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Soup sounded delicious but he was afraid his stomach just wouldn’t handle it.
“I’m fine,” he said, taking only one of the pills and returning the other to the bottle. He hated this loopy feeling and the medicine only made it worse. A few more days and he’d be ready to chuck the whole damn bottle into the toilet.
“I think it would be best if we let him rest now,” she told the other two agents as she bustled around him tucking in blankets, fluffing pillows, taking the glass of water from him to set on the bedside table.
She smelled delicious, he thought as she leaned over him to adjust the pillows once more. Like violets and sunshine.
“Sure. We were just leaving,” Cale said with a smirk. Lucky, lucky man, he mouthed to Gage on the way out the door.
He didn’t like bossy women, Gage thought as he watched them go. Even when their subtle spring scent made his mouth water. He closed his eyes as the pill did its magic and took the edge off his pain. No, he didn’t like bossy women at all. That was only one of many reasons why having her here just wouldn’t work out.
He made a mental note to tell her that as soon as he woke up.
Taking this job had been a mistake.
A huge mistake.
Her nerves jumping, Allie finished throwing together peanut butter and honey sandwiches for the girls in the FBI agent’s kitchen. She didn’t belong here. She should be staying as far away as possible from this man who could completely destroy her family.
If he recognized her as a fugitive, everything would be ruined.
She didn’t know if Joaquin and Irena had reported them missing. Maybe they hadn’t even realized she was gone yet since relations between them hadn’t exactly been friendly since the beginning of the custody battle.
But eventually they would try to visit the girls and would find her empty house. Would they go to the police or hire a private investigator on their own?
Even now she could be a wanted fugitive with her name and description broadcast to every law enforcement officer across the country. Taking the girls out of Philadelphia without notifying them was probably in violation of a court order, no matter how confident Twila Langston was that the judge’s ruling awarding joint custody to the DeBarillas because of her diabetes would be overturned.
Patient advocate groups were already rallying behind her cause, and she had been allowed to retain sole custody pending appeal. But she was fairly certain that custody arrangement didn’t include the freedom to flee across the country without leaving a trace.
Maybe all this was for nothing, but she didn’t dare take that chance. Not after she had learned from the girls that Irena had taken them to get passport pictures taken.
Even if Jaime’s parents could only win court-ordered visitation, they could still take the girls to Venezuela during one of those visits. Once in their own country, Allie knew they had the power and wealth to keep her from the girls forever.
Allie blew out a breath. If Joaquin and Irena had gone to the authorities, her name and description could be circulating among law enforcement officials even now. Her patient could have even seen it before he was injured.
She had been stupid to change her mind and agree to take this position. It was just too risky.
Fear settled cold and hard in her stomach, but she forced a smile for the girls and handed them the sandwiches, along with carrot sticks and a couple of cheese slices. “Here’s your lunch. There’s that nice table on the patio. Why don’t you take your lunch outside and have a picnic so we don’t wake Mr. McKinnon?”
Gaby and Anna grinned at the idea of eating outside. “Can we have juice boxes?” Gaby asked.
“Yes, I brought a few over from our house and put them in the fridge. Pick the kind you want.”
She helped them carry their bounty out to the table in the fenced backyard then set it out for them.
“Mommy, can you have a picnic with us, too?”
She hesitated. Her patient might need her. But judging by the exhausted pain lines on his face when he first showed up with his friends, he would probably be sleeping for hours. Anyway, she should be able to hear him through the screen door if he called out for help.
“Let me go check on Mr. McKinnon, then I’ll come back out and have lunch with you.”
She walked back through the small house with its floor plan similar to hers—two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a good-size living area, a small dining room and a comfortable, efficient kitchen. At McKinnon’s bedroom door she drew in a steadying breath and pushed it open.
His chest rose and fell evenly as he slept, with the blanket she had tucked in so carefully earlier riding down nearly to his narrow waist now. The network of pain lines around his mouth were more faint now, she noticed, and he seemed as comfortable as possible given the two thigh-high casts on his long legs.
As she watched him, the fear in her stomach gave way to something far more treacherous. He was so gorgeous. Lean and dark, with sculpted features and that dangerous-looking stubble on his cheeks.
She shivered, hating this attraction stirring around inside her. She didn’t want to notice how his lashes looked so long and spiky there against his skin, how his shoulders spanned nearly the width of the hospital bed, how his big hands on top of the blanket looked strong and blunt-fingered, capable of all kinds of delicious things.
She shouldn’t be noticing any of those things, shouldn’t be feeling this low sizzle of awareness. Not for any man, and especially not for this one, who could so easily destroy her.
Jaime had been gone only two years. Building lurid fantasies around another man’s hands somehow seemed grossly disloyal to her late husband. How could she even think about having this man she didn’t even know—and didn’t particularly like all that much—touch her the way only Jaime ever had?
She had loved her husband fiercely. He had been her first and only lover, and their physical relationship had been rich and rewarding, filled with laughter and tenderness and passion. Maybe that’s why she missed it so much, because it had been such an important part of their life together.
Still, missing the intimacy she shared with her husband didn’t explain how she could have such an instantaneous response to this man she didn’t know at all.
It was there, though, simmering under her skin with a steady, bubbling heat. His attraction wasn’t diminished at all by the fact that he was lying in a hospital bed with two painful-looking casts on his legs. If anything, just that hint of vulnerability made him even more appealing.
She couldn’t do this job. She absolutely couldn’t—not only because he posed such a risk to her freedom and the girls’ future but because of this, the low heat seething through her.
She would just have to tell Ruth she had made a mistake to take the job in the first place and hope her landlady would let her return to cleaning houses. If she started now, she could probably find a new caregiver for the girls by the end of the week.
She returned to the patio and found Gaby and Anna had abandoned their half-eaten lunches. One of the neighbors’ cats had made the mistake of wandering into the yard to find a snack and he was far more exciting than peanut butter sandwiches.
The girls were chasing the bewildered animal around the yard, laughing with joy every time they came close enough to touch the cat, which wasn’t very often.
“Kitty, kitty, kitty,” Anna chanted, her chubby legs working hard to keep up with her older sister.
Just when Allie was about to open her mouth and tell them to stop tormenting the poor thing, the cat finally clued in that any morsels he might chance upon in this backyard simply weren’t worth the trouble.
He sprang to the top of the redwood fence and sat watching with an amused feline look while the girls hopped and jumped and squealed, trying in vain to reach him.
After a moment the cat tired of the entertainment and pounced down the other side into what was undoubtedly safer territory.
Unfazed by losing their prey, the girls flopped down onto their stomachs in the grass. Sunlight flashed off their dark curls as they laughed together.
“Mama, there are two ladybugs in the grass,” Gaby called. “Come and see!”
She joined them and bent at the waist for a closer look. “I see four ladybugs.”
Anna frowned. “No. Only two.”
“Let’s count them.” She pointed to the bugs with a grin. “One and two.” Then she pointed to her daughters. “Three and four.”
Gaby giggled. “We’re not really ladybugs. We can’t fly and we don’t have black spots.”
“But you’re my ladybugs,” Allie said, tickling them both until they were shrieking with glee.
She had loved these last two days with her daughters, having them close while she and Ruth readied the FBI agent’s house for his return. It had made her realize what precious little time she’d been able to spend with them since Jaime’s death. She had been so busy sorting through his affairs, working twelve-hour shifts at the hospital, fighting the custody battle, struggling with her own health.
They were growing up so fast, right in front of her nose. Gaby should be starting kindergarten in the fall, which was just another thing to add to her worry list. How would they be able to stay in one place long enough for her daughter to complete the school year?
They couldn’t stay here. She had acknowledged that days ago. Without the FBI agent’s presence in the neighborhood she might have been able to stay in Park City all summer, maybe even all year. But it was just too risky having him living next door.
That was one of the reasons she’d taken the job, so she could save a little extra to tide them over wherever they moved. That reason still held, she reminded herself. She could take a few weeks to work for Gage McKinnon while she made arrangements to leave. Surely she deserved a few weeks to simply enjoy her girls.
Besides, McKinnon wasn’t working because of his injuries. If the authorities were looking for her, how would he possibly know? If he had seen her picture and recognized her, what difference would it make whether she worked for him or simply lived next door?
As to the attraction part, she could handle that, too. She just had to remember all the reasons why giving in to that attraction would be wholly, unequivocally disastrous.
Chapter 4
Geez, couldn’t a guy get any sleep around here?
Through the thick fist of nausea and pain that had him in a chokehold, Gage blinked awake to the sound of girlish giggles carried through the window screen on the warm breeze.
They sounded like a couple of miniature laughing hyenas out there. Charlotte must have one of her obnoxious little friends over again. Did they have to titter and cackle right outside his window?
He was sick. Really sick. He couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt so lousy. Was he dying? He figured he had to be pretty badly off or he wouldn’t be stretched out here in bed in the middle of the day with pain racking his whole body.
Mom really ought to put her foot down and make the little brats play on the other side of the house so he could go back to sleep. He opened his mouth to call to her but couldn’t manage to force the words through the sandpaper lining his throat.
Man, his legs hurt. He tried to remember what had happened to them. Did he crash on his bike or something? Maybe Wyatt tackled him when they were playing football in the backyard earlier. Why did everything seem so hazy and weird? You’d think a guy could remember why his legs felt like they’d been run over by the family station wagon.
He blinked as some fragment of memory came to him, but he couldn’t move fast enough to pin it down. Before he could try to puzzle it out, Charlotte and her friend giggled again. A soft voice that didn’t sound like his mother warned them to be quiet so they didn’t wake Mr. McKinnon.
Mr. McKinnon. That was him. Weird. No. It wouldn’t be Charlotte out there. He tried to clear the fuzz out of his brain. Couldn’t be her. Charley was gone, had been gone for years.
Everybody was gone. Mom, Wyatt. Everybody.
So who was playing outside his window?
He’d have to figure that out another time, when he wasn’t so damn tired.
The next time he awoke it was to a cool, dim room and the musical murmur of women speaking softly.
“I gave him a pain pill as soon as he arrived, about four hours ago. I offered him two but he only took one.”
The voice was low, sexy, and he thought he could lie here in this dreamlike state and listen to it forever. He recognized it in some dim corner of his mind, but he was too hazy from the pain pill she was talking about to do anything about pulling the memory out.
“He’s been sleeping since then,” she went on. “I think he might have surfaced a few times but never all the way and never for very long.”
“You ask me, the man’s a damn fool to leave the hospital four days after breaking both legs.”
The second voice wasn’t nearly as sexy as the first. This one was honey-coated barb wire. “What’s he trying to prove? I mean, come on. It’s always the macho, good-lookin’ ones, honey. They make the worst patients and the worst husbands. Believe me, I’m married to one and have nursed more than my share of the other.”
The first woman laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind, Estelle.”
“You do that. You do that.”
Still not sure he wanted to let these women, whoever they were, know he was conscious, he peeked under his lashes and saw that Estelle was a sturdy woman who looked about fifty. She had skin the color of warm caramel and dozens of rainbow-colored beads in her swinging cornrows.
He wondered who she might be and what she was doing in his bedroom, until he saw the bright pattern of her nursing scrubs and the stethoscope around her neck. Ah. The nurse from the home health company. Who was she talking to?
The other woman stood just out of the range of his vision unless he twisted around, something he wasn’t sure he could do, even if he wanted to. Again, he thought he recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it.
“I really hate to do this,” Estelle went on, “but I’m gonna need to check his vitals. That’s why they pay me the big bucks, to take care of stubborn cusses like this one who belong in the hospital but are too pigheaded to stay put.”
“I’ve been doing visual checks about every half hour while he sleeps. I’ve recorded all that for you.”
He managed to turn his head just enough to finally figure out who else was in the room—his very attractive next-door neighbor. Why had she been watching him while he slept? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, or that he wanted to delve too deeply into why that idea made him forget all about the ache in his legs.
“Something tells me you’re no stranger to a sickroom,” Estelle said. “You seem to know your way around pretty well.”
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he would have missed the way his neighbor’s face froze for a moment—a funny, almost frightened look flashing through her eyes before those delicate features became a blank mask. “I’ve had a little experience.”
“Good. I think you’re gonna need it with this one. He’s gonna keep you hopping. Hate to do it but to check his temp and blood pressure I’ll have to wake him up. You want to do the honors?”
After a moment’s hesitation, his neighbor nodded and stepped forward, her arm outstretched as if to shake him.
“I’m awake,” he growled. He didn’t want either of them poking at him or prodding him, not when he had suddenly discovered a much bigger problem than a couple of women who talked about him when he was supposed to be sleeping.
He needed to use the bathroom.
Severely.
Somehow he would have to figure out a way to heft himself into that wheelchair and maneuver through that narrow doorway while preserving whatever shreds of his dignity might be left to a man as helpless as a blasted kitten.
No way on God’s green earth was he going to ask these two for help.
He sat up, ignoring the way the room whirled and spun. That’s it, he decided fiercely. No more pain pills for him.
Right now he would have given just about anything he owned for a few moments alone in a room with that bastard Lyle Juber. Gritting his teeth, he managed to find the control to the bed and lowered it so he was on the same level as the wheelchair. He pulled himself to a sitting position then inhaled sharply as several dozen knives sliced at him.
“Hold on there, cowboy,” Estelle said briskly. “Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry.”
“Bathroom,” he growled. “You got a problem with that?”
The nurse laughed. “Only if you fall and break your arms to go with that matched set of casts on your legs. Let me give you a hand, there.”
She quickly showed him the transfer board tucked next to the bed and instructed him on the easiest way to get from the bed to the chair.
“Lucky you’ve got all these muscles in your arms here,” she said. “You’re gonna need ’em the next few weeks while you can’t use your legs.”
He made some noncommittal sound, then wheeled into the bathroom. Once more he found himself grateful to his landlady for installing grab bars that hadn’t been there a week ago. She’d thought of everything, he thought. Or maybe she’d had help from his neighbor.
“We’ll leave the door open in case you need any help in there,” the nurse called out.
