Leigh Riker - Agent-in-Charge

At an unexpected brush of air on her skin, Casey jerked back on the exam table. The doctor had passed a slow hand in front of her face, that was all. She had to get hold of herself.

“Shapes?” he said. “Do you see any shapes?”

She shook her head. “No. Just the flickering light sometimes.” Rarely.

In the hospital that first day, her whole body had hurt but Casey’s vision seemed fine. Then a few days later, it blurred, dimmed. From there, her eyesight had gone downhill. Was this all she could expect, forever?

Fresh anxiety ripped through her.

Her future promised—no, threatened—total darkness, her own terrors locked inside her like a scream. She didn’t know where the next thought came from. Certainly she didn’t want it. I’ll never see Graham’s face again.

She squeezed her eyes tight, turning the darkness into a blood-red sunset behind her lids, and conjured him mentally—dark hair and eyes, that handsome face and beloved smile, broad shoulders and tough, lean body so at odds with his sedentary job pushing papers at Hearthline.

Casey bit back tears. “I should get myself a guide dog, what do you think? A nice big German shepherd….” With teeth like razors.

She loved animals. She’d always wanted a dog, but not under these circumstances. How would she take care of it now? Take care of herself? She couldn’t do this, wouldn’t survive on her own this time.

The doctor patted her shoulder but said nothing more. Which, for Casey, said it all. Poor thing. She hated pity.

“Try to be patient,” he said. “You never know in cases like these. It can take time.”

Casey couldn’t cling to false hope. “I doubt time will help. You said I had some kind of delayed hemorrhage.”

“Yes, that happens sometimes after a frontal head trauma. Edema within the optic nerves leads to—”

“I know what it leads to.” Casey touched a hand to her forehead, where some of the worst bruises had been. They were healed, but her eyes were not. She made herself say the words through tears. “I’m blind.”

Bilateral blindness. Both eyes.

He didn’t try to contradict her. When the doctor slipped out of the room to make her next appointment, he left Casey defenseless in the blackness from which there would be no escape. She was alone inside herself. And still terrified, not only because of her blindness.

In Casey’s mind getting run down in that parking garage had been no accident. To her, that meant only one thing. Someone—the same someone who had blinded her—would try again to kill her. And now she couldn’t protect herself.

Ironic, really, when she had prided herself on not needing anyone, especially Graham.

But it wasn’t Graham she “saw” now. Another face, unsmiling, flashed through her mind. When she’d been in pain, she had suppressed the memory of the man she’d seen in the elevator at Graham’s office building. Pale hair, pale features, she remembered. Why think of him again now? Was he harmless, just an acquaintance she couldn’t quite place—or part of the threat she continued to feel?

The fear raced through her again like another speeding car bent upon her total destruction. When it happened the next time, she wouldn’t be able to see it coming.

IN THE LOBBY of her doctor’s building where he’d been waiting, Graham was relieved to see Casey finally emerge from the elevator. She wasn’t alone.

Graham nodded at the nurse then focused on Casey.

“Hey, babe.” He swallowed. “How’d it go?” He had heard the tap of her white cane before he actually saw her, but he could tell by her face that she’d had bad news. Casey didn’t hide her emotions as well as Graham did these days. She hadn’t walled them up inside.

Startled by his voice so near, Casey missed a step and Graham cursed himself. He hadn’t meant to surprise her. Briefly, her head tilted in his direction. Then she kept walking, the cane that had become an extension of her right hand in the past few weeks rhythmically tapping the Carrara marble floor.

“It’s a miracle,” she murmured in the too-light tone she sometimes used to downplay a problem, as she walked right past him. “I can see, I can see.”

Obviously, she couldn’t, and sudden anger swept through him. Graham glanced again around the busy lobby of the professional building, making sure it remained secure. For the past half hour, after his quick stop at home to shower away the smell of smoke and change clothes, he’d made regular checks of the area from his leaning stance against the marble wall. But, like Jackie Miles’s earlier blunder, he couldn’t quell his own uneasiness about Casey.

Graham peeled himself away from the wall. “I’ll take care of her,” he said to the nurse after introducing himself. When Casey didn’t object, he waited again while she thanked her doctor’s nurse, who gave Graham a crisp goodbye. And another thorough once-over as if to reassure herself that she was leaving Casey in good hands.

Graham watched the woman disappear into the elevator.

Casey wouldn’t welcome him fussing over her, either. Yet she needed someone right now—in this case, him.

He stepped in front of her, forcing Casey to halt when she would have struck off on her own.

“Tell me what he said.”

She gazed sightlessly at the floor between them.

“He said, ‘be patient.’”

Her sleek blond bob had slipped like silk around her pale cheeks, creating a heavy curtain that hid her smooth, even features. Her straight little nose. Her beautiful green eyes were hooded by her lids now, and she didn’t try to look at him, which made him all the more angry. With her, with himself. They might not be married any longer but…

“Casey. Don’t. It’s me.”

And he watched her crumple. Just like that.

She didn’t want to, he guessed, but she flowed like warm honey into his waiting arms.

To his surprise, Graham felt a flash of familiar but unwelcome desire run through his body. With their first touch, he had caught fire—like that run-down apartment building for the team exercise. Graham tried to tamp it down, but Casey, slender yet curvy in all the right places, her skin warm and as soft as down, felt like home in his embrace. Hell. What was he doing, lusting over a broken woman? A woman who didn’t belong to him now?

“It’s over,” she said against the front of his dress shirt. He felt wetness seep through the blue cotton. “I’m trapped inside myself. I’ve never liked small, enclosed spaces, but now that’s all I have. I’ll never be able to run an art gallery of my own again. Never see the paintings on the walls. The colors. Never know if something is good, or bad. How could I now?”

Graham shut his eyes, sharing the darkness with her for a moment. “You’ll find a way. You know you will.”

He had to remind himself that they were quits. Over, as she’d said of her gallery.

His remark seemed to stiffen her spine, but he hated seeing her like this, hated knowing what someone else had done to her in that lonely parking garage. To Casey, her career, her life, her future had been snatched away along with her vision.

And her accident still troubled him, too.

That was natural.

She had nearly been killed.

But why in hell had the accident happened in the first place? Mere steps from his own office at Hearthline?

He took another look around the lobby. When he saw nothing suspicious, Graham tipped up her chin so he could look into her eyes, and the pain ripped through him all over again. Her gorgeous green eyes. Hell, he could do this much for her if nothing more.

“Let me take you home. My car’s outside.”

Casey pulled away, then set her shoulders. “I may be blind. I’m not crippled. I am fully capable of leaving this lobby and raising a hand to call a cab.” She stepped back a few inches. “You have no responsibility for me, Graham, remember? Our marriage is over.”