever noticed before how far away their apartment was from the elevator?
Tania glanced at the unconscious face. “Doesn’t seem to be putting up much resistance at the moment. The man could be a criminal, you realize that, right?”
Almost there, Marja thought. Almost there. “He’s… not.”
Tania all but threw herself against the door, then waited as Marja fished out her key. “And you know this how?” she gasped.
Marja didn’t answer until she’d managed to unlock the door and resumed her forced march, this time through the doorway. “He doesn’t have criminal eyes.”
“Right. You’re crazy, you know that?”
Marja was getting a second wind. From where, she had no idea. “Whatever you say, Tania. Let’s get him… to the sofa,” she instructed.
Together, they deposited the man on the sofa. It was hard not to drop him, but they managed. Because of her position, Marja went down with him, then immediately scrambled to her feet.
“I can take it from here,” she told Tania, dragging in gulps of air. “You just get to the hospital.”
Tania took a step back. She glanced down at her clothes, checking herself over to see if any of the blood had gotten on her. Miraculously, it hadn’t.
Losing no time, Marja made her way to the kitchen for some clean towels and a basin of water. “I said you can go,” she called. “You don’t want to be late,” she added.
Tania glanced at her watch. “I’m already late,” she answered, seeming hesitant to leave. Tania shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Look, I really do have to go. I told them I’d fill in for Michaelson,” she said. “But let me call Jesse.” She began to take out her cell phone. “He can be here in ten minutes and he’ll stay with you until you finish being the Good Samaritan.”
“No,” Marja protested from the kitchen. In less than a second she was back in the room. Water sloshed out of the basin as she came. “No, let Jesse sleep,” she insisted, putting the basin down on the coffee table.
The cell phone remained in Tania’s hand. She wasn’t going to give up that easily. “All right, I’ll call Byron, then.”
That was equally unacceptable. She wasn’t about to put anyone out on her account. Besides, she could take care of herself. The fact that she was petite and young had nothing to do with her ability to defend herself if need be. “No.”
