LITMIR.BIZ

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Lise, at the risk of your own. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

      Her eyes flew open. She gaped up at him, trying to take in what he was saying, remembering the nightmare search from room to room, the dash up the attic stairs and the child huddled at bay in the corner. “You mean the fire was at your house?” she gasped. He nodded. In growing agitation she said, “All I heard was that the owner was away and there was a baby-sitter and a little girl. No names.”

      “My daughter. Emmy.”

      “Angeline’s daughter—she’s Angeline’s just as much as yours!”

      “Angeline left when Emmy was three,” Judd said in a hard voice.

      “You refused her custody.”

      “She didn’t want it.”

      “That’s not what she told me.”

      “Look,” Judd said flatly, “this is no time for an autopsy on my divorce. You saved Emmy’s life. You showed enormous courage.” Briefly he rested his hand over hers. “Thank you. That’s all I wanted to say.”

      His fingers were warm, with a latent strength that seemed to race through Lise’s body as flame could race along an exposed wire. “Do you really think I need your gratitude?” she cried, hating his nearness, despising herself for being so achingly aware of it. She was damned if she was going to respond to him like the lovesick adolescent she’d been; she was twenty-eight years old, she’d been around. And he was nothing to her. Nothing. She tried to pull her hand away from his, felt agony lance from her elbow to her shoulder, and gave an inarticulate yelp of pain.

      Judd said tautly, “For God’s sake, lie still. You’re acting as though you hate me.”

      With faint surprise that he could be so obtuse, she said, “Why wouldn’t I hate you?”

      To her infinite relief, he straightened, his hand falling to his side. An emotion she couldn’t possibly have defined flickered across his face. In a neutral voice he said, “You grew up with Angeline.”

      “I adored her,” Lise announced defiantly. “She was everything I always wanted to be, and she was kind to me at a time when I badly needed it.” Kind in a rather distant, amused fashion, and kind only when it didn’t inconvenience Angeline; as an adult, Lise had come to see these distinctions. Nevertheless, during a period in her life when she’d been horribly lonely, her cousin had taken the trouble to teach her how to dance, and given her advice on her complexion and how to talk to boys. Had paid attention to her. Which was more than Marthe, Angeline’s mother, had done.

      “Adoration isn’t the most clear-eyed of emotions,” Judd said.

      “What would you know about emotions?”

      “Just what do you mean by that?”

      “Figure it out, Judd,” Lise said wearily. The drugs were starting to take effect, the throbbing in her shoulder lessening; her eyes felt heavy, her body full of lassitude, and all she wanted was for him to go away. Then the door swung smoothly on its hinges again, and with a flood of relief she saw Dave’s familiar face.

      Dave McDowell was her co-worker, almost always on the same shifts as she. She liked him enormously for his calmness under pressure, and for his rock-solid dependability. He was still wearing the navy-blue coveralls that went under their outer gear; he looked worn-out. She said warmly, “Dave…good thing you were on that ladder.”

      “Yeah,” he said. “You were really pushing it, Lise.”

      “The little girl wasn’t in her room. For some reason she’d slept in the attic. So it took me a while to find her.”

      Judd made a small sound in his throat. Emmy slept in the attic when she was lonely, she’d told him that once. And he’d been away for four days. So if she’d died in the fire because she couldn’t be found, the blame could have been laid squarely on his own shoulders.

      Unable to face his own thoughts, Judd turned to Dave. “My name’s Judd Harwood—it’s my daughter Lise rescued. If you were the man on the ladder—then I owe you a debt of thanks, too.”

      “Dave McDowell,” Dave said with a friendly grin that lit up his brown eyes. “We make a good team, Lise and I. Except she doesn’t always go by the manual.”

      “Rules are made to be bent,” Lise muttered.

      “One of these days, you’ll bend them too often,” Dave said with a touch of grimness.

      “Dave, I weigh less than the guys and I can go places they can’t. And I got her out, didn’t I?”

      “You scare the tar out of me sometimes, that’s all.”

      Lise said a very pithy word under her breath. Dave raised his eyebrows and produced a rather battered bouquet of flowers from behind his back. “Picked these up on the way over. Although you’ll be going home tomorrow, they say.”

      “Come and get me?” Lise asked.

      “Sure will.”

      “Good,” she said contentedly.

      “Might even clean up your apartment for you.”

      Lise said with considerable dignity, “A messy room is the sign of a creative mind.”

      “It’s the sign of someone who’d rather read mystery novels than do housework.”

      “Makes total sense to me.” Lise grinned.

      Judd shifted his position. The easy camaraderie between the two of them made him obscurely angry in a way he couldn’t analyse. So Dave was familiar with Lise’s apartment. Was he her lover as well as her cohort at work? And what if he was? Why should that matter to him, Judd? Other than being the woman who’d saved Emmy’s life, Lise Charbonneau was nothing to him.

      Yet she was beautiful in a way Angeline could never be. A beauty that was much more than skin deep, that was rooted not only in courage but in emotion. He said brusquely, “I’ll be staying in the hospital overnight with my daughter. I’ll drop by in the morning, Lise, to see how you are.”

      “Please don’t,” she said sharply. “You’ve thanked me. There’s nothing more to say.”

      As Dave raised his brows again, Judd said implacably, “Then I’ll be in touch with you later on. McDowell, thanks again—your team did a great job.”

      “No sweat, man.”

      Judd marched out of the room and down the corridor toward the elevator. He wasn’t used to being given the brush-off. Hey, who was he kidding? He was never given the brush-off. Women seemed to find his looks, coupled with his money, a potent combination, so much so that he was the one used to handing out brush-offs. Politely. Diplomatically. But the message was almost always the same. Hands off.

      Lise Charbonneau hated his guts. No doubt about that. Dammit, she’d been scarcely conscious and she’d found the energy to let him know she thought he was the lowest of the low. And all because of Angeline. Who in the end had dumped him as unceremoniously as if he’d been a pair of boots she was tired of wearing. Trouble is, at the time that had hurt. Hurt rather more than he was prepared to admit. During the eleven years it had lasted, he’d done his level best to hold his marriage together, and to preserve the intensity of emotion that had poleaxed him when he’d first met Angeline. But he’d failed on both counts. Hence his propensity for brush-offs whenever a woman showed any signs of getting too close, or having any ambitions toward matrimony.

      Been there. Done that.

      He’d have to phone Angeline first thing in the morning: assuming that she was home in the elegant chateau on the Loire that was the principal residence of her second husband, Henri. Who was, incidentally, no longer richer than Judd. Judd, however, couldn’t lay claim to a string of counts and dukes in his ancestry. Far from it. If he rarely thought about Angeline, he even more rarely recalled his upbringing on the sordid tenements of Manhattan’s

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