Slow Burn Read online

  Cale approached the bed, set his kit on the floor, then sat on the edge and faced Sheila. Brady hovered in the background, his tone soothing as he spoke with Sheila’s daughter.

  “How are you doing today, Sheila?”

  Her smile might have been frail, but there was staunch determination in her still-sharp hazel eyes despite the horrible gurgling sound in her chest. “I’m not going with you,” she rasped with effort.

  Cale took her vitals and quickly determined she would indeed be going to the emergency room today. Not only was her temperature elevated, her pulse weak and thready, but her oxygen saturation level had dropped to less than eighty percent.

  He calmly held her arthritic hand between his and smiled at her. “I’m going to start an IV, Sheila, and then we’re going to transport you to the hospital.”

  With monumental effort, Sheila pulled in as deep a breath as her tired body could manage. “Not today.”

  A gnarled hand fell on Cale’s shoulder. He glanced up to see Sheila’s husband, Richard, standing beside him. “Leave her be,” he said, as he lovingly gazed at his dying wife. “It’s her time now.”

  Determination filled Cale. Her time? Not on his watch. His job was to sustain life, and that’s exactly what he planned to do.

  “I don’t think you understand what you’re saying.”

  “I understand perfectly,” the older gentleman said in a matter-of-fact tone. “My wife doesn’t wish to leave her home.”

  Cale carefully settled Sheila’s hand back on the soft, faded handmade quilt and stood. He signaled to Brady, who immediately stepped forward to watch over their patient, then steered Richard Eames into the hallway where his wife wouldn’t overhear what Cale had to say.

  “She needs to be in the hospital, Mr. Eames. Her condition is critical. You’ll lose her if we don’t transport her right away.” Cale knew there were no guarantees the doctors could save her this time, but he refused to voice his opinion. Right now, his sole intent was to do his job and help the patient.

  Eames lifted his hand and placed it over his heart. “How can I lose someone who’ll always be in here?”

  Frustration nipped at Cale. Dammit. “Then why did you place a 911 call?”

  “I didn’t. My daughter called. She’s having a difficult time letting go.”

  Obviously Eames didn’t suffer from the same malady. Cale had been called to Eames’s residence enough to know a little about the couple. They’d been married for over sixty years. Had Eames tired of the exhausting heartbreak of coping with a long terminal illness? There had to be a logical reason why he refused to convince his wife to allow them to transport her.

  Without a DNR, if Sheila had been unconscious when he and Brady arrived, Cale would’ve had no choice but to treat her, despite her husband’s wishes to the contrary. He had the power to help her, yet his hands were tied.

  Cale’s temper flared. “Mr. Eames,” he said forcefully, “Sheila will die if you don’t let us take her to the hospital. Do you understand?”

  An almost serene expression encompassed Richard’s deeply weathered face. “I know,” he said, his voice the epitome of resolute calm.

  Legally, there wasn’t a damn thing Cale could do except honor the patient’s wishes, a realization that did nothing to lessen the foreign helplessness he felt.

  “I don’t understand,” he said angrily. “If you love your wife—”

  “You don’t know how much I do love her,” Eames interrupted in that same calm, sure voice. “But Sheila doesn’t need me holding on to her, not in that way. The greatest love I can give to my wife is to let her go so she can finally be at peace.”

  Cale shoved his hand through his hair and stared at the older man as if he’d lost his mind.

  “Don’t misunderstand, son. I need my wife. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. She’s been by my side for sixty-five years. Except when I was in the army during the war, I woke up beside her for every day of those sixty-five years. We had two children, buried one of them and made it through hard times together. It’s simple, really. I love her enough to let her go. And loving her is more important than my needing her.”

  A lump the size of a football wedged in Cale’s throat. If his life depended on it, he couldn’t speak. Thankfully, Brady chose that moment to step into the hallway.

  “Mr. Eames,” Brady said gently. “Would you like us to give your wife something for the pain?”

  Richard Eames nodded. “Thank you,” he said. He gave Cale’s shoulder a squeeze, then walked back into the bedroom to be with his wife.

  Cale hung back and let Brady take over. After receiving approval from the E.R. doc, Brady administered morphine and instructed Sheila’s husband not to hesitate to call again if his wife’s pain became unbearable.

  Cale remained silent and thoughtful on the drive back to the station. Richard Eames’s reaction had been eons away from his father’s sheer determination to hold on to his wife. He remembered his dad keeping a constant vigil by his mom’s hospital bed for the three days it took for her to pass away, never leaving her side, never offering comfort to the sons who waited, knowing their mother was going to die soon. It hadn’t mattered to his dad that Mom had been in intense, agonizing pain from the burns that had covered most of her body. All that had mattered was that she not leave him.

  The sense of relief Cale had felt when his aunt had come to tell them that his mother had gone to a better place where she would not be in any pain, had been overwhelming. He might not have been able to understand why something so horrible had happened to his mother, but even as an eight-year-old boy, he’d understood on some level that she wouldn’t hurt anymore.

  If he concentrated hard enough, even now after all these years he could still hear the agonizing pain in the sobs that had wracked his father’s body that day. Cale had never doubted his father’s love for his mother. But suddenly, he couldn’t help wondering if his father hadn’t been selfish in refusing to let her go so she could finally find peace.

  Brady parked the rig in the bay, but neither of them were in any hurry to move.

  “I hate calls like that,” Cale admitted.

  Brady looked at him, compassion etched in his expression. “We did all we could for her.”

  All that she’d allow them to do for her, Cale thought. For him, it hadn’t been enough. “What would you do?”

  “You mean if it was Elise?” Brady asked. Elise was Brady’s wife. They’d only been married a couple of months. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t want her to suffer, that’s for sure.”

  “You wouldn’t want to hold on to her for as long as possible?”

  Brady shrugged, then slung his arm over the steering wheel. “Well, yeah,” he admitted. “I guess I would, but I love her, and if that means doing the same thing Richard Eames did tonight, then so be it.”

  Cale didn’t know what to say, so he kept quiet. But he did know what he had to do, and that was to tell Maggie what he’d learned today. The proof was nowhere near conclusive, but he at least had a name. With his connections in law enforcement, obtaining a copy of Amanda Hayes’s driver’s license hadn’t been a problem.

  He wasn’t worried that telling her what he’d learned today might not help with the return of her memories, but if she did remember, then she’d no longer need him. Now he finally understood what Richard Eames had been trying to tell him—love was more important than need.

  And when it came to Maggie, Cale knew with absolute certainty, he wanted her love.

  “THANK YOU, Detective Villanueva,” Maggie said, turning when she heard the rattle of Cale’s keys. Pearl came barreling through the living room at the sound and barked as Cale walked through the door.

  The smile Maggie had been wearing faded. From the look on Cale’s face, something was wrong. “Yes,” she told the detective, “for another few days at least.”

  Cale dropped his keys next to the lamp on the table near the door. “Can what for another few days?” he asked, abs
ently bending down to greet Pearl.

  She hung up the phone and pulled in a steadying breath that did little to calm the nervous twitters in her tummy. “Call me at this number if they have more questions.”

  He braced his feet apart and crossed his arms over his chest, his expression unreadable, giving her no clue what he was thinking.

  “Going somewhere?”

  She gripped the edge of the desk behind her and rested her backside against the antique wood. “Back to New York?” She hadn’t meant it to sound like a question. Or maybe she had. Lord knew the thought of leaving Cale had been plaguing her as much as her returning memories.

  His blue eyes darkened slightly, leaving her with a thin thread of hope.

  “Wanna run that one by me again, sweetheart?”

  She pushed off the desk and walked across the room to stand in front of him. Extending her right hand, cast and all, she smiled up at him. “How do you do?” she said when he took her hand. “I’m Amanda Hayes. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”

  His grip on her fingers tightened. “You know.” His voice had that same awe-filled tone Tilly had used back in the lingerie shop.

  She nodded.

  “But how?” he asked, wonder, disbelief and a hint of fear chasing across his chiseled features. “When?”

  “A few hours ago. Tilly and I were shopping and everything came rushing back.”

  She pulled her hand from his and walked to the sofa, then waited for him to join her. Once he settled down beside her, she explained about the handkerchief and how it had jarred whatever had been holding her memories prisoner.

  “I called Detective Villanueva to give him information about what I recalled prior to the explosion. That’s who I was talking to when you walked in.”

  She’d called her father first, but Lawrence Hayes hadn’t been the least bit surprised to hear from her. Her agent’s reaction had been similar—perfectly understandable responses, since she made a habit of going away for weeks at a time when she worked. To their credit, though, when she’d explained her situation, they’d been duly shocked and concerned for her well-being.

  The worry in Cale’s eyes deepened. “Do you remember the explosion?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she told him. “There are some things I remember, like how I got inside the warehouse and why I was even there in the first place.”

  “And?”

  Tilly’s humorous reaction and her virtually non-stop giggles about the fact that Amanda had been wandering around for days thinking she was a character in one of her books, had done little to ease Amanda’s embarrassment. Granted, when she was working on a book, she basically ate, slept and breathed her characters, but never to such a bizarre psychological extent. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to explaining it all over again, but Cale deserved to know every last scrap of the truth.

  She took another deep breath that did zilch to calm the butterflies tormenting her stomach, then turned to face Cale. “I’d better start at the beginning.”

  In that unique way he had of sensing her emotions, he reached across the space separating them and laid his hand on her arm in a gesture of comfort. She took strength from his warm touch.

  “I’m a writer, Cale.” She tried to gauge his reaction, but he showed no outward sign of surprise. “The reason I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d read that Adam Lawrence novel wasn’t because I’d read it before.” She pulled in another deep breath and let it out slowly. “It was because I’d written it. Adam Lawrence is a pen name. I took my father’s first name and a variation of my mother’s maiden name.”

  “I know,” he said quietly. “You’re ADH, Inc.”

  “You knew? For how long?” She didn’t want to believe he’d withheld something so important from her.

  He reached into his shirt pocket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. “Not until today,” he said, carefully opening the paper. “I had a hunch and did some digging. I called in a favor and was able to get this for you.”

  He handed her the paper and she stared at the black-and-white driver’s license photo. “Yup,” she said and set the copy on the pine table. “That’s me, all right. Twenty-seven years old, born on St. Patrick’s Day. No brothers or sisters, and, other than my father and stepmother, the only other relative I had is a grandmother who passed away four years ago.”

  She rattled off her personal information as if she’d never lost track of it, every detail as real to her as Cale sitting next to her listening intently.

  “I lost my mother when I was twelve and my life changed forever,” she told him. “My dad remarried a couple of years later and at my stepmother’s insistence, I was shipped off to a prep school abroad. I hated it there, but now I can at least value the education. I attended Yale for a semester but much to my father’s horror, I transferred to a small liberal arts college in upstate New York from which I graduated. I never went back for my master’s, but it’s an idea I’ve been toying with lately.”

  “What were you doing in L.A.?” he asked.

  Heat crept up her neck and burned her cheeks for the second time that day. “Researching my next novel,” she admitted sheepishly. “Uh…I think you might know the character. Her name’s Maggie LaRue, a reformed jewel thief.”

  He didn’t laugh, but he did smile. A big one that curved his mouth and brightened his heavenly blue eyes, and didn’t hold so much as an ounce of ridicule. “Something tells me it’s going to be your next bestseller.”

  Relief swept through her and she laughed nervously. “You don’t think I’m crazy?”

  He gave her a sidelong glance, clearing stating the subject was debatable. Okay, she deserved that one. What kind of sane person actually became a character in a book? None that she knew.

  “That still doesn’t explain why you were in the warehouse,” he said.

  She let out an exasperated breath and rolled her eyes. “Maggie’s father, James, is back and he’s smuggling jewels, getting them through customs in cans of paint. Maggie works for S.E.C.S., a fictional government agency that walks a thin legal line. When Maggie is busted the night she creates a diversion to save James, she’s given the opportunity to become a part of the S.E.C.S. team as a security advisor in exchange for her jail sentence. The caveat is that she must bring down her own father.

  “I needed to find out how the paint was warehoused, received, shipped, whatever, but the manager hadn’t been available. When I went back later, the place was already closed, so I sweet-talked my way past a very young security guard. He let me wander through the warehouse after hours to get a feel for the layout. I had planned to return the next day to talk to the manager.” She shrugged. “As I told Detective Villanueva on the phone before you came home, my guess is the guard took off for the hills when the fire started.”

  “So all these memories you were having were your character’s, not yours?”

  “Not all of them, but most. Some were actually mine. The dream I had about my apartment, hearing that woman’s voice and the boarding school, those were definitely real. The red hankie with the monogrammed V is real, too. It was my mother’s. Her name was Virginia.”

  Cale tried to absorb everything Maggie—Amanda—was telling him. As crazy as it all sounded, he couldn’t help the huge surge of relief that he’d been right. She wasn’t “Maggie LaRue.” “I don’t know which is more strange,” he admitted. “The dreams you thought were legitimate or the fact that your characters are that real to you.”

  She laughed nervously. “Just wait until I start talking to myself.”

  There wasn’t a single reason he should be shocked by her statement. Not after everything they’d gone through already. “Do you answer?”

  She bit her bottom lip. “All the time,” she replied sheepishly.

  “I’m sure they have warehouses throughout New York. Why come all the way to California?”

  “Because I’m setting the book here,” she explained. “I like to take a few weeks and…absorb, I guess
you could call it, an area. Before the accident, I spent a lot of time down on the docks in Long Beach, took in the atmosphere along Rodeo Drive and the Santa Monica Pier. Unfortunately, I spent a lot of money on Rodeo, so much that I’d even bought an extra suitcase.”

  He glanced over at the bags he hadn’t even noticed until now, stacked neatly beside the desk. A sense of dread filled him at the reminder that she would be leaving in a matter of days. Unless he could convince her to stay.

  “Where were they?” he asked with an inclination of his head toward the suitcases.

  “In the bungalow I’d rented for the month. Tilly helped me pack and bring my things here. I hope you don’t mind. It’s going to take a few days for me to get my things in order before I go back to New York.”

  “Yes,” he said suddenly. “I do mind. I mind a great deal.”

  Her mouth formed a perfect O as she stared at him in disbelief.

  He shot off the sofa, needing to move, to quell the restlessness settling around his heart at the reminder that he had absolutely no ties to her. That she had no reason to remain in California another minute.

  No, that wasn’t right. She had no reason to remain with him, that’s what he minded. But she did, and he planned to make her see it.

  “I mind a whole hell of a lot that you’re going back to New York,” he said sharply.

  “Cale—”

  “Don’t go,” he said before she had the chance to issue a list of arguments to the contrary. “Stay here. Stay with me.”

  “But—”

  “Look, I know you don’t need me to take care of you, but dammit, you do need me, Maggie.” She needed him to love her.

  A sweet smile tugged her lips. “Amanda,” she quietly corrected him.

  He shoved his hand through his hair. “Maggie. Amanda. Hell, I don’t care if your name is Persephone.”

  “Cale—”

  “Is there someone else?” he interrupted her again. God, now that she’d recovered her memory, maybe there was some guy in her life. He hadn’t even considered the possibility. No, he didn’t buy it. There wasn’t a snowball’s chance of another man in her life. There couldn’t be, not the way she’d loved him and gifted him with her heart and her body. Not a chance in hell.