She swallowed her next question. He was breathing hard, almost laboriously, with anger, she thought. She touched his left shoulder in a gesture of solidarity, but something warm and sticky adhered to her fingers. She spread them in the light and saw the blood.
“Oh, my God, Daniel! You’ve been shot!”
“Knifed,” he said tersely.
Then he turned and gave her a lopsided grin. She saw the bruise spreading across his forehead and held back a cry.
“Don’t faint on me, darlin’—not that you would. More likely to make someone else faint. You’re worse than a goddamned rattlesnake. Wish I had another gun for you, but I was relieved of my rifle. Stay close, sweetheart. If worse comes to worse, we can die together.”
“We aren’t … they aren’t …”
“We’ll be just fine, m’love, if Paddie and Harry, sensible and obedient people that they are, get back here in time with the police.”
“The police? Daniel—”
A bullet shattered a pane of glass above them. Daniel threw his injured arm over Whitney and crushed her to him, letting the glass fall on his back. He gave her an encouraging grin, but his face was white.
“Seeing you made me forget I’m in pain,” he said. “The bastards.”
Then he shoved Whitney behind a chair, bashed in a window, stuck his gun out, and fired. There wasn’t a prayer that he hit anything, but he seemed to feel better.
“Just like ‘Gunsmoke,’ “ he muttered, ducking below the windowsill. “Are you all right, Whitney?”
“I feel like I should be doing something.”
“You’ve already done enough. Damn it, where’s the accursed cavalry? I’ll bleed to death before—
Aha
!”
Then Whitney heard it, too: sirens. Daniel laughed and blew on the end of his gun. “And not a moment too soon,” he said, white-faced but irreverent until the end. “That, m’ sweet, was my very last bullet.”
And then he collapsed into her arms.
Chapter Twelve
Then the police arrived, Fats Gillibrew and Carl were scrambling into their truck. Two officers plucked them out and escorted them to the deck, where they raised their arms in surrender. No problem, officers, they said; they would go peacefully. No, no, they didn’t have any guns. They just had the rifle Fats got off Daniel Graham when Daniel had jumped him for no apparent reason. Yeah, they’d fired it, sure. Daniel was shooting at them. Nearly blew Carl’s head off. So Fats fired one shot in self-defense. Nobody was hurt, right? Naw, that cut on Daniel’s arm wasn’t anything; just Carl protecting himself when Daniel attacked.
“Seems Mr. Graham got the short end of the stick, boys,” said the police officer in charge, a ruddy-faced man with gray hair and dimples.
“That’s his problem,” Carl said. “Weren’t our fault.”
“What were you doing on his property?”
If Fats had weighed one or two hundred pounds less he might have actually looked sheepish. “Just took a wrong turn, that’s all.”
Daniel cast an oblique look at Whitney. He was seated in one of Paddie’s grid chairs and looked remarkably fit for a man who’d been knifed in the shoulder. His white cotton shirt was bloody and torn. Whitney felt a twinge of guilt when she found his poor battered body as masculine and sexy as ever. At the moment, however, his half-amused, half-sarcastic look did not promote any deep feelings of sympathy. In different company she would have stuck her tongue out at him. She was a better liar than Fats Gillibrew!
“Okay,” the police officer said, twisting his mouth thoughtfully to one side. “I guess we ought to—“ Paddie’s 1965 Chevrolet Bel Air, not in mint condition, came to a grinding halt behind the police car. Harry and Paddie hopped out. The gray-haired police officer moaned. “Oh, no, not those two again!” He raised his voice as they approached. “I thought I told you two to stay put!”
“It’s advice, Jim,” Daniel said with long-suffering patience, “that musicians don’t seem to hear.”
Whitney made a face. “Naturally you’re on a first name basis with the local law,” she said.
“Naturally,” Daniel replied evenly, looking her up and down with a frankness that jarred her. “Better watch it, love. You already have a lot to answer for.”
She smiled impishly. “Oh, really?”
He looked at her steadily. “Yep, really.”
“Well, so do you.”
He grinned. “Good.”
Paddie stomped onto the deck with Harry in tow. He looked a little pale. Paddie, on the other hand, was purple. She waved her hand at Daniel and Whitney and Carl and Fats and even the police as if they were all unwelcome Florida cockroaches. “Peace I want!” she boomed. “Quiet! An environment in which an artistic mind can flourish, and---”
“It’s no use, Paddie,” Daniel interrupted.
Paddie stared at him, stunned. Whitney wondered if she’d ever been interrupted during one of her tantrums. Harry wiped a grin off his face and cleared his throat. Jim, the police officer, didn’t bother, nor did his young brown-haired assistant with the mustache. They both chuckled.
“It’s all going to come out,” Daniel added.
Paddie paled, but said stoically, “I know.”
Daniel was remarkably calm. Perhaps it was loss of blood, Whitney thought. She’d offered to clean him up with some of Paddie’s Castile soap and water and wrap a towel or something around him, but he’d told her if she touched him he’d chop her fingers off. She believed him.
“Let me worry about it,” he said.
“Bah,” Paddie said, and flopped down into a chair.
But not for long. Jim heaved a sigh, muttered something about the luck of the Irish, and straightened up, looking official. “I’m going to need statements from the lot of you.”
Paddie looked at him haughtily. “You have mine.”
“Yeah, and I’m going to need it again. I’ve got some questions to ask all you ladies and gentlemen. This all sounds like one giant mess to me.” Not even noticing Paddie’s appalled look, Jim turned to Daniel. “You want to see to that arm before or after we start sorting things out, Daniel?”
“After will be fine.”
“Hope gangrene doesn’t set in by then,” Jim grumbled, and motioned for the two police officers guarding Fats and Carl to move them out.
Harry hung back, looking worried. “You all right, kid?” he asked Whitney.
“Yes, fine.” She smiled, suddenly wanting to hug him more than she had in her entire life, but Daniel was watching them closely as he climbed painfully to his feet. There would be time enough for other explanations later. “How ‘bout you, Harry?”
Harry grinned and gave her a friendly squeeze. “I just keep thinking it’s maple sugaring time up on the farm, Whit. I can almost smell the stuff.” He winked and let her go, joining Paddie.
Boldly, with a peculiar sense of happiness, Whitney slipped her arm around Daniel’s hard waist and helped him balance. “Be a hell of a time to faint,” she said, mimicking his lazy, mocking drawl.
“Darlin’,” he said in the real lazy, mocking drawl, “you’re not helping matters.”
“I just don’t want you to fall. What would Paddie say? What would Fats Gillibrew—”
“Falling’s not what I’m worried about.”
“No?”
“No. It’s sweeping you into my arms and carrying you off into my grove. We could make love among the citrus blossoms night after night and day after day. No one would ever find us.”
“Oh.”
“Sounds irresistible, doesn’t it?”
“I thought you were angry with me.”
“I am—and you with me. Ah, but think of the punishments we could devise for each other.”
Jim turned and yelled for them to hurry it up.
“But duty calls,” Daniel said. “Your arm, darlin’. Another second with your lithe and lovely body against mine and I’ll grab the first vine and swing us out of here.”
She removed her arm, and Daniel had the gall to laugh. But then he nearly fell down Paddie’s three little steps, and it was her turn to laugh. He scowled up at her, but took her arm. Fortunately, Whitney thought, there were no vines around.
That evening the weather turned cool, and Daniel built a fire in the big stone fireplace in the cypress-paneled study while Whitney put out the last of the spaghetti sauce for the cats. She had heated it up and served it over some hamburger buns she’d found in the freezer. Daniel hadn’t made a single disparaging remark, but Whitney had. “Harry would disown me,” she muttered.
But Harry, at least, wasn’t there to feast on her makeshift cuisine. He was off with Paddie, who was “politicking” for the first time in her career. She’d tracked down all the people who had been in Daniel’s living room the night before, told them the bare bones of what had happened, and invited them to join her at a press conference at Graham Auditorium at eight o’clock that evening. Daniel would be there.
Harry said he could think of better things to do on a Saturday night, but if Paddie needed a shoulder to lean on, he’d be there. Paddie, of course, said she certainly did not need a shoulder to lean on, hut asked him to be there in any case. Harry agreed. He seemed relieved, but Whitney understood. Harry Stagliatti preferred not to be needed too much.
Whitney wasn’t sure whether she would go to the press conference. It was a CFSO event, and she wasn’t sure she was a CFSO member. It was one of several things yet to be resolved.
She joined Daniel in the study. He was sitting on the floor, his back against the couch, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other bent, his good hand clasped around his ankle. She thought he looked pensive and thoughtful, but, considering what he had been through, she didn’t think this unreasonable. The knife wound wasn’t deep, but it was painful, and his doctor, who apparently knew him well, warned him against any further heroics for a day or two.
And she had selfishly wondered if “heroics” included lovemaking, and decided probably it did.
Entering the room quietly, Whitney grabbed a lightweight blanket off the back of a chair and went and sat down beside him. The house was big and drafty, and she was surprised at how cold she was. She studied the hard lines of Daniel’s face, where the flames flickered in shadows.
“Boo,” she said.
He turned and smiled. “Where’d you come from?”
“Schenectady,” she replied, grinning, “but I grew up in Manhattan.”
“A real city kid.”
“Nope. If I were, I’d still be living in Manhattan.”
“Parents?”
“Divorced when I was three. I lived with my mother, but I’ve always seen a lot of my father. They’re both musicians. Mother sings, Father plays—or so Mother always says. They’re not like your parents at all.” That, she thought, was an extraordinary understatement. She grinned. “You’d have moved out of Florida ages ago if they were!”
“Sometimes I don’t know why I stay,” he said, almost wistful, but then he chuckled softly. “But then who would be around to appall my mother? I have a younger sister in Jacksonville, but she lives according to the family rules.”
“Which are?”
“Work hard, make lots of money, and don’t make waves.”
Whitney stretched out her legs alongside his. Her muscles were sore and tense—and not just the ones she had used in encountering Carl and Fats. She had also encountered one Daniel Graham that afternoon, but on a very different and far more memorable level.
“I would think you work hard—occasionally. And by all evidence, you make lots of money—unless you’re living off a trust fund, which I tend to doubt. But as for not making waves …
“Not my style, is it, darlin’?”
“Not from what I’ve seen.”
He grinned, showing no bitterness over his roots. He had been born into a world of family, wealth, and tradition. Whitney had been born into a world of music. They were the givens of their lives, the things they could not change. But they were very different worlds. Geography played a ro1e but perhaps not the biggest role. There were no orange trees in Schenectady, of course, but there was music in Orlando, the arts, a cultural environment. And Daniel was a prominent patron of the arts. But being a patron of the arts didn’t automatically mean he would find any commonality, any happiness or fulfillment, with a musician.
“Your lips do the strangest things when you frown,” Daniel was saying. “Is it from all those years of playing horn?”
His teasing brought her out of her somber thoughts, and she couldn’t help but smile. “I’ve developed muscles in my lips you’ve never even heard of.”
“Is that what you think about when I kiss you? The muscles in your lips?”
“Of course,” she said lightly. “What else should I be thinking about?”
“Oh, lady, if I weren’t a wounded man …
“If you weren’t a wounded man, Daniel Graham, I wouldn’t be pushing my luck.”
He grunted, but she could see the glint in his eyes. And it wasn’t just the reflection of the fire. “You’ve pushed your luck about as far as it’ll go, m’love.”
“Then I guess it’s a good thing this business is finished and done with.”
“Yes,” he said heavily, and turned flush to the fire, the flames flickering in shadows on the hard lines of his face.
“Daniel
...
it is over, isn’t it?”
“You know as much as I do, Whitney.”
Which, she thought, all told wasn’t much. Despite Paddie’s protests, they had told the police everything—about the coffee, the misplaced scores, the switched covers, the phone calls, Harry, Whitney’s arrival in Orlando, their discovery of the poachers at dawn. They neglected to mention Paddie’s dead snake, and Paddie didn’t bring up the cartoon, which meant Whitney didn’t, either. In its own way, it was perhaps the nastiest item of all. Jim had not been thrilled with their past reticence. He had told Daniel he ought to know better. Obviously musicians couldn’t be relied upon to know much of anything besides Beethoven and Mozart.
While Whitney had been practicing her horn and contemplating her budding romance with Daniel Graham, he had received a panicked call from Harry. The two poachers were skulking around outside and Paddie was getting ready to go after them with her poker. Daniel instructed them to call the police and, if possible, get out of there; he’d be right along. He’d scrawled a note to Whitney—”an exercise in futility,” he called it—and left.