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jabbed her in the ass with a needle. Marie went out with the demon nurse’s name on her lips.
    Gretchen Young.

3
    “S o when are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
    Mason sat in the passenger side of Rachel’s hot little yellow T-Bird while she drove him home from his endless stay in the hospital. The top was down, and her hair was whipping like a flag in a hurricane. She drove way above the speed limit, despite the fact that her passenger was a cop. Driving usually had her smiling from ear to ear. Not so today. Today she was all nervous and jerky.
    She glanced sideways at him. “You’re almost as good at it as I am, you know.”
    “What? Reading people?” He shook his head. “Only criminals and you, babe.”
    She crooked one brow at him but kept her focus on the road as she zigged into the fast lane to pass a jacked-out Mustang, then zagged back in front of it again. She didn’t even taunt the driver with a wink or flip him off or give him a cutesy little wave. Something was definitely wrong with her, he thought.
    “So what is it?”
    “Nothing. I just... Okay, there’s something.” She drew a deep breath, and her shoulders rose with it. He knew that look. She was preparing to blurt it out, whatever it was. He braced himself.
    “Why don’t you stay at my place for a while?”
    And there it was. He watched her face closely. She didn’t have the same opportunity to watch his, but he didn’t figure she needed to. The stuff she “got” didn’t come from anything she could see with her eyes. In fact, most of the time when she was trying to read people she had to close those gorgeous baby blues.
    “You want me to stay with you,” he repeated without inflection.
    “Yeah. I mean, why not? The boys are already there, and it really hasn’t been as bad as I expected it to be.” She bit her lip on one side, glanced sideways at him. “I mean, it’s been great.”
    “You mean not as bad as you expected.”
    “Which is great.”
    “I think you need to look up the word
great
in the dictionary. Aren’t you supposed to be a writer or something?”
    She shrugged. “Look, you need to take it easy, and you can’t run a houseful of boys and take it easy at the same time. Come to my place. Just for a couple of weeks, until you get your strength back.”
    He tried to weigh his words before speaking them. He did not want to screw things up with her, but her invitation was weak. Or maybe he was just still stinging from that unrequited “I love you” he’d dropped on her a few weeks ago. She hadn’t said it back. And he hadn’t said it again. If she wasn’t ready for serious feelings, she sure as hell wasn’t ready for cohabitation.
    “Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”
    “I think,” he said, slowly and carefully, “that if we ever decide to...live together, I’d just as soon it not be because I’m too weak to be on my own.”
    She looked disappointed. “Oh.”
    “Jeremy and Josh will be a ton of help. My mother will probably want to move in. And there will be a home care nurse.”
    She nodded. “Yeah. Sure, okay.”
    “And you. You’ll be in and out all the time, too.”
    “Sure,” she said again.
    He was quiet for a long moment. She was upset. Dammit, she’d asked him in a way that was a lot like a person pulling off a Band-Aid. Grit your teeth, close your eyes and get it over with. He didn’t think she’d really been hoping he would say yes.
    “I just don’t want to risk messing up—”
    “It’s fine, okay? It’s fine.”
    It wasn’t though. Crap.
    “You hungry?” she asked at length. “We didn’t have lunch before we left, and there’s a Nice N Easy off the next exit. They make the best wraps.”
    “There’s a Mickey D’s, too,” he said, having seen the same road sign that she had.
    “Yeah, but you need to heal. Junk food isn’t gonna cut it right now. And I’m sure your mother and the nurse would agree with me.”
    He nodded. “Okay. Wraps sound good. And