Ericka frowned. Her eyes darted suspiciously from her doctor to her grandson. "At this hour?"

"It just worked out that way," Cole told her, relieved that the curtain to her room had been drawn all this time.

"Wish someone would take me home," Ericka grumbled. Her frown deepened as she looked expectantly at her grandson. "The food's terrible here and the service-" She sighed deeply before continuing. "Sometimes I have to wait five, maybe ten minutes before anyone shows up when I press that d.a.m.n buzzer." She nodded at the nurse's call b.u.t.ton.

Nika smiled at her. The nurses prided themselves on their quick response time at Patience Memorial. "That's not waiting, that's a blink of an eye."

"Easy for you to say." Ericka waved a blue-veined hand at her. "You've got time. For all I know, all I've got left is 'a blink of an eye.'"

Nika patted Ericka's bony shoulder lightly. "You're going to live to see your great-grandchildren."

Ericka's eyes shifted over toward her grandson. "Not if I have to wait for him to make a move." And then, just like that, the woman's eyes lit up. It was like watching the birth of an idea, Nika thought. Ericka's eyes shifted back to her. "Didn't you say that you weren't with anyone?"

A person with the IQ of a shoelace could see where this was going, but Nika played along. "Yes, I did."

"How about my grandson?" Ericka propositioned boldly.

"G." Cole didn't raise his voice, but the warning note was nonetheless evident in his voice.

Ericka waved her hand at him, dismissing his unspoken protest. She continued staring at Nika pointedly. "Do you think he's good-looking?" she asked.

Paraphrasing a line out of The Wizard of Oz, a movie both he and his late brother had watched countless times during their brief childhood, Cole intoned, "Pay no attention to the woman in the bed."

He was doing a masterful job hiding his embarra.s.sment, but Nika could sense it and couldn't help being just the slightest bit amused by his dilemma. She'd been on the receiving end of this kind of a scene more than once, listening to her mother despair about her ever getting married. She liked seeing this human side to Cole and she knew exactly how he had to be feeling.

"Yes," she replied, managing to keep a straight face, "I think he's good-looking."

Cole's grandmother nodded, pleased. It was obvious to Nika that she had just pa.s.sed some kind of test and progressed to the next level.

"You're a not-bad-looking young woman," Ericka continued. Her thin lips pulled back into a knowing smile. "You two would make very pretty babies."

Okay, he'd been the dutiful grandson long enough. He was drawing the line before G offered the doctor five horses and a mule to take him off her hands.

"That's enough, G," he told her sternly.

"Well, you would," Ericka protested, annoyed at the interruption. "And at my age, I deserve to see my great-grandchild before I kick the bucket. You're not getting any younger, either, you know, Coleman," she declared tersely.

Time to cut this short, Nika thought. "There'll be no buckets kicked on my watch, young lady," Nika informed Cole's grandmother, then changed the subject. "I think that your blood pressure will be down sufficiently enough for Dr. Chase to operate on you in the next couple of days, and we can get back to addressing the reason why you're here in the first place." Finished, Nika offered the woman an encouraging smile.

"Yeah, to make you and the other doctors all fat and rich," Ericka grumbled.

Cole looked at Nika and she could have sworn she saw an apology in his eyes. He came closer to his grandmother's bed.

"G, were you always this sunny and happy and I just didn't notice, or is this behavior something new?" he asked the woman.

"You try lying around in a hospital all day and see if you wind up being all smiles and happiness by the end of the day. Day? h.e.l.l, boy, you wouldn't last until noon," she p.r.o.nounced with a quick, firm bob of her head.

"No," he agreed. He'd never done waiting well. It was a given. "You're right, I wouldn't. You're definitely a better man than I am, G."

Ericka raised her chin, proud to have won that round. "And don't you forget it," she retorted, crossing her arms before her as if to seal the argument. "What are you doing here anyway?" she asked. Her eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. "Did she call you and tell you to come? Am I dying?" she demanded. Throwing back her shoulders like a young recruit, she told him, "If I'm dying, I have a right to know."

Nika placed a calming hand on the woman's wrist, drawing Ericka's attention back to her. "Do you feel like you're dying?"

The question took some of the wind out of Ericka's sails. "No."

"Then you're not dying," Nika a.s.sured her. "You'd be the first to know if you were. You know your body a lot better than anyone else does."

Ericka blew out a breath, clearly annoyed. "They pay you for that kind of advice?"

"Yes," Nika deadpanned.

"Do they pay you well?" Ericka pressed, her sharp, hawklike eyes pinning her down.

Nika smiled. "No, not really." She was earning a mere forty thousand a year for working herself to the bone on twenty minutes sleep a night. At least, it felt as if she was only getting twenty minutes' sleep. Maybe it was thirty-five.

The answer pleased Ericka and she nodded her head. "I can understand why."

"Be nice, G," Cole instructed.

Her head snapped around in order for her to look at him. "This is nice."

"Right," he agreed fondly. "I forgot."

Nika and Cole remained in his grandmother's room for another fifteen minutes. Though she struggled to remain awake, Ericka lost that battle and dropped off to sleep. The moment she did, they slipped out of her room like two teenagers bent on breaking curfew without getting caught.

When they were in the hallway, Cole struggled for a moment, searching for the words, before he apologized. "I'm sorry about my grandmother."

The apology surprised her. If asked, Nika would have said that the man didn't know how to apologize. She found that she liked these softer traits that she was being allowed to glimpse. It meant that the man had more than looks and brains going for him. She found his affection for his grandmother incredibly appealing.

As if he wasn't already.

"Don't be," Nika told him. "I've put up with a lot worse, trust me. Your grandmother's kind of cute in her own unique way." She was aware of Cole looking at her. More than looking, he seemed to be studying her. Her skin began to tingle. This was becoming a habit. "What?"

He shook his head, shoving his hands into his pockets. "Nothing. Just trying to see if your nose was going to grow, that's all."

He didn't believe her, she thought, amused.

"I really have connected with worse," she a.s.sured him. "Your grandmother's just frustrated. I can't say I blame her. Most people hate being confined and restricted. She's a feisty lady who likes calling her own shots. She can't do that in the hospital. She feels as if she's at the mercy of whoever's on duty. That kind of thing makes her curt and abrupt."

"And you like dealing with people like that?"

Nika never hesitated. "Yes."

That didn't make any sense to him. He wasn't a people person to begin with, but if he were, all things being equal, these wouldn't be the kind of people he would have chosen to be around. "Why?"

"For the most part, these people have worked all their lives, given of themselves and asked for little or nothing in return beyond a paycheck. That kind of sacrifice earns them the right to be treated with dignity and respect. They deserve to feel that their opinions still count, that they can have some kind of say when it comes to managing their own lives."

Her smile broadened. "And, like I said, I like hearing stories and they like telling them. That makes it a win-win relationship."

Not in his opinion, but it was obviously enough for her. There was a great deal more to this woman than met the eye at first. "Whatever you say."

They weren't all that different, she thought. "You feel a little like I do."

"How do you figure that?"

"Because you worry about your grandmother," she said simply. When he stared at her, a slight furrow forming between his eyes, she explained her reasoning. "You're here for her, instead of just shrugging off the responsibility. You could easily just hide behind your work and tell her that you're too busy to come by. But you don't, because you care."

There was a reason for that. "I owe her," he emphasized.

Maybe that was the key to making him understand her position. "And maybe I feel like I'm taking the place of people who owe these people something."

Cole laughed shortly and shook his head. "I won't even pretend that I understand what you just said." And then he nodded toward the elevator. "You ready to go home?"

She was more than ready at this point. "Yes." She a.s.sumed from his question that he intended to take her to her apartment. "But don't you have to go down to the precinct?"

"I can drop you off on the way," he told her. "Besides, there's not all that much I can do about Mr. Peters's less than timely demise tonight. The crime scene unit has to process his room first. If I go to the precinct, all I'm going to wind up doing is staring at a bulletin board, trying to make sense out of all these pieces that still haven't come together."

She felt tired, but oddly restless at the same time. "I could help you," she volunteered.

He laughed, shaking his head. "I can't bring you down to the station. Captain doesn't like civilians wandering around his squad room."

"I wouldn't be wandering, I'd be staring at the same bulletin board you were. Helping," she repeated.

"I appreciate the offer," he told her. He still wasn't going to bring her to the precinct. "How about we compromise and you can give me your thoughts while I drive you back to your apartment?"

Did he think she was too tired to understand what he was doing? "That's not a compromise, that's you getting your way."

Taking her arm, Cole moved Nika along a little faster toward the elevator. "I was hoping you wouldn't notice."

Laughing, she said, "You have to work on learning to be more subtle."

"I'll put it on my 'to-do' list." He was also going to have to learn, Cole added silently, not to react to the sound of her laugh, which seemed to wrap itself around him like a warm embrace on a cold winter's morning.

Though she knew that it was unreasonable, because Cole had a boatload of work waiting for him no matter what he said, Nika found herself hoping that he would bring her up to her door again.

And hoping for more than that.

She quietly held her breath as they drew near her apartment building. This time, she kept the suggestion that was on the tip of her tongue to herself, waiting to see what Cole was going to do. Waiting to see if he would just pull up to the building's entrance and merely let her out, or if he would drive his car into the parking structure the way he had last time.

He pa.s.sed the entrance and entered the parking garage.

Nika held her breath until he parked his car.

"I'd like to come up," he told her quietly once he turned off the ignition. She realized that it was more a question than a statement. He was actually asking her if that was what she wanted as well.

Nika made her choice-as if she could say anything else. "I'd like that."

d.a.m.n, what was he doing? Cole silently demanded, bewildered. Why was he putting himself into this kind of a position? It was like someone with a gla.s.s jaw leading with his chin in a boxing match. He was asking for trouble, for complications, for things he had no time for and didn't want. Complications that inevitably aroused feelings.

And yet...

And yet, there was something about her, something that made him feel alive, that connected him to a world he'd long since walked away from.

He'd forgotten he could actually feel anything.

He'd voluntarily been on the outside for so long, he'd come to believe that was where he belonged. Being on the outside suited him. Allowed him to do his job with no interference. Until this latest development with his grandmother, he had just touched base with the woman on occasion, remembering her on days the greeting card companies declared were important. But beyond that, he lived and breathed in a rarified zone that allowed his heart to function, to beat and direct blood to all his vital organs. But feel? His heart wasn't capable of doing that.

At least, it couldn't before.

Now he wasn't so sure.

And a large part of him resisted things changing, resisted finding out that his heart could do anything beyond beat.

But the temptation of Nika's mouth drove his resolutions out of his head, propelling them into a zone that was packed away out of the light of day, a darkened no-man's-land.

The hallways of her apartment building were carpeted, yet Cole could almost hear his own footsteps as he came closer and closer to his undoing, all the while guiding her to her door.

"I'd better go," he heard himself saying as she took out her key.

No, please don't go. To come so close only to still be so far away isn't fair. Nika raised her eyes to his. "Ever have a feeling of dej vu?"

He was having it right now. "Sometimes," Cole allowed.

She was on her toes, her mouth suddenly closer than his resolve. "I'm having that feeling now," she told him, her voice a whisper, her breath a temptation.

Self-preservation was a very finely honed instinct for a cop. His instincts told him that this was where he was supposed to turn around and walk away. It was called survival.

Nowhere in the self-preservation bylaws did it say anything about his diving out of an airplane headfirst without a parachute strapped on.

But that was exactly what he wound up doing when he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. Not gently or slowly or with any sort of sense of exploration, the way he had last time. He kissed her hard, as if he was fully prepared to stick his arm into the fire and deal with all the consequences that were coming.

He'd never been so unprepared in his life.

Cole swiftly saw that he had no control in this situation. There wasn't a single shot he could call. Instead, there was this wild sense of abandonment washing over him. Not as in being abandoned, but in throwing his soul to the winds. All he wanted was to feel that wild rush in his veins that kissing her inexplicably unleashed. Nothing else mattered.

His head began to spin at an incredibly fast speed, promising more of the same.

Cole wasn't sure just how they managed to get into her apartment. Didn't know if she'd unlocked the door before this wild ride began, or if she'd practiced some kind of sleight of hand and unlocked the door while lost in the throes of this kiss, but suddenly, they were no longer outside but in.

The door closing registered in some faraway region of his brain that was still capable of collecting data. But just barely so. The preponderance of his brain was busy being enticed. Busy savoring the mounting pa.s.sion that gave no sign of abating.

Ever.

Uncustomarily eager, Cole began undressing her and wound up all but ripping Nika's clothes from her body as he struggled hard to contain his all but overpowering excitement.

He thought he heard something ripping and then realized that it was his own clothes that had sustained the damage. She was tugging and inadvertently tearing his clothes from him, whether intentionally or by accident didn't matter. What mattered was that it was happening.

It was hard to think when her brain was wrapped in a fiery haze. Heaven help her, she'd never, ever felt this way and it wasn't just because she'd never been with a man this way before. It was because she'd never felt the desire to be with a man this intensely. No one had ever lit a fire beneath her even remotely close to the way this man had, never made her want things the way Cole did, just by existing, by breathing and being near her.