Dana Marton (3 page)

She’d never seen him like this before. Pictures of the last few minutes flashed into her head, the way he had shot those men. He sure hadn’t looked like a reporter back there. She struggled to make sense of it all. Then, as they rushed forward, her gaze snagged on a security camera high up on the wall—not pointing at the row of antique oil paintings but at the hallway itself.

“Can they see us?” She looked around, bewildered, expecting to run into rebel soldiers any second.

“They’re not working. The rebels took out the security system when they broke in. Phones are disabled, too. I already checked.”

Where? How? She didn’t have time to ask.

Voices came from up ahead.
No, no, no.
A fresh wave of panic hit just when she thought she was already at max capacity for fear. They were in a long, marble-tiled hallway with a single, ornately gilded door they’d just passed.

Parker pulled back immediately and reached for the knob. Locked. He looked around, searching the corridor.

Why didn’t he just kick the door in? She was about to ask when she realized they couldn’t afford to make noise. Good thing one of them had a clear enough mind to think.

The voices neared. Parker let go of her and hurried to an ornamental cast-iron grid low on the opposite wall, pulled a nasty-looking knife and began to unscrew it.

They were never going to make it. She looked back and forth between him and the end of the hallway.
Hurry, hurry, hurry.
“They’re almost here.”

He got the heavy-looking grid off and laid it down gently, without making a sound. Then he climbed in, legs first. She was practically on top of him. But he didn’t move lower to make room for her. “Get on my back,” he said.

“What? I can’t. It’s—” She didn’t have time to argue. The rebels were coming.

She went in, legs first like he did, feeling awkward and uncomfortable at having to touch him, having to hang on to him, being pressed against his wide back. He was all hard muscle just as he’d always been. She snipped any stray memory in the bud and kept moving. When she had her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist as if he were giving her a piggyback ride, she stopped, barely daring to breathe. She wasn’t crazy about dark, tight places.

And they weren’t in some storage nook as she had thought, but in a vertical, chimneylike tunnel with a bottomless drop below them.

But just when she thought things couldn’t get more dangerous, he let go with his left hand and reached for the cast-iron grid to lift it back into place. Boots passed in front of their hiding place a few seconds later, people talking.

The men stopped to chat just out of sight.
Oh God, please just go.

They didn’t. They stayed and stayed and stayed. Her arms were aching from the effort. She could barely hold herself. She couldn’t see how Parker was able to hold the weight of two bodies with nothing but his fingers.

An eternity passed. Then another. She distracted herself by organizing her half-million questions about his sudden appearance and his complete personality change.

“Hang on,” he whispered under his breath and moved beneath her.

She barely breathed her response. “I think we should stay still.” No need to take any unnecessary chances, make some noise and draw attention.

“Can’t. We’re slipping.”

All her questions cleared in the blink of an eye, replaced by a single thought. They were going to die.

Kate braced a hand against the wall and realized at once why they were slipping. The brick was covered with slippery powder. She could make out some cobwebs in what little light filtered through the metal grid. She didn’t want to think of the number of spiders that would be living in a place like this. She put the hand back around Parker’s neck.

He slipped another inch.

Oh God, oh God, oh God. Please, please, please.
She held her breath, expecting a fall any second. How high were they? And what was waiting for them at the bottom? Too dark to tell.

“Parker?”

“Relax,” he whispered; he could probably feel the tension in her body.

She loosened the death grip she had around his neck. Whatever he was doing to save them, he could probably do it better if she didn’t cut off his air supply.

He was slipping even though he had both hands and feet braced on the side walls. But they had a slow, controlled descent; he was able to achieve at least that much. After the first few moments of sheer panic, she unfolded her legs from around his waist and stuck them out, hoping to take some of her weight off him and help to slow them even more. The less they slipped, the shorter their climb would be back to the opening once the rebels moved away.

She succeeded, but only marginally. They were still steadily going down.

At least they weren’t crashing. She concentrated on the spot of light that was getting closer and closer, coming from the next cover grid on the floor below them. An eternity passed before they reached it.

Hanging on to the cast-iron scrolls, Parker was able to halt their downward progress temporarily.

They listened, but could hear no voices from outside.

“Can we get out?” she whispered.

“Maybe.” He waited a beat. “Looks deserted out there. We still have to be careful. I’m sure they secured every floor.”

“They can’t have people in every hallway.” At least, she really hoped they couldn’t.

“They don’t. They’re set up in strategic control positions.” Parker pushed against the grid, his muscles flexing against her.

The metal didn’t budge.

“Want me to get your knife out of your pocket?” she offered, although his pocket was the last place she wanted to be moseying around.

“Screws are on the outside. Can’t get to them.” He made another attempt at rattling them loose without success. “The offer is tempting, but I’ll pass for now.”

She bit back a retort at his teasing. She could and would let things go. She had learned over the years. “What do we do now?”

“Get to the bottom and find another way up.” He didn’t seem too shaken by their situation.

She, on the other hand, was going nuts in the confines of the tight space. “What is this place?” Her muscles tensed further as they began sliding again.

“The building used to belong to some nobleman back in the day. This is where the servants pulled up the buckets of coal from the basement for the tile stoves that heated his parlors.”

“And you know this how?”

He couldn’t shrug in their precarious situation, but made some small movement that gave the same effect.

Their shoes scraped on the walls that were less than three feet from each other, but the old coal dust muted the sound. She let go with one hand again and tried to find support. Carrying their combined weight had to be difficult even for a man as strong as Parker.

“I think I can do this on my own.” She’d seen rock-climbing done at the gym before, how those climbers supported their weight with nothing but the tips of their fingers and toes.

“We came from the second floor. With the twenty-foot ceilings these old palaces have, the drop to the basement could be fifty feet or more,” he said. “You stay where you are. If you slip, you die.”

She was perfectly clear on the hundred and one ways she could die in their given situation. She was trying hard not to think of them, thank you very much. “What can I do to make this easier?”

“Stop moving.”

She stilled and kept silent for a while before she realized she could probably move her lips.

“How did you get in here? Don’t tell me it’s for a story.”

“I quit that job. I work for the government now.”

He always had been dark and mysterious, something that had drawn her to him at the beginning of their relationship but had ended up driving a wedge between them eventually. Mysterious was fine in a sexy stranger. But when you were trying to build a life with someone, there were things you needed to know. There had come a time when she had realized that he was never going to let her in fully.

“You’re a marine?” The U.S. embassy was protected by marines. She had expected them to come after her eventually. But Parker wasn’t part of that team. He was probably too old for enlistment at this stage. She thought the age limit was twenty-eight. He was four years older than her, which made him thirty-six.

“Something like that,” he said, and in typical Parker fashion, wouldn’t elaborate.

She had a few guesses as to why. So her ex was some kind of special commando. “Something like” a marine. A picture was beginning to take shape in her mind. “Did you know I was here?”

She made sure to hold her elbows in, and her knees, although that wasn’t an easy task since her legs were wrapped around his waist for support. She couldn’t hold herself up by her arms alone any longer. On second thought, her brilliant idea of going down on her own might have been overly optimistic.

She tried hard not to think of the countless times her legs had been wrapped around his waist from the other side. Slow breath in. Slow breath out. The stifling air of the stupid coal chute seemed unbearably hot.

“I’ve been briefed,” he was saying.

He? What about the rest of the commando team? And in that moment, she knew without a doubt that there were no others. The embassy wasn’t being liberated. She was. Through some crazy plan, he was here to rescue her, and they were about to leave all those other people behind.

As if she would ever agree to anything as insane as that.

They were just reaching the landing, had to get down on their hands and knees to crawl out, touching each other way more in the process than she was comfortable with. He had always had an instant, mind-melting effect on her. There should be a vaccination against men like him, something that would give the recipient immunity. She’d be first in line at the clinic.

A dim security light burned somewhere, enough to see that they were both black, covered in hundred-year-old soot. He looked like some Greek hero, sculpted from black marble instead of white. She glanced down at her own clothes, stifling a sigh. She looked like an Old West horse thief, tarred and waiting to be feathered.

“Come on, we don’t have much time.” He moved forward, gun in hand. “I came in through the roof, but we’ll see if there’s a way out through here. Maybe some connection to the neighboring building. Like a secret emergency tunnel for the embassy staff.”

She thought of Anna, who had risked her life to melt the cuffs off her, and the kitchen staff who’d risked their lives to conceal her identity. She thought of Tanya and the two small children, and Ambassador Vasilievits, who had been separated from the others by the rebels.

“Did anyone make it out of the building?”

“No,” Parker said without turning around.

He was a dozen feet ahead before he realized that she wasn’t following and turned around. “What’s going on?” His eyes flashed with impatience.

She had a feeling he was about to get even more unhappy with her. “I’m not leaving,” she said.

W
HAT
in hell?

“You’re leaving, babe, believe me. You’re leaving if I have to carry you.” His blood pressure was inching up. For some unfathomable reason, she didn’t comprehend that every second counted. Odd really, because Kate Hamilton was one sharp woman.

“I’m not leaving the rest of the hostages to die. As soon as someone goes into the gym and realizes what you did, they’ll be massacred.” She was shooting him an accusing look, standing tall like some movie heroine.

Oh, man. She had that stubborn determination in her fine eyes, the same rich green color as the highland forests of Scotland. And he knew from experience that meant nothing good.

“I left them armed.”

No way was he going to stop to have a fight about this with her. He scanned the basement instead, which seemed closed to the outside, the only exit being a staircase that led up to the ground floor. He could see a few spots on the brick walls where at one point in the past there had been basement windows to the street, but they were walled in. And since the building was an old one, the outer walls were close to three feet wide, solid brick and mortar. They couldn’t even dig their way out.

“They are admin staff and people from the kitchen.” Kate wouldn’t let the subject drop. Her full and delicately shaped lips were set in a strict line of displeasure.

“The rebels won’t kill them. They need someone to negotiate with.” He eyed the stairs and calculated.

“They can negotiate with the ambassador,” she countered, backing away from him as he began stalking her. “The rebels have him someplace else in the embassy. He was taken away from the rest of us at the beginning.”

He stilled.

“Parker? What happened to him?”

And when he didn’t respond, she asked with horror in her eyes, “They killed him? That’s what the gunfire was about, wasn’t it?”

He said nothing.

Her tanned hands flew up to cover the lower part of her face until only her big, luminous eyes showed, glinting with moisture. Her shoulders drooped with defeat.

“Tanya…” Her voice sounded as if she was fighting for air. “How about his wife and the—” She didn’t seem to be able to take in enough air to finish the sentence.

“No idea.” He felt remorseful, but undeterred. “We are leaving. Now.”

“No. It’s
my
life.”

And his breath caught, because that had been the last thing she had told him before she’d left.
It’s my life, Parker. I’m sorry. I have to do what’s best.
And he had stood there, without a word, without trying to change her mind, and watched her walk away.

Letting her go had been the single most selfless thing he had ever done in his life. He knew she was better off without him. He was darkness and she was light.

But it had still hurt like hell.

He blinked hard, waited for the tightness in his chest to ease. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“None of your business,” she snapped at him. “I’m not going. I’m serious.”

So was he.

“Kate.” The word came out in a low growl of temper. He hated how quickly she could make him lose his cool. He was frustrated that she wouldn’t give him her full cooperation.

She hesitated another long second. Damn. There had been a time when she had told him everything, had laid her soul bare and shared it. Well, the trust was gone now. He should have expected that.

“I am considering adopting a child from Russia. Tanya has two adopted children. I had some questions about the process and the orphanage she used,” she said with a defensive set of her chin and a hint of vulnerability around her.

That wasn’t the answer he had expected. The words cut him off at the knees. There had been a time when he was looking forward to Kate having
his
children, although he had tried to tell her that the time wasn’t right just yet, that they would probably have to wait a couple of years. He didn’t want to miss anything. He didn’t want to be an absentee father on active duty. Not that he’d been able to tell her that. He’d had to cook up some stupid story about how he needed a lot of time at that point because he was fighting hard for his next promotion.

A tidal wave of regrets slammed into him. He couldn’t think about all that now. He had to get her out of here.

But she wasn’t done fighting yet. “Listen to me. Chances are they would have let the hostages go at the end. Now that you shot their men, they are going to kill the people we left behind.
Because of me.
I can’t live with that. I’m not that kind of person. I can’t.” There was urgency and desperation in her voice. “Please,” she added with her unique mix of vulnerability and determination.

She wasn’t a delicate woman. She was vivacious. She had lively eyes, a full mouth and a stubborn jawline. She laughed from the heart and cried from the heart.

He still had a crush on her. The realization caught him off guard. That rush of attraction, the magnetic pull. A crush—that was all it was. He imagined there wasn’t a man who could go within ten feet of Kate Hamilton without developing a little crush on her.

He could disarm a nuclear warhead. He should be able to neutralize some leftover attraction.

“Parker?”

She wouldn’t give up. She wasn’t the type. When someone needed help, Kate Hamilton was your gal. She’d charged to the rescue of neighbors, friends and coworkers alike, making time to find homes for strays she picked up on the street. Which made her a fine consul, he supposed, since part of her job was to assist U.S. citizens who ran into trouble here in France. She could manage a problem like nobody’s business.

“Please?”

Those eyes were going to be the death of him. Oh, hell, when had he ever been able to resist her?

He drew a deep breath, recognizing himself for the fool he was. “Okay. I’ll get you out. Once you’re safe, I’ll come back to see what I can do for the others.” And the Colonel was probably going to fry his ass. A freaking barbecue.

“How can you even think about taking only me?” She was outraged and not bothering to hide it.

“Because that is precisely the order I got.” He kept his voice deceptively low, although his blood was fairly boiling.

“From whom?”