colorful feather arrangement and a cowrie shell necklace she’d kept in a carved box beside her bed. Then he’d come back the year she turned twenty-one, and everything had changed.
And changed again.
Now she angled her chin up at him. “Yes, I’m a woman, but I’m also damn good at my job. Just ask Wainwright.” She knew full well Rathe had already called their boss, just as she knew he’d pushed to have her yanked from the case and been turned down. “Even better, open your eyes and see for yourself.”
“It’s not that.” He pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Yes, it is.” She stepped into the empty elevator car, bracing an arm across the opening to keep him out. “And for your information, I’m not quitting. If you can’t work with me, you’ll have to take yourself off the case.”
A large part of her hoped he would do just that. A smaller, more feminine part hoped he wouldn’t.
He scowled. “Damn it, Nia! Let me come up. We need to talk about this.” The air around him vibrated with tension, and his eyes seemed to shoot silver sparks, but she wasn’t afraid of him.
Not physically, at least.
She stepped back and pulled her finger off the open-door button. “No. We’ll talk about it tomorrow. Meet me in the coffee shop at seven.”
The doors tried to slide shut. He blocked them with his shoulder and glared at her. “Fine. But promise me one thing. Promise you won’t snoop around the hospital again tonight. Leave that to me, okay?”
Nia might have taken offense at the request, but she was too darned tired to do more than collapse into bed. And there was something in his frustration, in his suddenly human gaze, that told her the request wasn’t just the primary asking his junior investigator not to interfere.
Her father might have called it “The Time Rathe Asked for a Favor.”
Confused, stirred up and weary beyond words, she simply nodded. “Fine. I won’t go back to the hospital tonight. I’ll see you in the morning.”
A glint that might have been relief, might have been triumph, flashed in his eyes and he let go of the elevator doors. “Tomorrow, then.” He turned and walked away as the panels slid shut.
This time it was Nia who slapped a hand to keep them open. “Rathe!” He stopped and looked back without turning. She felt suddenly foolish, but something compelled her to call, “Be careful.”
Maybe he smiled. Maybe he winced. But after holding her eyes with his for a heartbeat, Rathe simply inclined his head and turned away.
Nia let the doors slide shut and resisted the urge to press her suddenly hot face against the cool metal wall.
THE NEXT MORNING Rathe leaned back in an uncomfortable booth and watched Nia enter the hospital coffee shop. A restless night was etched in the deep circles under her eyes. Her skin was tinted with makeup, but the hollows remained. And, damn it, they didn’t detract one iota from her beauty.
Her dark hair curled around her face, adding mysterious shadows to eyes that already knew him too well. A faint blush stained her high cheeks, and her full, sensuous lips drew into a flat line as she sank down opposite him, both hands wrapped around a cup of coffee. She grinned at him, though the expression didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Okay, Bwana. Teach me how to investigate.”
Rathe frowned but didn’t argue. During the long night, he’d acknowledged he would have to teach her some basic survival skills, since she seemed determined to see this through. He would walk her through a safely edited version of an in-hospital covert job, and try like hell to convince her it wasn’t what she wanted to do with her life. He just couldn’t picture her in the Investigations Division, all five-foot-something of her pitted against the ugliness that lurked beneath the underbelly of the medical community.
Why? He wanted to ask. Why are you so set on investigations? Your father would’ve hated it. You could be hurt. Killed. Why?
But that was personal, not business. So instead he pushed a sheet of paper across the table to her. “Let’s start with the laundry room. Why did you follow those men out to the loading dock?”
“What’s this?” She picked up the paper, scanned its contents and answered her own question, “It’s the pickup timetable for the linens. There was a team scheduled for the one-to-three shift the other morning.” She glanced up at him. “Why wasn’t this information in our background packets?”
Rathe shrugged. “Who knows? I copied it from the schedule in the maintenance office…” among other things that she didn’t need to know about. He would tell her enough to do her part of the job and no more. He’d pass along enough to satisfy her, plus a little disinformation to keep her away from the dangerous parts.
Though the case seemed simple on the surface, Rathe had a feeling it was anything but.
“So how do you explain the bed and all the equipment we saw in that so-called laundry van?”
“I didn’t see it.” When she raised an eyebrow, he shrugged. “I didn’t get there until after the door was shut.”
There was no need to tell her that he’d been nearly panic-stricken to see the tiny, furtive figure of a woman heading for the departing van. In an instant he’d been back in the Tehruvian jungle, seeing Maria wave from a rebel army transport.
And that was before he’d realized the shadow in the laundry room belonged to Nadia French.
“Why were you there, anyway? We weren’t supposed to start work until later that morning.” She pursed her lips and blew across the top of her coffee. Sipped. Swallowed.
Rathe looked away. He had to keep this professional. Mentor and student. Senior and junior. The way it should have been from the very first day he’d noticed his best friend’s daughter watching him from the beachfront stairs.
“I was looking around,” he replied, not mentioning the gut feeling that had drawn him down to the subbasement. He tapped the paper that now lay on the table between them. “Unless you have a compelling reason why you followed those two, I think we should move on.” Rather, she should move on and leave the subbasement to him.
“You’re going to disregard what I saw in the van?” Her fingers tightened enough to dent the cardboard cup.
“No.” Rathe shook his head. “Not disregard. File and continue.” He held up a finger. “Rule one—Don’t fall in love with your own theory. When that happens, you’ll overlook clues that don’t fit.”
He waited for the argument, but she surprised him by nodding. She sipped, then gestured to encompass the hospital. “It’s like making a diagnosis. Don’t pick a disease until you’ve gathered all the facts.”
“Right. Only, think of the entire hospital, or maybe the Transplant Department, as the patient. As a doctor, you’re already used to that sort of investigation. This is simply on a grander scale.” A more dangerous one, though he was determined not to let her experience that firsthand. In the wee hours of the morning, when he’d tried to catnap in the basement break room, he’d decided on that course, with one addition: he was going to do his damnedest to convince her that HFH in general—and investigations in particular—wasn’t for her.
It was what Tony would’ve wanted him to do.
“So our symptoms are as follows,” she began, ticking the points off on her fingers. “First, there’s an increase in transplant deaths. Second, supply shortages are reported to Transplant Director Talbot and Assistant Director Hart.”
Rathe thought she might have lingered on the second man’s name and he scowled. That was another thing about working with women. They couldn’t keep their minds on business.
She blew on her coffee again, and Rathe forced himself to glance around the near-empty café. They weren’t being overheard. And he was a hypocrite, watching her make love