Page 9 of Hunted

“You’re going to bleed to death.” She said it matter-of-factly, as if she couldn’t care less.

She had a point. He stuffed the handgun into his waistband and used his good arm to tear his shirt open. Then he shrugged out of it, balled it up and dropped it.

She gasped, which made him look at her instead of the bullet hole in his left shoulder. She was standing there with a hand pressed to her chest and it hit him that it wasn’t the first time. And suddenly, her breathlessness, the paleness of her skin, made sense.

“Is it your heart? Are you?—”

She avoided his touch, held up one hand. “It’s fine. It’s fine. It converted. Just … sore.”

He blinked because he didn’t know what the hell that meant. It didn’t look like she was going to tell him, either. She lifted her chin, fixed her gaze on the pulsing wound in his shoulder, and took his good arm in her hand. Apparently she was no longer averse to touching him. Maybe just being touched by him.

Her hands were cold, but her grip was firm. She led him back up the hallway and into a white bathroom, then nodded toward a pretty little chair he wasn’t sure would support his weight. He sat down anyway in front of a makeup stand or a vanity or whatever with an oval mirror. When he glanced at his own reflection, he figured it was no wonder she was afraid of him. Shirtless, bloody, his eyes as dark blue and merciless as the depths of the ocean, betraying no hint of feeling. His hair was too long. He’d abandoned the regulation cut he used to wear. He’d let it grow out during his eighteen-month attempt at retirement, since Wendy and the boys …

Don’t go there.

He pulled his focus back to his reflection. Hair, right. Too long. He hadn’t bothered cutting it again for this job. It wasn’t official. It was off the books. He was freelancing for one reason and one reason only. To get the man who’d murdered his family.

He heard water, saw her pouring it from a bottle onto a wad of sterile pads. She reached out and he flinched away from her. He couldn’t believe it. He’d had a moment of inexplicable fear when she'd reached for him. Him, Molotov Romano, afraid of a skittish, colt-eyed woman.

He could have analyzed it, but he didn’t. The fact was, he didn’t want her touching him. He didn’t need to dig into the reasons why. Rather than admit that, though, he held still while she tended his wound.

With an efficient and steady hand, Lexi Stoltz washed the blood from his shoulder and arm and chest. He inhaled and smelled her soap or shampoo as she leaned over him, and her breasts were too close to his face. So close he could see them through the white cotton nightgown.

Not a moment too soon she turned away, rummaging in a tall, freestanding cabinet and coming back with plastic bottle of alcohol and fists full of bandages, tape, and a tube of ointment. She used a syringe, sans needle, to suck alcohol from the bottle and spray it into the bullet hole, and it burned like a bastard.

“I’m surprised you didn’t just let me bleed out.” Maybe conversation would distract him from the pain.

“You wouldn’t have bled out from this little thing.”

“And yet you’re patching it up.”

“I’m a doctor. It’s what I do.” She used the syringe again, rinsing from the back this time. Then she plastered both entry and exit wounds with Neosporin and bandaged him up like a pro. “Besides, I don’t want you passing out before you tell me what’s going on here.”

She didn’t sound breathless and terrified anymore, he noticed. He didn’t like her caring for his wound. And he knew why. He tried not to think of Wendy, but he thought of her anyway, and those thoughts brought searing pain with them. Wendy, small and soft and fair. She used to touch him this way, her hands gentle.

She would squeeze scented oil onto her fingers and rub it all over his back at the end of a stressful day.

Wendy. Gone now. Barely enough left of her to bury. Nothing at all left of his little boys. Their markers stood over empty graves. All because he’d failed.

He didn’t have any business noticing the shape of some other woman’s breasts. He closed his eyes against the pain of grief.

Lexi’s hand stilled on his chest. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” His voice came out like sandpaper.

She looked at him as if she knew better. “I can get you something for the pain.”

“I’m fine.”

She shrugged and taped the gauze in place. "So are you going to tell me what this is all about?"

She was nearly finished. She would step away from him in a minute, put some space between them and then he’d snap out of this morbid guilt-fest.

He said, “You really don’t know?”

She shook her head, her gaze pinned to his, too brown and too honest.

“Then why did you quit your job at the clinic and move up here with him?”

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