“What were you trying to prove?”
“Nothing,” she answered quietly. She would have turned her head away if the effort hadn’t hurt so much. So she just looked at him steadily, meeting his probing gaze. “Just looking for space.”
He laughed shortly under his breath. The woman had intelligent eyes, and she certainly didn’t look stupid, but then, looks could be deceiving.
“You very nearly got it. Six feet by six by six,” Reese told her, pausing to write a notation in her chart. “A final space in the family plot.”
Beside her mother, she couldn’t help thinking. Maybe it would be peaceful there and she could finally find out who she was.
A flicker of rebellion rose from some faraway quarter that hadn’t been banged around relentlessly, and London looked at her intrusive surgeon with as much defiance as she could muster.
“A lecture? Save your…breath, doctor…I’ve heard…it all.”
She’d certainly heard more than her share. From her father, from Wallace, although she preferred the latter because at least Wallace was her friend. Her father, well, she didn’t really know what Ambassador Mason Merriweather was or how he figured into her life, other than to impose restrictions on her for as long as she could remember. Even Wallace and the other two bodyguards, Kelly and Andrews were part of her life because of him.
“Not a lecture, a fact,” Reese told her mildly. He slipped her chart back into its slot at the foot of her bed.
She was tired, very tired and there was this wide, soft, inviting region just waiting for her to slip into it. Its pull was becoming irresistible, but London struggled to ask one more question.
“Did you do it?”
The question caught him off guard. Reese looked at her. She appeared to be drifting off again. In another moment she’d be asleep, and the keeper at the gate would have to continue to wait before he would have the opportunity to talk with her.
“Do what?” Reese asked.
Every word was a struggle. Her mind was shutting down again. “Save…my…life.”
What he had done was utilize his training, his education and his instincts, not to mention the up-to-date technology that a hospital like Blair Memorial had to offer. There was no doubt in his mind that twenty years ago she would already have been dead. But even now, with all this at his disposal, there remained at bottom the x-factor. That tiny bit of will that somehow triumphs over death.
He allowed himself a small smile, though he doubted she could even detect it. “You saved your own life. I just put the pieces together.”
“Modest.” The single word came out on a labored breath. “Unusual…for…a…man.”
He began to say something in rebuttal, but it seemed that at least for now, his side wasn’t to be heard. His patient had fallen asleep again.
Just as well, Reese thought, standing at the foot of the bed and regarding her for one long moment. He didn’t feel like getting embroiled in a debate right now.
Not even if the opposing team looked like an angel. An angel, he mused, slipping out of the room, who had gotten banged up falling to Earth.
Very quietly he closed the door behind him.
Chapter 3
The moment Reese stepped out of the ICU, he found himself accosted by the big man who had stood vigil in the hallway all this time. He’d been told that Wallace Grant had been hovering around the nurses’ station ever since London had been brought out of recovery. To his credit, he had tried not to get in anyone’s way.
The question in the man’s eyes telegraphed itself instantly to Reese.
“She’s asleep,” Reese told him.
Wallace frowned as he sighed, frustration getting the better of him. He’d already put in a call to London’s father. The ambassador was scheduled for a meeting with a highly placed official in the Spanish government, but he’d canceled it and was catching the first flight from Madrid to LAX that his secretary could book for him. Wallace wanted to have some good news to give the man who signed his paychecks when he arrived.
Laying a large paw on Reese’s shoulder to hold him in place, Wallace blocked his exit.
“Is that normal?” he wanted to know. “I mean, shouldn’t she be waking up around now?”
Reese knew for a fact that the man had been looking in on London for his allotted five minutes every hour on the hour. The day nurse had told him so. But it was obvious that each time he did, he’d found the young woman unconscious.
“She did,” Reese told him. Surprise and relief washed over the other man’s face, followed by a look of suspicion. Wallace was a man who took nothing at face value. “For about five minutes,” Reese elaborated. “She’s going to be in and out like that for most of the day and part of tomorrow.” Very deliberately he removed Reese’s hand from his shoulder. “Maybe you should go home.”
Wallace looked at him sharply. “And maybe you should do your job and I’ll do mine.” Wallace didn’t appreciate being told what to do by a man who knew nothing about the situation they were in. “Her father pays me to be her bodyguard. I can’t exactly accomplish that from my apartment.”
Reese didn’t care for the man’s tone or his attitude. “Seems to me you didn’t ‘exactly’ accomplish it earlier, either, and you were a lot closer then.”
To his surprise he saw the anger on the other man’s face give way to a flush of embarrassment. His remark had been uncalled for. Reese chastised himself; he was civilized now, at least moderately so, and was supposed to know better.
He chalked it up to his being tired. It wasn’t an excuse, but it was a reason.
“Sorry,” Reese said. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” He wasn’t up on his celebrities, but it seemed to him that someone so young wouldn’t normally need to have her own bodyguard. Her name didn’t ring a bell for him, but that, too, was nothing new. For the most part, except for his small circle of friends or his mother, he tended to live and breathe his vocation. “Why does she need a bodyguard?”
The wide shoulders beneath the rumpled brown jacket straightened just a fraction. That was all there was room for. The man had the straightest posture he’d ever seen outside of a military parade, Reese thought. He’d had Grant pegged as a former military man.
“You can ask her father that when he gets here,” Wallace told him, his tone formal. “It’s not my place to tell you.”
Guarded secrets. Definitely a former military man, Reese decided. He shrugged. Whether she had a bodyguard or not didn’t really matter to him, as long as the man stayed out of the way.
“Just an idle question. Don’t have time for many of those,” Reese confessed, more to himself than to the man in front of him. Before he left, he stopped at the nurses’ station and looked at the middle-aged woman sitting behind the bank of monitors, each of which represented a patient on the floor. “Page me if the patient in room seven wakes up.” He leaned in closer to her and lowered his voice. “And don’t forget to tell our semifriendly green giant here, too.”
Slanting a glance at the man who had resumed his vigil in the hallway, the strawberry blonde raised a silent brow in Reese’s direction.
He grinned. “Call it a mercy summoning,” he told her just before he left.
Reese was in the doctor’s lounge, stretched out in a chair before a television set showing a program that had been popular in the late eighties. He must have seen that particular episode five times, even though he’d rarely watched the show when it was originally on. Murphy’s Law.
He