Читать книгу Guarding Jane Doe - Harper Allen - Страница 14

She’d been about to cry. No, Quinn corrected himself, she’d already started to cry by the time she’d spun around and taken off from him in that clumsy half-walk, half-run that had nearly cannoned her into a handful of bar patrons and at least one waitress before she’d disappeared into the washrooms. He’d seen the tears shimmering at the corners of those dark blue eyes, and they’d made him feel like a dog.

He’d done the right thing, there was no doubt about that. “No doubt at all, McGuire,” he murmured under his breath. “Someone had to make her face facts.” He downed the last of the whiskey in his glass, and wondered if he was drinking out of the same side as she had. She hadn’t been wearing lipstick—as far as a mere male could tell, she hadn’t been wearing any makeup at all on that poreless, creamy-pale skin—so there was no way of knowing what part of the rim her lips had touched. But he thought he could taste her.

He drew himself up sharply. He’d been heading for drunk tonight. Obviously he’d achieved his goal, if he was sitting here trying to persuade himself that under the smoky, peaty flavor of Bushmills he could discern a hint of crushed strawberries. But that would be what she’d taste like, he thought unwillingly. Like the wild strawberries he could just barely remember picking when he’d been a boy—the small, sweet ones that had looked like tiny jewels against the green, green grass.

The woman had stirred up far too many memories, he thought abruptly. He needed another drink.

Like magic, his waitress appeared, her smile a little harried as she set down a new glass, but then turning to a puzzled frown as Quinn stopped her from taking the empty one away.

“Humor me, Molly. Leave the glass here, and take this.” He dropped a thick wad of bills on the round cork-topped tray she carried. “That should cover the tab I’ve been running. The rest is for you.”

This time her smile was real. He’d made one woman happy tonight, he thought ruefully, as he lifted his glass and stared into the golden liquid. He’d made one happy, and he’d torn another one’s world apart.

Actually, if he were honest with himself, the odds were more like two to one. He was forgetting the nun.

…you owe me, Mr. McGuire—and it is high time you paid up.

He’d welshed on his debt. He could call it whatever the hell he wanted, but what it came right down to was that Quinn McGuire had weaseled out of an old debt. He closed his eyes, and there she was in front of him, the way he always remembered her….

In the antiquated conditions of the jungle hospital, she’d worked miracles. Of course, she hadn’t taken credit for them. There’d been a gleaming brass crucifix above her packing-crate desk. It had been the only thing in the place, besides the few surgical tools, that hadn’t been allowed to tarnish in the tropical humidity.

She’d been changing his dressing. Whenever he thought of her, that was how she appeared in his mind’s eye, but she looked like no one’s idea of an angel of mercy. If truth be told, Quinn had often thought, she’d always seemed forbiddingly unapproachable in the heavy black habit that she persisted in wearing. She had a slight limp, the legacy from a bout of polio when she’d been a child, he’d learned, and besides her bat-like attire, she’d been as blind as one. Her speech was sharp, and her English, though good, was heavily accented.

“You want to die. I want you to live. We’ll see who wins, Mr. McGuire,” she’d said grimly the first time he’d drifted up out of unconsciousness. One look at those angry brown eyes, ludicrously magnified behind the thick lenses she wore, had been enough to send him spiraling down into oblivion again. But she’d dragged him back, again and again, pitting her faith and her steely strength of will against the shadowy figure with the scythe. Only once had she even come close to losing hope, and that had been the day that his fever had climbed to its highest. He had been delirious, and whatever he’d been babbling, it had shaken her badly. All he could remember of that delusional day and night were two things.

He’d had wings, and he’d known if he only let himself go he would find himself soaring straight up from the sweat-soaked sheets he was lying on into a colder, lighter sky than the blazingly blue one that hung over the hospital. He’d heard them calling him, and he’d felt himself rising to meet them—

—and the second thing he remembered was Sister Bertille’s angular face, her mouth working soundlessly, huge tears standing out behind her crooked glasses, pressing a heavy, chilling weight against his forehead and bringing him crashing back down to earth. Just before dawn the fever had broken. He’d opened his eyes and she’d been sitting beside his bed in a golden pool of light from the gas lantern above her, her rosary in her hands and her mouth slightly open in exhausted sleep. He could still feel the heavy weight on his forehead, and with returning lucidity, he’d reached up and removed it. It had been the cross she usually wore around her neck.

You will know when the right case presents itself…

She’d been right. He had known. And still he’d done his level best to get out of it. Hell.

“You’re a stupid man entirely, Quinn McGuire,” he said out loud. “A stupid, bad man. A debt’s a debt, and you must have been crazy to think that you could get out of paying it with a clear conscience.”

He’d catch her on her way out and tell her he’d changed his mind. She didn’t have to know why, and although the nun was part of it, Quinn wasn’t sure he knew the whole reason either. If anyone needed someone to protect her, though, Jane Doe did.

Even if only half of what she’d told him was the truth.

“…know who you are. It was creepy!”

“It had to be some crackpot. I kept expecting some jerk to look over the stall partition, for God’s sake.”

The two young women passing his table had taken a couple more steps before what he’d overheard them say registered. Before they’d taken a third, Quinn was up and out of his seat and somehow blocking their way. One of them was a blonde, and she gave a little jump.

“Hey, you scared me!” Her gaze took him in, and she relaxed visibly. “I think he should buy us a drink to make up for it, right, Kathy?”

Before her friend could answer, Quinn’s hand shot out and held her lightly by the shoulder. “I heard you say something just now—know who you are. What were you talking about?”

“Do you mind?” The blonde’s flirtatiousness was instantly replaced by peevish annoyance. “The hand, mister. Get it off me.”

“It’s important,” he said impatiently, letting her go and curbing his own irritation with difficulty. “What did you mean by that?”

“We saw it in the washroom.” The blonde’s companion had been watching his face. Now she spoke quietly and quickly. “Those words were written on the mirror over the sinks in lipstick or something. It gave me a bad feeling—”

But already he’d dodged around them, and was heading toward the back of the room. He elbowed a beefy young man in a Yale sweatshirt out of the way, and heard an aggrieved shout and the crash of breaking glass behind him. He felt a hand on his shoulder, trying to pull him back, and without looking around he grabbed it and threw it off.

He was about ten feet away from the entrance to the washrooms when the lights went out. The whole room was plunged into pitch-blackness, and he heard a woman’s terror-filled, choked-off scream coming from somewhere ahead of him.

“No need to panic, people. Sure, and we’ll have the lights back on in a minute. Everybody just stay calm and remain where you are.”

Someone was trying to stem the panicky hubbub that had started up. The women’s washroom had to be nearby, Quinn told himself in frustration as he fought his way through the crowd and felt along the wall. There was a flimsy, freestanding partition that had shielded the washroom entrances from the view of the main room, so he hadn’t been able to note the exact location previously, but this was where Jane had gone. He came to a dead end, and realized he’d gone the wrong way.

Her scream—it had been hers, he knew it in his bones—had ended abruptly. That meant that even now she could be beyond his help. What had he told her? Something about if her stalker were serious, he would have killed her by now? Something criminally callous like that?

If the nun had ended up where she’d hoped, she could damn well bully God into giving him some help, he thought harshly as he felt a knob, turned it and swung the door back on its hinges with a crash.

Moonlight streamed through high-set, slightly open windows. Along one wall was a shadowy line of cubicles, each one of them open. Along the other wall was a long vanity, with sinks set into it and a mirror stretching its whole length. The place was empty.

He caught a reflection of movement in the darkened mirror, and instinctively looked around. There was nothing there. He looked back at the mirror, and the same wavering reflection caught his eye again.

Then he was whirling around and looking up at the ceiling just beyond the last stall and his heart was turning over in horror.

She’d been hanged by the neck, and even as he realized what he was looking at, her feet stopped twitching.

“Mother of God and all the saints…” The sickened prayer came automatically, but Quinn wasn’t relying on divine intervention. Already he had smashed open the door of the last stall, was clambering up onto the back of the toilet tank and hoisting himself to a precarious balance on the metal partition. The open ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes, and he grabbed one to steady himself, even as he wrapped his other arm around Jane’s limply dangling body. He lifted her up to ease the pressure on her neck, and her head lolled over onto one shoulder.

The lights—why hadn’t they gotten the damned lights working yet? Her dress had come undone, most of the buttons that had marched primly down the front probably somewhere below on the floor, and he could feel bare flesh against the forearm he had around her chest.

He had to get her down, lights or no lights. Whatever was around her throat was no longer cutting off her air supply, but if she still had a heartbeat, he couldn’t feel it. One-handed, he couldn’t fumble with a knot in the dark and keep her supported at the same time, which meant he wasn’t going to be able to get her down the logical way.

The building wasn’t new. The plumbing, in the washrooms at least, would be either zinc or lead, and neither of those metals was known for its strength. Judging from the trickle of cold water that was dripping onto him, there was a leaky joint only inches away from her noose. If he let go of his pipe, and grabbed hers as he jumped from the top of the washroom stall, the weight of one oversize Irishman would be more than enough to break the join and send them both, pipe and all, crashing to the floor.

All he had to do was hope the break was clean, and close enough to the knot that she slid straight off. Anything else didn’t bear thinking about.

He had a whole cartload of Belgian nuns praying for him, apparently. Surely that should buy him some grace.

Quinn let go of the pipe that had kept him balanced. He grabbed intuitively for the one that was Jane’s make-shift gallows and again jumped into darkness, his grip around her as tight as fear and muscle could make it.

As his hand found the second pipe, he gave it a massive downward tug, and for a moment he had the terrible conviction that the damn thing was built more solidly than he’d guessed. Then he heard a sharp cracking noise, and all of a sudden it was as if he and the woman he was holding had pitched off the top of a cliff and were riding a waterfall.

It wasn’t much of a drop, and he hit the floor immediately, breaking her fall with his body. The water was cascading from the broken pipe above them, and at any other time he would have taken a moment to drag her away from the icy flow. But he didn’t have moments, Quinn thought grimly. If her heart had stopped beating, he was going to have to get it started again.

He straddled her, pulling the two halves of her dress open and hearing it rip farther down than he’d intended. Impatiently he shoved aside the sodden scrap of cotton bra that was in the way, and bent down to her, listening for the sound he wanted more than any other to hear right now. There was no heartbeat. His own seemed to stop.

So this was how Sister Bertille had felt, all those years ago, he thought coldly, placing the heels of his palms flat on Jane’s chest. It was personal—him against the blackness that already had wrapped around her like a shroud. “I want her to live,” he muttered, pressing abruptly and forcefully down on the fragile bones beneath his hands. “We’ll see who wins.”

The cold water continued to stream down onto his back, turning his T-shirt into a second skin, but he was shielding the brunt of it from the woman beneath him. As seconds turned into minutes, and still he felt no answering echo under his palms, he began to think of her heart as an entity all to itself. As he continued in his desperate attempts to get it started again, he began to address it—not Jane, but her heart.

He was going a little crazy, he knew. He didn’t care.

“She doesn’t remember, but you do,” he grunted. “You must. There would have been a first kiss—remember how you sped up, how you felt as if you were going to melt? There had to have been times when she was a girl, catching the eye of a boy, and looking away. You beat faster then, didn’t you? And tonight when I held her and stroked her skin, and felt that velvety softness beneath my fingertips—don’t tell me you weren’t putting in a little overtime then, because I knew damned well you were. I could feel you, for God’s sake. No matter what she said, you were responding to me, weren’t you? Respond now, dammit!”

Two things happened at once.

Suddenly the lights went on. And as if the surge of power that had run through the electrical system had transferred itself to her, at that instant Jane’s eyes flew open. They were glazed and unfocused, but they were open—and her heart was beating, Quinn realized, all by itself.

Around her neck was a bright yellow nylon rope, like some obscene necklace, and her hands went up to it reflexively. She still hadn’t spoken, and neither had he, but for the minute there was no need to. Sliding his hands gently from her exposed breasts, Quinn pulled the two halves of her ruined wet dress together, his eyes on hers.

“I had to. You understand?” he asked softly. She’d shown panic earlier when his touch had been much less intrusive. He was suddenly worried that after all she’d been through, finding him over her like this would shock her into hysteria.

“Take it—” Her voice was a painful croak. Her eyes held a plea. “Take it off my neck, Quinn. Get it off me.”

The note of hysteria he’d worried about was there, but understandably so. Lifting her cautiously to a sitting position, he pushed aside the swath of sodden chestnut hair that obscured the back of her neck. His mouth was tight with anger as he saw the slipknot that had been fashioned in the yellow nylon. He drew the loose end of the rope through, flinging it as far across the room as he could. To cover his outrage he hoisted her a foot or so to one side, out from under the direct flow from the pipe above.

“Why are we wet? Where did all this water come from?”

She could barely speak, but he knew she needed to. She was distracting herself with non-essentials, trying to keep the horror that she’d just lived through at bay, if only for a few more seconds.

“I broke a pipe to get you down, but that’s not important right now. Do you want the police involved?” He brought his hand to her chin, tipping it up so that her gaze locked on his.

“The police?” She shook her head, violently enough so that wet strands of her hair clung to her cheekbones. “No. I told you before, I—I don’t want them asking questions. I just want to get out of here.”

“I know you do. But what’s happened tonight would make them take you seriously now. If you caught a glimpse of your attacker they could have a sketch-artist—”

“I didn’t see him. All I saw was that—” Her glance darted toward the scrawled message on the mirror and quickly away again. “Then the lights went out and he—and he—”

“Don’t try to talk about it now.” He shot a worried look over his shoulder. “Look, any minute now someone’s going to come through that door. We’d better get moving.”

For the first time she looked down at herself. He was no longer straddling her, but his arm was still around her back, supporting her. He sensed the instant that she finally took in her revealing state and the fact that she was pressed up against a wet male body. Without conscious volition, he glanced down too.

Although he’d tried to cover her up a few minutes ago, the ruined dress no longer could conceal the body beneath it—a body that was all graceful contours and surprisingly ripe curves. Creamy-pale breasts were tipped with a soft wash of pink, that even as he watched deepened to a rose blush. He’d thought of wild strawberries earlier. He was thinking of them now.

And it was a damn good thing he knew how to perform CPR, because he was pretty sure his own heart had just stopped.

“Please—please don’t look at me!”

Her voice, high and thin, was shot with panic. He ripped his gaze away immediately, silently berating himself. He hastened to redeem the situation before it got completely out of hand.

“Here, cover yourself up with this.” She was hunched over, her arms crossed in front of her, and he sat back on his heels, quickly stripping off his T-shirt. The thing was nothing more than a wet rag—an oversized wet rag that would hang down nearly to her knees—but it would hide what she wanted to hide.

Still averting his eyes, he tossed it in her direction.

“Thank you.” Her reply was barely audible. He waited until he figured she’d put it on, and then turned back to her—and once again his heart missed a beat.

He wasn’t going to tell her, but there was a reason why wet T-shirt contests were popular with a certain kind of crowd. She was demonstrating that reason right now, though she seemed unaware that the soaked cotton of his shirt was clinging lovingly to her every curve, and that her nipples were tautly outlined.

“I’m sorry.” Her words were still no more than a whisper. “I know you just saved my life.”

“Forget it. Now that you’re decent, let’s try to slip out of here without attracting too much attention.” He sounded brusquer than he’d intended, and he could also hear that he’d fallen into the broad brogue that he thought he’d grown out of years ago. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “There’s got to be a back exit somewhere around—”

He broke off, disconcerted by the expression on her face. Her lips were slightly parted, and the flush he’d seen lower down on her body had crept up to her cheeks. Her eyes were wide, and so dark that they looked almost a true navy blue. She was looking at him. She was looking at—

He was acutely conscious of the fact that he was naked from the waist up—not shirtless, not unclad, but buck-naked. There was something about the devouring way she was gazing at his chest that made that term the only appropriate one. But for God’s sake, there was nothing shocking about peeling his shirt off, even in front of a woman. This wasn’t the Victorian era.

She looked as if she was about to swoon.

“You’re very…very large,” she said faintly. “I hadn’t realized…” Slowly she brought her hand up. Lightly her fingertips ghosted across the surface of his skin. Between her parted lips Quinn realized that her breathing had shallowed and quickened.

She wasn’t the kind of woman he was used to. When he was on assignment, he found it easy to stay away from the sexual roulette of picking up a partner for the night. If the urge became absolutely unbearable, he resorted to fantasy, and despite what he’d been told as a boy, he hadn’t gone blind yet. But when he was back in Boston, he usually had some kind of short-term, casual relationship going. That was the kind of woman he looked for—someone who wasn’t looking for permanence, who took sex not irresponsibly, but lightly.

This emotionally fragile, sexually repressed woman wasn’t his type. But the hesitant, questing touch of her fingers on his chest was setting his blood on fire like no other female ever had. Worst of all, he doubted that she had any idea of what she was doing to him—but at any moment she’d be bound to. It wasn’t something a man could hide for long, especially in wet khakis that were plastered to his body.

Her glance travelled downward just as he’d feared, paused, and flew up again. Her face had been pink before. Now it blazed with color as her eyes met his.

Then her lashes came down, her head tipped back on her neck, and she moved infinitesimally toward him. Quinn found himself closing the tiny gap between them, found his hand cupping the back of that delicate, seal-wet head and found his own eyes closing like a boy moving into the mystery of his first kiss.

Her lips were cool, and beaded with water. He felt water running from the short ends of his hair, down his face like tears, to join up with the drops he could taste on her. He felt water dripping from her scalp to his hand behind her neck, felt water splashing from the pipe above them, felt it soaking through the fabric of his khakis as he kneeled there.

It wasn’t like kissing a woman. It was like kissing a mermaid.

And then her lips opened beneath his, and there was suddenly no doubt that he was kissing a woman—the essence of woman, distilled and condensed, so unadulterated that he knew that he’d never had anything this real before. He’d never come close to this. He tasted her, felt her taste him, and his grip tightened on the back of her neck, bringing her closer. His other hand came up to her face, and he was certain he felt her sigh softly against his mouth.

Then everything changed. He felt her stiffen, and opened his eyes just in time to see hers fly wide with shock. She pulled away from him, her hand going to her mouth as if to shield it from his.

“No!” She stared at him as if she’d never seen him before. “No—I don’t do this. This—this isn’t me!”

She wasn’t playing coy. There was real denial in her eyes, and her face was chalky-white. Quinn suddenly saw himself as he realized she was seeing him—too big, too male, too much tanned, battered hide showing. He felt as if he was looming over her. He knew he only had a split second before the situation spiraled out of control.

“It’s not you,” he agreed, careful not to make any move that she might construe as threatening. His hands hung loosely at his sides. “It was the shock of what you’d just been through. That’s why it happened—it was just a reaction.”

“But you kissed me back!” She was hugging herself, as if she was afraid she would fly apart if she didn’t hold on tight, and his heart turned over.

He’d thought compassion had been burned out of him long ago. It seemed he was wrong. He had no idea what had turned this beautiful, warm woman against her own nature, what had made her shrink from a mere touch, let alone the passion she’d displayed only moments ago. But someone, sometime, had damaged her. It would have been a man. Quinn felt his hands tighten into fists, and it took an effort to relax them.

“I kissed you back,” he admitted. “It won’t happen again. Can you accept that?”

Her gaze searched his face. Slowly the arms she’d wrapped around herself became less rigid, and she nodded, her eyes never leaving his. “I can accept that. I think you’re a man of your word, McGuire.”

There were a few different answers he could have given to that, but Quinn didn’t get the chance. Even as he began to get to his feet, holding out his hand for her to take or not, as she chose, he heard a perfunctory knock and the door behind him burst open.

“Mother of God—what’s been happening in here?” The outburst came from a short man with thinning red hair and astonished blue eyes. The green vest he wore strained over a paunch that probably owed much of its existence to the beer on tap in the bar. Quinn had seen him once or twice during the evening, and had guessed he was the owner of the place.

“I come in here to check that the lights have come on all right, and what do I find but a complete disaster area!” the man sputtered. He looked with appalled confusion around the flooded room, frowning in bewilderment at the lipsticked message on the mirror. “I Know Who You Are? Okay, I’ll bite—who the hell are you?”

The man’s tirade stopped as Quinn rose to his full height. Jane, to his surprise, had taken his hand and had risen with him. She stood beside him, almost, but not quite, touching him, the enormous T-shirt she was wearing making her seem more insubstantial than she was. She was tougher than she looked, he thought abruptly—just like another woman he’d once known.

I surrender, Sister, he thought in wry defeat. It was a losing battle I was fighting from the first, wasn’t it? Very carefully, he put a protective arm around Jane’s sodden shoulders.

“What the hell does it look like?” he growled. “I’m the lady’s bodyguard, of course.”