Just A Little Bit Married?

She closed her eyes. Later. She’d think about all this later. Right now she had to sleep or she wouldn’t be alert tonight, when her patients needed her.

Ten minutes later she slept.

Memorial Hospital was a new building in an older part of the city. Some of the homes in the area were shaded by hundred-year-old elms. The nearest residents belonged to professional clubs, historical associations and the Junior League. They parked Volvos and Mercedes in their curving driveways, along with the occasional sports car.

Not so very far away, however, lay a section of Houston that was neither new nor old. Simply tired. Poverty wore down a neighborhood fast. For three blocks on either side of that stretch of Burroughs Avenue, people were careful about what colors they wore, who they spoke to. The gangs had moved in two years ago.

Sara lived in the pleasant section, not far from the hospital where she worked. Normally she drove her four-year-old Ford Taurus to work. That night she rode in Raz’s black-as-night muscle car. He made conversation while she sat, stiff and mostly silent and all too aware of him.

Even after she arrived at work she was aware of him nearby, watching. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like the way her eyes kept straying toward him, or the fact that she felt safer with him there. Oh, she really didn’t like that. Her independence was too dearly won for her to appreciate his presence or the way it made her feel.

Halfway into her shift, Sara stood at the nurses’ station, writing out a prescription for the toddler in 3-B. Raz stood at the end of the hall, talking to one of the security guards. At least he’d hidden his gun and shoulder holster beneath a jacket tonight. Not that he would win any fashion awards. He wore a beige sports jacket with a green T-shirt, dirty running shoes and those sexy, faded-to-white jeans.

“Too dreamy for words,” a young, nasal voice was saying. “What do you suppose he’s doing here, anyway? The way he keeps staring gives me goose bumps.”

Sara’s eyes flickered up. She saw him standing there. Watching. It didn’t matter what he wore, did it? People noticed him. Women, especially, looked at him, not his clothes. They thought about what lay under those clothes, and whether they could get him to turn that smile on them.

Sara knew that, because she kept having the same thoughts.

“Hadn’t you heard? He’s Dr. Grace’s bodyguard.” That came from Lynn Daniels, a cheerful dumpling of a woman. She was an excellent triage nurse, and the only person on this shift who was shorter than Sara. “Quite a hunk, isn’t he?”

“Dr. Grace?” Jenny Burgoyen’s round face turned toward Sara. Her eyes were big with astonishment beneath eyebrows plucked to thinly penciled lines. “He’s yours?”

Was it so amazing that a gorgeous man would associate with her, even for pay? Sara handed the prescription to the charge nurse. “Not exactly,” she said shortly. “I’m only renting, not buying. Foster, please see that 3-B’s mother gets this prescription.”

Jenny giggled, Foster took the prescription, and Lynn handed Sara the next patient’s chart. “Is the boss back yet?” Sara asked. She hadn’t forgotten her decision to talk to her supervisor again about whether she was more of a hazard than a healer while Javiero was on the loose.

“Not yet. I told her you wanted a word. Oh, the blood gases are back on 2-A.”

Sara nodded. Before she realized it, her gaze had slid down the hall again.

He was there. Watching. Making her feel safe...making her heart give a stupid, excited little jump.

It took more of an effort than it should have to slide into the professional persona she’d built so carefully over the years—cool, calm Dr. Grace, the woman with nerves of steel. The woman who hardly noticed that her new bodyguard was standing in front of the same wall the security guard had smeared with his blood two weeks ago.

Raz watched Sara turn away and head for an examining room at the other end of the hall. He felt cramped, restless and altogether too close to the edge.

A cigarette would have helped. That’s what he’d done before when the present made him twitchy—reached for a cigarette. But the things he’d done in the past to cope hadn’t worked out very well, had they? Reason enough to quit, he’d decided two months and three days ago.

He’d been in a hospital then, too. Funny how life worked out.

His reaction to being in a hospital again came as an unpleasant surprise. He hadn’t known he’d developed a phobia about hospitals until he’d followed the pretty mouse into this one. How should he have? After all, he didn’t dream about the ambulance ride he’d taken two months and two days ago, or the emergency room where he’d ended up. And this wasn’t even the same ER.

But it smelled the same. They all smelled the same, like blood and misery and disinfectant. The examining tables looked the same, too. He remembered. God help him, he remembered all too clearly lying on one of those damned tables, bleeding and begging someone to tell him about Marguerite.

And now here he was at another hospital, trying to keep another woman from being gunned down. Raz leaned against the wall, his hands in his pockets, his attention split between the ER entrance and the woman walking down the hall toward him. Life was sure funny, all right, he thought as Sara Grace started to pass him by without a glance. One big, damned, ugly joke. “Where are you going?”

She paused, her lips tight while her eyes avoided his. Those pretty lips of hers had been tightening up all afternoon, ever since he didn’t kiss them. “What does it matter?”

“Think about it. My job—guarding you? It’s a little easier if I know where you are.”

“Fine, then,” she snapped. “I’m on my way to the ladies’ room. After that, I’ll be in Examining Room 4-B, then back at the nurses’ station, probably. Then I may get to go to the break room for a cup of coffee, unless my boss gets back or we get some new patients.”

He chuckled. “You’re a lot different once you sling that stethoscope around your neck, aren’t you? Ornery. I like it.”

“Did I ask what you like?” she muttered, but a hint of color touched her cheeks, and her eyes skittered away from his. “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

“I remember you now,” he said, unwilling to have her move away quite yet. “Once I saw you in your doctor clothes, the night we met came back to me.”

She stopped still, and looked at him.

“I’d been drinking.”

“I noticed.”

He shrugged. “I was Eddie at the time, and the people Eddie MacReady was hanging out with didn’t understand abstinence.” If he hadn’t been slightly fuzzed by alcohol, he wouldn’t have needed the twelve stitches she’d put in his arm. Normally he managed to avoid bar fights—or at least avoid getting cut in one.

She hesitated. “Being undercover...I guess you have to blend in.”

Only if you wanted to stay alive. “One way to avoid doing the hard drugs yet stay in character is to have a reputation for being real fond of the legal ones. Like bourbon. That’s Eddie’s preferred poison.” Raz might have blamed his failure to recognize Sara on the alcohol that had hazed his mind when he first saw her over six months ago, but he couldn’t afford the smallest self-deception anymore. The fact was, he hadn’t remembered her because she seemed like a different person here at work.

The change in her intrigued him even more than it bothered him, and he didn’t know why he had either reaction.

A small smile touched her lips. “Do you often talk about yourself in the third person?”

“Eddie isn’t me.” But thinking about a night when he was being Eddie helped him block memories of another hospital on another night. He remembered Sara’s hands best. She had graceful hands, the palms narrow and elegant, with long fingers ending in the short, scrubbed nails of a hairdresser or a surgeon. He remembered watching those deft fingers as they sewed him up. He’d been convinced there was something unique about her hands. Something magical.

An alcoholic fancy, of course. And yet he was surprised he hadn’t recognized her hands as soon as he saw them again.

She started to speak, but he never found out what she would have said. An ambulance crew called to say they were coming in with two of the victims of a three-car collision, and she hurried away as if she’d forgotten he existed.

He’d already noticed how unmouselike she was when she wore her doctor clothes. The woman he saw in action when the first victims were brought in was even more of a revelation. For the next several hours he watched his subject, the nurses, the halls and the patients. He flirted when he got the chance, and he considered ways Javiero might try to get to his target and how to counter those attempts. And some of the time, when the memories of another emergency room rose too near the surface, he distracted himself with other questions.

Who was Sara Grace, really? And what would her hands feel like if she touched him as a man instead of a patient?

Having company on the ride home from work felt strange to Sara, and there was something alarmingly intimate about riding in Raz’s low-slung muscle car. Christmas lights jeweled the darkness outside the car and reflected off the windows. Music, low and bluesy, throbbed from the speakers. It was not the sort of music she would have expected him to pick, yet somehow it fit. The car itself smelled of leather and cigarettes.

He hadn’t spoken since she slid in next to him at the ambulance entrance.

The silence worked to make her more conscious of him, not less. After a few blocks she had to break it. “Do you smoke?”

“I used to.”

“What made you decide to quit?”

He didn’t even look at her as he signaled, then turned smoothly onto Highpoint. “Health reasons.”

Her fingers drummed once on her thigh. Twice. Irritation made it easier to speak. “Look, you did suggest we’d deal with the situation better if we got to know each other.”