Secret Agent Affair

Marja picked her words carefully. She didn’t want to say any more over the phone than she absolutely had to. “I need you to come down, Tania.” She glanced toward the slumped figure to her right. “I’ve, um, got a slight problem.”

For a moment there was silence, then anger. “There better be nothing wrong with the car or you’re going to be facing more than just a ‘slight’ problem,” Tania warned her.

The next moment the connection was abruptly terminated.

Marja closed her cell phone, pocketing it along with her car keys. Squaring her shoulders, she braced herself for a lecture when Tania arrived. The car was really Tania’s, although they did share it. Her sister had bought it from Sasha after their oldest sister had purchased a new one, an SUV to accommodate her family increasing by one. In its time, the vehicle had ferried all five of the Pulaski women to and from the hospital, as well as the house in Queens where they all grew up and where their parents still resided.

Deciding to give it one more try, Marja shook her unconscious passenger’s shoulder again and wound up with the same results.

“If you know what’s good for you,” she murmured to the unconscious stranger, “you’ll come to—fast.”

The elevator leading up to the other floors was located on the far side of the garage. Marja watched as the doors opened. Her sister had arrived faster than she’d anticipated.

Tania, casually dressed in jeans and a blue pullover sweater, a giant purse slung over her shoulder, quickly cut the distance between the elevator and the parked vehicle to nothing.

It wasn’t until she was only about two feet away from her car that she saw Marja wasn’t alone in it. And it wasn’t until she’d reached the car that she noticed the passenger’s condition.

Marja was already out. Rounding the hood, she opened the passenger door. “I need your help to get him upstairs.”

Tania stared at her sister, stunned. She was accustomed to Marja bringing men home, but they were usually in a far better state than this one—and conscious. She looked back at the slumped passenger.

“Bringing home hospital overflow, Marysia?” she quipped.

This wasn’t the time to get into a discussion. She needed to take care of the stranger’s wound before it became infected.

“Just help me get him upstairs, Tania,” Marja said wearily. “It’s been a long night, not to mention a long day.”

Tania made no move to help. Instead she leaned over the passenger side and peered at the man.

“Scruffy, but definitely not bad-looking,” she pronounced. Straightening, she glanced at her sister, an incredulous expression on her face. “You were the one who always brought home strays,” she recalled. The habit had driven their mother crazy, despite the fact that Magda Pulaski found a way to house each and every wounded animal. “But this—” Tania gestured toward the stranger “—is over the top, even for you.”

Marja started to struggle with the man, trying to move him into position so that they could pull him out of the vehicle. If they both took hold of an arm, they could get him into the elevator.

“I hit him with the car, Tania.” It wasn’t something she’d wanted to admit, at least not yet. Not until Tania was at least a grandmother. But it was obvious that her sister needed to be coerced.

If she was shocked, Tania didn’t show it. Instead she placed her hands on Marja’s shoulders and moved her out of the way so that she could get a closer look at the man. After a quick assessment, she raised her eyes to Marja’s. “Since when does the car shoot bullets?” she asked. “Sasha never mentioned it could do that little trick.”

Annoyed, Marja shifted her out of the way and resumed trying to pull the stranger farther out of the vehicle. “Don’t get sarcastic, Tania.”

“Don’t get stupid, Marja,” Tania countered, her arms crossed before her chest. “We’re not bringing him upstairs.”

“Fine,” Marja snapped. She’d finally managed to get him to face out. It was like pushing a rock into position. “I’ll do it myself.”

Tania watched her continue to struggle for exactly five seconds, muttered a sharp oath and then grabbed the unconscious stranger by the other arm. Marja looked at her in surprise.

“You are the most stubborn woman on the face of the earth,” Tania declared angrily. Between the two of them, they hoisted the all but dead weight up to his feet.

“Blame Mama. I got it from her,” Marja gasped, struggling beneath the unconscious man’s weight and doing her best not to pitch forward or to fall backward as they slowly made their way to the elevator.

Tania held on to the man’s wrist, his arm slung across her shoulders as she took unsteady steps toward the elevator. “You know this is crazy, don’t you?”

Marja kept her eyes on the prize, silently counting off steps until they finally reached the steel doors. “We’re doctors,” she pointed out haltingly.

Leaning her forehead against the wall to help brace herself, Marja pressed for the elevator. When the doors opened almost immediately, she had to keep from falling forward. Breathing a huge sigh of relief—they were halfway there—she punched the button for their floor.

“We’re supposed to heal people,” she concluded, drawing in a lungful of air as she braced herself for the second half of the journey—getting the man to their apartment once they reached the fifth floor.

Tania craned her neck around the man they held up between them. “That doesn’t mean going out and trolling the streets for patients.”

“I wasn’t trolling. I told you, I hit him with the car.”

“How—?”

She’d braced herself for that same question. “One second he wasn’t there,” Marja answered. “Then he was. And I hit him.”

“But you didn’t shoot him,” Tania insisted. The elevator came to a stop and Tania shifted, getting what she hoped was a better hold on the man. “Why didn’t you just take him to P.M. or call the paramedics?”

Holding tightly on to his other hand, lodging her shoulders beneath his arm, Marja began to walk. “Because he wouldn’t let me.” Why hadn’t she ever noticed before how far away their apartment was from the elevator?

Tania glanced at the unconscious face. “Doesn’t seem to be putting up much resistance at the moment. The man could be a criminal, you realize that, right?”

Almost there, Marja thought. Almost there. “He’s… not.”

Tania all but threw herself against the door, then waited as Marja fished out her key. “And you know this how?” she gasped.

Marja didn’t answer until she’d managed to unlock the door and resumed her forced march, this time through the doorway. “He doesn’t have criminal eyes.”

“Right. You’re crazy, you know that?”

Marja was getting a second wind. From where, she had no idea. “Whatever you say, Tania. Let’s get him… to the sofa,” she instructed.

Together, they deposited the man on the sofa. It was hard not to drop him, but they managed. Because of her position, Marja went down with him, then immediately scrambled to her feet.

“I can take it from here,” she told Tania, dragging in gulps of air. “You just get to the hospital.”

Tania took a step back. She glanced down at her clothes, checking herself over to see if any of the blood had gotten on her. Miraculously, it hadn’t.

Losing no time, Marja made her way to the kitchen for some clean towels and a basin of water. “I said you can go,” she called. “You don’t want to be late,” she added.

Tania glanced at her watch. “I’m already late,” she answered, seeming hesitant to leave. Tania shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. “Look, I really do have to go. I told them I’d fill in for Michaelson,” she said. “But let me call Jesse.” She began to take out her cell phone. “He can be here in ten minutes and he’ll stay with you until you finish being the Good Samaritan.”

“No,” Marja protested from the kitchen. In less than a second she was back in the room. Water sloshed out of the basin as she came. “No, let Jesse sleep,” she insisted, putting the basin down on the coffee table.

The cell phone remained in Tania’s hand. She wasn’t going to give up that easily. “All right, I’ll call Byron, then.”

That was equally unacceptable. She wasn’t about to put anyone out on her account. Besides, she could take care of herself. The fact that she was petite and young had nothing to do with her ability to defend herself if need be. “No.”

“Mike. Tony.” Tania offered up the names of their other two brothers-in-law, both of whom were detectives associated with the N.Y.P.D. Marja firmly shook her head at the mention of each. Tania frowned. “All right. Dad, then.”

Marja’s eyes grew huge. “No! Especially not Dad. You call Dad about this and you’re a dead woman.” There wasn’t a trace of humor in Marja’s voice.

“Better me than you.”

“I’ll be fine,” Marja insisted, depositing the towels beside the basin. Placing both of her hands to her sister’s back, she steered and then pushed Tania toward the front door. “Really.”

Tania looked far from convinced.

But defeated, she surrendered. Temporarily. “I’m going to call you every fifteen minutes,” Tania declared, stepping out into the hallway. “And you’d better answer.”

Marja nodded, already retreating into the living room. “I promise.” And then she stopped for a second. “And, Tania—”

“What?”

“I’m sorry I hurt the car.” There was a dent in the front bumper. It was minor, but there, and she knew how Tania was about her possessions.

Tania waved her hand, dismissing the words. “Yeah, whatever.” She looked back into the apartment, at the body on the sofa. “Just be careful.”

Marja grinned. “Always.”

“Ha!” It was the last word Tania said before she closed the door behind her.

Marja turned her attention back to the unconscious, wounded man on the sofa. Moving quickly, she made her way through two of the bathrooms. Between the two, she collected all the things she was going to need to remove the bullet from his side and then sew up his wound.

As a graduation present, her parents had given each one of them an old-fashioned doctor’s black bag. It was there that she kept the kinds of instruments for digging a bullet out of the man’s side. She grabbed hers out of her room.

After depositing everything on the coffee table, Marja pulled on a pair of gloves and got down to business.

They’d dropped him face-down on the sofa. She rolled him over, then pushed open his shirt. Very carefully, she peeled back the T-shirt beneath it. A solid wall of abdominal muscles met her gaze. She hadn’t expected that. He looked a little small for a body builder, but perfect enough to be among their number.

“Who are you?” she murmured under her breath. Curiosity had her glancing at his left hand. No ring. But that didn’t mean there wasn’t a wife somewhere, beside herself with worry.

“He’s a patient, not a man,” she reminded herself. But a torso like that was difficult to ignore.

Taking several cotton swabs, she soaked them in alcohol, then started to clean the area around his wound. The moment she touched the swab to his skin, she saw his muscles contract. The next second he grabbed her wrist. Hard.

It took Marja a full minute to push her pounding heart back out of her throat. Her eyes shifted to his face. He was most definitely awake. And scowling like dark storm clouds over the prairie.

“Welcome back.” Marja did her best to sound flippant.

Taking a breath, trying to get his bearings, Kane released the woman’s wrist. His eyes moved quickly around the area. It wasn’t familiar in the slightest. Where the hell was he?

His eyes shifted back to the woman sitting on the edge of the sofa. There was something white and wet in her hand. “What happened?”

Setting the swab aside, Marja looked at him. She almost wished he was still unconscious. This next part was going to be a lot more painful for him awake. “You fainted.”

Kane sneered at the mere suggestion. “Men don’t faint.”

Oh God, he was one of those. Macho with an extra doze of testosterone. She should have known the second she caught a glimpse of his abdominal muscles. “You passed out,” she rephrased, then waited. “Better?”

He shrugged. The movement caused him more than a small amount of discomfort. He felt as if he’d gotten hit by a truck. No, wait, a Mustang. Her Mustang.

“Better,” he rasped. And then he saw the array of things on the table. He honed in on the scalpel. “You planning on using those on me?”

“Unless I can get you to change your mind about going to the hospital, yes.” Maybe if she was lucky, he’d pass out again.

Kane shook his head. The room tilted slightly, then righted itself. “No hospital.”

She didn’t think so. Though she knew nothing about him, she had a feeling he was as stubborn as hell. But then, most men thought they knew best—even when they usually didn’t.

Going over to the liquor cabinet, she found a partially empty bottle of whiskey. Tony had brought it over the other week to celebrate something. At the moment, she couldn’t recall what. Crossing back to the sofa, she offered the bottle to him. “This is going to hurt,” she said simply.

But Kane declined the drink. As far as he was concerned, he was still on duty, still needed a clear head. Alcohol made people stupid. It had certainly evaporated his uncle’s brain.

“Go ahead,” he ordered.

Well, he wasn’t a coward, she thought. Faced with having a bullet dug out sans anesthetic, most men would have grabbed the whiskey with both hands.

Picking up the scalpel, Marja inserted it into the wound. She kept one eye on her patient as she began to slowly probe the wound, listening for the sound of metal on metal. His face reddened. She looked for something to distract him.

Coming up empty, she finally asked, “Why don’t you want me to take you to a hospital?”

Kane took in slow, small breaths, struggling not to tense up. Trying to focus on her question, he gave her an excuse he thought she’d believe.

“I’m between jobs. How easy do you think it’ll be—” sweat was oozing down his brow as she probed deeper “—to get one if they look into my background and see that I was shot? I—” he took a deeper breath, as if that could somehow stand between him and the fiery pain “—don’t want to have to deal with a lot of suspicious, annoying questions.”

She raised her eyes to his for a second, pausing. “Like why were you shot?”

“Yes, like that.”

And then she heard it. That slight noise that told her she’d found her quarry. Metal against metal. Very carefully she went deeper, digging beneath the bullet until she managed to draw it out of the hole it had made. The stranger hadn’t made a single sound. What the hell was he made of?

She realized she was holding her breath and let it go as she deposited the bullet onto the cotton swab on the table. “Why were you shot?”

Pain undulated through him like a marauding snake. Kane took in a deep, shaky breath before answering her.

“Unsuccessful mugging,” he finally managed to say. “I didn’t have anything to mug. Guy got mad. I pushed him and ran. And he shot me. I kept on running. Until you stopped me with your car.” It had gone down differently, all except the last part. But for his purpose and her curiosity, he felt it would do. He looked at the bullet on the table. The bullet she’d removed. He raised his eyes to hers. “I’d say we’re even.”

Chapter 3

His eyes met hers, held her captive, so that she couldn’t look away.

Before Marja could respond to his comment, strains of a popular song came out of nowhere, filling the air.

Her cell phone was ringing.

An alert expression instantly came into the stranger’s eyes. But he didn’t tell her not to answer, or try to stop her when she took the phone out of her pocket and flipped it open.

Marja had a feeling she knew who was calling even before she glanced at the L.E.D. screen to read the number.

Tania. True to her word, it was approximately fifteen minutes since she’d left. Marja placed the phone to her ear.

“This is Marja,” she announced. And then she smiled patiently. She glanced toward the other occupant in the room. “Yes, I’m still alive. And yes, he’s still here.” She paused, listening and then nodded even though Tania wasn’t there to see. “Fine, you do that. Bye.”

With one finger against the lid, Marja snapped the phone closed again, aware that the stranger had been watching her closely the entire time. His gaze seemed to delve beneath her skin, as if taking inventory of all her veins and capillaries. It made her feel as if she owed him some sort of explanation, even though she knew she didn’t.

“She’s just checking to see if you killed me yet,” she told him, and saw his eyebrows rise with a silent question. Marja realized that she was getting ahead of herself again. There were pieces missing out of her narrative. “My sister,” she explained. “Tania. She helped me bring you up here. You were out, so I couldn’t really manage—”

“Are you alone here?” he cut in gruffly, stemming the flow of more words.

She didn’t answer immediately, torn between lying to him in the interest of possible self-preservation or telling him the truth, which, if he was a homicidal maniac, could prove dangerous.

Marja decided to settle for something in between.

“At the moment, yes. But that’s subject to change.” Especially if Tania decided to send in the cavalry no matter what she’d said to the contrary. “Besides, you’re here, so technically—” she smiled up at him disarmingly “—I’m not alone.”

Her answer earned her a scowl.

The stranger sat up and then swung his long legs off the sofa without any warning. Marja had to jump to her feet to avoid getting knocked off.

He glared at her. “Don’t you have the sense you were born with?”

She drew herself up, squaring her shoulders with a touch of indignation. It was bad enough that her parents and sisters took turns lecturing her. She didn’t need this from a stranger, especially one she was trying to help.

“I believe that the appropriate thing for you to say here is ‘Thank you,’” she told him hotly, “not try to ascertain whether or not I’m a candidate for MENSA.”

“MENSA?” he echoed with a dismissive snort. “You’re more of a candidate for the morgue.” He looked at her as if she only had a tenth of her brain functioning. “Don’t you know better than to bring a man you don’t know anything about into your apartment?”

If she hadn’t, he might have bled to death on that side street before anyone found him. Where the hell did he get off, shouting at her? “Only the ones who’re bleeding when they faint—sorry, pass out—” she corrected sarcastically “—at my feet.”

He continued glaring at her. This was New York City, people who lived here were supposed to be cautious. Murders were currently down but the overall stats on that were still high. Young, attractive women were supposed to know better than to invite trouble into their homes. “I could have been a murderer.”

“Are you?” she asked in a deceptively mild voice that hid her jumping nerves. It was in response not to what he was saying, but to the way he was looking at her, almost through her. Making her feel as if she were completely naked and vulnerable.

Maybe, despite her gut feeling, bringing him here was a mistake.

He’d killed people, but only in self-defense. By definition, that wasn’t a murderer, so his conscience allowed him to answer. “No, I’m not.” His eyes narrowed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I could have been and you took a hell of a chance on bringing me into your home.” Still sitting on the sofa, he gingerly slipped his shirt back into place, pulling down his T-shirt over the dressing.

This was going to hurt like a son of a bitch by morning, he judged. It didn’t exactly feel like a blissful walk in the park now.

Finished, he glanced in her direction. “You said I passed out in the car.”

Slowly, she nodded her head. “You did.”

Kane still couldn’t fathom how someone who seemed to be reasonably intelligent could actually do something so foolhardy. “Then why didn’t you just take me to the hospital? If I was unconscious, I sure as hell wasn’t in any shape to give you any trouble.”

Marja lifted her chin defensively. “Because you asked me not to.”

“And that’s enough?” he asked incredulously.

Either this woman was very, very good, he thought, or she was just plain stupid. But she didn’t look stupid to him. Naive, maybe, but not stupid. And, his eyes slid over her, he had a feeling that if she was very, very good at something, sainthood had little to do with the matter. Even in his present state, Kane wasn’t so far gone as to not notice the woman was drop-dead gorgeous.

Marja nodded in response to his question. “I felt responsible for you,” she told him. “So, yes, that was enough for me.”

“How old are you?” He wanted to know.

She had no idea why he’d want to know, but she wasn’t about to blurt out a number like a suspect being interrogated.

“Older than I look,” she informed him.

She was a doctor, but she didn’t look as if she was even thirty. There was a freshness to her, despite the smart mouth. He would have hated to see something happen to her because of her generosity—or naïveté.

“You want to live, you’d better learn to be more suspicious,” he told her matter-of-factly.

“Fine, next time I hit somebody with a bullet wound in his side, I’ll call the police.”

“You do that.” Subtly drawing in a breath, Kane carefully rose to his feet. The floor beneath them shifted. He paused, waiting for his equilibrium to kick in. It proved to be in no hurry to do so.

The feisty doctor was at his side instantly, lending her support and holding on to him in case he was going to fall.

He didn’t pull away immediately.

Kane was aware of her small hands pressed against his body, aware of the scent of her hair—something herbal—shampoo. Aware of her presence, which was too damn close to him. He didn’t like it weaving into his system.

“I’m okay,” he stormed.

Marja lifted her hands away from him, holding them up like a captured robber surrendering to the police to indicate that she was backing off. “Just don’t want you passing out again,” she told him.

“I won’t.” It sounded more like a vow to her than a statement. And then he looked at her.

“Marja.” He repeated the name he’d heard her say when she’d gotten on her cell phone. “What kind of a name is that?”

She continued watching him, worried that he might pass out again. “A good one.”

He laughed shortly. “I meant, what nationality is it?”

“I’m Polish.” Since they were exchanging information of a sort, it occurred to her that she didn’t even know his name or anything else for that matter. “You?”

“I’m not.”

She should have expected nothing less. “Not exactly talkative, are you?”

He took a tentative step, like a sailor getting back his land legs. “The less you say, the less can be held against you.”

She took a step with him so that she could remain in front. “Valid enough point,” she agreed, “but I’d like to know your name.”

She saw suspicion enter his eyes again. Rather than make her uneasy, it just made her wonder all the more about her unorthodox patient.

“Why?”

She shrugged carelessly. “I like knowing the names of people I take bullets out of.” He eyed her sharply. “I’m funny that way.”

Did he have something to worry about, after all? “So you can report this?”

If she’d wanted to report this, she would have driven him to the hospital. “I thought we’d gotten past that.”

Kane paused a moment. She had a point, he thought. And in a few minutes he was going to walk out the door and, most likely, he’d never see her again. He supposed there was no harm in giving her his first name. “Kane.”