Yikes. She’d never had such difficulty summoning it.
After she dressed and prepared, she’d taken a few moments to center herself and find that calm, chilly, professional inside her.
Robot Bitch. Right. That was where it all broke down. Because Robot Bitch was nowhere to be found, and without her, Tam was lost and dithering. No other word for it.
Not wanting Val to come back and find her gone. It felt like such a flagrant fuck-you. Not wanting to reject his help, to hurt his feelings, of all crazy things. Not wanting to make him angry. God, since when had she ever given a shit about whether or not she made a man angry?
If said man was not holding a gun to her head or a knife to her throat, that is. There were exceptions.
And this was another exception, God help her. She did care, enough so to box herself in and fritter away precious time hoping he’d get back before she’d gotten around to leaving. So that they could have a proper knock-down, drag-out fight that she could definitively win, forcing him to acknowledge that they’d be better off if she went alone.
Hah. Dream on. That knock-down, drag-out fight was a problematic scenario. Val was bigger, stronger, and quicker than her, though she hated to admit it. Stubbornly unreasonable, too. And very intense about protecting her, which was touching and sweet and manly of him, but oh, dear God, what an inconvenient pain in the ass.
The only way to win an argument with a man strong enough to be worth arguing with was to just slip away and do as she pleased while he was looking elsewhere. Deal with the fallout later. That had always been her policy before. So what had changed?
Never mind. She was afraid to examine that question too closely.
After all, she was calculating cold-blooded murder. If Janos didn’t ride shotgun, he had a small measure of plausible deniability with Ana, Donatella, their Camorra husbands, and the Italian authorities.
And the more streamlined her plan of invading the clinic, the better. For him, too. She understood his desire to monitor the situation so that he could keep her in one piece to help him save Imre, but solo, she could handle this more smoothly.
Besides, Val was too damn pretty. He attracted attention from every side. It was like hauling around a jewel-draped pink elephant. People looked, people took note, people remembered. Especially women. He was wildly impractical, as an accessory. To murder, anyway.
She herself was pale and severe today in her somewhat limp and wrinkled suit, hair braided tightly back. No makeup. Unlikely to attract undue attention. Ana would certainly notice that Tam was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, which bugged her, but there was no remedy for that except for shopping, and she had no time for anything so frivolous, or she would miss her window. It was today or it was never.
And? So? Move it, Steele. She forced herself to pick up the pace, hustling back to their funky room for a blanket to cover the filthy seat of the Fiat and protect her clothes. She grabbed her briefcase and purse, and off she went to find a decent car to drive and get the job done.
If all went well, she’d be back soon to face down Val’s wrath with her usual sass. And then she would go with him to Hungary and keep her end of the bargain.
And his wrath did always translate into spectacular sex. She was pleasantly aching and sore from last night’s massive dose.
She practically knocked Val over as she turned the corner of the casale. He tottered at the impact, a frightening apparition. Dead pale, blood and bruises on his face, hollow-eyed. He put out his hand to the building for balance, stumbled, and jolted down onto one knee.
It was a body blow to see him like that. It knocked out her air.
“Jesus, Janos! What happened to you?” she demanded.
He shuddered and swayed on his knees, teeth chattering. He smelled like the sea. He’d gone for a dip, for Christ’s sake. The raw mountain breeze whipped around them. She reached down and gripped him under his armpits, dragging him to his feet. The fabric of his wet jacket was sticky and dark on one side. Blood. “Oh, merde,” she muttered. “You’re wounded. What the fuck happened to you?”
“András,” he whispered. “Novak.”
Great. Just great. The baddies, all converging on them, and it had to be today. “Come on, let me get you out of this wind. You look like ten different kinds of shit, Janos. I should never have let you go out by yourself. I might have known you’d fuck it up. Men.”
His pale, shaking lips twitched at that, but he stumbled, thudding against the building with a gasp of pain. She loaded as much of his weight as she could onto her shoulder, on the nonbleeding side. She was not trashing her one outfit if she could help it.
Once inside, she whipped off her own jacket, rolled up her sleeves, and pushed him down until he sat on the bed. She started in with his shoes, peeled off the sodden pants and briefs. He moaned with pain when she started in on the jacket, so she slowed down, peeling it off what appeared to be the good arm first, and then lifting the blood-soaked sleeve gingerly away. Then the shirt.
She sucked air through her teeth when she saw the ragged, oozing mess of his shoulder and hurried to the bathroom, rummaging for the cleanest towel she could find. She pressed his torso down onto the bed, heaved his long legs up until he was lying flat, then dragged the thickest wool blanket out of the armoire and laid it over him.
“You lie there and warm up,” she said. “I’ll go get some disinfectant from the signora.”
Breathless seconds later, she was eyeing the sleek little Opel parked in the ulivetto as she banged the signora’s door. Nice. At least he’d gotten some decent wheels before getting himself fucked up.
She burst out her request for disinfectant, bandages, and dry clothes as soon as the door opened, and realized that her voice was thin, high and shaking, like a child. Whoa. Breathe, Steele. Breathe.
The signora’s face furrowed into a deep scowl. “He is in trouble?”
Tam gave her an expressive shrug. “E’ un tipo fuocoso,” she confided. He’s a fiery type. She hoped the older woman would assume he’d gotten into a stupid, macho fight.
The signora shook her head. “Men,” she muttered darkly. She shoved open the door to the kitchen and gestured Tam inside.
The room was huge, spotless, a baroque-era kitchen with appliances that dated from the 1950s. She disappeared into the inner rooms and returned moments later, presenting a bottle of alcohol, rolls and pads of gauze, and, miracle of miracles, surgical bandages—the kind you could buy over the counter in the States. Left behind by other tourists? Who knew? They just might close the wound.
The older woman thrust some men’s clothes at her.
“They will be short for him,” she warned. “I don’t have any pants long enough for that one.”
Tam thanked her effusively and scurried back, heart pounding wildly, as if Val might die or disappear if she took her eyes off him.
He was still shivering violently, even under the heavy wool. She turned on the light and hastened to deal with the shoulder wound.
It alarmed her. Deep, jagged and uneven, it looked like it needed internal and external stitches from an ER doc who knew what the fuck she or he was doing, not a seat-of-the-pants emergency medic like herself. She cleaned it as best she could, wincing in sympathy as he sucked in a tortured breath at the sting of the disinfectant.
She bandaged it, following the directions on the box to close the torn flesh until the surgical glue set. It took only seconds. Whether it would hold, she didn’t know. The shoulder was the worst, but she worked on his battered hands and knees as well. Then she dove into the poison kit, where she kept her emergency pharmaceuticals. Too bad she didn’t have a topical anesthetic, but at least there was a full spectrum