Natural Law by Joey W. Hill
She knew now that he wanted her as much as she wanted him. At that moment when she had answered Kiera, when her eyes had locked with his, there had been nothing but the truth of their hearts. No time, no shields, nothing but the simple honesty of two lives stripped down to the last breathing moment together.
"Mackenzie." She laid her cheek on his large hand, rubbing against the coarse hair, the rough knuckles. "Wake up. I need you so much."
The tone of the monitor stumbled, made her heart jump three beats. She straightened to glance at the machine. In her peripheral vision, she saw the nurse in her blue scrubs standing in the doorway.
"I think it was just a skip," Violet said. "Damn thing keeps scaring the shit out of me, every time it goes irregular."
"Well, let's see if we can't make it a bit more flat line."
Violet spun.
It was Tamara, not a nurse, standing in the doorway. Kiera's sister, composed as a cold statue, leveled a .38 directly at Mac's chest. Her finger squeezed the trigger.
It was ten feet to the door. There wasn't time for Violet to reach for her ankle piece or do anything but throw her body over Mac's upper torso, curling herself over his chest and head, her own skull an obstacle the bullet would have to shoot through to get to his.
The first bullet ripped through her shirt at the waist, burning her. Violet flinched at the staccato sounds of shots, her heart hammering so loudly against her chest she couldn't tell whether it was her own heart making her jerk, or slugs tearing through her flesh. Mac's hands moved, confused, scrabbling, his subconscious responding to shots the way any conscious cop did, even if he didn't have the physical ability to protect himself. He found her body, gripped, and she held onto him, kept him covered, unable to move even as she heard shouting, running feet, thuds.
"Officer Siemanski! Violet! Violet! Get off him, move off! He's gone flat line."
She heard the horrible whine of the monitor, would have wanted to cease living herself at the sound if her hand hadn't been curled around his throat, feeling his pulse pounding against her fingertips.
"No, the unit's been hit," a nurse called out above the din. "Get a new one in here, stat. Get a cuff on him. Officer, you have to move."
A variety of voices, calling at her from different directions, the hands of the nurse, then Suarez and Connie, prying her tight fingers off him.
Pull it together, Siemanski.
Letting go of Mac was the hardest thing she'd ever done in her life, but she managed it, rolled away, let the doctors and nurses swarm over him.
Falling back to the wall, she assessed the scene. Sergeant Rowe was checking her weapon, returning her service pistol to her shoulder holster. She stood just beyond Tamara's body, which was collapsed in the doorway, a macabre sight with nurses and medical personnel stepping hastily back and forth over her while a doctor checked her vitals, confirming that she was dead. Uniforms hovered just behind him, waiting to lift the corpse out of the way. There'd been no time to wound. The sergeant had taken Tamara straight through the chest cavity, twice, and dropped her. Two Styrofoam cups floated in a pool of brown liquid running across the hospital floor, on a direct course to intercept the trail of blood that leaked from Tamara.
Darla's gaze met Violet's. "Thought you could use some coffee," the sergeant said.
Violet nodded, a jerk of her head. The shock and terror were wearing off, leaving anger. Deep, tear-the-ass-off-the-nearest-fool-willing-to-get-close-enough-to-her anger.
"Why wasn't she being watched?"
Consuela Ramsey, standing at Rowe's side, stiffened at the tone. "Early this morning, a uniform informed her that her sister had been killed. She told him that she was going to their parents' place to break the news. She wasn't a suspect, Officer Siemanski."
"So someone was careless enough to let her know Mac was here? Did they just pull their heads out of their asses yesterday? And how the hell did a woman who was a dead ringer for the woman who put Mac in this bed walk through a hospital of cops without a single fucking one of them noticing?"
"Officer," Rowe said sharply. "They were in--"
"Why didn't anyone recognize that she didn't belong on this floor?" Violet snarled. "What, Charles Manson could throw on blue scrubs and waltz right through the children's ward here?"
She had started low, vicious, her teeth gritting over the words, but when she finished, she was one step below an enraged scream, bringing a momentary stunned silence to the room, the hallway, and likely to everyone on the entire floor. The doctor on call opened his mouth to snap at her, order her to get the hell out, she was sure, but before he could, someone else spoke.
"Singing... Beautiful sound."
She whirled on her heel. Past the arm of the nurse checking his blood pressure, Mac's eyes were half open, looking at her through a haze of pain and drugs. In them she saw a hint of that frightening distance that people teetering on the edge of life and death had. But they were open.
Violet circled the nurse, barely managing not to knock her out of the way, and put her hand against his face. "Mackenzie, you hear singing?" She groped to change gears, had a terrifying, hysterical thought. "Do you hear angels?" She looked around wildly to see if they had him hooked up to a new unit yet, so they could be sure that great heart wasn't grinding to a halt.
He made a noise, bringing her attention back to his face. There was something else in his expression, something it took a moment for her to recognize. Amusement. Amusement with her. His voice was a broken rumble.
"Just one, sugar."
She closed her eyes, put her forehead to his, both hands to his face. She felt his arm move weakly to the edge of the bed, brush against her leg.
"What...happened? Shots."
"Don't worry about it." She stroked his cheek, bent close so all he could see was her. She felt the press of the medical personnel against her, wanting to get her out of there. But this was important, as important to his survival as anything they were doing. "You just have to rest, and get better, because there's a lot I want from you, Mackenzie Nighthorse. I'm not going to let you keep your ass in this bed forever."
"You could...come put your ass in it with me."
Violet brushed her lips lightly over his, nearly broke into tears at the slight pressure of response. The nurse's touch on her arm had become an insistent clamp. "Soon, baby. But let them take care of you. I'll be right here."
He nodded, already slipping off again, but his finger caressed her leg once more. A promise that he'd be back. A promise he would keep, or she'd go yank him out of hell itself.
Violet moved back to the door as the new monitoring unit was brought in with several more nurses to get him hooked back up. Tamara's body was being lifted onto a gurney. A clean-up crew was moving in to handle the rest, the coffee and blood, as other staff members shooed the cops who had responded to the shots back toward the elevators. She thought to look down at herself, and discovered the bullet that had passed so close to her side and through the mattress had only burned the upper layer of skin, nothing serious. Glancing back into the room at the wall, she verified that Tamara had only gotten off two shots. The one that had nearly hit them, and then the one that had gone wild, hitting the unit, when apparently Rowe had put the first shot into her back.
Violet stepped outside of the room, looked down at the bloodstained floor. "I don't know whether to scream at you some more or thank you," she said at last to Mac's boss and Connie, both standing on the other side of the grisly puddle.
Darla put a restraining hand on Consuela's arm when Mac's coworker curled back her lip to snap. "Easy. We've all had a tough day. Detective Ramsey, please go with the body to the morgue, make sure everything is handled by the book."
Consuela blew out a breath, nodded, giving Violet a curt look that Violet returned with venom. She knew Darla was right. It didn't make her any less pissed.
"I'll put a man on the door," Sergeant Rowe said mildly, though Violet noticed the fingers of her gun hand were quivering slig
Violet looked at that shaking hand, lifted her eyes to Darla's face. "Have you ever--"
"Not in over twenty years on the force. This is my first." Darla gave a shaky laugh. "My nerves are shot to shit. But I'm glad as hell, if I had to finally do it, that it was to protect one of my own. I'm going to go for that coffee and then deal with this mess. Want to come?"
"I'd suggest decaf," Violet said, casting a pointed look at her fingers. "But I'll stick here. Maybe you could bring me back a cup, though. When you're done." She hesitated, brought a couple of dollars out of her back jeans pocket, reached over and put them in Darla's hand, met her gaze. "My treat."
Darla closed her fingers over Violet's, held there a moment. Nodded and turned toward the elevators.
"Oh." She stopped halfway there, turned back. "You know, that was an amazing and selfless thing you did in there. You better have a good pair of running shoes."
"How's that?"
The sergeant cocked a brow. "Knowing Mac, when he gets out of that bed and finds out what you did to protect him, he's going to chase you down and have your hide."
"He won't have far to go," Violet said, managing a tired smile. "I'll be right here."
Epilogue
Nine months later
Paperwork had kept her late, so the flicker of relaxing candlelight on the back screen porch should have been a welcome sight as Violet took the Stealth over the marsh bridge to their street. Instead, for just a moment, she was torn between wanting to go in and bury herself in his arms, and turning the car around and driving it as fast and far as she could, to outrun the ache that had been growing in her chest ever since he'd returned to active duty a couple weeks ago.
"Damn it, get over it," she snapped.
She pulled up next to his bike and noted that the Aztec lilies she had planted were coming into their second blooming of the summer. Bright, vibrant, passionate red. She had a sudden urge to rip them out of the ground. Instead, she worked her fingertips into the tightness in her temples, staving off the headache, taking a deep breath before she got out of the car.
Once in the house, she tossed her keys on the kitchen table and gave Boscoe his required ear scratching before she blocked out the jumble of emotions, composed herself the same way she did right before she went to work, and headed for the back porch.
Mac rose from his hammock chair, his smile easy but his eyes showing his concern, and she knew she wasn't masking her feelings well enough. He touched her face, curling a loose auburn strand back behind her ear, brushed his lips across hers. She fought back the urge to devour that firm mouth, to press her nose against him and just inhale all of him into her.
"Good day?" he asked, pulling off his wire-framed reading glasses, a very sexy accessory she hadn't even known he used until she had moved in here six months ago to oversee every halting and occasionally harrowing step of his return to health.
During that period, Violet learned that time could be slowed down and valued, one tick of the minute hand after another. Insurance and the same family trust fund that had paid for her Stealth paid for a home nurse when he was allowed to leave the hospital, but she took over the evening shifts, effectively moving into his home.
Boscoe staked out a spot on the sofa and became Mackenzie's watchdog when she wasn't around. She planted mums by his door in the fall, set a poinsettia on the kitchen table at Christmas and held Mac's head in her lap when he fell asleep on the sofa at nine-thirty on New Year's Eve night.
There were many times that the powerful man she loved had been filled with rage at the weakness that barely got him to the bathroom on his own. When it got to be too much, he took out that anger on her, the nearest target. In return, her fear would goad her to tear his ass apart verbally when he did too much and wore himself out.
But then one day the tide turned, and she saw him start to grow stronger. He began to do desk work for his job, investigative work, and returned to working out with weights to build up a body that had gone lean and gaunt from the months of recovery. She would come home and find him sweating and tired, but with a triumphant gleam in his eyes that told her he was getting better.
They made love several times then, carefully, gently. But she was afraid to do more, demand more. Over the nine months it took him to recuperate, D/s was an area they did not touch. He had reclaimed the bracelet, asked for it the moment they would let him wear jewelry in the hospital again, but she had not moved to reclaim the rights that went with it.
She couldn't initiate it. She didn't know why, because she knew the longing was still there in her, but she had no emotional strength to face what it was that was keeping her from going there with him. When they made love, she sensed a hesitance in him, as if he was waiting for something from her, but she turned away from it, squelched it with the passion of vanilla lovemaking, and stopped the topic from coming up.
"Good enough," she responded, taking a seat across the side table from him, close enough that they could link hands as they always did, establishing a loose connection. He poured her a glass of wine, and then he surprised her by bending over, untying the canvas sneakers she'd changed into before she came home, and took them off her feet, his hands gently taking her feet up to his lap to massage them.
"Mmmm." She made the casual noise of pleasure, but her gaze was riveted on the way those long-fingered hands moved over her arches, caressed her toes. The way his T-shirt stretched over his shoulders as he bent to remove her shoes. "We stopped a car carrying a kilo of coke this afternoon, but they're trying to get off on a technicality. You heard about that?"
"On the radio." He nodded at the police issue he kept just inside the door of the house. "Caught the tail end of it when I got home. George was an idiot, searching the car the way he did."
"So do you think we have a chance of making the bust stick?"
As he gave her his opinion, she put her lips to the glass, let her eyes fall shut. That deep, melodic voice, the joy of being able to listen to every syllable, set off an odd trembling deep in her stomach, a need so strong it spread through her limbs.
She didn't know when the words disappeared. His voice just became the music her soul yearned to embrace, to compose the right notes to make their songs come together again, as easily and beautifully as they had before.
His hands touched her face, and her eyes jerked open. She stared at him, leaning over her, and he lifted his hand, showing her the tears from her eyes wetting his fingers. He studied her, and she saw something in his expression, something that made the ache spread.
"I'll go check on--"
"No, you won't. Come here, sugar," he murmured.
Before she could object, he had his arms around her and he pulled her over onto his lap, cradling her. She knew he had built up his strength again, but it was surprising to feel how much, because she hadn't availed herself of it. For so long, she had been focused on the areas of his health that needed bolstering. Her body tightened in need and want in a way she had not permitted it to do for some time.
"Let it go, Violet," he said softly against her hair. "I swear to God, if you don't, I'm going to slap you around."
She shoved against him, trying to get away, and he simply yanked her back. She struck at him, and he blocked her, captured her arms proving without a doubt he'd regained his physical supremacy over her. She punched and pummeled, shouted at him, and he hung on grimly, until words became curses and curses became tears.
At last, when Mac thought he was going to have to shake it out of her, great racking sobs tore out of her chest. She collapsed against him, too exhausted to fight anymore. Thank God.
It was the hardest she'd ever cried in her life, Mac was sure. What was more, he knew the cause of every single tear that dampened his shirt front.
For nine months, he had watched her suppress every tear, every complaint, e
But she wouldn't let him, and he learned that a person could love too much. She had shut down her own emotional and physical needs so effectively that she didn't know how to get them started up again. Him going back to active duty had been the catalyst for her deteriorating temperament, the reason as obvious to him as it was incomprehensible to her. Well, he was better now, and he wasn't having any more of this bullshit.
She had soaked his T-shirt. When she ran out, ran down to hiccupping sobs, he removed the garment so her cheek wouldn't be against the wet. He used a dry portion of the cloth to wipe her running nose, dab at her eyes. She watched him as he did it, her beloved face confused and young. Pushing her head back beneath his chin, he coaxed her into nestling her cheek against his bare skin.
They quietly watched the sun go down. He didn't say anything, simply stroked her back, her neck, her hair. Her hand crept over the scar on his belly, her other palm around his back, on the marks of the lash that would always be there.
He lifted his head, brought his hand to her jaw and made her look into his eyes. "It's over, Violet," he said, and his voice was rough. "Don't let it take any part of what we were from us." He caught her hand from his stomach and bit her fingers, not gently. "I'm yours. I never stopped being yours." He kissed her lips, hard, willed her to nip at him as she had done once. When she would have turned her head away, shielding her reaction, he caught her chin in a hard grip, yanked her face back to his. Saw a flash of temper.