Baby, Don't Go

by Susan Andersen

  They had probably been an innocuous pair of black, spike-heeled pumps when they were new. Now the backs had been squashed flat beneath the wearer’s mesh-stocking-clad heels, turning pumps into mules. It amazed Nick that anyone could navigate in them, for the spiked heels angled down to the ground at a forty-five degree angle. Fascinated, he raised the Nikon and shot off a couple frames.

  It was through the lens that his attention branched out to the entire person. He noticed the wealth of black hair and expert makeup, the exotic sloe eyes and pretty face. He also noted the hooker’s hips were nonexistent beneath a tight black miniskirt, and that the slighty bowed legs were too muscular, and the bare shoulders rising above a screaming pink tube top were too wide to belong to a woman.

  It was a man dressed in drag, and he was reaching for something in his purse as he headed straight for them.

  Daisy’s hip brushed Nick’s as she stepped in front of him, and he expected to see her draw her gun. Instead, as she and the drag queen drew abreast, a fistful of black gadgetry unobtrusively changed hands. “Thanks, Benny,” she murmured and kept walking.

  “My pleasure, Daise. I can use the paycheck.” The transvestite’s gaze rested on Nick for a moment, then he flashed a cheeky smile. “Ooh.” He reached out to trail hot pink fingernails down the sleeve of Nick’s jacket as he passed by, and his voice floated back on the breeze. “Reggie didn’t nearly do that face justice. I’d sure hate to see it get messed up just because he’s too dumb to stay out of the park.”

  Daisy snorted and fell back into step with Nick, moving aside her jacket to clip what looked like a small Walkman to her jeans where her waist curved into her hip. She pinned a microphone to the underside of her blazer’s lapel and screwed an earpiece into her ear. Nick watched her hand slide into her jacket to press a button on the gadget just as they began to climb the stairs to the Academy of Sciences. “Okay, guys,” she said in a low voice, “everybody check in and tell me where you are.”

  “Walkie-talkie?” Nick guessed.

  Daisy glanced up at him, then beyond, her gaze constantly on the move as it swept the area. “It’s called a wireless ear induction system. But, yeah, it’s a radio.”

  “Kind of like what the Secret Servicemen use, huh?”

  “Okay, gotcha,” Daisy murmured to her backup crew and then nodded in response to Nick’s question. “Exactly.” She looked beyond him and reached out to give him a poke with her finger. “Here come the Trevors.”

  They went back down the stairs to meet the elderly couple. Eudora flashed them her sweet smile as she approached. “I just saw the most interesting person! I wish I had the words to describe her shoes to you.”

  “I wish I had the words to describe why she had an Adam’s apple,” Stanley murmured dryly, but he gave Eudora a gentle smile and her hand a loving pat when she looked at him askance. “Don’t mind me, sweetheart. I’m just rambling.” He winked at Daisy.

  Nick led them to a path next to the museum, and Daisy relaxed marginally once they’d left the open spaces of the concourse and its unlimited potential for ambush. Securing the garden paths was a much more manageable proposition.

  Nick stopped when they came to a fallen log off the side of the path. “Let’s start here. Eudora, Stanley, take a seat on the log. No, down just a little. There, perfect. The greenery will make a great backdrop.” He set down his bag and started pulling out equipment.

  Daisy moved off to where the path intersected with another. Pushing down the transmitter button on her radio, she said, “Benny, keep an eye on the entrance to the path we entered. John, Jere, come past us and take up positions at the next two intersections. Report your situation when you’re in place.”

  A moment later John and Jere strolled past. Fifteen minutes after that Nick moved the Trevors to a different spot within the network of intertwining paths, which necessitated moving her men. But then it grew quiet. Listening to her three helpers through the earpiece as they rhapsodized over Nick, she kept an eye on her paths and watched Nick charm smiles out of the Trevors. And she secretly hankered for a little less quiet. Professionally, inactivity was a desirable objective. But personally, it gave Daisy too much time to reflect on what a fool she’d been to take this job.

  Had she really thought that enough time had passed, that because she’d learned well from Nick not to trust, it had somehow nullified her ability to ever be hurt by him again? To be attracted to him again?

  Yes. She had. Such self-deception spelled only one thing in her mind, and that was simpleton. In huge, bold, uppercase letters.

  She had tried so hard not to think of Nick since the night he’d left her in that hotel room all alone. And when she had thought of him, all she’d remembered was the bad stuff. Like having him say he loved her—only to immediately turn around and virtually tell her to grow up, that she couldn’t believe what was said in the throes of sex, before he’d turned his back and walked out on her. She had somehow believed that remembering the utter pain of that would save her from ever falling back under his spell. It had slipped her mind how charismatic he could be. She’d forgotten the abundance of his charm, the lure of his humor.

  He used both qualities to hold people at arm’s length, and it said something about the force of his personality that no one ever seemed to realize what he was doing. She’d never seen his charm slip with anyone but herself. That should have been her first clue, but idiot that she was, she’d even romanticized that, convincing herself she was the one person with whom Nick could be himself.

  What a chump she was.

  She took a deep breath and blew it out. Okay. So she still felt a smidge attracted to him—big deal. Acknowledging it was half the battle. She could handle it. She’d start by keeping him well out of neck-kissing range.

  But where the hell was all the action she’d counted on to keep her mind focused? It would help if she had some bad guys to fight—the bursts of adrenaline that came from physical confrontations were an excellent antidote to sexual frustration. It was beginning to look as if Nick had overestimated Johnson’s determination to retrieve his adulterous wife’s pictures.

  Still, she instructed her team to institute a relay surveillance when she saw the photo shoot begin to wind down. Jere moved up to Benny’s spot at the path entrance, while Benny moved to the grassy bank that formed the Kennedy Drive border of the concourse, and John followed behind. She was proud of their synchronization as she and Nick bade the Trevors farewell and made their way back to the car. The guys passed and repassed each other, one taking up where the other left off, so there was always someone front and back, keeping an eye out. And it was handled with such subtleness that Nick appeared not to notice. If Hubby’s henchmen were anywhere about, which was looking more and more unlikely, Daisy doubted they’d notice either.

  “And that’s a wrap,” she murmured into the mike as they reached Nick’s car. “Nice job, guys. I’ll call Reg and instruct him to cut y’all a check.”

  Nick had unlocked her side of the car and gone around to his own. She heard him swear beneath his breath and start pawing through his equipment bag.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I used a filter at the first location,” he replied without looking up. “I remember setting the thing on the log when I took it off, but I don’t remember picking it up again.” He pawed through the bag some more, then wrenched open the car door and stuffed the bag in the small space behind the seat, his frustration evident in the way he manhandled it into place. Straightening, he stared at her over the top of the car. “Dammit to hell. I’d better go get it.” He slammed the door and headed back across Fulton.

  “Nick, wait.” She squeezed between the parked cars. Down the street she heard an engine roar to life and an intuition she never argued with made the tiny hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She broke into a run. “Coltrane, move your ass out of the street!”

  Daisy’s voice broke into the haze of Nick’s frustration, and he looked back to see her runnin
g at him hell for leather, her hand reaching into her waistband for her gun. He swung his head around to follow the direction of her gaze, expecting to see one of the men who had broken into his place the other day.

  Instead he saw a black car with dark windows. It peeled away from the curb and accelerated with a roar, going from zero to sixty in under ten seconds—headed straight for him.

  7

  HE froze for an instant in sheer surprise and the car bore down on him, a quarter ton of gleaming black steel, snarling horsepower, and lethal speed that grew larger and louder by the second. It was only a few feet shy of mowing him down where he stood when Daisy hit him with a flying tackle and knocked him out of its path. The car missed them by mere inches and Nick felt a heated whoosh of air as it screamed past.

  A second later, he and Daisy hit the parking strip. His breath exploded out of his lungs as his recovering shoulder slammed into the ground; then Daisy belly-flopped over his hip and jarred his shoulder all over again. Her hands scrambled against the grass in an attempt to break her fall with something other than her nose, which was heading toward the ground at warp speed. He rolled onto his back to remove the fulcrum from her stomach, and she collapsed cattywampus atop his torso.

  She lay draped across him for a moment, wheezing to regain her breath. Then she pushed back onto her knees and swung around, her gun out and her gaze intent as she stared in the direction the car had disappeared. A moment later she lowered the gun and Nick watched her shoulders relax as she turned back to him.

  “I don’t think they’re coming back.” She tucked the gun into its inside holster and looked at him. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about your shoulder?” She reached out to touch it. “You smacked it pretty hard.”

  “One more bruise at this point hardly matters one way or the other.” He rose up onto his knees. Adrenaline pumped through his veins and all he could think of was, “You saved my life.”

  Daisy shrugged. “Just doing my—”

  “Jesus, Daise, they were going to freakin’ run me down. Can you believe that? They tried to kill me. You saved my life!” He hooked his hand around the back of her neck and hauled her against him.

  She looked as wild-eyed as he felt, and he dipped his head and kissed her, hard and deep, his hunger nearly outstripping his control. For one brief instant he was aware that her mouth was hot and her body was firm where they pressed together from knee to chest. Then his cognitive processes shut down, and he dove into the feelings headfirst.

  Daisy would’ve stopped him in a red-hot minute if she’d had a second to prepare for it. But he caught her flat-footed, and Nick was a dynamite kisser. His mouth was insistent, his tongue commanding, and flames licked through her veins with every urgent sound that rumbled low in his throat. It was exactly the way it had been nine years ago: he touched her and she was lost. Wrapping her arms around his neck, she kissed him back.

  He groaned and tightened his arms around her, nearly cutting off her breath. One of his hands speared through her hair and gripped her head; the other wrapped around her hip. Everywhere he touched, heat radiated. She felt his mouth gentling and he raised his head just long enough to change the angle of the kiss. His eyes burned with a blue flame as he stared down at her, and she couldn’t prevent the little yearning sound that slipped up her throat.

  “Yes,” he muttered roughly. Then he came at her again, his mouth hot and uncivilized in its demand.

  She felt feverish and out of control as she parried the cocksure slide of his tongue with her own. She clung to him, dimly aware of the pulsing of her heartbeat in her wrists, in her throat, between her legs. Plunging her hands into the thickness of Nick’s hair, she curled her fingers to hold him fiercely in place.

  Then a voice demanded, “My God, are you two all right?”

  It shattered the haze of frenzied passion that had her in its grip, and as footsteps pounded up the sidewalk, awareness exploded into Daisy’s consciousness like fireworks in a Chinatown parade. Her eyelids snapped open.

  Nick seemed oblivious and she pulled frantically at the hair wrapped around her fingers. He resisted the pressure and kissed her harder, and to her eternal shame she was desperately tempted to sink back into the sensations. Which was not the way to keep her emotional distance from a man who had already demonstrated his ability to rip her heart right out of her breast and then step over it and walk away as if it didn’t lie bleeding at his feet. She fisted her hands and yanked.

  Nick lifted his head and blinked unfocused eyes at her. Their breath sawed in and out of their lungs as they stared at each other. Then Daisy let his hair slip through her fingers and brought her hands down to his shoulders, shoving back. She jumped to her feet.

  Dear God, what had she been thinking? They’d been going at it like a couple of cats in heat right in the middle of a public parking strip! Heart thumping much too fast, she pressed the backs of her fingers to her lips and winced at their tender, swollen state. How on earth had this come to pass? The rush of adrenaline from their near miss with the car must have short-circuited her brain.

  The inconvenient portion of her mind that always insisted on self-honesty feared there was much more to it than that. But for the moment, that was her story and she was sticking to it.

  “Daisy…” Nick climbed to his feet and reached for her arm, but she snapped it out of his reach as if his fingers were made of fire.

  It seemed like a millennium since the car had tried to run Nick down, but in reality only a few moments had passed. The man whose voice had interrupted their kiss skidded to a stop in front of them and leaned over to brace his hands on his knees as he sucked air into his lungs. His stomach sagged over the belt of his polyester slacks.

  “You saw the incident, sir?” Daisy addressed the spreading bald spot at the crown of his head, desperate to gather a cloak of professionalism back around herself. She watched as his instamatic camera swayed back and forth where it dangled in the triangle formed by his back, arms, and thighs.

  Still braced, he raised his head. “Yeah,” he panted. “That was some fast footwork, lady.” Cocking his head, he looked at Nick. “You nearly bought the farm, boy. I can see why you were kissin’ the little lady here—you must be some grateful, and sometimes a guy’s just gotta reaffirm he’s still alive and kickin’.” He looked from one to the other. “So, you two okay, then?”

  There was a beat of silence. “Yes,” Nick replied, and Daisy nodded, knowing that if the heat throbbing in her cheeks was anything to go by, they must be candy-apple red.

  “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that car heading right at ya.” The man straightened and shook his head. “Guy musta been drunker ’n a skunk.”

  Or very determined. Daisy kept the thought to herself. “Did you get his license plate number by any chance?”

  “No, sorry. Me ’n Mama were up there about a block away.” He pointed across the street behind them, and Daisy blessed the fact that his position had prevented him from seeing her pull her gun. Civilians tended to freak when they saw people aiming pistols on a public street. “It happened so fast,” the tourist added, “and I was too far away.”

  “Nick?” Daisy forced herself to look at him. “Did you get a look at the plates?” Her hands had left his hair all rumpled, and a shiny hank fell over his eyes, which were heavy-lidded as he stared at her without blinking. He looked unnervingly predatory and sexual.

  “No.” His eyes lost their sleepy look and blazed with intensity. “Listen, Daisy, we should talk—”

  “Neither did I. Damn. We’re not going to have much to tell the police.”

  The stranger looked alarmed. “You don’t need me for that, do you?” He glanced over his shoulder. “I gotta get back to the wife. We only have today and tomorrow left of our vacation, and I’d just as soon not spend the rest of the afternoon in a police station, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “I think you can safely forgo that pleasure,” Daisy ag
reed. She was conscious of Nick watching her and found it difficult to concentrate. “I don’t anticipate that they’ll have any questions for you, since you didn’t see anything that Nick or I didn’t see as well. Still, I’d like your name and the hotel where you’re staying, if you don’t mind. That way, if they do have an inquiry for you they can get in touch.”

  He gave her the information, and she wrote it down in the little spiral notebook she always carried on the job. When he left she turned back to Nick, tilting her chin to a belligerent angle to discourage a discussion of the much-regretted kiss.

  Since talking about it was the last thing Nick wanted to do, either, he escorted her back to the car in silence. For a rash moment or two, with the taste of her still lingering on his tongue, he’d been tempted to try to define with her just what this relationship of theirs was supposed to be. Happily, that flash of insanity had quickly passed. They didn’t have a relationship. The word alone was enough to give him chills, since it was a term designed for starry-eyed dreamers.

  But that was hardly his biggest problem at the moment. The crisis de jour was what J. Fitzgerald had set in motion.

  The man had tried to have him killed. Sweet Jesus. Never in his wildest imaginings had he envisioned anything like this. But if the car had succeeded in running him down, it would have been murder, pure and simple. That wasn’t an everyday occurrence in the crowd he ran with.

  And the kicker was, Nick had absolutely no way to prove it. Shock began to give way to pure, cold rage.

  “We should go to the Richmond station,” Daisy said, “since this is their territory.”

  He scowled at her. “You realize we’ve got bupkus to offer for evidence, don’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what the hell is the point of filing a report?”

  She slicked a hand through her hair and Nick watched it spring back up again in the wake of her fingers’ passage. “The violence is escalating, Nick. At the very least this attempt should be on record. It will help establish a pattern when we do come up with a provable claim.”