The Strong Silent Type

She was careful to keep her eyes trained forward. Any quick movements on her part seemed guaranteed to make her lose her bearings and fall.

“About time you got here,” she said to one of the policeman. “The fun’s all over.”

The officer closest to her took one look at the growing red splotch to the right of her rib cage. “Looks like it just started. In case you missed it, you’ve been shot.” Concerned, he raised his eyes to her face. “You better get yourself to a hospital.”

Drawing in a deep breath was out of the question. Breathing itself was becoming a challenge for her. She was deathly afraid she was going to pass out.

“Yeah, I guess I’d better.” She couldn’t manage the sentence without a sense of dread descending over her. The hospital was the last place she wanted to go.

“Finally, something sensible,” Hawk said.

Pressing her hand over her wound to stop the ooze of blood, Teri slowly turned to look at her partner. She wasn’t about to give in to this pain; she wasn’t. “Wow, you volunteered something on your own.”

“And you’re being smart. Red letter day for both of us.” Hawk stepped back as a patrolman snapped handcuffs on the two suspects. As he did, he glanced at Teri’s face. The last time he’d gone to the mountains, the snow hadn’t looked as white as her skin. Fear put in another appearance, stronger this time. “Hey, Cavanaugh, are you all right?”

Her knees suddenly went soft on her and someone had tilted the sky, leaving it at almost a right angle. Afraid of falling and embarrassing herself, Teri grabbed on to the first thing she came in contact with.

It turned out to be Hawk.

“Yeah.” She exhaled the word shakily. “Just peachy.” She needed a few minutes, just a few minutes to get a grip, then she would be all right. Pressing her other hand harder against her wound, she managed a tight smile. “Who turned the roof on? It’s spinning.”

The same police officer looked at Hawk uncertainly. “Want me to call the paramedics?” Hawk’s glare ended any debate that might have emerged on the pros and cons of the situation. “I’ll call the paramedics,” the officer volunteered.

She didn’t want a fuss, and least of all, she didn’t want to be excluded from the action. “I don’t need paramedics, just a bullet to bite on.”

“You need to dig it out of your side first.” With the suspects safely handcuffed, one of the officers raised a quizzical brow in Hawk’s direction. Frowning, Hawk waved the patrolmen on their way. “Take them to the precinct and book ’em.”

There were statements to take from the victims in 2E and that was best done while the memory of events and the order they transpired in was still fresh. But Teri had been shot, and who knew how bad it really was? He had to see to it that she was taken care of. He wasn’t about to leave her here and expect her to get herself to the ground floor. Right now, she didn’t look capable of getting herself two feet from where she was standing. Or sinking.

Turning toward Teri, he took hold of her by the arm. “I’ll take you downstairs.”

“I can walk,” she retorted, but two steps toward the rooftop entrance proved her to be a liar. She grabbed Hawk’s arm again. “Okay, maybe not.”

He didn’t have time for this—to help her take tiny steps to the roof’s stairwell and down the flight to the elevator—and she was obviously in no shape to do it on her own.

With an annoyed, unintelligible grunt, Hawk never hesitated. He swept her up into his arms. She didn’t weigh much, but then, he hadn’t expected that she would. She was five foot three something and filled with hot air. Hot air was never very heavy.

Teri wanted to protest, but she couldn’t find the energy. This was a whole lot better than trying to concentrate on placing one foot in front of the other. “I had no idea you were this gallant.”

He ignored the looks of officers who were vacating the roof. He’d never much cared about what people thought one way or another, as long as they didn’t get in his way. “I’m not. I’m pragmatic.”

She smiled at him. He could say what he wanted, but she knew he cared about her. This was a whole other side of Hawk she’d never seen before. Too bad it had taken her getting shot for it to emerge. Something warm began to stir within her. “Was that one of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table?”

She was babbling more than usual. “Are you getting delirious on me?”

“Delirious,” she repeated as if trying to remember. “First handmaiden to Queen Guinevere, right?”

Either she really was delirious, or she was taking this opportunity to yank his chain. Either way, it didn’t improve his mood. “Shut up before I think better of this and throw you off the roof.”

“I’m shutting.”

Trying very hard to ignore the fire that was eating up her side, Teri threaded her arms around his neck. She was fairly certain that the bullet had only grazed her, but that didn’t change the fact that everything was spinning around her. Even though she would have hated to admit it, she wasn’t that much of a trouper when it came to looking at her own spilled blood. She liked keeping it just where it belonged. In her veins.

She forced a smile to her lips as she looked at him. “Am I supposed to be out of my head right now so I can’t remind you of this gallantry later on?”

Coming to the door, he let one of the remaining policemen open it for him. He ignored the look the man gave him. Ignored, too, the strange feeling he felt in response to holding her against him like this. “Far as I’m concerned, you’re always out of your head, Cavanaugh.”

Maybe if she talked, she could keep her head from spinning off. “Spoken like a true gentleman. At least you’re making progress.” He was taking the stairs down and each step vibrated along her side. “That was almost a complete sentence. There’s hope for you yet, Hawk.” She sucked in her breath as he jostled her.

She was hurting, he thought, frustrated because he was powerless to help her. He didn’t like seeing her in pain like this. “Hang in there,” he muttered.

“Don’t have much choice, do I?” Her mind jumped from topic to topic like a frog going from one lily pad to another in a pond. She thought of word leaking back about her wound. It would spread in no time like a prairie fire across dry grass. “Oh, God, Dad’s going to freak.”

The moment she said it, a protectiveness gripped her heart. Andrew Cavanaugh had had enough to contend with in his lifetime. She didn’t want this added to the pile, at least not until he could see for himself that she was all right. Since she lived at home, there was no way she could hide this indefinitely, but she wanted to spare him as much as possible for as long as possible.

She looked at Hawk, her eyes imploring him. “Don’t call my father and tell him about this.”

They’d finally made it to the landing. He’d gone as slowly as he dared. Hawk brought her over to the elevator. Angling for the best position in order to get at the button, he raised Teri up slightly in his arms, then pressed. He’d bench-pressed twice her weight just yesterday. Didn’t she eat?

“I have no intentions of calling your father.”

No, he wouldn’t, she realized. He wouldn’t see the need for it. Hawk didn’t understand the kind of closeness a family like theirs generated. She wondered if he’d ever experienced anything remotely resembling closeness amid all the foster families he’d been shipped off to during his youth.

Probably not.

She felt something stir in her heart. It wasn’t pity, just an overwhelming amount of sympathy, but he probably wouldn’t have understood that, either. In an odd way, he appeared to be content in his life with things just the way they were.

But she wasn’t.

“Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to,” she mumbled. Teri withdrew her arms from his neck, but he made no move to set her on the floor. Given a choice, she would have rather remained this way, in his arms, for a host of reasons. But it ate at her independence. “You can put me down now,” she said softly.

His eyes met hers and she almost expected him to try to argue her out of it. He didn’t. Instead, without a word, he allowed her to test her own legs.

And find herself wanting. Teri’s knees all but buckled out from under her.

“Any other bright ideas?” he asked as he picked her up into his arms again.

“Several, but they all involve less clothing.” She gave him a sexy, sidelong glance to mask the pain she felt shooting up and down her entire left side. It was a joke, purely a joke, or so she told herself. But for one moment, something telegraphed itself between them, something almost erotic. The next moment, it was gone and he was looking at her with what appeared to be confusion. “Gotcha,” she muttered in triumph.

He made no comment. With Teri, it was safer that way. He glared instead at the light, which testified that the elevator car had not left the second floor in all this time. More than likely, it’d temporarily been commandeered by the officers going over the victims’ apartment. There was no telling when they would release the elevator. Probably not before checking out the rest of the building in case the burglars had accomplices who had fled to other floors.

He also didn’t know how long he would be required to remain standing here with Teri. And she was in no shape to wait indefinitely. Making up his mind, Hawk headed back toward the stairwell. When he reached it, he pushed open the door with his back.

Teri stared at him. “Where are we going?”

“To never-never land,” he said between clenched teeth. There she went, asking more questions, butting heads with him at every turn. Why couldn’t she just be cooperative and pass out like any normal person in her place would have?

Teri blinked. “A joke. You made a joke. I must be dying. Is it that serious?”

Hawk sighed, trying hard not to jostle her any more than he had to. He didn’t even look at his partner. “If I said yes, would you shut up?”

She wanted to thread her arms back around his neck to secure herself, but she felt that if she didn’t keep pressing her hand against her side, everything would come tumbling out. “Now you’re starting to hurt my feelings, Hawk. And just when we were getting so close, too.”

“We’re not getting close,” he informed her tersely, taking the next set of stairs down. “I don’t get close.” And because there was a real danger of that happening here, he put out a special effort to keep her at arm’s length.

Deep down, he didn’t really believe that, she thought. It was just something he’d talked himself into. “Even the Lone Ranger had Tonto.”

This time he did look at her. “I’m not interested in having anyone.”

She thought of the way the women at the precinct looked at him when he wasn’t paying attention. Which was all of the time.

“Oh, well, that’s a shame, because there are plenty of people interested in having you.” Determined not to let him know how much this was hurting, she pushed harder against the wound praying it would stop radiating pain.

He almost slipped and told her she was delirious again, but stopped himself in time. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She gave him that smile, that knowing, almost smug smile that said she was privy to some kind of inside information that he wasn’t. The one that never failed to test the parameters of his temper and find him seriously lacking. The one that got under his skin no matter how much he tried to keep it out.

“You know,” she said in an almost breathless manner that concerned him the moment he heard it, “for a police detective, you’re not very observant. Female people,” she finally elaborated. “You don’t seem to notice all the heads that turn whenever you come into the room, partner. You definitely raise blood pressures.”

He gave her a look that would have silenced a babbling brook, but had no effect on her. “You’re raising mine right now.”

She chose to interpret his comment the way she knew would drive him crazy. “What a lovely thing to say, Hawk.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Why did five flights feel so endless? She was surprisingly light, even in boots and a winter jacket, but he was being careful not to jostle her any further, and that took time and effort. He wasn’t happy about having to hold her against him like this. He had her so close, the blood from her wound had gotten onto his clothing.

It wasn’t the blood he was concerned about. With a little cold water, a lot of soaking, blood washed out. It was breathing in that cologne of hers—the one she swore she didn’t wear—that was getting to him. It made the closed-in area of the stairwell almost suffocating for him. He responded to her in ways he didn’t want to even think about.

In ways he didn’t want to respond. He couldn’t think of her as a woman, he reminded himself.

He couldn’t not.

Teri took a deep breath. The dizziness was beginning to pass slightly. Maybe she was getting her second wind, she reasoned. She looked at Hawk. “Let me walk down the rest of the way,” she said. “I don’t want you naming your hernia after me.”

This wasn’t even up for discussion. If he let her try to stand up, he was fairly certain she was going to go down like a stone. He would have bet his next month’s pay on it.

“You weigh twelve and a half pounds—don’t worry about it.”

She wasn’t exactly worried, but this definitely had the makings of something he was going to use to his advantage throughout their partnership. “This isn’t something you’re going to let me live down.”

She was out of her head, wasn’t she? he thought. Other partners had rapports where there was a certain amount of give and take, of banter. He would have liked nothing better than to spend his time with her in completely silence except for the dispatch radio.

“This isn’t something I ever intend to talk about. Ever,” he underscored.

She tried to guess at his reason. “Don’t like people reminding you that you’re kind?”

“Don’t like people being pains in the butt,” he countered.

Jack Hawkins was a hard nut to crack, she thought. But here he was, being nice to her. He could have waited for the elevator, could have waited for the paramedics to arrive on the roof, for that matter, instead of taking it upon himself to carry her down five flights of stairs to the ground floor. Six if they counted the set of stairs that had led from the roof to the fifth floor. Which meant the big lug cared.

“You can huff and puff all you want, Hawk, but I’ve got your number. You’re not the big bad wolf you pretend to be.”

Reaching the final landing, he paused long enough to look her right in the eye. She had to get over this noble image of him she was trying to paint. It got in his way.

“I don’t waste my time pretending.” So saying, he pushed down on the door handle with his elbow, opening the door that led out into the lobby.

Hawk could protest all he wanted; she knew better. But she played along, her mouth curving. “What you see is what you get, huh?”

He didn’t bother looking at her. Instead, he walked by the doorman, whose mouth dropped open when he saw the wounded woman in Hawk’s arms. “Right.”

“Wrong,” she countered just as the ambulance came into view.

Seeing journey’s end, Hawk almost sighed with relief. Not long now.

The doors of the stark-white vehicle with its red letters popped open. One of the two paramedics assigned to it jumped out.

Hawk deposited her inside the rear of the ambulance.

“She’s all yours,” he announced, backing away with his arms slightly raised, like a rodeo star who had just tied up a calf. “Best of luck to you.”

A ray of panic flashed between the shafts of pain vying for possession of her. He was leaving.

“You’re not coming?”

If he didn’t know any better, he would have said she looked scared. But if he’d learned nothing else these very long nine months, he’d learned that Theresa Cavanaugh did not get scared. Or, and this was probably more likely, if she did, she never showed it.

“Someone has to fill in the reports.”

Hawk began to walk away when he saw her wince as the paramedic slid off her coat. There was blood everywhere, spearing on his guilt. If it hadn’t been for her pushing him out of the way, he would have been the one with the wound. And, more than likely, his would have been more serious. He was taller than she was. It didn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination to realize that the bullet would have probably found its way into his gut.

The encroaching panic continued spinning out its web, swirling around her. She saw the way Hawk looked at her wound and guessed at what he was thinking, if not saying. She shamelessly used it to her advantage. “We caught the bad guys, Hawk. The paperwork can wait for a couple of hours.”

The paramedic was administering to her wound, bandaging it up as quickly as possible. Hawk averted his eyes from the exposed area, giving her her privacy. “Why do you want me to come with you?”

She could lie. She could make a joke about it. But right now, she needed to have him come with her. To chase the specters away. So she went with the truth and hoped it would work.

“I need someone to hold my hand,” she told him honestly. “I never liked hospitals. People die in hospitals.”

He wasn’t sure if she was putting him on again or not. But there was a look in her eyes that didn’t allow him to retreat the way he wanted to. He couldn’t just abandon her.

Hawk looked around the area. The so-called suspects had been placed in the back of a squad car that was about to pull out. There was protocol to follow, he reminded himself.

The paramedic was urging her onto the gurney. “Only the good die young,” Hawk informed her. “I’ll catch up with you.”

To his surprise, she said nothing. She only continued looking at him. Continued looking even as the paramedic closed the doors, severing eye contact.

“Ah, hell,” Hawk bit off, shaking his head. Spinning around on his heel, he looked around until he saw a face he recognized. Quickly, he crossed to the heavyset detective. “Hey, Mulrooney, tell Mr. and Mrs. Wong that I’ll be back to take their statements after they’ve had a chance to pull themselves together.”

Mulrooney looked surprised that Hawk wasn’t on his way back upstairs. “Where are you going?”

Hawk clenched his teeth together. He didn’t like having to explain himself, especially when he was having trouble understanding is own motivation.

“My partner’s been shot. I’m heading out to the hospital to make sure she’s all right.”

Again Mulrooney nodded, this time looking at the ambulance that had just peeled away, its siren going full blast. He grinned broadly. Everyone liked Teri Cavanaugh. The same couldn’t be said about her partner. “Trade assignments with you, Hawkins.”

Hawk made no answer. Given his choice, he would have liked to take Mulrooney up on that. The latter had the better end of the deal.

Muttering a few choice things under his breath, Hawk hurried to his car.

Her side throbbed wildly to the beat of the 1812 Overture by the time the ambulance pulled into the parking lot behind Aurora Memorial Hospital’s ER. Even so, Teri braced herself as the paramedic went to open the rear doors.

This was the hospital where they had brought her uncle Mike the day he’d been shot.

This was the hospital Uncle Mike had died in.

The shooting had happened less than a month after her mother’s car had crashed through the guardrail and gone over the side, to be submerged in the river. Teri had been twelve at the time and the two events combined had overwhelmed her almost completely. She’d come away with a lasting phobia of hospitals.

That same phobia was alive and well now, fifteen years later, even though she knew that logic dictated that she come here to be treated.

Logic was one thing, but superstitious and phobias didn’t understand logic.

“You better lie down.” The paramedic who’d treated her placed a hand on her shoulder, intending to help her get comfortable.

She stiffened as if she’d been shot again. There was no way in hell they were going to strap her down to the gurney, not while she was conscious.

“I can get out on my own power.”

She didn’t want to be held down while they wheeled her in, not as long as she could walk. There was something helpless about being pushed in through the electronic doors, not being able to move a muscle.

She pressed her lips together, her body tense, her side stinging like crazy as the rear doors opened, braced for the inevitable wave of fear to hit her with the force of a tidal wave.

What she wasn’t prepared for was to see Hawk standing there when the doors opened.

Chapter Three

He came.

The words vibrated in her brain, bringing with them a wave of relief and happiness. Teri waved away the paramedic who’d just tried to get her to lie on the gurney.

“I’ll sit, but I won’t lie down.” She looked at Hawk who stepped back as the gurney was brought out of the ambulance. The dread drained out of her. She didn’t have to face going in alone. “Did you forget something?”

“Yeah, my better judgment.” He’d seen the relief that had leaped into her eyes, so intense that for a second it stopped him in his tracks. What was that about? Was she actually afraid of hospitals? He hadn’t thought she was afraid of anything. It was part of the woman’s appeal.

The paramedics were pushing her through the doors. And Hawk was not fading back into the parking lot—he was coming in with her. “What about the statements?” she asked.

“I told Mulrooney to tell the victims I would be by later to take them.”

There were nurses and attendants scattered throughout the rear of the ER. Hawk flashed his badge at the one closest to them. The tall woman in dark green livery immediately pointed the paramedics to an open bed.

“We,” Teri corrected him. “We would be by later.”

There was brave, and then there was stupid. Cavanaugh had crossed the line. “Thinking of going somewhere, Superwoman?” Before she could answer, he asked, “Don’t you think that you’ve done enough damage to yourself for one day?”

Again she waved back hands that reached out to help. “I can do this,” she told the nurse who eyed her dubiously. Bracing herself against the mattress, she slid off the gurney and onto the hospital bed. Her body hated her for it. “It’s not like I stood there, daring the guy to shoot me. Hawk. I took a bullet for you.”

Guilt corkscrewed into him a little further. “Yeah, you did.”

Sitting on the bed, she read the look in his eyes. “And you feel guilty, don’t you?”

“Guilt’s not in my file folder.” He wasn’t about to have her poking around in his head, thinking she could read him. There were things there she couldn’t see.

Teri laughed shortly. “Don’t tell me that. I’ve seen it often enough on the faces of my brothers to know guilt when I see it.” Pain dragged spiked shoes across her side. Teri waited to catch her breath. It wasn’t easy. “No need for guilt. You would have done the same for me.” And then she surprised him by taking hold of his hand in hers. “Thanks.”

The simple gratitude he both saw in her eyes and heard in her voice stirred something within him and made him uneasy. He shrugged her words away.

Emotions of any kind, other than cold, steely anger, made him uncomfortable. They always had. He’d never had any outlet for them. The parents he’d once wanted so desperately to notice him, to get themselves clean and turn him and them into a real family, had rejected him. They had ignored him for as far back as he could remember. Instead, they had more interest in the drugs that could remove them from their world and take them to somewhere he had no desire to go.

Even as a kid, he’d known that drugs were bad. He’d watched firsthand as first his father, then his mother became firmly entrenched—because of drugs—in the land of the living dead.

He’d attempted, in his own way, to make his parents come around. He’d cooked, cleaned and tried to take care of them. There were tiny glimmers, moments when he thought things were finally on the right path, but in the end, all his efforts came to nothing.