She grabbed her shirt when he went to pull it up. “No. I...the stitches are just pulled. I’d like to go home. I’ll be quiet for the rest of the day.” She started to move up again when he pushed her firmly back. She was starting to get a little pissed. She hated bossy people almost as much—well, she didn’t much care for people in general when she was in pain.
“You’re a cop, right? When I want advice on how to arrest someone, I’ll call you. Right now, I’m the authority on blood. Let go of the shirt so I can see or I’ll call a nurse in, have you sedated, and cut if from you. Your choice, Detective.” She lay back down, but didn’t let go of the hem. She would not normally give in so quickly, but she hurt and she still felt a little dizzy. But she couldn’t let go, not just yet. She needed him to understand that this was a normal run of the mill wound.
“Doc, I’ve been shot. It’s bad. Please clear these people out, especially the kid,” she told him in a low, urgent voice.
She didn’t open her eyes, but heard him tell everyone to give him a few minutes and then the sounds of movements. Without opening her eyes, she knew that at least two other people besides the doc and her were still here. Her uncle’s cologne gave him away and the other was the nurse that had stepped in just after the commotion started.
“Go away, Uncle Paddy. Or I’ll have the doc here show you my bra and underwear. I think the ones I put on today are black and lacy. Besides, you promised.”
“Yeah, and you promised not to get hurt too. Caitlynne, I can’t...I love you darlin’, please don’t die on your old man. I donna think I can lose another family member.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I love you too. But you know that I couldn’t let that little girl get hurt. Go on outside and I’ll be out soon. Okay?” She felt the tears stream down her cheeks, but ignored them.
She felt him lean down and kiss her on the forehead and he left. Cait knew that he was upset, but if he saw her wounds, it would be too much for both of them. It was too much for her to even look at. She couldn’t think what he would say if he knew the extent of her injuries.
The doctor’s voice startled her from her thoughts. “When where you shot, Detective?”
“Twenty-three days ago. Don’t tell my uncle where the shots are. He knows I was shot in the chest. He just isn’t aware of where they entered. Please? He doesn’t want to...he has a bad heart.”
She knew the moment the doctor realized what she meant. There was a bullet hole one inch below her right breast, and there were two more over her left, right over where her heart was.
“You’re lucky you’re alive, as I’m sure you’ve been told. There are a lot of stitches pulled open. I’m going to have to have these repaired in the operating room because of how close they are to your heart. I don’t want to take the chance of anything going wrong, you understand. But I’m afraid you’re not going home tonight, maybe not even tomorrow. I’m sorry, Detective.” She nodded. She knew as soon as she had scooped that child up in her arms she had done damage to the area. She had felt them pull apart and blood begin to seep, running warm against her skin. But like she had told her uncle, she couldn’t have let the little girl be run down.
Cait noticed the children when she came out of the store, but didn’t think about what information was being filed in her mind the minute she saw it. Filing and cataloging information was a big part of what she did. It was why she was as good as she was at her job as a detective. She could see the entire scene as if she had taken a photograph of it and could pull it up.
There had been a pop machine to the immediate right when Cait came out of the store. The open parking lot was long and narrow with only pull in spaces that one could only get to from the main street, and there were three cars there besides her bike. On the other side of the lot was another building, this one older and brick. It looked to be some sort of gift shop. The main street, appropriately named Main Street, was barely two lanes wide, bracketed by sidewalks that small trees had been planted next to and into them. The walk went the entire length of the street.
The children, nine of them, had been tied together by a rope, each tiny wrist knotted at about four feet apart. They had been standing near the pole that held the awning to the store. It was where they had been tethered. The little girl Meggie was last and had the longest gap between her and the child before her of about nine feet. They were all standing there milling about and watching the people enter and leave the little store.
The tires braking is what Cait had heard first and saw the little girl standing in the middle of the road trying to pick up a cat that was running from her. She didn’t react to the people screaming at her nor the car coming at her. Cait now realized it was because she had not heard either of them.
“Detective? Are you all right? I can’t give you anything for the pain, at least not until the surgeon comes in and approves it. I’ll assist, but he’ll be the one calling the shots. Unless you have a doctor you’d like me to have called in for you.”
“It’s O’Malley, or Cait. Just stop calling me detective, please. No. No drugs.
When do you think I’ll be able to leave?”
“Let’s get you in the operating room first, all right?” he said with a chuckle.
The guy has a nice laugh and a very nice voice. He even smelled good, but not as good as the one called Spencer. Too bad he was married, she thought.
The next hour was a semi blur. The police had had to come in and relieve her of her weapon. She, as a fellow officer, could not give her weapon to anyone under her in rank so the Chief of Police had come in personally to take it from her and give her a receipt.
A weird thought popped into her head and she thought the man may have been running for some sort of office by the way he walked around like a banty rooster. Cait could not help but laugh when he heard that camera crews could not come in and watch him disarm her.
“But she’s a hero. We need to have coverage of her and me together. She saved the little Handy girl.”
“Right, and the little girl’s name is not Handy and I said no. O’Malley needs to rest and you are taking up a lot of her airspace just by being here. Leave or I’ll call security.” Cait decided she might like Doctor Grant more and more all the time.
Her uncle and Aunt Deirdre came in to see her, but they had already started Cait’s IV, so she was slightly out of it, but did remember seeing them. She made arrangements with her uncle about her weapon and he agreed. They stayed with her until she was wheeled into operating room three.
The last thing she remembered was the oxygen mask being sealed over her face and a small twinge of panic.
~CHAPTER 3~
Spencer watched her chest move up and down without really seeing it. That would have surprised him had he thought about it. He loved a woman’s breasts almost as much as he loved their laughter. He was so lost in thought that he barely registered the sound of squeaky shoes of the nurses going down the hall.
Meggie had gone home with his brother Nicky and his family. Spencer had stayed at the hospital with Damon to watch over the beautiful woman. He wanted to be there when she woke up. Paddy had taken Dee home because she didn’t like hospitals and was becoming nervous.
He glanced down at the file on his lap Devin had dropped off thirty minutes ago and asked him to read. He had. He was having a hard time equating the woman in the file with the woman on the bed.
Caitlynne Alexandra O’Malley was twenty-nine and worked as a homicide detective for the Chicago PD. She had been working since graduating from the Academy at twenty. She had worked her way up by hard work and a good nose for crime solving. Then four weeks ago, her partner had shot her and she returned fire, killing him and two other officers in an altercation at the firing range. She was on paid medical leave pending investigation. When she had been released from the hospital a week ago, her uncle, Patrick Shawn O’Malley, retired detective himself, had been there to bring her back to his home in Ohio.
She was to rest and relax and under no circumstances was she to lift anything near the weight of his daughter.
Devin didn’t know what had happened at the shooting as the details were being held until Internal Affairs finished their investigation. But he had said that she was lucky to be alive and that this was not the first time she had been called under review. She had always come out on top and had never been on the take.
Spence looked up at her when she moaned and he saw that she was looking at him. He smiled at her. She was very pretty even with her hair pulled up under an ugly cap and tubes running from under her gown.
“You should go home. This is no place for you to be when your wife and daughter need you. My uncle will be back soon anyway.” Her voice was scratchy and low and he rolled his chair closer to her bed to hear her better.
“Meggie is with my brother and his wife and I’m not married. Are you?” He didn’t know why he had asked when he had all that information in front of him.
But he wanted to hear her say it to be sure.
“No. Not married. Men find out I carry a gun and a badge, they tend to run in the other direction or they think I like to play rough. I usually shoot those guys in the nuts.” She chuckled and moaned at the same time. “Did the doc say when I can go home?”
Spencer reached up and moved her hair from her eyes and smiled. “No, but he did say you have the loveliest breasts he has ever seen. And being a doctor, he has seen a lot of them.”
“Ah, men are usually turned off when they see I have three nipples on one of my breasts and none on the other.” He must have looked shocked because she laughed and said, “I’m kidding, Grant.”
He felt drawn to her and didn’t know why. Actually, he found he didn’t care, not really. He realized that he had been wrong when he had said she was pretty. She was beautiful in a way that he had never really thought of before, simple. Her hair was bright red, carroty; he supposed he had heard it called. Her skin was milky white, but not unhealthy, with freckles everywhere including two on her lower lip. And her lips, Spencer thought, were enough to make a grown man whimper and think all sorts of carnal thoughts. He thought about how they would taste and noticed a small scar in the middle of her upper one.
“My first name is Spencer. How did you get this scar here? Some bad guy take exception to you arresting him?” He ran his thumb over the tiny mark that he had only noticed because he was so close to her. His voice had lowered and become huskier, his mouth dry too.
“No, nothing so nefarious as that. Our precinct was playing against fire for the championship two summers ago. I was first baseman and a guy came at me full tilt trying to get a base out of a foul ball. I caught it and he was a little...pissed that I had the nerve to catch it. Grant, you really need to back up a little bit.
You’re really crowding my space.”
“My first name is Spencer. What did he hope to gain by running on a foul?
Wouldn’t he have been better off just taking the strike?” Leaning forward more, he was now only an inch or two from her mouth, where he wanted to be in the worst way.
“Maybe, but the fact that I had hit a homer in the inning before off his pitch had him trying for a little revenge. He had thrown a no hitter for three straight games prior to that. And I know your first name. Do you plan to kiss me, Grant?”
“Say my name, Caitlynne. I want to hear you say it.” He brushed his lips over hers, barely touching them, then moved back a couple of inches.
“Not until we are in the throes of passion and you’ve made me come several times already. And I don’t see that happening anytime too soon, do you, Grant?”
“Oh, yes. I do, as a matter of fact. Very soon.” And he closed his mouth over hers.
He thought to only kiss her briefly, to press his mouth to hers and pull back.
But the moment he touched her, his body had other ideas in mind. And when she opened her mouth under the gentle probe of his tongue, he knew he could not pull back even if his life depended on it. He was quite sure that even then might be a problem.
She tasted sweet, like the lemony swab they had pressed in her mouth when she came back from surgery, but sweeter. Her mouth was hot and wet, her tongue was quick, and when it moved along his, swirling around it, he could feel it as if she was licking along his cock.
He was glad he was sitting down because he was sure that every drop of blood in his body had pooled in his groin, making him harder than he could ever remember being. Reaching up, he cupped the back of her head and tilted her a little and deepened the kiss more, darting in and out of her mouth in much the same way he wanted to be doing to her with his body. A moment of shock rushed though him. Never had he had those thoughts about someone he had just met. But then, he only wanted to taste and keep on tasting.
Bells, he could swear he heard bells. He had kissed quite a few women in his lifetime and he could honestly say he had never heard bells before. But before he could think too much on that, he found himself still sitting in the chair, but several feet away from her bed. There were several people now where he had been and they did not look overly happy to see either of them.
He was grinning again. He had been since Damon had pulled him into his office ten minutes ago to yell at him. Spencer knew this because Damon was glaring at him. Again. But he couldn’t seem to help himself. He was happy and not even his brother giving him a good dressing down could dampen that mood.
“Do you have any idea how stressful it is to the men and women who respond to a Code Blue? They have to move quickly and have everything in place before they go into a room. Every instrument, every med has to be ready—
they have to be...this is serious, Spencer! What the hell were you thinking?”
“That she tasted too good to stop. That if I did have to stop, then I was going to enjoy it as much as I could. Christ, Damon, lighten up. Everyone in her room thought it was great.”
They had actually congratulated them both on making the heart monitor register she had been hooked up to pop a fuse. They said that they had never responded to a Code Blue and been so happy to see that it was nothing.