Читать книгу Classified Baby - Jessica Andersen - Страница 5

Chapter One

Colorado, USA

“I’m here to see Ethan Moore at Prescott Personal Securities.” Nicole Benedict resisted the urge to wipe her damp palms on her jeans. The lobby of the posh Denver office building was cooler than the summer day outside, but the air-conditioning did little to quell her nervous jitters.

The uniformed guard tapped the touch pad on his computer screen, selecting the roster for PPS. “And you are?”

“Nicole Benedict. I don’t have an appointment.” And it was a good bet Ethan wouldn’t recognize her name.

Heck, she’d be surprised if he recognized her face. It had only been a couple of months since they’d met at Hitchin’ My Getalong, a hokey themed bar in the heart of the city, but the handsome, brooding stranger hadn’t been real sober when she’d hitched her getalong up onto the bar stool beside him.

Okay, neither of them had been real sober that night.

“Sign in here.” The guard handed over a digital pad that reminded Nicole of the ones the courier guy used when he delivered her research supplies.

The thought brought a wince. Unless she found a new sponsor for her biofuel project at Donner High School, the research would be doomed before the school year started. Then again, ten weeks ago, the conjunction of the defunct sponsorship, her thirty-fourth birthday and the one-year anniversary of her ex-engagement to Jonah I-prefer-blondes Douglas had been the most important things in her universe.

How quickly things change, she thought as she used the plastic wand to scrawl her name, destination and the time she’d entered the building onto the pressure pad. She glanced at the blank “time out” box and tried not to wonder how long her meeting would take. What Ethan would say.

Swallowing hard, she accepted a visitor’s badge from the guard and headed for the elevator. The deep blue carpet was springy underfoot. The elevator doors were made of copper-colored metal, and etched with repeating symbols that reminded her of the Navajo blanket on her bed. A classy plaque beside the call buttons bore the names of the megadollar companies that leased space in the downtown skyscraper. Prescott Personal Securities was listed at the very bottom, indicating that it was located on the top floor. Prime real estate.

Way out of your league, Nicky girl. You’re suburbs. This is city. The thought came in Jonah’s voice, complete with her ex-fiancé’s trademark smirk, which she’d found charming for entirely too long.

“Oh, shut up,” she said, and stabbed the elevator call button.

Moments later, the etched copper doors parted to reveal an aquarium. Okay, so technically it was a glass-enclosed elevator car, but Nic felt distinctly guppyish as she stepped inside and several street-level passersby glanced in her direction.

“Keep it moving, nothing to see here,” she muttered as she hit the button for the top floor. “Just a pregnant woman in a see-through box.”

She wasn’t showing at ten weeks, of course, but ever since the doctor had confirmed what four at-home tests had already told her, she’d felt as though she had the words unmarried and knocked-up by a one-night stand tattooed across her forehead.

The elevator doors hissed shut and the car ascended with expensive smoothness. The glass floor pressed against the soles of her sneakers, seeming hard and impersonal after the give of the lobby carpet. Unease flickered when she realized there were no supporting metal braces beneath her feet. Just more glass.

“It’s perfectly safe,” she told herself, scrubbing her damp palms against her jeans and tugging at her pale yellow sweater set. “Don’t be a wuss.”

Besides, she was pretty sure the nerves had nothing to do with the elevator and everything to do with her errand. What would she say when she saw Ethan again? More importantly, what would he say?

Nic swallowed hard and forced herself to focus on the view.

The Denver streets stretched out below, gleaming in the noonday sun. Buildings rose on either side of her, then fell away as the elevator carried her above the neighboring structures. The blue sky stretched to the edge of the city bowl miles away, where the Rocky Mountains spread across the horizon. A few clouds scudded high above, and the translucent glass paneling of the elevator made it seem as though she could stretch out and touch the fluffy white vapor.

When movement flickered in her peripheral vision, she turned, expecting a bird. Instead, she saw a snub-nosed helicopter.

Her first thought was that it had to be a traffic ’copter, but the shiny black machine didn’t bear the call letters of any local station. In fact, the chopper was completely unmarked, with dull black patches where its FAA identification should have been.

Nic’s heart picked up when the chopper drew nearer and the thump of rotors vibrated through the glass. She craned her neck to see if a second helicopter was filming whatever was going on. A reality show, maybe, or an action movie.

There was no sign of a camera crew as the unmarked helicopter swung around to face her, broadside.

Nic saw a pilot and two passengers, their features blurred by motion and distance. As she watched, a door rolled open and a large, muscular figure climbed out to perch on one skid. He hefted something onto his shoulder. It looked a whole lot like a rocket launcher.

Still no sign of a film crew.

Panic spurted and a scream built in Nic’s throat. Disbelieving, she stumbled to the back of the elevator; her spine slammed into the control panel, and the car jolted to a shuddering halt. An alarm bell shrilled, the sound muted by her scream as the man aimed the launcher directly at her.

A disembodied voice spoke from an intercom panel above her head. “This is building security. Is everything okay in there?”

Nic shrieked, “There’s a helicopter outside, and a man and he’s going to—”

Everything exploded.

ONE MINUTE Ethan Moore was in his little-used cube at Prescott Personal Securities, cursing his computer. The next moment, noise blasted around him like a thousand Humvees converging on a single spot, and he was sent flying through the air.

Shouting in surprise, Ethan rolled when he hit, trying to get away from pelting debris, but it was everywhere. Old training and newer instincts kicked in, laced with adrenaline as the floor shuddered beneath him and metal groaned.

A bomb, he thought, though experience told him that wasn’t quite right.

He scrambled to his hands and knees, head ringing. The too-hot fabric of his cargo pants and button-down shirt scorched against his skin. Acrid smoke stung his nose, eyes and throat, and he felt himself coughing but couldn’t hear the noise over the ringing in his ears.

A second explosion ripped through the office. He ducked and shouted with rage. Disbelief. How had the bomber gotten through their security? How had—

Never mind, he told himself. Logic, not emotion. Evacuate first, then figure out who’s behind the attack. Though there was no doubt in his mind Tri Corp. Media was behind the attack. Over the past five months, PPS had been struggling to uncover who was behind a vicious string of murderous attacks on their protectees. Now that they were hot on the trail of several higher-ups at the huge media conglomerate, the faceless mastermind had only sped things up.

Gasping smoke-laced oxygen, Ethan dragged himself to his feet as the noise of the explosion subsided. The smoke and fire alarms cut in, shrilling over the screams and curses that rose up from the other cubes.

“Everyone stay calm!” Ethan shouted in a voice he barely recognized as his own. He looked quickly around the high-tech office space, counting heads. Twelve men and women, all support staff. Most of the other PPS field agents were out chasing leads. Meanwhile, TCM had brought the fight home.

“You!” Ethan pointed to the closest sturdy-looking guy, a computer tech with a nasty gash below one eye. “Check all the cubes. If the wounded are ambulatory, get them out. If not, come find me. And for God’s sake, don’t move anyone who’s down and injured.”

Next, Ethan located their receptionist, Angel, a twenty-something woman wearing black clothes, black lipstick and a diamond stud in her nose. Knowing her penchant for fouling up even the simplest tasks, he kept it simple. “Pop the security doors so everyone can get out. Use the stairs, not the elevators. Got it?”

The terrified-looking receptionist swallowed hard. “Where are you going?”

“To find the boss,” Ethan said, and headed farther into the office suite without looking back.

He wasn’t leaving without Evangeline Prescott.

A few weeks earlier, her name had turned up on a list that included the half-dozen men who’d been murdered over the past few months as part of a deadly billion-dollar oil rights conspiracy. Evangeline was no investor, but the list suggested she was a target.

And the blast had come from the direction of her corner office.

Cursing, Ethan skirted the cube farm, dodging the debris and fluttering papers that swirled on the wind whipping through broken windows. The temperature rose as he headed toward the corner suite, heat crackling on his skin.

“Evangeline, are you in there?” he shouted. “Robert? You okay?”

Ethan called Evangeline’s husband’s name as an afterthought. He didn’t know PPS’s original founder well, and what he knew didn’t impress him much. Robert Prescott had reappeared the previous month after having spent the past two years underground, trying to figure out who’d set him up to die in a rigged plane crash that now appeared to have been one of the earliest moves in the TCM conspiracy, orchestrated by Robert’s former mentor in the world of international espionage. The way Ethan saw it, whether he was a real-life James Bond or not, a man shouldn’t ever let anything except actual death separate him from the woman he’d loved.

Life-and-death danger had a way of leveling differences though, so when Ethan stuck his head through the doorway leading to Robert’s office and called the man’s name, he felt a sharp twist of relief when he got an answer.

“Over here,” Robert said, voice cracking. The room was in shambles, with the desk overturned and wedged against one wall. The founder of PPS was trapped beneath the desk with only his salt-and-pepper hair and one blood-smeared hand visible. The hand waved and Robert’s voice carried the hint of a British accent and the authority of his MI6 background when he ordered, “Get this bloody thing off me.”

Emotion wanted to send Ethan bolting across the room to help his fallen comrade. Logic had him pausing to test the floor, which was tipped at an angle beneath his feet. When it seemed sturdy enough, he crossed the room, looked at how Robert was pinned, and levered a corner of the desk up and away.

After a quick field check for major injuries, Ethan hauled Robert to his feet. “Angel’s got the blast doors open. Take the stairs.”

Robert swiped a hand across a bloody gash on his cheek. “Bugger that. Where’s my wife?”

Though Robert and Evangeline’s relationship had been bumpy since he’d returned from the dead, Ethan heard the raw grief in the other man’s voice. Trying not to resent Robert’s right to that grief, Ethan turned away. “Let’s go find her.”

The men ducked out of Robert’s office, crossed the short distance to Evangeline’s door and stopped dead.

A low groan rattled in Robert’s chest.

Beyond the door, dust and smoke blurred the sight of the mountains in the distance. There was no outer wall. Hell, there was no office. It had become a crater in the side of the building. Heat radiated from the remnants of walls, floor and ceiling. Black soot smeared the carpeting beneath their feet, and the floor beyond fell away to air.

Robert sagged against the door frame.

“God,” Ethan rasped. “I’m so—”

“Don’t say it,” Robert snapped. “Don’t even think it. She’s not dead. She can’t be dead, not when we’ve just found each other again.”

You knew where she was all along, you selfish bastard. An angry ball congealed in Ethan’s gut, alongside the grief. You have no idea what it was like for her, what it feels like to lose someone you love.

But because Ethan did know, he said, “Let’s check the other offices, and the break rooms. The bathroom. Maybe—” He broke off when he heard a faint sound.

Robert heard it, too. He spun and bolted down the hall, shouting, “Evangeline? Evangeline, damn it, answer me!” He skidded to a halt outside the small kitchenette they used as a break room. “She’s in here!”

Then he cursed viciously enough to jab fear into Ethan’s gut.

When he reached the doorway, Ethan saw that the floor tilted away from them and down, as though all the support beams were gone. The refrigerator had tipped over, spilling its contents onto the floor. The chairs and tables were all lodged against the far wall, with Evangeline trapped beneath them.

The tall, forty-something blonde was bleeding but conscious. She and Robert locked eyes and she smiled with relief. “You’re okay.”

He made an unintelligible sound, and when he reached out a hand as though he could touch her across the distance separating them, his fingers trembled.

Dark emotion rose up to clog Ethan’s throat, a blend of relief, resentment and hell, yes, jealousy. Not because he wanted Evangeline, but because he hadn’t gotten a second chance with the woman he’d loved, and Prescott seemed to get nothing but second chances.

“I’ll get her,” Robert said. “You check the rest of the offices.” Ethan nodded shortly and turned away, but before he’d gone more than a few steps, Prescott called, “Did your client get out okay?”

Ethan stopped and looked back. “I’m not scheduled to see anyone today.”

“Angel left a message a few minutes ago on my voice mail,” Robert said. “She said a client was on her way up to see you.”

Ethan didn’t bother asking why she’d left the info with Robert—Angel lost half their messages and garbled the other half, but she was one of Evangeline’s projects, so firing her wasn’t an option.

“I haven’t met with anyone all morning,” he said now, a faint alarm stirring in the back of his skull. “Did you get a name?”

“I think she said Nicole Benedict. Ring any bells?”

The faint alarm became a war whoop as the name did more than ring a bell. It sent a lightning bolt through Ethan’s midsection, a mixture of guilt, regret and pure, unadulterated lust.

Air hissed between his teeth at the thought of the woman who’d helped him forget himself for a night, then disappeared. “Yeah. I know her. And if she was on the way up—” He broke off on a second hiss of breath as logic overtook emotion and he remembered that the track for the glass elevator ran along the outside of the building, right beside Evangeline’s office. It would’ve been right in the path of the explosion.

He took off at a dead run, hoping to hell he wasn’t already too late.

NICOLE REGAINED fuzzy consciousness to the feel of something cold and hard beneath her face. For half a second, she wondered what the hell she was doing lying on her kitchen floor. And why were her ears ringing? Was she hungover?

But that wasn’t right. She’d never been much of a partyer, and wasn’t drinking at all these days because of—

The connection sparked in her brain and clenched her stomach in an instant. The baby. Ethan. Prescott Personal Securities. Images blinked through her mind in rapid succession—the office building, the helicopter, the rocket launcher—

The explosion.

Her eyes flew open and she found herself facedown on the floor of the glassed-in elevator. She saw the street far below. Then a thin stream of blackish- gray smoke obscured her view for a moment, and the contrast showed her something far worse than the height. There was a crack in the glass beneath her.

As she watched, it grew longer and branched into two cracks that gave birth to two more in a growing spiderweb that weakened the only thing separating her from a fatal fall.

“Help me,” she whispered, half-afraid the small sound might send her crashing through. When it didn’t, she filled her lungs and screamed, “Help me!”

Incredibly, a man’s voice answered from above. “Hang on, Nicole. I’m almost there.”

“Ethan?” She wasn’t sure how she recognized his voice, ten weeks after they’d spent the night together doing everything but talking, but she knew him instantly, and the recognition brought a fierce rush of relief edged with fear.

“Don’t move.” His words sounded clearer than they ought to, and she heard the whistle of wind.

Fearing what she might see, Nic held her breath and tried to keep her body still as she turned her head to the side. She saw more glass, more cracks, and a gaping hole in the side of the elevator car, where the glass was gone. Beyond that was blue sky, a smudge of smoke and a dangling climber’s rope. She heard masculine shouts from higher up, a mixture of suggestions and curses from whoever was anchoring the line.

She remembered him saying something about rock climbing in his free time. Now he was shimmying down to rescue her. God.

As she watched, a pair of sturdy, brown leather hiking boots swung into her limited slice of view, followed by a hint of tube sock and a pair of strong, muscular legs encased in tough-looking cargo pants and a makeshift climber’s harness. The button-down front of a formerly white oxford shirt appeared next, gaping where a couple of buttons had torn away to reveal a lean, muscular torso.

Then he twisted through the broken section of glass, and she got a clear look at the edgy, masculine face she’d imagined all too often since realizing her period was late.

Hell, she thought, let’s be honest here. You’ve thought about him just about every day since that night at Hitchin’s. And she’d remembered him just right. His dark brown hair was lighter at the ends, signaling an outdoor lifestyle. His face was chiseled, his features as sharp and forbidding as she’d remembered. Now, though, the brown eyes she remembered as being coolly logical and almost sardonic, radiated tension as they locked on hers and he said, “Stay calm. We can do this, but you’ve got to trust me, okay?” He waited until she nodded, then said, “I want you to keep yourself flat and distribute your weight as evenly as possible. Then I need you to slide toward me. We’re going to get you out of there.”

Nic’s breath hissed out. She glanced down and saw emergency vehicles gathering far below. “I can’t… I won’t…” She stopped and sucked in a breath. “Can’t you open the doors from inside the building?”

“Not a chance. You’re—” He broke off, looked up as the rescue personnel shouted something she didn’t quite catch, and muttered a curse. “Look, the explosion knocked the elevator off its track, okay? It’s hanging by a single cable right now. It looks stable enough, but—”

A loud crackling noise cut him off, and the floor shifted beneath Nic. She whimpered deep in her throat and tears stung her eyes. “Ethan, please,” she whispered. “The floor’s going to go. I don’t want to die.”

“Slide over,” he repeated, speaking softly. “Go easy, but keep moving, no matter what happens.”

Heart pounding in her ears, Nic closed her eyes, pressed her cheek to the floor and slid an inch, then another. She heard crackling, but didn’t look at the glass beneath her.

“That’s it. You’re almost there.”

He sounded closer, prompting Nic to open her eyes. He’d dropped lower on the rope, so their faces were level through the broken panel.

His voice might be utterly calm, but his eyes held a strange, dark emotion she couldn’t quite define.

An answering surge tugged in her chest, the same feeling she’d had when she’d offered to buy him a drink and he’d turned to refuse, then accepted instead. Now, though, there was an added layer between them, the echoing heat of sex…and a baby he’d never know about if she fell.

“Ethan,” Nic whispered, heart pounding. “I came to tell you I’m pregnant.”

She might’ve imagined the wince, but there was no mistaking his low curse, or the look that flashed through his eyes before he shuttered his expression to one of utter determination and stretched his arm through the broken side of the elevator car. “We need to get you on solid ground. Take my hand.”

She looked from him to the ground and back again. When her weight shifted, the glass beneath her cracked further.

“Come on.” His eyes were steady on hers, his outstretched hand unwavering. “Trust me.”

Heart pounding loud in her ears, she reached out and grabbed his forearm, just as the crackling noise crescendoed—

And the glass gave way beneath her.

Nic screamed as she fell and then jerked to a suspended halt, dangling in Ethan’s grip, held only by their joined hands. Sobbing, terrified, she grabbed for him with her free hand as a roaring, crumbling noise built overhead, counterpointed by pinging metal.

She looked up and shrieked, “Ethan! The cable!”

Overhead, the elevator mechanism was coming apart.

He twisted his head and shouted to the men leaning out of a window two floors up. “Pull us in, damn it!” His expression remained impassive, but his voice was sharp when he said, “You’re going to have to climb up through the hole in the elevator floor before it goes. Watch the broken glass.”

The next two minutes were a blur as Nic scrambled, fighting for purchase as he pulled her up and out, helped by the uniformed rescue personnel two floors up, who were cursing and hauling on the rope as fast as they dared.

Then she was out! She lunged through the open panel and launched herself against Ethan just as the elevator gave way with a horrendous crack and plummeted down, trailing broken cables. Momentum sent them spinning, and Nic hung on tightly as they swung away from the building. She felt Ethan’s strong body against hers, felt his heart drum fast through the fabric of his shirt. Then the arc reversed and they went flying back toward the building.

“Hang on!” Ethan swung them so he’d bear the brunt, but an errant wind gust caught them and diverted the spin, changing their angle of impact.

Nic hit first, and she hit hard. The blow drove the breath from her lungs. Her neck whiplashed and her head slammed into the side of the building.

Starbursts flashed in her head, and then every sensation was abruptly sucked into a black void. Every sensation, that is, except the feel of the man who held her tight.