Gabriel West: Still The One

“Stay awake.”

She felt his fingers moving gently over her scalp. He found a tender spot and she winced.

His breath stirred in her hair. “Oh yeah, he hit you good. You’ve got a lump, and a cut that’s going to need stitching. Go to sleep and I’ll tan your hide.”

The unexpected humor would have made her smile if she hadn’t felt so startled and so sick. “Promises,” she muttered, then everything receded, slipping into blackness again.

A hoarse curse scraped from West’s throat as Tyler sagged into his chest. He caught her hard against him, lowered her to the concrete, then on another soft curse, jerked his T-shirt over his head, tore a strip of white interlock off and bandaged the seeping cut on the side of her head. When he lifted her into his arms, her head lolled against his shoulder and fear shafted through him. Head wounds were dicey things, she’d wake up with the mother of all headaches at the very least. He refused to think about other possibilities.

Seconds later he strapped Tyler into the passenger seat of his car, slid behind the wheel and searched one-handed for his cell phone as he took the ramp out of the underground garage.

He found the phone, pressed the emergency code, and waited for the operator to put him through to Accident and Emergency. When the hospital had all the details, he settled down to driving, the damp night air chill on his bare skin as he shoved the car through traffic. Rain continued to stream down in a light, steady drizzle that rose up off the slick streets as a thin mist, wreathing the fast-moving, raucous flow of inner-city traffic.

West’s heart was pounding, his belly tight with apprehension. He felt savage, wary and electrified by what had just happened. His mind fastened on the moment when the elevator doors had opened and Tyler’s dark gaze had found his, hooked somewhere deep inside him and clung. That moment had almost stopped his heart.

He’d moved into the apartment in Tyler’s building with the specific purpose of getting close to his wife, but a part of him hadn’t believed Tyler would ever allow him close again.

Just minutes ago she’d all but crawled inside his skin.

The lights ahead flashed red. He swore beneath his breath, considered running the light, then braked.

The abrupt jolting motion sent a shaft of pain through Tyler’s head. She winced and opened her eyes, for a moment disoriented by the glare of lights off rain-slick roads, and West sitting beside her, his torso bare. The last thing she remembered she’d been kneeling on cold concrete, leaning on West, and he’d been wearing a T-shirt.

The lights changed. West accelerated and, gingerly, she straightened, keeping her head as still as possible. The second she moved, she felt the touch of West’s gaze as powerfully as if he’d reached out and physically touched her. “How long have I been out?”

“Five minutes. We’ll be at the hospital in two. And don’t argue. Aside from needing stitches you’ve probably got a concussion.”

“That’s a safe bet.” Her head throbbed with a deep, frightening ache and she was seeing colors. That was the clincher. The only other time she could remember seeing colors had been when she’d been thrown from a horse at age thirteen, without the benefit of a protective helmet.

West turned into a car-park entrance and pulled into a space. Tyler recognized the A&E entrance of Auckland Hospital.

She reached up to touch the bandage that was wound around her head, and somehow managed to misjudge the distance so that her fingers connected with her head more violently than she’d intended. Hot pain flashed through her skull, and her stomach rolled.

She sucked in a shallow breath, then another, and groped for the door handle. “I’m going to be sick.”

Instead of the door releasing she must have hit the window button because glass slid down and damp air flowed across her face. She heard a soft imprecation. Seconds later her door swung open and West leaned in, released her seat belt, and she found herself hauled out into the rain. His arms came around her as her stomach cramped painfully, anchoring her against him as she emptied the meagre contents of her stomach into the shrubbery bordering the car park.

When she was finished she sagged against him, uncaring that it was raining and that they were both getting wet. An odd peacefulness settled over her at his silent support, his heat and strength engulfing her. All of the issues that existed between them aside, she was too needy, in too much pain, and too disoriented to do anything but accept his help.

The thought drifted into her mind that West might have broken her heart, but he had never broken her trust.

As crazy as it seemed, it was true. He had made promises, and he had kept them, and she’d married him knowing that their relationship would be constantly sidelined by SAS operations. If she was honest, in that sense, she had let him down.

A car cruised past. The bright gleam of headlights scythed the drizzle and broke the fragile peace.

“Are you ready to make a move?” West’s voice was low, with that calm note that said he would stay here holding her in the rain if that was what she wanted.

She’d forgotten that about him—that still, quiet quality. Years ago it had intrigued her. She’d fallen in love with his dark, soft voice, but somewhere along the way, the very qualities that had drawn her so powerfully had started to grate.

He had been too controlled, too patient, and she hadn’t had enough of either quality.

“Can you walk?” His voice was close to her ear.

“Just.”

He left her leaning against the car while he closed the window and collected her bag and the leather jacket. She heard the gentle thunk of locks engaging, then he draped the jacket over her shoulders, wrapped his arm around her waist and urged her toward the brightly lit entrance of A&E.

The rain eased off as they approached the steps, leaving the night still and sodden and heavy with the scents of car exhaust and bitumen.

Tyler lifted her head and caught her reflection in the glass doors, then wished she hadn’t. Her face was as white as the makeshift bandage around her head; her hair was straggling around her shoulders and what she could see of her suit beneath the jacket was wrinkled and sticking clammily to her skin.

West, in stark contrast, looked fresh and sharp and gorgeous, his bronzed shoulders sleek and glistening under the lights. The fact that he had no shirt didn’t seem to affect him. “You know, West, I had this fantasy of how in control I’d be the next time I bumped into you. This isn’t it.”

“Tell me about it.” He paused on the steps and produced a clean handkerchief so she could wipe her face.

Groggy as she was, she noticed it was monogrammed. “You get your handkerchiefs monogrammed?”

“Don’t crucify me over it. They were a gift from a friend.” An offbeat smile flitted across his mouth. “Roma McCabe gives them to me at Christmas just to tick me off.”

The humor in his voice, the sheer intimacy of the gift threw Tyler off balance. Numbly, she wiped her face and blew her nose. She knew who Roma McCabe was—the only daughter of the wealthy and powerful Lombard family. She was also aware of West’s business connections with that family, and that Roma had married one of West’s friends, Ben McCabe, but somehow the closeness of the connection had never sunk in. She had always considered West to be a loner—a man no one could ever truly get close to—most especially not a woman.

It registered that despite having lived with West for three years, she didn’t know him at all.

It also registered that against all the odds she was jealous.

The wail of an arriving ambulance went through West like a knife as the doors to the brightly lit waiting room slid open, flooding his nostrils with the smells of antiseptics and cleaners, the stale miasma of too many people. The abrupt sensory overload briefly spun him back to his childhood and early teens, to broken ribs and pain and, once, the wrong end of a knife. The proximity of sick, hurt people—the hospital itself—closed around him, made the back of his throat tighten. He dipped and nuzzled the top of Tyler’s head, breathed in her pretty, subtle scents, at once taking refuge in the woman in his arms, and conferring protection. If he’d had any doubts before about walking back into Tyler’s life, they were gone.

She might not like it, but right now, she needed him.

Chapter 4

Late-morning sunlight angled through Tyler’s hospital-room window, flooding the crowded room with a brilliance that made her wince as she straightened from gathering her clothes and shoes from the small bedside locker. With careful movements, she transferred the items into the small overnight bag that was lying open on her bed.

Apart from Detective Farrell and her father’s personal assistant, Claire Wheeler, the room was full of men: her father, Harrison, and her brother, Richard, Ray Cornell, the investigating detective, and two of Laine’s key managers, Kyle Montgomery and Ashley James.

They were all here ostensibly out of concern for her welfare, but Tyler couldn’t help a spurt of cynicism at that thought. Over the past few days, after the initial storm of publicity over the theft, she’d noticed her work colleagues had begun to avoid her, and the sense of isolation stung.

Unless the business managers of Laine’s diamond house could shed light on the theft or the mugging, there wasn’t much point to the visit. With the press crucifying her for the loss of the jade, and the details of her past splashed across the front pages of all the major dailies, there was nothing much to do but pick over the carcass.

The media had dismissed her doctorate, her years of experience and her charity work. They had thrown a murky shadow over the fact that she was even in the business of buying, selling and consulting on rare jade and artifacts. They had taught the public and, it seemed, her work colleagues, to view her in a different light. She was no longer Dr. Tyler Laine, expert on Eastern and Pacific-Rim artifacts, she was the daughter of Sonny Mullane, a petty criminal with a record as long as both of his lean, sinewy arms. Aside from operating as a small-time fence, Sonny had been a thief, a safecracker, and a pimp. If there was any crime he hadn’t committed other than murder, then, as far as Tyler was concerned, that crime hadn’t yet been invented.

According to the tabloids, the fact that Sonny Mullane’s daughter had been adopted by the Laine family didn’t make her any better than she had been.

“Can you remember any other details about the people who attacked you?”

Tyler shifted her attention to Cornell. The question was delivered politely, but with a flat patience that told Tyler that no matter how devoid of emotion his light gray eyes appeared to be, Cornell wanted more from her than the scanty details she’d so far been able to supply him.

“I can’t give you any more of a description,” she said flatly. “There were two of them. It was dark and they were wearing balaclavas. One of them was olive-skinned and tanned: he looked Asian.”

She gripped the bedside table and lowered herself enough that she could perch on the edge of the bed.

Just those simple actions were enough to make her break out in a sweat. She’d protested at spending the night in hospital, but there was no getting past the fact that her head was still throbbing despite the painkillers she’d taken, and that she was still wobbly on her feet.

Aside from the initial head injury, and the damage she’d done to her right hand and shoulder when she’d thrown that punch, she’d sustained a second head injury when she’d fallen and hit her head on the concrete. The first hit had been brutal enough to concuss her; the second one hadn’t been as violent, but had compounded the first injury with the added bruising and swelling. On top of all that, she was bruised and stiff all down her left side from the fall.

Gingerly, she pushed hair away from her face. She’d managed to shower that morning and change into the jeans and cotton shirt Harrison had brought in, but her hair was still a mess, tangled and matted around the wound, and she’d left it that way. Her one attempt to drag a comb through the tangles had left her clinging to the bathroom counter, a fine film of perspiration beading her upper lip.

The doctor who’d treated her the previous evening had only needed two stitches to close the cut on her head, but the area was still swollen, her scalp so tight and sensitive that even the movement of her hair hurt.

Some time around midnight, she’d stopped seeing colors. In medical terms, the swelling in her brain had subsided to a point where it was no longer pressing on the optic nerves, thus producing the neon-bright display, but she still felt oversensitive and fragile. Colors were too bright, voices were too loud—even the surface of her skin felt oversensitive, as if several layers had been peeled away and all of her nerve endings exposed.

“You said you thought someone followed you on two separate occasions the previous week. Have you got any idea who that might have been?”

The question was clipped and businesslike, not Cornell this time, but his partner, Elaine Farrell.

Tyler lifted her chin, and spoke carefully, mostly because the answer was so obvious, but partly because the small movements of her mouth and jaw pulled at the skin of her scalp and intensified the deep ache, so that even talking hurt. “If I’d been absolutely certain that I was being followed, and had any idea who was following me I would have done something about it.”

The small buzz of conversation in the room stopped.

Cornell went down on his haunches, his gaze neutral. “Are you certain the dark-skinned man who attacked you was Chinese?”

Anger flickered at Cornell’s deliberate alteration of the facts, his subtle sidestep into the shady realms of the jade investigation. There had been some speculation that the Chinese interests could be included in the thefts, but that was mostly media generated. “I saw part of his face. I’m certain he was Asian, not that he was Chinese.”

Richard made a sound of disbelief. “Are you saying the mugging could be linked with the theft of the jade?”

Cornell didn’t acknowledge Richard’s question, or answer. All of his attention remained focused on Tyler—the pressure of his gaze like a weight.

Bitterness and an odd indifference congealed in Tyler’s stomach—a grim remnant from childhood. Cornell was questioning her in order to track down the men who’d assaulted her, but she was beginning to feel more like the offender than the victim. She could feel herself stepping back inside, divorcing herself from the legal process that was unfolding around her.

With an effort of will, she slammed the door on the temptation to simply close off and go blank. When she’d been a child she’d been an expert at the tactics—the ice-queen of eight-year-olds. She’d worked hard to leave that pattern behind; it had taken years, and she’d be damned if she would start running now. There was too much at stake, too much to lose. Her reputation, her career. Her family.

She glanced at Richard and Harrison. They were standing side-by-side—both tall, lean and tanned, with light brown hair. Except for the thirty years Harrison had on Richard and the silvery wings at his temples, the likeness was so pronounced that they could have been brothers. Their jaws were both identically set, their dark eyes cold, voices clipped, as they grilled Cornell about the possibility of a connection between the mugging and the jade theft, and for a moment, confusion and an acute sense of separation swamped Tyler. It was obvious that Harrison and Richard were father and son—also obvious that they were similar in ways that transcended the father/son relationship.

They were her family, but in subtle ways they weren’t. Harrison’s wife, Louisa, had always been the glue that had held them all together, but since her death three years before, Tyler had felt herself drifting, her connection to both Harrison and Richard increasingly more tenuous.

Richard crossed his arms over his chest, his frustration palpable. “So what the hell are we investigating? A theft, or some kind of conspiracy?”

With her as the prime suspect.

Tyler rubbed at her temples. Her mind was still fuzzy, her head throbbing despite the painkillers she’d had with breakfast. “Leave it, Richard. The guy was Asian, that’s a fact. I was mugged, that’s another fact. At this point there is nothing to connect the mugging with the theft of the jade. As for the phone calls, and being followed…” Her own frustration welled, sending a fresh stab of pain through her skull. “All of that started happening before the robbery, so how could any of it possibly be connected?”

She could feel the consensus of opinion. The theft of the jade had sent shock waves through the world of artifacts. The mystery of who had taken the jade, and how it had been stolen, when to all intents and purposes Laine’s security system had not been breached, was disturbing enough. No one wanted to believe that the theft could be more complicated than simple larceny.

But if she was cynical enough, and right now it was hard to be anything but cynical, the police, and everyone present in the room, had to be examining the possibility that she was using last night’s incident to implicate the Chinese in the jade theft. The jade was, after all, Chinese in origin.

Although why would anyone, let alone Chinese people, attack her when they already had the jade? A renegade bubble of humor surfaced. Unless, of course, she had somehow stumbled onto the set of a “B” grade movie, and the bad guys wanted to cut her out of the money, bump her off and dump her body.

Abruptly, the implications were too much—especially if the press decided there was a connection.

She met Richard’s gaze coolly. “If I had any idea who it is that’s been following me and doing the heavy-breathing routine over the phone, I would have tracked him down and dealt with him the same way I dealt with the guy last night.”

Richard looked momentarily perplexed.

Cornell rose to his feet and slipped his notebook in his briefcase. “She broke his jaw.”

The moment when she’d swung that punch replayed through Tyler’s mind. She hadn’t made a conscious decision to hit him—that punch had burst from deep inside and she couldn’t have pulled it if she’d tried. Even now, just thinking about it made the fury well up and sent adrenaline pumping through her veins.

“You broke his jaw?”

The question was soft, clipped. Harrison.

She had never called her adoptive father Dad, and he had never asked her to—by the time the Laine family had adopted her she had been eight going on thirty. She and Harrison had compromised with his first name.

She met his dark gaze. Surprise jolted her when she saw tenderness there. She let out a breath. “I felt the bone give.”

There was an odd silence as the new tidbit of information was digested. It was the kind of blank silence she hadn’t faced since she was eight and Louisa had found her food stash moldering in her closet, along with the wad of money she’d accumulated from selling the clothes and shoes she’d been showered with and didn’t need—which had amounted to most of them. In the world she’d come from, cash was more important than a Barbie doll wardrobe.

Harrison nodded, as if it was a perfectly normal occurrence that his daughter should break a mugger’s jaw.

“Could the other offender have been female?”

The voice was husky, female. Tyler met Farrell’s gaze. For a split second she wondered if Farrell was playing with subtleties and trying for a guilt reaction that might connect her to both crimes, then the no-nonsense tone in her voice registered. Cornell was working the tactics; Farrell was simply being thorough. It was a valid question—plenty of women committed crimes—and Farrell hadn’t etched out a career in a hard-ass, male-dominated profession by pussyfooting around unpopular issues.

She saw again the flash of a male jaw and slanted cheekbone, felt the steely grip on her arm. A memory surfaced. “They smelled male.”

She caught the instant respect in Farrell’s eyes, felt the recoil that went around the room.

Amusement caught her off balance again. So, okay, noticing the scent of the people attacking her might not be a habit cultivated in the best circles, but she had smelled them, and it was a relief to remember something else definitive when the attack had happened in a blur of shadows and adrenaline.

“They were both male,” a dark, cool voice affirmed. “That piece of information was in the statements we both gave last night.”

Tyler’s head jerked up. She winced, her eyes squeezed closed, but not before she’d glimpsed West leaning against the doorjamb, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, a sleek black jacket hugging his shoulders.

West’s gaze briefly touched on each of the people filling Tyler’s room. Anger stirred through him at the inquisition that was taking place. He knew the police had a job to do, but her family could damn well back off. Tyler was tough, a real fighter, but she was tired and practically crawling out of her skin with pain.

He didn’t know what time she had got to sleep last night, but it had been ten-thirty before a doctor had been free to stitch the cut on her head, and after midnight before the statements had been completed. West had left the hospital at around one-thirty, after Tyler had been settled in her room.

“Who in hell are you?”

West ignored the GQ mannequin asking the question. He knew a number of the people in the room: Ray Cornell and Elaine Farrell, Richard and Harrison. He recognized Ashley James, who had been Richard’s right-hand man forever, but the woman and the suit with the question were strangers. They weren’t cops, that was obvious. They were too manicured—too nervy—which meant they had to be two of Harrison’s newer employees.

Ray Cornell nodded briefly. “West.”

Amusement at Cornell’s wariness took the edge off West’s growing fury. “It’s been a while.”

West bumped into Cornell occasionally. Ray was ex-SAS, now a detective at Auckland Central. The most recent occasion they’d hooked up had been a year ago when West’s friend Ben McCabe had been shot at, and they’d spent a couple of hours at Central giving statements.

Harrison acknowledged West, as he always did, with neutrality and politeness.

As out of place with the Laine family as he’d always been, West had never felt antagonism from his father-in-law, simply a void that had shown no sign of diminishing. The gap in life experience had just been too broad for either of them to breach. Richard, on the other hand, had no problem with the void; his cold gaze said just how much he liked it, and the bigger the better. West had never had a problem with his brother-in-law’s attitude, except that it had always hurt Tyler.

West had few people in his life he had ever been able to care for, but his feelings were clean-cut and simple: he would die for them. The way he’d grown up had narrowed his perceptions to absolutes, leaving him with a bedrock that alienated most people. The way he was wasn’t easy or comfortable, but his friends understood him.

West’s gaze touched on Tyler’s tangled hair, her utter stillness claiming his attention. As hard as he’d tried to make Tyler understand how he felt, how he was inside, how difficult it was for him to change and adjust, she hadn’t wanted to listen.

Harrison softly ordered his people from the room. As James, the pretty lady executive and the suit, who answered to the name of Kyle, filed past him, relief loosened some of West’s tension.

He wanted these people out of here, ASAP, and he wanted Tyler out, too. When he’d arrived the press had been gathering downstairs. Maybe they weren’t hunting for Tyler, but he wouldn’t place any bets on it.

Farrell offered him a hand, her gaze speculative.

West recognized the look, and the curiosity. Down under, the military world meshed closely enough with civilian forces that the gossip spread. A number of Auckland detectives were ex-SAS. It was a recognized career path for military personnel to slide sideways into civilian law enforcement. A lot of them ended up on the Special Tactics Squad, or the AOS, the Armed Offenders Squad. He also knew that Farrell was one of the few women who had served on the AOS, and that she was a current member. She would know he’d resigned from the SAS, and why.