Книга - Classified Baby

Classified Baby
Jessica Andersen


Experience the thrill of life on the edge and set your adrenalin pumping! These gripping stories see heroic characters fight for survival and find love in the face of danger.One night of passion…Nicole Benedict rarely let herself go. So when a one-night stand led to an unplanned pregnancy, she went to track down Ethan Moore and share the happy news. Until a criminal mastermind and the bomb he launched in her direction got in the way… As a bodyguard, Ethan was trained to protect people then walk away. But nothing had prepared him for protecting Nicole and his unborn child. Being the lone witness to the attack, Nicole had attracted a killer’s attention – yet had no memory of that morning’s events.Not only did Ethan’s career hinge on this job, but if he failed, he could lose everything he’d never known he wanted.







“It’s not like I can get pregnant all over again.”

“This is a bad idea.”

“Probably,” Nicole said with a fleeting smile that did strange things to his insides. “But at the moment I can’t say I care. We’re both adults and, given the situation, I think it’s only natural that we’ve got… closer.”

She took a deep breath, and for the first time Ethan saw a hint of nerves.

She exhaled and twined her fingers together beneath her robe. His job was to protect her, not take advantage of her. But how could he resist what she was offering? Especially when she said, “I want this. I really do.” That was all it took.


To Joanna Wayne, Ann Voss Peterson, Elle James, Kathleen Long and Cassie Miles, for joining me in writing the six books of this series, and to Allison Lyons for conceiving these wonderful stories.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say “hi!”



CAST OF CHARACTERS

Ethan Moore – A loner who freelances for Prescott Personal Security (PPS) as a bodyguard. Ethan doesn’t consider himself part of the PPS team and has no intention of replacing the wife he lost years ago.

Nicole Benedict – When trouble with her biofuel project and ex-boyfriend drives her to cut loose for a night, Nic has no idea how much trouble she’s going to wind up in, or how far she’ll have to go to save the child she and Ethan conceive that night.

Robert Prescott – The ex-British-intelligence founder of PPS has miraculously returned from the dead, only to find that things have changed while he was away. Now he’s fighting for his life on one front, fighting for his marriage on another.

Evangeline Prescott – Robert’s wife kept PPS running – and flourishing – while waiting for his return. Now that he’s back, she refuses to let him take over the investigation that could end with both of their deaths.

Clive Fuentes – Robert’s ex-mentor used him as a front for dirty business dealings, then tried to kill him when he got too close to the truth.

Stephen Turner – The head of media mega-corporation Tri Corp. Media (TCM) seems clean, but if that’s the case, why do so many of the clues lead back to TCM?

Olivia Turner – Robert’s ex-wife, now married to the head of TCM, is an unhappy woman.




Classified Baby


JESSICA ANDERSEN




www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)


Chapter One

Colorado,USA

“I’m here to see Ethan Moore at Prescott Personal Securities.” Nicole Benedict resisted the urge to wipe her damp palms on her jeans. The lobby of the posh Denver office building was cooler than the summer day outside, but the air-conditioning did little to quell her nervous jitters.

The uniformed guard tapped the touch pad on his computer screen, selecting the roster for PPS. “And you are?”

“Nicole Benedict. I don’t have an appointment.” And it was a good bet Ethan wouldn’t recognize her name.

Heck, she’d be surprised if he recognized her face. It had only been a couple of months since they’d met at Hitchin’ My Getalong, a hokey themed bar in the heart of the city, but the handsome, brooding stranger hadn’t been real sober when she’d hitched her getalong up onto the bar stool beside him.

Okay, neither of them had been real sober that night.

“Sign in here.” The guard handed over a digital pad that reminded Nicole of the ones the courier guy used when he delivered her research supplies.

The thought brought a wince. Unless she found a new sponsor for her biofuel project at Donner High School, the research would be doomed before the school year started. Then again, ten weeks ago, the conjunction of the defunct sponsorship, her thirty-fourth birthday and the one-year anniversary of her ex-engagement to Jonah I-prefer-blondes Douglas had been the most important things in her universe.

How quickly things change, she thought as she used the plastic wand to scrawl her name, destination and the time she’d entered the building onto the pressure pad. She glanced at the blank “time out” box and tried not to wonder how long her meeting would take. What Ethan would say.

Swallowing hard, she accepted a visitor’s badge from the guard and headed for the elevator. The deep blue carpet was springy underfoot. The elevator doors were made of copper-colored metal, and etched with repeating symbols that reminded her of the Navajo blanket on her bed. A classy plaque beside the call buttons bore the names of the megadollar companies that leased space in the downtown skyscraper. Prescott Personal Securities was listed at the very bottom, indicating that it was located on the top floor. Prime real estate.

Way out of your league, Nicky girl. You’re suburbs. This is city. The thought came in Jonah’s voice, complete with her ex-fiancé’s trademark smirk, which she’d found charming for entirely too long.

“Oh, shut up,” she said, and stabbed the elevator call button.

Moments later, the etched copper doors parted to reveal an aquarium. Okay, so technically it was a glass-enclosed elevator car, but Nic felt distinctly guppyish as she stepped inside and several street-level passersby glanced in her direction.

“Keep it moving, nothing to see here,” she muttered as she hit the button for the top floor. “Just a pregnant woman in a see-through box.”

She wasn’t showing at ten weeks, of course, but ever since the doctor had confirmed what four at-home tests had already told her, she’d felt as though she had the words unmarried and knocked-up by a one-night stand tattooed across her forehead.

The elevator doors hissed shut and the car ascended with expensive smoothness. The glass floor pressed against the soles of her sneakers, seeming hard and impersonal after the give of the lobby carpet. Unease flickered when she realized there were no supporting metal braces beneath her feet. Just more glass.

“It’s perfectly safe,” she told herself, scrubbing her damp palms against her jeans and tugging at her pale yellow sweater set. “Don’t be a wuss.”

Besides, she was pretty sure the nerves had nothing to do with the elevator and everything to do with her errand. What would she say when she saw Ethan again? More importantly, what would he say?

Nic swallowed hard and forced herself to focus on the view.

The Denver streets stretched out below, gleaming in the noonday sun. Buildings rose on either side of her, then fell away as the elevator carried her above the neighboring structures. The blue sky stretched to the edge of the city bowl miles away, where the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon. A few clouds scudded high above, and the translucent glass paneling of the elevator made it seem as though she could stretch out and touch the fluffy white vapor.

When movement flickered in her peripheral vision, she turned, expecting a bird. Instead, she saw a snub-nosed helicopter.

Her first thought was that it had to be a traffic ’copter, but the shiny black machine didn’t bear the call letters of any local station. In fact, the chopper was completely unmarked, with dull black patches where its FAA identification should have been.

Nic’s heart picked up when the chopper drew nearer and the thump of rotors vibrated through the glass. She craned her neck to see if a second helicopter was filming whatever was going on. A reality show, maybe, or an action movie.

There was no sign of a camera crew as the unmarked helicopter swung around to face her, broadside.

Nic saw a pilot and two passengers, their features blurred by motion and distance. As she watched, a door rolled open and a large, muscular figure climbed out to perch on one skid. He hefted something onto his shoulder. It looked a whole lot like a rocket launcher.

Still no sign of a film crew.

Panic spurted and a scream built in Nic’s throat. Disbelieving, she stumbled to the back of the elevator; her spine slammed into the control panel, and the car jolted to a shuddering halt. An alarm bell shrilled, the sound muted by her scream as the man aimed the launcher directly at her.

A disembodied voice spoke from an intercom panel above her head. “This is building security. Is everything okay in there?”

Nic shrieked, “There’s a helicopter outside, and a man and he’s going to—”

Everything exploded.

ONE MINUTE Ethan Moore was in his little-used cube at Prescott Personal Securities, cursing his computer. The next moment, noise blasted around him like a thousand Humvees converging on a single spot, and he was sent flying through the air.

Shouting in surprise, Ethan rolled when he hit, trying to get away from pelting debris, but it was everywhere. Old training and newer instincts kicked in, laced with adrenaline as the floor shuddered beneath him and metal groaned.

A bomb, he thought, though experience told him that wasn’t quite right.

He scrambled to his hands and knees, head ringing. The too-hot fabric of his cargo pants and button-down shirt scorched against his skin. Acrid smoke stung his nose, eyes and throat, and he felt himself coughing but couldn’t hear the noise over the ringing in his ears.

A second explosion ripped through the office. He ducked and shouted with rage. Disbelief. How had the bomber gotten through their security? How had—

Never mind, he told himself. Logic, not emotion. Evacuate first, then figure out who’s behind the attack. Though there was no doubt in his mind Tri Corp. Media was behind the attack. Over the past five months, PPS had been struggling to uncover who was behind a vicious string of murderous attacks on their protectees. Now that they were hot on the trail of several higher-ups at the huge media conglomerate, the faceless mastermind had only sped things up.

Gasping smoke-laced oxygen, Ethan dragged himself to his feet as the noise of the explosion subsided. The smoke and fire alarms cut in, shrilling over the screams and curses that rose up from the other cubes.

“Everyone stay calm!” Ethan shouted in a voice he barely recognized as his own. He looked quickly around the high-tech office space, counting heads. Twelve men and women, all support staff. Most of the other PPS field agents were out chasing leads. Meanwhile, TCM had brought the fight home.

“You!” Ethan pointed to the closest sturdy-looking guy, a computer tech with a nasty gash below one eye. “Check all the cubes. If the wounded are ambulatory, get them out. If not, come find me. And for God’s sake, don’t move anyone who’s down and injured.”

Next, Ethan located their receptionist, Angel, a twenty-something woman wearing black clothes, black lipstick and a diamond stud in her nose. Knowing her penchant for fouling up even the simplest tasks, he kept it simple. “Pop the security doors so everyone can get out. Use the stairs, not the elevators. Got it?”

The terrified-looking receptionist swallowed hard. “Where are you going?”

“To find the boss,” Ethan said, and headed farther into the office suite without looking back.

He wasn’t leaving without Evangeline Prescott.

A few weeks earlier, her name had turned up on a list that included the half-dozen men who’d been murdered over the past few months as part of a deadly billion-dollar oil rights conspiracy. Evangeline was no investor, but the list suggested she was a target.

And the blast had come from the direction of her corner office.

Cursing, Ethan skirted the cube farm, dodging the debris and fluttering papers that swirled on the wind whipping through broken windows. The temperature rose as he headed toward the corner suite, heat crackling on his skin.

“Evangeline, are you in there?” he shouted. “Robert? You okay?”

Ethan called Evangeline’s husband’s name as an afterthought. He didn’t know PPS’s original founder well, and what he knew didn’t impress him much. Robert Prescott had reappeared the previous month after having spent the past two years underground, trying to figure out who’d set him up to die in a rigged plane crash that now appeared to have been one of the earliest moves in the TCM conspiracy, orchestrated by Robert’s former mentor in the world of international espionage. The way Ethan saw it, whether he was a real-life James Bond or not, a man shouldn’t ever let anything except actual death separate him from the woman he’d loved.

Life-and-death danger had a way of leveling differences though, so when Ethan stuck his head through the doorway leading to Robert’s office and called the man’s name, he felt a sharp twist of relief when he got an answer.

“Over here,” Robert said, voice cracking. The room was in shambles, with the desk overturned and wedged against one wall. The founder of PPS was trapped beneath the desk with only his salt-and-pepper hair and one blood-smeared hand visible. The hand waved and Robert’s voice carried the hint of a British accent and the authority of his MI6 background when he ordered, “Get this bloody thing off me.”

Emotion wanted to send Ethan bolting across the room to help his fallen comrade. Logic had him pausing to test the floor, which was tipped at an angle beneath his feet. When it seemed sturdy enough, he crossed the room, looked at how Robert was pinned, and levered a corner of the desk up and away.

After a quick field check for major injuries, Ethan hauled Robert to his feet. “Angel’s got the blast doors open. Take the stairs.”

Robert swiped a hand across a bloody gash on his cheek. “Bugger that. Where’s my wife?”

Though Robert and Evangeline’s relationship had been bumpy since he’d returned from the dead, Ethan heard the raw grief in the other man’s voice. Trying not to resent Robert’s right to that grief, Ethan turned away. “Let’s go find her.”

The men ducked out of Robert’s office, crossed the short distance to Evangeline’s door and stopped dead.

A low groan rattled in Robert’s chest.

Beyond the door, dust and smoke blurred the sight of the mountains in the distance. There was no outer wall. Hell, there was no office. It had become a crater in the side of the building. Heat radiated from the remnants of walls, floor and ceiling. Black soot smeared the carpeting beneath their feet, and the floor beyond fell away to air.

Robert sagged against the door frame.

“God,” Ethan rasped. “I’m so—”

“Don’t say it,” Robert snapped. “Don’t even think it. She’s not dead. She can’t be dead, not when we’ve just found each other again.”

You knew where she was all along, you selfish bastard. An angry ball congealed in Ethan’s gut, alongside the grief. You have no idea what it was like for her, what it feels like to lose someone you love.

But because Ethan did know, he said, “Let’s check the other offices, and the break rooms. The bathroom. Maybe—” He broke off when he heard a faint sound.

Robert heard it, too. He spun and bolted down the hall, shouting, “Evangeline? Evangeline, damn it, answer me!” He skidded to a halt outside the small kitchenette they used as a break room. “She’s in here!”

Then he cursed viciously enough to jab fear into Ethan’s gut.

When he reached the doorway, Ethan saw that the floor tilted away from them and down, as though all the support beams were gone. The refrigerator had tipped over, spilling its contents onto the floor. The chairs and tables were all lodged against the far wall, with Evangeline trapped beneath them.

The tall, forty-something blonde was bleeding but conscious. She and Robert locked eyes and she smiled with relief. “You’re okay.”

He made an unintelligible sound, and when he reached out a hand as though he could touch her across the distance separating them, his fingers trembled.

Dark emotion rose up to clog Ethan’s throat, a blend of relief, resentment and hell, yes, jealousy. Not because he wanted Evangeline, but because he hadn’t gotten a second chance with the woman he’d loved, and Prescott seemed to get nothing but second chances.

“I’ll get her,” Robert said. “You check the rest of the offices.” Ethan nodded shortly and turned away, but before he’d gone more than a few steps, Prescott called, “Did your client get out okay?”

Ethan stopped and looked back. “I’m not scheduled to see anyone today.”

“Angel left a message a few minutes ago on my voice mail,” Robert said. “She said a client was on her way up to see you.”

Ethan didn’t bother asking why she’d left the info with Robert—Angel lost half their messages and garbled the other half, but she was one of Evangeline’s projects, so firing her wasn’t an option.

“I haven’t met with anyone all morning,” he said now, a faint alarm stirring in the back of his skull. “Did you get a name?”

“I think she said Nicole Benedict. Ring any bells?”

The faint alarm became a war whoop as the name did more than ring a bell. It sent a lightning bolt through Ethan’s midsection, a mixture of guilt, regret and pure, unadulterated lust.

Air hissed between his teeth at the thought of the woman who’d helped him forget himself for a night, then disappeared. “Yeah. I know her. And if she was on the way up—” He broke off on a second hiss of breath as logic overtook emotion and he remembered that the track for the glass elevator ran along the outside of the building, right beside Evangeline’s office. It would’ve been right in the path of the explosion.

He took off at a dead run, hoping to hell he wasn’t already too late.

NICOLE REGAINED fuzzy consciousness to the feel of something cold and hard beneath her face. For half a second, she wondered what the hell she was doing lying on her kitchen floor. And why were her ears ringing? Was she hungover?

But that wasn’t right. She’d never been much of a partyer, and wasn’t drinking at all these days because of—

The connection sparked in her brain and clenched her stomach in an instant. The baby. Ethan. Prescott Personal Securities. Images blinked through her mind in rapid succession—the office building, the helicopter, the rocket launcher—

The explosion.

Her eyes flew open and she found herself facedown on the floor of the glassed-in elevator. She saw the street far below. Then a thin stream of blackish- gray smoke obscured her view for a moment, and the contrast showed her something far worse than the height. There was a crack in the glass beneath her.

As she watched, it grew longer and branched into two cracks that gave birth to two more in a growing spiderweb that weakened the only thing separating her from a fatal fall.

“Help me,” she whispered, half-afraid the small sound might send her crashing through. When it didn’t, she filled her lungs and screamed, “Help me!”

Incredibly, a man’s voice answered from above. “Hang on, Nicole. I’m almost there.”

“Ethan?” She wasn’t sure how she recognized his voice, ten weeks after they’d spent the night together doing everything but talking, but she knew him instantly, and the recognition brought a fierce rush of relief edged with fear.

“Don’t move.” His words sounded clearer than they ought to, and she heard the whistle of wind.

Fearing what she might see, Nic held her breath and tried to keep her body still as she turned her head to the side. She saw more glass, more cracks, and a gaping hole in the side of the elevator car, where the glass was gone. Beyond that was blue sky, a smudge of smoke and a dangling climber’s rope. She heard masculine shouts from higher up, a mixture of suggestions and curses from whoever was anchoring the line.

She remembered him saying something about rock climbing in his free time. Now he was shimmying down to rescue her. God.

As she watched, a pair of sturdy, brown leather hiking boots swung into her limited slice of view, followed by a hint of tube sock and a pair of strong, muscular legs encased in tough-looking cargo pants and a makeshift climber’s harness. The button-down front of a formerly white oxford shirt appeared next, gaping where a couple of buttons had torn away to reveal a lean, muscular torso.

Then he twisted through the broken section of glass, and she got a clear look at the edgy, masculine face she’d imagined all too often since realizing her period was late.

Hell, she thought, let’s be honest here. You’ve thought about him just about every day since that night at Hitchin’s. And she’d remembered him just right. His dark brown hair was lighter at the ends, signaling an outdoor lifestyle. His face was chiseled, his features as sharp and forbidding as she’d remembered. Now, though, the brown eyes she remembered as being coolly logical and almost sardonic, radiated tension as they locked on hers and he said, “Stay calm. We can do this, but you’ve got to trust me, okay?” He waited until she nodded, then said, “I want you to keep yourself flat and distribute your weight as evenly as possible. Then I need you to slide toward me. We’re going to get you out of there.”

Nic’s breath hissed out. She glanced down and saw emergency vehicles gathering far below. “I can’t… I won’t…” She stopped and sucked in a breath. “Can’t you open the doors from inside the building?”

“Not a chance. You’re—” He broke off, looked up as the rescue personnel shouted something she didn’t quite catch, and muttered a curse. “Look, the explosion knocked the elevator off its track, okay? It’s hanging by a single cable right now. It looks stable enough, but—”

A loud crackling noise cut him off, and the floor shifted beneath Nic. She whimpered deep in her throat and tears stung her eyes. “Ethan, please,” she whispered. “The floor’s going to go. I don’t want to die.”

“Slide over,” he repeated, speaking softly. “Go easy, but keep moving, no matter what happens.”

Heart pounding in her ears, Nic closed her eyes, pressed her cheek to the floor and slid an inch, then another. She heard crackling, but didn’t look at the glass beneath her.

“That’s it. You’re almost there.”

He sounded closer, prompting Nic to open her eyes. He’d dropped lower on the rope, so their faces were level through the broken panel.

His voice might be utterly calm, but his eyes held a strange, dark emotion she couldn’t quite define.

An answering surge tugged in her chest, the same feeling she’d had when she’d offered to buy him a drink and he’d turned to refuse, then accepted instead. Now, though, there was an added layer between them, the echoing heat of sex…and a baby he’d never know about if she fell.

“Ethan,” Nic whispered, heart pounding. “I came to tell you I’m pregnant.”

She might’ve imagined the wince, but there was no mistaking his low curse, or the look that flashed through his eyes before he shuttered his expression to one of utter determination and stretched his arm through the broken side of the elevator car. “We need to get you on solid ground. Take my hand.”

She looked from him to the ground and back again. When her weight shifted, the glass beneath her cracked further.

“Come on.” His eyes were steady on hers, his outstretched hand unwavering. “Trust me.”

Heart pounding loud in her ears, she reached out and grabbed his forearm, just as the crackling noise crescendoed—

And the glass gave way beneath her.

Nic screamed as she fell and then jerked to a suspended halt, dangling in Ethan’s grip, held only by their joined hands. Sobbing, terrified, she grabbed for him with her free hand as a roaring, crumbling noise built overhead, counterpointed by pinging metal.

She looked up and shrieked, “Ethan! The cable!”

Overhead, the elevator mechanism was coming apart.

He twisted his head and shouted to the men leaning out of a window two floors up. “Pull us in, damn it!” His expression remained impassive, but his voice was sharp when he said, “You’re going to have to climb up through the hole in the elevator floor before it goes. Watch the broken glass.”

The next two minutes were a blur as Nic scrambled, fighting for purchase as he pulled her up and out, helped by the uniformed rescue personnel two floors up, who were cursing and hauling on the rope as fast as they dared.

Then she was out! She lunged through the open panel and launched herself against Ethan just as the elevator gave way with a horrendous crack and plummeted down, trailing broken cables. Momentum sent them spinning, and Nic hung on tightly as they swung away from the building. She felt Ethan’s strong body against hers, felt his heart drum fast through the fabric of his shirt. Then the arc reversed and they went flying back toward the building.

“Hang on!” Ethan swung them so he’d bear the brunt, but an errant wind gust caught them and diverted the spin, changing their angle of impact.

Nic hit first, and she hit hard. The blow drove the breath from her lungs. Her neck whiplashed and her head slammed into the side of the building.

Starbursts flashed in her head, and then every sensation was abruptly sucked into a black void. Every sensation, that is, except the feel of the man who held her tight.


Chapter Two

Ethan’s muscles worked automatically, stabilizing them against the side of the building and cradling Nicole’s unconscious body as the rescue personnel hauled them up, but his brain was jammed full. One part of him cataloged her injuries—she’d taken a hell of a whack to the head—while another, deeper part of him processed her announcement.

The last thing he’d expected—or wanted—to hear was that she was pregnant.

Then again, he’d never actually figured he’d see her again. The morning after their night together, he’d filed the memory in the tiny Pleasant Interludes section of his brain and walked away. Maybe he’d thought of her once or twice in the months since. And maybe he’d stuck his head into Hitchin’s a couple of times since. But a baby? God, no. They’d been careful. He’d used a condom, damn it.

But there was that whole ninety-nine-point-nine- percent-effective thing. Apparently, he’d stepped straight into that point-oh-one of oh, hell.

“We’ve got her,” a male voice said, breaking into Ethan’s thoughts. He was startled to realize they’d reached the place where a bank of broken windows had allowed him to climb down to the elevator. The rescue personnel almost hadn’t let him go, but he was the one with the rock-climbing equipment and the skills, and there hadn’t been time to wait for the real search-and-rescue team.

It was just dumb luck he’d had his gear in the office, dumb luck that’d he’d been able to save Nicole’s life.

Suited firefighters leaned through, reaching to grab her unconscious form and ease her to relative safety indoors.

“Careful,” Ethan said unnecessarily. “She’s—” Pregnant, he thought, but couldn’t say the word. “She banged her head pretty hard.”

It’d happened so fast he hadn’t been able to protect her from slamming into the building. She was breathing fine, but she was still unconscious. What had it been, two minutes? Five? Too long.

Jaw set, he climbed through, shucked off his harness and stowed his gear, then jogged to catch up with the group of paramedics who were carrying Nicole down the stairs, strapped to a backboard.

As the small group emerged into the early-afternoon sunlight, one of the paramedics glanced up at the smoke that continued to pour from the ruined PPS offices. “Looks like the building will hold, thank the Lord.”

There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Ethan didn’t join in. Instead, he scanned the street, which was a scene of barely controlled chaos. Most of the evacuees and onlookers had been pushed back, away from the damaged office building, but dazed-looking people continued to stream from the stairwells. Nearby, several wickedly jagged cement chunks were embedded in a cracked section of sidewalk, surrounded by the glitter of reflective glass shards. Off to one side, a scattering of first aid supplies ringed a dark stain.

The explosion had taken victims outside the building as well as in, Ethan thought, feeling the acid burn of anger in his gut.

“Ethan!”

He turned at the sound of Robert’s voice, and saw PPS’s founder loping across the deserted street toward him. The men gripped each other’s forearms in greeting, the first friendly contact Ethan could remember between them. “How’s Evangeline?” he asked.

“She’ll need a few stitches, but is fine otherwise. She’s spitting mad. Wants to take a chunk out of the bomber.” The last was said with a touch of pride.

“I’ll ditto that.” Half his attention on the paramedics, who were busy transferring Nicole to a gurney, Ethan gestured to the stained sidewalk. “Pedestrian?”

Robert nodded, expression darkening. “Falling debris caught a mother and her two kids. Doesn’t look good for the little girl.”

“Damn.” Ethan scowled. It had been bad enough when the mastermind had started killing off TCM’s investors one by one. It had been worse when they’d murdered a PPS computer tech and then slapped Evangeline’s name on the list, but at the very least those targets had been logical. Now they’d escalated way beyond that to injuring innocent bystanders… like the mother and her children. Like Nicole, who’d come to tell him he was a father.

Ethan glanced over at her, seeing the beauty beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

Her face had popped into his head more often than he cared to admit in the weeks since he’d met her.

That night, a friend’s wedding—and the memories it’d brought—had chased him out of the reception and into a tourist-trap bar. He hadn’t noticed her at first, hadn’t had eyes for much other than the glass in front of him. He would’ve had to have been dead, though, to miss noticing when she leaned across him to snag a napkin, pressing against him just long enough to let him know she was looking to play.

He’d been struck first by her dark curls, then by her eyes, which were a strangely intense shade of blue, bordering on violet. Rimmed by dark lashes, they’d looked moments away from laughter all the time, even when she’d been serious. During those serious moments, she’d caught her full lower lip between her teeth, an action that’d left him hard and wanting.

Then later, once the small talk was done and they were alone in the hotel room they’d rented because neither of them had been sober enough to drive home, she’d caught her bottom lip in her teeth again at the moment of her climax, prompting him to capture that lower lip with his own mouth and nibble it into submission.

Afterward, she’d looked at him with a hint of wonder in those violet eyes, a hint of shyness. All an act, he’d thought at first, designed to keep a bar conquest intrigued. But during the long hours of the night, small inconsistencies had added up in his carefully logical brain, leaving him wondering whether that night had been as out of character for her as it had been for him.

He’d resigned himself to never knowing for sure. Now, it seemed he’d been given a second chance to find out.

“Did you hear me?” Robert said, tone sharp.

“Sorry,” Ethan said without looking at his boss. “How about I meet you and Evangeline at the hospital?”

“You need a ride?”

“I’m all set.” He strode toward the ambulance they’d loaded Nicole into, only to stop and turn back when Robert called his name. “What?” he said, voice edgy with impatience and something more, something he didn’t want to analyze too closely.

Robert looked from Ethan to the ambulance and back. “Who is she?”

“She’s—” Ethan broke off, not sure what she was. She wasn’t a friend, wasn’t his lover, yet she’d come to tell him she was carrying his child. “She’s not a client,” he said shortly, and headed for the ambulance.

They’d figure out the rest once she woke up.

TERRIFIED, Nicole screamed and batted at the blurry shadows around her, fighting the feeling of weightlessness, of falling.

Then she was on the ground without hitting bottom, and something was pressing her down, trapping her arms and legs. She screamed again and fought the hold. “Let me go!”

A man’s voice said, “Nicole, you’re okay. You’re safe. Calm down and listen to me. You’re in the hospital, not the elevator. You’re okay.” The words were more rough than soothing, but they calmed her while sending up a strange shimmy inside.

She woke further, feeling warmth where his hands gripped her forearms. The voice and touch were familiar, but she couldn’t think of his name, couldn’t picture his face, and that brought a spurt of renewed panic, which took up residence alongside a pounding headache.

Opening her eyes, she squinted into the night-dim lights of a hospital room and saw a tall man wearing wrinkled khaki bush pants and a smudged white button-down missing a couple of buttons. His dark brown hair brushed over his forehead, streaked with highlights she imagined might be gold in better light. His eyes were dark brown and intelligent beneath heavy brows, his nose aquiline, his jaw chiseled. The whole effect was compelling and more than a little distant.

And it was a stranger’s face.

“Why am I in the hospital?” she demanded. “Who are you?”

Before he could answer, the hallway door swung open and a white-coated, dark-haired female doctor entered. Her expression softened when she looked at the bed. “It’s good to see you awake, Miss Benedict.”

Panic pounded through Nic as she pointed to the man. “I don’t know him.”

The doctor pursed her lips, leaned down and flashed a penlight in Nic’s eyes. “Follow this.” She kept up a background monologue as she ran through a quick exam. “I’m Dr. Eballa—that’s with an a and two l’s, please, not Ebola like the virus.” She paused and wrote something on a clipboard, then said, “Your vitals are good and everything checks out normal, but you’ve got a good-sized knot on the back of your head and you were out for quite a while.” She straightened away from the bed. “What’s your full name and what are your parents’ names?”

“Nicole Antoinette Benedict,” Nic said immediately. “My parents are Lyle and Mary Benedict. They live back in Maryland where I grew up.” The easy answers calmed some of the panic and she shifted and lifted a hand to the back of her head, wincing when she found a tender, raised bump the size of her palm. “What happened?”

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“I—” Nicole broke off, her stomach twisting when she realized that while she remembered lots of things, they weren’t in any sort of order. She could picture a greenhouse full of plants, but she wasn’t sure if it was a memory from last week or last year. Panic spiked through the pounding headache, and her voice trembled when she said, “I don’t know.”

The doctor touched her wrist, maybe in reassurance, maybe a quick check on her pulse. “That’s not uncommon after a concussion such as yours. Things should start to clear up over the next few hours or days, though you may never remember the actual attack.”

Nic’s blood iced in her veins. “I was attacked?”

“Not you personally,” the man said. “You were in an elevator when the building was bombed.”

“Bombed!” Something shivered just out of Nic’s mental reach, a flash of sunlight on a dark shape, there and then gone so quickly she wasn’t sure it had ever been. She closed her eyes for a second, scared and frustrated at the same time. “I don’t remember.” She glanced at him. “And I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Are we…” She trailed off, not sure what she meant to ask.

As she fumbled, Dr. Eballa stepped away from the bed and adjusted the lights higher. The man turned and scowled in the doctor’s direction.

Instantly, his image was overlain by another in her mind’s eye. It was the same face but a different setting—a bar, crowded, noisy and dark. He’d turned and scowled at her, but his brown eyes had warmed with reluctant interest when she’d said something clever—she didn’t remember what it had been, but no matter. She remembered him stretching out a hand, remembered the warmth and the faint electric buzz when they shook and he’d said, “I’m—”

“Ethan!” she said aloud in the hospital room, making him jump.

A flash of relief glinted in his eyes, tainted with something more complicated. “You remember.”

“I remember meeting you in a bar, and…” She trailed off as other memories reconnected. The bar hookup. The hotel room. Hot sex. A plus sign on the home pregnancy test when she’d been praying for a minus. “Oh,” she said, then more forcefully, “Oh! Oh, no. I have to talk to you. In private.”

He turned away, as though he didn’t want her to read his eyes when he said, “You already told me about the baby.”

“Oh.” She swallowed hard and tried to fight through the headache and a growing swell of nausea. “I don’t remember that.” What did I say? she wanted to ask. What did you say?

“What is the last thing you do remember?” he demanded, and she had a feeling there was more to the question than him judging the extent of her partial amnesia.

“I remember getting up this morning.” She glanced at him. “Is it Tuesday?” When he nodded, she felt a small measure of relief. “Then I remember getting up this morning. I read the paper and made a few calls for a project I’m working on.” Pitifully unsuccessful calls, she remembered. “Then I drove into the city to see you. I can picture myself parking somewhere and walking into a big building, but I’m not sure if that’s a memory or a logical guess.”

“You don’t remember being in a glass-walled elevator?” he persisted.

She shook her head, then winced and pressed her fingers to her temples when the headache spiked.

“You’re hurting.” He stepped away from the bed. “I’ll come back later.”

“No.” The terror had subsided somewhat with the piecemeal return of her memory. In its place was a sense of urgency. Despite what had happened at the office building, she’d set out that morning with a purpose. Now, she looked at Dr. Eballa and saw compassion in the other woman’s eyes. “Can we have a few minutes alone?”

The doctor hesitated a beat, then nodded. “You’re lucid, and it’s not unexpected for you to have blocked out the actual trauma. You may never remember that chunk of time, but everything else seems okay. I’ll take a walk. When you and Mr. Moore are finished, I’ll come back and run a few more tests, just to be on the safe side.”

When she was gone, Nic stared at her legs beneath the pale blue hospital blanket. “In case you were wondering, there’s no chance the baby could be anyone else’s.”

He nodded, though she didn’t know if that meant he believed her, or if that was what he’d expected her to say. Which just underscored how much she didn’t know about the father of her unborn child. She’d picked him up in a bar, for heaven’s sake, and though she’d like to think she wouldn’t have been attracted to a jerk, her track record said otherwise.

“Do you…” She faltered, but pushed through the awkwardness with a faint thread of optimism. “What do you think about being a father?”

“Being a sperm donor doesn’t make a man a father,” he said, voice nearly inflectionless, but he paced the length of the room, body language giving voice to the upset within.

When he stopped at the window and worked the mechanism to open the blinds and look out at the night, she thought she saw something sad in the reflection of his eyes, something that defused her quick anger and left the hurt behind.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “It’s not about you, or about what we did. It’s…” He turned toward her and spread his hands away from his long, lean body. “Let’s just say the world is better off if I’m in it by myself.”

A flare of disappointment warned Nic that no matter how many times she’d told herself not to think foolish thoughts, some piece of her had been hoping for the happy nuclear family she’d always dreamed of. But she forced her voice level when she said, “I didn’t come looking for a marriage proposal. Lucky for us, society has evolved past shotgun weddings.”

Though she had a feeling her professor father’s reaction wouldn’t be particularly evolved when he found out his first—and possibly only—grandchild would be born outside of wedlock.

Ethan repeated, “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too,” she said. “I wish…” She trailed off, not sure what exactly she wished. If she hadn’t gone into Hitchin’s that night, damned caution and hiked up onto a bar stool beside the hottest guy in the joint, she would’ve missed out on some pretty fabulous sex. And yes, she would’ve missed out on the life growing inside her. An unplanned life, perhaps, but one she already cherished.

“I’m okay with it, really,” she said, not sure whether she was saying it for his benefit or her own. “I’ve always planned on having kids. Even thought I’d found the right guy once.”

“Jonah,” he said, surprising her.

She nodded, remembering that she’d mentioned her ex in passing during their brief bar flirtation. “Good memory. But that—obviously—didn’t work out.”

Ethan looked over his shoulder at her. “Was that why you were at Hitchin’s that night? Because of him?”

“No,” she said quickly, then stopped herself and went with the truth. “Or, not really. It was my thirty-fourth birthday that day. I had all these plans with my friends from the school.” She glanced at him. “Did I tell you I’m a teacher?” When he shook his head, she said, “Science. Donner High School. Anyway, we were supposed to have a girls’ day out—a few hours at the spa, a movie, that sort of thing. Simple fun. But I got up that morning, looked in the mirror, and all I saw was someone I never expected to be. Thirty-four, unmarried, no kids.”

She shook her head. “That much I could’ve dealt with. I’d been dealing just fine. But then I checked my messages and found out that Toulouse Inc. was backing out of funding this biofuel project I’ve been working on with some of my students. We’ve built this great greenhouse.” She sketched the building with her hands. “Corn. Wheat. Soybeans. Easily renewable resources. And we’ve got a converter we designed…” She trailed off, aware that he was staring. “And I’m babbling. You don’t care about any of this. Sorry.”

Jonah had always hated when she’d interjected her “little project” into dinner-party conversation, even though it had been his idea that she leave grad school for the more family-friendly schedule of teaching high school. The way she figured it, if Jonah hadn’t cared about the biofuel project, then Ethan certainly wouldn’t.

“Sorry,” she said again when he just stared at her. She felt a hot flush climb her cheeks. “That’s not what you’re here to talk about, is it? You want to settle things, make sure I’m okay. Well, I am.” She took a deep breath to quell the taint of nausea at the back of her throat. “I didn’t go looking for you because I wanted a proposal, or money or anything like that. I’m fully prepared to have this baby and raise it on my own. Heck, I’m looking forward to it. If I’m lucky, I’ll meet a man and fall in love with him, and the three of us can make a family, make more babies, have the white picket fence, the Labrador and the whole nine yards.” She paused, then continued, “But that doesn’t change the fact that this baby is half yours, so I needed to tell you about him or her. What you do with the information is pretty much up to you.”

She was babbling again, she realized. Or maybe she was speaking normally and it just felt like babbling because Ethan was so reserved, so remote.

Still standing by the window, silhouetted against the darkness, he inclined his head in a brief nod. “Thanks for telling me. And I’m sorry you got caught up in what happened back at PPS. I just need… I need to take a walk.” He glanced from her to the door and back. “Don’t go anywhere until I get back.”

“Where am I going to go?” she said, but he was already gone, the door swinging shut at his back, leaving her alone in silence broken by the faint hum of fluorescent lights and ventilation, the sense of movement and activity just beyond the door.

Nic sat for a second, not sure how she felt other than sore everywhere, and unbelievably tired.

Well, that was over. She wasn’t sure if she was more relieved or disappointed. She felt hollow, drained of just about everything. Her headache had even subsided, leaving her vaguely restless.

She glanced down, making sure she wasn’t hooked to any machines before she sat up in the hospital bed. When that earned her only a long, lazy spin of the room and a thump of the headache, she decided to try using the bathroom. If she could make it there and back under her own steam, she was doing okay. Maybe even okay enough to go home.

Suddenly, she couldn’t think of anything more appealing than her four-room apartment with the soft Navajo blanket on the bed.

“Bathroom first,” she said aloud. Suiting action to word, she threw back the blankets and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her feet were numb and her whole body felt disconnected, as though her head was floating along under its own power as she made it across the room, nearly to the bathroom door.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw a dark shadow through the window of the hallway door. The shadow paused, then pushed through.

Nic turned, expecting a lecture from Dr. Eballa. “I was just—” She broke off because it wasn’t her doctor. It was an unshaven, heavyset man wearing a white lab coat over a T-shirt, jeans and heavy boots.

He grabbed her before she could react, and covered her mouth with his hand.

Panic spurted as Nic screamed against his palm. She struggled, kicking him with her bare feet and scratching at him with her fingernails. He didn’t react, just held on as she felt a prick in her upper arm, then a fiery sizzle in her veins that quickly faded to cool numbness.

Aware of her surroundings but unable to stay upright, she slumped to the floor and hit hard. He pushed through the door for a moment, then returned, pulling a gurney behind him. He grabbed her around the waist, heaved her up onto the gurney and covered her most of the way with the blanket from her bed.

Then he wheeled her out of the room.


Chapter Three

Ethan walked the hospital corridors with no real destination in mind. He simply thought better when he was moving. He always had.

Nicole’s child might have half his DNA, but he knew as well as anyone that biology didn’t make a father. Character made a man a father. Honesty did, and integrity. Wholeness.

And though Ethan considered himself a logical, honest man, he was anything but whole.

Seeing a knot of people in the hallway up ahead, he detoured down the next offshoot corridor. If he’d still believed in the religion his mother had tried to instill in him, he might’ve thought it no accident that the hallway dead-ended at the hospital chapel. Since he’d long ago renounced faith in a higher power, he thought only that it was a quiet, empty space with padded benches.

He sprawled in one, let his head fall back with a thump and closed his eyes.

Just that morning, everything had been normal. True, the TCM investigation was way beyond PPS’s usual cases, but that was work, not personal. Over the past five years he’d done his best to insulate himself against letting things get personal. If he wasn’t involved, he couldn’t be hurt.

More importantly, he couldn’t hurt anyone else.

“Ethan?” Evangeline’s voice said from nearby. “Is everything okay?”

Though he normally enjoyed her company, his first thought now was oh, hell.

He cracked his lids and watched her sit in the pew across the aisle from him. She was wearing the top half of a set of scrubs, along with her own pants and shoes. Her right arm was bandaged from shoulder to elbow, and a Band-Aid above her left eyebrow was several shades darker than her pale skin. But she looked steady enough as she said, “What’s wrong?”

“Where’s Robert?”

“Why, because you and he are both Neanderthal enough to think it’s his job to keep me under control?” She sent him her trademark give-me-a-break look. “For your information I’ve been treated and released. No hospital room, no observation period. I’m fit and ready to get back into the fight.” She flexed her good arm, showing a decent muscle, but he noticed that she didn’t try it with the bandaged arm. “And to answer your other question, Robert is on the phone with one of his police contacts, trying to get an update on what the crime scene analysts and the bomb squad think about the office.”

“Still, you shouldn’t be walking around alone,” Ethan said.

She sent him a sharp look. “I ran PPS by myself for more than two years, during which time, I might add, I hired you. Just because Robert rose from the dead doesn’t make me incapable of defending myself.”

He shook his head. “I didn’t say you were, but your name is on the hit list and your office took the brunt of the attack. You have to be careful. We can’t afford to lose you.”

If Robert had begun to reemerge as the leader of PPS, Evangeline was the glue that held them together. She had drawn Ethan into the organization, giving him the base of support he’d so badly needed, along with the freedom to take short-term protection assignments that suited his short-term attention span.

“I can take care of myself,” Evangeline repeated. “I’m not going to do anything stupid, though. And don’t think I didn’t notice you changing the subject. So give. Why’re you sitting in here alone?”

“I like being alone.” But the question brought his mind circling back to Nicole.

She was going to have a baby. His baby.

What the hell was he supposed to do about that? Nothing, he knew. It would be better for everyone involved if he did nothing. His own father had been a sperm donor, his stepfather a savior. Nicole and the baby would be far better off finding a man to complete their family without living the hell his own mother had suffered through to find her Prince Charming.

Besides, a family meant commitment and emotion, neither of which were rational choices for someone like him.

Evangeline waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she said, “It’s an open-ended offer with no statue of limitations. So if you need a friend to talk to, come find me, okay?”

Ethan dipped his chin in a nod. “Thanks.”

She stood, mostly covering her wince. “Robert and I are headed over to the Vault.” Her eyes glinted with determination, along with rising anger. “PPS will be run from there until this thing is finished.”

“The Vault?” Intrigued despite himself, Ethan climbed to his feet and followed her out of the chapel. “I thought that was an in-house urban legend.” Rumor had it that PPS maintained a secret underground location, and had spy ware in place to duplicate every piece of information that came and went from the PPS offices, sending it to the Vault.

“It’s real,” Evangeline said with a small smile. “It’s located in an old Cold War bunker outside the city. With the main office destroyed, we’re going to move operations there. A couple of the guys are organizing the support staff, figuring out who we absolutely can’t do without, and getting them set up underground.” Her lips thinned. “It’s coming down to the wire, Ethan. Either we take out whoever is behind that list or they take us out.”

She pushed through the door leading to the hallway, with Ethan right behind her. Just then, heavy footsteps rang out around the corner, the sound of a big man, moving fast.

Ethan stepped in front of Evangeline, tensing for battle, then relaxing when Robert appeared.

The other man’s expression was tight. “Is Miss Benedict with you two?”

“She’s in her room,” Ethan said. “Second floor, 201A.”

Robert shook his head. “Her bed’s empty. And it wasn’t a bomb that took out the office. It was a surface-to-air missile, only it wasn’t fired from ground level—it was an aerial attack from a dark helicopter with no markings. None of the witnesses were close enough to catch any details. With the way the windows are set up, Miss Benedict is the only person who might’ve seen the chopper.”

Blood roared through Ethan’s veins, and he turned and sprinted up the hallway with Robert and Evangeline at his heels, spurred by the knowledge that the TCM conspirators didn’t leave witnesses alive.

NICOLE FLICKERED in and out of awareness, sometimes able to process her surroundings, sometimes not.

At first she saw hospital corridors rolling past as her captor wheeled her along. Then she was in an elevator. Another hallway. Then a plain room with gray-green walls and a palpable chill in the air.

The next time she surfaced, she was still in the gray-green room, still strapped to the gurney, but the man in the white lab coat was gone and the room was seriously cold. She shivered, realizing that the room wasn’t just somebody-turned-up-the-AC-too-high cold, it was all-the-way-to-igloo freezing.

Like a meat locker, she thought, panic kindling as she twisted her head, trying to get a good look around. She didn’t see any dead bodies—she wasn’t in the morgue, thank God—but she didn’t see much else. The insulated walls of the bare room were painted gray-green, and the shiny white door bore a freezer handle and a small, fogged window. A refrigerator unit bolted to the ceiling above her hummed, blowing cold air.

“Hello?” she said, her words emerging on a puff of vapor as her breath met the chilly air. She raised her voice. “Can anyone hear me?”

The echoes bounced off the walls and door, faint beneath the refrigerator’s hum.

Breath clogging in her lungs, she tugged frantically at the straps securing her to the gurney, but succeeded only in pressing her body into the thin mattress beneath her. She felt very small and weak and scared. Worse, she realized she’d stopped shivering, and when she exhaled, the vapor was faint, warning that her core temperature was falling. She was probably only minutes away from hypothermia, maybe an hour away from death.

She sucked in a breath and screamed, “I’m in here! Somebody! Anybody, get me out of here!”

Her only response was the hum of the cooling unit.

ETHAN STOOD at the main admittance desk, cold anger pounding in his veins. “She’s not in the hospital. The bastards took her.”

Robert clasped his shoulder briefly. “We’ll find her.”

But they both knew that by then it could be too late.

Around them, the admitting area bustled with normal hospital activity, plus the tension of an organized search. All free personnel were on the lookout, and security officers had spread throughout the complex. If she’d been transported somewhere else, though, the effort was useless.

“Call the cops,” Ethan said, possibilities flickering through his mind in a gruesome slide show. “You’ve got friends there. They’ll look if you push them.”

“Already done,” Robert said. “Given that she’s the only witness who might have seen—”

“Mr. Moore, Mr. Prescott!” A woman’s hail interrupted and Ethan turned to see Dr. Eballa rushing toward them, followed closely by a tall teenager wearing blue scrubs and a volunteer’s badge. “I may have something.” When she reached the men, she urged the teen forward. “Tell them.”

The dark-haired youth looked at a nearby uniformed security officer, flushed and stared at his feet. “There was a guy in the back stairwell.”

When he fell silent, Ethan was tempted to grab him and shake the story loose. Instead, he stepped closer and lowered his voice. When he caught the faint scent of pot, he said, “Look, kid. Nobody cares what you were doing or where. Just tell me what you saw.”

The teen glanced from Ethan to the guard and back, then mumbled, “Promise?”

“You won’t get in trouble for smoking in the stairwell,” Ethan said. “At least not this time. After that, you’re on your own.”

“’Kay.” The kid nodded. “So listen, I was in the back stairwell, okay? And this guy came up from the basement wearing a white coat, okay? Only he wasn’t a doctor—his clothes were all wrong and he didn’t have a badge. Besides, why would a doctor be coming up from the basement? Ain’t nothing down there but empty rooms. And he was using a phone, and that’s not allowed in here, right?”

Robert interjected, “What did he say?”

“Something like, ‘Make up your goddamn mind already.’ I didn’t hear the rest because I took off before he saw me.”

“Are you sure he didn’t see you?”

The kid bobbed his head. “Positive.”

Ethan turned to Dr. Eballa. “Where are these stairs?”

“I’ll take you.” As they hurried through the hospital corridors, she said, “He’s right, there’s not much down there. Mostly empty storage rooms we use as overflow during disasters.”

Something chilled inside Ethan. If the white-coated guy in the stairwell had taken Nicole, he might have hidden her down there.

Or he might have dumped her corpse.

He swallowed hard. “What sort of overflow?”

Dr. Eballa pushed through a doorway marked Stairs, then glanced back. “Bodies. Two of the rooms are set up as temporary morgues. We only run the refrigerators when we need the space, though.”

They reached the bottom of the stairs and pushed through a set of heavy doors. The corridor was dimly lit. The cement walls were painted a muted green and the floor was white laminate, like much of the rest of the building. But down in the basement, the color scheme didn’t seem soothing. It felt swampy. Ominous.

Tension vibrating through every fiber of his being, Ethan shouted, “Nicole? Are you down here?”

When there was no answer, he strode down the corridor, checking doors as the doctor hurried in his wake. The first two rooms were dark and silent. The window of the third was blurred with condensation, and when he felt the door handle, it was cold to the touch.

Robert and a handful of security officers appeared at the far end of the corridor. Ethan shouted, “In here!” He worked the door handle and shoved through, gut tight with apprehension. “Nicole?”

His heart stopped, simply stopped when he saw the motionless figure strapped to a gurney. Dark curls fanned out from a too-pale face, and her lips were the same blue as the thin blanket that covered her body.

“Nicole!” He skidded to her side and yanked at the straps holding her down. When she was free, he felt for her carotid pulse and nearly shuddered at the feel of her corpse-cold flesh. Then, miraculously, he felt a faint flutter beneath his fingertips. Another.

“Move!” Dr. Eballa hustled him aside. “We’ve got to get her upstairs, stat!”

She turned the gurney toward the door. As she did so, Nicole’s eyelids flickered open. She looked around wildly for a moment, then her eyes fixed on Ethan. Her lips formed the words, Thank you.

Then she was gone, whisked away by the doctor, who snapped orders about heating blankets, warm-water lavages and an ultrasound. Ethan followed, but Dr. Eballa barred him from cramming into the car with the gurney and the security officers. “Meet us up there, you’ll just be in the way.” Then she paused, and said, “I’ll put a guard on the door, and she’ll get the best medical team in the state. God willing, she and the baby will both be fine.”

Then the elevator doors slid shut, leaving Ethan behind. He wasn’t alone, though. He could hear Robert in the cold room, ordering the security officers to seal the scene and call in the PD, and Evangeline stood in the hallway nearby. He saw the knowledge in her eyes when she said, “Let’s head upstairs. You’ll want to be there when they’ve got her stabilized.”

It’s not what you think, Ethan wanted to say. I can’t be a father.

Instead, he turned and headed for the stairs, rubbing absently at his chest where an ache had gathered.

Robert emerged and fell into step at his side. “They’ll secure the room and I’ll make sure the pothead sits down with a sketch artist. I’ll put some men on Miss Benedict’s room. Once she’s conscious, we’ll want the artist in with her, too.” A flicker of satisfaction crossed his face. “This could be the break we’ve been waiting for, our chance to nail these bastards.”

Instantly furious, Ethan grabbed his boss and slammed him up against the green-painted wall. He crowded close, levered an arm across Robert’s throat and got in his face, growling, “Stay the hell away from Nicole. She’s not a break in your case, she’s not bait, and she’s not a pawn in one of your spy games.”

The big man didn’t give him the satisfaction of struggling. He merely narrowed his eyes. “Then what is she?”

Ethan didn’t hesitate, knowing the lie was a necessary evil. “She’s mine.”


Chapter Four

Evangeline arrived in time to see Ethan release her husband and stalk off, climbing the stairs two at a time.

Robert muttered a curse and smoothed his shirt cuffs even though the garment was hopelessly wrinkled and stained. The small, fastidious detail reminded her of the man she’d fallen in love with seven years earlier, back when she’d been with the FBI and Robert had been trying to get PPS off the ground. He’d helped her find the truth about her parents’ deaths, and he’d changed her life by bringing her into his business and his world—or so she’d thought. These days, it was all too clear that he’d let her in only so far, keeping other pieces of himself hidden away.

Now he turned to her, his expression dark and complicated. “Were you coming to rescue me from Ethan or have him hold me down while you took a few swings?”

“I hadn’t decided.” She crossed the distance separating them, but kept her attention on the stairs, where Ethan had disappeared. “He’s never mentioned Nicole.”

“Is that a problem?”

His clipped tone had her glaring. “You think I have something going with Ethan?”

He looked away, a muscle bunching at the corner of his square jaw. “Two years is a long time.”

For a split second she thought he might be trying to confess an indiscretion of his own, but there was none of that in his expression when he finally looked back at her. There was only sad resignation, as though he’d already decided the answer for himself.

Anger flared quickly, at him, at the situation, and she snapped, “I know exactly how long you were gone, Robert. Worse, thanks to exactly one stinking phone call, I knew you were alive and hiding out. Do you have any idea—” She broke off and gritted her teeth. “Never mind. We’ve been around this barn a few times already. I hate that you shut me out rather than trusting me to help, and you figure I should be grateful because everything you did was for my own good, to keep me safe. We’re at an impasse.”

They’d been at loggerheads for weeks now, ever since the first blush of their reunion had worn off. Worse, she wasn’t sure there was any way for them to get past this issue. He was a stubborn Brit and she wasn’t big on second chances in the absence of a damn good apology, which she had yet to hear.

“I thought you were dead when I first saw your office. I thought—” He broke off and looked away. “I wanted to kill the murdering sod who’d pulled the trigger, followed by the bloody bastard behind it all, and then myself, because I don’t want to live another day without you.”

Her heart turned over in her chest at the banked violence in his voice, at the raw grief that pressed up into her own throat, the desire to throw herself into his arms, forget the past and only look forward. But early in her life, when she’d lost her childhood to the foster system in the wake of her parents’ murders, she’d learned that wanting something wasn’t enough, especially in the absence of honesty and trust, so she hardened her heart and said, “Now you know how it feels not to know whether the person you love is alive or dead.”

“That’s not fair,” he said, lowering his voice to a growl when a trio of uniformed police officers emerged from the nearby elevator and headed for the crime scene.

“I know.” Evangeline took a step back, away from her husband. “You want things to be like they were before you left, but it doesn’t work that way. We’ve both changed. Hell, I ran your company.”

“Is that what this is about? Take the damn company. It’s yours, I don’t care, just so long as we can get past this and I can have my wife back. So I can have my life back.”

He cursed and dragged a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair, leaving it spiky. His torn, soiled clothes and disheveled hair made him look sexy and dangerous. Tempting.

Forcing herself to stand her ground, she shook her head. “It’s not about the company, Robert, it’s about you not trusting me and not letting me be an equal partner in our marriage.”

“I trust you,” he said, but they both knew his actions over the past two years said otherwise.

“Come on,” she said. “Ever since my name turned up on that list you’ve been trying to marginalize me.”

His eyes glinted with building fury. “I’m not marginalizing you, I’m protecting you, and if you don’t see the difference, you’re—” He clicked his teeth on whatever he’d been about to say, retreating behind the calm, cool facade she thought of as his spy face.

“I’m an FBI-trained agent who neither wants nor needs protection.” And here we are again, Evangeline thought. Back at that same old impasse. She was suddenly tired beyond words and her injured arm throbbed with the beat of her bruised heart. Tears stung her eyelids, a weakness she could ill-afford if she wanted to prove herself to the man who mattered most. Not wanting him to see, she turned away and headed for the stairs. “On that note, I’m going to speak with Ethan’s friend. If anything, her abduction says we’re not the only ones who think she saw whoever blew up the office.”

Evangeline started up the stairs, part of her foolishly hoping Robert would call her back. When he didn’t, a single tear broke free and tracked down her cheek.

WHEN NICOLE regained consciousness this time, she knew exactly where she was—back in her hospital room—and what had happened to her—some guy had grabbed her and tried to turn her into a Popsicle.

What the hell was going on?

She looked for Ethan before she could stop herself, before she could remind herself he’d wanted nothing to do with her or their baby.

Yes, he’d rescued her from the cold room, but then again he was a professional bodyguard; she’d learned that much from the Prescott Personal Securities Web site, along with the fact that he’d mustered out of the military a year or so before he’d joined PPS. A Google search had pulled up little else, which either meant he was relatively baggage-free, or that his baggage wasn’t the sort that made it onto the Web.

“And why the hell are you worrying about him when there are more important things going on?” She said the words aloud, partly for emphasis, partly to test her voice, which came out audible but scratchy.

Because, a small voice said inside her, guy problems are normal. Being nearly killed twice in one day isn’t.

“Do you talk to yourself often?” a female voice asked from the doorway.

Nic winced and turned her head in that direction, and was relieved to see Dr. Eballa rather than…well, just about anyone else who might’ve been there. At least the doctor was a neutral third party. Because of it, Nic dredged up a smile. “Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do. I just usually check to make sure I’m alone first.”

“I think we can forgive the lapse, given the day you’ve had.” The doctor crossed the room and touched her wrist in the same habitual move she’d used before, part reassurance, part pulse check. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired.” Nic emphasized the word with a jaw-cracking yawn. “Exhausted, in fact.”

“That’s not surprising. You should shut down for a bit and let the healing begin.”

Nic couldn’t keep the wistfulness out of her voice when she said, “Do I have to stay here?”

“As a matter of fact, no,” Dr. Eballa said, surprising her. “Medically, I’m willing to discharge you. But ethically, I need to be sure you’ll be safe.”

“I don’t know—” Nic began, but broke off when a small group appeared in the doorway of her hospital room, with Ethan in the lead.

He announced, “Miss Benedict will be under the protection of Prescott Personal Securities until her attacker has been apprehended.”

Nic narrowed her eyes at him. “I appreciate it, but I’m not a client.”

When Ethan didn’t answer, a fit-looking man in his late fifties stepped forward. His tattered clothes said he’d been in the PPS offices when the missile hit, and his air of authority indicated that he ranked. “I’m Robert Prescott, founder of PPS,” he said confirming her guess in a voice that held a faint English accent. He nodded to a blond woman in her late thirties, maybe early forties, who was wearing a sling and a faintly sulky expression. “My wife, Evangeline. You already know Ethan, and these other two are Detectives Riske and Montenegro.”

Nic wasn’t sure which detective was which: one was a dark-haired woman who walked with an aggressive swagger, the other an older black man with wise eyes and white-frosted hair beneath a Colorado Rockies baseball cap.

“Don’t worry, Miss Benedict,” Robert Prescott continued. “We’ll take care of everything. There’s no reason you should suffer because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.” His eyes searched her face. “We’re pretty sure that man grabbed you because you were in the elevator at the time of the attack. We’re hoping you might remember something that could lead us to the perpetrators.”

“I told Ethan before that I don’t remember anything about the first attack. I don’t even remember being in an elevator,” she said slowly. “But I can certainly describe the man who took me out of my room.”

Robert nodded. “Then we’ll start there.”

He stood so the female detective could have his chair. She sat and pulled out a small PDA, which she flipped open and activated with a few touches of a plastic stylus. Then she said, “Detective Shelia Riske, recording an interview with Miss Nicole Benedict.” She reeled off the date and location before she focused on Nic. “Miss Benedict, could you please walk us through what happened earlier today?”

Nic thought for a second, trying to line up her memories in some sort of coherent order. “Ethan had just left my room, and all I wanted to do was go home. I figured if I could make it to the bathroom on my own, I’d be able to convince the doc to spring me. I was halfway across the room when the door opened and a stranger came in…”

ONLY A sheer effort of willpower kept Ethan leaning against the wall as she described what had happened. He wanted to pace and growl, wanted to be out of the hospital, tracking the bastards who’d set their sights on PPS.

Before, he’d been only peripherally involved in the TCM matter. He’d been off on a string of bodyguard assignments during the first stages of the investigation, when Jack Sanders, Mike Lawson and Cameron Morgan, three of the best operatives PPS had in the field, had connected a string of murders to TCM, a mega company run by billionaire Stephen Turner. With Stephen married to Robert Prescott’s first wife, Olivia, and Robert’s estranged son, Kyle, working high up in the company, the ties between the conglomerate and Robert—who’d been presumed dead at the time—had seemed too strong for coincidence.

Still, it hadn’t really been Ethan’s problem. He worked for PPS because Evangeline had recruited him and the lifestyle was a good fit, but he was more of an independent contractor than part of the team. He’d stayed on the edges of the investigation, moving even further into the background when veteran PPS agent John Pinto and rookie Lily Clark brought Robert back from Cuerva Island, where he’d been hiding out and investigating his own death.

Robert returned with solid evidence that his ex-mentor and former business partner, Clive Fuentes, had tried to kill him because he’d gotten too close to one of the lucrative but highly illegal schemes Clive was running under the legitimate business operations at PPS. Robert’s investigation had also uncovered a link between Clive and the shell company used to broker the TCM oil-rights-leasing scheme that had led to the murders being investigated at PPS. Clive, however, had disappeared, leaving them unsure of whether he was involved in the attacks, or whether he’d been killed along with a half-dozen of the original oil-rights investors and Lenny, a PPS computer tech.

Lenny’s death had hit close to home, but even then Ethan had held himself apart, thinking it wasn’t his fight. Rationally, he knew it still wasn’t his fight, except that Nicole had been coming to see him when she’d gotten caught up in the danger. That made him responsible.

The child she carried made him doubly responsible, whether he liked it or not.

“Thanks,” Detective Riske said, warning him that he’d missed most of Nicole’s report. “I think we have what we need.” She saved her notes on her handheld and stood. “We’ll be in touch to schedule you with our sketch artist, and I’ll match your description to some head shots we’ve got on file. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

Judging from her tone, she wasn’t holding out too much hope on that, which Ethan had to second. So far, the PPS investigators hadn’t gotten any lucky breaks on this investigation. Each time it seemed like they were starting to make headway, things took a turn for the worse.

Detectives Riske and Montenegro exited, talking in the clipped shorthand of longtime partners. That left Ethan, Robert and Evangeline, along with the question of how to keep Nicole safe when every last PPS operative was needed in the field.

“We have a safe house,” Robert said, his thoughts clearly paralleling Ethan’s. “You can take Miss Benedict there for a few days. Maybe she’ll remember something we can use.”

“Call me Nicole, please,” Nicole said from the hospital bed. With deep purple shadows beneath her eyes and the faint smudge of a bruise on one cheek, she looked too lovely, too vulnerable to be caught up in something as ugly as the TCM mess.

Ethan was tempted to agree to the plan, tempted to hide her away in the safe house and stand guard. But that was emotion talking, not logic.

“You need me on the investigation, not holed up in the safe house,” he said flatly. He turned to Evangeline. “Take Nicole to the Vault with you. That way she’s safe, and you can run things underground while Robert and I—”

“Don’t even finish that statement,” Evangeline interrupted, eyes blazing. “And don’t think for one second that I’m staying in the Vault while you big, strong men fix everything. Two years ago, Clive Fuentes took the man I loved. I didn’t go after him then because I didn’t know who was behind it, since somebody—” her eyes flicked to Robert “—wanted to protect me by keeping me in the dark like some idiot child. But not this time. Not ever again. I’m going to be on the front lines of this one, and you two can go to hell.”





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