For those of you not entirely familiar with Duke and Anna history, there is a clip on youtube of what happens prior to this "missing scene". For some reason, I cannot post a link, but search for Duke Paralyzed/Prison 27 to find it on youtube.


Sean Donely woke suddenly from a deep sleep, thinking he was having a nightmare. He'd heard a chill-inducing shriek-that was what had woken him. But the penthouse was silent now. As it should be. It had been just a dream. He allowed himself to relax and drift back off.

And then there it was again, jolting him instantly back into consciousness. A woman's scream, shrill before ending abruptly. Such a sound he'd never heard since…since….since…? He struggled to place why it sounded familiar. And then his stomach dropped as he realized: Anna Devane's final double-agent mission-the one that had literally blown up in her face.

Anna. She and Duke Lavery were in the secret room Sean had had built for his goddaughter, Robin, the daughter of Anna and his best friend, Robert Scorpio. Anna and her lover, Duke, were in protective custody until Duke's sentencing, hiding out from the vengeance of the mob against which Duke had testified. The room was supposed to be sound-proof, to keep its inhabitants from being detected. So if he could hear her….

Sean leapt from his bed and grabbed the automatic revolver from his bedside table. He ran silently down the hallway to the hidden panel that opened into the secret room. To his surprise, the door was still closed. All was quiet. But if someone had gotten in there with Anna and Duke….

Or maybe no one had gotten in there with them. Maybe Anna had let herself be fooled again, and convinced Sean and Robert to be taken in, too. If Lavery had hurt her….

"Anna!" Sean shouted, pounding on the door. The room was not only a safe room but a panic room, capable of being secured from the inside. And it had been. He couldn't get in unless the occupants let him in. "It's me, Sean! Anna, open up!"

No response. Complete silence.

"Devane, you open this door right now," he shouted, falling back into an old role and pulling rank. "That's an order!"

The camouflaged door swung slowly inward, and there she was, looking small and vulnerable, wrapped in a pale dressing gown, her eyes huge and dark in a flushed face surrounded by hair that was a fright. She looked like she'd suffered an electric shock.

"Yes, Sean?" she said to him.

"Are you all right?" Donely asked, concerned. "Where's Duke?"

Anna took a step back. "He's right here. We haven't gone anywhere. We're fine."

Sean took a step into the room, looking around for intruders or evidence of a struggle. Peering through the darkness to the right, he could just make out Lavery in Robin's twin bed, obviously naked but for the sheet pulled up to his waist.

"Good evening, Sean," Duke offered. "Is everything okay?"

"Yeah," Sean said. "Yeah…. I just… I thought I heard…. I was worried…," he stammered, looking at Duke and then back to Anna again.

"Oh….," Anna said, raising her eyebrows and turning a brighter shade of pink. "I'm sorry. Everything's great…. We didn't mean to…disturb you…."

"No, no, it's okay," Sean rushed to assure her. "I'm sorry…. I just…. I panicked…. Overreaction…. On high alert…. You know how it is…," he said apologetically. "I'll just…. I'll be going now." He turned and stepped quickly out the door.

"Thanks," Anna giggled. "Sorry. We'll try…I'll try not to…worry you again," she promised as she pushed the door shut.

"Come back to bed, luv," Sean heard Duke say quietly, just before the door closed tight.

Anna snickered as she walked back toward the bed, shedding her robe and thinking back on the events that had led up to Sean's sudden appearance in the doorway

[*****Flashback*******]

"Shhh," Duke had hushed her.

"What?"

"Would you mind saving the rest of the story till the morning? Because I have some…unfinished business I'd like you to take care of."

Anna smiled at him, knowingly, and leaned in to meet his kiss. She kept leaning, pushing him down to lay across the pint-size bed.

Her hair-so soft, so sweet-smelling-streamed down around their faces, and Duke knew his patience was just about at an end. It had been so very long-weeks and months-since they had been together like this, and so much pain had passed between them. He needed this-needed her-to dull the memory of it all.

Duke sank his fingers into Anna's hair and stroked it back out of her face so that he could look up at her smiling down on him. There had been a time, so very recently, when he'd never thought to see her smile at him again. He'd known how badly he had hurt her, with his involvement with the mob and the lies and betrayals that had entailed, and he had thought he would never get to make love to her again. And then the shooting-both shootings...first Ramsey's blanks in the brownstone and then his live ammunition meant for Scorpio-had, miraculously, brought Anna back to Duke. She'd told him that thinking he was dead had forced her to admit that she still loved him-and that she didn't want to live without him.

But that second time, he'd woken to find himself paralyzed, and then he'd thought that he never could make love to her again-that he would never be able to. And he'd thought that he would rather be dead.

"After the surgery…," he'd asked Dr. Tony Jones haltingly, in private, when that surgeon had nearly convinced him that his paralysis could be repaired, "will I have…full function? Of everything. Not just my legs…."

"You mean sexual function," Tony clarified matter-of-factly, sympathetically.

"Yes," Duke admitted.

"Yes, I would expect you to. That's not something you should have to worry about."

But he had worried. He'd suspected that this would be his punishment for failing to be man enough to stand up and tell Anna the truth: His manhood would be stripped from him, leaving him emasculated and undeserving of a passionate, loving woman like Anna.

Now Anna's kiss had proven that was not the case. Already, with just a kiss, he felt the first stirrings of physical desire for her. It would be a struggle to savor the feeling rather than rush greedily to glut himself on what he had missed so much-and already feared to lose again.

They had so little time, he thought, as he kissed her and stroked her hair. Just days until he would be sentenced and incarcerated alongside men who sought to kill him. It was so tempting to hurry to get his fill of her, to try to get enough to tide him over through what were sure to be some very dark and lonely nights….

It was Anna herself that kept him in check. She needed to go slowly, needed to feel his love as well as his lust. She knew, now, that he had risked his life for her. He had turned against the mob, taken a bullet for Robert, and promised to turn state's evidence all out of love for her. All that, and yet still it stung that before he had loved her, he hadn't thought twice about the damage he could do to her. He had first pursued her, she suspected, because he could, because she was a challenge, because she was an enviable prize-and because he had seen in her eyes, the first time they'd looked at each other, that he would eventually, inevitably, succeed. Even after they'd become so much more to each other, he had proposed marriage to her because the mob had ordered him to do it. He had admitted to that, and that confession, more than anything else, was what had broken her heart.

Now he was once again claiming that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. But she knew he said that while believing that the rest of his life might actually be spent behind bars-and that it might be very short in duration, if Angus failed to protect him and the mob had its way.

And so her kiss lingered, trying to slow down time, trying to lengthen the minutes, trying to keep him with her as long as possible.