11. Chapter 11
Chapter eleven
F or a moment, Rissa could do nothing but stare at her erstwhile captor, out cold on the ambulance floor. Then, she roused herself to kneel beside him. With trembling fingers, she searched the pockets of his jeans.
“Shit!” They were empty. What had he done with her cell phone? She scrabbled across the ambulance floor, looking for a dispatch radio or something of the kind, but her knee slipped in Elio’s blood.
There was so much of it.
You can’t let him die, her conscience shouted, and Rissa sighed heavily. Slowly, she turned back, gazing down at his face. It was haggard in the dim light, his angular jaw brushed with the dark beginnings of a beard. The neat row of stitches just behind his ear. The strong, lean length of him sprawled out before her, yet again in need of emergency care.
I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought, finding a pair of scissors in a compartment to her right and beginning the arduous task of cutting through the leg of his jeans. But what if he’s telling the truth? This plan of his is entirely foolhardy, but he doesn’t deserve to die. Especially if he’s innocent.
Could it be that he was? He had turned her loose, after all.
She was completely back in doctor mode now, finding the wound and confirming that it was just a graze. The bullet had cut deep into the flesh but passed clean through. She rummaged through the ambulance’s wound care supplies and cleaned the deep gash, staunching the blood flow before suturing it closed. Only seven stitches—one of his more minor wounds at this point.
She found the pain meds and gave him a low-dose injection. Then, she gingerly lifted the hem of his shirt, which was sticky with blood, to check the wound on his abdomen. As she had feared, it was partially open again, but before she could do anything about it, his hand closed over her wrist—just as it had some twenty hours before as he was wheeled into the hospital, handcuffed to a gurney.
Rissa jumped, looking up into his dazed hazel eyes.
“I have to go,” he said, sitting up. He groaned, releasing her wrist to put a hand to his head. “The police will be here soon,” he mumbled. “All you have to do is wait.”
“No,” Rissa argued. “You can’t go on the run like this, Elio. You should still be in the hospital. There is still something seriously wrong with your head. That’s why you keep passing out. You need medical care. If what you say is true, and you’re being set up, we’ll get a lawyer involved, go to other detectives and cops who aren’t in on it. We’ll figure it out.”
Elio was already rising to his feet, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “You can’t get involved. We don’t know who is behind this or what they’ll be willing to do. . .”
He was leaving, Rissa realized. She couldn’t let him do that—for his safety as well as everyone else’s. At this point, it didn’t matter whether he was telling the truth. Her eyes fell on the handcuffs he had removed from her wrists, and before the action even fully formed in her brain, she stood up and reached for them.
Elio turned with her as if he had been watching for that very move from the corner of his eye. His hands closed around her wrists, and he slammed her back against the side of the ambulance. His size and strength, even depleted as it was with blood loss, immediately overwhelmed her. Rissa cried out, writhing beneath him as he pushed her to the floor and straddled her with his knees, wrestling the handcuffs out of her hands and twisting one of her arms behind her back.
His face hovered over her, a mixture of desperation and desire warring in his expression. Rissa arched against him, twisting to get free, but suddenly, Elio’s face was even closer. And then he was kissing her deeply. His lips closed over hers, and his tongue pried them apart, searching, plunging into the depths of her mouth as she opened it in a gasp.
Rissa’s body responded with a shuddering heave of longing. She stilled, at first just a passive recipient of the kiss. Elio’s free hand was suddenly behind her head, gripping her hair and tilting her chin up, leaving an exhilarating pain that brought a whimper to Rissa’s lips.
Abruptly, she gave in to the yearning that was sweeping in an aching tide through her body, making it a magnet to Elio’s. Her hips lifted, and she felt the taut bulge of his penis against her crotch. Her breasts were crushed against his chest. She suddenly wished there was nothing between them, that she was as naked as she had been in her dream.
Elio’s lips devoured hers, and Rissa kissed him back, her tongue flicking into his mouth to taste the rich heat of him, her mouth opening of its own accord to let him in. His hand released her pinned arm to slip under her shirt, his callouses warm against her smooth, sensitive skin as he cupped her waist and slid his hand upward, bunching her top and baring her middle.
The cool air against her belly sent another round of shudders through Rissa’s being, and at the same time, the sound of sirens pierced her ears.
Elio drew back, releasing and lifting off her so suddenly that Rissa’s head bumped against the ambulance floor. She scrambled to pull herself together, left chilled, empty, and yearning as Elio skidded to the back of the ambulance and threw open the doors, jumping out and stumbling on his bad leg.
She was still sitting there, staring after him in bewildered need when he turned back, his eyes meeting hers for a single, flaming second before he spun on his heel and limp-ran across the dark cement toward a single car parked on the other side of the aisle.
Rissa scrambled after him, tumbled out of the back of the ambulance, and watched as the tires of the small, dark car squealed out of the parking space and spun away. She was still standing there trying to understand what had just happened when the first police car screeched into sight and skidded to a stop.
Two cops leaped out, sheltering behind their doors as they pointed their drawn weapons at her.
“Put your hands behind your head!” The female officer yelled. Rissa stared at her in bewilderment. Was she speaking to her?
“Hands behind your head and get on your knees!” the woman shouted again. “Now!” She was looking directly at her, the gun in her hand never wavering.
Slowly, Rissa lifted her hands to link them behind her head and sank to her knees on the cold concrete floor.