Into the Crossfire

  It was a quarter to nine—rush hour was long over. Traffic would be light, she could make it into her office in less than twenty minutes.

  Just the thought of her office, so pretty, so ordered, so silent, with no demands on her other than work, calmed her. She had a Pavlovian response in her office, focusing on work immediately with no outside distractions.

  Four or five hours’ solid work there would more than make up for the lost day. She suddenly yearned for the cool calm of her office the way a desert straggler yearned for water.

  She was in the car, pulling away from the curb, before she realized that something was missing. That slight edgy feeling in her gut that Creepy and Creepier would come out and harass her.

  But nobody had. The two seemed to live to watch her come and go from her house but tonight there was silence.

  Thanks to Mike.

  Thanks to Sam.

  Whoa.

  No, no. She’d done way too much thinking about Sam. Tomorrow she’d have to face him, make some kind of decision about him, but today she was going in circles and had to stop.

  Don’t think about Sam. Her new mantra.

  The next few hours had to be about the job. She resolutely focused on what needed to be done as she drove into town, making good time on the almost-empty roads. She had mentally drafted her to-do list, sifted through priorities and decided which translation went to whom, by the time she pulled into her slot in the underground garage.

  Being good at her job, making Wordsmith a success, had a direct bearing on her father’s well-being. She had to remember that. Stay focused.

  As always, she enjoyed the ride up in the elevator. It was usually full in the mornings and evenings as the building filled up and emptied out. Tonight it was empty, a big, wood-and-brass cube with bronze internal doors so polished they were as reflective as mirrors.

  She looked at herself and winced as the elevator smoothly rose. Thank God it wasn’t office hours. She made such a point about meticulous grooming on the job, it was a good thing no one saw her. Hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, no makeup, jeans, a white shirt and flats. She looked at her face reflected in the doors. She looked tired and worried. Which was as it should be, because she was tired and worried.

  The elevator whooshed to a stop and pinged as the doors opened. She walked down the corridor, itching to get to work. The evening cleanup crew hadn’t arrived yet. The flower arrangements were drooping; there was a streak on the floor where someone had dragged something heavy.

  Tomorrow morning it would be pristine. Nicole loved that, that there was something in her life that someone else took care of.

  She stopped in front of her door, in the middle of the corridor. Though she ached to reach the sanctuary of her office, she instinctively turned left, as if compelled by a powerful magnet.

  She stood before a door exactly like her own except that the little shiny brass plaque read Reston Security instead of Wordsmith.

  Nicole reached out a hand to touch the cool, smooth wood.

  Sam’s office. Tomorrow morning he would be behind this door.

  She’d ring the doorbell and he’d open the door and…what? The next few minutes were a complete and utter blank in her mind. What would she say? Sorry?

  Sorry, Sam, I just freaked. Couldn’t deal with you at all.

  Would he forgive her?

  She was so tired. Not just from last night and today. She was tired from wrestling with her problems day in, day out. So tired some barriers in her mind were coming down, crumbling to the floor, leaving her naked and raw and defenseless.

  She stood, head bowed, hand on the door for a few minutes, coming to terms with the fact that she was looking forward to seeing Sam Reston again tomorrow. To absorbing some of the heat and strength that he seemed so happy to share with her.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow something might change in her life. But for tonight, she had work to do.

  Feeling somehow better, Nicole turned back to her own door, fit her key in the lock and pushed it, feeling for the light switch as the door swung closed behind her.

  Suddenly, hands grabbed her, slammed her against the wall so brutally it knocked the breath out of her. A cold steel circle ground so hard against her temple, the skin broke. A drop of blood slid down her cheek, dripped off her chin.

  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see.

  A puff of breath against her ear and a low, vicious voice. “Scream, and I’ll blow your head off.”

  Chapter 9

  Sam knew it was stupid staying late in the office when he wasn’t getting any work done and he had a perfectly good home to go to. But the thought of walking into his house without Nicole, without having spoken to her, made his stomach clench. Would the house still smell of her? The sheets would. God, he’d ground her into his sheets. They would smell of her and taste of her. Shit, if he went home without her, he’d just wander around his living room with a sad boner and nowhere to go with it.

  He had to go home sometime, though. Harry and Mike were keeping tabs on him. If he was still here at midnight, they’d come to take him away, probably to some bar somewhere to get him drunk, then they’d get him home.

  It was a thought. Getting shit-faced, oh yeah. Maybe pick up someone in the bar, fuck her, start getting Nicole out of his head.

  Nope, that wouldn’t work. The thought had no appeal at all. Zero.

  Jesus, this was scary shit. His cock hadn’t even stirred at the thought of fucking another woman. If anything, it shriveled, balls curling up into his groin. If his dick could talk it’d tell him only Nicole would do, which was bad juju, since the lady wasn’t talking to him.

  He’d finally stopped calling her office and her home around midday, when she’d taken her phone off the hook. Cell phone still off, so he was stymied.

  Mike had reported back on his mission to put the fear of God into those two scumbags but he’d been annoyingly close-mouthed about Nicole. When Sam had asked him how Nicole looked, he’d answered, “Beautiful.”

  Yeah, thanks Mike. If there was one thing Sam knew in the world, it was that Nicole Pearce was beautiful.

  Mike also said that Nicole loved her father very much.

  After that, Mike just zipped it, leaving Sam hanging.

  Sam sat behind his big desk, a big, fat, shiny success symbol that went nicely with the big, fat, shiny success symbol that was his office, and contemplated this huge curveball life had thrown at him.

  Ever since his eighteenth birthday, when no one had any legal power over him anymore, he’d gotten everything he wanted out of life. It hadn’t been easy, fuck no, especially becoming a SEAL, but by Christ, if he set his mind to it, if hard work and intelligence and perseverance could get it, it was his.

  He’d never failed a mission he set for himself.

  Except right now, when failure was staring him in the face. He’d rarely wanted anything in his life the way he wanted Nicole, but she’d slid right out of his grasp, and he didn’t have the faintest idea what it would take to get her back.

  He was dying, here. Just sinking down into some black hole, with no clue to where a handhold would be.

  Sam sank further into his extremely comfortable, $6,000 designer chair he’d been embarrassed to buy but the decorator had insisted on.

  Fuck. He was whining. Good thing Mike and Harry couldn’t see him now, because they’d knock all this self-pity right out of him.

  But the thing was, in every mission he’d ever had, he knew exactly what it would take to get what he wanted. Hard work and willpower usually, things he was capable of in spades.

  But Nicole wasn’t graduating BUD/S or surviving a firefight or founding a company. She was a woman, with a woman’s totally unfathomable heart, and Sam simply couldn’t see his way clear here. It was like being lost in a fog.

  He second-guessed every move. Call, not call? Well, that was blown out of the water when he spent all morning punching out her home number.

  That hadn’t worked well.

/>   What would she want? What would help?

  Send flowers? What kind? He’d read somewhere while waiting in a barbershop that roses were over. No one wanted roses, they showed that a man had no imagination. So, fuck, what else was there? He racked his brain for other flowers and all he came up with was daisies. Weren’t daisies associated with death?

  Christ, he didn’t recognize himself. This wasn’t him. He was…dithering. Sam Reston, dithering. He didn’t do dither. He did action.

  Only not tonight, he thought with a sigh. Showing up on her doorstep would just alienate her, not to mention the fact that her dad was really sick and Sam might disturb him if he was sleeping. Man, he’d never seen anyone look the way her dad did, ready to step over the threshold of death at any moment. Sam had seen death before, but usually it came in the form of a bullet, shattering a healthy young body.

  No, if Nicole’s dad was sleeping, or had taken a turn for the worse, she wouldn’t appreciate his ringing her doorbell. If there was one thing that had been made real real clear to him, pounded into his thick skull, it was that Nicole loved her father and had made him her top priority, and that wasn’t going to change.

  It was a real pity that it only made him admire her even more.

  Jesus. Maybe it would be a good idea to go back to Plan A, getting shit-faced with his brothers.

  Yeah, that would—

  Sam froze. He had a bank of monitors on the short side of his L-shaped desk, one showing the corridor outside his door. It had gone blank about an hour and a half ago, and he’d made a mental note to have it fixed, toot sweet, as Nicole would say.

  The monitor showed Nicole, right outside his door. Looking troubled and tired and unbearably beautiful. Long, slender hand outstretched, touching his door.

  That’s right, honey, he thought, rising. Oh yeah. Knock on my door and walk straight into my arms and we can pick up where we left off.

  She stood, clearly tempted, but then she turned around and he lost her. She’d gone into her own office.

  Shit.

  Well, she was here. He wasn’t going to have to wait till tomorrow to see her. Whatever was going on inside that complicated, beautiful head of hers, he’d find out in the next five minutes.

  Sam shut down the office and walked across the hallway.

  He was about to ring the bell next to the door when he stopped, frozen.

  Oh Christ.

  He could hear a man’s deep rumble, though he couldn’t make out the words. Shit! Of all the scenarios he’d run through his head, the fact that she was seeing someone else simply hadn’t occurred to him. But if she was going out with someone else, then why the fuck had she accepted his invitation to dinner? Gone to bed with him?

  He turned his head, good ear towards the door. Oh yeah. That was a man’s voice. Unmistakeable. He stood there, as if someone had encased him in cement, trying to process this thought. Nicole was with another man.

  Then he heard a high-pitched cry of pain and Sam forgot every ounce of training, every second of experience he’d had as a soldier. It had been drilled into his hard head by men with equally hard heads, over and over again, that you do not go blind into a battle situation. Ever. Any instructor would have had his ass if he’d done in training what he now did.

  If he’d been able to use his brain to think instead of being instantly filled with terror at the nightmarish image of Nicole being hurt he’d have gone back into his office, where he had a shitload of weapons in his gun locker, picked up his Glock 19, checked to see the load, get a pair of restraints in case he didn’t kill the fucker, used his thermal imager so he’d know where Nicole was, and make a dynamic entry.

  He’d have taken a few seconds to run through the scenario in his mind and it would have gone smooth as shit through a goose, something he’d done a thousand times before, though never on his own, without a team by his side.

  There’d been only one male voice, and Sam would pit himself against any man alive in combat.

  Training said to wait and to go in prepared and with the right gear.

  But the hell with training. No one knew better than Sam how much damage an angry man could do to a woman in just a minute. Broken arms, broken jaws, a punch so hard it reduced the liver to pulp…he’d seen it all in his childhood.

  He’d touched every inch of Nicole last night and though she was toned and sleek, she didn’t have the muscles of someone who knew self-defense. She was helpless.

  Nicole cried out in pain again and Sam operated out of pure, wrenching terror, picking the lock in a second and launching himself into the room and, oh Christ, it was his worst nightmare.

  A man in tactical gear, holding a gun against Nicole’s head, one arm around her throat. They both turned, and Sam would never, ever forget the look on Nicole’s face. She’d been struggling in despair and when she saw him her face simply lit up, with joy and hope. Blood dripped from where the muzzle broke the skin of her temple.

  “Sam!” she choked and moved instinctively toward him, only to be caught up short by the man holding her.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” the man growled, tightening his arm. “Stop right there,” he said to Sam and Sam stopped. Fuck fuck fuck! They were against the wall, with Nicole’s desk between them. There was no way Sam could rush him. The man was holding a Kimber 1911, safety off, finger in the trigger guard. He looked like he knew how to use the gun. And he looked like he would use it in a heartbeat.

  “Who the fuck are you?” The man tightened his left arm even more around Nicole’s throat, caught inside his elbow. Sam could hear her struggling for breath. It was a hold he knew and he tried not to let panic overwhelm him because it was a hold a trained man could use to snap her neck in a second. A lift of the forearm, a push to the left from the gun hand and the delicate bones in the neck would snap. It was a hold Sam had used. On men who dropped lifelessly to the ground.

  Terror iced his veins. This was no casual thief he could maybe trick. This was an operator. Sam circled to the left, but the man kept something between them—the desk, a client chair.

  The man shook Nicole. “I said, who are you? Tell me or her brain will be decorating this pretty desk.”

  Jesus. Sam knew exactly what a bullet through the head looked like. He had to exercise all his self-control not to visualize Nicole, red mist where her head used to be, collapsing to the floor.

  Time. She needed time. He held his hands up. Look, no weapons. Christ, it was true. Not even a fucking knife. “Sam Reston,” he said.

  “Reston, huh.” He shook Nicole a little. “Stay still, bitch.” The man’s dark gaze sharpened. “The guy with the office across the way?”

  Sam nodded, eyes never leaving his. Nicole was fixed on him, eyes pleading, but Sam didn’t dare even look at her. Every cell in his body was focused on the man, watching his every movement. All Sam needed was the barest chance, even a second’s drop in attention.

  But this guy was good. He moved carefully, completely unmindful of the fact that he held a desperately wriggling woman in his arms. He was circling toward the door, dragging Nicole.

  Her chest was bellowing in a useless attempt to pull in air. Her lips were turning blue.

  “You’re choking her.” Sam kept his voice low and even, watching the man’s eyes. “Ease up a little.”

  The man didn’t even answer. He jerked his head toward the back wall. “Get over there behind the desk. Sit down and put your hands on the desk.”

  Sam hesitated. Nicole’s eyes were starting to roll up in her head. Maybe he should just launch himself at the fucker, see what happened. Nicole was going to be dead in a few minutes, anyway, if he continued choking her. Maybe the fuckhead would switch the gun to the big guy rushing him and away from the woman. If he didn’t get off a head shot, maybe Sam could take the bullet and live long enough to snap the fucker’s neck…

  “Now!”

  Except maybe the intruder would go for a head shot. The guy could drop him in a second and then Nicole would be at h
is mercy. As long as Sam was alive, she had a chance. He moved to the chair and sat.

  “Hands on the desk. Palms down, fingers spread.”

  Jesus. Sam didn’t even have a knife. He was good with a knife, almost better than with a gun. He could have his K-bar through this guy’s eye and into his cortex in a half second, dropping him dead so fast that the instruction to his trigger finger to fire a bullet into Nicole’s head would never make it past the first synapse.

  But he was weaponless. His hands and feet were weapons but he had to get to the man first and right now, that was impossible.

  The intruder was moving toward the door, dragging Nicole with him. Her wheezes sounded painfully loud in the silence of the room. Her feet scrabbled for purchase, heels drumming against the guy’s ankles. He didn’t even flinch. Sam dropped his eyes to the man’s feet. He was wearing combat boots. Nicole was trying to kick him, hurt him, and he wasn’t even feeling it.

  Nice try, honey. She was nearly passed out from lack of oxygen and she was still fighting.

  The two had reached the door. The guy was going to try to escape with Nicole, but he wasn’t going to get far, dragging a woman kicking and screaming. Sam would catch up with him soon enough, it would be…

  Sam was mentally reviewing his options, none of them good, when the man loosened his arm from around Nicole’s throat, picked her up bodily and hurled her across the room, straight at the big plate-glass windows of her office on the ninth floor.

  “Honey, honey, stay awake. Don’t go away again, that’s a good girl. Look at me now. That’s right, open those beautiful blue eyes.”

  Strong fingers, tapping at her cheek. Annoying. It was really annoying, when all she wanted to do was sleep. Some small memory in the back of her head told her she’d been drifting in and out of consciousness.

  She was on her back, head in someone’s lap. Someone she knew…

  Another tap and her eyes opened. Strong features, face drawn, deep brackets around his mouth.