mother had argued that she could become part of the D.A.’s office. That way, she would still be in law enforcement, only in the safer end of it. But Lydia had remained firm. Sitting behind a desk with dusty books or standing up in court in front of a judge whose bout of indigestion or argument with a spouse might color the rulings of the day was not for her.
With tears in her eyes, her mother had called her her father’s daughter and reluctantly given her blessing while praying to every saint who would listen to keep her daughter safe. Lydia had no doubt that her mother bombarded heaven on a daily basis.
Mercifully, Louise Wakefield remarried six months after Lydia had successfully completed her courses at Quantico. Her stepfather, Arthur Evans, was a kind, genteel man who ran a quaint antique shop. Her mother made him lunch every day and always knew where to find him and what time he’d be home. It was a good marriage. For the first time in nearly thirty years, Lydia knew her mother was at peace.
Lydia looked at the wall clock as she passed it. She sincerely wished she could lay claim to some of that peace herself right now. Glancing at the clock again, she frowned. It announced a time that was five minutes ahead of her own watch. Not that it mattered in the larger scheme of things. It just meant that her prisoner had now been in surgery for three hours and forty minutes, give or take five.
She rotated her neck and felt a hot twinge in her shoulder. It had been bothering her the entire time she’d been here. She couldn’t wait for this night to be over. All she wanted to do was to go and soak in a hot tub.
It was her bullet they were digging out of Conroy. If he hadn’t moved the way he had, it would have been lodged in his shoulder, not his chest. Though she was filled with loathing for what he’d done, she’d only meant to disarm him. Cornered, the man had trained his weapon on Elliot. There’d been no time to debate a course of action. It was either shoot or see Elliot go down.
Lydia felt no remorse for what had happened. This kind of thing went with the territory and she had long ago hardened her heart to it. If there was pity to be felt, it went to the parents of the boy whose life had been lost and to the people who, simply going about their business, had been injured in the blast.
Lydia sighed. The world seemed to be making less sense every day.
She found herself in front of the coffee machine again. If she had another cup, she seriously ran the danger of sloshing as she moved. But what else was there to do? There was no reading material around and even if there had been, she wouldn’t be able to keep her mind on it. She was too agitated to concentrate.
Digging into her pocket, she winced. Damn the shoulder anyway. It felt as if it was on fire. Probably a hell of a bruise there. When she’d shot him, Conroy’s weapon had discharged as he’d fallen to the ground. She’d immediately ducked to keep from getting struck by the stray bullet. As near as she could figure, she must have injured her shoulder when she hit the floor.
Lydia glanced down at herself. The jacket and pants she had on were both discolored with the prisoner’s blood. Shot, he’d still tried to put up a fight. It had taken Elliot and her to subdue him. For a relatively small man, Conroy was amazingly strong. She supposed hate did that to you.
She looked accusingly at the operating room doors. Damn it, what was taking so long? Were they rebuilding Conroy from the ground up?
Lydia stifled a curse. She knew she could have someone from the Bureau stationed here in her place, but she didn’t want to leave until she had a status report on the bomber’s condition. She wanted to know exactly what she was up against. There was no way she was going to lose this one, even for a blink of an eye.
Her stomach rumbled, reminding her that not even she could live on coffee alone. She tried to recall when her last meal had been. The day had taken on an endless quality.
Lydia jerked her head around as she heard the operating room doors being pushed open. The sound of her heels echoed down the corridor as she quickly returned to her point of origin.
The physician who had given her such a hard time emerged, untying his mask. He looked tired. That made two of them.
“Well?” she demanded with no preamble.
It didn’t surprise Lukas to find the blonde standing here like some kind of sentry. Gorgeous, the woman still bore a strong resemblance to a bull terrier, at least in her attitude. Their earlier exchange had convinced him that she wasn’t someone who would let go easily. Or probably at all, for that matter.
Lukas took his time in answering her, walking over to the row of seats in the waiting area and sinking down onto the closest one. The woman, he noted, remained standing.
“Well, is he alive?” she pressed.
Lukas pulled off his surgical cap and looked at her. “Yes. He’s lucky. The bullet was very close to his heart. Less than a sixteenth of an inch closer and he’d be on a slab in the morgue.”
Her mouth twisted. Whether the word lucky was appropriate or not was a matter of opinion. “Too bad the boy his bomb blew up wasn’t as lucky.”
Lukas didn’t feel like being drawn into a debate. Weary, he rose to tower over the woman. It gave him an advantage. He found he preferred it that way. “Look, I don’t want to know what he did. My job is to patch him up as best I can.”
Her eyes grew into small points of green fire. “How can you not care?” she asked heatedly. “How can you just divorce yourself from the fact that the man you just saved killed a teenage boy? That he might have killed more people had his timing been a little more fine-tuned.”
The woman was a firebrand. The kind his uncle always gravitated toward. Too bad Uncle Henry wasn’t here to appreciate this, Lukas thought.
“Because I’m a doctor, not a judge and jury.” The look in his eyes challenged her. He knew all about hasty judgments. “Are you sure you have the right man?”
She laughed shortly. The tip they had gotten had specifically named John Conroy as the mastermind of the new supremacy group whose goal was to “purify” the country. The explosives they’d found in his house erased any doubts that might have existed. What they hadn’t found, until it was too late, was the man himself.
“Oh, I’m sure.”
There was something in her voice that caught his attention. “That was your bullet I took out.”
“Yes.” And he was going to condemn her for it, she thought. She could see it coming. There was a time for compassion and a time for justice. This was the latter. Lydia raised her chin. “We chased him down into the rear loading dock behind the mall. I shot him because he was about to shoot my partner.”
The hour was late and he should be on his way. But something kept Lukas where he was a moment longer. “I didn’t ask you why you shot him. Figured that was part of your job.”
She didn’t like the way he said that. “You weren’t there.”
“No, I wasn’t. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a life to get back to. Or at least a bed.”
Finished, he brushed past her and accidentally came into contact with her shoulder. The woman bit back a moan, but he heard it. Lukas stopped and took a closer look at the bloodied area around her shoulder. When she’d first come in, he’d assumed that the blood belonged to the prisoner. Now he had his doubts.
“Take
