Lawman Lover. Lisa Childs
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she had made a horrible mistake. She would have been smarter to lock her and the prisoner inside the morgue, rather than out of it.
“Get Dr. Bernard out here,” Warden James said. The man was obviously used to everyone jumping to obey his commands.
If he had really ordered her brother to kill an undercover agent, Jed would not survive his show of disobedience.
She swallowed hard and replied, “He left for the evening.”
“Then you need to call him and get him back down here. Now,” the warden insisted, a jagged vein standing out on his forehead as he barely contained his rage.
“I don’t have the doctor’s private numbers, and I’m not sure where he is, sir,” she murmured, barely able to hear her own voice over the furious beating of her heart. Now she understood why everyone in Blackwoods County feared Warden Jefferson James whether they were confined in his prison or not.
“I’m just waiting for a funeral home pickup.” Forcing away her nerves, she gestured with a steady hand toward the gurney.
“So you have a key to the morgue?”
She shook her head. It wasn’t really a lie since she wasn’t supposed to have a key to the morgue. “No. Dr. Bernard left me in the hall here, waiting. The funeral home’s driver is late.” Her friend wasn’t actually going to show at all, but hopefully the warden wouldn’t check her story.
“Who does have a key?” James persisted.
Despite the tension quivering in her muscles, she managed a shrug. “Maybe the hospital director?”
“Can you call him down here?”
She shook her head. “Sorry, sir, the phones don’t even ring down here after hours. And I can’t leave this body unattended until the funeral home gets here.”
“Why not?” Warden James asked, his already beady eyes narrowing with suspicion. “It’s not like he’s going to walk off.”
A couple of his goons uttered nervous chuckles of amusement.
“Is it?” the warden asked. Now he focused on the DEA agent’s sheet-covered body.
Macy willed the sheet not to move with Rowe’s heartbeats or his breathing. “Of course not, sir. It’s protocol for the hospital and the state that a body never be left unattended outside the morgue. I might lose my job if I leave.” And her life if she stayed and the warden lifted that sheet. If he was willing to kill an undercover DEA agent, he would have no problem killing her. And then her brother…
Her eyes widened as she imagined the sheet shifting a bit as if sliding off Rowe’s body, and she accidentally bumped into the gurney so that the wheels lurched a couple of inches across the linoleum floor. The sheet moved, too, but didn’t slide off any farther. Nothing of Rowe was visible beneath it but the outline of his long, muscular body.
The warden stepped back with a slight shudder of revulsion. How could a man who was so often around death be unnerved by it? “I don’t give a damn about protocol,” he said. “I need to talk to your boss right now.”
“If you go to the main desk upstairs, they can help you,” she said. “They’ll be able to reach Dr. Bernard at home and have him come back to the morgue.”
The warden glared at her before turning and heading toward the elevator. Like devoted dogs at his heels, the guards followed him. Macy waited until the doors closed on him and his henchmen; then she exhaled the breath she’d held and her knees weakened. She stumbled against the gurney and sent the wheels rolling forward a few feet this time.
Still covered with the sheet, the body rose, like a ghost rising from the dead. Then Rowe shrugged off the shroud and turned to her. He expelled a ragged sigh as if he’d been holding his breath. “That was close.”
“That was crazy,” she said, trembling in reaction to the confrontation. “I thought for sure he was going to lift the sheet. You were moving.” She reached out to smack him, as she would have her brother, but this man wasn’t her brother. He was a potentially dangerous stranger, so she snatched back her hand before she could connect with his bare skin and muscle.
“I wasn’t moving,” he said, his already impressive chest expanding as he filled his lungs. “I wasn’t even breathing.”
In her fear, she had only imagined the sheet slipping then. “The warden kept staring at you like he knew I was lying….”
Thank God he had not called her on that lie.
“I thought your brother was lying,” Rowe admitted.
“About his innocence?” She bristled with indignation. “He is innocent.”
“I thought he was lying, or at least exaggerating about you,” he said, as he slid off the gurney, “but you are really smart. You think faster on your feet than some agents with years of experience on the job.”
“I feel like a fool,” she said, because he was probably playing her for one. “I should have called the police, or at least told Dr. Bernard about you.” She could have trusted her boss to help her; he had treated her very well the past three years.
“You’ll get me and your brother killed,” Cusack warned her.
“I only have your word that will happen,” she pointed out. And she had been stupid to take his word for anything.
“Remember what happened to Doc,” he advised her. “Why do you think he died?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It could have had nothing to do with you. A prisoner could have freaked out on him.” So many ODs came to the morgue from the prison, the inmates overdosing on controlled substances to which they never should have had access. It was very plausible and overdue for the DEA to investigate the drug problem at Blackwoods Penitentiary.
“Then why did the warden show up here?” he asked, his blue eyes bright with anger. “He’s looking for me.”
“And I probably should have turned you over to him.” But she couldn’t take the risk that Jed wouldn’t get hurt or, worse, wind up like Doc, if she talked.
Trusting this stranger, though, was putting her own life at risk. Warden James was not going to be happy if he learned that she had lied to him. So she had to make certain that he never learned the truth.
“I THINK YOUR BROTHER DID kill me and send me straight to hell,” Rowe grumbled as he zipped up the sweatshirt Macy had tossed over the seat a minute before. “First a body bag and a coroner’s van.”
“Then a slab in the morgue,” she murmured over her shoulder.
“And a cold unventilated drawer.” It had also been dark and confining, reminding him of those closets he’d been locked in so many years ago.
“I didn’t shut it all the way.”
He leaned through the partition separating the back from the front seat. “No, you didn’t, or I would have suffocated and wouldn’t be taking this ride right now—” Rowe shook his head in disbelief “—in the back of a hearse.”
“You couldn’t just walk out of the morgue,” Macy said, her voice muffled as she stared straight ahead, peering through the windshield. She steered the hearse down the narrow road which, like every other road in Blackwoods County, wound around woods and small, inland lakes in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
“No, I couldn’t, not with Warden James and his goons hanging around the hospital,” he agreed. So he’d had to trust Macy Kleyn again and rely on her quick-witted thinking to get him out of the hospital unseen.
He lifted his gaze from the windshield to the rearview mirror hanging from it, and caught the reflection of headlamps burning through the darkness behind them. His gut knotted with apprehension. “But someone still might have followed us.”
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