Accidental Commando (16 page)

Tyler looked around the ballroom. Though it still was a disaster area, there was order to the chaos. The injured had been triaged by the first emergency personnel to reach the scene. The more critical cases were already being transported to the hospital. Currently, the doctors and paramedics were working their way through the people who remained in order of need. Most of the injuries were gunshots. Some people had suffered broken bones during the panic caused by the shooting. Emily had been hurt by a razor-sharp sliver of crystal from the downed chandelier. It had been kicked up by a stray bullet and was embedded in her upper arm.

As the team’s medic, Jack was more than qualified to tend a minor injury like hers. He was right. If he didn’t do it, she would have a long, painful wait ahead of her. Yet Tyler felt that she deserved better than being treated in the field like a soldier. He knelt in front of the gilt chair Gonzo had commandeered for Emily earlier and reached for her free hand. “This could leave a scar. Say the word and I’ll take you to a hospital. They’ll find you a plastic surgeon.”

She forced a smile. “It’s just my arm. If there’s a scar, it will hardly show. Besides, it’s only a flesh wound. That’s what Jack said. He explained that’s what you guys call anything that doesn’t involve—” her breath caught as Jack injected a local anaesthetic “—major surgery,” she went on. “What kind of wuss would I be if I made a big deal over this scratch?”

He stroked a lock of hair from her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. She’d begun the evening with her curls twisted on top of her head, yet her hair had started to escape the combs and pins long before he’d tackled her and now hung to her shoulders in a wild red cloud. Mascara from the tears she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge smudged the skin beneath her eyes. Blood streaked her arm and stained her dress. She’d broken the heel of one of her shoes so she’d taken them both off and was sitting with one bare foot curled over the other.

On the surface, she bore little resemblance to the beautifully dressed woman who had entered this ballroom with him, yet Tyler couldn’t get enough of her. He’d had a hell of a time keeping his mind on his job tonight. One look at the way that dress clung to her body had made him remember how he’d first seen her. Naked and magnificent. “You’re no wuss, Emily. You’re a Valkyrie.”

She rolled her eyes. “So I did hear you right. You called me that the day we met.”

“It’s what came to my mind when I saw you in action.”

“Don’t they run around wearing scary breastplates and helmets with horns?”

“Only in operas.” From the corner of his eye, he saw Jack ready his forceps. “My Grandpa Lindstrom told me they were beautiful warrior women who ride through the air and choose mates to take back to Valhalla with them.”

“Well, you’re way off base on all counts, cowboy. Besides, I don’t ride.”

“You could do whatever you put your mind to.”

She glanced down at her arm. Her face paled as she watched Jack draw out a three-inch fragment of crystal. He used a gauze pad to absorb the gush of blood that followed. “I can’t recall having a splinter that big,” she said, her voice rising. “I used to get lots when I was a kid. One of my uncles had an old dock down by the lake and it seemed every time I pulled myself out of the water I ended up wearing part of the boards on my elbows and knees. Stop me anytime. I know I’m babbling. Tell me more about your grandfather. Wasn’t he the guy who taught you how to ski?”

Tyler cupped her chin and eased her face back toward his as Jack cleaned out the wound. “Yes. He liked the winters. He liked to brew his own beer, too. Best I ever tasted.”

“Sounds like an interesting guy.”

“He was. The beer and the long winters were the reasons he was so good at storytelling. Want me to tell you about Thor’s hammer?”

“Jack’s about to stitch it up and you’re trying to distract me, right?”

“Yes. You don’t need to watch. He knows if he makes you so much as flinch I’ll have to hurt him.”

“That goes for me, too,” Duncan said, moving past Tyler to stand at Emily’s left. “You did well tonight, ma’am. We couldn’t have done the job without you.”

“I wish I’d spotted El Gato sooner. Then maybe no one would have been hurt.”

Duncan rested his hand on the back of her chair. “If you hadn’t spotted him, he would have worked his way to the envoy before he opened fire. He could have taken out the president and most of his cabinet, too. We’re not the only ones in your debt.”

Jack tapped his fingertip against the edge of Emily’s wound. When she didn’t react, he inserted the tip of the needle into her flesh.

Tyler did his best to keep his own reaction from showing on his face, but he felt every suture as if he were the one getting them.

“Is Helen okay?” Emily asked. “She got away before the shooting started, didn’t she?”

“The envoy’s fine,” Duncan said. “So’s the president. The major and the palace guard only needed a few seconds head start, and you gave it to them.”

“And the woman who was being held hostage?”

“Shaken up, but unharmed.”

She looked past Tyler to the shambles of the ballroom. “How many people…didn’t make it?”

The bodies of two women and four men, not counting El Gato, had already been taken away. A few of the critically injured weren’t expected to last the night. This wasn’t the right time for her to hear the details. “Don’t think about it, Emily,” Tyler said.

“I can’t help it. They thought they were coming to a party. They’d done nothing wrong, any more than the gardener or that poor construction worker. It’s not fair. They weren’t the assassin’s target. They were only in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

As Emily had been a week ago. “The important thing is that it’s over,” he said. “He’ll never hurt anyone again.”

Her fingers trembled within his. “It’s hard to believe how fast the end came.”

He guessed from the tremor in her hand that she was remembering the final moments of the standoff. He’d known he would get only one chance to finish it. He wished that he’d had the presence of mind to warn her not to look. “I’m sorry that you had to see that.”

“You had no choice, Tyler. You had to kill him. Otherwise, more people would have died. With all the bullets that were flying, it’s a miracle that anyone survived. He was shooting everywhere.” Her chin trembled. “I can still hear it.”

“It’ll fade, Emily.” He squeezed her hand.

“I was still a little drunk the last time I was shot at. It was already over by the time I got scared, but this…” She looked from him to Duncan and then to Jack. “How do you do it? How can you keep putting yourselves into situations where you know you’ll be risking your lives?”

Jack had finished stitching her wound. He spoke for all of them as he smoothed on a bandage. “We think about how much worse it would be if we hadn’t been here.”

Emily clutched her bag to her chest as she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The walk back to her room had seemed endless, and not only because she was barefoot. Time was playing tricks on her, slowing down or jumping ahead without warning. It was like her pulse. Just when she thought it had settled down, she’d feel another punch of memory and off it went again.

“How’s the arm?” Tyler asked.

She tried to shrug, but the tug of the stitches beneath the bandage stopped her. Whatever Jack had used to numb the pain in her arm was wearing off. “Just great. No problem.”

“You should try to keep the dressing dry for at least a day.”

“Yes, Jack told me. I guess that trip to the beach I’d been hoping for is out. On the other hand, swimming might not be that good an idea, anyway. There are probably sharks in the water. I’ve heard they’re more common in warm regions. What do you think?”

“I think you’re wired, and the sooner you get some rest the better you’ll feel.”

She glanced toward the other end of the corridor. Kurt and Gonzo were back on duty, standing outside Helen’s suite. That was no surprise. Even though El Gato was out of the picture, they would continue to act as the envoy’s bodyguards until she was safely on her way to the States. The two men gave her a friendly wave, as if there was nothing unusual about the sight of a shoeless woman in a bloodstained evening dress being escorted by a man in a rumpled tuxedo with no shirt.

She focused on Tyler’s chest and felt another punch of memory, along with a flutter of sexual awareness that had nothing to do with the danger they’d confronted. Or perhaps it had. The reason he was half-naked beneath that tux was because he had used his shirt to immobilize the crystal fragment in her arm while they’d waited for Jack. He hadn’t left her side throughout the whole endless aftermath.

But she wouldn’t have expected any less from him. She already knew he was a nice guy. “Thanks for walking me back,” she said, opening her door. “And for holding my hand while I got stitched up and all that, but you don’t have to feel guilty because I got hurt. It was a fluke.”

“I know that.” He held out her shoes. He’d been carrying them by the straps so they dangled in midair between them. “Maybe you can get these fixed.”

Her eyes filled with tears as she took the shoes from his hand. Seeing the broken heel put the finishing touch on the evening. They weren’t glass slippers, that was for sure. And the clock had already struck midnight. This wasn’t a fairy tale. People had died tonight.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“I can’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“You’re probably expecting me to make a crack about whether the major will compensate me for those shoes or my dress. Or I could say something about how President Gorrell won’t ask us back to another one of his parties since we did such a bang-up job ruining this one.”

“Why would I expect that?”

“Because that’s what I always do when I’m trying to deal with feelings I don’t like. But I don’t need to tell you that. You already figured it out, didn’t you?”

He guided her into the room and closed the door. She’d left the lamp on the bedside table burning. It filtered through the rose-colored tulle that framed the bed to create an island of light in the darkness, warm and inviting.

Emily bit her lip as she felt another sexual flutter.

Tyler bypassed the bed and walked to the bathroom. “Stay there,” he said. “I’m going to run you a bath.”

She dropped her bag and the shoes and followed as far as the doorway. “Why?”

“Because you need to relax.” He switched on the lights above the sink, pushed his jacket sleeves to his elbows and bent over the claw-footed tub.

“You just finished saying I need to keep my bandage dry.”

He waited for the water to start steaming, then adjusted the temperature and straightened up. “You can keep your arm on the rim of the tub.”

“Oh, great.” She leaned her back against the door frame. “Now you’re issuing orders again.”

“I want to help you.”

The tenderness in his tone brought another spurt of tears. She rubbed her face. “Don’t feel sorry for me. Just because I’m a bit off my game right now doesn’t mean I need your pity. Save it for the real victims of that maniac.”

“Of all the things I feel for you, Emily, pity isn’t one of them.”

“Good. Because it’s not a bath that I need.”

“Then what? Ask me anything.”

“You were touching me all evening. You’ve hauled me around and knocked me down too many times to count.”

“That’s true.”

“So would it be too much to expect that a guy who seems to have no problem with physical contact might realize I need to be held a lot more than I need a bath?”

He left the water running, walked where she stood and placed his hands on either side of her waist. Taking care not to touch her right arm, he drew her away from the door frame until she leaned against his chest. It was a gentle embrace, compared to what he’d given her in the past. “You’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”

She turned her face to his neck. “I doubt if that’s going to happen. Not unless Jack put more than novocaine in that shot he gave me.”

“Your body’s still going through the fight-or-flight response. When it wears off, you’ll crash.”

“It took you a while to calm down after you defused that bomb.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s why you kissed me in the stairwell.”

“One of the reasons.”

“I guess you don’t want to kiss me now, huh?”

His grip on her waist tightened. “Emily, if I kiss you, I’m not going to stop until I’ve stripped off that dress you’re barely wearing and whatever racy scraps of lace you’ve got underneath and tasted every inch of you.”

Her heartbeat went off the scale. She curled her fingers around the lapels of his jacket. Her knuckles tingled as they brushed his bare chest. “Doesn’t sound like such a bad idea to me. Would it be a problem for you?”

“Damn right, it would. You don’t really want me. You just want a distraction. You’re not thinking straight, and we both know it.”

“What if I don’t care?”

“You’ll care tomorrow.”

“Your mission ends tomorrow.”

He rubbed his cheek against the top of her head. “Exactly. I’ve got enough on my conscience without taking advantage of your mental state. I don’t want to give you another reason to hate me.”

“Tyler, I don’t hate you. I—” She stumbled over the word. What on earth had she been about to say? He was right. She wasn’t thinking straight. Being hot for his body was one thing, but she knew better than to let her emotions get involved. Didn’t she?

She kissed his neck.

He straightened his arms, easing her away from him. His chest heaved. “We have to stop.”

“Why?”

“For starters, there’s the water.” He stepped back and leaned down to shut off the taps. He stayed where he was, his hands braced on the rim of the tub. Wisps of steam rose from the surface to wreathe his head. He spoke without looking at her. “I wasn’t completely honest earlier.”

“Okay. Which time?”

His jaw hardened. “At the reception. When Kenyon was talking to you.”

“What about it?”

“I didn’t rush you away only because he seemed suspicious.”

“Ah.”

“You were the most beautiful woman in the room. It didn’t matter why we were there, I just wanted you to myself.”