With wide eyes both women shook their heads and pointed tremulous hands toward the street and the dark night beyond.
'Where's Bella?' Consuelo asked sharply. 'What have you done with her?'
As the three turned back to the dark mouth of the alley, Isabella limped slowly toward them. Belatedly, he remembered the thud of her body hitting the pavement.
'You always leave a woman sprawled out like that?' she quipped.
Her hip felt as if it had been ripped from its socket, her left knee burned from a bloody scrape, and her right arm tingled from wrist to elbow. But, damn it all, she would keep her sense of humor even if it killed her. Twice now she'd tumbled in front of Rafe, sprawling as gracelessly as a toddler. She was not going to revert to the shakiness that threatened her limbs.
'Bella,' Nita wailed. 'Are you hurt? Is anything broken?'
Connie ran practiced, assured hands over Bella and glared at Rafe. 'What kind of a thug are you?'
Bella felt her face flush. 'It's okay, Connie. I'm not hurt. Rafe's a polite thug.'
'Looks like you're well enough to wrangle,' Rafe muttered, edging Connie aside. He took Bella's hands and turned them over, observing the knuckles and then the palms. 'So I guess you'll live.' He glanced down at her knee. 'My place is close. We'd better get some antiseptic on those abrasions.'
Rafe daubed at his temple with a snowy white handkerchief, but made no reference to his own bleeding wound, Bella noticed. Without another word he trotted back down the alley, retrieved his jacket from the ground, and gazed carefully around.
A few feet from where he'd dropped his jacket, he crouched down and touched his fingers to what looked from a distance like an oil stain on the asphalt close to the brick wall of the building. He dipped his fingers into the stain, lifted them to his nose, and sniffed. What had he found?
Bella shivered and Connie clutched her harder around the waist. What if their assailant came back while Rafe dawdled and poked around in the dark alley?
Suddenly she remembered the gun. Rafe's weapon. She had felt it jab into her leg when he slammed against her, but she hadn't realized what it was until he pulled it out after they tumbled to the ground.
Her analytical district attorney's mind clicked into gear. What kind of government agent was Rafe that he carried a weapon? Definitely not a paper pusher. Not the local police either. She would've immediately recognized the badge as one of theirs.
After several long minutes of examining the alley, leaving her and her sisters in the murky parking lot, Rafe returned. 'Let's go.' He touched her arm and started to guide her toward a giant Hummer parked directly beneath a street lamp, its dark green color shiny and fluid in the night air.
Connie shoved his hand away. 'No!' she commanded, fierce as a momma bear with her cub. 'She will go home with us.'
Bella started to agree, but curiosity overtook caution. What was the elusive Ashraf, call me Rafe, long A, up to? He wore a gun to a fancy bar and met with a guy who clearly didn't belong there.
He engaged in a pickup date, but got mugged in an alley. In her mind his badge was protection enough for her to go along until she discovered what he was up to. Some kind of undercover, she decided. Anyway, she didn't want to go back to her mother's small house in Pico Rivera, and apart from the cursory flash of his badge hours earlier, she knew innately that she was safe with him.
'Consuelo, I'll be fine,' she insisted. 'Rafe… uh… works in… uh… law enforcement.'
He grinned wickedly and flashed his badge again, aiming it Connie's way. 'I'm close by,' he said, 'and I'll bring her home. No worry.'
Connie reluctantly agreed to leave with Nita after they'd exchanged phone numbers, addresses and car license plates. Rafe got a grilling stricter than screening for the CIA.
His apartment was indeed a short distance from the district that housed Stuckey's Bar. His neighborhood was one of those gentrification projects that sprang up from time to time in crowded cities. Abutting a more worn, seedier area to the west and upper-middle class property to the east, it accommodated young professionals with incomes on the rise.
Up a flight of well-worn stairs and down a poorly lighted corridor, a door at the end of the hall opened into a surprisingly spacious and homey apartment. Bella took in the sparse furnishings and understated decor. A man's place, arranged for convenience and comfort with minimal distraction.
Rafe pushed her into a deep, oversized arm chair that faced a giant plasma television screen, propped her feet on the hassock in front of the chair, and left the living area through a white shuttered swinging door. Bella glanced at the small end table to her left, littered with half-opened mail, yesterday's newspaper, and the latest television guide.
He returned moments later bearing a small first-aid kit containing bandages, antibiotics, and hydrogen peroxide, along with a clean white towel. He pushed the end-table contents onto the floor, set down the items, and knelt to inspect her knees. As he hunched over her wounds, she noted the flecks of gray woven through the thick jet waves.
'This might sting,' he warned, dabbing at her knee with a peroxide-soaked cotton ball.
'Ouch!'
'Don't be a baby,' he chastised, blowing on her knee and sounding exactly like Consuelo. But the slight roughness of his callused fingertips as he held her calf wasn't anything at all like her sister's touch.
'That's fine,' she said impatiently, attempting to rise from the chair.
'Whoa, there, you're not going anywhere until I bandage that knee.'
He shoved her back down and quickly smoothed ointment onto the abrasion, then fitted on a large bandage. Without a word he took her hands in his and examined the scrapes on the heels. Dabbing them with more peroxide, he then placed them in her lap, his own large hands covering hers.
Now his face hovered inches from hers as he examined her eyes. She hated the strong betrayers of her emotions, the flush that crept into her normally pale cheeks and the pattering of her heart.
'Is it that hard for you to let someone help you, Isabella?' Rafe's breath fanned her cheek and the tangy scent of liquor filled her nostrils. He seemed sincerely curious and rather gentle.
She blinked furiously and protested, 'I let people help me.' Her voice sounded thick in her own ears.
'Like hell you do,' he said softly, tucking an errant curl behind her ear. An eternity passed with him alternating between staring at her lips and examining her eyes. And then he said what she'd been thinking all along. 'Do you want to kiss me, Isabella?' Her name rolled off his tongue with the intoxicating accent of one schooled in her native tongue. Ees – sah – BEL – la.
She expected it, but even so, she felt a thrill of shock when what they'd begun in the bar and continued in the alley looked like it might finish right here in Rafe's apartment. The night's danger fled her mind like trees stripped bare on a windy day.
'Do you, Isabella?' he murmured again, just as if he'd read her mind, and the answer to the question was a simple, unqualified yes.
'What about my knee?' she whispered staring at his mouth. 'What about the scrapes on my hands?' She held them up for his inspection as if they were proof of required kissing.
He took her hands in both of his, smoothing rough fingertips over the tender palms, and then in turn, lifting each one to his mouth and placing gentle kisses on them. Then he leaned in slowly to kiss her mouth. Not like the kiss in the alley, not the heated passion of mating, but a gentle melding of two people in tentative like with each other.
Tremors started in her thighs and injured knee and traveled upward to her shoulders while tears prickled her eyes. Clearly recognizing her case of the shakes, Rafe pulled her into his arms. He brushed back the damp hair from her forehead and wrapped his large, hard body around her.
'It's just a delayed reaction.' He spoke into her temple, his lips warm against her skin. 'Don't worry.'
Swiping at her tears, Bella gave him a little shove, her arm braced against his chest. 'What kind of idiot reacts to an event hours after the fact?'
He smiled. 'A normal kind of idiot.' He picked up another bandage and affixed it to her shin where a smaller
