Gabriel West: Still The One. Fiona Brand

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СКАЧАТЬ actions were enough to make her break out in a sweat. She’d protested at spending the night in hospital, but there was no getting past the fact that her head was still throbbing despite the painkillers she’d taken, and that she was still wobbly on her feet.

      Aside from the initial head injury, and the damage she’d done to her right hand and shoulder when she’d thrown that punch, she’d sustained a second head injury when she’d fallen and hit her head on the concrete. The first hit had been brutal enough to concuss her; the second one hadn’t been as violent, but had compounded the first injury with the added bruising and swelling. On top of all that, she was bruised and stiff all down her left side from the fall.

      Gingerly, she pushed hair away from her face. She’d managed to shower that morning and change into the jeans and cotton shirt Harrison had brought in, but her hair was still a mess, tangled and matted around the wound, and she’d left it that way. Her one attempt to drag a comb through the tangles had left her clinging to the bathroom counter, a fine film of perspiration beading her upper lip.

      The doctor who’d treated her the previous evening had only needed two stitches to close the cut on her head, but the area was still swollen, her scalp so tight and sensitive that even the movement of her hair hurt.

      Some time around midnight, she’d stopped seeing colors. In medical terms, the swelling in her brain had subsided to a point where it was no longer pressing on the optic nerves, thus producing the neon-bright display, but she still felt oversensitive and fragile. Colors were too bright, voices were too loud—even the surface of her skin felt oversensitive, as if several layers had been peeled away and all of her nerve endings exposed.

      “You said you thought someone followed you on two separate occasions the previous week. Have you got any idea who that might have been?”

      The question was clipped and businesslike, not Cornell this time, but his partner, Elaine Farrell.

      Tyler lifted her chin, and spoke carefully, mostly because the answer was so obvious, but partly because the small movements of her mouth and jaw pulled at the skin of her scalp and intensified the deep ache, so that even talking hurt. “If I’d been absolutely certain that I was being followed, and had any idea who was following me I would have done something about it.”

      The small buzz of conversation in the room stopped.

      Cornell went down on his haunches, his gaze neutral. “Are you certain the dark-skinned man who attacked you was Chinese?”

      Anger flickered at Cornell’s deliberate alteration of the facts, his subtle sidestep into the shady realms of the jade investigation. There had been some speculation that the Chinese interests could be included in the thefts, but that was mostly media generated. “I saw part of his face. I’m certain he was Asian, not that he was Chinese.”

      Richard made a sound of disbelief. “Are you saying the mugging could be linked with the theft of the jade?”

      Cornell didn’t acknowledge Richard’s question, or answer. All of his attention remained focused on Tyler—the pressure of his gaze like a weight.

      Bitterness and an odd indifference congealed in Tyler’s stomach—a grim remnant from childhood. Cornell was questioning her in order to track down the men who’d assaulted her, but she was beginning to feel more like the offender than the victim. She could feel herself stepping back inside, divorcing herself from the legal process that was unfolding around her.

      With an effort of will, she slammed the door on the temptation to simply close off and go blank. When she’d been a child she’d been an expert at the tactics—the ice-queen of eight-year-olds. She’d worked hard to leave that pattern behind; it had taken years, and she’d be damned if she would start running now. There was too much at stake, too much to lose. Her reputation, her career. Her family.

      She glanced at Richard and Harrison. They were standing side-by-side—both tall, lean and tanned, with light brown hair. Except for the thirty years Harrison had on Richard and the silvery wings at his temples, the likeness was so pronounced that they could have been brothers. Their jaws were both identically set, their dark eyes cold, voices clipped, as they grilled Cornell about the possibility of a connection between the mugging and the jade theft, and for a moment, confusion and an acute sense of separation swamped Tyler. It was obvious that Harrison and Richard were father and son—also obvious that they were similar in ways that transcended the father/son relationship.

      They were her family, but in subtle ways they weren’t. Harrison’s wife, Louisa, had always been the glue that had held them all together, but since her death three years before, Tyler had felt herself drifting, her connection to both Harrison and Richard increasingly more tenuous.

      Richard crossed his arms over his chest, his frustration palpable. “So what the hell are we investigating? A theft, or some kind of conspiracy?”

      With her as the prime suspect.

      Tyler rubbed at her temples. Her mind was still fuzzy, her head throbbing despite the painkillers she’d had with breakfast. “Leave it, Richard. The guy was Asian, that’s a fact. I was mugged, that’s another fact. At this point there is nothing to connect the mugging with the theft of the jade. As for the phone calls, and being followed…” Her own frustration welled, sending a fresh stab of pain through her skull. “All of that started happening before the robbery, so how could any of it possibly be connected?”

      She could feel the consensus of opinion. The theft of the jade had sent shock waves through the world of artifacts. The mystery of who had taken the jade, and how it had been stolen, when to all intents and purposes Laine’s security system had not been breached, was disturbing enough. No one wanted to believe that the theft could be more complicated than simple larceny.

      But if she was cynical enough, and right now it was hard to be anything but cynical, the police, and everyone present in the room, had to be examining the possibility that she was using last night’s incident to implicate the Chinese in the jade theft. The jade was, after all, Chinese in origin.

      Although why would anyone, let alone Chinese people, attack her when they already had the jade? A renegade bubble of humor surfaced. Unless, of course, she had somehow stumbled onto the set of a “B” grade movie, and the bad guys wanted to cut her out of the money, bump her off and dump her body.

      Abruptly, the implications were too much—especially if the press decided there was a connection.

      She met Richard’s gaze coolly. “If I had any idea who it is that’s been following me and doing the heavy-breathing routine over the phone, I would have tracked him down and dealt with him the same way I dealt with the guy last night.”

      Richard looked momentarily perplexed.

      Cornell rose to his feet and slipped his notebook in his briefcase. “She broke his jaw.”

      The moment when she’d swung that punch replayed through Tyler’s mind. She hadn’t made a conscious decision to hit him—that punch had burst from deep inside and she couldn’t have pulled it if she’d tried. Even now, just thinking about it made the fury well up and sent adrenaline pumping through her veins.

      “You broke his jaw?”

      The question was soft, clipped. Harrison.

      She had never called her adoptive father Dad, and he had never asked her to—by the time the Laine family had adopted her she had been eight going on thirty. She and Harrison had compromised with his first name.

      She СКАЧАТЬ