Tami Hoag - Heart of Gold

“I can handle this, Ms. Kincaid. I was a medic in ’Nam. It’s not as serious as it looks.”

“He’ll need medication-”

“It’ll be taken care of ma’am.”

Shane forced his eyes open a slit and caught the look Alaina Montgomery shot at Del. “Lord, they’re worse than the damn Boy Scouts-always prepared.”

Suddenly Mr. Fitz loomed overhead like a giant billy goat, scratching at his snaggled whiskers, an unholy light in his eyes. The smell of fish hung around him like an acrid cloud. “Lord, ladies, what did ye do to the rascal? Did he have it comin’?”

“Mr. Fitz, please stand back,” Matthews asked, exasperated. The towheaded agent leaned over Shane with a penlight, checking his pupils for response.

Shane squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, Faith was bent over him, concern etched in every feature of her heart-shaped face. She sure was pretty, he noted, needing something to fasten his mind on. Her teeth dug into her full lower lip. He remembered how sweet that lip tasted-like cherry soda. She reached down and stroked his cheek with fingertips that felt like icicles on his burning skin.

She was worried about him. It was there in her lovely sable eyes, but Shane could feel it more than see it. He grasped it with a sense that had no name and wasn’t counted among the five most normally used. He could feel Faith’s concern. And he wondered, just before he lost consciousness, what it would be like to let down his guard and let this woman’s concern touch his innermost self, the lonely man he kept locked inside him behind walls of wariness and cynicism.

Heaven. It would be like heaven, but heaven was a long way out of his reach.

The dream he fell into was an old one. For months it had been his nightly companion, but he had gradually banished it. In recent years it had returned to haunt him only when he had been too weak to fight it off. This was one of those times. The shiver that coursed through his big body as the scene began to unfold in his mind was one of dread. A sick sense of anticipation twisted like a knife in his chest.

Ellie Adamson. She stood at the end of a long, white corridor, nothing more than a dark silhouette at first. As he rushed toward her, her features became visible. She looked so young, with her pixie face and short fair hair.

Sweet, idealistic Ellie. She shouldn’t have been the one to stumble across the conspiracy at the training center in Quantico. Shane knew he should have been able to talk her out of involving herself in the case. He shouldn’t have fallen in love with her. He shouldn’t have let her die.

It was his fault. Ellie had stayed in because of him. She had died because of him. And his punishment was to watch it happen again and again in his dreams.

Always it happened in slow motion, increasing Shane’s belief that he should have been able to prevent the tragedy. But he hadn’t been able to move fast enough in reality, and he never could in his dreams either. Every time it was the same. He could see her turning toward him, see the light of recognition in her eyes, see her reach out to him, see the bullet explode into her chest.

As he held her and felt the life seep out of her, he brushed her hair back… and looked down on the face of Faith Kincaid.

“No!” he shouted.

It wouldn’t happen again. He wouldn’t let it happen again. Gathering what strength he had, he pushed Faith from his arms and the nightmare from his mind.

Promptly he fell into another dream. The Silvanus bust. He’d spent three years submerged in their organization. They were men who dealt daily in drugs and extortion, then went home at night to families. They talked about contracts on people’s lives the same way ordinary businessmen talked about mergers and acquisitions. They were men who took the idea of the American dream and twisted it inside out until it was an ugly, surrealistic nightmare.

Shane had despised them for what they were. By the end of the case he had nearly come to despise himself. He had gotten too close, lost his focus, lost his edge, and nearly lost his life because of it. He could still see Adam Strauss’s face twisted in rage, still hear the hoarse cry as the man realized Shane was the one who had betrayed him and the organization he worked for. Once again Shane felt the bullet slam into his shoulder.

The dream became even more disjointed then. There were bits and pieces of memory from the emergency room and the hospital. He listened again to John Banks’s slow monotone explanation of Strauss’s escape, and to reassurances spoken in the same emotionless tone of voice.

“He’ll never find you, Shane. We covered your tracks so well, it looks like you vanished into thin air.”

Then he saw himself floating through the black void of space, touching nothing and no one.

Faith dipped the washcloth into the pan of water again, wrung it out, and lifted it to Shane’s forehead. He tried to push her away and twisted restlessly on the sheets. Dodging his arm, she shushed him and pressed the cool cloth to his brow.

Matthews had diagnosed the problem as an infection to the gunshot wound in Callan’s shoulder. The necessary medications had magically appeared and been administered. He had assured Faith all they had to do now was wait for the drugs to kick in. Shane would be fine in a day or so. This wasn’t anything he hadn’t gone through before.

A gunshot wound. That ought to tell you something, Faith Kincaid, she thought with a sigh, as she sat back in her chair beside his bed. This was a man to steer clear of. He wasn’t a part of the world in which she wanted to exist. She was an ordinary woman with ordinary needs and dreams.

At any rate she wasn’t the sort of person who craved a lot of excitement. She didn’t need to get involved with people who took getting shot in stride as a normal hazard of their everyday lives.

But when Shane moaned in his sleep, she bent over him to stroke a soothing hand along the hot, rough, beard-shadowed plane of his cheek. The action was as automatic as breathing. She responded to him on an instinctive level. Just as she had turned to him when she had been stricken with fear, she could not turn away from him while he was stricken with fever.

Fever wasn’t all that was plaguing him, she thought, as she tried to quiet him. He moaned and mumbled protests, his head snapping from side to side on the pillow. Sweat beaded again on his forehead as he struggled with some hidden demon. Faith thought of the emotions she had heard in his music-the longing, the loneliness-and wondered if there was any connection to what haunted his dreams.

Romanticizing again, Faith, she scolded herself, and nibbled on her lip.

In all fairness it was difficult not to fantasize, considering the circumstances. She felt like the heroine of a historical novel, a damsel nursing a fallen knight-who happened to be more handsome than the devil himself. With a sigh she sat back and studied him as he settled into a deeper sleep.

Again the lines of his face struck her as being aristocratic-the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the finely chiseled mouth. Even in sleep it was a strong face. And the strength continued down the corded muscles of his neck to his broad shoulders. Whorls of black hair adorned the planes of his chest and swirled down in a line bisecting his abdomen, disappearing beneath the sheet he kept trying to kick off. Faith’s cheeks bloomed fuchsia as her imagination rushed to picture the half of him covered by eyelet-edged ecru linen. If the top half of him was anything to go by, the bottom half of him had to be breathtaking.

Who was he, she wondered, trying frantically to get her mind off his anatomy. Where was he from? What was his family background? How could she be so attracted to him without knowing these vital bits of information? She wasn’t the sort to fall for a man based on looks alone.