Strong and Sexy

by Jill Shalvis

  Because whoever had shot Maddie was just outside the plane, waiting for them.

  Chapter 26

  Dani’s fingers shook as she tossed Shayne his pants. Pulling on her clothes, she dropped to the floor next to Shayne. “Police are on their way. Ambulance too. Ohmigod, is she—”

  “Alive. She’s alive.”

  Dani gulped for air. Alive was good, very, very good.

  Maddie’s eyes fluttered open. “Shayne?”

  He leaned over her, grabbing her hands. “Right here, I’m right here.”

  Maddie gasped. “She’s completely lost it.” Her face was a tight mask of pain. “Goddammit, getting shot hurts.”

  Shayne was peeling her shirt away so he could see the wound. “Maddie, you’re bleeding like a sieve.”

  Dani leaned over Shayne and saw that Maddie had a bullet hole in the region of her collarbone. One that was pumping out a shocking amount of blood.

  Maddie coughed. “Shayne—”

  “Don’t talk,” Shayne begged her, pulling his shirt from the foot of the bed and pressing it against Maddie’s wound.

  “Listen,” Maddie said, grabbing his hand. “She’s not Dani’s stalker. She’s yours.”

  Shayne gently pushed her hair from her face and cupped her jaw. “I love you, Maddie, you know I do. But when you talk, you’re pumping blood out like a hose. So shut the hell up, okay? Just shut up and hold on.”

  “No. Please.” She licked her dry lips. “Get Dani out of here, okay? Or Michelle’ll shoot her too.”

  Michelle? Dani looked at Shayne, who appeared just as shocked as she.

  “She’s been scaring off all your dates since she became a client and fell all in psycho love with you,” Maddie managed. “But Dani didn’t scare off—Oh, God.” She closed her eyes, her face pasty white and damp with perspiration.

  “Maddie,” Shayne said hoarsely. “We’ve got help coming, so you just hang on. You hear me? Hang on.” He pulled back to look down into her face. “Christ.” Setting her back on the floor, he checked her pulse.

  “Is she—”

  “Alive.” His mouth was grim. “The bullet went all the way through. Maddie?”

  No response.

  “Shock is going to set in.” Dani covered her with a blanket from the bed. “We have to keep her warm.”

  A funny ping sounded, and Dani would have sworn something whizzed right by her ear as the window cracked above her.

  And then the wall splintered.

  “Down.” Shayne accompanied this demand by fisting his hand in Dani’s shirt and tugging hard. He hunched over both her and Maddie, craning his neck, eyeing something behind her. “We’re sitting ducks in here. We have to get out, and that’s our only chance.”

  “What is?”

  “Back door. Come on.” Hoisting Maddie up into a fireman’s hold over one shoulder, he grabbed Dani’s hand and yanked her to the exit on the opposite side of the plane. “Stay low.” He cracked the door.

  They were facing the steel wall of the hangar. Five feet to the right was a door to a long hallway that led to the maintenance and mechanic’s offices. “There.” But just as he reached for the door, another ping ricocheted off the steel doorway above his head.

  Before Dani could draw a breath to scream, Shayne shoved her ahead of him, around the back of the plane. In front of them was one of the golf carts they used to transport clients and their luggage back and forth from their planes to the lobby. Shayne carefully set Maddie in the back. Dani hopped into the passenger seat while Shayne took the driver’s side and turned the key.

  The engine was loud, and as Shayne hit the gas and held the wheel with his left hand, he shoved Dani’s head down with his right, keeping his hand there as if he could protect her from getting shot. He took a hard right, and Dani let out a breath, thinking they were going to make it, but then came the staccato beat of bullets against the steel wall of the hangar, close enough to make her ears ring.

  “She’s shooting up the Lear! Hold on!” he shouted.

  He wasn’t kidding, because suddenly it felt like they were in a spin and Dani was flung hard against the door. But just as she braced herself, they spun in the other direction and she slammed into Shayne. “God, what about Maddie?”

  “She’s wedged in,” he told her grimly.

  Bleeding to death . . .

  Oh, God, this was bad, so very, very bad. More bullets, and Dani bit her lip to keep her scream in.

  “Christ, and now the Piper,” Shayne muttered and took his hand off Dani’s head to put both hands on the wheel, which he promptly tugged hard to the right.

  From Dani’s vantage point, she caught sight of a plane wing, and then just the ceiling of the hangar, which was a series of rafters and wires and lights. And then she saw it.

  A flash of leg.

  Female leg.

  “She’s above us,” Dani gasped. “In the rafters.”

  Pop, pop, pop.

  “And the Moody. Goddammit, that’s not even ours!” He made a hard right, and the engine coughed. Stalled.

  Died.

  “Fuck.” He pulled Dani out of the seat and then grabbed Maddie as if she weighed nothing. “I’m going to kill Brody for being too damn cheap to upgrade that cart!”

  “Do we have a plan?”

  “Yes. Run like hell. Behind the Beechcraft—”

  “The what?”

  “Behind that plane ahead of you is the maintenance closet. It’s built like a tanker.”

  They rounded the back of the plane, with Dani’s skin literally leaping at every heartbeat, expecting to be pierced by a bullet at any second.

  Instead, Shayne yanked open the door of the closet, set Maddie down and then shoved Dani in after her.

  “What—” she started but he put his fingers over her mouth.

  “Stay in here, you’ll be safe.”

  Oh, God. She snagged his arm just as he turned away. “Where are you going?”

  “To make sure you stay safe.”

  He was going to play the hero. “No, Shayne—”

  “I have to stop her. We have other clients on the premises.”

  “She’s got a damn gun!”

  “She won’t shoot me. I’m going to draw her away until the cops come.” He waited until she thought about exactly how true that was—Michelle didn’t want Shayne dead, she wanted him very much alive.

  “She’s crazy,” she whispered.

  “Nutso. So swear to me you’ll stay here.”

  While he went out there, unprotected.

  “Dani. Swear to me.” He closed his eyes, then leaned in and put his mouth to her ear. “I can’t do this with you right next to me, a target.” His voice was low, hoarse. “I can’t think when you’re out there, a target.”

  A huge admission, one that reached into her soul and warmed it. “She’s in the rafters,” she whispered.

  “I know.”

  She fisted her hand in the front of his shirt, dragging his face to hers. “Don’t get hurt. Not one hair on your head. Swear it.”

  “I won’t get hurt.” He covered her hand with his until she loosened her grip on him, then kissed her once, his eyes on hers as he slammed the door in her face.

  Chapter 27

  Dani kneeled on the floor of the maintenance closet and checked Maddie’s wound.

  “Shayne,” Maddie whispered.

  “He’ll be right back.”

  “Oh, God, he went after her? Stupid man. Why are all men so stupid?” She struggled to get up. “So stupid.”

  “Maddie, stay down. Please, stay down. You’re bleeding.”

  “Shayne—”

  “He said she wouldn’t hurt him.”

  Maddie, eyes closed, shook her head. “She’s got a past date of Shayne’s dead in her suitcase.” Her eyes, feverish and glossed over, met Dani’s. “She’s taken a right turn out of Saneville, Dani.”

  Dani stared at her. “So she’s going to hurt him.”

  “Oh yeah. She’s going to
hurt him. And Brody too.” Wincing in pain, she clamped a hand over her shoulder and gritted her teeth. “God.”

  The sound of another gunshot split the air. Steel on steel.

  “She’s going to hit her own damn precious plane,” Maddie gasped. “The idiot.”

  “One of those planes is hers?”

  “The Beechcraft is in the northeast corner. She treats that thing like her baby.”

  Dani leapt to her feet. “I have a plan.”

  “Do you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  “A knife?”

  “No.”

  “Honey, then you don’t have a plan.”

  “Something needs to happen to her plane to distract her.”

  Maddie nodded. “I knew I liked you.”

  “Good, huh?”

  “Brilliant. Shit.” Maddie tried to reach up into her own skirt but gasped in pain and fell back, face pasty white. “I have a knife. Take the knife.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  Dani reached up Maddie’s skirt, found her garter and a—“You really have a knife up your skirt.”

  “If Michelle gets a hold of Shayne, she might—she could make him fly her to Mexico. Where she could get away.”

  Dani looked down at the knife in her hands. “So I need to stop her.”

  “And do not, and I repeat, do not get yourself hurt. Shayne will kill me if you do, and—” She broke off to grimace in pain.

  “Maddie—”

  “And . . .” She let out a breath. “I really like my job.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” Dani slipped the knife into her pocket, then peeked under Shayne’s shirt at Maddie’s wound.

  “I’m not dead yet.”

  “Go.”

  Right. Go. Dani cracked the door and peeked out.

  Utter silence.

  But then, from the far side of the hangar, came a scraping noise, and another. Good. Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, they were doing it far away. Heart in her throat, she slipped out of the closet and backed up against the wall, next to a stack of boxes, where she hoped like hell she was completely out of sight.

  She could see the tail of Michelle’s plane now, and when she moved around the boxes and hid behind a set of portable stairs, she could also see the landing gear. The tires of the landing gear.

  Slipping her hand into her pocket, she fingered the knife. If she popped the tires, the plane wouldn’t be able to take off. Felt like a good plan. She ran across the floor toward the phone—

  “Ah, there you are.”

  Uh-oh. Dani slowly tipped her head up. High in the rafters above her knelt Michelle, still looking as if she should be on the cover of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, not holding a gun.

  But she was.

  Aimed at Dani. But then the gun shifted, and re-aimed—at a spot in the rafters across the way, at the figure of a man steadily making his way toward her.

  At Shayne, who wore only his jeans, no shirt, no shoes.

  No weapon.

  “No,” Dani gasped. “Don’t shoot him. Please don’t shoot him.”

  “Oh, I’m not going to shoot him. He’s going to fly me out of here.” Michelle sent a smile toward Shayne. “Soon as I set up the tragic scene here, of course. Shayne? Be a good boy now, and go get my baby ready to fly.” Holding the gun on a very still Shayne, she turned her attention back to Dani. “Look at that. He doesn’t want to leave you.”

  “Michelle,” Shayne said very quietly.

  “Do you love him?” Michelle asked Dani. “Do you love my pilot?”

  Shayne pulled himself a little closer to Michelle, who suddenly whipped her head in his direction. “Don’t.”

  He went still, but not Dani, who took the last step to Michelle’s “baby” and slipped her hand into her pocket for the knife.

  “Goddamnit, answer me!” Michelle screamed, suddenly not looking so much Victoria’s Secret as ready for a straitjacket.

  Dani stared up at Shayne. She couldn’t see his expression clearly, but she could sense his disbelief that she’d left the safety of the closet, his frustration at being held at gunpoint, helpless, his anger that there was nothing he could do to protect her.

  “Do you love him?” Michelle yelled to Dani.

  Anguish too. There was just enough anguish in his eyes that Dani nearly staggered back. “I do,” she whispered. She cleared her throat, her gaze never leaving Shayne’s. “I love him.” Her eyes burned, her throat tightened at the look of shock and awe on his face. “I love him very much.”

  “Well.” Michelle stared down at Dani, who’d have sworn the crazy model’s eyes actually filled with tears. “Then you’re definitely going to have to be taken care of.” Her voice was thick and hoarse. “Aren’t you?”

  “No—” Shayne started forward, but Michelle’s head whipped toward him, gun at his chest.

  “Do not defend her. Ever. We’re going down. We’re going down and I’m going to do what I have to, and so are you. You’re going to fly me out of here.”

  In the split second that Michelle’s attention was on Shayne, Dani scooted behind the landing gear tires, which she sincerely hoped would absorb any flying bullets. God, she really hoped that as she stabbed the first tire.

  “You cannot make me fly you anywhere,” Shayne was saying.

  Dani could hear his voice clearly far above her as she crawled on her hands and knees toward the next tire.

  “Yes, Shayne, I can,” Michelle assured him. “And you know why? Because I have the gun.” But then her scream of fury bounced off the walls as she discovered Dani gone.

  The gun went off then, and Dani, crawling the last few feet between the tires, actually closed her eyes. Such a girl thing to do, but blindly she stabbed out with the knife and blessedly connected with the next tire at the same time that she heard another furious scream.

  “Not my baby, don’t you touch my baby!”

  Then something slammed into Dani’s arm, spinning her around. Dropping the knife, she hit the cold floor. On her back now, she had this great view of the ceiling, through a funny haze that was slowly taking over her vision. She couldn’t hear, couldn’t really feel.