Internal Affairs

His clothes were damp with sweat and blood, and streaked with dirt and other substances. His pockets were empty save for her spare key; a quick search revealed that he wasn’t carrying any wallet, ID, or weapon. She placed his clothes and boots in a paper bag and taped it shut, signing her name across the tape. Then she locked the bag in the gun cabinet. It wasn’t a perfect chain of evidence and probably wouldn’t be admissible in court, but it was the best she could do under the circumstances.

It’s just in case, she told herself, and worked very hard not to think about what some of those cases might be.

Returning to him, she found that his color was a little better, his flesh a little warmer beneath the blankets. It seemed very strange that her patient’s skin was flesh-toned and body temperature, but she shoved aside the oddity, locking it down along with her emotions and telling herself to woman up and do what needed doing.

She set him up on a portable monitor that told her what she already knew: his blood pressure, pulse and respiration were all dangerously depressed. Knowing she needed to get his vitals headed on the upswing, she started him on a saline drip. If it came to it, she’d transfuse him with her own blood. She was a type O, a universal donor. But God help her, she hoped it didn’t come to that. She’d already given him everything she intended to of her inner self.

Soon, though, his numbers started coming back up, and his skin and gums pinked, indicating that the shock was fading. Which left her with the bullet wound.

She followed the bruise tracks with her fingers, probing as deeply as she dared. She found three spots where she was pretty sure she felt something. The bullet had fragmented. Damn it.

Doing the best she could, she pulled on sterile gloves, cleaned and numbed the three spots, then chose one and used a scalpel to dissect away the skin and muscle. Without clamps or suction, blood welled immediately, obscuring her working field. She cursed and blotted it with a sterile pad, but gave that up almost immediately as pointless. Instead, she resigned herself to working blind, probing with the scalpel, then forceps.

“Come on…come on…” She was breathing heavily, sweating more from nerves than exertion. Then she felt the forceps lock on to something hard and metallic. “Ah! Gotcha.”

She dropped the bloodstained fragment in a specimen jar, used stitches to close the muscle and incision and then repeated the process twice more. By the time she was done, she’d nearly gotten used to the fact that when she cut into him, he bled. Yet although his vitals had stabilized where they needed to be, he hadn’t moved or made a sound. He just lay there, breathing. In and out. In and out.

Forcing herself not to watch the rhythmical fall of his back, she returned to her work, stitching up the last of the three cuts before turning her attention to the recovered fragments. When she pieced the ragged bits of metal together in their specimen jar, it looked as though she’d gotten all of the projectile. The metal was deformed, making it impossible for her to be sure, but without an X-ray, there wasn’t much more she could do.

She cleaned the entry wound as best she could, then closed it as well, leaving a spot at the bottom for drainage. Finally, she hit her patient with a whopping dose of a broad-spectrum antibiotic. That, plus crossing her fingers, was going to have to be enough. She debated over the painkiller choices she had on-hand, and went with the mildest. He’d be hurting when he awoke—she deliberately thought “when,” not “if,” as though positive thinking would be enough to pull him out of the deep unconsciousness that continued to hold on to him. But it was that very unconsciousness that meant she couldn’t give him one of the stronger painkillers, which had sedative effects.

She needed him to wake up, needed to get a grip on whether the head injury that had blown his pupils to uneven sizes had caused serious damage. If it had, she’d be doing him a major injustice keeping him hidden. But it wasn’t as if she had a CAT scan or an MRI handy.

Her training warred with her conscience. She knew she should take him to the ER, where he could be properly cared for. But at the same time, despite what had happened between them, she had to believe that Romo never would have perpetuated a fraud of any sort—never mind faking his own death—if it hadn’t been absolutely necessary.

As a child, he’d lived through scandal and a trial when his businessman father had been framed for embezzlement by a coworker. Thanks to solid police work and an ambitious public defender on her way up the political ladder, Romo’s father had been acquitted, the other man jailed. Gratitude, and that early exposure to justice, had set Romo on his path to a career in law enforcement.

Sara had heard the story for the first time at his funeral. She also hadn’t realized he’d come to Bear Claw via the Las Vegas PD. That it’d taken his funeral for her to learn that much about his past had bothered her. At the same time, it’d made her wish she could have one last chance to confront him. She’d imagined herself demanding to know what had gone wrong between them, why he’d done what he’d done, even knowing about her past and how badly his actions would hurt her.

Now, though, her sketchy knowledge of his childhood only served to reinforce Sara’s instinct to follow the instructions in his note. He’d gone into police work looking for justice, undoubtedly moving into internal affairs for the same reason. And though he might leave something to be desired on a personal level, she simply couldn’t see him joining the terrorists’ cause.

Having done what she could for him, she leaned back on her heels and considered her options. She couldn’t lift him by herself, and even if she could, she’d risk tearing the heck out of the stitches. So he’d be staying on the floor for the time being. She did manage, through a combination of leverage and no small amount of tugging, to get a thin camping mattress underneath him, helping keep him warm as well as getting him off the bloodstained floor.

“I’ll deal with the cleanup later,” she said aloud, wrinkling her nose. But, the immediate issues dealt with, she became aware that she was a mess, and the room didn’t smell all that pretty. Maybe she should deal with cleanup sooner than later. This was her home, after all.

Trying not to wonder why he’d come to her rather than whoever he’d been working with since his faked death, she moved around the house, closing the curtains and shutting the blinds, lest a casual—or not so casual—observer chanced to look in the windows. As she did so, small shivers marched their way along her skin, warning her that she hadn’t yet thought through all the ramifications of what she’d done, or the question of what she was planning to do next.

Life or death, he’d written. If the terrorists knew about him, if he feared they would kill him if he surfaced, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’d be looking for him? But if that were the case, why wouldn’t he want Fax, Seth and the few other agents he trusted to know he was alive? Again, why had he come to her?

That made her pause. What if he really had been working for—

“No,” she said aloud, refusing to go there. The Romo she’d known would never in a million years have switched sides. She knew that for certain. Everything else was just going to have to wait until he woke up.

Still, partly because she didn’t want him hurting himself if he started thrashing, partly because her head wasn’t quite as sure of him as her heart wanted to be, she pulled a couple of bungee cords from the camping equipment she kept piled in her office closet. Wrapping the cords around his waist and over his wrists, she bound his arms, then did the same with his ankles.

He didn’t stir over the next couple of hours, as she showered and changed, made herself a quick dinner and then freshened the living room as best she could. Finally, near midnight, her body drained of the frenetic, nervous energy that had been driving her up to that point, and she sagged with a sudden onslaught of fatigue.

Romo was stable enough for her to detach the monitors and saline as he moved into the recovery phase of his injuries, when she’d need to be watching for infection or other signs that she’d missed something with the relatively crude care she’d been able to provide. Telling herself it only made sense to stay near him, in case problems arose during the night, she clicked on a night-light in the kitchen to provide a low level of illumination, and bedded down on the couch with a couple of pillows and a thick, soft afghan.

Although she ached with fatigue, her brain kept her restless and wide-awake for far too long. It took almost superhuman effort not to watch him sleep and wonder what had happened to him, what would happen next. It was even harder to keep herself from remembering their times together, both good and bad, all of them tainted with the ache of betrayal and heartache. Eventually, though, she dozed. As she did, she let her hand dangle off the edge of the couch, so her fingertips just brushed the edges of his blanket. Finally, she slipped into a deep sleep.

She awoke hours later, roused by a sound, or maybe just an instinct. Going into doctor mode, she rolled over and moved to rise, opening her eyes as she did so. She froze for a half second at the sight of the empty spot where Romo had been.

Panic sluiced through her and she moved to react, but it was already too late. A man’s figure rose above her, silhouetted in the dim light. She saw the glint of his eyes and teeth, and the shadows of his hands as he reached for her, grabbed on to her, his grip hard and hurtful.

Screaming, she exploded from the couch, but it was already too late. His hands covered her mouth and pressed her back down into the cushions, cutting off her air. Smothering her.

HE BORE DOWN while his enemy grabbed his hands, his wrists, her fingernails digging in as she fought, squirming and bucking against him. And yes, it was a woman, though that didn’t make her any less the enemy. Why else had she kept him bound as she slept? She was one of them. One of the ones who hunted him, who wanted him dead. One of the ones whose faces had haunted him in his nightmares and dragged him back to consciousness.

“Who are you?” he said, his voice rasping with the effort his weakened self was expending to hold on to her, as sharp pain flared in his shoulder.

She whiplashed against him, her legs kicking out and meeting nothing but air. Not a trained fighter, his brain cataloged, but he already could’ve guessed that from the way she’d bound him, with cords that had stretched easily under pressure.

He must’ve been weaker than he’d thought, though, because seconds later she got away from him, clawing and kicking. She hit the floor hard, scrambled up and bolted for the door, screaming.

“Damn it!” Heart hammering—and not just from the fight—he lunged and his legs folded beneath him. Landing hard, he reached out with his good arm, snagged her by an ankle and yanked, bringing her down with him. Strength failing, head pounding with a relentless beat, he went with expediency and lay full length atop her, pinning her with his weight.

She struggled, still screaming, though her screams had turned to words. A name. Romo.

He didn’t know the name, not really, but he was starting to remember the room. They had fallen halfway into a kitchen; a small night-light was on, allowing him to see more details of the homey, feminine space, and triggering the memory of coming to the house earlier in the day, knowing he’d be safe.

But if he was safe, why the hell had she tied him up? And why the hell was he practically naked?

Scowling, he glared down at his captive. She’d gone still and had stopped screaming, but her face was pale even in the diffuse light, her eyes stark and staring. And a hell of a face it was, too, even terrified.

He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes or hair, beyond knowing that they were both light-hued. But the dimness didn’t detract from the elegant lines of her face and swanlike neck, the sculpted arches of her eyebrows and the wide bow of her mouth. Beneath him, her body was lithe and strong—he could feel that strength in the sore places on his shin and arms, and the burn of his injured shoulder where she’d yanked against him in her struggles. But although she was strong, she was also wholly feminine, her curves pressing against him, bringing a stir of memory—this one older and more deeply buried.

As he lay atop her, he belatedly realized that he’d come here, to this woman, because he’d trusted her to help him.

Shame washed through him. Guilt. “I’m sorry,” he said, though he didn’t let her up. “I was dreaming. Nightmare. Then I woke up, not sure where I was, and my arms and legs were tied.”

She took a shallow breath and he thought she might scream again. Instead, she said, “Your note didn’t give me much to go on. I was trying not to be stupid. Apparently, the bungees were borderline on the stupid factor.” He gave her credit for guts, though even as she tried to play it cool, her voice shook.

A roil of memories he couldn’t pin down, couldn’t place, had him stilling and loosening his hold, then rolling onto his side, taking her with him. She was free to move away, but she didn’t. Instead, she lay there facing him, her eyes searching his.

“Where have you been?” she asked, her voice hitching on a suppressed sob. “What happened to you?”

I don’t know. I don’t even know who I am. Who you are. Who we were together. That was what he should’ve said. Instead, he found himself staring, filling himself with the sight of her. Though he was no longer touching her, he felt her curves as though they’d been imprinted on his flesh, creating new memories to replace the ones that were gone. A wellspring of loneliness surged from nowhere and everywhere at once—an ache of longing and a deep sense of loss.

He reached for her blindly, moving purely on instinct. Incredibly, she met him halfway in a kiss that started soft and gentle. Then her lips parted on a small moan of surrender and he slipped his tongue inside to touch hers, tangle with hers. He stroked her hair, her face. She cupped his cheek in her palm.

And, for the first time since he’d regained consciousness in the forest, he felt as though he was exactly where he belonged.

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