Books by Maggie Shayne (3 page)

"Someone's upstairs, hmm? Who, Alexandra? Your father?"

Maggie $hayne She shook her head but averted her eyes. She was breathing too fast.

Not from agitation. Something else. Her chest rose and fell harder, faster than it should have, and each time it did, her small, unbound breasts pressed themselves to the fabric that covered them, making perfect outlines in the cloth.

A sound came from upstairs then and her eyes told him it shouldn't have.

When had he seen a face express every thought the way this one did?

Something wasn't right in this house.

He yanked the gqn from his waistband automatically. When she saw it, her gasping got worse. She pressed her hands to her chest, whirling and running right out of the front room through the huge, dark archway before he could stop her. He hadn't expected it, and something, instinct maybe, made him hesitate before going after her.

He saw where the broad staircase began, saw her stop at the base of it, snatching a bottle of some sort from a stand there, bringing it to her lips as she fought to breathe, and then sucking loud bursts of medicine from the thing.

She bowed her head, apparently exhausted, apparently waiting for relief to come. Asthma? he wondered. She stepped around the staircase, just out of his line of vision. And the second she was out of his sight, he heard her scream.

It was a pathetic, frightened wail, punctuated by harsh gasps. Torch ducked to one side of the doorway, peering around it, straining his eyes.

She stepped into sight again; a white angel appearing in the darkened room, whimpering in fear, but it had little effect on the brute who held a gun barrel so tight against her temple that it was likely biting into her skin. His arm crushed her breasts and held her back tight to his chest.

A low growl came from Toreh's right, and he jerked his gaze around, only to see a black cat the size of a mountain lion arching its back and hissing. Then it scrambled away, disappearing under the sofa.

 
Torch cussed mentally, bringing his attention back where it belonged.

Alexandra Holt's eyes were rounder than ever. The guy who held her so cruelly was dressed all in black, almost invisible in the darkened room, and h apparently wasn't aware of Torch's presence. Experience and caution had caused Torch to park his heap. a little farther down the dirt track than that van so they wouldn't have seen that, either.

And he had no doubt it was "they" and not just "he." Because this wasn't Scorpion. This man was too short, his build too slight. This was one of Scorpion's henchmen, and while their boss worked alone, his thugs worked in bunches.

Torch sidled his way to the front door and slipped through it, unseen, into the night.

Alexandra clung to her inhaler. Her attack was easing now, thanks to the spurt of medicine she'd inhaled before he'd grabbed her, but she had no doubt this kind of fear would instigate a relapse before tong Damn her asthma! She might have managed to get away if she hadn't been weak and dizzy from the attack. Father had always called it a weakness, always told her it would keep her from amounting to anything. And it had. The frequent illnesses and hospitalizations had made her miss too much school. Her grades had fallen, and kept her from getting into what Father considered a good uni~versity. Now the damned condition might just help get her killed by madmen in her own home.

She was afraid, so afraid she felt sick and dizzy. She had no idea what was going on, why these people were treating her this way. The man's grip was too tight on her, crushing her chest. The gun barrel pressed painfully against her skin. Her eyes scanned the room for Max. Her poor eat would be terrified by all this disruption. He was probably hiding, likely scared half to death.

"Where is your father?" the madman rasped into her ear. His voice carried a cadence she couldn't place. When she didn't answer instantly, the gun barrel drove harder into the side of her head, breaking the skin, and she cried out. "Where is he!"

"I don't" -- "Is he here, in this house?"

"I don't know what you're" -- The barrel embedded deeper. She felt white-hot pain, and warm blood trickling down the side of her face.

"No!" She screamed the word.

"Not here!"

The pressure eased a little. Maybe now he'd leave, go search for her father somewhere else. What did he want with him? Why was this happening?

Someone might be after me, Alexandra.

No. Her father had been delusional, sick, when he'd said-The man shoved her through the archway, into the front room, to the door. She tripped over Max, and he let out a howl before Streaking out of- the room to hide. She stumbled on the rag, but couldn't fall down. The madman's grip on her was too tight for that.

"You will take us to him, then," he said.

She'd never been so afraid in her life. And she wondered for an instant if these men meant to kill her. And where was the other one?

Was he with this brute, or did he have his own reasons for bursting into her house in the middle of the night?

"I know who you are, Alexandra Holt," the man with the gun whispered into her ear, and his strange, exotic accent made his words seem even more fghtening.

"You will take us to your father or we will kill you.

A very simple choice, really. When we have him, we will let you go. "

"But my father isn't" -- The gun pressed harder.

"No talk. You will take us to him."

She bit her lips to stop them from shaking. She had a feeling that no matter what she said, this animal would kill her anyway. And she couldn't have spoken a coherent phrase even if she'd wanted to.

Could Father have been sane all along? Was this what he'd been running away from, hiding from? Had he been telling the truth when he'd told her that someone might try to follow him?

He pulled her backward, through the front door.

"You'll come with me, pretty one. And you will take us to. him. If not, we have men waiting in line for the chance to interrogate you. Each believes his methods will be the most effective in making you talk.

There have been wagers laid on who will succeed." He stopped just outside the door, turning again, staring down the gravel driveway into the darkness beyond.

"It won't be pleasant for you, I'm afraid. But great fun for the men."

Alexandra stared into the darkness, but there was no help for her there.

Pine boughs sighed in time with the wind that whispered through their needles. Early winter's chill laced the air, and it tasted like snow.

It seemed like such an ordinary night. How~could any of this be happening to her?

He backed down the st~ps and turned to wave, and she ~ saw the van parked at the roadside, black, sharp-nosed menace, like a shark waiting there to devour her. Even the windows were tinted.

The van crept into the driveway. The man shoved Alexandra forward, and the van stopped. A second later, its side door slid opened.

She caught her breath as she saw another man, crumpled on the van's floor, dressed entirely in black just like the one who held her. Then a foot nudged the body, and it rolled out onto the gravel.

The man holding her pushed her to the ground, shouting a curse and lifting his gun toward the van's dark interior. He got one shot off before the other man--the first one she'd encountered tonight--leapt on him, knocked him to the ground and with a single punch, put him out for the count.

Panting, he turned to Alexandra. She pulled herself up off the ground, gasping, pressing the inhaler to her mouth and sucking in blasts of medicine. Her eyes never leaving his, she back away a step, then two.

The bastard who'd rung the doorbell and shouldered his way inside. Damn him. He'd 'saved her from the two men in black, but for what purpose?

He bent down to take the gun from the other man, and when he straightened, she saw the blood on his shirt.

It didn't matter that he'd been hurt, she told herself. He was no better than the other two and she was getting the hell out of here.

She turned to run.

"Don't make me hurt you, Alexandra."

The words were low, and she could hear the pain that laced each' one.

It was enough to make her pause and look back. Only to see him pointing the gun at her.

"You're either going to have to deal with me, or more like these two.

Believe me, they won't be long in arriving."

She shook her head, shock seeping like ice water through her veins.

She lifted her hands to press them to either side of her head, biting her lips to keep them from trembling. She was dizzy with fear.

"Dammit, get a grip. Tell me where your father is or he'll end up dead... or worse."

He was bleeding. The gleaming scarlet stain on the front of his shirt grew and spread. His left arm hung useless at his side while his right one gestured with the gun as be spoke.

She took another step backward.

"I don't know what any of this is about. Just get out of here and leave me alone!"

 
Hysteria grabbed her, but she fought it. Her car was in the garage.

If she could only get to her car. One of the men on the ground moaned, and she went rigid and still.

"Snap out of it, Alexandra! Your life is in danger, or haven't you figured that out yet? You don't really want me to drive off and leave you to these two, do you?"

His long, dark hair was wild, and his eyes seemed as untamed. His arm must be hurting. His unshaven jaw was rigid, suggesting grated te~th behind those thinned lips, and she could see the corded muscles in his neck standing out. Oh, yes, he was in pain. A lot of it. He came closer, lifted the wounded arm, gripped her shoulder in a hand that dripped blood.

"Damvnit, where is your father?"

She blinked, tearing her eyes from his to look down at one of the forms on the ground--the one that groaned again and moved a little.

Then she focused on those intense eyes. In the moonlight she saw them, pain-glazed but piercing all the same.

"My father is dead," she whispered, because she couldn't seem to speak louder. Fear made her throat swell nearly shut.

"Dead?" He almost shouted the word. She only nodded.

The man swore fluently.

"All right. Okay, we'll have to search the house." His hand finally fell away from her, but she felt the sticky warmth it left behind.

"Get me some rope, so I can keep these two from kicking the hell out of me. And make it fast. We have a few hours at most."

Alexandra blinked, not moving. This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening. My God, what did this man want? What did it have to do with her father? Why did he want to search her house?

Of all the questions swirling in her mind, she only voiced one.

"A few hours until what? "

"Until some friends of these guys show up, or maybe some other guys who'll be just as nasty. The rope, Alexandra."

"My God... my God, what is this all about?"

He scowled at her until his dark brows touched. She shook herself and turned toward the little shed beside the house. The one that held all Father's gardening tools. He used to love to putter in a flower bed during the tiny fragments of time when he wasn't working. Spent more tune digging in the tiny patch of brown dirt than he did talking to her.

Alexandra hated gardens.

She went into the shed and found some rope.

The two thugs were bound, gagged and struggling in the living room of Alexandra Holt's Gothic monstrosity of a house. Torch had blown out most of the candles. Didn't want their thrashing to start a fire.

He'd turned on flights instead, half-surprised they even had lights this far up in the middle of nowhere.

She didn't like the lights. Her face told him so without her lips speaking a word. She squinted and shielded her eyes from them. It was as if she'd rather scamper off into the woods, into the dark, away from him and every ugly human being ever to draw a breath. To live out there, with her own kind. The wary woodland creatures.

Stupid to keep thinking of her that way, but it was just such a fitting image. She seemed like something rarely seen by mortal eyes.

Something that only came out of hiding when she was certain no one was near. Always afraid of being hurt. Or something.

She was definitely afraid of something.

 
The thugs most of all, at the moment, anyway. She wouldn't walk by them even though they were tied up. She followed Torch through the house, questioning him once or twice in a voice soft with fear, but still deep and smoky. But when he passed the terrorists, she hung back.

He stopped at the bottom of the staircase, stating up at the seemingly endless hall above, the countless doors lining it.

"Damn.

You couldn't have lived in a quaint little cottage, could you? "

His shoulder raged and nagged for attention. It was only a matter of time before more guy sing-black showed up. And here he was with a search grid the size of Arkansas.

"You won't get away with this," she was telling him like some-heroine in a murder mystery. Only she had the balance wrong.

There ought to be more defiance, less fear in her voice.

"Someone will be coming along any minute now, and you" -- "Someone will be coming along all right, but they won't be much help."

She stood just inside the archway, and though she'd been speaking to him, her eyes were glued to the two wriggling black bundles hog-tied on the floor. Her skin looked like chalk, and her lower lip trembled.

Her fear was palpable, and something softened inside Torch's granite heart. The feeling shook him right. to the core, so he looked away from her. But not fast enough.

Her wide brown eyes stayed right there in his mind's eye. He couldn't make them leave. Damn. There was something about her that made him want to touch her. Stroke her hair and her face, run his palms real slow down her back and up again and over her shoulders, and tell her it was going to be okay.

He cleared his throat, the friction of it scattering the images forming in his mind.

"Look, I don't have time to search the whole place," '~ he told her, and it was an effort to sound as cold and hard as he wanted to.

"So I'm gonna have to trust you. Where are your father's notes?"

 
She blinked, and her gaze finally tore free of the thugs and met his.

"Notes?"

"The project he was working on just before he resigned, Alexandra.

The formula he developed. Where is it? "

Her eyes narrowed. She was either completely unaware of the mess her father had created, or a very good actress.

Torch hadn't decided which.

"I don't know."

Torch pushed a hand through his hair, rolled his eyes, swore--none of which helped the situation. When he looked at her again, she was staring at the floor near his feel He glanced down, saw the bloodstain on the carpet, saw fresh drops raining down from his arm to add to the mess.

"You're going to bleed to death." She said it matter-of factly as if she could care less.

She had a point. Torch stuffed the thug's gun into his waistband and used his good arm to tear his shirt open. Then he shrugged out of it, balled it up and dropped it.

She emitted a soft, gasp that drew his eyes back to her face. And then she amazed him. Because she straightened her back and she: lifted her chin. Sending one last, fear-filled glance toward the men on the floor, she bit her lip, fixed her gaze on the pulsing wound in his shoulder, and she came to him. She walked right past those two, though she was shaking visibly as she did. She took his good arm in her hand.

Firm grip, but cool. Fear tended to lower one's body temperature. She drew him up the curving staircase and through one of those countless doors, flicking a light-switch as they entered. Her hand never relaxed on his forearm as she drew him into the plush, gleaming bathroom and gently nudged him onto a dainty chair he wasn't sure would hold him. He found himself sitting at a vanity, with an oval mirror at its back. And when he glanced at his own reflection, he figured it was little wonder she was afraid of him. Shirtless, bloody, his eyes as dark blue and merciless as the depths of the ocean, betraying no hint of feeling. His hair was too long, no longer the regulation above-the-ears cut he used to wear. He'd let it grow out during his brief attempt at retirement, and hadn't bothered cutting it again for this job. It was a dark tangle that hung to his shoulders.

He heard water running and turned to see her coming toward him with a clean, wet cloth. She reached out and he leaned backward, away from her.

She frowned, meeting his gaze.

"You'll have to hold still."

He couldn't believe it. He'd had a moment of inexplicable fear when she'd reached for him. Him, Torch Palamaro, afraid of. a fragile-looking, not to mention beautiful, woman. Why?

He could have analyzed' it, but he didn't. Fact was, he simply didn't want her touching him.

Rather than admit that, though, he held still. Alexandra, with a surprisingly gentle, if trembling, touch, cleaned the gunshot wound on the front his shoulder. Then she leaned closer, hen cling over him to clean the e~it wound on his back.

And he inhaled the good, clean, woman scent of her. Her breasts were too close to his face. So close he could see their outline right through the white flannel, and he could tell she wore nothing beneath it.

Not a moment too soon she turned away, rummaging in a medicine cabinet and coming back to him with gauze and tape, and some ointment in a tube.

"Why are you doing this?"

She stopped two feet from him, her hands full, and she blinked twice, as if asking herself the same question. Then she shook her head, shrugged.

"I'm a doctor. It's... what I do." She smeared ointment on a gauze pad, used another to dab the new blood away.

"Or may he I just don't want you dropping dead before you tell me what this is all about."

He didn't like her caring for him wound. And he knew why. He tried not to think of Marcy, but he thought of her anyway, and those thoughts brought searing pain with them. Marcy, small and soft and fair. She used to touch him this way, her hands gentle. They might not have been in love, but they'd been lovers. He couldn't remember it, not the way he should. But he knew it had happened. Often. She'd squeeze scented o'tl onto her fingers and rub it all over his back at the end of a stressful day.

Marcy. Gone now. Barely enough left of her to btmj. Nothing at all left of his sons. Their markers stood over empty graves. All because he'd failed.

And him, here, studying the shape of some other woman's breasts. He closed his eyes as the pain intensified.

Alexandra pulled her hand away.

"Did I hurt you?" "No." His voice came out like tree bark.

"Are you going to tell me? What this is about, I mean?"

She was nearly finial led She'd get away from him in a minute, and he'd snap out of this morbid guilt-fest.

When she did, he looked up.

"You mean to say you really don't know?"

She shook her head, her gaze pinned to his, too brown and too innocent.

"Then why did you quit your job in the city and move out here with him?"

She shrugged.

"Father was determined, and I ... I couldn't very well let him come out here by himself. He was old, and..." She sighed.

"His mind wasn't just right. He thought people were out to get him ...." She glanced through the open door, toward the stairs, and shuddered a little.

"Yeah, well, your old man wasn't as crazy as you thought he was."

She blinked at him, as if reaching the same conclusion. Then she turned to the basin, on the pretense of washing her hands. But he was too astute not to notice that she 'only turned on the cold tap, or that she held her wrists turned up to the flow to counteract the shock.

"What was it my father was working on? What are all you people after?"

He didn't like her lumping him in with all the others, and almost said so. But he stopped himself. He didn't give a damn what she thought of him.

 
"I'm not at liberty to give you details. Suffice it to say that he created a formula that could be used as a weapon, and as a weapon it would be more devastating than the A-bomb."

She shut the water off, dabbed her hands with a towel and lifted her face to the mirror in front of her, meeting his gaze there.

"My father wouldn't be involved in anything like that."

"Your father was involved in something just like that. When he realized what he had, he must have finally understood what the repercussions could be. He took all his notes, erased his files from' the computer and vanished from the face of the earth, for all intents and purposes.

Problem was, he was sloppy. He left a page from a notebook. The formula wasn't on it, but there were enough hints to make it clear what he had.

The information obviously leaked. Now every two-bit despot and terrorist leader in the world is itching to get his hands on him and his formula."

Clutching the towel in her hands, she turned to face him. "And which two-bit despot or terrorist leader sent you?"

He blinked. Her voice was a little stronger now, and her eyes had gone cold.

"That's classified."

"Then so is anything I might know."

He rose slowly from the chair," recognizing a standoff when he saw one.

He hadn't expected it. Not from a woman as easily frightened as this one was. Seemed there was a little toughness in there after all.

Buried . deeply buried. But there. The path to her steel lay in her old man. Say something bad about the sainted Alexander Holt, and find his daughter's anger.

But he couldn't tell her what she wanted to know. Hell, the very fact that I-CAT existed was top~ecret. And it had to stay that way.

"I can't tell you."

"Then you might as well leave."

He smiled just a little, knowing he had her beat.

"And what do you plan to do with those two downstairs, Alexandra or the backup crew who are probably on their way right now?"

"Nothing. I'm leaving, too. If I didn't learn another thing from my father, I learned how to hide."

Now that was more in keeping with his image of her. To scurry away into the woods. To burrow into a den somewhere in the forest with the other timid, wild things.

"But I found you," he told her.

"They found you.

They'll find you again. "

"And I'll run again."

"That's no way to live."

"That's my problem, isn't it?"

She was tougher than she looked. Still shaking, shocked right to the core by what he'd accused her father of having done, scm~xl half out of her mind, but tough. She wouldn't tell him. The determination was right there in her fright He battled a grudging admiration for her.

"All right," he said slowly.

"I'll tell you this much. The people I work for want that formula, but not to use as a weapon. They want it so they can make sure every trace of it, and the research that led up to it, is destroyed."

She stepped closer, her eyes narrowing, staring so deeply into his eyes that he felt their touch on his soul. She was trying to see inside him, he realized, trying to see if he was lying to her. She licked her lips, a quick, nervous dart of her pink tongue.

"How do I know I can believe you?"

"You don't."

She stood there a moment, deep in thought. Finally she shook her head.

"It's all a mistake. My father was a genius and a great man. He wouldn't have done this."

"He did it."

"No." She blinked, and he saw tears threatening to spill over.

"I don't believe it. He'd have told me " She let her voice trail off, uncertainty clouding her eyes.

"Would he?"

Maggie Shayne Her chin came up, and her gaze met his.

"He couldn't have done what you say he did."

"Okay.

I say he did it, and you say he didn't. There's only one way to prove which of us is right. "

She closed her eyes, clenched her teeth.

"I... I have to think" -- "There's no time to think, Alexandra. I'm not lying when I tell you more men like those two downstairs will be showing up soon. And they'll do everything they said they'd do to you... and then some."

Her eyes opened and she faced him. He thought maybe she'd come. to a decision.

"If I tell you ... where to find the papers ... will you leave me alone?"

He was not going to leave her alone. She'd end up dead if he did.

"Sure," he lied.

She swallowed hard, nodding slightly.

"After ... after my father died, I was go' rag through his things and.

and there was a receipt. He'd paid for a safe-deposit box in a New York bank. If there is anything to be found, that's where it will be."

"I want the name of the bank, hon. And then I want the key."

She frowned, as if searching her mind again. Then she turned and left the room. Torch was on her heels. He followed her down the hall, into a bedroom that had to be hers. The rumpled bed attested to a sleepless night. That beast of a cat peered out from underneath it.

When she yanked open a dresser drawer,-he half expected her to pull out a file containing all her father's secrets, and he allowed himself a sigh of relief. It was cut off when she only took out a pair of jeans and bent to step into them, tugging them on under the nightgown, snapping them around her narrow waist. Giving him a brief glimpse of supple skin and the dark well of her navel. Making him feel something he had no business feeling.