Raz stopped in his tracks, naked and dripping. Thirteen days? Only thirteen days until Christmas? Disbelieving, he looked out the window of his second-story apartment. A sunny South Texas sky promised another warm day.
He had vaguely noticed holiday decorations going up, but people put those up earlier every year. He hadn’t paid attention to them. He hadn’t wanted to see them at all. But surely they hadn’t been up very long ... had they?
The disk jockey’s patter gave way to Bing Crosby singing about a white Christmas. Raz thought about the snow in his dream, shivered, and shut the radio off.
So Christmas was less than two weeks away. Christmas, the time of hope and miracles...and everything else Raz couldn’t believe in anymore. But he did believe in family. If he had to lie, steal, kill or die to protect his family, that’s what he’d do.
Though it was December, the air was barely cool that morning as a swimmer stroked up and down an outdoor pool in a Houston neighborhood filled with old houses and new money.
The sun had been up for twenty minutes when Sara Grace finished her first lap. The water was cooler than the air, almost chilly. It flowed like liquid silk over her skin. Sara loved the feel of it as much as she liked the pull and warmth of her muscles as she stroked and kicked. Water was innately sensual. Here, for a little while, she could feel sensual, too. Here she was lithe and graceful and quite unlike her usual self.
As she slid through the water she let her mind slide into a daydream. It was better than thinking about what bullets, fired at a rate of 950 rounds per minute, could do to a human body. Like hers.
Sara had never had much time for daydreaming, so she wasn’t very good at it. She vaguely imagined the feel of strong, male arms around her. The look of a man’s hard, muscular body. A teasing flash of a smile. The combination brought a little tingle of excitement to her own body.
When she reached the south end of the pool she paused long enough to assure herself that the police officer still stood by the gate, watching over her. Then she flipped around and started back.
What had happened to the poor orderly last night had left her terrified. No surprise there. Sara knew she was a coward. But, being an experienced coward, she knew how to banish her fears, at least temporarily. Fear was an ice demon, tight and rigid. It had a hard time holding on to a body warm and loose from exercise. By the time she reached the other end of the pool she made her turn automatically, her mind drifting back to the man she’d been fantasizing about, a man she’d stitched up six months ago.
She’d been on her third night in a new job in a new city when he’d shown up at the ER. Sara remembered the number of stitches she’d put in the gash in the man’s forearm, and she remembered the way his chest had looked—hard, with a dusting of soft brown hair in the center.
Once again she felt that pleasant little tingle of heat.
Her recently developed fantasy life was strangely soothing, rather like having a secret place to go when life became too large and scary. A bit childish, maybe, she thought, but it hurt no one. She did feel slightly guilty for drawing on her memory of a patient’s anatomy for her daydreams. But he’d only been her patient for a couple of hours, after all. She’d never see him again.
Sara stroked smoothly down the length of the pool and thought about the man she would never see again. A dangerously attractive man—sexy, charming—oh, yes, he’d been all of that and more. More, as in possibly wanted by the police. He’d claimed the cut on his arm was an accident, but Sara knew a knife wound when she sewed one up. She’d reported it, of course. He’d sneaked out of the examining room before the officer came to get his statement.
Sara was nearly at the south end of the pool again when a man’s voice interrupted her daydream. “Dr. Grace?”
Shock and fear jolted through her. Her head went up. Her hand, outstretched at the end of a stroke and ready to grab the side of the pool, froze. In that split second she saw not one, but two men. The detective she’d spoken with so often since the shooting knelt by the edge of the pool, his face shadowed by his black Stetson.
Behind him stood the man of her dreams.
Sara nearly drowned.
After several embarrassing seconds of splashing around like a two-year-old in a wading pool, she managed to grab the edge of the pool. She drew herself up with as much dignity as she could. “Yes?”
“Sorry,” Lieutenant Rasmussin said in the Texas drawl Sara had almost gotten used to hearing in the past six months. He was a hard-looking man with a thick mustache and odd, pale eyes. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I brought someone I’d like you to meet.”
Her eyes flicked to the man behind him.
He reminded Sara of a young Harrison Ford, cocky and entirely too charming, his face intriguingly creased when he smiled. His jeans were faded almost to white. His T-shirt was a truly ugly shade of purple, covering a chest that surely couldn’t be the peak of masculine perfection she remembered.
The crooked grin he flashed at her was the same, though. And, oh, heavens, she felt the same little sizzle of heat. Except it wasn’t that little.
She cleared her throat. “We’ve met.”
One of his eyebrows went up quizzically. “We have?”
It was absurd to feel disappointed. She wasn’t a woman who made a lasting impression. And surely she hadn’t wanted a man like him to be the exception? “I sewed up your arm a few months ago, Mr. MacReady.”
His lips twitched. “Uh-oh.” He glanced at the other man. “You were right about her memory for faces. She, uh, knows me as Eddie MacReady.”
Lieutenant Rasmussin’s expression barely changed, yet he managed to look disgusted. “You might have said something.”
“I didn’t know who your witness was. You’ve kept their names from the press, though God alone knows how.”
“Apparently it didn’t do much good, since Javiero found the other one.” Tom Rasmussin sighed and stood. “Explanations are obviously in order. Dr. Grace, this reprobate is my brother, also known as Sergeant Ferdinand Rasmussin of the Houston Police Department Also known by various other names, including Eddie MacReady. He works undercover and he has a sick sense of humor. Raz, meet Dr. Sara Grace.”
She stared at the reprobate. He was a police officer? Now that she looked closely, she saw differences between her memory of him and the way he looked today. His clothes were vastly different, of course. This man’s hair was shorter and lacked the blond highlights she remembered. And his eyes. There was something different about his eyes, but she couldn’t pin down what it was.
He smiled at her, a smile as slow and as sweet as the chocolate-candy color of those eyes. “Call me Raz,” he said, looking almost bashful, as if he should have a hat to doff and boots to scuff in the dirt. “Glad to meet you under my right name this time, ma’am.”
Detective Rasmussin scowled at his brother. “Stop playing around, Raz.”
He shrugged. “I’ve got to do something to counter the impression she has of me. Eddie’s not a very nice boy.”
Sara was confused. On several levels. “You, ah, you want your brother to take over for the other officer?” she asked the detective. “You’re assigning him to stay with me until I get a bodyguard?”
“Not exactly. Raz is on leave from the force right now. Do you want to get out and dry off, Dr. Grace, before I explain?”
Get out—in front of these two men—in her swimsuit?
Sara’s face heated. Nerves fluttered in her stomach, and her throat closed. The rising tide of symptoms was only too familiar, but no easier to combat because of it. She reminded herself