Shadow's Lady (A Pajaro Bay Cozy Mystery + Sweet Romance) (4 page)

In a flash, the angel was at his side, brushing his face with one hot little hand. "No, don't talk. I'm sorry," it said. "You're hurt. You have to stay still."

The hands were burning, searing him, the heat painful and yet a welcome warmth to his cold body.

He could still feel his body, even though he was dead. He could feel the angel's touch comforting him, gently patting his cheek as it said "there, there" in the same way Mama used to when he was a small child and had scraped his knee playing in the tide pools.

He sighed in relief. Death wasn't so bad. The angel wasn't angry, even knowing who he was—even knowing everything he'd done, and everything he hadn't done. He felt contentment wash over him, just this once knowing he was accepted in spite of everything, loved and forgiven with no need to explain himself.

He thought of the death and destruction he'd left in his wake, and wondered how the angel could be so gentle to the likes of him. "It's been so long since my last confession," he whispered, but again no sound came out.

The angel shook its head, bending over him again. "Lie still," it said. The angel's golden body crinkled with a strange sound like the squeak of a damp rubber raincoat.

It
was
a raincoat, a glossy yellow one, he realized, and hard behind that realization came the dreadful conclusion that he wasn't dead at all.

This was no guardian angel. He hadn't been forgiven. He was still Matt DiPietro, and he couldn't escape his fate, whatever it was.

He tried to regroup, tried not to be disappointed that the moment of pure acceptance and forgiveness had been only an illusion.

He had to pull himself together, to figure out what had happened. This must be Pajaro Island. The sandstone cliffs were right in front of him, so he must be lying among the tide pools at Pirate's Cove, right beneath the lighthouse itself. He'd made it.

But now he was helpless at the hands of that girl from the grocery store. What was her name? The Project had briefed him on this.

Her name became an obsession to him. If he could remember her name, then he was in control of the situation, and not a pathetic lump of flesh at the mercy of these people.

The effort to concentrate was too much, and he drifted off again.

Next thing he knew the girl had wrapped him in the yellow slicker and was apparently trying to examine his injuries.

Her warm little hands felt so good he decided to let her go ahead and examine anything she wanted to.

When she moved down his body toward his left leg, she gasped. It probably looked a mess. He wondered if the bleeding had stopped. Somehow he found it hard to care one way or another.

The girl's hands cupped one of his hands. She was so hot—or was he so cold? It was hard to tell. She was talking again, leaning over him and speaking earnestly to him in that soft voice, but he couldn't make out what she was saying—something about ginger tea, and ghost dogs, and stupid surfers getting themselves killed.

He knew that couldn't be right, so he decided to sleep some more.

Her hands cradled his face. "Wake up!"

He opened his eyes.

"Don't pass out on me, you... you... twit!"

Her eyelashes were the same golden blonde as her hair. He felt an irrational urge to kiss them. For some reason, that thought made him smile.

"This is not funny!"

Her eyelashes were wet—sea spray, or tears? They really looked like tears. He didn't like that. Tears didn't fit his assessment of the scenario, and he wasn't up to doing a re-evaluation.

"We have to get you out of this cove before the tide comes in," she said, with what he could have sworn was genuine concern.

Don't trust.
He closed his eyes, trying to dredge his memory for every scrap of information he had on her. He was too tired to remember. She was somebody he should know. Was she on his side, or the other?

Whoever she was, he was going to die out here if she didn't help him.

Finally, he thought of it: "Lorelei." His throat burned from the strain of speaking, but the sound came out.

Lorelei. That was her name. The siren who lured sailors to their deaths. He had laughed about it when they told him. What a name for a lady lighthouse keeper. He was absurdly pleased that he'd remembered the name, as if it really did prove he was in control.

"Lori," she said. "Nobody calls me Lorelei."

Nobody except the IRS, NSA, and every other government agency that had a record on her.

"How did you know my name? We hardly even spoke at the store." She looked surprised. This was bad. First word out of his mouth and he'd made her suspicious.

He closed his eyes again.

"It's all right," she said. "We'll talk later. But we have to get you higher out of the water before I go call for help."

"Call?" His voice sounded like an old man's, weak from the effort of living.

"I've got a marine radio in the lighthouse. Can you keep yourself above the waterline here while I call the Coast Guard?"

He grabbed her arm.

"Ow!"

He ignored her wince of pain and kept gripping her tightly. If she called for help, he was dead. And so was she. Now he remembered. She was a civilian. She was Ms. Zelda's great-niece.

"Don't go," he whispered.

Surprisingly she didn't pull away from him. Instead she patted the hand that was clenched into a bruising grip on her arm. "It's okay. I won't leave you. Don't be afraid."

She was an angel. But now he was starting to come to full consciousness, and he finally realized what a horrible thing he'd done. She wasn't the enemy. She was some dumb kid out here all alone. He'd dragged her right into the middle of this life-and-death game.

"Don't leave me," he whispered. He had to keep her here until he could figure out what to do.

"I won't," she said in that soft little voice. She looked around them. "We can't stay here. The tide's coming in and you'll drown. We've got to go up that hill."

"Hill?" He tried to turn his head to see where she pointed, but he didn't see any hill, just the sheer, pale cliffs he couldn't possibly climb.

Suddenly she was on her feet, standing over him. "Stay here. I'm going to call for help. I'll be back as fast as I can."

He tried to shout to her, but no sound came out of his ravaged throat. She just waved reassuringly at him and kept going. He felt himself gripped by a primitive, cowardly fear that this was finally it. The untouchable, uncatchable Shadow had been caught. He'd be dead as soon as she got on that radio and announced where he was to anyone listening in. And she'd be dead, too. That was what shook him out of his stupor. Maybe his life was expendable, but hers wasn't.

He rolled onto his stomach, only then realizing just how much his body hurt. But the effort of moving also made him start shivering once again, and that was a good thing. The shivering would stave off hypothermia. A bit of light exercise would warm up his body and do him good.

He tried to pull himself upright, using the nearest boulder for support. The bad leg scraped across sharp rocks. He didn't scream. He was good at not screaming. He was an expert at not screaming. And this was nothing. Some sore muscles, a shivering that made his teeth chatter until they ached, and one minor gunshot wound.

Piece of cake.

He became intimately acquainted with three more boulders before he had to stop and rest.

He looked back. He'd covered about four yards. He was all the way out of the water now, but it wasn't enough. Not nearly enough. If he could make it to that big rock at the base of the cliff, he could hide before anyone else got here. He hadn't yet figured out what to do when they walked around the rock and shot him in the back, but he was working on it.

"You're going the wrong way!" She was back, and kneeling down by him.

He rolled over to face her, intending to knock her out, but he didn't. It was really hard to slug a woman, even a foolish girl who might get him killed. One of his weaknesses. Gold-tipped eyelashes were hardly a good reason to let down his guard.

"I can't leave you like this," she said. "You're delirious."

She fetched the raincoat he'd dropped in his struggle through the rocks and brought it back, placing it around his shoulders again.

"Radio?" It was the only thing on his mind.

She shook her head. "I haven't gotten back to the lighthouse yet. I'll have to wait until I can get you out of danger before I call."

"Danger?"

She pointed toward the sea. "The tide's rising too fast. You can't stay here."

Oh. That kind of danger. He felt himself grinning.

"I don't see what's so funny. You're a mess, and the tide is coming in, and I need to get help."

"No help," he whispered.

"Look, Mister Tough Guy, don't try to be all macho. You need help. Why you surfers think you have to risk your lives just for some stupid thrill is beyond me."

A surfer. That's what she thought he was. Okay, that'll work. "Sorry," he whispered. "Stupid."

"Yeah, that makes two of us. Now what am I going to do with you?"

Good question, Lorelei York.

She stood up and put her hands on her hips.

He watched her. She bit her lower lip when she concentrated, he noticed. This was not a good thing. It made her look even younger than her twenty-something years. How many years? He thought hard again.

"24," he whispered.

"Huh?" she said. She looked him over, as if assessing him. Blue eyes. Wide eyes. Dangerously innocent eyes. There was an eerie familiarity about them. He had felt it at the grocery store, too.

She was beautiful. No, not beautiful, really. Not some abstract perfection like a fashion model. The nose was a bit too crooked, the eyes a bit too wide-set, the mouth a bit lopsided. Not physical perfection.

Cute? No, that wasn't quite it either. She was small and skinny, but not childlike. More wiry than slender. And there was too much character in the face, too much intelligence in the eyes for cute.

But a presence. Powerful and memorable. Unforgettable. And eerily familiar, as if he'd seen her, known her somewhere before, long ago. But that was impossible. He knew everything about her, and they'd never met before that run-in at Santos'.

She continued to look him over, small white teeth nibbling on that lower lip as she tried to figure out how to rescue him.

It really did appear that she was attempting to rescue him. Obviously she had no idea who he was.

He tried to put on a friendly, not-too-intimidating expression.

She smiled at him. Good.

He had to try to think. For some reason his mind was so foggy. He squinted, trying to break through the vagueness to his usual crisp analytical pattern. What did he need from this woman? Concentrate.

"Has the bleeding stopped?" he finally whispered.

She nodded. "It's not gushing out or anything." Then she frowned. "But it must hurt."

That was a masterful understatement. Rubbing sand into flesh wounds was a standard torture method in at least three countries he'd visited recently.

One look at her wide, scared eyes and he swallowed that remark, and instead smiled his best Harmless Civilian smile, and said, "then there's no problem."

•••

This man was impossible. One minute he was practically hysterical with delirium, crawling around on the rocks and acting crazy. The next he was smiling and acting like this was no big deal. So what if he he had a gut-wrenching gash covering half his leg? So what if he was passing out from exhaustion? No biggie.

The tide was coming closer each time the waves crashed up against the rocks. If she didn't get him out of this little cove he would drown by the time she climbed up to the signal room, called for help on the radio, and got back here.

But she couldn't possibly move him. And he didn't seem to be able to help himself.

She felt the tears welling up, and that made her mad.

She turned her back on him and wiped her face with one grimy palm.

So try again
. She wiped her eyes impatiently.
Just act like the dozens of doctors you've encountered over the years.

She turned back to face him. "Let's have a look at that leg," she said in her best officious tone. "Lie back and stop moving around."

Silently he leaned back against a boulder.

She knelt down on the ground next to him.

Wow, his leg was an even worse mess than it had looked at first glance. His wetsuit was ripped from knee to ankle, and the gruesome gash in the flesh beneath oozed blood.

She swallowed hard. Emergency room doctors did not throw up at the sight of gore, she reminded herself. She had to stop thinking about how much pain he must be in. Doctors must be able to turn off their empathy at will. Otherwise they'd spend a lot of their time passed out on the emergency room floor.

She looked down at the wound again, then up at the man patiently waiting for her to do something brilliant.

She pulled the raincoat off of him and felt around the neckline. Yup, the hood zipped off. She unzipped it and then folded it over lengthwise. It was just long enough to go around his leg.

"What are you doing?" he asked in that awful, raspy voice.

"I'm going to wrap this around your leg to keep the gap in your wetsuit closed. Then the cut won't get any more sand in it, and I can do a proper job of cleaning you up once we get to the house."

That sounded so confident and matter-of-fact she almost believed it herself. While she placed the folded hood across the gaping gash and tied it on with the hood string she ignored all the questions battering at her mind. How to "get to the house" with a huge, one-legged, muscle-bound jock. How to make sure he didn't catch some awful infection that made his leg turn gangrenous and fall off before help arrived.

She put on a stern expression. "Don't worry. I've got everything under control, uh... what is your name, anyway?" She supposed calling him My Pirate was out of the question....

He seemed to be seriously contemplating her question, as if he were turning over several possible responses in his mind, discarding each one until he finally came to the best answer: "Huh?"

His voice still held that raspy undertone that made her wonder if he'd swallowed sea water. People died of that, didn't they? And of exposure, or hypothermia, or whatever it was people died of when they were swept ashore in the middle of winter storms.

She tried again. "Your name. What's your name?" Were his ears full of water or was he really this dumb?

Again that slow, wary deliberation while he gathered the raincoat closer around him with shivering hands. Finally, the response. A shrug of the shoulders.

Maybe his condition was deteriorating. Well, she may not be an expert at search and rescue, but he wasn't going to die on her watch.

If he passed out cold that was the end of it. No way could she carry him up that hill.

She felt something on the back of her neck, and impatiently brushed it away.

Water.

Drops of water.

She looked up and one plopped in her eye. She blinked it away. The mist had turned to drizzle. Soon the rain would be back, and her pirate would freeze to death before her eyes.

"We're leaving now," she told him. "Get up."

He just looked at her blankly.

Okay, no more coddling him. "On your feet. Now." She held out her hand to him.

He looked incredulous—at her tone of voice, or at her assumption that he could stand, she wasn't sure.