Page 73 of Hunted

Her hands stilled on his chest. She paused to gape at him, then shook her head and began working on him again. “Oh, sure. Now that you’re all shot to hell, now you love me.”

He tried to smile but wasn’t sure of the results. Lexi shrugged her coat off and covered him with it. She dragged a metal box over and propped his feet on it. He heard sirens.

“I loved you all along. All that crap … about it not meaning anything…”

“Just trying to get rid of me, huh?”

“I thought … killing White was more … important,” he managed to say, and his words were beginning to sound the way they did when he’d had too much to drink. “But I was wrong. I realized it as soon as you left. I was coming to tell you …”

She stared down into his eyes. “You were?”

He tried to nod but felt oddly paralyzed. His entire body had gone numb. “Yeah,” he whispered.

He liked it when she ran her hands over his face. And he liked it better when she bent to kiss his lips. Hers were parted and wet and salty with her tears.

Men came running, guns drawn. There were sirens getting louder.

His eyes dropped closed. He was fading fast. He couldn’t even feel the pain now. He could still hear, though. He could hear Lexi’s smoky voice screaming for paramedics, shouting orders. And he could hear them scrambling to obey. And then there was someone else crouching beside him, and she said, “Who are you? What are you doing?”

“Name’s Stryker,” he said.

Stryker muttered something else, but Romano couldn’t hear anymore. He’d receded to some far-away place where sound couldn’t reach. And then suddenly he felt the back of Stryker’s hand connect with the side of his face. His eyes flew open and he realized he could feel pain again.

“Stop!” Lexi yelled.

“I’ll stop when he’s heard what I have to say,” he barked. And then Stryker looked him right in the eyes and said, “Your boys are alive, Romano.”

Lexi gasped.

“You hear me? Justin and Jackson were not killed in the explosion. They weren’t in the house.”

“I don’t know what you’re doing,” Lexi said, “but?—”

“You were a suspect,” Stryker went on, ignoring her. “So was Darren, but I didn’t have proof. I knew about Wendy’s call to you that day. I knew she and the boys had seen something they shouldn’t have. I knew if it leaked your kids were still alive, whoever tried to kill them would try again, and I was half-convinced it was you. So I put them into protective custody.”

Connor lifted a hand, and the motion cost him more effort than he’d thought he had left in him. He closed it on the front of Stryker’s shirt. “If you’re lying …”

“I’m not.”

“You … kept me from my sons when ….”

“I know. Look, it kept them alive, didn’t it?”

Connor’s hand went limp and fell to the floor. His eyes closed again. He fought to cling to consciousness … to life … and he heard Lexi’s voice, tear roughened. “Get out of the way so I can take care of him. We have to get him to a hospital.”

After that, he didn’t hear anything at all.

Chapter Eighteen

They’d wheeled Connor into the OR, and Lexi asked to go in, but there was no way that was going to happen. Didn’t matter that she was a doctor, she was also a mess. She was still arguing when the surgical team closed the doors and wheeled him away, out of her sight.

“Don’t die,” she whispered. “Don’t die, Connor.”

A soft hand closed on her shoulder, and she turned, blinking against her tears and seeing a beautiful woman with long wavy hair in every shade of blonde she could think of, looking at her with big, wet eyes. “He’s not going to die, Lexi.”

“How do you know?”

“Oh trust me,” said another female voice. “She knows. It’s freaking creepy how much she knows.” This belonged to a woman wearing leather, and with short auburn hair that had scarlet streaks.

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