“No,” she said seriously. “It couldn’t.”
He held her gaze for a long moment, his eyes narrowed and dark with tension. Then he stepped back, beckoning her to enter the cabin.
A shudder of awareness tingled through her as she slipped past him in the tight confines of the doorway and entered the great room. He led her to the long leather sofa near the fireplace and sat, his gray gaze watching her as she settled beside him and gave him a quick once-over. He looked pale and feverish, but at least he was awake and relatively alert. She deposited her purchases on the coffee table and reached up to test his temperature.
He caught her hand, trapping it against his face. “You didn’t have to sneak out.”
Her hand tingled where it lay trapped between his rough palm and his beard-stubbled jaw. “You wouldn’t have let me go alone, and you needed your rest.”
“I wouldn’t have let you go at all,” he corrected with a wry grimace. He released her hand, and she dropped it to her lap, curling her fist against the lingering sensation still buzzing through her fingertips.
“Maybe that’s why I had to sneak,” she murmured.
“Fair enough,” he admitted. “Did you get some ibuprofen?”
“Yes. And something better.” She reached into one of the plastic bags and retrieved the small paper sack with the bottle of antibiotics. “Amoxicillin. You’re not allergic to penicillin or anything like that, are you?”
His brow furrowed, his gray eyes dark with alarm. “Where did you get those?”
“Does it matter?”
He grabbed the bottle and looked at the label. “Doris? Your friend at the diner?”
“She has chronic ear infections-all she has to do is call her doctor and he calls her in a prescription because it happens so often.”
“And now she knows where we are.”
“No-I met her on Route Five at a gas station. She doesn’t know where I went from there.”
He raked his fingers through his hair. “You shouldn’t have risked it.”
She placed her palms on either side of his face, worried at how hot he felt. “You have a high fever. Your wound may be getting infected. I’m not even sure the amoxicillin is going to work, but it was worth the risk to find out. So shut up and take it.”
He pressed his lips together, his eyes flashing with irritation, but he opened the prescription bottle and shook out a tablet.
Jane opened a bottle of water and handed it to him. Reading the directions on the label, she said, “You need to take two now, then one in the morning and one in the evening until they’re gone.”
He added another tablet to his palm and put them in his mouth, washing them down with the water. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and met her concerned gaze. “What else did you get?”
“Like I said, I got some ibuprofen, too.” She opened the bottle and shook out a couple of caplets. He downed them with the rest of the water and set the empty water bottle on the table.
“I don’t suppose you got any real bandages this time, did you?” He picked up one of the plastic bags from the coffee table and started going through the contents.
“As a matter of fact, I did.” She took the bag back and pulled out a box of gauze pads she’d found at the convenience store. “Let’s see how that wound is doing.”
He followed her to the bedroom, close enough that she could feel the heat of him washing over her back. He sat on the bed and started unbuttoning his shirt, wincing as the movements jarred his injury.
“Easy,” she murmured, moving his hands away from the buttons and taking over. Her fingers shook a bit as she finished unbuttoning the shirt, especially with Joe’s smoldering gaze fixed on her face.
Heat flooded her cheeks, making them burn, but she focused on keeping her trembling fingers steady enough to guide the buttons through the holes until his shirt lay open, baring his lean, muscular chest and flat stomach.
She stepped back, licking her dry lips. “I think you can take it from there.”
The corners of his mouth quirked slightly as he eased out of the shirt and laid it on the bed beside him. He slanted a look at her. “Why’d you come back here?”
The question caught her by surprise. “What?”
His gaze followed her as she pulled the chair up next to his bed and sat. “You had the truck, the cell phones. All the money. You could’ve left me here and gotten away. Nobody could’ve stopped you, not for a while.”
That he was asking such a question at all made her stomach hurt. “That’s what you think of me?”
He didn’t answer aloud, but the wariness in his eyes, darkened by something that looked very much like pain, told her the answer to her question. She looked away, sickened.
The image of a dark-haired man flickered through her mind-the same handsome face, same silver-flecked sideburns she’d remembered before when she was waiting outside the food mart for Doris.
“Let’s get this bandage changed. Okay?” Joe’s voice pulled her out of the memory.
She forced herself into action, trying not to give in to the hot tears pooling behind her eyes as she gathered her supplies and went to work. The redness around the ragged edges of the bullet wound hadn’t increased since the last bandage change, to her relief. She cleaned it as gently as she could, reapplied some antibiotic ointment and taped the new gauze in place. “How’s that feel?”
“Better,” he said, his voice tight. “Thank you.”
She couldn’t meet his gaze. “You’re welcome.”
“No, I mean thank you for everything. The antibiotics-that was resourceful. I appreciate the trouble you went to.” She still heard anger and distrust in his voice, but apparently he was too much of a straight-shooting cowboy not to express gratitude where gratitude was due.
“I just hope they help,” she said.
“Me, too, because we need to get out of here soon.”
“I told you, Doris doesn’t know where I went.”
“All she has to do is let it slip that she saw you at a gas station halfway to here and people will know we didn’t keep going to Boise. People know you were Angela Carlyle’s roommate. Somebody may even remember she brought you here once. We need to move on as soon as we can.”
“Maybe tomorrow. But I want to give the antibiotics some time to work before we try to make another long drive in the truck. Okay?”
He considered her words with a slight frown but nodded. “Okay.”
“Good.” She stood. “I’ll go make soup for dinner. We have chicken noodle and chicken noodle.”
“Actually, I think I’d like to have some chicken noodle if that’s okay,” he said with a half smile that faded quickly. His gaze grew serious and wary, and her heart sank.
“Chicken noodle soup it is,” she murmured, heading back to the kitchen before the tears she’d been fighting all day escaped her eyes.
She heated the soup in a saucepan, waiting on a stool at the breakfast bar while it came to a simmer. Angrily knuckling away the tears under her eyes, she thought about her most recent memory. So, a murder suspect, a con artist’s henchwoman and now a pickpocket, too.
What other hidden sins would come back to haunt her before this was all over?
Chapter Seven
Joe watched Jane push the spoon around her bowl of soup without eating and felt guilty about his earlier anger.
