When the baby quieted, she nodded to a stunned-looking Max. “Go ahead.”
He stared at her for a moment longer before he
turned to Summerton. “Okay, here goes. What can you tell me about your wife’s family medical history? Any heart problems, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, that sort of thing?”
Summerton divided his attention between Max and his daughter, who had cuddled right up against Raine’s neck. “Cari’s mother is staying with me. She’ll be back any time now, and could answer that better than I can. But I think she’s got an aunt with late-onset Alzheimer’s, and her great grandfather died of a heart attack in his forties. Beyond that, nothing that I know of.”
“How was Cari’s health in general?”
“Good,” Summerton said quickly. Then he took a breath. “It was good. She was healthy. A little heavier than she’d been before the baby, but she was working on that. She was a little depressed, I think, because I’ve been away so much lately and she’d been here alone with the baby….” He shot a look at his daughter, as though fearing she’d overhear and take it the wrong way. “There just hadn’t been much time for the two of us, you know?”
Max nodded sympathetically. “Anything problematic about the birth?”
Raine paused in her jiggle-bounce, startled by the question, but he was right. What if all four women had recently given birth? It was definitely something to check out. A risk factor, of sorts.
“Well, she had a C-section. Something about her pelvic conformation wasn’t optimal. They said it was the safest way.” When Max nodded encouragingly, Summerton continued, “As long as they had to open her up, Cari got a tummy tuck. She’d been hinting about wanting breast implants recently, but I didn’t want her to get them. She’s—she
was
perfect already.”
His face nearly crumpled, but he pulled it together, and held it together through the remainder of Max’s questions. Raine couldn’t tell if they were gathering useful information or not, but the baby grew heavy and warm as she dropped off to sleep, in turn relaxing muscles that Raine hadn’t even realized were tight.
She leaned her cheek against the pink-clad back and indulged in a moment of baby smell.
Contrary to what Max might think, she didn’t have anything against babies. She just didn’t think a woman should have one just because she happened to have a uterus. Until she could say without hesitation that she was willing to give up her other goals, or at least put them on hold for twenty years or so, then she didn’t feel she was ready for a child of her own.
If she never was, that would be okay, she told herself firmly, ignoring the little ache that fisted beneath her heart when Baby Summerton cooed in her sleep.
“Thanks for your time,” Max said. He stood and shook Summerton’s hand. “My cell number is on the card, please feel free to call me if you or your mother-in-law think of anything else that might be helpful.”
“I will.” Summerton looked over to Raine and his eyes softened. “Thank you for taking her. That meant a great deal to both of us.”
“Of course.” Raine eased the sleeping child off her shoulder and placed her in the crib. She handed Summerton the dribble rag. “She’s a beautiful girl.”
Still looking down at his sleeping daughter, he nodded. “Yes, she is. I just wish—” He broke off and swallowed hard. “I wish she’d gotten to know her mother.”
Eyes filling, Raine mumbled something appropriate, shook Summerton’s hand and fled to the rental car. There, she breathed deeply and had herself more or less under control by the time Max joined her.
He started the engine and pulled out of the driveway before he glanced over at her. “That was quite a scene back there.”
She wasn’t sure if he meant her with the baby, or Summerton talking about his loss, so she went with a noncommittal, “Neither of us expected this to be easy.” She took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I expected it to be this hard, though. Even though
I know I did everything I could to ensure that Thriller would be safe for its users, I can’t help thinking…” She trailed off and stared out the window, throat closing on tired, hopeless tears.
This time, when he took her hand, he simply held it.
Chapter Ten
Though it was only midday, Max could see that Raine was near collapse. He thought about driving through, but he was low on sleep too, so he picked a hotel at random and checked in under a totally bogus name, paying cash from the emergency stash he’d retrieved from the bottom lining of his duffel bag.
With only a few hundred dollars, he thought about saving money by just getting one room. But ever since earlier that day, when he’d opened up to Raine about Charlotte, he’d felt his natural anti-Raine defenses weakening. They’d taken another hard hit when he’d seen her holding Baby Summerton and something had clicked in his brain, in his gut.
That’s what I want,
the click had said.
Only that. Only her.
Too bad he couldn’t fully trust the feeling, or the woman. They might make a good couple for a
while, but she’d run in the end. That was her pattern, and he didn’t see any evidence of it changing.
So he asked for separate rooms without a connecting door. If he was near her, he would only want her. And from the looks he’d intercepted once or twice over the course of the morning, he had a feeling she wanted him right back. But anything they’d have together would be temporary, and he wasn’t looking for temporary.
Especially not the kind that took a part of him when it left.
He led the way to the fifth floor and handed her a key card. “I’m right next door. Knock if you need me.”
She looked startled for a moment, then her face flooded with a complicated mix of emotions. “Does that mean you trust me not to run?”
“I trust that you’re smart enough to know you’re safer with me than without me at this point. And I know you’re smart enough to figure out you won’t get far without using your credit card number, which I can pretty much guarantee has been flagged by both Detective Marcus and The Nine.”
He wasn’t sure when the existence of the shadow group had gone from impossible to probable in his mind, but too many of the facts fit best when he plugged them into a group rather than a single individual or company.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence, I guess,” Raine said, lips twisting in a rueful smile. “I’m going to get some sleep. Want to meet for dinner?”
“I’m going to get room service and keep working.” He jammed his key card in the slot with more force than necessary. “I’ll call the next-of-kin in Richmond. We’ll go there tomorrow morning, then swing back up to the third victim’s family in New York City.” Saying it like that brought home a point he’d begun to consider that afternoon.
Apparently Raine caught the connection, too. “Do you think it’s significant that three of the four deaths were on the east coast?”
He used his foot to hold open his hotel room door. “I’m not sure, but Ike’s checking it out. She’s trying to pull the sample batch numbers and see if the deaths were linked that way. Maybe a small portion of the samples were tainted during the original production process.”
Raine frowned. “How is she going to figure out…she’s hacking into the FDA? That’s illegal!”
“So’s conspiring to hold useful drugs off the market so your own patented compounds keep making money.” Max pushed the door open and stepped through. As an afterthought, he pulled out a twenty from the emergency funds and handed it to Raine. “Get something from room service for yourself.” When she shook her head in protest, he
insisted, “Trust me, protein and carbs. You may not want to eat, but you’ll feel better if you do.”
After a pause and a sigh, she took the twenty, lips curving in a soft smile. “You saving me again, Max?”
“Nah. Saving myself from having to carry you around tomorrow after you faint from low blood sugar.” That got a small laugh out of her, pleasing Max. Feeling as though they were chitchatting to prolong the end of a date, he said, “Good night. Sleep well.”
And before he’d fully processed the impulse, he leaned down and kissed her softly on the lips.
It was a chaste kiss, little more than he might give a first date he hadn’t really connected with. But its effect on Max was anything but chaste.
His blood leaped in his veins, revving from idle to racing speed between one heartbeat and the next. Her lips yielded beneath his, warm and inviting, and he was poised to accept that invitation—
When she pulled away.
She blinked up at him, then exhaled a long breath. “Sorry, Max. I’m not looking to be rescued anymore, and I don’t want a man who has to be needed that way. I’m looking for someone who’ll see me as an equal, someone who’ll need me as much as I need him.”
I see you as an equal
, he started to say, but stopped when he realized that wasn’t so. He saw
her as a beautiful, desirable woman. As the surprisingly savvy boss of a company that had proved itself successful up until its current troubles. As a different person than the vulnerable, fragile woman he’d known back in Boston.
But not as his equal. Not as someone he could turn to when things got tough.
She nodded. “Thought so.” She pressed her lips together as though remembering his kiss. “Too bad, Max. It might’ve been fun for a while.”
She disappeared into her room next door, leaving him alone with the taste of her on his lips.
“WHEW. NARROW ESCAPE,” Raine said into the generic hotel room, the likes of which were becoming depressingly familiar. She glanced around, saw nothing out of the ordinary and shrugged. “Guess it’s a shower first.”
Then she stopped, having realized that she was talking to herself, trying to fill the quiet. She’d been in constant company for nearly the past four days.
Being alone felt strange. A little eerie.
“Max is right next door. There’s even a connector.” She crossed the room and unlatched her side, so he could come through if she called for him. Not that she would, of course, but in the case of an emergency…
“Get a grip,” she told herself. “They don’t know where we are. You’re safe here.”
Still, the creepy feeling persisted as she checked and double checked the locks, then stripped down for her shower.
She was tempted to luxuriate beneath the spray, but that felt somehow wrong after what she’d been through that day. Cari Summerton would never again take a good shower, would she? That sweet little girl would never get to swim with her mother, never get to talk to her, laugh with her, yell at her, all those things girls did when they grew up with a mother of their own.
Many of the things Raine had missed out on.
“This isn’t about you,” Raine said sternly as she shut off the water and stepped out onto the bath-mat. “None of it is about you. At least not directly.”
It was about Thriller. About a group of men who, for reasons unknown, had decided to discredit the drug and destroy her in the process.
Collateral damage,
Ike had called it.
When self-pity threatened, Raine scrubbed harder at her hair, wringing it dry until the tears came from the pull at her scalp rather than worthless sniveling. She wrapped a dry towel around her torso and stepped out into the hotel room.
And stopped. “Oh, hell.” Her relatively clean clothes—the business outfit she’d washed in the
sink last night and hung to dry—were in Max’s duffel. She looked down at herself. “Oh, hell no. That’s so not happening.”
Refusing to be so stupid—or obvious—as to visit Max in a hotel-size towel, she grimaced and pulled the jeans and sweater back on. She padded to the connecting door barefoot and knocked.
She heard the sound of a lock being thrown, and the door swung open to reveal a scowling Max. “There wasn’t supposed to be a connecting door.”
Though she felt a frisson of disappointment at how thoroughly he wanted to avoid her, Raine shrugged. “Sorry. I promise not to bother you again. I need my clothes.”
His face went blank. Then comprehension washed over his expression. “Right. Wait here.” He turned away, cursed and turned back. “Ignore me, I’m being an ass. Come in.” He gestured to a table beneath the single window, where a room service tray rested. “Eat. I got enough for two, because I figured you wouldn’t follow orders.”
“I just got out of the shower!” But even given the circumstances, Raine found a faint smile. “It’s one of the basic differences between men and women. The woman showers first. The man orders food.”
Still standing, they shared a tentative smile.
At Max’s prompting, she sat. Their knees bumped
beneath the hotel-issue table, but neither of them mentioned the contact.
Many things went unspoken as the meal progressed.
By silent accord, they kept the conversation light. They didn’t speculate on the case. They didn’t talk about their past association or the way it had ended. They didn’t talk about Charlotte or Max’s empty apartment. Raine didn’t ask whether he’d ever gone to New Bridge, looking for her once she’d run.
Instead, they stuck to safe stuff like movies—which they mostly agreed on—books—ditto—and the occasional foray into current affairs and politics, where they were forced to agree to disagree.
The good news was that it made for a pleasant meal. The bad news was that it recalled entirely too many of the hours they’d shared during her stay at Boston General.
Worse, it reminded her that Max wasn’t just a handsome face stuck on a hell of a body. He wasn’t just an overprotective macho man in search of a little woman to take care of.
He was both of those things, true.
But he was also really good company, damn it.
When the meal was over, their conversation faltered. She fell silent, and after a moment, he did, too. They stared at each other over the remains of their
food. The scene was lit by daylight filtering through cheap hotel curtains. It wasn’t romantic, wasn’t ambience, but Raine’s heart tilted nonetheless.
“Aw, hell.” Max leaned forward and Raine met him halfway. Their kiss tasted of red wine and companionship, and the heat built gently. Surely. As though this time it was right.