Red Alert (9 page)

The sound was overridden by a stranger’s voice at his elbow. “You climbing or just watching?”

Erik turned, annoyed that he’d been caught staring. “Just waiting for a friend.”

The stranger was in his midforties and wore the silver hair and tanned, wrinkled skin of an outdoors-man with pride. Unlike most of the other climbers, his shirt was uncut and tucked into loose drawstring pants. Something sparked in the depths of his brown eyes when he held out a hand. “I’m Luke Cannon.”

Erik shook because it would have been rude not to, but he could think of only two reasons why the stranger had come over. “If this is a pickup, I’m not interested, and if you’re looking for money, I’m not giving.”

Cannon snorted. “Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t swing that way, and I don’t need your money. Otto asked me to come over. Meg’s friends are his friends, if you get my meaning.”

Erik scowled harder. “And Otto would be…?”

The older man jerked his head toward the chiseled male-model type spotting Meg. “He owns the place.”

“Which still doesn’t explain why you’re talking to me. I’m not much for idle conversation.”

“I hadn’t noticed.” Cannon’s lips twitched. “I came over to see if you wanted to have a go.” He gestured to the roped climbers. “It’s not as good as outside, but it’s better than sitting at a desk.”

Erik turned his back on the climbing wall and the faint surge of wistfulness, and focused his attention into the other room, where Meg was halfway up the UFO. As he watched, she swung from her fingertips in an arc that brought her to a bright yellow handhold and a new point of purchase. He grimaced. “Not interested. Like I said, I’m just waiting for a friend.”

And even that was an overstatement. He and Meg were hardly friends.

“Fair enough.” There was a rustle of cloth as Cannon dug into the back pocket of his warm-up pants and withdrew a nylon wallet. He pulled out a business card. “This is neither a come-on or a request for money, but if you ever change your mind, give me a call.”

“I won’t.” But Erik took the card and glanced at it as Cannon walked away with an awkward, rolling gait. The simple cream-colored stock was embossed “Luke Cannon, Pentium Pharmaceuticals.”

Pharma, eh? It might have been a simple coincidence. The gym was located in the center of the hospital district. It was a good bet that more than half of the climbers were hospital or research types.

But that didn’t explain why Cannon had come over to him.

Erik tucked the card into the back pocket of his slacks and turned toward the rope wall just in time to see Cannon strip off his warm-up pants. Metal glinted where Cannon’s right leg should have been, and suddenly his overture and the rolling gait made too much sense.

He was an amputee.

A hard, hurting fist clutched in Erik’s gut, bringing with it the smell of antiseptic and the fear he’d felt in the hospital as he’d lain there, powerless to do anything but let the IV seep into his veins, one drop at a time, keeping him alive whether he liked it or not.

We may have to take the leg,
they’d told his boss, thinking him unconscious when really he lacked the strength to open his eyes and respond.
It might be the best thing for him.

In the end they hadn’t, taking only the dying muscle, the pieces that wouldn’t reattach no matter how hard the arthroscopic surgeons worked. They had patched him up and taught him how to walk again, all the while reminding him how lucky he’d been to keep the leg.

But now, as he watched Cannon strap into the climbing gear and begin his ascent, hopping nimbly
from one purchase to the next, deftly inserting a specially designed artificial foot into cracks too small to admit flesh and blood, Erik cursed himself for being weak, for being too broken to heal.

Why else did the one-legged man seem like less of a cripple than he did?

He turned away, hating the smell of sweat and activity, which served only to drive home the point that he didn’t belong here, didn’t belong anywhere.

With a half-formed plan of grabbing Meg and hustling her out on some pretext or another, he stepped into the bouldering room. Two things happened simultaneously.

His cell phone rang.

And he saw that Meg was gone.

Chapter Six

Meg had just negotiated a tricky part of the course Otto had set up for her, one that sent her around the backside of the wall, when she heard Erik bellow,
“Megan!”

She didn’t stop to question how she immediately knew it was him amid the dozen or so other men in the climbing area that knew her name. She didn’t want to consider how quickly the timbre of his voice had engraved itself on her consciousness, for good or ill. Instead, she fixed on the fear in his tone.

Something had happened. Something bad.

She quick-timed it back along her route, traversing a narrow crevice that barely held the tips of her climbing mocs, and then swinging around the corner almost blind, her entire weight suspended by the fingertips of her left hand as her right reached for the faraway hold. At deadpoint, the moment when her body stopped swinging up and gravity took over, she stretched extra hard and felt the grippy, sponge-like material beneath her fingertips. She grabbed it,
felt sinew and muscle stretch, and then released with her left hand, letting gravity turn her into a pendulum as she lifted her legs and aimed for a narrow ledge that was maybe three inches wide.

For a moment she was weightless. Flying. Free. Nothing else mattered. Then her toes hooked the ledge and she balanced there, no longer weightless, now shackled to the wall by the bonds of gravity and shackled to the present by the glowering man who stood twenty feet below.

She turned and leaned back against the wall with her heels braced on the ledge, resentful that he’d interrupted and annoyed that she felt a sharp slice of guilt. She’d brought him here not just because she’d needed the release of physical activity, but because she’d needed to prove something to herself by seeing him here.

She’d wanted to remind herself that he wasn’t for her. Not on a professional level, and not on a physical level. She was trying to rediscover her exciting, physical side. He’d lost his along the way, and was too busy being mad at the world to try to find a new path.

The knowledge sharpened her voice when she said, “Yell a little louder, why don’t you? I’m not sure the beginner’s belay class heard you out in the front room.”

He exhaled through his nose, displeasure crackling in the air between them. She was aware that a few of the climbers sharing the central boulder with her were tuned in to the conversation, while others
concentrated on their climbing, minding their own business. “Come down here,” Erik said, his tone quieter but no less sharp. “Please.”

She bent her knees and eased down from the ledge, catching a series of handholds and footholds on the way down. If she’d been outside on an unfamiliar wall with only a small, portable pad below her, she would’ve taken it slower. As it was, the floor was heavily padded and she was familiar with the indoor line. She descended effortlessly. Fluidly.

Freely.

She was breathing hard when she touched down, feeling the ache of exertion, the steady thud of her heart, which reminded her how good it was to be fit again, to be active again. How important activity was to her.

And how much it would hurt to lose.

The padding gave beneath her as she turned and strode toward Erik.

“You bellowed?” She shot a hip and moved to stick her hands in her pockets, but they glanced off the smoothness of her climbing shorts. She crossed her arms, hoping she looked tough rather than defensive. “Look, about Luke Cannon. I don’t want you to think—”

He reached out and gripped her forearms, pulling her arms straight, forcing her guard down as he looked at her, blue eyes intent on her face. “I didn’t see you. I thought you’d disappeared on me.”

The raggedness in his voice had her biting back her first retort. Instead she turned her arms beneath
his hands, so his fingers slid down and, almost unconsciously, linked with hers.

Still aware of the curiosity of the other climbers, the weight of Otto’s stare from the shadows, she thought about pulling away, but didn’t. She couldn’t have said why. Instead she tightened her fingers on his. “I was just on the other side of the boulder. I’m okay.”

But she saw from his eyes that it wasn’t just that she’d been out of his line of sight. Something else had happened.

“What is it?” she asked, suddenly dreading the answer.

His voice went hollow when he said, “It’s Raine. She’s just been rushed to the ER. It looks like a stroke.”

ERIK USED HIS SHOULDER to shove through the ER doors and almost fell inside when they gave. He was aware of the curious stares from the other occupants of the waiting room when he stumped across the room at top speed. At his side, Meg strode grim-faced. She’d spent the short taxi ride on the phone, trying to reach her lab or one of the doctors on the case. But the lab was six-o’clock empty and the ER nurses were trained to fend off inquiries.

Immediate family only,
they’d said, and when she pressed doctor-to-nurse she’d gotten,
We don’t know anything yet.

When they arrived at the main desk, Meg had her hospital ID at the ready. “Raine Montgomery,” she snapped. “Which room?”

The lady behind the desk raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me,
Doctor?
”

Erik didn’t quite understand the sneer in her voice, but he’d been around enough deals-gone-bad to know where this one was headed. He nudged Meg out of the way—perhaps more forcefully than necessary—and slapped a warm, concerned expression on his face. “Forgive my friend. She’s worried. We both are. Raine is important to us.”

It wasn’t until he’d said the words that he realized they were true. Not in the way he suspected Raine wanted, but he’d come to trust her. He, who didn’t trust pretty women, trusted Raine. She was important to him.

Yeah,
an internal voice sneered,
so important that you’ve left her on her own while you chase a woman just like Celia.

The nurse’s expression softened a hint, but she said, “I really can’t give out information to nonfamily members.”

“I’m her boss, and I know the doc here comes on strong, but she means well. Cut us a break.” Erik lowered his voice. “Raine is divorced, she’s lost contact with her foster parents and I work her so hard she doesn’t have time for a social life. I count as her family.”

The nurse’s lips twitched almost involuntarily. “If she’s lost contact with her family, then who’s the ‘brother’ in there waiting on her? Big guy named Max.”

“Another friend,” Erik answered as he wondered why Meg’s second-in-command was taking a
personal interest. He leaned closer and lowered his voice. “What do you say? Can you help us out here?”

The nurse’s eyes cut from him to Meg and back before her chin dipped. “Okay. You can go on through. Third floor, Surgery Suite 3B.”

Erik gave the woman his best grin, then had to hurry to catch Meg. They rode the elevator in a silence broken only by a beep from his pocket, indicating that his data unit had received a text message.

“Turn that thing off,” Meg snapped. “You’re in a hospital.”

“Right. Sorry.” He hit the kill switch on the transmitter, turning the pocket-size unit into a nontransmitting PDA. When he clicked over to view the text message, he got nothing. He cursed and reminded himself to buy a new one ASAP. This was the second time in the past few days it had glitched out on him. “Stupid piece of garbage.”

Then the elevator doors opened and he saw Max sitting in a small, austerely furnished waiting area.

Meg crossed to him. “What’s the situation?”

They conferred briefly in med-speak that Erik interpreted by the expression on Meg’s face, which went from grave to graver, though she kept a professional front when she turned to him. “Raine’s in surgery. She developed a clot in her right lung, and may have suffered a small stroke.”

Though that had been the gist of Max’s initial phone call, it still didn’t make sense. “I thought she was being treated.”

“We were too late.” But the wrinkle in Meg’s
brow suggested it was more than that. She glanced at Max. “Maybe she’d formed some clots in larger, more resistant vessels and the IF-G treatment broke them apart and moved them.”

“Or?” Erik prompted, hearing the qualifier in her voice.

“Or maybe there’s something else going on. A trigger. A problem with the baby, perhaps, or an outside agent.”

“Preeclampsia?” Max said. He hadn’t moved from his seated position except to toss a magazine on a low table in the center of the room. His body was etched with fatigue and frustration. Professional or personal? Erik wasn’t sure.

Worse, he didn’t think he had the right to ask.

“It’s possible,” Meg agreed. “But what triggered the problem? Our treatment? Or something else?”

A door at the far end of the waiting area swung inward to reveal a gowned figure.

“How is she?” Erik demanded.

The surgeon, whose nametag said Oberman, looked past him and latched on to Meg. “Dr. Corning, can I have a word with you in private?”

“No,” Erik said flatly. “Say what you need to out here. If a mistake’s been made, I want to know about it right now.”

At Oberman’s inquiring glance, Meg nodded. “Go ahead.”

“If you insist,” the surgeon said, doubt evident in his voice. “I’ll start by saying she has a very good chance of pulling through. We got the pulmonary
embolism, and her vitals are rebounding nicely. They’re finishing up now, and from there she’ll go to recovery. You should be able to visit her within the hour.”

“And the baby?” Max asked quickly.

“Fine for now, but she’s probably looking at bed rest for the duration.”

Erik winced, knowing Raine would hate the confinement.

“What else?” Meg asked, voice tight.

“You’d just started her on interferon treatment, right?”

She nodded. “Today was day four. She seemed to be tolerating it well. We did blood work before and after, and—”