“I’m not!”
“Then, what’s this crap about somebody wanting to kill Rutledge? How the bloody hell do you know?”
His mounting temper was reassuring. This Irish she could deal with much more easily than the woebegone shell he’d been minutes earlier. She’d had years of practice sparring with him. “Somebody told me he was going to kill Tate before he took office.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shit,” he cursed viciously. “Don’t start that again.”
“If you’ll give me a chance, I’ll explain.”
He took another drink, ground his fist into his other palm, and finally relaxed against the back of the sofa, relaying that he was ready to sit still and listen.
“Believing me to be Carole, somebody came to me while I was still in the ICU. I don’t know who it was. I couldn’t see because my eye was bandaged and he was standing beyond my shoulder.” She recounted the incident, repeating the threat verbatim.
“I was terrified. Once I was able to communicate who I really was, I was afraid to. I couldn’t tip my hand without placing my life, and Tate’s, in jeopardy.”
Irish was silent until she had finished. She returned to the sofa and sat down beside him. When he did speak, his voice was skeptical.
“What you’re telling me, then, is that you took Mrs. Rutledge’s place so you could prevent Tate Rutledge from being assassinated.”
“Right.”
“But you don’t know who plans to kill him.”
“Not yet, but Carole did. She was part of it, although I don’t know her relationship with this other person.”
“Hmm.” Irish tugged thoughtfully on the flaccid skin beneath his chin. “This visitor you had—”
“Has to be a member of the family. No one else would have been admitted into the ICU.”
“Someone could have sneaked in.”
“Possibly, but I don’t think so. If Carole had hired an assassin, he would simply have vanished when she became incapacitated. He wouldn’t have come to warn her to keep quiet. Would he?”
“He’s your assassin. You tell me.”
She shot to her feet again. “You don’t believe me?”
“I believe you believe it.”
“But you think it was my imagination.”
“You were drugged and disoriented, Avery,” he said reasonably. “You said so yourself. You were half blind in one eye and—forgive the bad joke—couldn’t see out of the other. You think the person was a man, but it could have been a woman. You think it was a member of the Rutledge family, but it could have been somebody else.”
“What are you getting at, Irish?”
“You probably had a nightmare.”
“I was beginning to think so myself until several days ago.” She took the sheet of paper she’d found in her pillowcase from her purse and handed it to him. He read the typed message.
When his troubled eyes connected with hers, she said, “I found that in my pillowcase. He’s real, all right. He still thinks I’m Carole, his coconspirator. And he still intends to do what they originally planned.”
The note had drastically altered Irish’s opinion. He cleared his throat uncomfortably. “This is the first contact he’s had with you since that night in the hospital?”
“Yes.”