Shiver (31 page)

“It’s
Halo,
Mom!” Tyler threw at her, barely taking the time to glance in her direction. Instantly refocusing on the TV, he bounced up and down in excitement. “Shoot, Trey, shoot!”

But after one look at Sam’s face, “Trey” apparently had enough of a sense of self-preservation to know when to call a halt.

“Time we took a break,” he said to Tyler, hitting a button that froze the action.

“Mom, you’re interrupting the game!” Tyler howled, looking around at her for real now.

“I got you some cars.” As a mother, one of Sam’s guiding principles had become that distraction works. That’s how she had gotten through the terrible twos with her sanity intact, as well as the troublesome threes and almost all of the fearsome fours (Tyler’s fifth birthday was in three weeks). Crouching, rummaging through the bags, she came up with the promised package of toys. Like her, Tyler was something of a car buff, and when she stood up with the pack and said, “There’s a Mustang Cobra in here, and a Dodge Charger, too,” he was off the couch and running over to take it from her. For a moment he just stood there looking raptly at the cars in their little plastic rectangles.

Then he glanced up at her. “Thanks, Mom.”

“You’re welcome.” She smiled at him. It didn’t take much to make him happy; he was such a good, sweet-natured kid. Truth was, he deserved better than her, but she was what he’d gotten.
“Why don’t you take them up to your room”—it felt odd to refer to the room he slept in here the same way she did to his bedroom at home, but she did it—“and get them out?”

“Okay.” He looked around at Marco. “You want to come and see?”

“Thanks, but I think I need to talk to your mom for a little bit.” No fool, Marco was clearly able to read the signals she was sending. As in, you’re toast.

“’Kay.” Holding the package of cars so that he could study them through the plastic wrap as he walked, Tyler headed for the stairs.

Fixing Marco with a gimlet gaze, Sam waited until her son was out of sight. For his part, Marco hit the remote, which turned off the TV, then set the remote down on the coffee table beside the controllers. As if he were a guilty kid trying to hide the evidence of his wrongdoing, Sam thought.

“That game is totally unsuitable for a four-year-old. What were you
thinking
?” She said it as soon as she was sure Tyler could no longer overhear.

Marco had relaxed back against the couch cushions and turned sideways a little so that he could look at her without craning his neck. “Come on, Sam. It’s
Halo Reach.
One of the best video games from one of the best video game series ever. A classic. I play it with my nephews all the time.”

“How old are they?”

He had the grace to look a little abashed. “Eleven. Twelve. Fourteen.”

Sam filed away the fact that he had eleven-, twelve-, and
fourteen-year-old nephews for future reference. “That’s still too young for a game like that, if you want my opinion, but it’s a lot better than four.”

“My sisters don’t have a problem with their boys playing it. All their friends play it, too. And Tyler likes it.”

Sisters? He had sisters? Something else to ponder later. Not that she meant to spend any time thinking about him. Anyway, she had more important fish to fry.

“Of course he likes it. He loves guns, and pretending to shoot things, and playing army, and all that stuff. That doesn’t mean it’s good for him.” Sam’s mouth thinned with exasperation. “He’d love having candy for breakfast, too, if I’d let him.”

“He was pretty good at it, for such a little kid.”

“I don’t care! I don’t want him playing a violent video game.”

Marco held up both hands in mock surrender. “Okay, my bad. I’ll disconnect the game console and put it back in the cabinet where I found it.”

“Good.” She gave him another stern look and bent to pick up her bags.

“Sam.”

Straightening with bags in hand, she glanced at him in answer.

“He is a boy, you know. Boys like guns, and shooting things, and violence. It’s normal.” At the look she gave him, he added hastily, “Just saying.”

“Do you have any children?”

“No.” Something that looked suspiciously like a twinkle appeared in his eyes. She was still looking closely at it, trying to
decide what it meant, when he added, “No wife, either, if that’s where you’re going with this.”

What?
“You know that’s not where I was going,” she said crossly. “Where I was going is, if you don’t have children, you don’t know anything about them, so I’ll thank you to let me raise mine the best way I can.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He was openly grinning at her now.

Sam turned her back on him and headed for the stairs. Maybe it was her imagination—she didn’t think so—but she could almost feel his eyes on her butt. The thought did not please her, but it did make her step quicken. Along with her pulse.

Which also did not please her.

“Sam.” She heard him trying to get up, heard the thump of a dropped crutch, heard a curse. “Wait a minute. Ow!”

That
ow
did it. She couldn’t help herself. She glanced back at him. He was balancing beside the couch, one crutch beneath his arm, the other flat on the carpet at his feet. The foot of his injured leg barely touched the ground, and he was grimacing with pain.

Her inner worrywart got the best of her.

“What, have those stupid pills quit working or something?” she asked him sharply.

His grimace was overridden by a gleam of amusement in the glance he shot her way as he gave a single negative shake of his head. “I quit taking them. They got me in trouble.”

She absolutely refused to go there. “So you’re just going to hurt.”

“Seemed like the best idea.”

Sam realized that she hated the idea that he was in pain, and then hated that she hated it. It occurred to her then that, much as she disliked having to face it, she and Tyler needed him. If, for example, he should have to go to a hospital to get his leg reoperated on, they would be left alone with the marshals. Or not. Because every single one of their guardians had made it clear that their job was to protect Marco, and she and Tyler were nothing more than excess baggage. Sam was pretty sure that she could count on them only as long as Marco was around to insist they protect her and her son.

All the more reason for the insurance policy she’d tried to put in place.

“Did you change the bandage on your leg?” If she sounded irritable, it was because she was feeling irritable. Constantly battling back fear did not have a good effect on her, she was discovering.

“Not yet.”

“You’d better do it.”

“Everything I need is upstairs, and I’m not going upstairs again until it’s time to go to bed. Getting up and down those stairs on crutches is too damned much work.”

He bent over, swiping at the crutch on the floor in a failed attempt to pick it up. Lips compressed, Sam watched as he finally snagged it, in two minds about whether or not she should offer to help him with the changing of his bandage. She pictured the location of the wound and the degree of closeness to him that would be required, to say nothing of the hands-on nature of the task, which she had already experienced. Then she remembered
last night—and this morning.
No way in hell,
was her deciding thought on the subject as at last he got the crutches situated beneath his armpits. With that she turned and went upstairs without another word, ignoring him as he called after her. Whatever he wanted to say to her, she was in no mood to hear.

By the time 11:00 p.m. rolled around, they’d had no more private conversation, and she was wiped out. She’d done several loads of laundry: Tyler’s and her clothes, their bedding (because who knew who’d been sleeping on those sheets before they had arrived), some towels. She had cleaned her room and Tyler’s, and dusted and swept and run the vacuum over the entire house. She’d played cars and hide-and-seek, made a garage out of a shoebox, and baked brownies because Tyler loved them and there was a box of mix in the pantry. All the activity served the admirable goal of keeping her busy, which prevented her from worrying too much about more bad things that might be coming their way. But also, under the guise of cleaning in particular, she had contrived to learn where every window and door (possible exits) were located and how they operated, where an extra house key was kept (on a hook inside a cabinet, along with another, nearly identical key, which she thought might be a key to the town house next door), where the car keys were kept (inside the drawer closest to the garage), as well as where the garage door opener was stashed. As Sanders went off guard duty and was replaced by Abramowitz, she’d learned the code to the security system by watching Sanders type it into the keypad beside the door in the kitchen that led to the garage. When they’d grilled hamburgers for dinner, Abramowitz had sat in
a lawn chair and kept guard, Marco had done the actual grilling, Sam had formed the patties for him and made a salad, and Tyler, beaming with excitement about grilling out, which was something he had never experienced because they didn’t have a grill, had been in charge of opening the buns. While they were outside, with everyone else pretty much occupied, she had taken the opportunity to check out the backyard gate, how it worked, what it opened onto. And she had done all those things just in case. Just in case the bad guys should find them, or just in case she should decide to take Tyler and go it alone. Or—well, just in case.

Having supervised Tyler’s bath and then read a chapter in their new book to him, she stayed with him until he fell asleep and then emerged, yawning, into the hall. Except for being barefoot, she was still fully dressed, in the jeans and tank she had been wearing all day, with her hair still in its single fat braid that fell over her shoulder now. What she was looking forward to doing next with an eagerness that bordered on greed was soaking in a hot bath before falling into bed.

That required use of the second bathroom, because the bathroom off the master bedroom only had a shower stall.

Of course Marco would be emerging from that bathroom at precisely the same moment as she stepped out of Tyler’s room. Looking big and broad shouldered and way too hot for her peace of mind, he was once again wrapped in the white robe, wearing nothing else that she could see (although hopefully he had boxers on under there somewhere). Just the sight of him
(un)dressed like that brought a whole raft of sizzling images to her mind that she kicked out at once.

Scowling at him, she would have passed on by without a word—although it was slightly difficult getting past him when, on crutches, he took up most of the hall—but he reached out and caught her arm, stopping her.

Her eyes snapped up to meet his. He smiled at her. She absolutely distrusted everything about that smile.

“Got a minute?” he asked.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

T
he correct answer to that question where he was concerned was no. A thousand times no.

What Sam said was a truculent,
“What?”

“Something I need to know?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Seriously. She didn’t. But she did know that she didn’t want to talk to him at all. Especially not now, when he was obviously just out of the shower and half naked and she couldn’t keep her heartbeat from quickening or her body from tightening with excitement stoked by absolutely nothing at all except memories and his proximity. Who would have thought that the smell of soap and toothpaste could turn her on so? But it did. At least, when it was associated with him.

When she tried to pull her arm free, he leaned toward her, crowding her back toward the wall. His chest brushed her breasts. His pelvis nudged hers. She could feel the whole long length of him corralling her, trapping her, and knew that he was doing it deliberately. His body heat surrounded her, making
her feel hot in turn. Suddenly she was finding it harder to breathe. Stubble that was way past five o’clock shadow darkened his chin; doing a lightning mental recap of the last few days, she was pretty sure he hadn’t shaved since she had met him. His eyes were dark and slightly bloodshot, but alert. His hair was damp, and a few tiny drops of water from his shower still beaded his skin.

Sam couldn’t help it; her pulse started to race.