“It’s about time you decided to wake up and join the living.” As a doctor, Reece had thought he’d become immune to suffering and death. Until he’d seen Molly lying amidst all that garbage, valiantly clinging to life.
He held out a plastic glass, encouraging her to take a sip of water from the straw. “Not too much.” He took the glass away too soon. It seemed she’d barely had a chance to wet her lips.
“I’m…so…thirsty.” It was not Molly’s nature to complain. But she felt as if all the sand on the Los Angeles coastline had somehow ended up in her mouth.
“I know. But you’ve been on IVs for the past eight hours, so you’re in no danger of dehydration—”
“Eight hours?”
“Thomas found you when I was going off shift.”
Thomas? She shook her head, then wished she hadn’t, when lightning flashed behind her eyes and boulders inside her head shifted.
“Was I—” she had to struggle to get the words out “—in an accident?” Molly felt as if she’d been run over by a bus.
“There’s plenty of time to get into details later.” He reached down and brushed her dark hair away from her forehead with a soothing touch. ”Lena’s been going out of her mind with worry. She’s in the cafeteria. Let me go get her.”
He left the room, leaving her question unanswered.
Molly was staring up at the ceiling, trying to focus her mind, which she realized was fogged with some heavy-duty painkiller—Demerol?—when she became aware of the sound of footfalls on the tile floor.
The sight of the blue uniform took her back suddenly to that terrifying night when the house had been surrounded by police. She could hear the unforgettable sound of the front door being kicked in, and she gasped involuntarily. The sudden intake of breath was incredibly painful.
“The doc said your ribs are cracked,” a baritone voice rumbled. “You probably should avoid any deep breaths.” Ignoring hospital rules, he sat down on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
His face bore a striking resemblance to Alex Kovaleski. But this was not the man who’d tried for so many hours to talk her father out of murder. It was his son, Dan, who had, over the intervening years, become almost like a brother to Molly.
“Thirsty,” she managed.
He glanced over at the pink plastic glass. “Did Reece say you’re allowed to drink anything?”
“Since when did you become a stickler for rules and procedure?”
He laughed at that and held out the glass to her. “Welcome back. I told Lena that low-life slimeball couldn’t beat the spunk out of you.”
“Beat?” After taking a long wonderful drink, she tried to blink away the fog clouding her memory. “I was beaten?”
“Aw, hell. Reece didn’t tell you?”
“No.” But Dan Kovaleski’s frown spoke volumes. “I guess it’s up to you.”
He looked as if he’d rather try to serve a speeding ticket on Zsa Zsa Gabor. “How about we wait and see what the doc thinks you’re ready to hear?”
“I never would have taken you for a coward, Daniel Kovaleski.”
He cursed ripely. “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got to be the most stubborn female God ever made?”
“All the time.” The familiar sparring helped clear her head and take her mind momentarily off her pain. “Personally, I’ve always taken it as a compliment.”
“You would.” He cursed again, softer this time as he linked their fingers together. “There weren’t any witnesses, Molly. At least none that we could find, which doesn’t mean anything.
“Right now, all we know is that you left the hospital a little before midnight. Six hours later, Thomas showed up at the ER door, frantic because he’d found you lying unconscious in the alley a few blocks away.”
Her fingers tightened on his. “Is he all right?”
Dan shrugged. He had never liked Molly’s dangerous predilection for picking up strays. “Thomas is Thomas. He’s the same as he always is. Nuts.”
“He’s in emotional pain,” she managed to argue. “But he still managed to get help for me.”
“Point taken.” His gaze drifted out the window toward the mean streets. “It’s also a possibility that he’s the one who did this to you in the first place, then suffered a sudden case of remorse. Or fear.”
“Thomas would never hurt anyone.”
Dan’s expression was cop hard. “You can’t be sure of that, Molly.”
“I’d stake my life on it.”
“When all that Demerol wears off and you can think rationally again, you might just realize that may be exactly what you’ve done.”
Although the brief conversation had exhausted her, she had to stand up for a man she knew didn’t have the strength to stand up for himself. “Thomas isn’t responsible.”
“Actually, you’re probably right,” he agreed with obvious reluctance. Two strong-willed people, they’d argued often over the years and neither was fond of losing. “Since the test results came back negative.”
“Test results?”
A reluctant smile hovered at the corner of his grimly set lips. “From what we could tell, you bopped the guy a good one, kiddo. Not all that blood in the alley was yours.”
“Nor Thomas’s.”
“No.” He gave her a long look as if judging whether or not to say more.
Belatedly understanding his dilemma, Molly decided to help him out. “I was raped, wasn’t I?”
He closed his eyes, briefly. When he opened them, Molly saw regret and embarrassment. “Yeah.” He exhaled a long breath. “Hell, Molly, I’m so sorry.”
She thought of all the rape victims who’d come through the doors of the ER and realized that in some way, she might be fortunate her memory had blocked out the assault. “You and Reece don’t need to tiptoe around the subject. I’m no different than any other rape victim.”
“Yes you are,” Dan shot back. “The fact of your being a nun—and a virgin—should put you off-limits to creeps like that.”
Jacob’s daughter, Dinah, had been raped, Molly remembered. When she also recalled that Dinah’s brothers had massacred all the men in the rapist’s city to avenge the defilement of their sister, she decided not to share that particular Bible story with this grim-faced man.
“Virgins get raped every day. Some of them are children.” Although her eyes were barely slits, she managed to meet his frustrated gaze. “And I’ve seen you deal with that.”
“True.” This time it was his fingers that tightened on hers. “But what you don’t see is me throwing up afterward.”
Molly tried to smile, then flinched when the attempt pulled the stitches Reece had sewn in her top and bottom lips. “You’re a good man, Dan. And you’re definitely your father’s son.”
His grip loosened, his smile brightened his brown eyes. “Speaking of Pop, he’s been driving everyone nuts waiting to get in to see you.”
Amazingly, Alex Kovaleski had taken an interest in the orphaned McBride sisters after that fateful night fourteen years ago. He’d even tried to adopt them, only to be informed that divorced men were not suitable fathers for little girls.
The bureaucrats were wrong. Molly didn’t want to think about how much