Holding his injured hand like an unwieldy club, he brushed against her shoulder as he sank onto the lower bunk. She suspected he did it on purpose, to test her, so she stood her ground and refused to back away. If she was going to do this job, she couldn’t act like she was about to run screaming in the opposite direction every time she came into contact with a prisoner. Besides, she’d noticed the lines of pain and fatigue in his face and was starting to lose some of her fear. He was hurting far more than he let on.
“This is probably a waste of the courage you screwed up to come here,” he said. “Unless you brought an X-ray machine and some plaster, I doubt there’s anything you can do for me.”
“Sorry, no plaster.” She set the kit on the bed beside him. “Some antiseptic and Band-Aids, though.”
“I’d settle for a couple of Tylenol.”
“It’s against the rules for me to dispense any medication. You can buy aspirin from the store.”
“Aspirin doesn’t work for me.”
“Well, it’s against the rules for me to give you anything else.”
The look on his face told her what he thought of her response. “It’s against the rules for you to be here now, but Hansen makes his own rules. What’s a couple of Tylenol? Think about it, Officer—” his eyes flicked to the name sewn on her shirt “—Hadley. Two capsules of extra-strength Tylenol and you can consider your mission here complete. Then you won’t have to dirty your hands by touching a monster like me.”
A monster like him? If he was a monster, it certainly didn’t show on the outside. Despite the injuries that marred his face, he was one of the most attractive men Gabrielle had ever seen. He practically exuded virility, from the comfortable way he fit his body to the aristocratic features of his face—the aquiline nose, the thin upper lip, the prominent jaw and those incomparable eyes.
“What makes you think I have a problem with that?” she asked, snapping open the kit and rummaging inside.
“You mean, besides the revulsion on your face? It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see you’d sooner touch a leper.”
Gabrielle kept her focus on what she was doing and didn’t answer. He was right. He’d murdered his wife, and she didn’t want to come anywhere near him. But he could definitely use what little first aid she could give. Although the blood on his split lip had congealed, his hand had swollen considerably. The cut on his forehead was bleeding again, if it had ever stopped, and he had to keep wiping away the blood to stop it from rolling into his eyes.
“Can you blame me? Your record doesn’t do much to recommend you,” she said, pulling on the latex gloves she carried on her belt.
“You can’t believe everything you read.”
She folded a piece of gauze and doused it with antiseptic. “Oh, yeah? I suppose you’re innocent, just like everyone else in here.”
He sucked air between his teeth as she cleaned the gash above his eye. “I don’t think you give a shit whether I’m innocent or not. No one else does.”
She fumbled with one of the butterfly bandages from the kit, trying to figure out how to use it. The wound on his head needed stitches. She’d never seen one quite so deep. But the gloves made it difficult to feel what she was doing, and the darn bandage wouldn’t stick.
She looked back at Roddy and Brinkman, hoping they would finally see how unethical it was to deny Tucker the medical help he so obviously needed. But they stared straight ahead, stone-faced, and Gabrielle couldn’t decide whom she disliked more. Tucker, for being the murderer he was, the very scum of society. Or Hansen, Roddy and Brinkman for their refusal to do the right thing.
She studied the wound some more, knew it was too deep to leave as it was, and finally stripped off her gloves so she’d have a chance of making the bandage stick.
Tucker glanced at the discarded gloves. “Aren’t you taking quite a risk?”
“It’s a bit late for that, don’t you think? I already got your blood all over me earlier.”
“And now you think you’re going to die of AIDS.”
“Am I?”
He shrugged. “Depends on who you’re sleeping with. You won’t get it from me.”
Ignoring his allusion to her love life, she concentrated on what she was doing so she wouldn’t ruin another bandage. Come on…come on. Once this is on, I’ve handled the worst of it, she thought, but his next question made her pause.
“Why did you do it?”
She met his gaze, then looked quickly away. There was something so clear and beautiful about his eyes, they could almost make her forget she was confronting a murderer.
“Do what?” she asked. She’d finally got the bandage to close the cut and was nearly limp with relief.
“Jump into that fight. If you don’t have a death wish, you’re either incredibly stupid or incredibly brave. I can’t decide which.”
“Fortunately you don’t have to. I was just doing my job.”
“If you were doing your job, what was Roddy doing?” He indicated Roddy with a slight nod.
“I’ll show you what I’ll do if you don’t shut your freakin’ mouth,” Roddy warned, slapping his baton against the palm of his hand.
Gabrielle shifted to block the officers’s view of Tucker. “You’re probably going to have a scar above your eyebrow,” she said to distract him from their hostility—and to distract herself from the odd sense of intimacy she experienced at standing between Tucker’s spread legs, only inches from his bare chest.
She tilted his chin up so she could clean the cut on his lip and was moderately surprised to find she felt none of the repugnance she’d expected to feel at touching him. He might be a convict, but he was a man of flesh and bone, and the more honest part of her had to admit that his flesh felt better than most. The rough jaw she cupped in one hand and the soft lip she pressed down with her thumb to reach the cut in the very corner sparked a response someplace deep inside her—someplace that didn’t seem nearly as concerned with character as it should have been.
She hurried to finish before he could read her grudging admiration of his physical attributes as easily as he’d read her earlier fear and reluctance. “How are your ribs?”
He didn’t answer, but he winced as she ran her fingers over his injured side. She was searching for something obvious, something that could possibly puncture a lung, but if his ribs were broken, she couldn’t tell. So long as Tucker was still breathing, she doubted she could get Hansen do anything about it, anyway.
“Maybe they’re only cracked,” she said at last, refusing to acknowledge how smooth and warm his skin was. His wife had probably enjoyed the same sensation…once.
A heartening amount of distaste finally came with that thought. Gabrielle put some space between them and started packing up. “At least your cuts are cleaned and bandaged. Hopefully time will take care of the rest.”
He said nothing. Now that she was finished, he looked even more exhausted and wrung out from the pain, which made Gabrielle do something she hadn’t intended to do at all.
“Let me see your hand before I go,” she said.
Tucker hesitated, as though his first inclination was to deny her, but then Roddy piped up. “Come on, you ain’t gonna to be able to do anything for his hand.”
“You’re done playing nursemaid to this lowlife,” Brinkman added.
Their intervention was enough to convince him. Defiance etched in every line of his face, he held out his injured hand.
Shifting to block Roddy’s and Brinkman’s view one more time, she rummaged through the first