The Case of the Mesmerizing Boss

He got up and went to the window, stretching again. He was tired. He hadn’t slept since they’d brought her in. All through the operation, he’d paced and waited for news. It had been the longest night he’d ever spent.

A soft sound from the bed caught his attention. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stood beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. The unbecoming hospital gown did nothing for her. She was too thin. He scowled as he looked at her, his mind on the coldness he’d shown her over the years, the unrelenting hostility that had, eventually, turned a shy, loving girl into a quiet, insecure woman. Tess had wanted to love him, and he’d slapped her down, hard. It hadn’t been cruelty so much as a raging desire that he’d started to satisfy in the only way he knew to satisfy it—roughly, savagely. But Tess had been a virgin, and he hadn’t known. She’d run from him, in tears, barely in time to save her honor. Afterward, she’d never come near him again. His pride hadn’t allowed him to go after her, to explain that tenderness wasn’t something he was used to showing women. Her frantic departure in tears had shattered him. She didn’t know that.

He’d been antagonistic to hide the hurt the experience had dealt him, so it wasn’t surprising that she thought he hated her. He’d even tried to convince himself he didn’t mind the fact that Tess avoided him like the plague. To save his pride, he’d even made it appear as if his actions had been premeditated, to make her leave him alone.

He thought back to those dark days after he’d been shot. Everyone had deserted him. His mother had always hated him, despite her pretense for the sake of appearances. Even Jane, his wife, had walked out on him and filed for divorce, after being blatantly unfaithful to him. But Tess had been with him every step of the way, making him live, making him fight. Tess had been the light that brought him out of the darkness. And he’d repaid her loving kindness with cruelty. It hurt him to remember that. It hurt him more to realize that she could have died last night.

A faint tap on the door announced the nurse’s entrance. She smiled at Dane and proceeded to check Tess’s vital signs.

“Lucky, wasn’t she?” the woman asked absently, as she waited for the thermometer to register. “Just a few inches to the side and she’d be dead.”

The impact of the idle remark was as sharp as a tack. He blinked, his dark gaze steady on Tess’s closed eyes. If she died, he’d be alone. He’d have no one.

The enormity of the thought drove him out of the room with a murmured excuse. He walked down the long corridor without seeing it, his mind humming all the way to the black Mercedes he’d had Helen drive to the parking lot for him while Tess was in surgery. He still had to call the office and tell them how she was. He checked his watch; it was time they were at work. He’d stop by on the way to his apartment to shower and change his clothes.

He unlocked the car, but he didn’t get in, his hand on the door handle as he stared up at the hospital. Tess wasn’t a relative in any sense at all. Their parents had never married. But they were both only children and their parents were dead.

With a rough sigh, he opened the car door and got in. He didn’t start it immediately. He stared at the blood on his sleeve. Tess’s blood. He’d watched it pulse out of her in the darkness as if it were his own. She could have died in his arms.

Once she’d been such a bright, happy girl, so eager to please him, so obviously in love with him. He closed his eyes. He’d killed that sweet feeling in her. He’d frightened it right out of her with his clumsy headlong rush at her that afternoon, when he’d given in finally to the need that had been tearing him apart. He’d never wanted anyone so much. But he knew nothing of tenderness, and he’d terrified her. It hadn’t been deliberate, but maybe, subconsciously, he’d wanted her to back away, before she became his world. A failed marriage made a man gun-shy, Dane thought bitterly, looking back to the time three years ago when Tess and he had first met….

From the evening that Tess and Dane had first met—so long ago, at a restaurant where their parents had invited them to get acquainted—they saw very little of each other except on holidays. Dane and his wife, Jane, were not getting along. And even his mother, Nita, had mentioned cattily that Jane had been seen with another man. It was almost as if it pleased Nita to know that Dane’s wife was being openly unfaithful to him….

Those days had not been good ones for Dane. Then, on the morning that Wyatt Meriwether and Nita Lassiter announced their engagement, Dane had walked into a shootout with some bank robbers and had wound up in the county emergency room fighting for his life.

Tess had rushed to the hospital as soon as she knew. Her father drove her, but when they discovered that Nita was still at home and that Jane couldn’t be found, he’d left.

But Tess stayed, that night and the next day. Once she convinced a floor nurse that he was going to be her stepbrother, and that he had no one else, they allowed her to see him in intensive care. She held his hand, smoothed his brow and cringed at the damage the bullets had done, because she’d had a look at the torn flesh of his shoulder, spine and leg where the bullets had penetrated.

“Will I walk?” he managed in a pain-laced voice when he regained consciousness.

“Of course,” Tess said with a gentle smile. She touched his lean face and pushed the hair away from his forehead with a possessive feeling.

His eyes closed and he groaned. “Where’s my mother?” he asked harshly. “Where’s Jane?”

She hesitated.

His black eyes opened again, fury in them. “She was sleeping with my partner,” he said harshly. “He told me….”

She grimaced.

He laughed coldly and went back to sleep.

In the weeks that followed, Dane’s life changed. Jane came to see him once, stiffly apologetic, only to inform him that she’d filed for divorce and was remarrying the minute the divorce was final. His mother peered in the door, remarked that he seemed prepared to live after all and went sailing with Wyatt.

Tess, infuriated with the rest of the family, devoted herself to Dane’s recovery.

God knew, he needed someone, she thought. What he’d found out about Jane had very likely distracted him enough to get him shot. Then Jane walked out on him. His own mother had deserted him. Not only that, but he even lost his job, because the surgeons agreed that he might never be fit enough for full-time work again because of the damage to his spine.

When they told him the bad news, he almost gave up, he was so depressed.

“This won’t do,” Tess said gently, recognizing instinctively the lack of life in his lean face. She knelt beside the chair where he was sitting up for a few minutes and took his hand in hers, holding tightly. “You can’t give up, Dane,” she told him. “They only said that you might not be able to work—not that you will. You can’t let them do this to you.”

“Can’t? They already have,” he said tersely, averting his eyes. “Why don’t you get out, too?”

“You’re my almost-big-brother,” she said. “I want you to get well.”

He glared at her. “I don’t need a teenage sister.”

“You’ll get one, all the same, when our parents marry,” she said pleasantly. “Come on, cheer up. You’re tough. You were a ranger, after all.”

His face closed up. “Was is right.”

“So you won’t be in prime condition for a while. So what? Listen, Dane, there are plenty of things you can do with your law-enforcement background. God doesn’t close doors without opening windows. This can be an opportunity, if you’ll just look at it in that light.”

He didn’t speak. But he listened. His dark eyes narrowed as they searched hers. “I don’t like women,” he began.

“I guess not. With all due respect, your life hasn’t been blessed wtih nice ones.”

“I married Jane to spite my mother. Not that I didn’t want her at the time. She was all set to settle down and have children. That was all she wanted.” He averted his face, as if the memory of her desertion was killing him. “Get out, Tess. Go play nurse somewhere else.”

“Can’t.” She shrugged. “Who’ll keep you from wallowing in self-pity?”

“Damn you!” he snapped, his eyes flashing warning signals as they met hers.

She grinned, refusing to be intimidated. That was the first spark of interest she’d seen since they’d told him he couldn’t work. “That’s better,” she said. “How about a cup of coffee?”

He hesitated. But after a minute, he gave in to the irritating need to be fussed over. He nodded and she almost ran in her haste to get to the coffee machine down the hall. He stared after her with helpless need. He’d never been treated like this by a woman, by any woman. It was new and unsettling to have someone care about him, want to do things for him. With his mother, and especially Jane, it had been, “What can you do for me?” Tess was different. Too different. She was getting under his skin, and not just with her warm affection. He looked at her body and felt a kind of desire he hadn’t experienced in years. She aroused him as Jane never had. That, he thought worriedly, could present some problems later on. She was only nineteen, even if she was probably experienced. Most girls were these days. He closed his eyes. Well, he’d cross that bridge later. Not now.

He began to think about what she’d said, about a new profession. His lips pursed thoughtfully and all at once he began to smile as wheels turned in his mind.

As the weeks passed, Tess came with time-clock regularity, sitting with him, talking to him. He accepted her presence and finally began to let his guard down with her. They grew closer, even as he fought his headlong attraction to her.

The attraction slowly began to undermine his efforts to be kind to her. He was overly irritable one Monday morning when she came to his apartment and found him lying listlessly in bed.

“You again? What the hell do you want?” he’d asked coldly.

Used to his flashes of temper by now, she only smiled. “I want you to get well,” she said simply.

He lay back and closed his eyes. “Go away. Aren’t you late for school?”

“I graduated. It’s summer.”

“Then get a job.”

“I’m going to secretarial school at night.”

“And working during the day?”