isn’t making that an easy proposition. I have to know that what you’re telling me is what’s actually going on, and not some drug-induced hallucination.”
“Not…hallucinating now.”
“Right. And five minutes ago when you grunted something about snakes, you weren’t hallucinating then, either?”
Snakes? He’d always hated snakes, ever since he was a kid. Every nightmare he’d had until the age of ten had generally featured the slithery devils. He’d stopped being afraid of them a long time ago, but he still hated them. So it shouldn’t be any surprise they’d popped up again, given his current state. Especially given the nature of the situation. Snakes abounded, only they were in human form.
“I thought you were trying to tell me you’d been bitten by one, and that was why you were delirious out of your mind, but someone has delivered quite a beating, and that was no snake. Well, not the reptile version, anyway.”
He wanted to smile at their parallel thoughts, but the simple act used way too many parts of his face that had no interest in cooperating without making him pay, so he just tried to corral his thoughts and focus his awareness—such as it was—on assessing himself, his situation, his current specific location. He was no longer on the floor. He was on something soft. He didn’t bother trying to determine how she’d moved him from where he’d collapsed to wherever the hell he was now. Tate had been one of the most resourceful agents he’d ever had.
Then another thought occurred to him. “Where?” he said. “Hosp—?” He didn’t think she’d have made that kind of mistake, but then from what bits and pieces he could recall of their initial conversation, she hadn’t been too happy to see him. Of course, if she had dumped him in the authorities’ laps, he doubted she’d have stuck around to see how he fared.
In response to his attempt to speak, she pressed the straw to his lips again. He sipped slowly this time, and was grateful when she left the straw positioned there for a bit longer, giving him the chance to take several life-giving sips. It could have been the finest champagne, and it couldn’t have tasted any better. “Thank you,” he managed.
To which she replied, her tone as dry as his throat, “Well, well, a please and a thank-you, all in the span of four hours. You must really be in trouble.”
“Trouble,” he repeated. “Yes.” Trouble he’d brought right to her door, and in possibly the worst way he could have. “Sorry.”
“The miracles continue.”
“Tate—”
She pressed the straw to his lips again, effectively shutting him up if he didn’t want to choke. “Right now, the only miracle I need, barring all of this being a really bad nightmare from which I would love to wake up any time now, is for you to get better as fast as possible so you can tell me what the hell you’ve done, and why the hell you’ve dragged me into it.”
“CJ.”
She didn’t say anything immediately, so he tried to open his eyes again. He realized that the blinding light was actually the sun coming in through the window. He squinted against the brilliance of it, and just the act of squinting pulled at enough tight spots on his face to tell him that she hadn’t been kidding about the beating he’d taken. He’d only had to squint his right eye, as it seemed his left was somewhat permanently squinted at the moment, being as it was swollen half shut.
He started to lift his hand to do a cursory touch test, but Tate put a quick stop to that.
“No moving. I haven’t inventoried all of your injuries yet, but I think we can safely say you suffered a dislocation of your left shoulder and a few of your fingers weren’t looking too hot, either.”
He carefully tried to curl fingers in both hands, wanting to gauge her assessment personally.
“Honestly, what part of no moving didn’t you understand?” She trapped his wrists with the palms of her hands, her touch gentle, but restraining nonetheless. “You’re in my cabin. You’re on my bed. I haven’t alerted anyone to your presence here. All three of those things will change if you don’t do as I say.”
He closed his eyes again, mercifully escaping the piercing light. “Bossy.”
“I learned from the bossiest.”
A chuckle rumbled in his chest without his permission. “True,” he managed, even as he winced through the renewed daggers of pain.
She pressed the straw against his lips. “Drink.”
He sipped, but this time the taste was bitter. He immediately clamped his lips and tried to pull back.
“I’m not poisoning you,” she told him, sounding more weary than pissed. “Trust me, if I was going to do something to you, it would be direct and unadulterated. I’m trying to give you something to ease the pain. You can’t swallow pills, so I crushed up some pain reliever. Just sip as much as you can. I’d give you something stronger, but I don’t know what they pumped into your system.”
“Don’t…want that.”
“You can handle some ibuprofen. That’s all this is. I won’t give you anything stronger.”
He relaxed again. “Okay.” He sipped. A little pain reliever probably wouldn’t begin to touch the problems he was currently dealing with, but it sure as hell couldn’t hurt.
“I’m going to make some soup. We’ll see if you can get a little of that down.”
He nodded once, but he was starting to slip away again, and that was all he could manage. As sleep claimed him, he was faintly aware that this time it was just that, sleep. The room didn’t feel like it was spinning. And he still had control of his thoughts. Maybe the fog was finally starting to lift.
“I’ll check back in on you. Don’t do anything stupid.”
He didn’t smile at that. He’d already done something so monumentally stupid, he couldn’t possibly do anything worse.
He’d told her he was sorry, but that didn’t begin to cover the depth of his remorse. She still had no idea how badly he’d fucked things up.
But she was going to.
He just had to hurry the hell up and heal enough so he’d be the one to tell her what lay in store. And not the guys with the tranquilizer guns and the happy juice.
Chapter 3
Tate leaned on the doorjamb and watched him sleep. At least it seemed as if he was sleeping now. He was resting more peacefully, at any rate. Far better than the fitful, twitchy, complete-with-delirious-rambling unconsciousness that had passed for sleep the last time he’d checked out on her.
She tried not to think about some of those ramblings. In his drug-induced delirium, her name had been on his lips more than once. And not in a professional, teamwork kind of way.
She shifted her weight, crossed her arms more tightly, as the echo of those feverish, highly sexually-oriented ramblings made her body twitch in ways it hadn’t in a very, very long time. And had absolutely no business twitching now.
All the rest
