by Julie Frost
“How is he?” he asked Janni, needing the distraction.
“Still shivering. I should get him out of those wet jeans.” Her mouth turned down at the corners, and she pulled bits of bloody cloth away from Ben’s injuries with trembling fingers. “Do you need anything else?”
“A hot babe and a warm cognac, but the only hot babe in the car looks taken, and Megan would shoot me again if I had a drink right now,” he wheezed, noting to himself that Janni seemed to have a fair amount of experience in shucking Ben’s pants off.
“I guess what they say about you is true,” Janni said, as she settled Ben back inside the blanket, with his head on her lap and her hand compulsively stroking his curly blond hair.
“What, that I’m charming and witty?” Blackness was starting to encroach on Alex’s vision, and he still couldn’t get enough air, so he pressed harder on the ice pack. It didn’t help.
“That you’re prone to making completely inappropriate remarks at completely inappropriate times.”
“Oh, that. Well, yes.” He called back over his shoulder. “Phelps, how much longer?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
Alex gasped. “Faster … faster would be better.”
The Bentley accelerated smoothly, although they’d been doing at least eighty before. “You got it, sir. Hang on, I’ll get you home in time.”
“Good … good man.”
Janni’s eyes were wide with fear—whether for him or because of their velocity, Alex wasn’t sure. “Home?” she asked. “You need an emergency room.”
“I don’t do … hospitals. Doc Allen will fix me up … right as rain.” Off her dubious look, he said, “Hey, it’s gonna be okay.” Possibly, the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth was ruining his attempt at reassurance. “You should’ve seen me … the time I had a … kayaking accident.” The rocky rapids had been just a tad much for him, and that little incident had introduced him to the term “flail chest,” which was exactly as terrible as it sounded, especially with as much water as he’d inhaled before the rapid had spit him out into the calm part of the river. “This … is nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing. Just what the hell have you gotten us involved in?”
“Tell you … when we get home …” Not enough air, still. His ears were singing. “Phelps … faster …”
Janni’s alarmed “Mr. Jarrett?” was the last thing he heard.
O O O
Janni hung onto Ben as the limo squealed around the driveway that circled Alex’s Beverly Hills mansion and pulled into an oversized garage attached to the house. The back door popped open, and she found herself confronted by a balding, stocky man in his mid-fifties with an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He wore rumpled tan slacks, a wrinkled dark blue polo shirt, and running shoes.
“I’m Doc Allen,” he grunted, unrolling a portable stretcher onto the floor of the Bentley and tucking his cigarette behind his ear. He made short work of examining both Ben and Alex. “Sorry, miss, but it looks like Jarrett’s worse off; I’m going to have to work on him first. This should tide your fella over …”
He swabbed the inside of Ben’s arm with alcohol and injected something from a syringe—she didn’t know what—too quickly for her to caution him about Ben’s general reaction to any kind of needle in his vicinity. Ben didn’t even twitch, which attested either to the doctor’s skill or Ben’s deep unconsciousness. Janni was afraid of the answer to that particular question. Wounded like this, he looked even more like a vulnerable puppy than he normally did.
The door on the opposite side opened, and Alex’s driver pulled Alex onto the stretcher while the doctor gave the billionaire a shot in the exit wound with another hypodermic. They trundled him away, with Doc Allen reeling off instructions.
Janni emitted an “eep!” noise when someone else stuck his head into the car. This man was in his early sixties, she judged, tall, with a full head of wavy white hair, and dressed in a butler uniform, minus the morning coat and tie, and with his sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular forearms.
“Hello, Miss Janni,” he said. It figured that Alex Jarrett’s butler would be English. “My name is Chambliss. Shall we get Master Ben inside and cleaned up?”
They used the blanket as a sling and carried Ben into the opulent mansion filled with marble halls, lush wood paneling, thick carpets in the rooms, and art Janni was sure was original as they passed several living spaces and what looked like a ballroom on their way to an elevator big enough to hold twenty people. “This way, miss—we’ll get you settled in a guest room.”
“He needs a doctor.”
“Doctor Allen will be with you as soon as he can. He gave him an injection, did he not?” At her nod, he continued. “Master Alex is at the forefront of nanotech pharmaceuticals. The shot will help your young man start healing immediately. In fact—” The butler hadn’t stopped talking while they’d been in the elevator, which stopped four floors up and opened into a hallway decorated with original bronzes in alcoves and paintings on walls—Remingtons and Russells.
They entered a bedroom the size of her and Ben’s living and dining rooms combined and deposited Ben gently on a California-king-sized bed, which sported a cheerful yellow floral comforter. Matching curtains decorated a pair of enormous windows, and a couple of Georgia O’Keeffe sunflower paintings hung on the walls.
Janni pulled the blanket back to get a better look at Ben in the light and gasped.
She’d seen him injured before, of course—even though Ben mostly had a desk job, he would on occasion go out into the field if her mom needed backup, and sometimes he got hurt. And there was the network of scars left over from Afghanistan. But this kind of recent, calculated brutality wasn’t something she was used to, and it shook her. Ben looked a whole lot worse than he had under guttering streetlights. Were those burns over some of his bruises?
Chambliss’s brow lowered a fraction. “Yes, we’ll need to get the bits of his shirt out of those welts before they begin closing. I’ll be right back with a basin and a cloth and some dry clothing for both of you.” With that, he spun and hurried from the room.
Janni combed Ben’s bloody hair out of his face with shaking fingers. “Oh, sweetie …” She had to hold it together, because it wouldn’t do for him to wake up and find her falling apart on him.
Chambliss returned with hot water and a pair of washcloths, and she took a deep breath and steadied herself to the task of taking care of physical injuries instead of mental ones.
She was better at the mental ones.
O O O
The torture hadn’t stopped when Ben passed out. The bad guys followed him into his dreams and bound his wrists behind his back, ignoring, once again, his panic attack. Grabbing his hair, they thrust his face into a bucket of icy water, half-drowning him before letting him come up for air. They shouted questions in a language he didn’t understand, questions he wouldn’t have answered even if he had the capability, before dunking him again. And again. At this point, he was just waiting for death to come and release him once and for all, because he knew he wasn’t getting out of this any other way.
A shriek from above made everyone jerk their heads skyward, and the men scrambled away from him, leaving him on his knees, soaked and freezing and gasping. A dusky-skinned Valkyrie swooped down with white wings and a nasty attitude, tearing his torturers apart with her claws, screaming his name. They vanished, dead or fleeing, and she landed beside him with a whisper of feathers and a gentle hand on his head, the other hand working at the bindings on his wrists, setting him free to collapse against her as the wings wrapped around him.
“Janni,” he said, and opened his eyes to find he was lying on his side in the softest bed imaginable with his arm thrown across Janni’s legs because she was propped up next to him against the headboard.
“Oh, Ben,” she choked, and something warm and wet splashed on his face. Was she crying?
“I’m alive,” he said, half-unsure. Then he sucked a b
reath into his sore chest and sat up much too quickly, as the threat “Your girlfriend’s next” echoed through his head. The blanket dropped down to his waist, and he heard Janni suck in a breath of her own. “They didn’t, they haven’t—” he started.
“You’re safe,” Janni said. “Lie down, sweetie.”
Safe was good; he was too dizzy to do anything about it if they weren’t. His ears were ringing and his vision had done that “black around the edges and spotty in the middle” thing. He laid his head back down and closed his eyes as she pulled the blanket back over his shoulder. But he’d seen her face, and, yes, she was crying, which made him wonder—she hardly ever cried, at least in front of him.
Whatever painkillers they’d given him had brought the agony down to an ache, although his ribs were twinging pretty hard, and now he had another thought. Who were “they”? Because this wasn’t his and Janni’s place, or a hospital, which was the next logical place—and it sure as hell wasn’t their bed. “Safe where?” he asked.
“Alex Jarrett’s house.”
It was all too much, and his dizziness increased. “Alex Jarrett? The guy whose case we’re on? Why are we at his house?”
“I went to that fundraiser we’d planned on, for recon on some of the players in this case. Alex was there, of course,” Janni said. “Whoever had you called me from your phone and sent me a picture of your back.” Her shaking fingers roamed through his hair, which felt good and normal, or what passed for normal with them. “Alex followed me out—I guess he was bored. And then he got shot, and his driver brought us here because he’s got a doctor on call.”
Something bubbled to the surface of Ben’s frazzled brain. “Yeah,” he said. “They were asking me … about this job. What we knew. I didn’t tell them anything. I’m so hungry, they didn’t feed me …” He was free-associating and just babbling whatever came to mind, and he thought, distantly, that he might be concussed.
“They said you’d need something to eat,” Janni said. “Sit up slowly. Alex’s butler made you a protein shake—it’s on the nightstand.”
He jacked himself up in stages, and this time his head remained un-woozy. He sipped the shake, which tasted terrible but was easy on his too-empty stomach. Dried blood encrusted the creases of his knuckles, and he knew without being able to see—because he couldn’t see a damn thing without his glasses—that he was probably covered in it. “I should get cleaned up, because, yuck.”
“Can you even walk?” Janni asked. “You need sleep. Real sleep.”
“Sleep better if I’m clean.” He finished the shake and assessed himself. “I can probably make it into the bathroom by myself. Might need help with the actual shower.”
“All right. Here we go.” Janni steadied him with a hand on his arm as they walked, bending to pick up a stack of clothing on the way into the lavish bathroom, which was nearly the same size as the bedroom they’d just left.
They stood there, blinking, for a few moments.
“Oh, wow,” Janni said, staring at a cabinet plugged into the wall. It had a round window showing several large and fluffy towels rolled up inside, and there was a dial on top. “Is this … it’s a towel warmer. Wow.”
She turned the odd contraption on, along with the water in the biggest shower stall he’d ever seen, complete with a bench running along the back and down one side. She took off the clothes she was wearing—which obviously weren’t hers. They were several sizes too big, and Ben knew she didn’t have sweatpants like that or a Jarrett Biologicals T-shirt.
“The floor in here is heated,” he said, stepping out of his boxers, which, yes, were still his. He could tell because of the bloodstains. “Holy cow. I guess you can have nice things when you’re an eccentric billionaire.”
Ben braced his hands on the tiles and hissed as the hot water hit the welts on his back, squeezing his eyes shut. He cracked them open again when Janni laid a hand on his arm.
“Too warm, too hard?” she asked. “This shower head has a bazillion settings, and it’s a handheld, too.”
“No, honey, it’s fine. Just … tender.” That was a good word. His hair was matted with blood, and he tilted his head back into the spray to rinse it out. The water ran into his face—
And he launched himself across the stall and hit the floor, shaking, as a flash of red bucket and an angry, shouting man leaped across the screen of his closed eyelids. His lungs seized—the short, sharp gasps not providing nearly enough oxygen—and he felt dizzy and ill. Unsure of where he was, he muttered, “No, I don’t know” in a litany that had never stopped them, but he couldn’t help it.
Janni was beside him right away, wrapping around him, whispering in his ear. “You’re safe, safe with me. I’ve got you,” over and over again, while his heartbeat thundered in his ears in white-hot panic mode. And if Janni was here, then he wasn’t there, so he was safe, he knew it, he did, but he still took a while to pull himself together.
The water in his face had shocked him like he hadn’t been shocked in quite some time, other than by nightmares. He could usually avoid trigger-y things, getting kidnapped notwithstanding, but this had smacked him out of the blue. How could he avoid them if he didn’t know what they were?
Finally, his heart rate slowed to an acceptable level. Ben sagged limply against the tiles and let his arms drop to his sides. Deep breaths were a thing again.
“Okay,” he said hoarsely. “That was new and unpleasant.”
Janni stroked his bicep, soothingly, up and down, with the backs of her fingers. “What did they do to you? Besides the obvious.”
His heart started another mad gallop through his chest, and his throat closed. He held a hand up. “I can’t—”
“All right. All right,” she hastened to say. “You don’t have to. Shh.”
More breathing. He could do this. He got a hand on the seat and pushed himself into a standing position, Janni right there next to him.
“Let’s get out—” she started.
He put a finger on her lips. “I have to finish this. I can’t go through life unable to friggin’ shower. There’s blood in my hair, I can still feel it.”
She took a deep breath of her own, and he reminded himself that the wreckage of his psyche was hard on her, too. Why she’d taken him on—
He didn’t get to complete the thought. “Okay,” she said. “Sit.”
His knees were wobbly anyway, and he was exhausted, so he sat on the bench with a minimum of protest. She grabbed the showerhead, with its extra-long hose, and held it a half-inch from his skin, running it all over his body, washing the accumulated blood and sweat and stress away. And it was good to just let her do this for him, while his muscles loosened and his head got heavier. Then she was moving him, getting him settled back on his elbows.
“Tip your head,” she said softly, supporting his neck with one hand.
He couldn’t help it, he went tense again, every muscle trembling. His throat closed, and his hands clenched into fists.
Janni ran the water over his head, careful to keep it out of his face, using the same half-inch-away technique. She caressed his arm and reminded him to breathe.
He gritted his teeth and took slow breaths. This was Janni. She was the only person on the planet he trusted utterly. She was even more vigilant about his triggers than he was. More slow breaths. The water stopped, and he felt her massaging some no doubt ridiculously expensive shampoo through his hair before the spray came back for a rinse.
And he was clean for the first time in what felt like ages, warm and cherished, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d fall asleep right here in the shower stall.
“None of that; come on,” Janni said, leading him out with a hand on his elbow. She grabbed an oversized towel out of the warmer and wrapped it around his shoulders, pushing him into the chair in front of the makeup mirror.
He crossed his arms on top of the vanity and put his head down, watching through heavy eyelids while she dried herself off with ruthless efficiency and
put clean clothes on. He hardly noticed when she patted him dry, sleepwalked though her dressing him, and wasn’t even aware when she guided him back into the bedroom and hustled him under the comforter.
O O O
Janni sat beside Ben on the bed and leaned her head back against the headboard with her eyes closed. He shifted beside her, scooting over to rest his head on her thigh and wrap his arm around her legs before sinking back into slumber. He was breathing a lot easier than she was right now.
Because Ben’s goalposts had just been moved. He’d been getting better, and Janni wanted to scream and throw things and hurt the men who’d done this to him.
She was saved her very own freakout by Doctor Allen walking into the room.
He noted the empty glass with its remnant of protein shake and nodded approvingly. “How’s he doing?” he asked, grabbing the cigarette from behind his ear and sticking it in the corner of his mouth.
“He’s cleaned up and already starting to heal,” Janni said. “And before you come at him with a needle again, you need to know that doing that while he’s awake without warning him first is a terrible idea. We’re talking thermonuclear meltdown.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. I take it he has his reasons?”
“Yes,” she said briefly. It wasn’t like anyone needed to know the why, just the what. Even her mom didn’t know.
Allen checked Ben’s color and had a look at his wounds. “He’ll have some interesting scars, but he’ll be okay—this is all surface, superficial stuff, relatively speaking, other than the cracked ribs. It looks worse than it is. You did a good job, young lady. I don’t think he’ll need another injection, but keep an eye on him, watch for infection, fever. He’ll be alternately hungry and tired from the nanotech. Let him eat and sleep as much as he wants.”
“How’s Mr. Jarrett?” she asked.
“He’s all right, recovering in his bedroom. It was nasty, but pretty basic; I’ve seen him worse.” He turned and tossed off a wave, lighting the cigarette. “I’m going to sit with him until Megan gets here. Holler if you need anything. House is intercommed.”