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“I don’t have any. I came here unexpectedly, remember?” She curled her toes as more pain sought her out. She forced herself to think past it. “The hospital issued me paper ones. I think they’re under there somewhere.”
Snagging the only things he found, Dylan frowned as he straightened them out. They were slippers, all right—of a sort. “Don’t see how these are going to make much of a difference.”
“It’s all I have right now.” Lucy reached for them, but to her surprise, Dylan started to put them on her feet himself.
“You’re better off not bending and struggling just yet,” he explained gruffly. She might be tough, but she wasn’t always the most sensible woman.
Like the time she’d whispered to him that she loved him.
Carefully, he eased the elastic back on first one, then the other as he slipped them on her feet. Standing up, he offered her his arm again.
She took it, careful to tuck the ends of her gown together. Lucy held them down by pressing her elbow against her side before she straightened again.
“No robe?” He glanced around the room and had his answer even as he asked.
“No robe,” she confirmed. She felt wobbly and tried not to show it. “I’ve got a suitcase packed, but it’s at home. In all the excitement, I forgot about it.”
He should have taken that into account when the ambulance came for her. It was an oversight on his part. “Can’t you call someone to bring it to you?”
There was Alma, but she was busy with the shop. For just a moment, her eyes touched his face before a curtain fell over them. Thoughts of her best friend faded into the background, nudged aside by memories of other times. “Not right now.”
“I’ll get it for you.” He bit the words off. He glanced toward the door. From where he stood, it was a long distance from the bed if measured in pain-encased inches. He still thought she should be resting. “Ready?”
“Ready.” Her voice quavered just a little as very slowly, Lucy took her first step away from the bed and toward the door.
Chapter 4
He’d thought he could contain it. Contain the question and just move on from there. Pretend it didn’t even exist. But it did exist and he hadn’t counted on it ebbing and flowing within him like a living force of nature, rising up like a tidal wave and threatening to wash over him and sweep him away entirely.
There was nothing he could do to stop it.
“Who’s the father, Lucy?” he asked.
Just crossing the threshold leading out of her room, Lucy faltered. Though she’d known she would have to face the question from him soon enough, she hadn’t expected it to be put to her so bluntly, without a preamble.
She kept her face forward, concentrating on her goal—the farthest corner of the nurses’ station’s outer desk. “Just someone I knew.”
Every word stung him, leaving behind a mark even though he told himself it shouldn’t. After what had happened between them, how could she have gone on to someone else so quickly? “That casual?”
One step after another, she chanted mentally, watching her feet. “There was nothing casual about it, but it’s over.”
“He’s not in your life anymore.” It wasn’t exactly a question, but an assumption. One he was very willing to make, though he knew it was selfish of him.
She wished he’d stop asking questions. He hadn’t the right. “Not where it counts.”
“Does he know about the baby?”
She thought of lying, but there were enough lies to keep track of. “No.”
He never could leave things alone, he thought. Even when they were the way he wanted them. “Don’t you think you should tell him?”
She spared him one glance before looking away again. “No. There’re enough complications in both our lives without bringing that in, too. He’s better off not knowing about the baby.”
He couldn’t believe that Lucy would keep something like this a secret. It seemed out of character for her. “Don’t you think you owe it to Elena to let her father know she exists?”
There was anger in her eyes when she looked at him, reminding him of the passion he’d once seen there. Passion that had belonged to him at the time.
If she could have, she would have pulled her arm away from his. But she felt too unsteady to manage the gesture. The words, though, she could manage.
“So that he can knowingly reject her? I don’t think so. Better for that to remain a question than a fact.” It cost her dearly to pull her shoulders back, but she did. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, all right?”
She had a right to her privacy. He’d always insisted on his. They’d been lovers for less than two-thirds of a year, but she’d never known anything about his family other than the few vague answers he’d given her. “All right.”
She made the next few steps in silence, nodding at the nurse who walked by them and smiled. Lucy knew from experience that Dylan could keep his own council indefinitely. “But I do want to talk.”
He heard the note in her voice and knew what it was about. “I figured.”
“Tell me about Ritchie.” Though it hurt to think of her brother being dead, she forced herself to ask. “How did he die?”
She was still weak. Otherwise, he knew she wouldn’t be hanging on to him so tightly. He didn’t want to add to what she was already going through. “Lucy, this isn’t the time—”
She wasn’t going to let him put her off any longer. And she had a right to know what had happened to her brother. “It’s never the time to hear that someone you loved is dead.” Lucy turned her face toward Dylan. “How did he die?”
“He was shot. At close range. They found him in an irrigation ditch near the farmland,” he said.
The city stood on the site of what had once been a huge farming estate owned by the Bedford family for several generations. Now there were only small, sporadic patches left. Located in the western end of Bedford, they were still coaxing forth crops of corn, strawberries and, in a few places, oranges.
Lucy looked at him, the halting progress she was making temporarily aborted. “Farmland? Ritchie would have never been there. He never liked anything remotely rural.”
Dylan tended to agree with her. The Ritchie he knew was far more likely to be found in clubs and wherever there were bright lights.
“He was killed somewhere else, then dum—left in the ditch.” Dylan caught himself at the last minute, steering clear of the detached language he usually used in referring to victims and suspects. It served to maintain his perspective. Attachments only got in the way of judgment.
But in this case, he couldn’t let himself be clinically detached. To be that way was disrespectful to the friendship he and Ritchie had once had, however fleeting.
Besides, he didn’t really need to be detached here, it wasn’t his case to solve. Only to relate. So far, in his opinion, he was doing a damn poor job of it.
“According to the medical examiner, Ritchie died sometime around seven-thirty this morning. Do you know where he was supposed to be at seven-thirty?”
Lucy’s expression froze. She knew exactly where he was at seven-thirty this morning. She knew because he was doing it for her. “He was going in to work early so that he could get the time off to take me to the doctor.”
Dylan knew what she was thinking. Separation hadn’t dulled his ability to read her thoughts. “It’s not your fault.”
“Isn’t it?” Her eyes filled with tears, which she kept from spilling out through sheer force of will. She didn’t deserve the comfort of tears. Ritchie had died because of her. “If he hadn’t gone in early for me, maybe he’d still be alive.”
“And maybe he would have just been killed later.” He wanted to shield her, but at the same time, he wanted to strip away her guilt. He told her the rest of it. “Lucy, Ritchie was shot execution-style.” One bullet to the back of the head. It seemed surreal when he thought about it. Who could Ritchie have run afoul of for that to happen? He saw the horror in Lucy’s face and pressed on. “That means it was done on purpose. He didn’t just wander in on a burglary gone awry, or a car-jacking that went sour. Somebody meant to kill him.” Impatience clawed at him. There were too many people around. “Can we go back to your room? This isn’t the kind of thing to talk about strolling through the hospital halls.”
“I wouldn’t exactly considered this strolling,” Lucy answered evenly.
She was trying very hard not to let her emotions break through. Inside, it felt as if she had a pressure cooker on, full of steam, ready to explode. Digging her fingers into his arm, she turned around to face the long trip back to her room.
The pace was getting to him. He’d never been one to hurry things along normally, but there was nothing normal about this. “Why don’t I just carry you back? It’d save time.”
Lucy blocked his hand as he moved to pick her up. “No,” she snapped. “I can do this.”
She didn’t want him holding her. Not if she could avoid it. If he held her now, she would lose her strength and just dissolve against him, sobbing her heart out. She’d encountered enough setbacks in her life today as it was. She wasn’t about to set herself up for more.
Annoyance at her stubbornness warred with a grudging admiration for her grit. Dylan managed to curb his impatience until they’d returned to the door of her room. But once he opened it, he swept her up into his arms and carried her the rest of the way.
“What are you doing?” She was almost too exhausted to offer a protest.
“Cutting about forty minutes off the trip back to your bed.” Dylan caught himself thinking she still felt as if she weighed next to nothing.
He had her back in her bed in little more than four quick strides.
“Everything all right in here?”
Turning around, Dylan saw a nurse with salt-and-pepper hair in the doorway, peering into the room. She looked from him to Lucy.
“Fine,” Lucy assured her. “I just got a little tired. It was my first time out of bed.”
The nurse nodded knowingly. “Shouldn’t try to do too much first time up.” And then she smiled, her eyes washing over Dylan before they came to rest on Lucy. “A lady could do worse than have a handsome man carry her around.”
With a wink aimed at Lucy, she left, closing the door behind her.
Dylan moved back from her bed as she slowly toed off the slippers from her feet one at a time. The effort almost drained the remainder of her energy. She moved her legs under the covers, relieved to be lying down again.
With a sigh, she looked up at him. “Do you think you’ll catch whoever killed Ritchie?”
He didn’t answer her directly. “It’s not my case.”
She didn’t understand. “Then why…?”
He was asking himself the same thing. “I thought it might be easier on you, hearing the news from me.” Dylan shrugged carelessly. “Obviously I miscalculated. I hadn’t figured on you being pregnant.”
The coldness in his voice sliced through her. Defenses locked into place. “We can’t always factor in everything. So, who is handling Ritchie’s case? Do they have any leads?”
“Detectives Alexander and Hathaway, and they’re not even sure where he was killed, yet. There was no blood at the crime scene, so he was moved.” He went with the obvious first. “You said Ritchie was working. Where?”
“At a restaurant. He’s a—was a waiter.” Her mouth curved slightly. “He said they call them servers now.”
Yeah, they did. Another attempt at depersonalizing everything, Dylan thought. He would have said it was a good thing, but there were times he wasn’t sure. Being anesthetized was close to being dead, and he’d felt dead for a long time.
Except for the time he’d spent with Lucy.
But all that was over now. He’d made his peace with the fact. He just had to remember that, that’s all.
“Do you know where Ritchie worked?”
She nodded. “It’s called Den of Thieves.” He was staring at her. His face was impassive, but she could see that she had caught him by surprise. She wanted to know why. “What?”
It was a hell of a coincidence. “Are you sure that’s where he worked?”
Why did he doubt her? “Yes, I’m sure. A friend of his got the job for him.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know, Ritchie didn’t give me a name. Just someone he knew.” She should have pressed harder for an answer. She should have done so many things differently. Her eyes met Dylan’s. “Someone he said owed him a favor and this was his way of paying him back.” And then she remembered something. “I don’t know if this means anything or not—”
His eyes pinned her down, the detective in him coming out despite efforts to the contrary. “Let me be the one to decide.”
She tried to get the words just right. “A couple of days ago, Ritchie told me he was on to something. Something that would put us in the money and on the right side of things for a long time to come.” Taking a dim view of his schemes, she’d told him to forget about it then. But Ritchie had been too stubborn to listen.
“Did he say what?” Dylan asked.
She shook her head. “You know Ritchie, he gets—got—excited over things.” It was so hard to think of him in the past tense. She wasn’t sure just how she could bear it. “But he always played them close to his chest if they weren’t completely aboveboard. He said there was no reason for me to know, too. That’s what made me think it was dangerous.” She bit her lip, taking a deep breath. It didn’t ease the ache in her chest, or the one in her throat. “I told him that I didn’t want him doing anything illegal and he said he wasn’t the one standing on the wrong side of the law.” Despite her best efforts, a tear spilled out, followed by another. She brushed them away with the back of her hand. “That’s what got him killed, wasn’t it?”
He curbed the desire to wipe away her tears. The word no hovered on his lips, but he tried to avoid lies whenever possible. The only lie he’d ever told Lucy was that he didn’t love her.
“Possibly.”
He was going to have to get back to Alexander and Hathaway on this. As well as Watley. Den of Thieves was suddenly one man short. The task force could use this information to their advantage. Could plant one of their own men inside.
The fact that he was using this tragedy as a tool to further the investigation disgusted him, but he knew that ignoring it couldn’t help Ritchie now. And there was far more at stake here than just a dead man’s sister’s feelings and his own personal code of ethics. Other people’s lives were involved. Innocent people.
“What exactly did Ritchie say to you?” He saw that she didn’t understand where he was going with this. “Did he physically have something, some kind of evidence that he was going to blackmail someone with?”
Things began to crystallize in Dylan’s mind. A few weeks ago, the accountant for Den of Thieves, Michelson, had approached the local D.A., saying that the restaurant was a front for money laundering. But the man had vanished without a trace before any sort of case could be made. If for some reason the person Ritchie was looking to blackmail was Alfred Palmero, the owner of the restaurant, it would go a long way toward explaining things.
Lucy shook her head, frustrated. “I don’t know. He wasn’t specific.”
Dylan wondered how much he could tell Lucy about this, then decided that for her own protection, and that of the child she’d just given birth to, she needed to know at least some of it.
Because he knew he had a tendency to be far too blunt, Dylan tried to pick his words more carefully this time. “If he was looking to blackmail his boss, Alfred Palmero, your brother made the mistake of getting in over his head.”
“Your brother,” she echoed, looking at Dylan with disbelief. Could he really be that cold? Of course he could. Why did the fact keep surprising her? “You make it sound as if you didn’t know him.”
Damned if he did, damned if he didn’t. “Lucy, I was just—”
But she was tired and angry and more than a little fed up. With him, with everything. All the hurt she felt finally made her temper snap.
“Keeping your distance, yes, I know. The way you do with everything. With me, with him, with life. You’re very good at that. Keeping your distance. Protecting yourself at all costs.” She was through crying over him. “Look, I don’t need you coming into my life right now, disrupting everything. Thank you very much for coming by, for helping me, but I’d really just rather not see you again, all right?”
Dylan felt his own temper fraying. But he knew she had a right to what she was saying. “Sure, fine. I understand.”
The thing of it was, he thought as he walked out, that he did understand. He would have probably played it the same way she had and for the same reason. For self-preservation.
But he still couldn’t shake the image of Lucy’s expression from his mind.
