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  Rather than argue with her—something Matt was quickly learning just led to nothing but one dead end after another—he caught her off guard by quietly saying, “You’re welcome.”

  The two simple words stopped her cold in her tracks even though she continued to glare accusingly at him. She knew damn well that she would probably have been the one with the bullet in her if he hadn’t played the hero.

  And who knew? That bullet could have gotten lodged in a fatal place. In effect, he could very well have saved her life, even if she was having trouble admitting that fact.

  “Yeah,” Kendra finally acknowledged with more than a little reluctance, all but spitting the word out as if it had turned bitter on her tongue. “Thanks.”

  He laughed. “Sugar and spice” was definitely not a description that could easily have been applied to her. She was more like hot sauce and wasabi.

  “Don’t worry, Good. I’m not about to say that your life’s mine now or anything like that just because I saved you.” Moving quickly despite his wound, he cuffed the unconscious dealer’s hands behind his back. “I just didn’t want to disappoint my mother and tell her that the invitation was canceled.” With that, he hefted the skinny man up over his good shoulder, ready to transport him into a vehicle.

  “Get in the car,” she ordered, pointing to their unmarked vehicle. “I’m driving.”

  The second he did, after depositing the unconscious drug dealer in the back, Kendra took off.

  Abilene braced his one good arm against the dashboard, thinking that perhaps the invitation would have to be canceled after all. Dead people didn’t attend brunches.

  Chapter 8

  “Who taught you how to drive?” Abilene asked less than ten minutes later as they peeled into the hospital’s E.R. parking lot.

  The entire trip whizzed by in a blur with his partner going way over the speed limit and flying through yellow lights less than a beat away from turning red. He’d white-knuckled it all the way, wondering if they would make it to the hospital in one piece or if her driving would land them in the morgue instead.

  “My brother, Tom.” Kendra brought the car to a jarring stop. “Why?”

  Abilene silently released the breath he’d been holding for the last nine and a half minutes. “By any chance does your brother have anger issues?”

  Kendra shot him a warning look. “No, but I do.”

  Jumping out of the car, she rounded the hood before Abilene could get his door open and was at his side as he slowly rose from his seat. She saw that he needed to hold on to the side of the vehicle to do it. The whole side of his sleeve was now crimson.

  This was not good, she thought, concerned and disturbed by what she saw. “Dammit, Abilene, you could have been seriously hurt!”

  He forced a smile to his lips. “Ah, Good, I didn’t know you cared.”

  “I don’t, wise guy,” she bit off. “I just hate filling out reports in triplicate—and God only knows who they’d give me as a partner this time around, seeing as how they’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel.” She looked at him accusingly.

  “Stop, you’re making me blush,” Abilene protested, pretending to hide his face.

  “You wish,” she retorted. In contrast to his shirtsleeve, he looked exceedingly pale. “My God, Abilene, right now it looks like all your blood is draining out of your body.”

  “My body’s just fine,” he assured her, then made her an offer, smiling weakly. “Care to check it out for yourself?”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.” She hoped her flippant retort would hide her concern. “Stay here, I’ll get someone to bring a gurney for our friendly neighborhood dealer,” she told him, nodding at the unconscious suspect in the back seat.

  “You know where to find us,” Abilene called after her as she hurried away. Still holding on to the side of the vehicle, he lowered himself back into the passenger seat.

  Kendra returned quickly, leading an orderly and a nurse back to the parked car. Between them they were pushing a gurney.

  “Stayed right where you told me to,” he declared, trying to sound cheerful and carefree. Watching Kendra approach, Matt pulled himself back up to his feet again. It took more energy this time.

  “Good, looks like you’re finally learning how to listen, Abilene,” she quipped, doing her best to hide how worried she was. She came around to his side as she got out of the orderly’s way. “Now if only—Abilene?” she said uncertainly as she saw the towering man swaying ever so slightly.

  When he turned his head to look at her, Matt felt his knees start to buckle. He did his best to stiffen them and remain standing.

  Seeing him begin to sink, Kendra reacted instinctively. She pushed her shoulder under his arm and turned herself into a human crutch. Holding on to his arm, which she’d leveraged around her neck, she braced her partner against herself and struggled to keep Matt upright. Her free arm immediately tightened around his waist as she felt his weight begin to shift.

  “A little help here,” she called out to the orderly. The other man had his hands full transferring the unconscious drug dealer to the gurney.

  But it was Abilene who answered her. “You’re doing just fine,” he drawled. There was the hint of an amused smile in his voice.

  She looked up at her partner suspiciously, wondering if he was doing this on purpose, but something in her gut told her that he wasn’t. He was just reacting to losing so much blood.

  “I need another gurney for my partner,” she called over to the nurse, who was already helping the orderly guide their prisoner back through the hospital’s electronic doors. “Now!” she ordered.

  “I love it when you throw your weight around,” Abilene muttered, his words tumbling into one another.

  “Shut up, Abilene,” she warned.

  “Right away,” the nurse was saying, responding to the request for another gurney. “We just need to get this one inside the hospital.”

  “I don’t need a gurney,” Abilene protested with what he thought was feeling, but he was just short of slurring his words. “You’re doing just fine propping me up like this, Good.”

  She slanted a look at him. “Don’t tempt me to drop you.” Dammit, didn’t he realize how serious this could get?

  Just then, Abilene gazed down into her face, his eyes on hers. Something inside her warmed and sent out pulses through her whole body. She couldn’t begin to describe the feeling it generated—or maybe she could, but thought it best not to.

  “You wouldn’t do that,” he told her in response to her threat.

  He wasn’t baiting her, daring her or even teasing her. He was telling her what he knew to be true. That even though their partnership was still in its infancy, he absolutely knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had his back and that he could count on her not to let him down no matter what.

  Kendra chose not to respond, not because she felt he was putting undue pressure on her with his assumption but because she struggled with the implications of his statement. It took the partnership out of the realm of the temporary, which she considered nice and safe, and tossed it into the dependable and permanent, which, given her track record with permanent, scared her.

  She preferred looking to the future in terms of day by day, not with any sort of a permanent plan. It was far safer that way.

  “Just shut up and try to keep upright until they come back with a gurney for you,” Kendra instructed him testily.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he murmured.

  She could feel him growing more lax, could feel his limbs growing heavier. She wasn’t sure how much longer she was going to be able to sustain him in his present vertical position.

  “C’mon, Abilene, stop playing around,” she ordered, doing her best to sound really annoyed.

  She knew he wasn’t playing around, that he was doing what he could not to collapse against her completely. But berating him might get Abilene to rally faster than merely tossing encouraging words at him. The man responded to a challenge, sh
e thought.

  The nurse, followed by two orderlies and an E.R. doctor, returned just in the nick of time. The moment they did, Kendra felt Abilene go completely limp. Another second and they would have both been on the ground with her finally succumbing to Abilene’s lax body and sinking under his weight.

  “We’ll take it from here,” the physician told her as he and an orderly each took one side of Abilene to ease him onto the gurney.

  “But we were doing so well,” Abilene protested dryly.

  “Shut up, Abilene,” she ordered.

  She heard him suck in a lungful of air before being able to make any sort of a response. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Stopping before an empty trauma room, the doctor turned to her as the orderly and a nurse pushed the gurney and her wounded partner into the room.

  “Do you have a number where we can reach you?” he asked her.

  “Lean out of the room and shout,” she told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “He’s not in any immediate danger,” the doctor assured her, apparently thinking that might be why she wanted to stay.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she repeated.

  “Don’t argue with her,” Abilene advised the E.R. doctor weakly just before the door closed. “You’ll never win.”

  “Jerk,” she muttered under her breath as she stood outside the room, hating the fact that she was left out in the corridor to pace and wonder and worry—almost against her will—until someone came out to talk with her.

  Because she didn’t want to dwell on what was happening behind closed doors, Kendra took the opportunity to make a few calls. She called her lieutenant and filled him in on everything that had happened, including the fact that they had a drug dealer in custody at the local hospital. And that Abilene was being stitched up.

  “Does the dealer look good for the murder?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Well, he says he was in San Francisco at the time and took some cash from an ATM at approximately the time of the murder. I need to get a look at the footage from the ATM camera to confirm his alibi.”

  “I’ll turn you over to Wong,” the lieutenant told her. “He can check it out for you. Let me know how Abilene’s doing,” Lt. Holmes tacked on just before he terminated the phone call.

  “Most likely I’ll find him flirting with a nurse once they’ve got him all stitched back together,” she prophesied.

  But she was talking to dead air. With a sigh, she closed her cell and put it away.

  She went back to waiting.

  Impatiently.

  * * *

  But when it was over, she didn’t find Abilene flirting with the nurse in attendance, even though she was rather cute. Kendra couldn’t help wondering if they’d stitched up his libido as well.

  The E.R. physician had paused to give her a quick update on Abilene’s condition when he was finished with the minor surgery. Abilene’s wound had turned out to be just a flesh wound. The reason he had lost more than the usual amount of blood was because he’d been popping aspirin to help ease the pain of an old knee injury. The aspirin, in turn, had rendered clotting generally elusive, thus contributing to the inordinate amount of blood flow and his weakened state.

  Given the go-ahead, when Kendra walked in on her partner, Abilene was already sitting up on the gurney, struggling to put his shirt back on over the rather bulky bandage.

  “Doctor said it was ‘much ado about nothing,’ ” she told him dryly as she walked into the small recovery area where they had placed her partner after his surgery.

  His back to the entrance, Abilene twisted around slightly to look at her. “Here, give me a hand with this, will you?” he requested. “My arm’s a little sore from being used as a pin cushion.”

  “Your arm shouldn’t be ‘a little sore,’ ” she informed him, picking up his casual shirt and easing one of the sleeves over his arm and shoulder. “It should be in a sling.”

  His expression told her what he thought of that suggestion. “The bullet just nicked me.” He said it as if it was an everyday occurrence.

  “Tell that to all the blood you lost.” And then her agitation and exasperation got the better of her. “Don’t you know better than to pop aspirins like they were candy?”

  He paused to smile at her. “That’s what I have you for. To be my nagging Jimmy Cricket.”

  “Jiminy,” she corrected. “I think you might mean Jiminy.”

  He’d never been up on all those kids’ movies. Beyond the fact that Snow White knew seven dwarfs, the extent of his knowledge was rather limited.

  “Whatever.” He waved away the correction. Leaning forward, he felt Kendra slide on the other sleeve. Houston, we have liftoff. “I could have just slapped a couple of butterfly Band-Aids from my medicine cabinet on it and been okay.”

  “The doctor told me that you had to be given a pint of plasma as well. Got that in your medicine cabinet, too?” she queried innocently as she flagged down a nurse who, it turned out, had Abilene’s discharge papers ready for him to sign.

  The man signed the papers in just under the speed of light. He was more than ready to go. The plasma must have given him a boost of energy because he was feeling more like his old self. And that old self was definitely reacting to the volatile little firecracker giving him all this lip. The woman aroused him.

  “You always like to have the last word, don’t you, Good?” he asked mildly as they stepped out into the E.R. parking lot.

  She made him stay where he was—the car was only a short distance away and she brought it back to the entrance to pick him up.

  “When I’m right—which I usually am,” she said, picking up the thread of the conversation again as if there had been no long pause between sentences, “then, yes, I like having the last word.”

  Abilene deliberately eschewed her offer of help—it was a matter of male pride—and lowered himself into the passenger seat as smoothly as he could.

  “I’m honored to be driving around with a saint,” he told her evenly.

  Having rounded the hood and gotten in on the driver’s side, she glared at him as she buckled her seat belt again. The car hummed to life. “Now, I didn’t say I was that, did I?”

  Their eyes met for a very long, electricity-filled second and he murmured, “Oh, God, I hope not.” Because saints didn’t do the kind of things that just being around this woman seemed to keep conjuring up in his mind.

  Kendra slowly released a breath, wishing she could steady her pulse as easily. Why she felt suddenly enveloped in a blast of heat she had no idea, especially since not a single other factor around her had changed even minutely.

  Talk, idiot, before he thinks you’ve been struck dumb. “Do you want me to take you home?”

  The smile on his lips unfolded slowly. Sexily. “Is that a proposition, Good?”

  She didn’t bother trying to get him to stop calling her that. Apparently, it was a useless exercise.

  “No,” Kendra replied as evenly as she could, “that’s a question related to your so-called flesh wound. After losing all that blood, I thought you might want to go home and rest instead of going back to the precinct and all that paperwork.”

  Well, maybe he wasn’t chomping at the bit to get to the paperwork, but the rest of it sounded pretty good to him. This case had become almost personal for him. Maybe because it was his first in Homicide, but he was determined to solve it, to close it. And that meant being there, not going home and lying down. He needed to prove himself to her, to show that he had something to contribute to this partnership, other than just being a human shield.

  “Nope. I’m definitely good to go,” he told her solemnly. His eyes never left hers as his mouth curved teasingly. “And I’m pretty much ready to work, too,” he added.

  Why did she feel as if he was propositioning her? And why in heaven’s name did she want to take him up on it? What was wrong with her? Was it just a matter of her not having been with a man for over eighteen months? The last time had been
just before Jason had been so badly burned. After he’d killed himself, her heart had just slipped into solitary confinement and she’d withdrawn from everyone but her family.

  These days, she still didn’t mix work with her personal life beyond grabbing an occasional drink at the local hangout with some of the people she worked with.

  So why the change now?

  Maybe because your last partner looked like an aged lawn gnome and this one could raise the body temperature of a dead woman.

  Snapping out of it, she slid the key into the ignition.

  “Okay, Wong is checking out ‘John Smith’s’ story about using that ATM in San Francisco at the time of Summer’s murder. Let’s get back to the office and you can write up your notes.”

  “Notes?” he echoed.

  Had he taken notes? And where was his notepad, anyway? His brain still felt a little fuzzy and unfocused. The only thing that seemed to be coming in loud and clear was his reaction to Kendra. Ever since his body had pressed hers to the ground, he’d detected a low-grade hum running through it.

  Celebrating.

  “Yes, notes. You’re right-handed, right?” Kendra glanced at his hand resting on his knee.

  “Right, but I think it’s experiencing sympathy pains for my left arm,” he told her solemnly. To “prove” it he held up his hand and pretended to try to flex his fingers. Under his watchful eye, they moved stiffly, like sticks bowing one by one. “See?”

  “I see, all right. I see a fraud. Now, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t go back to work and then milk everyone for sympathy and not do anything,” she pointed out.

  Because it amused him, he played the game a few minutes longer. “Wow, they didn’t tell me you were this hard-hearted.”

  She doubted if anyone even had any sort of opinion about her. “You just didn’t ask the right questions,” she countered flippantly.