“I hear you.” Dane cradled Tess’s head in his lap. “Let’s go.”

Just as the officer got in behind the wheel, his partner came into view with a handcuffed man. Dane stiffened.

“M-20’s on his way,” the officer called to his partner. “I’ve got a wounded lady in here. Can you manage?”

“You bet! Get her to the hospital!” the other man called back.

The older man wheeled the squad car around with an expertise that Tess might have admired if she’d been less nauseated and hurt.

Minutes later, they pulled up at the municipal hospital emergency room, but Tess didn’t know it. She was unconscious….

Daylight was streaming through the window when her eyes opened again. She blinked. She was pleasantly dazed. Her upper arm felt swollen and hot. She looked at it, curious about the thick white bandage it was wrapped in. She stirred, only then aware that she was strapped to a tube.

“Don’t pull the IV out,” Dane drawled from the chair beside the bed. “Believe me, you won’t like having to have it put back in again.”

She turned her head toward him. She felt dizzy and disoriented. “It was dark,” she mumbled drowsily. “These men came after me and I think one of them shot me.”

“You were shot, all right,” he said grimly. “They were drug dealers. What happened? Did you get between them and the police, get caught in the crossfire?”

“No,” Tess groaned. “I saw them pass the stuff. They must have panicked, but I didn’t realize what I’d seen until they were after me.”

He stiffened. “You saw it? You witnessed a drug buy?”

She nodded wearily. “I’m afraid so.”

He whistled softly. “If they got a good look at you, and recognized the office building…”

“One got away.”

“The one who shot you,” Dane said flatly. “And they don’t have enough on the one they caught to hold him for long. They’ll charge him, but he’ll probably make bail as soon as he’s arraigned, and you’re the gal who can send him up for dealing.”

“His cohort shot me,” she pointed out. “But the one they arrested was there. Can’t he be arrested as an accessory?”

“Maybe, maybe not. You don’t know how these people think,” he said enigmatically, and he looked worried. Really worried.

“I’ll bet you do,” she murmured sleepily. “All those years, locking people up…”

“I know the criminal mind inside out,” he agreed. “But it’s different when things hit home.” His dark eyes narrowed on her wan face. “It’s very different.”

She must be half-asleep, she decided, because he actually sounded as if he minded that she’d been shot. That was ridiculous. He resented her, disliked her even if he had felt sorry enough for her to give her a job when her father had died. He was her worst enemy, so why would it matter to him if something happened to her?

Dane stretched wearily, his white shirt pulled taut over a broad chest. “How do you feel this morning?”

She touched the bandage. “Not as bad as I did last night. What did the doctors do to me?”

“Took the bullet out.” He pulled it from his shirt pocket and displayed it for her. “A thirty-eight caliber,” he explained. “A souvenir. I thought you might like it mounted and framed.”

She grimaced. “Suppose we frame and mount the man who shot me instead?”

His black eyebrow jerked up. “I’ll pass that thought along to the police,” he said dryly.

“Can I go home?”

“When you’re a little stronger. You lost a lot of blood and they had to put you under to get the bullet out.”

“Helen will be furious when she finds out,” she murmured with a smile. “She’s the private eye, and I got shot.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’ll be livid with jealousy,” he agreed. He paused beside the bed, his dark eyes narrow and intent on her face in its frame of soft, wavy blond hair. He looked at her for a long time.

“I’m all right, if it matters,” she said sleepily. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know why it should. You hate me.”

Her voice trailed off as she gave in to the need for rest. He didn’t answer her. But his eyes were stormy and his mind had already registered how much it would have mattered if her life had seeped out on that cold concrete.

He got up and went to the window, stretching again. He was tired. He hadn’t slept since they’d brought her in. All through the operation, he’d paced and waited for news. It had been the longest night he’d ever spent.

A soft sound from the bed caught his attention. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stood beside her, watching the slow rise and fall of her chest. The unbecoming hospital gown did nothing for her. She was too thin. He scowled as he looked at her, his mind on the coldness he’d shown her over the years, the unrelenting hostility that had, eventually, turned a shy, loving girl into a quiet, insecure woman. Tess had wanted to love him, and he’d slapped her down, hard. It hadn’t been cruelty so much as a raging desire that he’d started to satisfy in the only way he knew to satisfy it—roughly, savagely. But Tess had been a virgin, and he hadn’t known. She’d run from him, in tears, barely in time to save her honor. Afterward, she’d never come near him again. His pride hadn’t allowed him to go after her, to explain that tenderness wasn’t something he was used to showing women. Her frantic departure in tears had shattered him. She didn’t know that.

He’d been antagonistic to hide the hurt the experience had dealt him, so it wasn’t surprising that she thought he hated her. He’d even tried to convince himself he didn’t mind the fact that Tess avoided him like the plague. To save his pride, he’d even made it appear as if his actions had been premeditated, to make her leave him alone.

He thought back to those dark days after he’d been shot. Everyone had deserted him. His mother had always hated him, despite her pretense for the sake of appearances. Even Jane, his wife, had walked out on him and filed for divorce, after being blatantly unfaithful to him. But Tess had been with him every step of the way, making him live, making him fight. Tess had been the light that brought him out of the darkness. And he’d repaid her loving kindness with cruelty. It hurt him to remember that. It hurt him more to realize that she could have died last night.

A faint tap on the door announced the nurse’s entrance. She smiled at Dane and proceeded to check Tess’s vital signs.

“Lucky, wasn’t she?” the woman asked absently, as she waited for the thermometer to register. “Just a few inches to the side and she’d be dead.”

The impact of the idle remark was as sharp as a tack. He blinked, his dark gaze steady on Tess’s closed eyes. If she died, he’d be alone. He’d have no one.

The enormity of the thought drove him out of the room with a murmured excuse. He walked down the long corridor without seeing it, his mind humming all the way to the black Mercedes he’d had Helen drive to the parking lot for him while Tess was in surgery. He still had to call the office and tell them how she was. He checked his watch; it was time they were at work. He’d stop by on the way to his apartment to shower and change his clothes.

He unlocked the car, but he didn’t get in, his hand on the door handle as he stared up at the hospital. Tess wasn’t a relative in any sense at all. Their parents had never married. But they were both only children and their parents were dead.

With a rough sigh, he opened the car door and got in. He didn’t start it immediately. He stared at the blood on his sleeve. Tess’s blood. He’d watched it pulse out of her in the darkness as if it were his own. She could have died in his arms.

Once she’d been such a bright, happy girl, so eager to please him, so obviously in love with him. He closed his eyes. He’d killed that sweet feeling in her. He’d frightened it right out of her with his clumsy headlong rush at her that afternoon, when he’d given in finally to the need that had been tearing him apart. He’d never wanted anyone so much. But he knew nothing of tenderness, and he’d terrified her. It hadn’t been deliberate, but maybe, subconsciously, he’d wanted her to back away, before she became his world. A failed marriage made a man gun-shy, Dane thought bitterly, looking back to the time three years ago when Tess and he had first met….