Rising Heat (106 page)

“Cutter is dead.”

I can’t even begin to describe the sense of relief that floated through me. It was over. The nightmare was really over. I had so many questions, but at this moment, all I wanted to do was go see Hawk. Before I could voice my request, or even think about trying to move again, I fell asleep, overcome by the inky blackness.

The next time I opened my eyes, the room seemed darker. Had I slept all day? I heard a noise out in the hallway, saw a nurse moving past my doorway, then a white-coated figure.

I assessed myself, felt like I was a little more “with it” and made an attempt to move. Mistake. I winced at the pain that small effort elicited within me.

I closed my eyes, and then with an effort, I open them and lifted my head off the pillow. The sheet and blanket was pulled up to my armpits, my arms outside of the covers. On the index finger of my right hand was a plastic gadget, like a giant clothes pin. An IV line was taped to the inside of my forearm. My left arm, from the base of my fingers up to my elbow, was wrapped in a thick white bandage.

My head hurt, but not as bad as it had hurt in the cellar. Once again, everything came back to me in a rush. A shiver of fear raced through me, but I managed to tamp it down. It was over. Cutter was dead.

“How are you feeling this evening, Tracy?”

I startled and turned to the sound of the female voice and saw a nurse gazing down at me with a gentle smile.

“Thirsty,” I managed.

She nodded and moved around the foot of my bed toward the bedside table. She reached for a small covered plastic cup with a straw on it. She maneuvered the cup so that the straw was closer to my lips.

“Take small sips for now,” she warned. “It will hurt when you swallow, but there’s no permanent damage.”

I sucked, felt the moisture flow through my mouth, and then swallowed. She was right. It hurt like hell.

“Hawk?” I managed to croak.

She placed the cup back on the bedside table. “We just moved him out of intensive care—”

My eyes widened and I opened my mouth to speak. Intensive care?

She placed a comforting hand on my shoulder. “He was in surgery yesterday morning. The doctor repaired the injury from the stab wound to his upper chest. It didn’t pierce his lung, but it did some internal damage. He’s in a room just down the hall.”

“How long… how long have I been here?” My voice was still raspy and hoarse, but a little clearer, at least I thought so. And Hawk. So close and yet so far. I desperately wanted to see him. I think the nurse read my mind.

“You’ve been here two days. Tomorrow we’ll get you out of bed, get you moving around a little. You can go see him then, all right?”

I nodded and then fell back to sleep.

When I woke next, the room was bright. I glanced around, realized that I felt better. Stronger. I noticed the clock high on the wall opposite the bed. It was the middle of the morning. My head didn’t throb quite as badly as it had. The tubes were gone from my right arm. I shifted my feet, just wanting to test. I felt like I had been run over by a truck, especially my right thigh. With my right hand, I felt my leg beneath the covers, felt a bandage there.

But I was alive. A miracle, really. And a miracle that Hawk had survived as well. And then I thought about Cutter. I didn’t want to, but I did. My mind drifted back to the cellar, to the horror I’d experienced there. The overwhelming fear. The certainty that I was going to die.

I was just thinking about—

“Oh good, you’re awake.”

I nearly jumped out of my skin, then turned to look toward the door and saw a nurse, a different one than before. She was smiling at me. Comforting and understanding.

“Someone’s been asking for you, getting awfully impatient too.”

I smiled, knowing exactly who it was. I felt the sting as the cut on my lip stretched and winced. “Hawk.”

She nodded. “I’ll be back in just a minute.”

She disappeared briefly and returned only seconds later, guiding a wheelchair this time. “Would you like to get up and go see him?”

Now that was the understatement of the year. I nodded and then tried to lift myself off the bed, startled by how weak I was.

“I’ll help you.” She leaned down and gently pulled the covers down. I glanced down to see one of those ugly hospital gowns. I didn’t care. Just the thought of seeing Hawk, seeing with my own eyes that he was still alive, had my heart thumping with excitement. The nurse helped me sit up.

A wave of dizziness nearly toppled me back onto the bed. She kept a steady hand on my upper back though, murmuring that the dizziness would pass, to give myself time to acclimate to a sitting position. Reminding me to breathe deeply.

I did, anxious to follow every instruction she gave me, knowing that if I did, it would only be moments before I could see Hawk again. After several moments, she asked me how I felt.

“A little woozy, but better.”

My voice still didn’t sound like my own, but I knew that in time it would. The physical injuries would heal. The psychological ones would take a little longer, I was sure.

The nurse asked me if I could sit up by myself for a minute and I nodded. She watched me for a second as she took her hand off my back, then quickly moved around the base of the bed toward the bedside table. She opened the drawer and reached inside, pulling out a package of slipper socks. She tore the wrapping off the socks and then moved around back to my side of the bed. She crouched down, sliding the socks onto my feet. They reached my ankles and had non-slip material embedded into the soles.

I didn’t think I’d be walking anywhere and struggled with my impatience to go see Hawk. Then I realized I had to stand before I could transfer to the wheelchair and understood.

At any rate, in a matter of minutes I was sitting in the wheelchair, surprisingly exhausted by that little effort. She covered my legs with a little lap quilt. I felt like an old woman. Then she was arranging the leg rests, gently grasping and guiding my feet onto the metal foot supports, taking care not to move my right leg too quickly.

“Ready?” she asked.

I nodded, and then changed my mind. “Wait,” I gasped, reaching my good hand up to my hair. “Can I comb my hair first?” I was sure it was a mess.

She smiled at me, returned to the bedside table, and retrieved a comb. She handed it to me and several swipes later, I looked up at her. “Do I look okay?”

She nodded. “You look fine.”

I doubted it, but smiled and nodded. As she maneuvered the wheelchair carefully out of the room, my pulse pounded with anticipation. In the hallway, I saw several patients, some walking with nurses’ aides, some by themselves, one taking one slow step at a time, holding onto an IV stand with one hand, a hallway railing on the other. A physical therapist or a nurse, I couldn’t tell which, walked close behind him with a wheelchair.

At the end of the hallway, the nurse paused in front of the last room on the right, just before the hallway ended into a T-shape. And then she was wheeling me through the doorway. The moment I saw Hawk on the bed, sitting nearly upright, turning to look at the movement in the doorway, I couldn’t hold back my cry of relief. I lifted a hand to my mouth at my first sight of him.

His chest was bared to the waist, a thick bandage covering his right shoulder. There was hardly a spot on him that wasn’t bruised. His left eye was still swollen, as was his right cheekbone. The cut on the side of his face had been covered with a thin white bandage. I was sure it had been stitched. His lower lip was still swollen, but he still smiled when he saw me.

“Hawk!”

His name left my lips with a combination of relief, bubbly exuberance, and affection. We had made it out of that cellar alive. His eyes searched me from top to bottom. The nurse wheeled me to the bedside and I reached for his hand, his arm resting on the bed.

Though he couldn’t move his arm much, he clasped my hand tightly in my own. Tears filled my eyes as I gazed at him. The nurse locked the wheelchair in place, then muttered a few words about having to take care of something, but I was only half-listening. She quickly left the room, closing the door softly behind her.

I leaned forward as far as I could, wanting to do nothing more than climb onto the bed beside Hawk, to cuddle within his embrace. That would have to wait.

“I wasn’t sure…” My voice faded. I began to weep. He cupped his palm over my cheek, his thumb wiping away my tears.

“Everything will be all right,” he said. “It’s over now—”

A knock on the door interrupted him. He made a frustrated noise and then sighed, looking toward the door. “Come in.”

The door opened and to my surprise, Detective Westin walked in. When he saw me in the wheelchair, he froze. He looked uncomfortable, and then continued into the room.

“Glad to see you up and about, Tracy,” he said. He glanced at Hawk. “You still look like shit.”

Hawk merely offered a lame shrug.

Westin looked from Hawk to me, then back again. “I have some news.” He paused.

I could tell that maybe he didn’t want to talk about it in front of me. “Tell us.”

Westin glanced at me, as if uncertain. As much as I wanted to forget all about Cutter and everything that happened, I knew I couldn’t bury my head in the sand. If I was going to deal with the aftermath, I had to know. I nodded.

Westin returned the nod and then spoke, first looking at me. “We found you at Cutter’s house, just outside of town. He inherited it after his parents died.” He glanced at Hawk. “We found a scrapbook.”

I swallowed. A scrapbook?

“And several bodies buried in the woods behind his house.”

Hawk watched him, waiting for the rest. Westin sighed.

“There’s photographs of nineteen women in the scrapbook, dating back to when he was in high school.”

I gasped. Nineteen women?
Nineteen?

“There may be more, but we may never know for sure.” He shook his head. “All these years… not a sign, not a clue. He was able to fool everyone. You, me, everyone in town. There’s talk about burning his house down, obliterating it.”

I turned to look at Hawk. He looked… I wasn’t even sure how to define it. Sad? Angry? Somewhere in between? I felt much the same. I turned back to Westin. He had dark circles under his eyes and his shoulders sagged. He saw me watching him and then straightened his back, offering an encouraging smile at both of us, which surprised me.

“The doc says you’ll both be out of here in a day or two. If you’re up to it in the next couple of days, I’ll be needing a full statement…”

“We’ll take care of it as soon as we can,” Hawk told him.

Westin nodded and then turned to leave the room. “I’ll keep you updated.”

And then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him. I turned to Hawk. He watched me. I knew I still had to process the events of the past days, had to come to terms with what happened, about the truth about Cutter and what he had done, what he had been doing all these years. I imagined it was much the same for Hawk. And Westin. But at this moment, I didn’t want to think about Cutter or his sick mind.

All I wanted was to fill my mind with this image of Hawk, and revel in the emotions I felt.

“I want you to know I meant what I said.” I ran my thumb along the skin of his hand. “When we were down in the cellar. When I told you—”

“When you told me how you felt about me,” he finished.

I stared at him in surprise. He
had
heard me? He gave me a soft smile.

“I love you too, Tracy Whitcomb,” he said. “When I got to the motel room and saw that you were gone, likely in the hands of the stalker — Cutter — I realized how important you were to me.” He paused. “Realized the truth of the matter, that I loved you. I love you. I know we haven’t known each other for long, but maybe we can change that.”

I stared at him. My heart began to thump. “I love you too, Hawk.” I had never been so sure of anything in my life. I knew that it would take a while to put the past behind me, for us both to deal with what happened. But now there was a glimmer of hope. Something positive to come out of all this.

“What would you say about spending the winter up at my cabin?”

His remark left me reeling — with pleasure. My head filled with images of his cabin, so secluded, so rustic. I was startled by the idea, but I rather liked it. The privacy. The thought of spending uninterrupted hours on his bed, naked, exploring everything there was to know about him, his body, and how I reacted to it.

I got hot just thinking about him, naked. In spite of my present condition, and his, my sexual attraction to him burgeoned instantly. I grinned at him, then swept my gaze down his body. I saw the obvious movement just below his waist.

He laughed.

The rumble in his chest excited me. I wanted to do nothing more than climb up on the bed, to wrap my fingers around his cock and give him the most glorious blow job he had ever experienced, but that would have to wait, at least another day or two.

“And what would we do all winter long, snowed in at your cabin?”

Again he chuckled, deep in his throat, his gaze once again glancing down to his groin. His growing erection was obvious, forming a tent. I reached out and grasped his hard cock through the blanket with my good hand, squeezing it gently.

He made a noise in his throat and then shifted his gaze from the sight of his cock in my hand to my face, looking at me with a lifted eyebrow.

“I can think of a thing or two,” he said.

Again, his words took me by surprise. Pleasant surprise, no doubt about it. My heart trip-hammered with excitement, with hope. I didn’t have to say anything. He saw the look in my eyes. “Sounds like a good idea to me, but…”

“But what?” he asked with a lifted eyebrow.

I glanced pointedly at my hand wrapped around his cock. “What would you say to sealing this deal with a kiss?”

He laughed softly. “And how do you suggest we handle that, considering we’re both half-hobbled?”

I winked. “Just watch me.”

I
was released from the hospital first. I was discharged three days after Detective Weston found me on the steps of Detective… former Detective Cutter’s back porch steps. Hawk would have to stay in the hospital for several more days, maybe a little longer depending on how well his wounds healed and to make sure none displayed signs of infection.