All That He Loves (Volume 2 The Billionaires Seduction) (36 page)

There was the sound of footsteps running somewhere behind me. Johnny put his arms around me and pulled me forcibly away. “Lily, get back, they need to get to him – ”

“Connor – is he alright?! Connor – oh my God!”

It wasn’t anything about Connor that caused that last statement.

It was the bright red spray of blood along the corridor walls, fifteen feet away.

As Johnny pulled me back and two men in EMT uniforms descended on Connor, I saw a body lying on the hallway floor. I couldn’t see more than his feet and legs, but I knew instantly it was the server, the man with the gun and the silver tray I had seen just seconds before.

He was dead. Even without seeing the upper half of his body, there was no other explanation for how still he lay, or how his legs had fallen in such an unnatural, contorted position.

“Don’t look,” Johnny whispered in my ear, his voice anguished. “Don’t look.”

“What happened to Connor?” I cried. “What happened to – ”

“Shhh,” Johnny whispered. “He’s going to be okay, he’s going to be okay.”

One of the EMTs glanced back at Johnny. “Where’s he hit? I don’t see anything.”

“Lower to mid back, left of the spine,” Johnny snapped.

“There’s no blood – ”

“He had on a bulletproof vest.”

A bulletproof vest?!

I had no idea exactly what one looked like, but I sure as hell hadn’t seen anything that would remotely qualify.

“Get him on,” the EMT ordered to his partner. “Moving him on one, two, three – ”

They rolled and hoisted him onto the stretcher they had brought.

Meanwhile, a crowd had gathered. Twenty feet away, men in suits and earpieces had blocked off the corridor and were holding back other people, one of whom was struggling to get through.

“Let go of me!” Sebastian cried out in anguish. “Johnny?! Lily?!”

“Let him through, let him through!” Johnny called out.

Sebastian burst through the line of security men, and as his eyes fell on Connor, his face went ashen grey. “Oh my God,” he choked out.

“Sebastian – Sebastian!” Johnny yelled, jerking Sebastian back to reality. “Help me get Lily up on her feet!”

Sebastian raced over and grabbed one of my arms, and he and Johnny hoisted me to my feet as I continued to stare at Connor. He looked so silent and still on the stretcher, his face completely blank, his eyes closed like he was sleeping.

“He saved me,” I said quietly, still in shock – and then I broke down sobbing. “He saved me, he saved my life – ”

“You saved him, too,” Johnny said. “If you hadn’t yelled when you saw the gun, we would’ve all been dead.”

The EMTs were bracing Connor’s neck, and then they were lifting his stretcher into the air. They started down the hallway, away from the crowd.

“Take Lily, I’ve got to go with him,” Johnny ordered as he handed me off to Sebastian.

“I want to go,” I sobbed. “Johnny, please – ”

“There’s no room, I’ve got to go with him in case – ”

Johnny paused, and looked stricken.

“ – in case they try again.”

“GO!” Sebastian yelled at him. “We’ll meet you at – where, Westside General?”

“Yeah,” Johnny nodded, and then tore off after the medics.

In less than ten seconds they burst through a pair of double doors and disappeared.

I turned my head against Sebastian’s chest and sobbed.

“We have to go,” he said, his voice feeble and weak. “We have to go now…”

“What about the police?” one of the security men called out. “They’re going to be here any – ”

“Tell them we’ll be at the hospital,” Sebastian barked, suddenly back in control. “You two, come with me and get us outside!”

With two of the security men acting as shields, Sebastian led me out of the hallway, out towards the lobby and into the crowds of people standing around jabbering and straining to see what had happened.

By the time Sebastian and I were through the lobby, my head had cleared somewhat.

Connor had been shot, but I hadn’t seen any blood anywhere on him – which had to be good.

But he was unconscious, which was bad.
How
bad, I didn’t know.

The gunman was dead, apparently killed by Johnny.

And now we were on our way to the closest hospital – and one of the most respected ones in all of Los Angeles.

“God, my car’s down in valet,” Sebastian muttered as we stumbled through the lobby, his arm around me. I hadn’t seen him cry back in the hallway, but his eyes were red and his cheeks were streaked with tears. I immediately wanted to hug him and tell him that it was going to be okay…

…but I didn’t know that myself.

“We’re never going to be able to get out of here, not with the cops showing up – damn it – ”

“Todd,” I said, remembering the name like a detail out of a dream.

“Todd?”

“My limo driver… the one you hired,” I said, and pulled the business card out of my clutch purse. “I told him to go get food… he might be out on Sunset somewhere.”

“Thank God,” Sebastian said as he pulled out his cell and dialed the number on the card. “Todd? You drove Lily Ross earlier – where are you? Good,
excellent.
Meet us at the corner of Sunset and – I don’t know, a couple of streets west of the Dubai, stay on the phone and tell me where you are, we’ll come find
you.
”

Sebastian and I stumbled out of the Dubai into the darkness just as the cop cars came roaring up in front of the hotel, sirens blasting. The limos and Lamborghinis and Bentleys were still so thick in the valet area that a couple of the police cruisers drove up on the sidewalk.

Sebastian and I escaped through the crowds and hobbled up Sunset until we saw a black limo waiting on a side street, with Todd standing by the rear door.

When he saw our faces, he knew something was horribly wrong. “What happened?”

“Never mind! Do you know where Westside General Hospital is?”

“Yes.”

“Get us there ASAP – go!”

The limo tore down La Cienega Boulevard, barely stopping for red lights.

“What happened?” Sebastian asked as we sat in the back facing each other.

I told him about the elevator ride down and Johnny greeting us. How, as Connor stood with his back to the hallway, I had seen the gun and screamed –

“It’s my fault,” I said, breaking down into tears again.

“How can it possibly be your fault?” Sebastian asked.

“I-if we h-hadn’t been on the elevator… if I h-hadn’t made him take me up to the p-penthouse – ”

“Then he’d probably be dead,” Sebastian said matter-of-factly.

I looked up at him in horror.

“I saw the shooter’s body,” Sebastian said, now calm and in control of himself. “And I saw the gun. There was a silencer on it. He was in a Dubai uniform. Somehow he managed to get past security, which means he had everything planned out ahead of time, or there’s someone on the inside who got him in. Not only that, he knew
exactly
when to target Connor. He wasn’t in that hallway by accident, not at that precise moment. Lily, this was a professional hit. He was there to kill Connor, and he would have taken the best opportunity that presented itself. If it hadn’t been in the hallway, it would have been somewhere else, sometime this evening. You might have saved Connor’s life just by being there tonight. You never know.”

I just shook my head miserably. I appreciated him saying it, but I felt such overwhelming guilt. If I hadn’t lured him away from the crowd… if I hadn’t put him in such a vulnerable position…

“How did the ambulance guys get to him so fast?”

“We always have an ambulance stand by at events like this. Just in case.”

Just in case somebody gets shot?
I almost asked, but I didn’t want to speak the words aloud.

Then I remembered that it hadn’t looked like Connor had been shot at all. “Why wasn’t there any blood on him?”

Sebastian leaned back and rubbed his face with one hand. “Thank God for that, at least. Two months ago, after you… um, left, Johnny kept after him over and over to wear a bulletproof jacket out in public. He’d always resisted it up until then, but he was so morose and out of it that he agreed to whatever just to get Johnny off his back. Johnny called around and got some sort of new prototype that could be sewn into other clothes. We got Armani to outfit a new batch of suits with the prototype incorporated into the jackets and vests… and they did the tux, too, thank God.”

Suddenly I remembered when I had handled Connor’s jacket – both when I had pulled it off him, and later picked it up off the floor. How strangely heavy it had seemed. Now it made sense.

“So he’s okay?!” I asked, joy and dread wrestling inside me – because I had seen him unconscious. He obviously
hadn’t
been okay.

“I don’t know,” Sebastian said, struggling to remain calm. “It was a prototype… and Johnny told me it’s not like in the movies, that people don’t just take a bullet and walk away. The jacket probably stopped it from entering his body, but he might have had internal damage… I just don’t know. We have to wait and see at the hospital. But if he hadn’t had that jacket on…”

I trembled in my limo seat.

If he hadn’t put it on…

If he had instead walked out of the penthouse with it casually slung over his arm…

Things were bad enough now; the possibility of what
might
have happened was too terrible to contemplate.

“Why did he do it?”

“Who, Connor?”

“No, the guy with the gun. …why?”

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed grimly. “He was paid, that’s why.”

“What, for a suicide mission?!”

“No. He made a mistake in shooting Connor first. You saw the gun, that’s what screwed him. My guess is, once you yelled, he was just a little bit slower on the draw than Johnny. If he’d gone for Johnny first, though – ”

Sebastian didn’t finish.

My stomach turned at the thought of how things might have gone differently.

“But who hired him? Do you think it was that guy who came up to me at the pool, that first weekend at the Dubai?”

“I doubt it.”

“So who?”

“I’ll give you one guess.”

“…his parents?!”

“No, although that’s a good second choice.”

“Miranda?! You think
Miranda
did this?”

“That’s where I’m putting
my
bet.”

“That’s insane!”

“To think she would do it, or for her to
actually
do it?”

I struggled with that. Miranda Lockwood had tried to ruin my life. She’d publicly humiliated me on national television. She’d blackmailed Connor, using me as a bargaining chip. She’d also lied about it all to the press. And indirectly, she’d almost destroyed my relationship with him.

But murder?

No matter how much of a sociopathic bitch I thought she was, I found it hard to believe a woman worth hundreds of millions of dollars, who had everything that Miranda did, would even consider something so…
evil
as a murder-for-hire of her ex-fiancé.

Then I remembered the look she had given me in the lobby of the Dubai, and I shivered.

“Although you can be sure of one thing,” Sebastian continued. “If Miranda
is
behind it, we’ll never find one shred of evidence implicating her.”

Todd the limo driver was pretty damn good. Even without a siren and flashing lights, he got to the hospital just as the EMTs were unloading Connor’s stretcher outside the Emergency Room.

The limo screeched to a halt and Sebastian and I jumped out. Johnny was already on the sidewalk as the EMTs released the legs and turned the stretcher into an instant gurney.

“Johnny, is he okay?!” I cried out as Sebastian and I ran across the sidewalk.

And then I heard the most beautiful sound ever:

Connor’s voice, even though it was more like a croak.

“…Lily…?”

I rushed up beside him and burst into tears. He looked blearily up at me and grasped for my hand. I grabbed it and ran beside him as the EMTs rushed him inside.

“…are you okay?...”

“Yes, yes,” I sobbed.

“…are you sure?...”

“
You’re
the one who got shot!”

“…I got shot?”

“Just a little bit,” Sebastian said drily.

Connor looked up at Johnny. “…don’t I pay you so that doesn’t happen?...”

I glanced over at Johnny and saw the guilt on his face.

Connor saw it, too. “…kidding,
kidding…
Jesus, lighten up…”

“Not funny,” I scolded him.

“…
I
thought it was,” he said, then turned back to Johnny. “…you got him, though, right?”

“Yes,” Johnny said grimly.

“…dead?”

“Yes.”

Connor pointed at him playfully
.
“…see,
that’s
what I pay you for…”

“How can you joke?! You almost got killed!” I sobbed.

“…naaah, I just got my girlfriend back… it’d take a whole lot more than one asshole with a popgun to take me out of the game now…”

I stared down at him, my lower lip trembling.

I just got my girlfriend back.

I clasped his hand tightly in mine.

He just smiled at me and winked.

Then one of the wheels hit some sort of a bump in the floor, jarring the gurney.

Connor immediately winced
hard,
like somebody had punched him. “OW… guys, careful…”

“Sorry,” one of the EMTs said, then looked at me. “Ma’am, you need to step back, we’re going to hand him over to the doctors now.”

I looked up. Sure enough, two men and a woman in scrubs were racing out of a pair of sliding glass doors. Immediately they started yelling, and the EMTs began reciting jargon right out of the TV show
E.R.

“Male, 29, gunshot, lumbar region, bulletproof vest non-penetrating, non-critical, probable concussion, possible internal bleeding – ”

“Trauma two – stand back, ma’am, you can’t come back in here – ”

“BP’s 95 over 60 – ”

“Pulse ox 99, stable – ”