THE PERFECT TEN (Boxed Set)

down the numbers — hemoglobin, platelet count and the rest. “Based on what I’m seeing, I don’t think we’ll have to worry, but we’ll keep monitoring the situation.”
    Okay, so she seemed to be out of immediate peril. Time to tackle the hard stuff.
    “How’d I get here?”
    One beat, two, three, as though he were weighing how much to tell her.
    “I brought you.”
    “ You brought me?”
    “Yes. I was there, in the alley. I saw the attack.”
    “No.” The denial emerged on an exhalation. She wasn’t even sure what she was denying.
    “Yes. I witnessed it. I saw that creature attack you.”
    Her heart started banging again. A man fiercely grappling with her attacker. A black-haired man.
    “You were there.” A statement, not a question. She remembered now. And she remembered something else.
    His was the face she’d seen when she’d surfaced from that cold hell she thought was death. Then she remembered what had wakened her from that icy place — his mouth, hot on her bare throat, like a lover’s.
    No. No way. It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have. Just a dream, like the other one.
    She wet her lips. “Where are we?” Lifting her head, she scanned the room. No nurses came and went. Nothing fit her experience with various wards at the hospital. “This isn’t the Regional.”
    “You are in my home. But I assure you it is as well equipped as your hospital to deal with your particular emergency. Better equipped, in fact.”
    This was his home ? It looked more like a trauma treatment room. And how freaky was it that he’d brought her here to treat her? Scary -freaky . Fear warred with anger. By the slimmest margin, the latter won.
    “I can see for myself that you’re well equipped. My question would be, why? And while we’re at it, why didn’t you call an ambulance to take me to the emergency room? That would be the logical response.”
    Those glowing eyes narrowed to dark slits. “And what would you have told them at your ER, Nurse Crawford?”
    She lifted her chin. “That I’d been attacked by…”
    “A vampire?” he finished.
    “Yes! You know I’m telling the truth. You were there. You saw it.”
    He didn’t move so much as a muscle, but for all his stillness, he emitted an odd leashed energy. It poured off him in waves so potent, she could almost imagine she saw an aura of energy surrounding him.
    “Indeed I did witness it. But the ER staff who would have attended you weren’t there. They didn’t see it.”
    “You could have hung around and explained.”
    His lips turned up at the corners in a flash of amusement that was gone so quickly she wondered if she imagined it. “Yes, I suppose I could have given them the Readers’ Digest version of events, but I rather value my professional reputation.”
    “Okay, yes, they’d be skeptical in the extreme, until they’d seen this .” She lifted a hand to her throat, where she could still feel the pain of her wounds beneath the bandage.
    “Remove the dressing.”
    She blinked. “What?”
    He opened the drawer on her bedside table and extracted a hand mirror, which he offered to her. “Remove the dressing and have a look.”
    Panic flared. Did she really want to view those puncture marks? She knew the attack had happened. She remembered it in horrifying detail. But to look on her wounds would make the proof of it incontrovertible. If she looked in the mirror, she couldn’t then decide she’d dreamed it. She couldn’t then conclude, for the sake of preserving her own sanity, that she’d had some kind of psychotic break.
    “Not up to it? I see.” He started to return the mirror to the drawer.
    “Give it to me.”
    “Are you sure?”
    Her answer was to peel the adhesive dressing away with one swift motion.
    “So be it.”
    She accepted the mirror from him, angling it to get a look at the puncture marks. Once again, her pulse skyrocketed. The skin of her throat was smooth and unbroken, with nothing but some faint bruising and some redness from the adhesive removal to suggest any kind of trauma.
    Impossible.
    She put a hand to her throat, running her fingers over the area to confirm what her eyes had already told her. Sweet Jesus.
    “You see why the medical staff at the hospital might question your story?”
    “But how? I was bitten… I can still feel the burn. Where did the puncture marks go?”
    Behind the lenses of his glasses, his eyes seemed to blaze even stronger than before. “These creatures cover their