by Linda Howard
She tried to remember where her purse was, and think how she could get it and get out the door without Zane knowing. His hearing was acute, and he would be watching for her. But the room service waiter would bring their breakfast to the parlor, and Zane, being as cautious as he was, would watch the man’s every move. That was the only time he would be distracted, and the only chance she would have to get out of the room undetected. Her window of opportunity would be brief, because he would call her as soon as the waiter left. If she had to wait for an elevator, she was sunk. She could always try the stairs, but all Zane would have to do was take the elevator down to the lobby and wait for her there. With his hearing, he probably heard the elevator every time it chimed, and that would give him an idea of whether she had been able to get one of the cars or had taken the stairs.
She opened the bathroom door a little, so he wouldn’t be able to catch the click of the latch.
“What are you doing?” he called. It sounded as if he was standing just inside the double doors that connected the bedroom to the parlor, waiting for her.
“Putting on makeup,” she snapped, with perfect truth. She blotted the sweat off her forehead and began again with the powder. Her brief flash of anger was over, but she didn’t want him to know it. Let him think she was furious; a woman who was both pregnant and angry deserved a lot of space.
There was a brief knock on the parlor door, and a Spanish-accented voice called out, “Room service.”
Quickly Barrie switched on the faucet, so the sound of running water would once again mask her movements. Peering through the small opening by the door, she saw Zane cross her field of vision, going to answer the knock. He was wearing his shoulder holster, which meant, as she had hoped, that he was on guard.
She slipped out of the bathroom, carefully pulled the door back to leave the same small opening, then darted to the other side of the bedroom, out of his line of sight if he glanced inside when he passed by the double doors. Her purse was lying on one of the chairs, and she snatched it up, then slipped her feet into her shoes.
The room service cart clattered as it was rolled into the room. Through the open parlor doors she could hear the waiter casually chatting as he set up the table. Zane’s pistol made the waiter nervous; she could hear it in his voice. And his nervousness made Zane that much more wary of him. Zane was probably watching him like a hawk, those pale eyes remote and glacier-cold.
Now was the tricky part. She eased up to the open double doors, peeking through the crack to locate her husband. Relief made her knees wobble; he was standing with his back to the doors while he watched the waiter. The running faucet was doing its job; he was listening to it, rather than positioning himself on the other side of the table so he could watch both the waiter and the bathroom door. He probably did it deliberately, dividing his senses rather than diluting the visual attention he was paying to the waiter.
Her husband was not an ordinary man. Escaping him, even for five minutes, wouldn’t be easy.
Taking a deep breath, she silently crossed the open expanse, every nerve in her body drawn tight as she waited for his hard hand to clamp down on her shoulder. She reached the bedroom door to the hallway and held the chain so it wouldn’t clink when she slipped it free. That done, her next obstacle was the lock. She moved her body as close to the door as possible, using her flesh to muffle the sound, and slowly turned the latch. The dead bolt slid open with smooth precision and a snick that was barely audible even to her.
She closed her eyes and turned the handle then, concentrating on keeping the movement smooth and silent. If it made any noise, she was caught. If anyone was walking by in the hallway and talking, the change in noise level would alert Zane, and she was caught. If the elevator was slow, she was caught. Everything had to be perfect, or she didn’t have a chance.
How much longer did she have? It felt as if she had already taken ten minutes, but it was probably no more than one. Crockery was still rattling in the parlor as the waiter arranged their plates and saucers and water glasses. The door opened, and she slipped through, then spent the same agonizing amount of time making sure it closed as silently as it opened. She released the handle and ran.
She reached the elevators without hearing him shout her name and jabbed the down button. It obediently lit, and remained lit. There was no welcoming chime to signal the arrival of the elevator. Barrie restrained herself from punching the button over and over again in a futile attempt to convey her urgency to a piece of machinery.
“Please,” she whispered under her breath. “Hurry.”
She would have tried calling her father from the hotel room, but she knew Zane would stop her if he heard her on the phone. She also knew her father’s phone was tapped, which meant that incoming calls were automatically recorded. She would try to protect her father, but she refused to do anything that might endanger either Zane or their baby by leading the kidnappers straight to the hotel. She would have to call her father from a pay phone on the street, and a different street, at that.
Down the hall, she heard the room service cart clatter again as the waiter left their suite. Her heart pounding, she stared at the closed elevator doors, willing them to open. Her time was down to mere seconds.
The melodic chime sounded overhead.
The doors slid open.
She looked back as she stepped inside, and her heart nearly stopped. Zane hadn’t yelled, hadn’t called her name. He was running full speed down the hall, his motion as fluid and powerful as a linebacker’s, and pure fury was blazing in his eyes.
He was almost there.
Panicked, she simultaneously pushed the buttons for the lobby and for the door to close. She stepped back from the closing gap as Zane lunged forward, trying to get his hand in the door, which would trigger the automatic opening sensor.
He didn’t quite make it. The doors slid shut, and the box began to move downward. “God damn it,” he roared in frustration, and Barrie flinched as his fist thudded against the doors.
Weakly she leaned against the wall and covered her face with her hands while she shook with reaction. Dear God, she’d never imagined anyone could be so angry. He’d been almost incandescent with it, his eyes all but glowing.
He was probably racing down the stairs, but he had twenty-one floors to cover, and he was no match for the elevator—unless it stopped to pick up passengers on other floors. This possibility nearly brought her to her knees. She watched the numbers change, unable to breathe. If it stopped even once, he might catch her in the street. If it stopped twice, he would catch her in the lobby. Three times, and he would be waiting for her at the elevator.
She would have to face that rage, and she’d never dreaded anything more. Leaving Zane had never been her intention. After she’d warned her father, she would go back to the suite. She didn’t fear Zane physically; she knew instinctively that he would never hit her, but somehow that wasn’t much comfort.
She had wanted to see him lose control, outside of that final moment in lovemaking when his body took charge and he gave himself over to orgasm. Nausea roiled in her stomach, and she shuddered. Why had she ever wished for such a stupid thing? Oh, God, she never wanted to see him lose his temper again.
He might never forgive her. She might be forsaking forever any chance that he could love her. The full knowledge of what she was risking to warn her father rode her shoulders all the way to the lobby, one long, smooth descent, without any stops.
The rattle and clink of the slot machines never stopped, no matter how early or how late. The din surrounded her as she hurried through the lobby and out to the street. The desert sun was blindingly white, the temperature already edging past ninety, though the morning was only half gone. Barrie joined the tourists thronging the sidewalk, walking quickly despite the heat. She reached the corner, crossed the street and kept walking, not daring to look back. Her red hair would be fairly easy to spot at a distance, even in a crowd, unless she was hidden by someone taller. Zane would have re
ached the lobby by now. He would quickly scan the slot machine crowd, then erupt onto the street.
Her chest ached, and she realized she was holding her breath again. She gulped in air and hurried to put a building between herself and the hotel entrance. She was afraid to look back, afraid she would see her big, black-haired husband bearing down on her like a thunderstorm, and she knew she would never be able to outrun him.
She crossed one more street and began looking for a pay phone. They were easy to find, but getting an available one was something else again. Why were so many tourists using pay phones at this time of the morning? Barrie stood patiently, the hot sun beating down on her head, while a blue-haired elderly lady in support stockings gave detailed instructions to someone on when to feed her cat, when to feed her fish and when to feed her plants. Finally she hung up with a cheerful, “Bye-bye, dearie,” and she gave Barrie a sweet smile as she hobbled past. The smile was so unexpected that Barrie almost burst into tears. Instead she managed a smile of her own and stepped up to the phone before anyone could squeeze ahead of her.
She used her calling card number because it was faster, and since she was calling from a pay phone, it didn’t matter how she placed the call. Please, God, let him be there, she silently prayed as she listened to the tones, then the ringing. It was lunchtime on the east coast; he could be having lunch with someone, or playing golf—he could be anywhere. She tried to remember his schedule, but nothing came to mind. Their relationship had been so strained for the past two months that she had disassociated herself from his social and political appointments.
“Hello?”
The answer was so cautious, so wary sounding, that at first she didn’t recognize her father’s voice.
“Hello?” he said again, sounding even more wary, if possible.
Barrie pressed the handset hard to her ear, trying to keep her hand from shaking. “Daddy,” she said, her voice strangled. She hadn’t called him Daddy in years, but the old name slipped out past the barrier of her adulthood.
“Barrie? Sweetheart?” Life zinged into his voice, and she could picture him in her mind, sitting up straighter at his desk.
“Daddy, I can’t say much.” She fought to keep her voice even, so he would be able to understand her. “You have to be careful. You have to protect yourself. People know. Do you hear me?”
He was silent a moment, then he said with a calmness that was beyond her, “I understand. Are you safe?”
“Yes,” she said, though she wasn’t sure. She still had to face her husband.
“Then take care, sweetheart, and I’ll talk to you soon.”
“Bye,” she whispered, then carefully hung the receiver in its cradle and turned to go to the hotel. She had taken about ten steps when she was captured in the hard grip she had been dreading. She didn’t see him coming, so she couldn’t brace herself. One second he wasn’t there, the next second he was, surfacing out of the crowd like a shark.
Despite everything, she was glad to see him, glad to get it over with instead of dreading the first meeting during every dragging step to the hotel. The tension and effort had drained her. She leaned weakly against him, and he clamped his arm around her waist to support her. “You shouldn’t be out in the sun without something on your head,” was all he said. “Especially since you haven’t eaten anything today.”
He was in control, that incandescent fury cooled and conquered. She wasn’t foolish enough to believe it was gone, however. “I had to warn him,” she said tiredly. “And I didn’t want the call traced to the hotel.”
“I know.” The words were brief to the point of curtness. “It might not make any difference. Las Vegas is crawling with a certain group of people this morning, and you may have been spotted. Your hair.” Those two words were enough. Redheads were always distinctive, because there were so few of them. She felt like apologizing for the deep, rich luster of her hair.
“They’re here?” she asked in a small voice. “The kidnappers?”
“Not the original ones. There’s a deep game going on, baby, and I’m afraid you just jumped into the middle of it.”
The sun beat down on her unprotected head, the heat increasing by the minute. Every step seemed more and more of an effort. Her thoughts scattered. She might have plunged Zane and herself into the very danger she’d wanted to avoid. “Maybe I am a pampered society babe with more hair than brains,” she said aloud. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know,” he said again, and unbelievably, he squeezed her waist. “And I never said you have more hair than brains. If anything, you’re too damn smart, and it seems you have a natural talent for sneaking around. Not many people could have gotten out of that suite without me hearing them. Spook, maybe. And Chance. No one else.”
Barrie leaned more of her weight against him. She was on his left side, and she felt the hard lump of the holster beneath his jacket. When he’d grabbed her, he’d instinctively kept his right hand free, in case he needed his pistol. What he didn’t need, she thought tiredly, was having to support her weight and keep his balance in a firefight. She forced herself to straighten away from him, despite the way his arm tightened around her waist. He gave her a questioning look.
“I don’t want to impede you,” she explained.
His mouth curved wryly. “See what I mean? Now you’re thinking of combat stuff. If you weren’t so sweet, Mrs. Mackenzie, you’d be a dangerous woman.”
Why wasn’t he lambasting her? She couldn’t imagine he’d gotten over his fury so fast; Zane struck her as the type of man who seldom lost his temper, but when he did, it was undoubtedly a memorable occasion—one that could last for years. Maybe he was saving it for when they were in the privacy of the suite, remaining on guard while they were in the street. He could do that, compartmentalize his anger, shove it aside until it was safe to bring it out.
She found herself studying the surging, milling, strolling crowd of tourists that surrounded them, looking for any betraying sign of interest. It helped take her mind off how incredibly weak she felt. This pregnancy was making itself felt with increasing force; though it had been foolish of her to come out into the sun without eating breakfast, and without a hat, normally she wouldn’t have had any problem with the heat in this short amount of time.
How much farther was it to the hotel? She concentrated on her steps, on the faces around her. Zane maintained a slow, steady pace, and when he could, he put himself between her and the sun. The human shade helped, marginally.
“Here we are,” he said, ushering her into the cool, dim cavern of the lobby. She closed her eyes to help them adjust from the bright sunlight and sighed with relief as the blast of air-conditioning washed over her.
The elevator was crowded on the ride up. Zane pulled her against the back wall, so he would have one less side to protect, and also to set up a human wall of protection between them and the open doors. She felt a faint spurt of surprise as she realized she knew what he was thinking, the motives behind his actions. He would do what he could to keep anything from happening, and to protect these people, but if push came to shove, he would ruthlessly sacrifice the other people in this elevator to keep her safe.
They got off on the twenty-first floor, the ride uneventful. A man and woman got off at the same time, a middle-aged couple with Rochester accents. They turned down the hallway leading away from the suite. Zane guided Barrie after them, following the couple until they reached their room around the corner. As they walked past, Barrie glanced inside the room as the couple entered it; it was untidy, piled with shopping bags and the dirty clothes they’d worn the day before.
“Safe,” Zane murmured as they wound their way to the suite.
“They wouldn’t have had all the tourist stuff if they’d just arrived?”
He slanted an unreadable look at her. “Yeah.”
The suite was blessedly cool. She stumbled inside, and Zane locked and chained the door. Their breakfast still sat on the table, untouched and cold. He all but pushed her
into a chair anyway. “Eat,” he ordered. “Just the toast, if nothing else. Put jelly on it. And drink all the water.” He sat down on the arm of the couch, picked up the phone and began dialing.
Just to be safe, she ate half a slice of dry toast first, eschewing the balls of butter, which wouldn’t melt on the cold toast anyway. Her stomach was peaceful at the moment, but she didn’t want to do anything to upset it. She smeared the second half slice with jelly.
As she methodically ate and drank, she began to feel better. Zane was making no effort to keep her from hearing his conversation, and she gathered he was talking to his brother Chance again.
“If she was spotted, we have maybe half an hour,” he was saying. “Get everyone on alert.” He listened a moment, then said, “Yeah, I know. I’m slipping.” He said goodbye with a cryptic, “Keep it cool.”
“Keep what cool?” Barrie asked, turning in her chair to face him.
A flicker of amusement lightened his remote eyes. “Chance has a habit of sticking his nose, along with another part of his anatomy, into hot spots. He gets burned occasionally.”
“And you don’t, I suppose?”
He shrugged. “Occasionally,” he admitted.
He was very calm, unusually so, even for him. It was like waiting for a storm to break. Barrie took a deep breath and braced herself. “All right, I’m feeling better,” she said, more evenly than she felt. “Let me have it.”
He regarded her for a moment, then shook his head—regretfully, she thought. “It’ll have to wait. Chance said there’s a lot of activity going on all of a sudden. It’s all about to hit the fan.”
Chapter 13
They didn’t have even the half hour Zane had hoped for.
The phone rang, and he picked it up. “Roger,” he said, and placed the receiver into its cradle. He stood and strode over to Barrie. “They’re moving in,” he said, lifting her from the chair with an implacable hand. “And you’re going to a different floor.”