“Hardly a scratch on you,” the EMT confirmed, ruffling the child’s hair. “And you’re sure she didn’t experience any head trauma? Not the pavement or the building?” Marguerite shook her head. The EMT looked up. His gaze covered the torn awning, the bent frame, shifted upward to the shattered fourth-floor window and finally moved all the way to the top of the Bank of Florida building, tilting his head back to do so.
“Christ, that’s the closest thing to an act of God I’ve seen all year, I can tell you that. All right, then. She’ll need to go to the hospital to get a thorough looking-over, but I’m pretty sure all they’re going to find a few bruises. You’re going to be okay, honey.” He gave Natalie a quick stroke as she buried her face back into Marguerite’s abdomen. As Marguerite’s arms closed around her, his gaze shifted to her. “Now you’re a different matter. Let’s take a closer look at your injuries.”
She shook her head again. “I’ll take care of it later. We’re waiting for her mother.”
“Ma’am,” he insisted. “I can see from here you’ve got broken bones. The fingers,” he nodded toward them, “and most likely the clavicle—the collarbone. That blood over your ear says you had a blow to the head, so you could have a concussion. You just jumped off a building.”
“I was there.” The blue eyes fired, lips curling back in a snarl. “I am not disoriented or confused. I said I’ll take care of it later. And I know what a fucking clavicle break is.”
“Excuse me a sec,” Tyler said firmly, leaving Mac with the others to go to her side.
“Angel.” He drew her attention away from the frustrated EMT. “They have to look you over, make sure you’re okay.”
“Not yet. Not until it’s over.”
“Ma’am. Internal bleeding—”
“I said, not until it’s over.” She surged up from the fender of the car, her expression so savage the man leaped back, startled. Natalie, holding on like a burr to her midriff, began to cry again. Marguerite bent over her and amazingly managed to lift her. When Natalie’s arms and legs wrapped around her shoulders and hips, Tyler frowned at the sheen of perspiration that appeared on Marguerite’s forehead. He assumed the only thing keeping her from screaming from the pain was her extraordinary discipline and residual adrenaline. Possibly the numbing effect of shock.
She sank back down to the hood holding the child and pinned the EMT with a glacial expression. “I didn’t expect to live through today,” she said. “You think whatever miracle saved her life is going to take mine in the next thirty minutes? I refuse medical treatment. I’ll get it when I’m ready. Go. Away.” As the EMT shifted his gaze to Tyler, he put a light hand on her shoulder. When she turned her venomous look on him, he returned it with a hard, direct one of his own.
“Think twice before using that tone on me,” he suggested mildly.
He could have overruled her, forced her, for he could sense the fragility in her. The giddiness that she’d had when she first landed in his arms was fast slipping away.
Something dangerous and dark was brewing just below the surface of those blue eyes, something unresolved, and he knew she had to be here to see whatever it was finished.
So despite the roiling in his gut he allowed it, though every lover’s instinct told him to simply dump her on a gurney, strap her in and send her out of harm’s way.
“She’ll be along to the hospital shortly,” he said to the EMT. “I’ll make certain of it.
But leave her be for now.” He laid a reassuring hand on Natalie’s back, rubbing, feeling the tiny body shaking, knowing the only way they were going to separate them was with a pry bar anyway.
As if he’d reassured her with the same touch, Marguerite’s tension visibly eased.
The EMT gave him a short nod, not happy, but not much else he could do.
“I’ll be right back,” Tyler promised as Mac made an insistent gesture, calling him back to the huddle of cops.
When he reached them, a new police car arrived at the scene, lights going but siren off. Tina Moorefield exploded out of the backseat when the policewoman opened it. As her gaze darted around the crime scene, Marguerite straightened from the hood of the car, drawing her attention and just about everyone else’s as only a nearly six-foot-tall blonde could, particularly one whose hands were stained with blood and who held a young child as if she weighed no more than an infant. Tina cried out and ran to them, her arms already out. Marguerite murmured to the little girl, lowered her painfully to her feet. Natalie turned, the brown eyes seeking, confused. When she found her mother, her face crumpled. She stumbled forward, choking sobs becoming wails.
“Mommy…Mommy…Mommy…”
Tina went to her knees when Natalie got to her, clasped the child to her almost violently, weeping. Natalie clung to her mother, wails escalating into screams. The terror that had been frozen for survival now found voice, because her mother’s appearance said she was well and truly safe. She was okay.
Tyler saw Marguerite move stiffly toward them. She raised the right hand, whether to lay it on the woman or child, he didn’t know. Lifting her head, Tina stared at the blood on Marguerite’s fingers. Pulling Natalie’s legs up around her waist, she staggered to her feet, backed away, her expression one of revulsion. She turned her back and let the policewoman guide them back to the car, away from all of this.
Leaving Marguerite standing there alone. As she’d always been. It made him want to snarl at the men asking him questions that didn’t matter anymore. She was the only one that mattered. Mac’s hand moved to his shoulder, the light pressure steadying him, telling him the man understood and was trying to get what needed to be done finished as quickly as possible.
When he’d caught her, Tyler had felt the warmth of her flesh against him, the beating of her heart. A shudder had racked him so that for a moment he hadn’t known who was shaking worse, him or her. As he’d cradled her in his arms, with the child in hers, those blue eyes had looked up at him, humbling him by what he saw there. What he’d earned through patience and luck but would never deserve.
You said you’d catch me if I fell.
He understood that she’d always believed herself cursed, his angel. That she lived on stolen time. That she deserved nothing, even though she had clawed and scraped her way out of the dark morass of her memories by herself, a nightmare that would have made Sylvia Plath read like a Disney tale. But for a handspan of time, the few precious weeks they’d shared, he’d seen something come to life in her eyes, something that made him mad to protect her, to nurture that part of her, see it come to life permanently. Do as Natalie’s mother had done, wrap himself around her and never let her from his side again, never let her experience harm.
He forced himself to focus when Mac repeated something to him. The sooner he got this out of the way, the sooner he could get her out of here. He’d get her somewhere she could receive the care she needed. He wouldn’t let her be alone. Never again.
Marguerite watched Tina and Natalie leave, just shadows in the back of the police car. When the car turned onto a side street and disappeared from view, her gaze shifted.
The coroner had pronounced her father dead, finished his on-scene paperwork and now they were preparing a body bag to transport him. Soon she knew she would be asked what she wanted to do with him. His only living relative.
A blackness rose up in her, foul and putrid, like rot that had festered in a wound for so long it was going to drive her mad. Maybe it already had.
She started walking toward that body. Tyler was nearby, talking to Mac. The moment she moved, both men’s attention shifted to her. Since she had to move at a slow pace, they made it to her in several strides. She stopped, swaying, but when Tyler reached out she shook her head. “I’m fine. Your gun.” The syllables echoed strangely in her head, as if there were nothing else there. There was only this moment, just as all the philosophies she’d explored had taught her, the universal truths.
“What?”
“I want to borrow your gun.” She managed it this time in her most polite tearoom voice. “The large one.”
She couldn’t form the words to explain, could only hope by the expression in her eyes she was conveying what she was after. That the unusual ability he had to understand the breadth and depth of her, places she’d been unable to go herself, would be there. Her gaze shifted to her father’s body and then back to him.
“Mac.” Tyler turned to the other man, who was frowning. “I think I understand what she wants. The coroner’s already pronounced him dead and he’s about to go to the morgue. Can you tell your men it’s okay? Please?” Mac’s attention moved between them, to the dead man, back to Marguerite. She simply waited.
“You owe me for the paperwork,” he muttered to Tyler. “Mountains of it. And a job if they fire me. Wait right here.”
He turned, went to the other officers on scene, spoke to them. After a few moments of deliberation, of raised eyebrows and raised voices, he glanced over his shoulder, nodded.
Tyler gave her the Desert Eagle, butt first. “Do you remember how to use it?” She nodded. She felt all their eyes on her as she turned, walked across the crime scene toward the being who had spawned her. Who had nearly destroyed her mind but not quite, thanks to good friends, the strength that she had found in herself and Tyler.
Especially Tyler.
“It has a heavy kick,” he reminded her. He’d stayed right with her, just a step behind, protecting her back. She closed her eyes a moment, then slowly opened them, fixed them on her father.
Impassively she observed how death had frozen the monstrous features into permanence. He’d soiled himself, a fragility even he had not been able to escape. It would have been her all those years ago if not for David’s arms around her, his body beneath her to take the force of the concrete. Just as Tyler had done, he’d been there to catch her as she fell. David, Tyler and Mac. A monster of a father should have destroyed her faith in men according to any psychological textbook, but men like that had broken the theory, stole its power.