Читать книгу Lone Star Knight - Cindy Gerard, Dianna Love, Шеррилин Кеньон - Страница 9

“Justin—hey, Justin, wait up.” Matt Walker was striding wearily toward the burn-unit nurses’ station when he spotted Justin Webb, dressed in green scrubs, heading for the elevator.

Justin turned, sipping from a paper cup that Matt knew held the world’s worst coffee. After a long, critical once-over he scowled, showing Matt his doctor’s face. “I’ve done admits on patients who look better than you.”

Matt knew exactly what his friend saw: a five-o’clock shadow, badly rumpled shirt and bloodshot eyes. He scrubbed a hand over his unshaven jaw, rolled the stiffness out of his shoulders. “I’m fine. Just a long night.”

Justin snorted. “More like a lot of long nights.”

When he extended the coffee Matt grimaced and made a warding sign. “How do you drink that sludge?”

“Cast-iron stomach.” Justin flashed a grin. “Besides— I like it. But we were talking about you. You knock your-self out from sleep deprivation and you’re not going to be any good to her, Matt.”

Both men knew exactly who Justin was talking about. It had been almost two months since the plane crash that had resulted in Lady Helena Reichard’s emergency admission to the burn unit at Royal Memorial Hospital. She had been among a group of Asterland dignitaries and a few locals—Matt’s friends Pamela Black and Jamie Morris among them—who were en route to Asterland after a posh diplomatic reception at the Texas Cattleman’s Club. Close to a full month had passed since Matt had been assigned by his fellow club members to stand guard outside Helena’s door.

It didn’t much matter that he was beat. His welfare wasn’t at stake here. Helena’s was. He just wished he knew who, or what, he was protecting her from.

Besides Matt and Justin, only three other club members knew the mysterious details surrounding the charter jet’s emergency landing that had sent Helena to the hospital. Though luckily no one had been killed, even now, two months later, it was still tough to absorb. The crash had been bad enough. But there’d also been a murder. A jewel theft. The hint of an attempted political coup involving the European country of Asterland.

Helena Reichard, it seemed, was stuck smack in the middle of it all; Matt understood exactly how vulnerable she was. He also understood that nothing, absolutely nothing more was going to happen to her under his watch.

“How’s she doing?” he asked, as Justin drained the cup then tossed it into a trash bin.

“Well, to hear her tell it, she’s doing just fine.”

Matt studied his friend’s face. “I think I’d rather hear you tell it. How is she, really?”

Justin crossed his arms over his chest, gave Matt a considering look. “We’ve covered this ground before.”

“Humor me. Cover it again.”

“Look, I’m not the primary here—I’m just consulting until she’s ready for the cosmetic repairs. Harding’s on the burns. Chambers is her bone man. But the charts pretty much speak for themselves.”

“Not to me they don’t.” Matt shifted his weight to one hip. “Suppose you fill me in.”

“You’re not family, Matt.”

“Oh, for the—”

“Wait. Wait.” Justin held up a hand. “Cool down. You’re not family but, since you’re all she’s got standing between her and Lord knows what might be a threat to her, you have a need to know. And that gives me license to tell you.”

After a glance toward the charge nurse who was busy on the phone, he steered Matt toward the sofa at the end of the hall on the pretense of privacy. Matt suspected what Justin really wanted was to get him off his feet. Too tired to make an issue of it, he sat.

“As you already know, most of her burns are second degree and restricted to her left arm and upper leg.” Justin eased down beside him. “It’s that nasty patch of third degree on the back of her left hand that’s giving her trouble. The extensor tendons are heavily involved—the ones that control finger movement. We had to graft. Unfortunately, the site’s been problematic.”

Matt slumped back, rubbed an index finger over his brow. “Infection, right?”

Justin nodded. “We’d hoped to avoid it—we always hope to avoid it—but with a burn that deep and so much debris ground into it, it was pretty much a given. It’s cleared up now but it set her recovery back. Only time will tell what kind of mobility she’ll regain.”

Matt thought of the lovely hand he’d held in his at the Cattleman’s Club reception and dance. The petal-soft skin. The slim, graceful fingers. “And her ankle?”

Justin shook his head. “That’s still up for grabs, too. It’s a bad fracture. Real bad. Even with the surgery and the pins in place, Chambers can’t guarantee that she won’t have a permanent limp.”

Matt stared past Justin’s shoulder to the partially open door of Helena’s room. He thought of the beautiful, vivacious woman he’d waltzed around the dance floor. The woman whose cornflower-blue eyes had smiled into his with unguarded interest. The woman who had said his name in her perfect, practiced English yet made it sound exotic and made him feel extraordinary. That woman had been beyond perfection.

He didn’t have to be inside her head to understand that the woman in the hospital room, though still beautiful, was now badly scarred, potentially disabled—and that there would be much more to her recovery process than knitting bones and healing flesh. And he couldn’t throw the helpless notion that there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to help her.

“You need sleep, bud.” Justin’s voice broke into Matt’s thoughts. “Call someone to relieve you.”

“Not an option. Not tonight anyway. My men are tied up, so I’m it.”

After a long look, Justin rose. “Okay. Here’s the plan. I’ve got a patient on the floor spiking a temp so I’ll be here for a while. I can cover for you for a few hours.”

“Thanks, but she’s my assignment, not yours.”

Justin’s long, measuring look asked the same question Matt had been asking himself lately. Are you sure this is just an assignment?

Matt wasn’t sure of anything except that he wasn’t ready to admit, even to himself, that it might be more. Yeah, he recognized that his commitment to her safety was running a tad toward territorial. He also knew that he found himself thinking about her more than he should. Helena was, after all, an intriguing woman. Not his type of woman, but intriguing, nonetheless.

Regardless, it all came down to one thing. The five club members who were in the know on this incident agreed that Lady Helena Reichard was his responsibility. It was a charge he took seriously. Even more so after what had happened last week. He’d ducked out for a moment and come back to find a strange man standing just outside her open doorway. The man had run like hell when Matt had approached him, and in the darkened hall, he’d never even got a glimpse of his face. Whoever it was, he was still out there. Judging by his actions, he was also a potential threat.

“I’m not going anywhere, Justin,” he stated flatly.

“Yeah,” Justin said with quiet authority. “You are.”

He pointed to the room across the hall from Helena’s. “The bed in there is empty. Use it. I’m taking your watch for a few hours. End of story.”

When Matt opened his mouth to protest, Justin cut him off. “Use it,” he ordered and walked to the nurses’ station to grab some charts.

Helena stared out her hospital-room window into the predawn darkness of the West Texas morning. The nightmare had awakened her. Again. As she so often did, she sat in the dark and fought a losing battle with haunting memories of the crash.

She swallowed back the slick ball of nausea that rose to her throat. Almost two months of endless nights had passed, and she still hadn’t been able to come to terms with what had happened to her. And with what hadn’t.

She hadn’t died. Miraculously, no one had. In fact, she and Robert Klimt, a member of King Bertram’s cabinet, were the only ones who had been seriously injured. Yes, she had lived, but her injuries were a constant, vengeful reminder that life, as she’d known it, would never be the same again.

A helpless anger flushed her skin as she carefully peeled the protective pressure glove—her constant companion for at least the next year—from her left hand. She made herself look at it. At the disfiguring patch of grafted flesh, the repulsive scarring, the stiff, useless fingers that might never again hold a champagne glass, might never wear a ring or be lifted to a man’s lips for a lingering kiss.

She pushed back her sleeve and forced her gaze to travel the angry red scars that ran almost to her elbow. Touching her hand to the insulted flesh, she shivered at the dry, hot feel of it then grimly flipped back the long folds of the hospital gown that covered her legs.

More painful even than her broken ankle and the six-inch surgical incisions running on either side of it beneath the cast, more painful even than the burns, was the donor site on her leg. A four-by-three-inch patch of skin had been harvested from her outer thigh to graft to the back of her hand. It still looked raw. It still gave her pain. The hope was that it would also give her back the use of her hand.

That was the hope.

She covered her leg, tucked her hand into the folds of her robe, and hated herself for giving in to self-pity. Robert Klimt still fought for his life. She did not know him well. She knew only that he lay in a coma and might not recover. Yet she sat here feeling sorry for herself because her perfection had been marred.

“Beauty such as yours is a rare gift, child. You are a jewel. A precious, flawless gem to be adored and revered by the world as a priceless treasure.”

Her father’s words, words she’d heard and believed since she’d been old enough to crawl up on his knee and bask in his adoration, echoed relentlessly through her mind.

“Not anymore, Papa.” She stared into the hollow, echoing silence. “I’m not flawless anymore.”

Matthew Walker had thought she was perfect. She had seen it in his eyes, eyes she’d envisioned too often in her mind since the crash. She’d heard it in his laughter, laughter that brightened her dreams, but never her days. She’d thought he would come to the hospital to see her. For conflicting reasons, she’d been both disappointed and relieved when he hadn’t.

She stared again at the hand that no longer seemed to belong to her, at the mass of ugly scars, the stiffened fingers that refused to work as they once had.

Matthew Walker would not think that she was perfect now.

No one would.

She raised her head, stared without seeing, as the blackness of night slowly gave way to the pearly gray break of another dawn. Artificial light from the hall behind her shone in through her door, casting the room in half shadows. A call bell pinged softly at the nurses’ desk; a doctor’s page echoed in this sterile, isolated world where the silence spoke of an aloneness only someone who had spent myriad sleepless nights swathed in bandages and morphine and uncertainty could understand.

She had become accustomed to the night sounds in the burn unit for she had slept too little and thought too much. Now, in the background, the nursing staff moved with quiet efficiency to the soft rustle of crepe-soled shoes and pristine white uniforms.

She hadn’t rung for their assistance when she’d inched carefully out of bed and eased into the chair by the window. She’d been managing that particular feat by herself for over a week now. The fine sheen of perspiration beading her brow was the only outward indication of the physical cost. The tear that trickled unheeded down her cheek was less a result of the pain than of the growing and grim acceptance that she would never be, would never look, the same again—and that the waltz she had shared with the tall, handsome Texan might have been her last dance.

Matt scrubbed a hand over his face as he stood like a shadow in the doorway of Helena’s room. He didn’t know if he felt better or worse for the three hours of sleep Justin had insisted he grab. He figured he had to feel better than she did.

He didn’t much like fighting this constant urge to go to her. Just talk to her. Maybe make her smile as she’d smiled for him one night that now seemed a lifetime ago.

Her smiles aren’t your concern, though, are they? he reminded himself grimly. Her protection was.

And yet, she looked so lost as she sat there. So absolutely alone. Nothing like the self-assured, sensual woman who’d shamelessly and skillfully flirted with him on the dance floor at the club. It tore him up, that look, and yet he didn’t want her to know he was there—watching that silken length of pale blond hair fall across her face as she hung her head and battled the tears welling up in her eyes. He didn’t want her to know he was remembering the texture and the scent of her hair trailing across his fingers as they’d danced around the room while he’d smiled into her laughing eyes.

Pride, he’d discovered this past month, was a quality Lady Helena owned in abundance. She wouldn’t want to know that anyone had witnessed her struggle—or her pain. Neither would she want to know that he’d been holding vigil outside her room. Or that the reason he was here was to protect her from an unknown enemy, with an as-yet-undetermined agenda. He didn’t want her to know it either. She had enough to deal with without adding a possible threat to her life to the list.

He cupped his palm to his nape, stepped silently away from the door and tried to sort it all out in his mind. He wasn’t exactly up on his cloak-and-dagger etiquette—it had been a while since he’d been called on to draw from his military background—but he’d come up to speed in a hurry. Anyone wanting to get to Helena was going to have to get through him.

Damn, he didn’t like what was happening. Didn’t like any of it. The only good news unearthed lately was that the investigation into the plane crash had turned up evidence that it had actually been an accident that had caused the emergency landing, not sabotage as they had originally suspected. An engine fire had caused some of the systems to lock up, including the landing gear. On impact, liquor bottles in the bar had broken, the electrical systems inside the luxury charter jet had shorted out and sparks had ignited the flammable liquor. Helena, sitting closest to the bar, had paid the biggest price.

So yeah, thankfully, they’d ruled out sabotage, but nothing else was resolved. He wished to hell he could get a handle on it.

“Okay, Walker,” he muttered and sank down on the small sofa by the window in the corridor just outside Helena’s room, “start at point A.”

Point A, the Lone Star jewels—three precious gems entrusted through generations to the Club members’ keeping—had been stolen. Before this nasty business, he’d never actually seen the jewels. Like every Cattleman’s Club member, he had sworn to protect them as part of Royal’s legacy of prosperity. Like every other Royal resident, he’d known of them through folklore and legend and had, from time to time, wondered if they actually existed. Well, he wasn’t wondering any longer. He’d seen two of them himself after Justin had recovered them at the crash site. The black opal—representing justice—was magnificent. The emerald—representing peace—was dazzling. He’d held both in his hands and damn if he hadn’t felt a dynamic sense of—

Of what? He shook his head, not wanting to believe that even now, almost two months later, he was still convinced that they’d warmed his palm with energy and heat.

He shrugged that off and concentrated on point B—the missing stone, a rare red diamond. The diamond represented leadership and completed the circle of prosperity upon which Royal was dependent. The big question that remained was where the devil was it? And if it wasn’t found and reunited with the other stones, would Royal’s thriving economy fold like a tower of cards as the legend predicted?

Since he didn’t have the answers to any of those questions, he moved ahead to point C. Riley Monroe was dead. Riley had been a fixture behind the bar at the Cattleman’s Club even before Matt had been initiated into the ranks. Anger didn’t begin to cover what he felt for the scum who had killed him. And all because they’d wanted the jewels.

That indisputable conclusion only brought up more questions. How had an outsider actually found out about the jewels’ existence, discovered their hiding place and then stolen them? Why were the opal and the emerald on that plane bound for Asterland? Again, another dead end, another set of unanswered questions.

Leaning forward, he propped his forearms on his thighs and stared at his loosely clasped hands. Okay. Point D. Milo Yungst and Garth Johannes. Talk about cloak-and-dagger.

When the four other club members who were in the know on this mission had last met, he’d confided to them his concerns about the pair.

“I don’t care that Yungst and Johannes are representatives from the Asterland government. I don’t give a good damn that they were sent to investigate the plane crash.”

He’d looked around the private meeting room at the Cattleman’s Club at Justin Webb, Aaron Black, Sheikh Ben Rassad and Dakota Lewis. “I don’t trust them. And I don’t like their methods. I like even less the interrogation tactics they used on Pamela.”

He’d seen from the dark scowl on Aaron’s face that he was in agreement. Pamela had been on the plane with Helena and Jamie Morris. Pamela was also Matt’s good friend. He’d given her away the day she’d married Aaron. Now that she was his wife, Aaron had more than a vested interest in Pamela’s welfare.

And that’s what brought Matt to point E and the reason he was here, outside Helena’s hospital room. It was at that meeting that they’d decided Jamie and Helena needed protection. Ben had been assigned to guard Jamie. Matt had volunteered to watch over Helena—an assignment the five of them had agreed was necessary until they unraveled the mystery and were sure the women were safe.

At least it had started out as an assignment. Maybe it was fatigue—maybe not—but he was finally ready to admit that somewhere along the line, it had ended up feeling like more.

Well, he couldn’t afford to let it be more. Couldn’t let her be more. Not to him. And still, it was the more that compelled him to rise and walk back to her room. Shoving his hands in his back pockets, he leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb and studied the beautiful, tortured profile that had haunted him for as many nights as he’d known her.

In the diluted light, he looked at her solemn profile. He looked at her damaged hand, at her leg in an immobilizing cast that ran from toe to mid-calf. His mouth set in a grim line, he tried to shake one niggling question. If this was just an assignment, why did he find himself wanting to heal those hurts that her eyes betrayed but that she would never admit to?