Just A Little Bit Married?

The sun had been up for twenty minutes when Sara Grace finished her first lap. The water was cooler than the air, almost chilly. It flowed like liquid silk over her skin. Sara loved the feel of it as much as she liked the pull and warmth of her muscles as she stroked and kicked. Water was innately sensual. Here, for a little while, she could feel sensual, too. Here she was lithe and graceful and quite unlike her usual self.

As she slid through the water she let her mind slide into a daydream. It was better than thinking about what bullets, fired at a rate of 950 rounds per minute, could do to a human body. Like hers.

Sara had never had much time for daydreaming, so she wasn’t very good at it. She vaguely imagined the feel of strong, male arms around her. The look of a man’s hard, muscular body. A teasing flash of a smile. The combination brought a little tingle of excitement to her own body.

When she reached the south end of the pool she paused long enough to assure herself that the police officer still stood by the gate, watching over her. Then she flipped around and started back.

What had happened to the poor orderly last night had left her terrified. No surprise there. Sara knew she was a coward. But, being an experienced coward, she knew how to banish her fears, at least temporarily. Fear was an ice demon, tight and rigid. It had a hard time holding on to a body warm and loose from exercise. By the time she reached the other end of the pool she made her turn automatically, her mind drifting back to the man she’d been fantasizing about, a man she’d stitched up six months ago.

She’d been on her third night in a new job in a new city when he’d shown up at the ER. Sara remembered the number of stitches she’d put in the gash in the man’s forearm, and she remembered the way his chest had looked—hard, with a dusting of soft brown hair in the center.

Once again she felt that pleasant little tingle of heat.

Her recently developed fantasy life was strangely soothing, rather like having a secret place to go when life became too large and scary. A bit childish, maybe, she thought, but it hurt no one. She did feel slightly guilty for drawing on her memory of a patient’s anatomy for her daydreams. But he’d only been her patient for a couple of hours, after all. She’d never see him again.

Sara stroked smoothly down the length of the pool and thought about the man she would never see again. A dangerously attractive man—sexy, charming—oh, yes, he’d been all of that and more. More, as in possibly wanted by the police. He’d claimed the cut on his arm was an accident, but Sara knew a knife wound when she sewed one up. She’d reported it, of course. He’d sneaked out of the examining room before the officer came to get his statement.

Sara was nearly at the south end of the pool again when a man’s voice interrupted her daydream. “Dr. Grace?”

Shock and fear jolted through her. Her head went up. Her hand, outstretched at the end of a stroke and ready to grab the side of the pool, froze. In that split second she saw not one, but two men. The detective she’d spoken with so often since the shooting knelt by the edge of the pool, his face shadowed by his black Stetson.

Behind him stood the man of her dreams.

Sara nearly drowned.

After several embarrassing seconds of splashing around like a two-year-old in a wading pool, she managed to grab the edge of the pool. She drew herself up with as much dignity as she could. “Yes?”

“Sorry,” Lieutenant Rasmussin said in the Texas drawl Sara had almost gotten used to hearing in the past six months. He was a hard-looking man with a thick mustache and odd, pale eyes. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I brought someone I’d like you to meet.”

Her eyes flicked to the man behind him.

He reminded Sara of a young Harrison Ford, cocky and entirely too charming, his face intriguingly creased when he smiled. His jeans were faded almost to white. His T-shirt was a truly ugly shade of purple, covering a chest that surely couldn’t be the peak of masculine perfection she remembered.

The crooked grin he flashed at her was the same, though. And, oh, heavens, she felt the same little sizzle of heat. Except it wasn’t that little.

She cleared her throat. “We’ve met.”

One of his eyebrows went up quizzically. “We have?”

It was absurd to feel disappointed. She wasn’t a woman who made a lasting impression. And surely she hadn’t wanted a man like him to be the exception? “I sewed up your arm a few months ago, Mr. MacReady.”

His lips twitched. “Uh-oh.” He glanced at the other man. “You were right about her memory for faces. She, uh, knows me as Eddie MacReady.”

Lieutenant Rasmussin’s expression barely changed, yet he managed to look disgusted. “You might have said something.”

“I didn’t know who your witness was. You’ve kept their names from the press, though God alone knows how.”

“Apparently it didn’t do much good, since Javiero found the other one.” Tom Rasmussin sighed and stood. “Explanations are obviously in order. Dr. Grace, this reprobate is my brother, also known as Sergeant Ferdinand Rasmussin of the Houston Police Department Also known by various other names, including Eddie MacReady. He works undercover and he has a sick sense of humor. Raz, meet Dr. Sara Grace.”

She stared at the reprobate. He was a police officer? Now that she looked closely, she saw differences between her memory of him and the way he looked today. His clothes were vastly different, of course. This man’s hair was shorter and lacked the blond highlights she remembered. And his eyes. There was something different about his eyes, but she couldn’t pin down what it was.

He smiled at her, a smile as slow and as sweet as the chocolate-candy color of those eyes. “Call me Raz,” he said, looking almost bashful, as if he should have a hat to doff and boots to scuff in the dirt. “Glad to meet you under my right name this time, ma’am.”

Detective Rasmussin scowled at his brother. “Stop playing around, Raz.”

He shrugged. “I’ve got to do something to counter the impression she has of me. Eddie’s not a very nice boy.”

Sara was confused. On several levels. “You, ah, you want your brother to take over for the other officer?” she asked the detective. “You’re assigning him to stay with me until I get a bodyguard?”

“Not exactly. Raz is on leave from the force right now. Do you want to get out and dry off, Dr. Grace, before I explain?”

Get out—in front of these two men—in her swimsuit?

Sara’s face heated. Nerves fluttered in her stomach, and her throat closed. The rising tide of symptoms was only too familiar, but no easier to combat because of it. She reminded herself that her swimsuit was a conservative one-piece. And these men didn’t care what she looked like. They wouldn’t be checking out her body for flaws. Besides, she’d look more ridiculous if she stayed in the pool.

But real shyness couldn’t be reasoned away. She was barely able to stammer, “I’ll, uh—my towel. It’s—if you’d just—”

The wrong man figured out what her fractured request meant. The one she thought of as Eddie MacReady turned and grabbed her towel from the webbed chair where she’d left it. He crouched near the edge of the pool.

“Here.” He smiled as he held out the towel.

This was awful. He was so close, and looking right at her. Sara shut her eyes and heaved herself up and out. She sat on the edge of the pool and twisted to take the towel from him, eager to get it wrapped safely around herself. Her fingers trembled slightly when they brushed his.

Heat. Quick. Purifying. It zipped through her in a sudden rush. Just that fast, her shakes and sick nerves were gone, washed out by something stronger. Her hand clenched the towel. She stared at him, astonished.

His eyes were wide and startled and, for a split second, completely unguarded.

“Do you want to go in?” Lieutenant Rasmussin said.

His voice brought Sara back to reality. Partway back, at least, enough to realize she still sat there in her skin-hugging swimsuit. She blushed and hastily wrapped the thick terry towel around her. “Yes,” she said, and pushed to her feet. “I’ll fix coffee.”

Now, of course, he would see what had been hidden by the water. But while Sara was painfully self-conscious about some things, she had her pride. She was proud of the fact that she walked at all, and damned if she would be ashamed of the scars.

Her back was straight even if her gait couldn’t be when she limped to the chair where she’d left her cane. She started for her cottage then, and she didn’t look back.

Two

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Raz demanded in a low voice. The sound of the shower his subject was taking traveled clearly through the wall to where he and his brother stood in the kitchen of her dollhouse-sized cottage.

Sara Grace lived on Highpoint Avenue—typical doctor territory, expensive and exclusive. She rented from a doctor, in fact—the chief of surgery at her hospital. But Sara’s home was a tiny “mottter-in-law” house built behind the mansion by a previous owner. Her kitchen was a narrow, unfussy room with several plants hung in front of the long window in lieu of curtains. Like the rest of the house, it had wooden floors. A basket in the center of the table held a miniature holly bush covered with red berries and tiny red bows. Beneath it was a red place mat with a holiday border.

Christmas. Now that Raz had noticed the holiday, he saw it everywhere.

The coffeemaker that sat at one end of the green-and-whitetiled counter gave a last burp and gurgle. Tom set his hat on the counter and reached for the pot. “Tell you what?”

“That she was injured when Javiero went gunning for his rival at the emergency room.” Damn, he felt edgy. Automatically he patted his pocket, then pulled his hand away when he remembered. No cigarettes.

“She wasn’t. I don’t know why she limps, but it’s not from the shooting. Want a cup?”