Bed of Lies (48 page)

He looked down and saw that she was right. Just above his hipbone on his right side, soaking through his shirt, there was blood, or if he was lucky a combination of blood and mostly rainwater. Shit. Right over the damned incision. He hadn't even felt it bleeding, because he was soaked through and through and cold as hell.

"Did I do that? Did I hurt you? I'm so sorry," she said.

"Honey, I had a gun at your back. You're allowed to try to get away."

Her expression was almost comical then, like the angel-girl couldn't stand the thought of hurting anyone, even when she was scared half out of her mind and trying to get away from a guy with a gun.

"Relax, it's an old injury. And I might have done it earlier today. I did help pull a tree off of Tink's owner, and getting the tarp over the hole in the cabin roof was no picnic."

She was up on her knees, looking like she just had to get to her feet, that she couldn't stand to do nothing. "You can't just stay there like that, bleeding."

"Believe me, I've been hurt much worse than this and survived."

She looked around the cabin. There really wasn't much to it. "There must be towels in the bathroom somewhere. I could get you one."

"Grace, I'm in no danger of bleeding to death," he insisted.

"Are you in some kind of trouble? Is there some reason you think someone might be looking for you? To hurt you?"

Give the angel-girl a prize.

"I doubt it," he said, regardless.

"Because, I'm really not scary," she went on.

"Yeah, I get that. I'm sorry about the whole gun thing. It's highly unlikely that anyone's looking for me or trying to hurt me. But it's possible, so I'm being extremely cautious right now. That's all."

Well, that and the fact that Maeve, injured and pinned under a tree, had brought back some really bad memories, and he was still jacked up on adrenaline from both what had happened today and what happened three and a half months ago. But he wasn't going to explain that to a girl who actually had him apologizing for defending himself against what he had every right to believe was an intruder who'd broken into this place.

"Okay." She sat back down, as if that made it all seem perfectly reasonable and she'd wait right there, pleasantly even, until he was sure he had nothing to fear from her. "Would you like to tell me what you did?"

"No." He laughed in spite of himself. "But I'm not a criminal, Grace. The cops aren't looking for me. And I'm not some guy your brother freed from death row and is hiding here until the media circus dies down."

"Zach told you about all that? Because he never actually told me that. I mean, people in the family suspected at times, but....

"I'm not a criminal," he said again.

"Okay."

The dog whined and nudged his giant head against her, and she petted him, despite all the mud, happy as could be until she lifted her head and looked back at Aidan.

No, she was staring at the blood that had soaked through his shirt.

"This is ridiculous," she said. "I'm not that scared of you anymore, and I really don't think you're that scared of me, are you?"

"No," he agreed.

"So there must be some way we can work this out. You're wet. You're bleeding. You've got to be freezing because I'm not as wet as you are, and I'm really cold. Let's come up with a plan we can both live with."

Five Days Grace

by

Teresa Hill

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Five Days Grace

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Continue your journey with an excerpt from Teresa Hill's

Twelve Days

The McRae's Series

Book One

Excerpt from

Twelve Days

The McRae's Series

Book One

by

Teresa Hill

USA Today Bestselling Author

Chapter 1

On the first day of Christmas, eleven-year-old Emma sat in the backseat of the social worker's car, her little brother Zach on one side of her, baby Grace sleeping in a car seat on the other side.

The light was fading fast, streetlights coming on, and the entire neighborhood glowed with the light of thousands of tiny Christmas bulbs strung on just about everything she could see. Snow was falling, big, fat flakes, and everything was so pretty.

For a moment, Emma thought she might have stepped inside the pages of one of the Christmas books she read to Zach or that maybe she'd shrunk until she was an inch high and was living inside one of her most prized possessions—a snow globe.

It was so beautiful there, inside the big, old, magical-looking house, so warm, so welcoming. Emma could make it snow anytime she wanted with just a turn of her wrist, a bit of magic that never failed to delight Zach and the baby. She thought nothing bad could happen in a place like that and often wished she could find a way to live inside the little ball of glass.

Blinking through the fading light and the gently falling snow, she thought for a moment the neighborhood they were driving through looked oddly familiar, though she was sure she'd never been here before. She would have remembered the big, old houses reaching toward the sky, with all those odd angles and shapes, the fancy trim and silly frills that seemed to belong to another place and time.

Rich people's houses, she thought, the knot in her stomach growing a bit tighter. What would anybody with a house like that want with her and Zach and the baby?

Zach leaned closer to the window, his nose pressed flat against it, fogging a little circle of glass. "It's almos' Chris'mas. Ever'body has their tree and stuff up."

"I know, Zach." There were wreaths on doors and on the old-fashioned black lampposts topped with fancy metal curls, the lights perched delicately on top. There were stars made of bright Christmas lights, even Christmas trees in people's yards.

Emma had never seen people go to so much trouble for Christmas. They must have spent hours. And the money... It must take a lot of money to decorate a house like this just for Christmas. She couldn't imagine what the insides of those houses must be like. She and Zach and the baby didn't need anything fancy. Just a place where they could stay together. She couldn't bear it if they were separated. Emma had to make sure that didn't happen.

The social worker pulled the car into a long driveway and at first Emma thought they were going to the house on the right, all castlelike and fairy-talish.

Aunt Miriam—that's what she'd told them to call her—turned off the car and pocketed the keys. She twisted around in her seat and said, "Let me make sure someone's here before we take the baby out in the cold, okay?"

Emma nodded, knowing they were running out of chances.

"Zach," Aunt Miriam said. "You stay in your seat belt and in that backseat. Emma, don't let him near the steering wheel or the gearshift. Cars aren't playthings. I'll be right there on the porch. You yell if you need me."