Searching for Cate (13 page)

“O
n another quest?”

Cate swung around, her hand instantly going to the hilt of the gun holstered inside her jacket.

Blowing out a breath, she silently upbraided herself for letting her guard down as she made eye contact with Christian. She hadn't even heard him open the door or come up behind her. If he'd been someone who meant the girl harm, he could have gotten the drop on her. What was the matter with her? She was getting sloppy and there was no excuse for it.

Withdrawing her hand from inside her jacket, Cate looked at him grudgingly. “That's a good way to get yourself shot.”

“Making my rounds?” he deadpanned. Taking the girl's limp wrist in his hand, he glanced at his watch
and took her pulse. “Haven't you heard? Bedford is supposed to be one of the safest cities in the country.”

Yes, she'd heard that. She also knew that this girl had been found in a Bedford warehouse. “There are always exceptions to everything and nothing ever stays constant.”

“I know.”

Was that sadness she heard in his voice? Cate told herself she was imagining things.

She stepped to the side as Christian slipped in to take her place beside the girl's bed. After taking his stethoscope from around his neck, he began to listen to his patient's heart. His methods struck Cate as almost old-fashioned in the face of all the state-of-the-art monitors jammed into the small intensive care unit.

“Don't trust the monitors?” she asked, nodding at the gaggle of technological marvels.

The smile that crossed his lips was fleeting, but she found it potent nonetheless.

“I'm hands-on,” he explained.

She couldn't have said why the term made her think of those same hands on her, other than it had been a long time since she'd been with a man. A long time since she'd wanted to be with a man.

She didn't want to now, she insisted silently.

“I like checking things out for myself,” he added, taking up Jane Doe's chart.

Looking at the entries on the bottom of the second page, he nodded to himself. Everything was going along the normal postsurgical path. Except that the girl still hadn't woken up, not even once. At least, not during any of the nurses' interactions with her. She'd re
mained unresponsive even after prodding. That bothered him.

Christian returned the chart to the foot of her bed and sighed. And then he looked at the woman standing here. “It's late. What are you doing here?”

A little on the defensive, she lobbed the question back at him. “I could ask you the same thing. I have it on the best authority that doctors do go home.”

There was nothing at home for him except time to think. Sometimes he spent nights right here in the hospital, stretched out on the sofa in his office, because he didn't want to be alone with his thoughts. “I don't keep banker's hours.”

“Neither do I.”

He laughed shortly. “I guess that gives us something in common.”

“That,” she conceded, “and knowing Lydia.”

Cate tried not to stare at him.

What's your story, Doctor? What is it about you that keeps getting to me? Was something inside of me ready to crack and you were just there at the right time?

God, she felt as if she was losing her mind.

He didn't notice the change in her expression. His attention had been drawn back to his patient. By rights, the girl belonged to Reese now. Bendenetti had performed the surgery and was best suited to care for his patient from here on in. But there'd been something about the child-woman that reminded him of Alma. And made him want to save her.

As if that could somehow atone for his having failed to save Alma. And Dana.

He realized that Lydia's partner was looking at him and that he'd lapsed into silence. “Speaking of Lydia, I'm surprised she's not here instead of you.”

“I headed her off.” It was his turn to look puzzled. “She seemed really wiped out,” Cate told him, “so I told her I'd look in on Jane here.”

Wiped out. Yeah, he just bet she was. One of the classic signs of pregnancy. God, he hoped that she'd come to her senses soon and tell Lukas that she was pregnant. Lukas worshipped the ground his wife walked on, but he wouldn't let her be foolish. He'd make her take a desk job.

Christian realized he'd lapsed into silence again and that Cate was regarding him curiously. He grasped at the last thing she'd said. “Jane?”

“Jane Doe,” she explained. “At least according to her chart.” She frowned, shaking her head. “The name seems so cold, so impersonal.”

There was a solution to that. “If it bothers you, why don't
you
give her a name?” he suggested mildly. “Although you know what Shakespeare said.”

She told herself that she'd made a mistake in coming back tonight. She told herself that she should be leaving. She told herself a lot of things she didn't seem to be paying attention to because she was still here, sharing the small space with a collection of machines, an unconscious girl and a man who, just by breathing, made her come alive again, inch by unfreezing inch.

And that, she knew, could be dangerous.

“No, I'll bite,” she said gamely. “What did Shakespeare say?”

“A rose by any other name—”

From somewhere amid all the trivia she'd collected in her lifetime, the line came back to her. “Would smell as sweet.”
Romeo and Juliet.
It figured. “A doctor who quotes Shakespeare?”

He could recite entire passages, and had. To Alma. On long, hot, still nights that stretched out into oblivion. She'd liked listening to the sound of the words she didn't quite grasp. He'd loved seeing the wonder in her eyes when she looked at him.

Christian shrugged evasively, not knowing if she was amused or amazed or how he should respond to either set of circumstances.

“We all have our guilty pleasures. When I was a kid, I'd read anything I could get my hands on. We didn't have much of a library on the reservation, so I'd wind up rereading a lot of what was there.” He watched her face for her reaction, but the mention of where he'd lived out his childhood had garnered no particular response from her. No covert disdain the way he'd seen mark so many other faces. “Care to hear Marc Antony's speech from
Julius Caesar?
”

The suggestion made her laugh and for that she was grateful. A little of the tension she'd felt building up since he'd walked into the room drained away. “Maybe some other time.”

His grin was fast, guileless and lethal. “Don't know what you're missing.”

The words felt as if they were dancing along her skin long after they faded from the air.

He was standing too close, she thought.

Or maybe just close enough.

Close enough for her to feel something humming
between them. Something she hadn't really felt for a very long time. Chemistry? Electricity?

A physical craving?

She wasn't really sure what to call it, only that she'd missed feeling it. And that it frightened her at the same time that it enticed her.

Her smile faded just a little, growing serious. “No,” she agreed quietly. “I guess I don't.”

He was unprepared for the jolt he felt, looking into her eyes. Unprepared for the sudden longing that came out of the recesses of his being where it had dwelled, unattended, far too long.

For one insane moment, he felt like…

Christian shook himself free, clinging to the one word that had burst upon his brain with clarity.

Insane.

It was utterly insane to feel this pull, this need that was even now gnawing away at his gut. Desire, with its accompanying passions, had left him the day Alma had died. As if all those feelings had been surgically excised out of him. At the very least, all the nerve endings connecting him to that part of his being had been ruthlessly severed.

Nerves that were cut never regained their feeling. He believed this to be true until a moment ago.

She needed to leave, Cate thought urgently. She needed to get some air to clear her head of all the strange thoughts that were crashing into one another.

Cate took a step toward the door. “I'd better be going. I just stopped by here because…because she has no one.” Why did she feel she had to continue to justify her actions to him? She'd already said she was here
instead of Lydia. That should have been enough. “At least, no one we can contact. And I didn't want her to be alone.” Cate willed her mouth to stop moving, but for some reason, she kept on talking. “Stupid, isn't it? I mean, she doesn't know I'm here. She probably wouldn't even recognize me if she did open her eyes.”

Cate's last words caught his attention. “Should she recognize you?”

Who knows if she'd even been processing any information that one split second back in the warehouse? Cate shrugged. “I was the last person she saw before she blacked out. She clutched my hand and cried. I couldn't make out any of the words, they were badly garbled, but the meaning was crystal clear. She was terrified and she wanted to be saved.”

His eyes met hers and she felt another tidal wave coming on, navel level. “Well, you saved her.”

“Maybe.” She was the one who'd found the girl. That wasn't quite the same thing. “No, I didn't,” Cate amended abruptly. “You did. You and that surgeon you called in.”

“Reese Bendenetti,” he told her. “But I wasn't talking about that. There's saving the body and then there's saving the soul.” That much he had picked up from his mother and the old ways. “She probably saw something in your eyes that helped her hang on.”

That was almost spiritual. Cate stared at him. Graywolf was definitely a hard person to pigeonhole. She supposed that wasn't such a bad thing. In her line of work, she had a tendency to want to file everything and everyone neatly under a heading. Some people, the interesting ones, defied that.

“I thought you said that you didn't believe in prayer.”

“Not prayer, but something. Sheer force of will.” Christian shrugged. Some things just defied being labeled. “Something,” he repeated, leaving it at that.

She studied him in silence for a moment. “You're a very complex man, Doctor.”
And I'm letting myself get sidetracked much too much.
With renewed energy she headed toward the door. “Well, good night.”

Cate had every intention of leaving the hospital. But as she placed her hand on the doorknob, she found herself pausing. Wrestling. Finally, she looked at him over her shoulder. “Would you like to go somewhere for a cup of coffee or something?”

His first impulse was to say no. He'd turned down a great many invitations from women in the past three years. In that time, he'd grown almost reclusive except for his frequent trips to the reservation. But now, for reasons he could not fathom, a tiny slit of light had opened up inside of him. Warmed him. He didn't want it to close just yet.

“That depends.”

Her eyes met his. The soft hum of the machines faded into oblivion. “On what?”

She saw his mouth curve. Felt her pulse rise in direct proportion. “On whether or not you're going to pump me for information.”

Cate shook her head. “No pumping. Not tonight. Just coffee.”

He'd had next to nothing to eat since breakfast. Lunch had been nonexistent and dinner had been a sandwich of some kind of mystery meat from the cafeteria. He'd forced half down before giving the rest of
it away to some birds outside the cafeteria. The birds had enjoyed the sandwich far more than he had.

Coffee sounded pretty good right about now. Something to fill the gnawing emptiness in his belly. “All right. There's a coffee shop down the block. I think it's still open if you want to give it a try.”

She didn't want him thinking this was any big deal. Part of her was already regretting having asked.
Because it might lead somewhere?
She didn't even try to answer that. “The cafeteria'll do. I'm easy.”

He glanced at his watch. “The cafeteria's closed at this hour.”

“There's always a vending machine.” She vaguely remembered passing one that touted coffee, hot chocolate and chicken soup.

He'd never met anyone who would have opted for vending-machine fare over something from a coffee shop, especially since the former usually tasted like lukewarm, murky-colored water.

“You really are easy, aren't you?” he asked.

The response was on her lips automatically. “I'm a cop's daughter. My father taught me to roll with the punches.” Abruptly, her expression changed. “I mean, I thought I was a cop's daughter—”

He could see in her eyes that she'd made no peace with this yet. “Biology doesn't make a person a parent. Being there for the scraped knees, the heartaches and the small joys, that's what makes a parent.”

“Yeah, well I'm still having a little trouble sorting all that out.” She eyed him. It had been a mistake to act on impulse. She needed to back off. “Maybe we'd better take a rain check on that coffee.”

He paused for a long moment. She had no idea if she'd just insulted him, or taken him off the hook.

“Maybe,” he finally said.

Cate left the room before she changed her mind again and ruined her retreat. As she hurried out of the building and to her car, a wave of disappointment assaulted her, mixing with the cooling night air.

L
ukas walked into the kitchen and came up behind his wife as she stood at the stove. He could see she was frowning as she stirred a large pot of her version of marinara sauce. He wrapped his arms about her waist, pulling her against him.

Pressing a kiss to her neck, he inhaled the light fragrance he always associated with her. A feeling of contentment wafted through him and he nuzzled her, thinking how perfect his life had become these past few years.

The only thing that would make it even more so was if they had a child. They'd talked about having children, several times in the last few months, and Lydia was open to the idea.

She'd said, “Soon.”

The thought about making babies was on his mind
a great deal lately. He wanted to be young enough to enjoy them, to run with them and be their companion in every sense of the word.

“You know,” he proposed, his voice low and husky, “we still have time for a quickie.”

He was outlining the shell of her ear with his tongue and Lydia found it really hard not to melt against him. He had this drugging, hypnotic effect about him that always got to her.

“A very quick quickie,” she pointed out, struggling to keep stirring. Their guests were due soon.

Raising her hair, Lukas brushed his lips against the other side of her neck. “I do some of my best work under pressure.”

Any second now, her eyes were going to drift shut and she was going to be a goner. Lydia gripped the stirring spoon harder. “Luke, what if one of them comes early?”

“Then they'll just have to entertain themselves for a while by ringing the doorbell.” He turned her around so that she faced him, his arms still resting around her waist. Something was wrong, he'd sensed it for a while now, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. “I thought a little lovemaking might help relieve your tension.”

It took everything for her not to stiffen and give credence to his words. Instead, she just laughed lightly. “What tension?”

“The tension that brings out the faint little line between your eyes.” To illustrate, he traced the line with his fingertip.

Lydia curtailed her impulse to pull her head away. She didn't want him delving too hard. Their marriage
wasn't about lies and she didn't want to begin now. Besides, she always felt that he could see right through her. With a mighty effort, she rallied, gave him a quick kiss on the mouth, wiggled free of her confinement and went back to stirring the temperamental sauce.

“The tension's not going to go away until I close up this case.” That much was true, she consoled her conscience.

“And if you don't close it?”

He saw her shoulders stiffen with determination. “I
will,
” she insisted.

“Never let it be said that you lack confidence.”

Lukas stepped back from her and leaned his hip against the sink. His eyes on her profile, he studied her in that quiet way of his that always got under the layers of her skin and saw straight into her heart. Every time.

Except that this time, she made very sure she kept the barriers up.

“Lyd, is that all that's bothering you?”

She'd known this was coming. With all her heart, she hoped she sounded convincing.

A little more time, I just need a little more time.
She flashed a quick smile at him. “Sure, what else could there be?”

He spread his hands wide, frustrated. “I don't know, that's why I'm asking. It's just that lately, you've seemed preoccupied, as if there was something else on your mind.”

“I have a lot of things on my mind.” She reached for the container of Parmesan cheese and shook out some more to thicken the sauce. She had the heat on low, but
even so, tiny bubbles burst along the surface of the sauce like miniature erupting volcanoes. Lydia turned the heat down another notch to avoid having tiny streams of sauce shoot out like lava. “Carrying off this dinner without a hitch, for one.” She slanted him a look. Diversion had always been her best asset. “Wondering if some hussy is after my husband, for another.” That had hit the mark. There was a look of surprise on his face. “Lots of women fall in love with their doctors.”

Lukas laughed incredulously, shaking his head. Even if he was given to roving, which he never had been, she had absolutely nothing to worry about in that department.

“Most of my patients are over sixty,” he pointed out.

She leveled a warning look at him. “Never underestimate a sexy grandma.” When he laughed, she took umbrage, suddenly realizing that her insecurity did actually reside in the recesses of her brain, thanks to the emotional roller coaster she'd found herself on these last four weeks. “Hey, I'm serious.”

“No, you're not,” he scoffed, refusing to believe that she could possibly entertain such an absurd idea. “Because you know damn well that you've got my heart wrapped up around your little finger.” His eyes held hers for a moment, communicating things that couldn't be put into words, at least not when they had guests arriving in minutes. “You have since the day I met you.”

She knew she should be convinced, but something kept her from shutting the door on the thought. She was
turning into her own worst enemy. This was supposed to be a diversion, not an inquisition based on real insecurities. She had to get hold of herself before she allowed this to get out of hand.

Lydia tried to keep her voice playful, even if the question was not. “You never had any desire to see if the grass is greener on the other side?”

“In my experience,” he told her, “if it's greener, it means it's just crabgrass, or weed grass.”

She pretended to look at him over the top of an imaginary pair of glasses. “And by experience, you would mean…?”

“I read a lot.” Okay, enough was enough. There was something else going on here. He knew her. This whole act was camouflage. “Lydia, really, what's wrong?”

Covering the large pot, she turned off the burner and let the sauce stand there, absorbing the residual heat. “I already told you—”

“You're actually worried about me having an affair with a patient?” he asked, not believing it for a minute. Lydia wasn't one of those insecure, jealous women.

She retreated to a more plausible, immediate explanation, hoping Lukas would back off for now. Until she could tell him the truth. “No. I know I can trust you. I meant about this little dinner party.”

For the time being, even though it seemed out of character for her, he decided that maybe this really was what was preying on Lydia's mind, at least for the past couple of days. Ever since she'd had him invite Christian and said that she was asking Cate to come over as well. His own reaction to it had been lukewarm at best, but he'd always been the type to let fate take
over. After all, fate had brought her into his life, hadn't it?

“Four people is not exactly a party, but I can see your point.” He picked up one of the canapés she'd made and pulled away before she could hit his hand to make him drop it. “I didn't know you had this match-making bug in you. Is this something all women are born with and it just comes out later in some than in others?” He popped the canapé into his mouth. “Mmm, good.”

She leveled a gaze at him. “Thanks, and define ‘later.'”

As a male, he knew he was perilously close to having stepped in it. “Not twenty-one.”

“Good answer.” She nodded her approval. “Nice recovery.”

“I thought so.” He debated having another canapé, but Lydia was armed with another large spoon. He wouldn't put it past her to use it, so he saved his appetite. “Seriously, Lydia, I'm not sure how Christian is going to react to being set up with Cate.”

“It's not a setup,” she protested a bit too heatedly, “it's food. Away from the hospital and the field office,” she added, then shrugged. “I thought they looked good together.”

The old line about the best-laid plans of mice and men drifted through his brain. “On paper, so do salt-water fish and freshwater fish, but I wouldn't go putting them in the same tank together. One of them is bound not to make it.”

After putting on an oven mitt, Lydia opened the oven door. A curtain of steam escaped, then cleared
away so that she could check on the veal chops she'd stuffed and breaded earlier. They were turning the right color, thank God. Golden brown instead of charred black like the last ones she'd attempted.

“Is that your sneaky way of saying that you'd rather be fishing than here?”

He laughed. “I'd rather be anywhere you are, but since you mentioned it, Dr. Amos has invited us to go deep-sea fishing next weekend. I've got someone covering my rotation. Are you up for it?”

Ordinarily, she would have said yes without hesitation. She loved going out on the water with him. But the thought of being out on a rocking boat at sea, no matter how large it was, almost made her stomach rise up in her throat. She took off the oven mitt and tossed it on the counter. “I'll get back to you on that. Our witness might regain consciousness before then,” she added for good measure, in case he asked why she was stalling.

Lukas sighed. Maybe this case
was
the only thing on her mind. And if it was, he was afraid that she was letting it become an obsession. “I know how important this case is to you. How important they all are to you, but you're letting it consume you—”

The sound of chimes interrupted anything else he might have said.

“Doorbell,” Lydia declared cheerfully, finally understanding the full import of the phrase, “Saved by the bell.”

Lukas tabled what he had to say. For now. He passed her and crossed to the kitchen's threshold. “Yes, I can still distinguish sounds, Lydia. I haven't gotten that old yet.”

“No,” she agreed, a wicked look coming into her eyes. “I'd say you've still got a few miles left in you.” Lydia punctuated her statement with a sexy wink.

He stopped where he was. If he lived to be a hundred, he was never going to fully understand women. He'd never seen Lydia so mercurial before.

“I can still put the chain on the door—” Lukas offered, comically raising and lowering his dark eyebrows like a silent film would-be Romeo.

“Go.” She shooed him off with her free hand. “Make yourself useful.”

He gave her one last glance over his shoulder. “I thought that's what I was offering to do. My husbandly duty.” His voice floated back to her as he made his way to the front door.

Lydia laughed as she took the sauce off the burner and then began ladling out some of it into a serving dish. God, but she loved that man. And she absolutely hated keeping this pregnancy from him. All right, so it wasn't an outright lie, it was just omission, she told herself. But she knew he'd see it as a lie if he ever found out that she knew she was pregnant and hadn't told him.

Just a little longer, I promise,
she swore to him.

All the leads they'd had regarding the case had suddenly dried up. The game of musical residences had temporarily halted, or at least they'd ceased to leave an identifiable trail. It was as if the girls and the people responsible for pimping them out had fallen off the face of the earth.

She knew that was impossible. Scum had to be cleansed before you could get rid of it. Like mildew, it
would return again and again unless you eradicated it once and for all.

Sullivan had called in a few favors and pressed more people into undercover work. They in turn put out feelers, pretending to be eager johns looking for “tender, young flesh.” The very idea turned her stomach, but if you wanted to catch the bad guys, she told herself philosophically, that's what it took. You had to cover yourself with filth to avoid detection.

More than anything in this world, she desperately wanted to catch the bad guys.

Hoping for some good news, she'd called the hospital just before she'd begun cooking dinner. But the guard they had posted outside the ICU room said that there'd been no change in “Jane's” status. The young teenager was still clinging to life, still unconscious.

Every cage the department had rattled so far had come up empty.

The frustration was driving her crazy. Not to mention that she didn't know how much longer she could hold out against Lukas and her own conscience.

 

“Smells good, whatever it is,” Christian said, walking into the two-story house with its recessed windows, stucco exterior and vaulted, beamed ceilings. He'd told Lukas the house reminded him of some of the haciendas he'd seen in Arizona. And the interior always made him feel as if he'd stepped onto a western movie set.

Lucky for Luke that Lydia had the same taste as he did, Christian thought.

He handed his brother the bottle he'd brought with
him. Lukas looked at it, then at Christian, raising an eyebrow. “Sparkling cider?”

He knew what Lukas was thinking. He usually brought Wild Turkey. But this wasn't a time for hard liquor. He shrugged casually. “Alcohol-free. I thought we'd try something new.”

When he'd gotten the invitation, he'd hoped that Lydia had changed her mind and was going to make an announcement about the baby at dinner. But one look at Lukas's face told him that if she was making any announcements, she'd kept her secret from her husband.

“I'm game for anything,” Lukas said, leading the way into the living room.

From there, Christian could see into the dining room. The table was set for four instead of three. “Someone else coming to dinner?”

Before Lukas could answer, they heard a car pulling up in the driveway.