He froze.
One, two, three seconds he watched her. She lay still as stone. Must have been an involuntary response sound. The bitch was in a coma. He relaxed and returned to his work.
Her arm flopped.
She moaned. Louder.
Her eyes opened.
She flopped her arms again. Tried to roll toward the other side of the bed away from him, those hideous sounds gurgling from her throat.
The monitors screamed for attention as her heart’s rhythm reacted to the fear.
Shit! He had to hurry!
He placed his thumb on the plunger, pushed. “Just die,” he muttered.
“What’re you doing there?”
The nurse didn’t wait for his response. She dropped the patient chart she carried and rushed toward him.
He released the hypo. Hoped it would be enough. He jumped across the bed, bypassing the nurse. Then he rounded the foot of the bed.
He knocked down another nurse as he charged out the door. She scrambled up, screaming for help.
Would the small amount he’d injected prove sufficient? No way to be sure. He could hope.
As if to set his mind at ease, the code blue echoed through the hospital’s intercom system.
Excellent. He mentally marked taking care of that bitch off his list of things to do.
Now he had to escape.
His son needed him.
And there was the business of the last princess.
23
1708 Monroe Street
Pascagoula, Mississippi; 9:00 p.m.
Adeline tucked her cell phone into her back pocket and moved down the hall to join Wyatt in his living room. The chief had called her a third time. He wanted to send Detective Metcalf down to back her up. Metcalf had gotten his shield a couple of months ago and she liked the guy. She wouldn’t mind having him as a permanent partner.
But she didn’t need backup down here. She watched the man pacing the living room. Wyatt wasn’t going to let anyone close to her anyway.
That realization settled heavily against her chest.
What the hell was she doing allowing this to happen?
Those emotions she’d struggled with all day churned fiercely, way down deep inside her. She gritted her teeth, pushed the feelings aside. This investigation was unnervingly close to home to say the least. But she’d worked unnerving plenty of times.
It was beingherewithhim. Every cell in her body was affected by him. By beinghere. From the day she had left Mississippi, she had disowned this place. Home wasn’t home anymore. She’d worked hard to make Huntsville, Alabama, home. And she had succeeded ... until about twenty-four hours ago when all the walls she’d built between her and here—between her andhim—had come crashing down.
The choices she’d made, out of necessity at the time, now seemed all wrong. Misguided and hasty. Second thoughts weren’t supposed to haunt a person nine years later.
Yet she stood here now, staring at the single most relevant part of her life back then, and she understood that she couldn’t pretend there wasn’t still something there. Couldn’t ignore the hold he still had on some part of her.