“You better mean that you need help getting to the bathroom.”
For a second he wondered if the attraction sparked in only one direction. Nothing sexy about bathroom talk unless she meant a shower, and he knew she didn’t. “Definitely not.”
“Get back into bed.” She pointed as she walked. The stern look, the clear voice, it all said teacher.
School hadn’t been his favorite thing, except for gym class and the football team, but a teacher who looked like her might have made him reassess his limited time in the library. “There’s somewhere we need to look for Sara.”
“Let the other guys do it.”
“They don’t know about this place.”
Meredith sat down next to him and braced a hand on the opposite side of his legs. “You could tell them.”
Any other time he’d love being straddled by her, but right now he had to find Sara. “Logical, but not an option.”
“Care to tell me why?”
“Can’t.”
“More top secret ridiculous spy stuff?”
“The word you’re looking for is operative.”
“It all sounds like a line to me.”
Meredith was not going to let it go and he couldn’t blame her. He’d never have bought this spy crap if she’d tried to sell it to him. “It’s a safe house. A place Sara knew to go if everything else fell apart.”
Meredith sat back up, taking her weight off him. “But why would she go there if she was no longer seeing Garrett?”
The woman asked good questions. Logical questions. But common sense had no place in gut reactions. “I don’t have an answer. All I have is a hunch.”
“How do you plan to get there? We don’t have a car.”
He’d forgotten about the transportation issue. He couldn’t exactly call a cab, and asking any of the guys for keys would tip them off. But he did have a backup. He always had a backup.
She didn’t say “I told you so,” but her smile said it for her. “Guess that settles that.”
As if he’d let a little thing like car theft stop him. Luckily he didn’t have to resort to that. “We’ll borrow one.”
It was her turn to look stunned. Her eyes bulged. “You mean steal.”
“We’ll bring it right back. Well, eventually. Unless we accidentally wreck it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Are you kidding?”
“Actually, yes. There’s a car stashed in the falling-down groundskeeper shed. It’s old but it runs. We’ll use that.” The way her skin flushed and her eyes got all fiery when she prepared for battle made him hotter than he cared to admit. It was spooky how much he enjoyed watching her. “Make sense?”
She started shaking her head before he finished the sentence. “No, nothing about this plan does.”
“I can’t let anything happen to Sara.”
Meredith stilled. “You like her.”
“Garrett loves her.” Jeremy emphasized his brother’s name. “That’s all that matters to me. If he’s not around to save her, I will.”
“You should have started with that explanation. It’s your best argument.” Meredith stood up and raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Why are you still sitting?”
Relief plowed into him. He almost hated to ruin the feeling but he had no choice. “I need to give you a few obligatory warnings about staying back and listening to orders.”
“Not until you give me a weapon.”
He’d rather tie her to the bed and leave her there. For more reasons than one….
A novice with a gun was a dangerous combination. He didn’t even worry for his safety, but she could shoot herself or be attacked for holding the weapon, and the possibility of that made him sick. He couldn’t take the risk. “Absolutely not.”
She didn’t even flinch. “I go armed or we stay here.”
He recognized the tone. Firm and sure and not budging an inch. Still, being a confident woman was not enough. Her attitude didn’t stand a chance against a bullet. “Are you sure you can shoot?”
“Yes.”
Not the response he expected. “A person?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
Against every ounce of common sense inside him, he handed her a weapon. “It’s a semiautomatic. You shoot and it reloads. You’ll have eight bullets, and be prepared for flying cartridges.”
“I’ve used a semiautomatic before and know how the magazines work.”
He had to ask. Not knowing was killing him. “You’ve practiced, what, once or twice?”
“I’ve shot about four thousand rounds, the most recent time being about five days ago.” She held out her hand palm up. “The gun, please.”
A whole new side of her opened up to him. He wanted to know more. “Is there anything you want to tell me about your past or your life outside the classroom?”
She inched her hand closer to him. “If we want to find Sara before midnight, you need to find me a gun and we need to go.”
Chapter Seven
A half hour later Meredith stood in front of a firehouse garage somewhere in downtown San Diego not far from PETCO Park, the baseball stadium. A rusty lock secured the metal brace to the brick wall of the building. A chain-link fence surrounded the property but its bent bottom didn’t exactly shout safety. The black graffiti scrawled across the twenty-foot-high double doors didn’t inspire confidence either.
“This is it?” She froze when the broken bulb of the safety light crunched under her foot.
Jeremy leaned one shoulder against the wall. “The point of a safe house is to blend.”
She glanced down the abandoned street and rows of falling-down garages. “Define ‘blend.’”
He chuckled. “The neighborhood is in transition.”
“The place looks abandoned.”
“Then we set it up right. It’s the perfect cover.”
“If you say so.”
When he threw an arm around her shoulder and pressed her tight against his side, her heart sped up to a hyper rat-a-tat beat. With his hair damp from his quick wash-up after the medical attention, he brushed his cheek against hers.
“There are two cameras at the top of the building and across the street.” The volume of his voice dipped low. “We monitor the entire place all the time.”
“Is someone here?”
His gaze bounced all around them as every inch of him went still. “Why, do you see something?”
“I’m wondering why you’re whispering?”
“Just in case.”
When she tried to look up, he gave her a small squeeze she assumed meant not to move. “That seems to be your justification for a lot of things.”
He pointed at the chained door. “The rust is fake and the fence could stop a truck. There are motion sensors and all the images go to monitors at Garrett’s office and directly to our phones.”
“Very stealthy.” And a bit scary.
The over-the-top security both stopped the nerves jumping around in her throat and set her back teeth chattering. Being here went against every minute of training she’d invested in. She never left public places when meeting with a man she didn’t know. For Jeremy, she made an exception. The question was, why? And she really couldn’t come up with a reasonable answer.
Even injured, with a slight limp from protecting his wounded side, he struck her as being twice as tough as any guy she’d ever met, including Garrett. The dark scowl gave him a sexy in-control look, but his smile... Oh, yeah. The way the corner of his mouth kicked up lit up his whole face, even as it sucked the air right out of her lungs.
Over the past few hours she’d glanced over only to find him staring back at her. He didn’t turn away or pretend he hadn’t seen her gaze. He met her eyes with a heated look of his own.
Garrett had walked in and out of her life and filled the role of helpful neighbor during those times when he wasn’t absent. Even though the siblings shared identical looks, Jeremy’s impact on
her senses surpassed routine and sped straight toward explosive. There was nothing sisterly about the little dance in her stomach every time she looked at his face.
“I knew Garrett had many secrets, but a twin brother and all this covert equipment is a surprise.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Jeremy took the keycard out of his pocket.
“Where did you get that?”
“I always carry it. Slipped it out of my wallet back at the motel. Here, take this back. I should have just let you keep it at the motel.” He turned her hand over and laid his cell in her palm. “And now for the impressive part.”
She’d spent almost every minute with him being impressed. It took only a short time for her to figure out the truth. He stayed calm. He remained focused. He hunted the bad guys and wanted to save Sara because that’s who he was. He never questioned what should be done. He just did it.
He slipped his fingers underneath a brick and pulled out the row of grout. “Embedded reader.”
“Caterpillar. See? I can say random words, too.”
“You’re hysterical.” Before she could blink, he slid the card through the crack.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting access.”
“To what?”
“The entry log.”
He could have said anything, even used his shoe to call for a flying car and had it land in front of him, and she wouldn’t have been more surprised. Instead, he hit a button on the phone and lines of black print filled the small screen.
She squinted, hoping the gibberish would make sense if the words blurred together then broke apart again. “I have no idea what that says.”
“It’s code. The important piece of information is that someone has been here. Is still here.”
“Sara?”
“I hope. Or Garrett. Someone with access swiped a card, which is a good sign.”
“How exactly?”
“No one tried to break in. The log shows one entry.”
“Unless two people went in together.”
He froze. “What?”
“Just stating the obvious.”
For the shortest of blips, his guard wavered. From the slight slump of his shoulders to the hitch in his voice, she knew his mind wandered to that awful place of uncertainty where he didn’t know if his brother lived or not.
She’d survived a similar darkness. In her bleakest moments, when the man she’d thought she loved switched from insults to threats, she’d feared not the end but the moment before the end, when she’d know which one of her breaths would be her last. Then she’d made a decision not to face the unknown horror for one more day. She’d bought a gun, learned to shoot, moved out...and rolled through the waves of panic that came every time the phone rang or footsteps sounded in the hallway.
She’d been nineteen and naive and so sure she’d found what people searched a lifetime to find. She never saw how disconnected from reality she’d become. But this, right here, with Jeremy, tasted and felt real. Terrifying and completely incomprehensible in her black-and-white mind, but real. She’d long ago lost her ability to read men and no longer trusted her judgment, but Jeremy made her want to believe.
With his arm bent and tucked against his side, he threaded the fingers of his other hand through hers. “You okay?”
Shaking her head, she snapped out of the past and fell back to the present. Those deep blue eyes held her until her stomach bounced.
“Fine.” She turned her attention to the boarded-up front door. Anything not to get lost in his gaze. “Do you own this building, too?”
“Garrett uses it for business.” Jeremy felt behind the hinges. “Motion sensors.” Another swipe of the card and the door opened, opposite to the way it would normally swing.
“If you’re trying to impress me...”
His eyebrow rose. “Is it working?”
“Totally. Yes.”
She followed, slipping in behind him as he entered the building. The door opened into a small metal-walled room. It looked like an entryway but there was no obvious way out except the door they’d just used. “I don’t get it.”
“Nothing is ever what it seems in Garrett’s world. Or in mine, for that matter.”
A lesson she knew all too well after her house had blown up. “You probably shouldn’t say that to a woman you barely know. Doesn’t exactly build trust.”
Jeremy motioned to the wall in front of her. With a scrape, it started to rise. Darkness filled the edges of the dark cavern on the other side. Water dripped in the distance, mixing with the screech of the wall against its tracks. When it hit the halfway point, the backlit image in the middle of the room came into focus.
“Sara.” Jeremy whispered the name as his hand dropped from around her and his gun appeared in a flash.
“Do not move, Mr. Hill.” The menacing voice ripped through the empty room and slapped her in the face.
A man dressed all in black stood with his arm wrapped around the neck of a petite blonde. More menacing was the gun aimed at her head. Fear radiated off her as her chest rose and fell on hard thumping breaths. Her fingers clawed at her attacker’s forearm and tears flooded her eyes.
Meredith could feel the other woman’s every breath and every drip of panic. This had to be Sara, which meant they’d arrived too late.
“Garrett.” Tension held the woman’s jaw tight as she spoke.
Meredith could tell the difference between the brothers. It was more than an issue of hairstyle. The distinctions ranged from the cadence of their steps to the subtle shades in their facial expressions. If Meredith knew, Sara knew. You couldn’t love a man and not know. She was using Garrett’s name for a reason, whatever it was.
“What do you want?” Jeremy took a step away from Meredith, but his gun didn’t leave his side.
“Put your weapons on the floor. All of them.” The man pointed his gun at Meredith. “And just who are you?”
When she tried to move forward, Jeremy put out his arm and signaled for her to stay still. “She stays with me. She’s not involved in this.”
“Then you shouldn’t have brought her with you. Your mistake.” The man braced his legs apart and shifted the gun until it aimed at Meredith’s heart. “What’s your name, and no games. Tell me what I want to know or Sara Paulson dies.”
The shock of hearing Sara’s full name for the first time broke Meredith out of her stunned silence. Fear rumbled through every part of her body. Her legs shook hard enough to knock her over. It took all her concentration to hold still. “Meredith.”
“Hill, if you care about Meredith or Sara here, you’ll dump those weapons now. I won’t tell you again. Not when I have all these bullets with your name on them.”
“Screw you.”
“Since you know how to follow orders, I have to assume you don’t think I’m serious.” The attacker took an exaggerated sniff of Sara’s hair. “Should I hurt one of these lovely ladies as proof? Maybe you’re the type who prefers that sort of thing.”
Jeremy stood there for another few seconds before his hand moved to the band on his arm. Bending his knees, he dropped two guns on the floor. “Now we can talk.”
“Slide them over here.”
“No.”
“Maybe you need to learn the hard way.” The man smiled as he tightened his arm and tipped Sara’s head back. His mouth hovered right over her ear and their cheeks touched.
“Stop.” One gun, then the other skidded across the cement toward the attacker but out of grabbing range.
“Nice try, but I’ll take the one at your ankle and everything else you have on you.”
“Garrett.” The plea for help was clear from the wobble in Sara’s voice.
Her hands shook and her eyes mirrored the fear clogging Meredith’s throat, threatening to choke her. She had no idea how Sara kept on her feet.
“Satisfied?” Jeremy asked as he dumped a small gun and two knives to the floor.
“Now the shirt. Untuck. Le
t me see your skin.”
“I’m not into that.”
“You would be just the type to tape a weapon to your bare chest. I’m not taking any chances.”
Jeremy braced his legs apart. He unbuttoned his shirt and let it hang loose at his sides. On anyone else the obedience and bare chest might signal weakness. Not Jeremy. His chest puffed, growing more formidable and impressive the longer he stood.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Someone with a message for you. But first you have to do something for me.” The man motioned for Jeremy to raise his hands. “Good. Now pick.”
Jeremy frowned. “What?”
But Meredith understood. She’d been on the wrong end of a man determined to take down a woman before. Had seen the swirling sickness grow and pulse as he invented new ways to show his power.
All the helplessness came rushing back to her until dizziness shook her brain. The man planned to kill one of them. Either her or Sara.
“We have two women. You’re one man, but you can’t be greedy.” The attacker pointed his gun at Meredith then at Sara. “Choose.”
The muscles in Jeremy’s face clenched. “You want me. Take me and let the women go.”
“Thanks but I’ll keep my leverage.” The man pulled Sara in tighter against his side.
Jeremy’s jaw tightened to the point of snapping. “Won’t mean much when I kill you.”
No empty boast here. Meredith heard the vow in the soft darkness of his voice. It should have shaken her, knocked her back and sent her into an emotional spasm that stopped her brain. Should have, but it didn’t.
Security wrapped around her, filling her with a wellspring of strength. The kind that made her believe she could survive anything.
The attacker shook his head. “With what? I’ve left you defenseless.”
“I’ll only need my hands. Probably only one.”
For the first time, the attacker’s smug assurance fell. The smile disappeared. “Maybe I’ll kill both women, then take you out.”
The gun tucked into Meredith’s belt rubbed against her back. The heat burned into her skin and the weight almost doubled her over.
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