“You mean besides saving your life? That’s something we probably need to talk about. You want to settle in for a chat now or you want to get the hell out of here?”
By way of a reply, she shot him a withering look.
“Then let’s go.”
He headed toward the door as he spoke. Her hand moved to the controls, turning the chair to face the door, leaving Davenport and everything she thought she had known about him behind. The whirr of the motor sounded as loud as a jet engine to her ears, but she knew that was just because she was so on edge she was ready to jump out of her skin.
“You all set?” Weapon in hand, he stuck his head inside the dark sitting room and looked cautiously all around.
“Yes.” She rolled to join him.
“Kick that thing into high gear. We need to
move.
And stay close.”
He kept in front of her, his pistol at the ready, moving fast but cautiously toward the hall, glancing back to make sure she was keeping up. With one last disbelieving look at the open air panel that just minutes ago had been the front wall of Davenport’s office, Jess rolled into the thick, gray shadows of the sitting room, following Ryan as closely as she could.
That sense she’d had of someone behind her when she’d entered Davenport’s office—it almost certainly had to have been Ryan.
She’d already come close to dying tonight. That made it twice in a week. What was it they said about the third time being a charm?
“Can’t you speed that thing up?” Ryan frowned at her over his shoulder as they emerged into the relative brightness of the reception area.
“If I could, I would.”
They passed the reception desk. She rolled down the center hall, going as fast as she could, putting the pedal to the metal in wheelchair terms, while a fast walk was all that was required for Ryan to keep pace with her. The fact that Davenport was dead and had tried to kill her was more than Jess could take in for the moment. She did her best to push all thoughts of what had just occurred out of her head. Just getting out of there had to be her first priority. The dim lighting, the closed doors on either side, the enormous paintings with their abstract slashes of black—everything felt different now. Her workplace had suddenly become a place of fear. So had the rest of the world.
A bullet could come out of nowhere. . . .
“Security’s probably watching us right now.” It came out in a horrified exclamation as Jess suddenly remembered the building’s elaborate camera system. Heart in her throat, she searched wide-eyed for any cameras protruding from the ceiling.
“Davenport knew you were coming, right?”
“Yes.”
“Believe me, when somebody gets around to checking they’ll find the cameras up here aren’t working for some reason or another.”
Jess blinked.
Right.
Davenport would have made preparations. He had planned this. He had told her to come up here planning to kill her.
Davenport’s first shot had missed, but if they’d been alone, a second one almost certainly wouldn’t have, because after throwing herself out of the chair she had just run out of options. If it hadn’t been for the man striding along beside her, she would be dead right now. She looked up at him. He was eye candy as always, but that wasn’t what she cared about right then. His jaw was taut, his mouth grim. He scanned the area ahead of them with cold precision. He held the gun like he knew what to do with it, which of course he did. He looked like somebody who could be counted on to keep them both alive.
“I have a key to the private elevator,” she told him. “That’s how I came up.”
“The problem with elevators is that if anybody figures out you’re in one, they can trap you in it.”
As they reached the end of the hall, Jess was still digesting the mind-boggling thought that somebody might want to trap her in an elevator. Something, a sound, an instinct, pulled her gaze to the elevator bank with its gleaming brass doors. And the numbers above it. One was lit up. The car on the left was on the second floor, no, now the third. It was on its way up.
One look, and she thought her heart might leap right out of her chest.
“Ah, shit.” Ryan saw it, too. “Okay, stop.”
“What?”
He shoved his pistol into its holster and, when she didn’t immediately do what he told her, grabbed the handles at the back of her chair to stop her himself.
“This thing is too damned slow. We’ve got to
go.
Here, put your arms around my neck.”
Jess realized he meant to pick her up at just about the time he scooped her out of the chair. She barely managed to hang on to her purse as she was swung up into his arms.
“What? What are you doing?”
“Picking up the pace.”
He was already running with her, racing down the hall away from whoever was coming up on that elevator, heading toward the north end of the building, where she had come up in the private elevator. She wrapped her arms around his neck and held on for dear life. His arms were hard with muscle and strong around her, and he was carrying her in the most comfortable way possible for her, high and close against his chest as one would carry a cherished child. She guessed that he was mindful of her injury and didn’t want to hurt her, and she appreciated that.
Still, comfortable this was not. She was bouncing all over the place.
“If you don’t want to use the elevator, how do you suggest we get out of here?” she gasped out.
“The stairs.”
“Stairs?”
“Yep.”
“They’ll be here soon,” she warned. She knew from experience that the elevators in the building were fast.
“Figured.” He was running flat out, his hard-soled shoes pounding on the slick marble floor.
“They’ll see the wheelchair.”
“Can’t help it.”
Seconds later they had nearly reached the end of the long hall. It was a good distance from where whoever was coming up on the elevator would emerge but still within their sight if they looked left.
A tiny
ping
sounded in the distance.
“They’re here,” she whispered in a panic.
“Hang on.”
Another bound, and he skidded to a stop in front of the door marked EMERGENCY EXIT. Jess felt one arm shift as he grabbed the knob and jerked the metal door open. Then they were through, and he was holding her tight again. The narrow chute of steel-reinforced concrete had been designed to be fire- and blast-proof, but it looked surprisingly low-tech, beige walls and gray metal stairs with iron-bar railings. Jess could do nothing but hold on tight as Ryan clattered down the stairs with her.
“If you’re . . . heading toward the parking garage, you should know that there’s somebody down there . . . waiting for me. At street level. Near the private elevator, which means . . . near the building.” The ride had just gotten a whole lot rougher, which was why she was talking in bursts. Her grip on him tightened exponentially as her fear of falling or being dropped skyrocketed.
“Who?”
“Davenport’s secretary, Marian Young. She drove me here.” Jess suddenly felt sick. Had Marian known what Davenport intended? Maybe, but she didn’t think so. On the other hand, before tonight she would never have believed that Davenport might try to kill her, either.
“She alone?”
“She was when I left her.”
“Okay.”
His replies were clipped and brief for good reason. He was in great shape, there was no doubt about that. But she could feel his body heat increasing with each flight of stairs. By the time he burst out through another exit door onto the second floor of the parking garage, he was practically panting.
The scream of sirens hit her even before the door closed behind them, proof that the stairwell was soundproof as well as everything-else-proof. The flashing lights of some kind of an emergency vehicle burst through the large rectangular openings in the top half of the concrete walls to carom around the parking garage in disorienting bursts of blue. She could hear shouts, jumbled voices, the sounds of a crowd on the street just below.
That was good, right? Because there was safety in numbers, and all that?
But as far as she could tell, this level of the parking garage was deserted. If anybody wanted to attack them, this was the place. The walls were gray, the floor was gray, the high, concrete-beamed ceiling was gray. The lights set deep into the ceiling provided circles of distilled illumination in the areas directly below them and cast the rest of the vast space into shadow. Add in the revolving emergency lights, and it became almost mind-blowingly psychedelic. Jess thought they were alone, that no one was following them, but given the constantly changing nature of their surroundings, it was impossible to be sure.
“Do you have a car?” Her narrowed eyes continually scanned the shadows behind him, just in case.
“Across the street.”
She realized that he was heading toward the door at the far end of the garage. One flight down, and another door just like it would open onto Connecticut Avenue, at the opposite end of the garage from where Marian was parked. Jess felt a quick welling of pity as she pictured the other woman waiting in her car for Jess to reappear, with no idea that her world had just been smashed to smithereens. Marian would be sick with grief when she found out that Davenport was dead.
Ryan pulled open another door, and then they were in another stairwell, going down.
When he reached the bottom one short flight later, he pushed open the door. They had to cover only a few more yards through a shadowy corner of the garage before exiting through the door out into the street.
“Maybe we should go tell Marian what happened.” She spoke practically in his ear, her voice hushed.
“Yeah. No.”
He said it like that was that. Like it was entirely his decision to make. Which, since he was the legs of the operation at the moment, she guessed it was.
Her eyes straining through the darkness, she searched for Marian’s car. There were a couple of others, parked and left for the night or however long—but, yes, there it was, right where Jess had gotten out, waiting beneath the neon elevator sign which shed just the tiniest amount of light on the Volvo’s navy blue roof. All the lights inside and outside the car were off, but the elevator light above illuminated the interior just a little bit. Jess frowned. She couldn’t see Marian. In fact, if Jess hadn’t known better, she would have sworn the car was empty.
She was still craning her neck toward it when Ryan shouldered through the door to the street.
They emerged into a growing, jostling crowd, with people packed together on the sidewalk. Most people were barely moving. They were gawking. At something lying in the street.
Jess felt her stomach turn inside out. She couldn’t see anything, which was probably a good thing, but she knew what they had to be looking at. Multiple sirens, most still at a distance, filled the air, drowning out the noise of the crowd. About five blocks down, Jess saw the flashing lights of an ambulance as it fought to reach the scene.
“You can put me down now. I couldn’t manage the stairs, but this is flat,” she whispered in Ryan’s ear. Her voice took on an urgent undertone as she noticed a few glances directed their way. “We’re starting to attract attention.”
Ryan grunted in acknowledgment and set her on her feet, keeping a hard arm around her waist for support. Her legs felt rubbery, but she gritted her teeth and wrapped her arm around him and started walking when he did, responding to his assessing glance with a nod that said she was all right. Using his shoulder as a buffer, taking her with him, he wove through the crowd clogging the sidewalk with single-minded purpose. Against her body, she could feel the solid strength and heat of him.
“Duck your face down. I don’t want anybody getting a good look at you.”
Of course. She’d been plastered all over TV. People might recognize her. She had forgotten that. It occurred to Jess in a lightning burst of awareness that if she still harbored any doubts about Ryan and his intentions toward her, this was her moment to scream some variation of “This man is not my daddy!” and enlist the power of the many people surrounding them to get away.
The question boiled down to this: Was she safer with him or without him?
On the negative side, he was a Secret Service agent. And she was pretty sure he’d lied about having tests done on her IV.
But then he’d saved her life tonight, and in the hospital. He was a trained protection officer with a gun.
She was pretty sure he didn’t want to kill her, or want anyone else to kill her. Otherwise, she’d be dead.
So she was going with,
with
.
Shaking her head so that her hair covered most of her face, she lowered her head so that she was looking at the ground.
“Careful of the curb,” he warned in an undertone.
Then they stepped off the sidewalk and into the street, heading, she assumed, toward wherever he had left his car, dodging the vehicles that were still trying to force their way past and that would occasionally shoot free of the congestion like a cork from a champagne bottle.
The view was better as they crossed the street, because the bulk of the crowd stayed on the sidewalk. For the moment only a single police car was on the scene. The two officers were out of the car. One was trying single-handedly to redirect the honking traffic that was already backed up for blocks. The other was standing in the street, looking down.
Jess couldn’t help it. She followed his gaze. She caught just a glimpse of black dress pants and a white shirt, realized that it was Davenport lying sprawled on his stomach on the pavement, felt the gorge rise in her throat, and hastily looked away.
She was suddenly breathing hard. Her pulse pounded in her ears. She felt light-headed, woozy—and then she saw Marian.
Unmistakable with her upswept hair and gray suit, the woman burst through the crowd about two hundred feet away.