Internal Affairs. Jessica Andersen

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СКАЧАТЬ boots, his feet. Her brain spun. The basic exam didn’t indicate an immediate spine injury, but the bullet could lie near the vital areas, poised to shift and impinge on the critical nerves if she made a wrong move. She needed more information, needed an X-ray, needed—hell, she needed a doctor who had more experience with living tissue than dead, one who wasn’t faintly unnerved to feel warmth beneath her fingertips.

      The heat of him, so unlike the refrigerated flesh she touched on a daily basis, unsettled her. More, it wasn’t just any living body. It was Romo’s living body, which should’ve been impossible.

      Where the hell have you been? she wanted to shout at him. How could you let everyone think you were dead?

      By “everyone” she meant herself and his parents, because while the funeral had been well attended, and dozens of cops, agents and other staffers had railed against the prison riot that had taken his life, as far as she’d been able to tell, she had been one of the few who had truly mourned his death, one of the few who’d truly considered him a friend, even after everything that had happened between them.

      His parents had been there. They’d been shattered and disbelieving, and Sara hadn’t had the strength to say anything to them, hadn’t wanted to try to define her nonrelationship with their son. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to admit that she’d been grieving more for what she and Romo’d had in the past, for the man she’d thought him, not the man he’d turned out to be.

      Who, apparently, was alive, though not well.

      Crouched beside him, one hand on his warm, bloodsoaked shoulder, Sara fought an inner battle. She should call for an ambulance, get him to the hospital. The surgeons could deal with the bullet, the cops with his fate. She didn’t owe him anything.

      But instead of reaching for the phone, she picked up his note and scanned it a second time. Nobody can know that I’m here. That was straightforward enough, though difficult under the circumstances, when she needed to get him to an ER. Life or death. But whose life or death. Hers? His? A larger threat?

      Prior to his death—or what she’d thought was his death—Romo had been working with the BCCPD and occasionally the FBI, using his undeniable computer skills in an effort to ferret out the suspected terrorist conspirators within the BCCPD. Though he’d set his sights on Sara’s office as the center of the conspiracy—no doubt thanks in part to Proudfoot’s influence—Romo had also been looking at other departments, other cops. Then he’d been killed—supposedly—in the prison riot.

      The rumors had said his death had been no accident, that he’d been getting too close to the conspirators and they’d managed to take him out.

      From there, Sara realized, it was a short leap to believing that his apparently faked death was related to the case, too. What if he’d used it to drop under deep cover? Chelsea’s fiancé, Fax, had pretended to be a killer in order to get himself incarcerated in the ARX Supermax, in an effort to get close to al-Jihad. It was certainly possible that Romo, though a detective rather than an agent, had done something similar. If she assumed he was the lone man who’d escaped the net of the manhunt, then maybe he’d fled the terrorists because they’d found him out, or betrayed him.

      But if that were the case, why hadn’t he turned himself in to the members of the task force? If not during the chase itself, then why not later? Why had he come to her? Why tell her to keep his presence a secret?

      Damn you, she thought as she stared down at him, trying to figure out if that scenario really made sense, or if she just wanted it to. Her hypothesis did fit the evidence, she decided, but the same evidence would also support the reverse, namely that he’d faked his death so he could drop off the grid entirely and go to work for the terrorists, then got separated from them in the melee of the task force raid on the terrorists’ cabin.

      Both hypotheses fit, but which was the right one? Or was there yet another explanation she hadn’t come up with?

      “That doesn’t matter right now,” she said aloud. “What matters is what you’re going to do with him.” She glanced at the note, brain spinning.

      She knew Romo, knew what he’d been through as a child, and how those experiences had shaped the man he’d become. That, more than anything, told her logic favored the undercover theory. The Romo she’d known had been all about justice, sometimes to the exclusion of all other, softer emotions. She had to believe he’d been working for the good guys. That didn’t explain why he wanted to stay in hiding, but it did suggest that if the wrong people found out he was still alive, he could be in very real danger.

      Which, if she followed that line of thought to its conclusion, explained why he’d come to her if he felt he couldn’t go to whoever he’d been working for. She’d had her full medical training before deciding to specialize in pathology, and kept a small set of supplies on hand in case of emergencies. He would’ve known that, would’ve known she could patch him up. And, damn him, he would’ve known that she’d be unable to turn him away.

      Shaking her head, Sara stared down at him. “You’re really a bastard, you know that?”

      He didn’t answer. Didn’t even twitch. Which was so not helpful.

      She could call an ambulance, then dragoon one of her trusted cop friends to watch over him. There might be suspicions of complicity within the BCCPD and local FBI field office, but she knew for a fact that Chelsea, Fax, Cassie, Seth, Alyssa and Tucker were among the good guys. There was no way any of them were involved with the terrorists. They’d help keep Romo safe.

      But Sara stalled, because he’d come to her. He’d asked her to keep his presence a secret. Maybe, just maybe, it made the most sense to follow his instructions for the moment, and make her decisions once he was conscious and could fill in some of the blanks.

      Warning bells chimed at the back of her brain, but she couldn’t deal with them just then. She needed to make a decision, and it had better be the right one. Except when she came down to it, she knew she’d made her decision the moment she stepped toward him rather than away; the moment she’d touched his injured shoulder and felt warm skin, and remembered what they’d once been to each other.

      “Fine,” she said, her words seeming too loud in the silence of her secluded home. “Have it your way. You always did.” Reaching for a double handful of his clothing—and steeling herself to be a doctor rather than a woman who still, inexplicably, wanted to weep—she said, “I need to roll you. This is going to hurt.”

      She doubted he could hear her. The warning was more for her own sake than his, because she wasn’t used to dealing with patients who still had their pain responses intact.

      Doing her best to minimize the amount she twisted and moved him, in case the bullet had ended up someplace grim, she levered him partway up and checked for an exit wound or other injuries on the front of his body. She didn’t find either, which was both good news and bad: good news because his injury seemed localized and treatable, assuming the bullet hadn’t punched through to something internal; bad news because she didn’t know where the damned thing had gone.

      Easing him back down onto his flat stomach, trying not to remember how he’d slept like that, his face smashed into the pillow, his long limbs sprawled toward her, onto her, some part of him always touching some part of her, she rose and headed deeper into the house, through the smallish, oddly arranged rooms that she’d decorated to blend one into the next, with neutral, mossy colors and richly patterned curtains.

      She took the stairs leading up to her office and the bedroom, and tried not to remember СКАЧАТЬ