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“And just how do you figure I’d do that?”
    Teri grinned from ear to ear despite the pain that insisted on shooting through her with the precision of a Swiss watch. “Snappy patter comes to mind.”
    The remark was so incongruous, the image so out of character for him, Hawk laughed. The rich sound encompassed the tiny area they occupied.
    She thought of her father’s fresh coffee, first thing in the morning. Rich, smooth. Fortifying. “You know that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you laugh. Nice. You should do that more often.”
    His face was somber again. “You do like telling people what to do, don’t you?”
    “Second nature, I guess.” The pain had been melting away, but now the room was in danger of having the same thing happen to it. She grasped on to the metal railing on one side of the bed. “Damn, what did that nurse jab into me?”
    “Well, if I’m lucky, something to put you to sleep.” She began struggling to get off the bed. He caught her by the arm, holding her in place. “Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
    “I don’t want to go to sleep here. I want to gohome.” She was going to leave while she could still feel her legs. Sort of.
    “Cavanaugh—”
    She clutched his hand and raised imploring eyes up to his face. That was twice today she’d looked at him that way, and he didn’t like it. Didn’t like the position it put him in or how it made him feel—uncertain of his parameters around her. “Promise me that you’ll take me home.”
    He’d seen prisoners less desperate to escape their jail cells. Hawk tried to remove her fingers and found that they were locked in almost a death grip around his wrist. Very firmly, he peeled back her fingers from his flesh. “Look, they have to stitch you up first, clean the wound—”
    “Okay, okay,” she interrupted, “but I’m not staying here overnight. Do you understand?”
    What he understood was that somehow, the department had paired him with a woman who was a damn good detective, but that didn’t change the fact that she was irritating and crazy to boot.
    “If I say no, you’re not going to let go of my hand, are you?”
    He saw Teri slowly move her head from side to side and knew that she wasn’t kidding. He could, of course, disengage himself from her. She had a good grip but she was, at bottom, absolutely no match for him. Even if he were a ninety-pound weakling, once the medication put her out, he could easily just slip away.
    Again, he didn’t know why he didn’t. Maybe it was because for some reason she looked as if she needed him, and even though he told himself he didn’t want to become involved, he had a hell of a hard time turning his back on that. On her.
    It was why he was in law enforcement in the first place. Because people needed to be protected. From drug dealers, like the ones who had snuffed out his parents long before they were murdered, and from burglars, like the ones they’d caught today who had gotten off on seeing the terrified faces of their victims.
    People needed protecting. And his badge made him a protector.
    He sighed, surrendering the battle that had never really gotten onto the battlefield. “Okay, I’ll stay.”
    “And take me home when the time comes.”
    “And take you home when the time comes,” he finally said after she’d pinned him with those blue-gray eyes of hers.
     
    It was another three hours before she was finally able to get into his car again. Three hours in which she’d been tortured, injected, stitched and finally bandaged. Three hours in which she’d hovered between pain and a drug-enabled euphoria.
    She was still somewhere in the region of the latter. Stretching as best she could, she sighed and leaned back against the seat.
    “God, I feel like I could just leap off the top of something and fly,” she said.
    Knowing that a silly grin had taken over her face, and not caring, Teri turned to flash it at her partner. She congratulated herself for