Covert M.D. (16 page)

And the most complicated. Though human kidneys were basically redundant, and a living donor could pass a normal, healthy life with only one, HFH fieldwork was far from a normal life. Candidates had to pass rigorous physical exams, or else be assigned to less dangerous aspects of the organization.

She lifted her chin. “He knows.”

“And he took you, anyway? He must’ve been desperate.” Rathe didn’t consider the words or how they might sound. His mind was locked into a replay of the past
four days. She’d been in worse danger than he’d ever imagined. One knife stab in her remaining kidney, one bullet, one well-placed kick—

And she’d be dead. Or on dialysis until they found a transplant donor.

He and Tony had originally met at the field hospital because Tony had been wounded and needed a transfusion. The two shared the same rare blood type. And if Nia had been a match for Tony—

The connection clicked.

“You’re a rare type.” As was he. Rathe leaped from the bed and swayed as his wounds sang a thousand painful songs and his head spun. “Damn it, Nia. How could you risk yourself like that?”

He meant her pursuit of an Investigations position. She took it another way. Her eyes snapped and she sprang off the bed. “It was my choice. Yes, he was dying from the heart condition, but he wasn’t ready to die yet. I gave him fourteen more months of life, and you know what? I would’ve given him the other one if I’d thought it would help.”

He stretched out a hand. “Nia, I didn’t mean—”

“Of course you didn’t.” She paced the room with jerky strides. “You probably think you did him a favor by not coming back. But he needed you. He was scared and he needed you.”

What about you? Were you scared? Did you need me?
The sick feeling he’d been carrying inside flared to nausea.

He closed his eyes, pinched the bridge of his nose and
nearly dropped when the pain grayed his vision. The smaller aches were fading with time and movement, but the larger injuries remained. Damn Cadaver Man. Damn whoever he was working for.

When had this gotten so complicated?

That was easy. The moment he’d opened an airport hotel door and found his best friend’s daughter outside. The moment he’d seen how much she’d matured—from brilliant young woman to
the woman.

“I never should have let you in that hotel door.” Because he had, Tony had ordered him away from the family, away from Nia. For her own good. If it hadn’t happened that way, Rathe would’ve been there when Tony got sick.

But he’d opened the door and owned everything that had happened because of it.

Nia didn’t pretend to misunderstand. Surprisingly she blushed and crossed her arms over her chest. “No. That was my fault. You were sick and I took advantage of the situation. We both know you wouldn’t have touched me if you’d been in your right mind.”

“Bull.” Rathe crossed to her and slid his hands from her elbows to her shoulders, holding her still, not letting her look away. Forcing her to see the truth in his eyes. “The moment I saw you standing in my doorway, I knew I had to touch you.” He touched his sore lips to hers, didn’t deepen the kiss, but simply stayed there absorbing the buzz of contact. Knowing she felt it, too. He lifted his lips, but didn’t break the half embrace. “Fever or no, I knew exactly what I was doing.”

Making love to his best friend’s daughter, ten years his junior. Loving her.

“Yet you left. It wasn’t enough.
I
wasn’t enough.” She pushed away from him and stalked to the opposite side of the room.

“You were everything!” Rathe shouted, surprising himself as a backwash of emotion hit him, desires long denied, regrets long ignored. “But Tony was right. You were better off without me. What sort of life would it have been for you, Nia? Would you have waited at home for me to finish assignments, wondering if I would make it back or whether this would be the time I didn’t?” God knows, he’d wondered it often enough, though over time the answer had ceased to matter. “Or would you have followed me from country to country, living in a lousy tent with no running water, surviving on biscuits when the food ran out?” He spread his hands. “That’s no life for a woman.”

“You didn’t have the right to decide that for me.” She pressed her hands to the windowsill and looked out. “Neither of you did. It was bad enough Dad warned you off…” The sigh seemed to come from the depths of her soul, a tired, depressed sound. “I hated him for that. I was angry with him for a long, long time. Then he got sick and it didn’t seem so important anymore. In the end…in the end he understood why I made the choices I did. At least he tried to.” She glanced over at him. “But you didn’t even try, didn’t even give me a chance to explain when I called.”

Her shoulders slumped. Rathe would’ve gone to her, would’ve embraced her, but she was a room away.

A world away.

“I left because it was the right thing to do. I left because of how much I cared about you and your father.” Why couldn’t she see the sacrifice for what it had been?

She snorted inelegantly, but her eyes held hurt. “Feel free to tell yourself that bull, but don’t waste it on me. You care about the job and yourself, in that order. It’s all about you, your feelings, and what’s easiest for you, Rathe. It had nothing to do with me or Dad.”

A fist of emotion gripped his heart and squeezed. “That’s not fair. I left you because it was in your best interest. And I didn’t come back to see Tony because I didn’t want him to die knowing he’d compromised at the end.”

Or so he’d told himself every day since Tony’s funeral, when he’d slipped into a back pew, said his goodbyes and left before Nia or her mother saw him.

“No, you did both of those things because they were easier. Because they meant you didn’t have to change your life or your opinion.” She gripped the windowsill until her fingertips whitened. “Dad was wrong to send you away, but you were equally wrong to go. And you should have come back when he asked you, Rathe. You shouldn’t have used that damn promise as an excuse. You should have cared enough. But you didn’t.”

Silence followed her final word. Neither of them breathed, neither of them moved.

In that quiet, Nia’s phone rang.

“Hello?” She didn’t look at Rathe as she listened, but he saw her eyes sharpen, her shoulders square. Her chin
lifted, like it did before she went into each battle. “Fine. We’ll be right there.”

She hung up and strode into the bathroom.

“What? What happened?” Rathe tried to reassemble his HFH professionalism, tried to ignore the words still buzzing in his brain.

It wasn’t true, couldn’t be true. Denying Tony’s dying request had been torture, eclipsed only by the devastation he’d felt when he sent Nia away. Those had been the tough decisions. The right decisions.

Hadn’t they?

She emerged from the bathroom and tossed a bottle of ibuprofen at him. “Take some. We’re needed at the hospital.”

“Another death?” he asked as she strode through the room, dragging off her sleep shirt and not seeming to care that she was gloriously half-naked in front of him.

“No.” She dug a sheer white bra out of a drawer and yanked a white button-down shirt from the closet. “They’ve arrested Logan Hart.”

Chapter Ten

“There’s nothing here.” Hours later Nia pushed away from Logan’s office computer and blew out a breath.

“Of course not, or he wouldn’t have agreed to let us search.” Rathe’s words were muffled by the half-open closet door. Instead of coats, the tiny space contained stuffed-to-the-brim file cabinets. But nothing incriminating. The police hadn’t found anything, and neither had the HFH investigators.

Yet.

“I don’t think he’s guilty. He brought it up last night, and I have to admit I believed him.” To Nia, the awards dinner seemed a lifetime ago. So much had happened since the night before, since even that morning…

She’d rather forget that morning. She wasn’t sure where all the emotion had come from, and the sharp sense of disappointment that had pierced her when she’d realized how wrong things had gone between them.

In his work, Rathe was fearless. The superhero she’d always imagined him. But over the past few days she’d realized he took the emotional easy way out. Blaming
himself for Maria’s death was a crutch. His seeming misogyny was a front. Even his promise to her father was a convenience.

He liked to believe he’d done her a favor by sending her away, but he’d really done it for himself. Leaving her had been the easier option, turning it into the story entitled “The Time Rathe Hadn’t Cared Enough.”

She hadn’t needed her father to tell her the story. She’d lived through it firsthand.

“You can’t argue the evidence, Nia.” It took her a moment to remember they were discussing Logan Hart, not their relationship.

“I’m not trying to. I’m trying to make it fit.” She opened a bottom desk drawer and rifled through it. “The blue sedan was his—they know that because of the VIN number, right? But the plates belonged to a stolen car of the same general description.” Which explained why the police hadn’t made the connection immediately.

“Right.” Rathe closed the closet door and turned his attention to the glossy, wooden bookshelf. He pulled each thick tome off the shelf, flipped through it and returned it to its place.

“So why bother?” Nia turned her attention to Logan’s address book, an old-fashioned leather binder. Black, of course. “If Cadaver Man and Pockmark had already stolen the other sedan, why switch plates? Why not use the stolen car?”

She found a card tucked into the back flap of Logan’s little black book. In discreet gold lettering, it spelled out
the name of a local matchmaking service. Nia raised her eyebrows.

It seemed Assistant Director Hart needed some help in the social department.

Then again, she wasn’t exactly a poster child for having a life, either, so perhaps she shouldn’t judge. She’d had just two unimpressive-and-almost-not-worth-the-effort affairs since—

“Find something?”

She blushed and tucked the card away. “Nothing relevant. How about you?”

“No. But that’s a good question about the car. You got any ideas?” Rathe dropped into the desk chair and pulled the bottle of ibuprofen out of his pocket. By Nia’s count, he’d already doubled the daily recommended dose, mute testimony to his pain. She felt a flash of healer’s empathy. A moment of womanly desire to soothe.

She banished her urges and the confusion they brought, and focused on the job.

“Well, I can think of two possibilities. One, Logan is innocent and Cadaver Man’s boss is trying to set him up.” She leaned against the wall, as far away from Rathe as she could get and still be in the same room. “Or two, he’s guilty and has reversed the frame, so we’ll assume he’s innocent.”

Rathe looked unconvinced. “I think—”

“Dr. French?” Marissa poked her head through the door. “Can I talk to you for a moment? I— Oh! I’m sorry, Dr. McKay. I didn’t see you there. Never mind.”

Nia’s left eyelid quivered as the woman disappeared. “Logan said something yesterday…” She hesitated, not wanting to sling accusations but needing to know the truth. For the sake of the patients. Her father’s memory. Her own fears. “I’m going after her.”

He stood and met her at the doorway, crowding her and reminding her that he was physically stronger than she. Or maybe that wasn’t his intent. Maybe that was just her body’s awareness of him, of his presence and warmth. Maybe it was his scent, spicy and male through the tang of hospital air.

And maybe she needed to get a grip.

“Excuse me.” She tried to brush him aside, but he didn’t budge.

“Nia. I’m sorry.”

And with a woman’s intuition, she knew he was talking about their earlier relationship, not the case.
I’m sorry.
Two little words she would’ve given anything for at one time. Now perhaps too late.

She looked up at him and saw beyond the bruises and scrapes to the man beneath. The man she’d once loved, though she’d barely known him. She’d known enough, or so she’d thought.

“Sorry for what?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come when you called. All other things aside, Tony was my friend and he deserved better.”

If he’d apologized for making love to her, or for leaving, Nia could’ve armored herself or dismissed it. Though part of her had long ago realized that the situ
ation wasn’t as simple as she’d wanted it to be, she could still blame him for his choices. But he’d unerringly found the core of her anger.

Being angry for herself was selfish. Being angry for her father was her right.

“Yes. He deserved better. And so did I.”

He held her eyes, and for a brief instant she could see confusion, desire…and regret. So much regret.

Or maybe that was a reflection of her own thoughts.

“I was at the funeral.”

“I know.” She’d sensed him, though at the time had thought it was wishful thinking. “I saw the plant.” A single spindly juniper tree left beside his grave the next day. Sad amongst the blooms and fancy arrangements, it had best represented her father—a man who’d rather sink in his roots than venture abroad.

She had planted the tree beside his headstone, knowing it had come from Rathe. Then she’d waited for him to come to her.

He hadn’t.

“It wouldn’t have been right,” he said, as though she’d spoken aloud. “I couldn’t drag you into my world.”

“No. I dragged myself.” She pushed away and reached for the door. “And now I’m going to do my job. You should try doing yours.”

He caught her wrist, and the contact shimmered through her like the dawn, though she cursed herself for the weakness. “Nia. I’m sorry. I swear it.”

“Fine.” She nodded, and damned the tears that suddenly swam in her eyes. “Apology accepted. Now let me go.”

She closed Logan’s office door behind her, crossed the hallway and pressed her forehead to the cool glass of a picture window while she willed her heartbeat to slow, willed the tears to subside, willed the memories away.

“I’ll be darned,” she murmured after a moment. “He’s right. Men and women can’t work together without it getting personal.”