“Love you,” Olivia whispered.
Gabe kissed her again. “Love you more.”
“I now present Mr. and Mrs. Gabriel Knight.”
* * *
THOMAS BEAMED FROM ear to ear as Gabe and Olivia walked past. He looked back toward the altar to watch Duff, Niall and Keir escort the maid of honor and bridesmaids to the center aisle. His smile vanished and his eyes narrowed when he saw their steps hesitate, saw their jaws go rigid, saw their gazes turn up to the balcony.
His own muscles clenched in that split second and he knew something was terribly wrong.
“Gun!” Niall shouted. His sons were already scrambling when Thomas heard the first shots. “Get down!”
The organ music clashed on a toxic chord and went silent.
Niall touched his arm and Thomas nodded that he was taking cover. Flying like shrapnel, wood splintered over his head as he ducked. A vase at the altar shattered. Explosions of marble dust filled the air.
Thomas’s entire world flashed between heartbeats.
Duff was pulling a gun from behind his back. “Everybody down!”
Keir was hugging his arms around Millie and his bridesmaid, tugging them down between the pews. “I’m calling SWAT.”
Gabe was shoving Olivia to the floor and shielding her with his body, even as his daughter tried to reverse positions to protect him.
Thomas hadn’t protected Mary all those years ago. He should have been the one at that convenience store when the bullets had taken down every customer and cashier in the building. He should have saved her.
People were shouting, ducking for cover, running to save loved ones, running toward the threat raining terror down on the guests in the sanctuary. His gun and badge were locked up at home. He was helpless to protect his children, to save his friends. Helpless to do anything but reach for his elderly father.
Blood spattered his cheek a split second before his father’s cane clattered against the marble tiles. Thomas caught Seamus as he fell, cradling him in his arms as he lowered his limp body to the floor.
“Niall!” He shouted for the closest doctor at hand. “Help me, son. Dad’s been shot.”
September
If anyone had to suffer a stroke after a traumatic brain injury like being shot in the head, Thomas hoped he or she possessed the same stubborn cussedness Seamus Watson did. There were bound to be a lot of arguments, setbacks and hurt feelings along the road to recovery, but apparently, it was the only way to survive.
He just wished there weren’t so many casualties along the way.
Thomas looked from his father’s red face to Millie’s pale, gaping expression to the retreating backside of the young speech-therapy intern who was running out the door of the Saint Luke’s Hospital rehab center in tears. Although the young woman barely looked old enough to have graduated from high school, much less college, her youthful enthusiasm, pretty face and obvious competence hadn’t spared her from Seamus’s wrathful outburst at the end of a long afternoon of medical evaluations.
While he went down on his good knee to gather up the flash cards his father had knocked to the ground, Thomas spared a glance at the fourth person in the room, the private nurse he’d hired to aid in Seamus’s recovery, Jane Boyle. How was Battle-Ax Boyle, as his three sons had secretly nicknamed her, going to handle his father’s refusal to do the speech test since she was taking point on Seamus’s health and physical rehabilitation?
Although her rigid professionalism and terse, almost-awkward personal skills had earned her the teasing, never-to-her-face nickname, Thomas had spent enough time with Jane over the past several months to have a slightly different take on the resident battle-ax. No one could question her devotion to her duty, a fact that all of them, as a three-generation family of cops, could understand and respect. As for the I’m-not-interested-in-making-friends vibe she put off? He wished he wasn’t so intrigued by a challenge like that.
Thomas Watson solved mysteries. He’d done it so well for so long that he taught other cops how to solve them. And Jane Boyle was the biggest mystery to cross his path in a long while.
The nurse’s honey-brown ponytail hung in a straight line down to the high collar of the pink mock turtleneck she wore. She stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her stance emphasizing feminine curves beneath the shapeless blue scrubs. About the only time she wasn’t wearing boxy scrubs and a jacket of one pastel hue or another was in the mornings when she went for a run before breakfast. Or late at night, when she roamed the upstairs hallway between the guest room and the shower in a sweetly sensible pair of pajamas that usually consisted of a T-shirt and cotton pants that never quite met at the waist, exposing a thin strip of bare skin that he’d glimpsed more than once as she hurried into one room or the other and closed the door.
Really? He was a grown man, crawling on the floor of a major metropolitan hospital, cleaning up after his eighty-year-old father’s tantrum and picturing the woman who worked for him in her pj’s?
Man, he needed to stop noticing details like that. It wasn’t like he could do anything about that little hum of awareness that seemed to excite his blood every time he cataloged another observation about Jane. After six months living under his roof, sharing meals and a few family evenings together, he couldn’t seem to help himself from noting the sleek arch of her hips, the flawless skin hugging the angles of her oval face, the soft pink mouth that rarely smiled. She worked for him. He needed her to focus on his father’s recovery. He needed to focus on his father’s recovery, too.
He might have a few gray hairs at the temples of his dark brown hair, but he wasn’t dead. Yet he needed to act as if all the male parts of his body were too old to care about the pretty in a woman in order to maintain the professional relationship between them.
Thomas set the cards on the table and pushed to his feet, ignoring the inevitable protest in his left leg. “Dad, you can’t talk to people that way. Stephanie was doing her job. She was trying to help you.”
Seamus’s blue eyes stared straight ahead, ignoring both Jane’s thinning mouth and his own voice of reason. He’d seen his dad bleeding and unconscious; still and pale in a hospital bed after surgery; unable to speak or use his legs and right arm; fighting to stand and pick up his feet and relearn how to hold a fork; working his lips and teeth and tongue so hard to form a coherent word that a lesser man would have given up months ago. It felt wrong to be wishing for even one moment that the old man couldn’t talk.
“I’m not doing da tupid eckertise again.” Seamus’s slurred words were articulate enough to make his frustration and fatigue clear.
Jane sat her hip on the edge of the table, facing Seamus. “Yesterday in our therapy session at home, you handled the tongue rolls and language exercises just fine.”
“I’m too tlow. Tink faster dan I talk. Make mi-takes.”
Although her words were a little less peppered than Seamus’s tirade had been, Jane’s tone seemed as reprimanding as his father had been
