The porch door opened into Anne's kitchen, cavernous beneath the skeletal framework for a dropped ceiling. She pulled one of the mismatched oak chairs out from the round table, and with only a sharp glance at her, as though he wanted to argue the necessity for sitting but knew he'd lose, David Huerra sank onto it. She left him there while she went back out to the truck to retrieve her bag and his, but when she returned, he'd recovered enough to go exploring.
Just off the kitchen, also at the rear of the house, was a room that might have once been a sleeping porch or possibly a housekeeper's quarters. The double glass-paned doors argued for a more formal use, but the location denied it. She thought it would probably be perfect for her jewelry workshop if she ever got the courage to do what she already suspected was inevitable, but for now that same location made it just as perfect for her renovation tools and clutter.
She found him in that room, studying what had to be the oldest table saw in existence. He traced his hand along the homemade rip-fence and looked up, grinning. "This is vintage. It came with the house, I presume?"
She chuckled. "It's not quite that old. And it came with two cases of chicken pox and a broken ankle."
"And a pint of blackberry jelly?"
"I wish."
He reached for his bag, but she stepped back, holding it away from him and studying him. Thank God for safety glass. Without it, he'd have been a maze of cuts and slashes, but even safety glass had its limits when bashed by pine logs. "Come on. I'll show you to the downstairs bathroom and let you wash away some of that glass grit."
He nodded and followed her back into the kitchen and out the door she'd had knocked through the wall into the front hallway. The bathroom under the stairs would eventually be little more than a powder room, but because she was more or less confined to the ground floor until she did major work upstairs, she had finished this one with new fixtures and a small, tiled shower enclosure.
"Nice," he said, when she opened the door to the tiny room.
Yes, it was, Anne admitted to herself as she saw it for the first time through a stranger's eyes. "Thanks." She stepped back to let him enter and handed him his bag as she pointed out the obvious: fresh towels and washcloths on the wicker shelf, a basket holding soaps and even a package of disposable razors, the hair dryer in its tole-painted rack. "Call out if you need anything," she told him. "I'll be in the kitchen. Oh—and don't even think about putting those clothes in your bag. I'll run them through the washer and dryer with a load of my work clothes."
"Have you ever been told you're pushy, Doc?" Huerra asked her. But there wasn't any heat in his words. There wasn't much energy either, and she could tell he was far from the "all right" he had insisted he was.
"Yeah," she said. "Probably about as often as you've been told you're stubborn, Detective."
He absorbed that, gave her a weary smile, and closed the door against her.
She listened outside the door for a moment until she was sure he wasn't going to collapse on the floor and then went back into the kitchen.
And realized what she was doing.
She gripped the edge of the poor, beat-up old kitchen sink. She'd brought a complete stranger home with her, bossed and bullied him into stripping off and bathing in her private space, and was now preparing to cook for him and do his laundry?
Maybe the house was haunted, after all. Something had her acting like she was the one who had gotten thumped on the head.
Nonsense, she told herself. She was a doctor, for God's sake. She had chosen and had been trained to nurture her patients.
But she had also been trained not to take unnecessary risks with her safety, and that lesson was one she'd sworn she'd never again forget.
He was a cop, she reminded herself, not an ax murderer or a drug dealer, not a danger to her. Well, at least not to her physical safety. The last thing she needed in the wreck her life had become was a cop. She'd had enough of cops—and all the pain that they drew like magnets—to last her the rest of several lifetimes.
But he was injured. She reminded herself of that, too. "He's your patient," she whispered to herself. "Remember that."
And she did, at least until he walked into the kitchen several minutes later, all scrubbed from his shower and dressed in jeans and a shirt so fresh from the laundry that the creases fairly crackled. He held a small stack of his clothes carefully away from his body.
"I don't think you want to wash these with anything of yours," he said. "If you'll give me a bag of some sort, I'll let a commercial machine take the risk." He grimaced. "Or maybe I'll just throw them away."
He didn't look like a cop, and except for an unnatural pallor, a few nicks now visible on his jaw and throat and the burgeoning bruise near his left temple, he didn't look like a patient.
"Nonsense." She reached for the clothes, but he held them away from her. "Okay." She smiled and pointed to the washer and dryer across the room.
Huerra nodded. In only moments he had competently loaded his things into the washer, added soap, and started the cycle. Well, well, she thought. Maybe his clothes were commercially starched and pressed because he liked them that way, and not because he didn't know how to take care of them himself.
Which was none of her business. None at all.
"Any dizziness?" she asked, as he closed the lid and turned to study the wreck of the kitchen. "Blurred vision? Blood where it shouldn't be?"
He grinned and shook his head, then winced and leaned back against the washing machine. "You've got a he—heck of a bedside manner. Anybody ever tell you that?"
"Yeah." She pulled out a chair and pointed at him, then at it. "Sit."
"I'm only letting you get away with that because I see a coffeepot on the counter and I haven't had my quota of caffeine this morning," he told her as he eased himself onto the chair.
"And you're not getting any from me, either, until I'm sure it won't do you more harm."
"Come look in my eyes, Doc, and feel my pulse. No concussion. And, to answer your last, oblique question, no signs of internal bleeding. No lumps or bulges," he volunteered, "that don't appear superficial, manageable, or normal. Nothing requiring stitches, intensive care, or even taping up. So, please, Annie," he said, giving her what she suspected was his best good-little-boy grin—a grin that had probably gotten him just about anything he'd ever asked for. "Please, please, please, can I have some coffee?"
She gave him a laugh as seemingly easy, and as false, as his grin and reached for the second of two canisters. He didn't have to know it was decaf. "Is that how you solve your cases?" she asked, determined to continue their light, meaningless patter. "Beg until the perpetrator confesses?"
His grin faded, and although he made a quick attempt at recovery, it wasn't quite successful. Ah hah, she thought. Secrets. And definitely a man who wasn't as superficial as he'd tried to make her think. Well, she understood secrets, and the necessity for keeping them private, quiet, and contained. "I suppose the next thing you're going to ask for is cholesterol. And carbohydrates."
"And calories?" The little boy was back, more naturally now, with just a touch of flirt. Not so much that she couldn't handle it. Not so much that for a little while she couldn't enjoy it.
"I've heard nasty rumors that those things are bad for you," she told him as she filled the coffeepot and turned it on.
"Yeah. Me too. Problem is, those same rumors would have you believing everything's bad for you. You do have sausage, don't you?" he asked, looking at her in feigned horror. "You do have . . . eggs?"
"Of course I have sausage and eggs."
He put his hand over his heart and grinned again, but as she turned her attention to the refrigerator she glanced at him and realized that he was fading fast. If she was going to feed him, it would have to be soon, or he'd be sleeping at her table. And feed him she would. He was displaying no signs of concussion or internal injury. Of course, if he lost his breakfast, she'd have to do some fast rethinking.
And it would be all right for him to sleep. She was confident of that now. In fact, it would be better for him if he did. The human body had miraculous powers of recovery, as long as it was given time and, in some cases, permission to recover.
In deference to his failing energy and her less than wonderful kitchen skills, she opted for toast instead of biscuits, but she did dig out a jar of blackberry jelly—purchased, not homemade—and for once everything else she cooked turned out better than just edible . . . pretty good, in fact. It was amazing what six months without a McDonald's had done for her kitchen chemistry.
Huerra was exhausted but trying to hide it when he finished off the last slice of toast. "That was great, Doc. Now if I could just trouble you for a ride out to the Tompkins place—"
She shook her head. "I said a couple of hours, and I meant a couple of hours." She picked up their plates and carried them to the sink. "If your breakfast doesn't come up—" He raised a hand as if to assure her. She ignored it. "—and if you don't start seeing four of me, I'll deliver you out there before noon."
He winced again, and turned in his chair in a surreptitious effort to get comfortable. Before he realized what she was doing, she returned to the table and captured his face in her hands, looking into his eyes.
"Are they crossed?" he asked.
She released him. "No. And they're not dilated, either." She nodded toward the front of the house. "Come with me. Your body's got to be screaming for some rest."
He rebelled at the bedroom door, looking in at her unashamedly romantic comforter and curtains. "That's your bed."
She nodded and pretended to write on a chart. "Very good. Abstract thinking and cognitive skills appear unimpaired."
"Come on, Annie," he said, "I can't take your bed."
He'd dropped all pretense of humor; so did she. "You can barely stand up," she told him. "You need to rest. Your choices are exactly two: my bed or a sofa with about as much support as a marshmallow."
"Or my own rented bed at a fishing camp just outside of town. I can rest there."
"Maybe," she admitted. "Probably. But I wouldn't feel good about abandoning you there, and since I can't leave until my weekend carpenters show up, the question is not debatable. Another hour," she said, relenting when she saw how uncomfortable her skewed impersonation of Marcus Welby must be making this big-city cop. "Humor me for an hour longer."
She gestured toward the bed. "There's a phone. Make any calls you think necessary, and then lie down before you fall down."
He looked at her, still dubious, she knew, but nodded. "An hour," he said, as though confirming a contract. When she nodded, too, it was as though all the argument went out of him. "All right," he told her. "I'll rest. But I won't sleep."
He slept for three hours.
She checked on him frequently, but after the first time she unplugged her bedside telephone so he wouldn't accidentally be awakened and fought her own battle with her conscience about awakening him deliberately to check on him. He'd shown no signs of concussion, and he slept the sleep of the exhausted, not the injured.
She amended that thought as she stood in the doorway and watched him sprawled in sleep across her bed. The exhausted and the injured. Because the collision he'd been through today would take its toll on his body—in bruises and sore muscles he didn't yet suspect. But something else, something more, had already taken a toll, as evidenced by the dark shadows under his eyes, of the way, in sleep and without his deliberate attempt to hide it with smiles and animation, his face seemed drawn and lined beyond his years.
Secrets.
She had enough of her own.
She didn't need his, too.
She shook her head. Food, a shower, and a couple of hours of observation. That was all she had promised him. That was all she—owed him. And she did owe David Huerra in some strange, off-kilter way. If she hadn't been stopped at the end of the lane, he might have had an escape route.
After he woke up, after she delivered him out to Gene and Gretta Tompkins's place, she would have lived up to her obligations. He could have his fishing trip and then take his big-city problems back where they belonged, to the city, and leave her in the peaceful small-town solitude she had sought out and was so carefully wrapping around herself.
Solitude or not, Anne was pretty close to cursing small-town living hours later when Huerra carefully walked his bruised and battered body back into her kitchen.
"You let me sleep longer than an hour."
He headed immediately for the coffeepot—now filled with the fresh, real coffee she'd decided she needed instead of decaf—helped himself to a cup as though he had every right in the world to do so, and leaned back against the counter frowning at the lumber she'd carried in from Agnes's bed and stashed mostly in the room with the power tools, with only a little overflowing into the already cluttered kitchen.
He pointed to his left temple, to the bruise that promised to spread colorfully over most of that side of his face. "Did you see this?" She nodded, but he didn't seem to want an answer. "If your good buddy Hank could see me now, he'd really think I was one of the bad guys. How the hell did I get bruised on that side of my head?"
"And other places?" she asked.
"Yes," he admitted. "Oh, hell, yes." He glared at her. "You knew, didn't you?"
She suspected that if he had been shot, if he had been seriously injured, he would have borne it with stoic acceptance, but he hadn't been, and he didn't. "Didn't you ever work traffic detail?" she asked.
He slumped against the counter. After a moment while they both considered the unexpected trauma even the mildest wreck could inflict on a person, he took a drink from his cup and looked across to where she sat with her feet propped up on a nearby chair. "Too long," he said. "Sorry."
"Apology accepted." She dropped her feet from the chair and gestured toward it with her coffee cup. "Maybe you'd like to sit for a while?"
He nodded. "Do you think I could have a couple of aspirin now?"
"On the counter beside the sink." She'd put them there earlier, knowing he was probably going to need them. She watched while he swallowed three with his coffee and then came over and eased himself onto the chair.
"So what's got you down in the dumps, Doc? And where's your help?"
"It's the same question," she said, saluting him with her cup. "And the same answer."
"Are they coming later?"
Her glower at her now empty coffee cup had to have answered him.
"Well," he said, "the economy here can't be so good that there's not a half-dozen people waiting in line for a job."
She transferred her glower to him, knowing he didn't deserve it but needing to vent her frustration in some way. "That was my fourth crew. This one didn't even bother to tell me they weren't coming. When I called the lumberyard here in town to find out what the holdup was, the clerk there told me they hadn't even been in to pick up the drywall and other standard supplies I need. And that they'd started a different job."
"And left you with a half-finished kitchen ceiling, at least one unfinished doorway, and—and what else?"
She felt a grin trying to break through. She didn't have to waste her energy getting indignant. David Huerra, the big-city cop, was doing it for her. "An upstairs that is practically uninhabitable."
"And a fading purple paint job."
Inside the house she could and often did forget how bad it looked from the outside. Apparently Huerra's first impression was still too new for him to forget. "That, too," she told him. "But an outside paint job is way down on my list of must dos. First I'd like to make sure I'm warm and dry for the winter."
"You could import a crew or two and have this done in no time," he said.
Antsy, frustrated, and needing the release of movement, she got up from the chair and paced to the coffeepot. She filled her cup and carried the pot back to the table. "In case you haven't noticed, I practice family medicine in a small town, not a specialty in some affluent suburb. I'm not exactly rolling in money."
For the first time she saw a touch of cynicism in David Huerra's eyes, but it was gone almost before she saw it, replaced by—what? Chagrin? "So what do you do now?" he asked.
Good question. What did she do? She poured him some coffee and sat back down. "I guess I do the things I can do around here, put out the word at the lumberyard and at Willie Johnson's sawmill and among my patients, and hope to find a couple more out-of-work carpenters."
He lifted his cup and tried to hide his body's reaction to his sore muscles. "Four crews?" he asked. "In how long?"
"Not quite six months." But for the first time since he'd entered the kitchen, she didn't want to talk about carpenters and repairs. She suddenly remembered what discomfort he had to be in.
"Isn't that stretching bad luck a little far, even in a place as small as Allegro?"
That echoed her own earlier thoughts too closely for comfort. "Or good luck," she told him. "Since it seems that everyone I manage to find winds up with a job that's both bigger and better than the one I offered."
The cynicism she now saw open and unmasked in David Huerra's expression was not new to her. It was one of the reasons she had fled Chicago. It was something she sometimes still saw in her own bathroom mirror. But she had never expected to face it across the oak table in her disaster area of a kitchen.
"Are you hungry?" she asked him.
He let her change the subject. "No."
But he was still tired, still sore, and still needing rest. "I called Gretta Tompkins while you were asleep. Gene is out on the lake with some fishermen, but she promised to hold your cabin and have it ready for you when we get there."
Why was she dismissing him? Maybe it was because he was far from recovered from the accident. But maybe, and the thought nagged at her like a toothache, maybe it was because for the first time in months she didn't want to cut herself off from anyone and everyone who knew what life away from Allegro was like. And maybe, just maybe, it was because she sensed more of a tie between the two of them than just that knowledge.
Gretta Tompkins had done more than keep the cabin for him. She had stocked the pantry and the small refrigerator, and turned up the heat and turned back the covers on the only moderately lumpy bed. Obviously she'd heard about the accident. Of course, David thought, remembering. Anne had probably told her when she telephoned earlier.
And Pete—her son and his captain—had undoubtedly called and warned her about the short fuse David had been traveling on for so long, maybe even told her he'd ordered David to vacation and all but ordered he do it with them.
"Well—" Anne turned in a circle, surveying the room, taking note of the roaring panel-ray heater and the empty spot on the nightstand where no telephone sat. "You'll be all right?" she asked, sounding anything but convinced that he would be. "It's pretty basic out here. You might need a telephone."
"I'll be all right," he said. He was no more convinced than she was at the moment, but he hoped his voice didn't give his doubts away. Damn. All he wanted right now was to crawl into the bed and sink into oblivion while his body healed. He must really have taken a battering if he could stand in a rented room with a woman who looked as tempting as Anne Locke and desire only—well, almost only—rest.
Anne smiled at him. Taking a package from a pocket in the light windbreaker she wore, she placed it on the nightstand. "It isn't much," she said hesitantly. "Just something a little stronger than aspirin in case you need it. You'll call me if you have any problems?"
"Yeah." He nodded, too fast, and his head began pounding again. "But I won't have any problems."
"Right." Her face lit with a crooked grin before she gestured toward the minuscule kitchen. "You probably won't, but you should avoid caffeine for a while. And definitely no alcohol for a couple of days. Rest. Yes. That's—"
"Doc." And damned if she wasn't. A doctor that was. He was having trouble remembering that. "I told you. I've been thumped before. I know the drill."
"Right," she said again. "Then I'll—I'll see you if you—I'd like to check you over—I mean . . ."
He almost laughed. He would have if he hadn't known how much it would hurt. Slowly, he walked to the door, holding it half open while she backed out, embarrassed and tongue-tied. "Thanks for everything," he said.
"Go home, Annie," he told her when she continued to stand on the small porch, obviously reluctant to leave him in the primitive cabin. Finally though, she gave an abrupt nod, spun on her heel, and marched away toward her parked truck.
David watched until she climbed into the truck and drove away. Agnes. The woman had actually given her truck a name. He wondered for a moment if she'd named that purple monstrosity of a house.
Cautiously, he worked his arms out of the windbreaker and dropped it over the back of a chair. The aspirin he'd taken earlier hadn't begun to cut the bone-deep aches that had started sometime during his unexpected nap. He picked up the bag she'd left, took out one of the sample packages it contained, read the label, and shook out two of the capsules.
The water from the kitchen tap was icy cold and free of any chemical taste. He downed the capsules with a generous swallow, then finished the remainder of the glass. A well, he thought. Deep and clear and clean. It had been a long time, years, since he'd tasted water so pure.
Maybe that was something else he had to think about this month.
As if there wasn't enough already.
He managed to get his boots off and stretched out on the bed, fully clothed, giving in to the groan because there was no longer any reason to hide it.
A doctor for God's sake. He'd been rescued by a doctor.
He glanced at the wooden planks of the ceiling, and beyond. He'd been a scrawny little kid in west Texas, growing up poor and Hispanic and Catholic. He'd been a scrawny, scrappy adolescent, still poor, still Hispanic, still Catholic, when he fell in love with Marla Hamilton, the rich, Anglo Protestant daughter of the county's only private-practice doctor.
He hadn't been good enough for her. That was the lesson he'd learned the summer of his seventeenth year. That was the lesson her daddy had made sure he and all his family learned.
Lying through his teeth but smiling all the while, Dr. Hamilton had fired David's mother from her job as his housekeeper and accused his brother Patrick of stealing his medical bag. Of course, Dr. Hamilton's word had been taken over David's, his mother's, and his brother's. In that county, at that time, doctors were ranked right up there with God. His payment for dropping the false charges was David's leaving the county, leaving the doctor's precious daughter. David had left to save his brother from prison, but Marla hadn't been willing to leave her father, his money, or his prestige.
Yes, that had been a hard lesson, one David barely survived and one he had stubbornly, angrily rejected. But he'd absorbed another one, not even realizing he had, until his prejudice against all doctors had come crashing into his professional life. He'd been a good cop. At least he thought he had been. Impartial, objective, even dispassionate in a job that exposed him to all human passions and emotions. Until he'd been blindsided by a hatred as irrational and as deeply ingrained in himself as the one that had spawned his own.
And apparently his childhood Catholicism was as deeply ingrained. "I don't need more lessons," he said to a spot somewhere beyond the ceiling. "I've already had those. Remember? We did that last month. What I'm here to do is—"
Is what?
Decide whether or not he had more blind spots ready to jump out in ambush.
Decide whether he had what it took to be a cop. No. To be a good cop. A decent cop.
And after fifteen years of living with the dark side of humanity, to learn whether he still had—if he'd ever had—the ability to be a decent human being.
And for that, he didn't need another lesson. He didn't need another doctor in his life, no matter how . . . human she seemed. No matter how appealing he found her. How attractive.
No matter how much he felt as though the God of his Catholic childhood had put her in his path.
No. What he needed was solitude, peace, and quiet for at least long enough to examine what was in his own heart and psyche, and then, if he still thought it necessary, the strength to say good-bye to a job he loved but was no longer competent to perform.