She took a sip of her milk before continuing. “You’re breathing short and shallow. I’m sure your other doctor told you how important it is right now to be deep breathing and coughing to prevent pneumonia because of your broken ribs. You need to take the pain meds for a while so you can manage the pain of coughing and taking deep breaths. All of your other wounds are healing well.”
“I want to feel the pain,” Dante admitted testily.
“Why?”
Dante watched Sarah’s eyes. She wasn’t judging him right now, nor was she trying to pacify him like the department psychologist. She was simply . . . curious. What he was doing didn’t make sense in her logical mind.
“Patrick’s dead. I’m alive. He had a wife and son who adored him.” Shit. How could he explain how he felt to Sarah when he didn’t even get it himself? All he knew was that it should have been him. What did he have? His siblings cared about him. It wasn’t like he didn’t know that. But it wasn’t the same as having the life that Patrick had been living with Karen and Ben. They’d been a family. Patrick had been a father. His son was now fatherless, and his wife was a widow.
Dante had never been that close to a woman. Sure, he got laid as often as possible, but mostly by women who wanted things as casual as he did. Being a detective in homicide was a job that pretty much existed twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for him. He was the job. He ate, breathed, and slept the job. And he liked it that way.
“I understand that you lost your best friend and your partner, but what does that have to do with you taking care of yourself? How is it going to change anything if you just take your medication?” Sarah asked, confused.
“It should have been me who took that bullet. I wouldn’t have left a fatherless son and grieving wife behind. Patrick had too much to live for. Hell, I knew the risks of my job when I took it, and I was okay with the fact that I could die on any given day trying to get murderers off the street.”
“And you think Patrick didn’t know that, too?”
He died doing exactly what he wanted to do. He loved being a detective, and your partner. This isn’t your fault. Both of us knew the risks. I accepted them when I married him.
Dante’s big body shuddered as Karen’s words floated through his head. “He might have known intellectually, but I don’t think he accepted that it could really happen to him,” he finally answered grudgingly.
“People deal with risky jobs in different ways. I’m sure he knew, but he didn’t dwell on it,” Sarah answered reasonably. “And judging by the amount of phone messages I’ve had to listen to because of people’s concern for you, I’d say you’d be leaving just as many grieving people behind. Take the pills, Detective Sinclair. And consider yourself lucky that so many people give a damn.” Sarah gave him a pointed stare as she rose and carried her empty plate to the sink.
In a sudden surge of frustration, Dante swiped his hand across the left side of the table in an effort to make the pills fly off the surface. His palm missed the narcotics and slammed into the glass of juice, sending it flying in Sarah’s direction. The glass shattered near the sink, right next to where she was standing. Stepping back in reaction to the noise, her bare foot came down right on top of the sharp glass fragments.
“Ouch!” She backed up in confusion, her other foot coming down on another piece of glass. This time she was less careful with her words. “Shit!” Stopping suddenly, she assessed the situation, her eyes scanning the floor before she backed out of the glass-and-juice mess, grabbing a handful of paper towels as she went. She sat back down in her chair and shot Dante an accusing look. “Were you actually trying to hit me? If you were, you have a lousy aim.”
Horrified, Dante watched as the blood pooled and smeared on the floor where she’d stepped. As quickly as he could, he moved around the table and dropped to his knees, oblivious to any pain it caused him. He could have told her that he was an expert marksman, one of the best on the entire force, and if he was aiming at something, he didn’t miss. “Fuck! I wasn’t trying to hit you. It was an accident.” He watched as she picked tiny pieces of glass from her feet, putting them carefully into a paper towel on the table, and tried to stem the flow of blood from her right foot, obviously the worst of the two, since it was the foot that was oozing blood. “What can I do? I’m taking you to the hospital.”
“No!” Sarah exclaimed a little too forcefully. “I’m a doctor. It’s superficial. I can deal with it myself.” She pointed toward the kitchen entrance. “I need some of the bandages I used on your arm and leg.”
Dante moved like his ass was on fire, even with his injuries, feeling helpless and more than a little guilty. He had the bags of bandages back to Sarah in moments. By the time he knelt in front of her again, she was examining the other foot.
“Superficial scratch,” she murmured as she peered at her left foot, her blonde locks veiling her face as she lowered her head to look closely. She quickly slapped a large gauze bandage over the cut and switched to the right foot again.
Dante’s breath seized as he saw the blood exiting the wound. Shit! He was a stupid bastard, and his heart sank as he realized his careless actions had caused Sarah injury. “Maybe it needs stitches.” He might not be a doctor, but he was trained in basic emergency aid.
Sarah never looked at him as she answered. “It needs to be thoroughly cleaned. I’ll take care of it.” She wrapped a bandage around her foot after applying several layers of gauze directly to the cut.