Beckett's Convenient Bride. Dixie Browning

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      She was wielding a tire-iron in a way that was anything but reassuring. “Open your eyes,” she demanded in a quavering voice.

      No way, lady. I’m safer playing dead.

      She crept closer. He squeezed his eyes shut, hoping she’d be convinced and leave him alone. Nothing in the genealogist’s chart had indicated a strain of insanity in the Chandler genes, but then the lady genealogist hadn’t gone into any personal detail.

      “You’re not dead. I saw your eyelids twitch. I hardly even touched you.”

      She hadn’t touched him at all, but only because he’d jumped out of the way just in time. She hesitated, but he could hear her breathing. She was still looming over him with that damned tire iron. The right tool in the wrong hands could be lethal.

      “Darn you, open your eyes!” she whispered fiercely. By then she was so close he could feel the heat of her body, feel her breath brushing his face. “I barely touched you, you can’t be dead,” she declared.

      He was having trouble regulating his breathing. It would be just his luck to have a sneezing spell. He felt her knees press against his side, felt the soft pressure of cool fingertips on his throat, then on his chest.

      Yeah, I’m alive, he was tempted to tell her. Keep on touching me like that and I’ll show you just how lively I can be, headache or no.

      Fat chance. He was fighting on too many fronts to take on one more. She smelled like…cinnamon? Apples?

      Something equally innocuous…and equally tempting.

      She touched his forehead and jerked her hand away. He wanted her fingers back. They were cool, soothing, and God, he needed that. What the hell was he supposed to do now? None of this was in the script. If he opened his eyes or even so much as twitched a muscle, she’d probably cold cock him with that damned tire iron.

      “You’re alive, I know you are. I don’t even see any blood, so you can’t be seriously hurt. But while you’re down I just want you to know that I didn’t see anything, not one blessed thing, so you don’t have to worry about me. Just because my car happened to be in the parking lot, that doesn’t mean I saw what you did. I was on the other side of the cemetery. I couldn’t even hear what you were fighting about.”

      Breathing through clenched teeth, Carson mentally assessed the damage. He was winded, but probably in no worse shape than before. Unless he slid into the ditch and drowned. If she didn’t stop pressing her knees into his side, that was a distinct possibility.

      What the hell was she talking about? A cemetery? Fighting? She sure as hell had seen him.

      “Well,” she said tentatively. “I probably shouldn’t leave you here in case another car comes. Besides, you’re blocking the intersection.”

      Tentatively, she picked up his hand and tugged. He felt something tickling his cheek and hoped it wasn’t alive, because the last thing he needed on top of everything else was an infestation of chiggers.

      “Look, I know you’re not unconscious, I can tell by the way you breathe.”

      He could have told her that his breathing would be a lot more convincing if she weren’t so close…and so damned female. Were pheromones considered hormones? His were supposed to be out on sick leave.

      He could sense her studying him as if he were something under a microscope. Thank God he wasn’t armed. Sometimes he carried when he was off duty, but not when he was this far out of his jurisdiction. Besides, this wasn’t that kind of a case. Hadn’t started out that way, at least. But who knows, with a crazy woman…

      “I didn’t hit you that hard. I didn’t even feel a bump,” she said defensively.

      He didn’t know what to say, and so he said nothing. If his head weren’t hanging lower than his feet, he’d have been content to stay right where he was for the foreseeable future.

      On the other hand, with a crazy woman feeling him up…

      Get your hands off my body, lady, that’s private property you’re invading.

      Her hair hung down and tickled his face. She was muttering under her breath, something about a gun. What the devil was she talking about? She didn’t even know he was a cop—they’d never got that far in the introductions.

      Kit was looking for his pistol. He had to be wearing one, because why else would he be wearing a leather coat on a day like this? As long as you stayed out of the wind, it felt almost summer.

      Had he had it in his hand when she’d hit him? If so, it could be anywhere, even in the ditch—although she hadn’t heard a splash.

      The murder weapon. Oh, my blessed mercy!

      She had to find it before he came to and hold it on him until she could get help. Yell for one of the men on the wharf to call the sheriff.

      Being able to hand over his gun as evidence would make up for not giving her name when she called, but first she had to find it. One side of his coat was caught underneath his body, and so she started, carefully patting him down. His body was hot. Hot, hard and…

      Squatting beside him, she leaned over and slipped her fingers under the other side of his coat. Right-handed men wore their guns on the left side, didn’t they? And vice versa?

      She had no way of knowing which handed he was. Some men shoved their guns into the back of their belt, but he was lying on his back and he was too heavy for her to roll over.

      And then her fingers touched something that felt like leather. Too flat to be a gun or a holster…

      Frowning, she managed to ease it out of an inside pocket. “A badge?”

      “Satisfied?” His voice sounded like iron grating on concrete.

      She gasped and dropped the badge, scrambling backward and trying to look as if she hadn’t been caught with her hands in places they had no business being. “Look, whoever you are, we’re going to have to move you, else you’ll slide into the ditch and drown, but don’t try any funny business, because we’re being watched.” She had no idea whether or not the men working on the waterfront a few thousand feet away were paying any attention, much less whether they could actually see what was going on. “So don’t think you can get away with anything.”

      “Wouldn’t think of it,” he rasped. His eyes were still closed. She didn’t know whether to trust him or not.

      “Can you move?” She leaned forward on her knees again and studied his face, which was hardly reassuring, but then at this point it would take the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to reassure her.

      “Can you open your eyes?”

      No way, lady. As long as he didn’t open his eyes, Carson told himself, he could pretend this was all a bad dream. All of it…the purple banshee, the smell of cinnamon and apples, the babbling testimony—those cool hands pawing over his body.

      Don’t try any funny business? What was she, a comic book character? There was nothing even faintly funny about any of the past forty-eight hours.

      He СКАЧАТЬ