Deadline (Sandra Brown)

heart. The gesture moved him more than a spoken endearment and felt even more intimate than the hard-core sex.
    It was time for him to go.
    He moved away from her and pulled her skirt down over her bare thighs. He passed her the discarded T-shirt, then stood up and buttoned his jeans. She remained huddled there, looking up at him with perplexity, modestly clutching the T-shirt to her chest. “What are you doing?”
    “Leaving.”
    “Why?”
    The dismay behind her voice was almost his undoing. “This shouldn’t have happened, Amelia.”
    “What are you saying?”
    “What I’ve said before. I can’t have you.”
    “You just did.”
    “You know what I mean.”
    Her swallow was loud in the silence. “I know you want me.”
    “Only with every fucking breath.”
    “Then why are you doing this?”
    He backed away from her, moving toward the door into the living room, which would lead him out and away from her. “Because you had one selfish bastard who damn near ruined your life. I won’t be the second one.”

Chapter 26
    D awson pulled open the door to Headly’s hospital room and looked in. The patient was propped up in bed. His chin sprouted a salt-and-pepper beard, and he had bed head, but his color was better. Eva was holding a cup of coffee as he sipped it through a straw. Then he angled his head back and, making a terrible face, complained of it being as “cold as a wedge.”
    “Be glad you can swallow,” she said. “And breathe without a ventilator. If the bullet had affected other vertebrae—”
    “I know, I know,” he said crossly.
    “You’re getting meaner,” Dawson said as he came in. “A positive sign.”
    Eva greeted him cheerfully. Headly less so. After an exchange of pleasantries—“How did you sleep?” and so forth—Headly got to the matter of Flora’s grave. “I talked to Knutz a few minutes ago. Nothing to report yet. Getting lights in there last night would have been a logistical nightmare, so the team didn’t start the exhumation until this morning.”
    “How long do you think before you hear something?”
    “Hard to predict. Until they start excavating, they don’t know what they’ll find. It’s slow-going because they have to be careful not to compromise or destroy evidence. Ascertaining how she died, whether it was of disease or something else, will depend largely on how long she’s been buried.”
    The subject matter apparently distressed Eva. She tried to foist a carton of apple juice on Headly, who reacted as though she’d offered him a cup of hemlock. She returned the carton to his tray, then wheeled the trolley away from his bed. A wheel caught on the tangle of tubes on the floor at his bedside.
    Dawson motioned toward it. “Is anybody monitoring what goes where?”
    “I hope to God somebody is,” Headly groused. “So they don’t pump something out that’s supposed to be pumped in, or vice versa.”
    Eva freed the wheel and moved the trolley away from the machines, monitors, and IV paraphernalia. Then she sat down on the edge of the bed and motioned Dawson toward the chair.
    “Thanks, but I’m fine standing.”
    “You’re fine?” Headly said. “You’re twitching like a man with a rash in his crack.”
    It was true. He was as restless as he’d been all night. He’d known sleep would be out of the question, but when he returned to his hotel, he’d laid down and had at least tried to rest his weary body.
    But within minutes he was up again, moving around his hotel room without aim or purpose except to outdistance his memory of Amelia’s disillusionment and the pain he had caused her when he left. He was doing her a favor, but it had entailed humiliating her, and he couldn’t stand that.
    Headly broke into his disturbing thoughts. “Cough it up. What’s the matter?”
    Eva laid her hand on her husband’s arm, a silent command for him to can it. To Dawson, she said, “You were on your way to see Amelia when you left here yesterday.”
    “Um-huh.”
    “How is she holding up?”
    “Okay. Ambivalent about Jeremy. She wanted to know everything, but dreaded hearing it all.”
    “You told her everything?”
    “Yes.”
    “About her father?”
    “That was the toughest.”
    “How’d she take it?”
    “Just as I expected. A meltdown over how he’d been tortured. But grateful to have it confirmed that he hadn’t taken his own life.”
    Sadly, Eva said, “Lord, that poor young woman has been put through so much.”
    Like he wasn’t