Gabriel West: Still The One

The chill of the dusty concrete struck through the crumpled cotton of her suit, making her shiver. Awkwardly, she pushed herself into a sitting position, ignoring his sharp demand that she stay where she was. She needed to get up, get moving.

Her mind flinched from the fact that she’d been hit on the head, but there was no other explanation for her to be lying on the garage floor. Her right hand was numb, and her arm and shoulder hurt, but she managed to wobble onto her knees. She heard West’s soft curse, then his hands closed on her arms, steadying her, and she didn’t complain because she was having trouble orienting herself at all.

He cupped her chin, his fingers startlingly hot against her skin, and abruptly his face snapped into focus.

He stared intently into her eyes. “What’s your name?”

Bemused, Tyler answered.

“Today’s date?”

Pinpointing the date was more difficult, but that was mostly because she hadn’t paid much attention to dates lately. She repeated the date. “I don’t have any memory loss.”

As disoriented as she felt, she knew she’d been mugged and knocked out. The sequence of events was burned into her mind like a series of freeze frames. She could remember the moment her briefcase had been wrenched from her grip, the flash of light when she’d been hit.

A car swept into the underground garage and she tensed, her breath coming in sharply.

“Don’t hit me,” West murmured, and for the first time she focused directly on his face: hot gold eyes, tanned olive skin, black hair tumbled and loose around his shoulders—the glitter of a silver stud in his ear.

He looked as if he’d just rolled out of bed, sleepy and unkempt, as alert as a cat, and through the throbbing whirl of nausea and exhaustion she wondered—and not for the first time—if he slept alone.

Something grabbed in her throat, her heart, a hot pulse of emotion that shook her to the core.

Hit West? Now there was a fantasy…. She just needed her head to stop spinning first.

His fingers closed warmly around her clenched fist, making her aware of the numbing ache in her knuckles, the symphony of pain that stretched from her fingertips all the way to her shoulder, skipping her face, then throbbing somewhere deep in her skull.

“Let me see,” he demanded softly. “Open your hand.”

For the craziest moment she thought he’d said, “Open your heart.”

She couldn’t help the bemused smile that twitched at her lips. The pain aside, she felt ridiculous—giddy—like a drunk on a bender. “Last time I heard, you weren’t a medical doctor.”

His mouth curved in a quick, hard smile. “I’ve been called a lot of names, but never that.”

Reluctantly, she uncurled her fingers. God, she hated it when she got hurt—hated to look at the damage. She heard his rough intake of breath.

“Oh, jeez, you belted him. Where in hell did you learn to hit like that?”

She ignored his question in favor of surveying her swollen knuckles, and the grazes decorating them. “I broke his jaw,” she said with satisfaction. “I felt it go.”

“Are you hurt anywhere else?”

She glanced around and saw her handbag lying beside her. With an effort of will, she snagged the strap. At least she still had her credit cards and her driver’s license, and they hadn’t gotten her car keys. “Yeah, in my heart. They took my laptop. The bastards took my laptop.”

She thought he said, “When did you get so tough?” then a wave of dizziness caught her.

She leaned into his shoulder and gulped down a deep breath, which didn’t do much to alleviate the dizziness or the pain, then wound an arm around his neck, searching for the leverage to get to her feet. It struck her that in the last five years West had never been so useful.

She pushed against his shoulder, but a warm palm cupped her nape, effectively holding her in place and making her feel as weak as a day-old kitten.

“Don’t you ever give up? Stay still. You’ve got a head wound and you’re bleeding. I’m going to check you out a bit more, then get you to a hospital.”

“I’m not going to a hospital. I hate hospitals.”

“That’s one thing we’ve got in common.”

As he shrugged out of his leather jacket and draped it around her shoulders, swamping her in heavy, soft warmth, the rich scent of leather, she worried at the oddness of the terse comment. As far as she was concerned the only thing they actually had in common was a marriage certificate. Blinking, she resisted the urge to let her forehead rest on his shoulder again, or even worse, snuggle into the curve of his neck. She wasn’t a leaner—she couldn’t remember the last time she’d leaned on anyone—but right now the temptation was almost too much. She’d been exhausted before the attack; now she felt as though she was swimming through molasses. “I feel…strange—”

“Stay awake.”

She felt his fingers moving gently over her scalp. He found a tender spot and she winced.

His breath stirred in her hair. “Oh yeah, he hit you good. You’ve got a lump, and a cut that’s going to need stitching. Go to sleep and I’ll tan your hide.”

The unexpected humor would have made her smile if she hadn’t felt so startled and so sick. “Promises,” she muttered, then everything receded, slipping into blackness again.

A hoarse curse scraped from West’s throat as Tyler sagged into his chest. He caught her hard against him, lowered her to the concrete, then on another soft curse, jerked his T-shirt over his head, tore a strip of white interlock off and bandaged the seeping cut on the side of her head. When he lifted her into his arms, her head lolled against his shoulder and fear shafted through him. Head wounds were dicey things, she’d wake up with the mother of all headaches at the very least. He refused to think about other possibilities.

Seconds later he strapped Tyler into the passenger seat of his car, slid behind the wheel and searched one-handed for his cell phone as he took the ramp out of the underground garage.

He found the phone, pressed the emergency code, and waited for the operator to put him through to Accident and Emergency. When the hospital had all the details, he settled down to driving, the damp night air chill on his bare skin as he shoved the car through traffic. Rain continued to stream down in a light, steady drizzle that rose up off the slick streets as a thin mist, wreathing the fast-moving, raucous flow of inner-city traffic.

West’s heart was pounding, his belly tight with apprehension. He felt savage, wary and electrified by what had just happened. His mind fastened on the moment when the elevator doors had opened and Tyler’s dark gaze had found his, hooked somewhere deep inside him and clung. That moment had almost stopped his heart.

He’d moved into the apartment in Tyler’s building with the specific purpose of getting close to his wife, but a part of him hadn’t believed Tyler would ever allow him close again.

Just minutes ago she’d all but crawled inside his skin.

The lights ahead flashed red. He swore beneath his breath, considered running the light, then braked.

The abrupt jolting motion sent a shaft of pain through Tyler’s head. She winced and opened her eyes, for a moment disoriented by the glare of lights off rain-slick roads, and West sitting beside her, his torso bare. The last thing she remembered she’d been kneeling on cold concrete, leaning on West, and he’d been wearing a T-shirt.

The lights changed. West accelerated and, gingerly, she straightened, keeping her head as still as possible. The second she moved, she felt the touch of West’s gaze as powerfully as if he’d reached out and physically touched her. “How long have I been out?”

“Five minutes. We’ll be at the hospital in two. And don’t argue. Aside from needing stitches you’ve probably got a concussion.”

“That’s a safe bet.” Her head throbbed with a deep, frightening ache and she was seeing colors. That was the clincher. The only other time she could remember seeing colors had been when she’d been thrown from a horse at age thirteen, without the benefit of a protective helmet.

West turned into a car-park entrance and pulled into a space. Tyler recognized the A&E entrance of Auckland Hospital.

She reached up to touch the bandage that was wound around her head, and somehow managed to misjudge the distance so that her fingers connected with her head more violently than she’d intended. Hot pain flashed through her skull, and her stomach rolled.

She sucked in a shallow breath, then another, and groped for the door handle. “I’m going to be sick.”

Instead of the door releasing she must have hit the window button because glass slid down and damp air flowed across her face. She heard a soft imprecation. Seconds later her door swung open and West leaned in, released her seat belt, and she found herself hauled out into the rain. His arms came around her as her stomach cramped painfully, anchoring her against him as she emptied the meagre contents of her stomach into the shrubbery bordering the car park.

When she was finished she sagged against him, uncaring that it was raining and that they were both getting wet. An odd peacefulness settled over her at his silent support, his heat and strength engulfing her. All of the issues that existed between them aside, she was too needy, in too much pain, and too disoriented to do anything but accept his help.