enough.” She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall. Beside her, she could feel the solid warmth of Anson’s long, lean body. His quiet respirations helped drive away some of the gnawing fear she’d been operating under since she’d looked across the car and seen her brother’s blood spilling down the front of his shirt.
Don’t get too used to it, a cautionary voice whispered in her head. He’s not going to be there forever. Or even tomorrow.
She was on her own. As always.
And she was all Danny had.
* * *
BY THE TIME the hospital in Knoxville moved Danny Coltrane to a room, midnight had come and gone. Danny had awakened during the gurney ride to the fourth floor, just sober enough to know he’d been drinking too much that night. His tearful apologies to his worried sister had grated on Anson’s nerves until he was ready to explode.
Never again was the most useless phrase in the English language. It held no meaning, acted as no promise, broke a million hearts and rendered the speaker an unmitigated liar.
There was always an “again.” Always.
He made his escape and waited down the hall in a small lounge area set aside for patients and families to meet without going to the formal waiting room. The area consisted of two small sofas and a handful of chairs, all empty at this hour of the early morning.
He folded himself into one of the chairs, grimacing at his own reflection in the windows. He was six foot four in his bare feet, and trying to fit his long limbs into the bowl-shaped chair he’d chosen made him look rather like a praying mantis trying to tuck itself into a walnut shell.
With a sigh, he moved to the sofa and averted his gaze from his reflection as he pulled out his phone to check his email. Twenty new messages in the past two hours. All of them virtually useless.
He rubbed his bruised rib cage, wincing at the flood of pain even his light touch evoked. He was going to be a walking bruise by morning.
He had one email from Tuck at the office. Marty Tucker was his assistant in the IT department and currently holding down the top job while Anson was on administrative leave. Anson opened the email and scanned Tuck’s rambling missive about the latest glitches and grumblings from what Tuck liked to call “The Great Unwashed,” those field agents at The Gates whose grasp of technology was, to be kind, subpar.
Nothing urgent or particularly interesting popped up in Tuck’s verbal meanderings, though Anson was mildly amused by Tuck’s latest nickname for one of their newer agents, Olivia Sharp—“Bombshell Barbie.” Sharp was tall, blonde, shapely and bigger than life, and she walked around The Gates as if she owned the place. Still, she’d seemed nice enough the handful of times he’d run into her before he’d been stripped of his duties. Tuck was in mad love with her, it seemed. In that annoying way of adolescent boys.
Too bad Tuck was older than Anson.
He pocketed the phone and rose to stretch his legs, grimacing at his battered body’s creaks and groans of protest. He had to keep moving—sitting still would only make the pain worse.
At least he’d have a story to tell the next time he ran into someone he knew, right? How many IT professionals could brag about taking a beating for a pretty girl?
Thinking of Ginny Coltrane brought his mood down quickly. He’d had no idea she was living such a sad, stressful life. Sure, she didn’t smile or joke much at work, but a lot of people approached work that way, with singular focus and intensity. They still had fun on the weekends or at night, enjoyed their families and friends. Anson’s life was pretty solitary compared to most people’s, but he had a group of old friends from high school he still spent time with on the weekends, white-water rafting or fishing or just swimming in the river where it widened and deepened down past Johnson’s Dam.
He wondered if Ginny ever got the chance to slip on a bikini and spend some time on the river. Probably not. Her nights and weekends were probably spent the way she’d spent tonight—dragging her brother out of bars before he could drink himself to death.
As he neared Danny Coltrane’s hospital room, he heard singing. A woman’s voice—Ginny’s voice—quietly singing a mournful mountain ballad he remembered from his early childhood. It was a rather gruesome lament about a woman whose love for her dead sweetheart wouldn’t let him move on to his peace, but Ginny’s soft alto made it sound ethereal and full of dreadful beauty.
Stopping outside the doorway, he leaned against the wall, closed his eyes and listened as she sang, remembering his mother singing the same words. His mother’s voice had been warbly and slightly off-key, but he’d loved to hear her sing anyway, loved everything about her, from her rosewater scent to her soft brown hair that fell in a long braid down her back.
She’d died when he was five, leaving him alone with his father. He’d never known another moment of happiness at home.
Footsteps coming down the hall faltered, distracting him from Ginny’s song. Opening his eyes, he saw a man standing about ten yards from where he stood, dressed in dark blue scrubs. But the uniform couldn’t hide the shaggy beard or the hard blue eyes of the man who’d gone after Ginny tonight at the Whiskey Road Tavern.
The man with the beard locked gazes with Anson, his eyes widening.
Anson pushed away from the wall and squared himself in front of the doorway, daring the man to make a move, even though his heart was racing like a scared squirrel being chased by a hound dog.
For a second, Anson saw the man consider it. Then he turned and started running, surprisingly fast for a man his size.
Anson took off after him.
The sound of running feet pounding down the corridor outside Danny’s hospital room stopped Ginny’s song in the middle of a verse. She turned her head in time to see Anson Daughtry speed past the open door.
With a quick glance to make sure Danny was still sleeping, she hurried out into the corridor. Down the hall, the door to the stairwell was slowly swinging shut.
The pretty dark-eyed nurse at the desk caught her eye as she passed, a frown on her face. “Friends of yours?”
Friends? As in plural? “The tall, lanky guy is. There was someone else out here?”
“An orderly, I think—at least he was wearing the uniform.” She frowned. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before, though. Should I call security?”
“Yes,” Ginny said, heading for the stairs.
She could hear the sound of footsteps running a couple of floors below her, shoe soles squeaking on the rubber stair treads. She headed down after the sounds before she talked herself out of it. If Danny’s life was in danger, she needed to know why.
On the landing two floors down, she stopped, listening for more sounds of running. Either they were so far ahead of her the sound didn’t carry up to the fifth-floor landing or they’d exited on one of the floors above.
As she started back up the stairs, she heard a door swing open below and a flurry of footsteps rushing up the stairs toward her. Gripped by a sudden urge to run, she took the steps two at a time, stumbling as she reached the sixth-floor landing and hitting her shin hard on the top step.
Biting back a gasp of pain, she pushed to her feet, darting a quick look behind her.
Anson stared back at her, his eyes wide. “Are you okay?”
She slumped against the wall of the stairwell, grimacing at the throbbing ache in her bruised shin. “What the hell is going on? The nurse said you were running after some orderly?”
“We need to get back to your brother’s room.” The note of urgency in his voice made her stomach ache.
“Why? What happened?”
He