by Lucy Monroe
“So, do you know what department is looking for the book?” Ethan asked him.
“No. My contacts haven’t heard even a murmur of interest in Lester Wilson or the assassin, Arwan.”
“Oh my, I had no idea you’d done so much investigating already,” Queenie said.
Hotwire shrugged. “It hasn’t done us much good. Do you remember the name of the agency that hired Arwan for his jobs?”
“It wasn’t in the kill book, just a contact name. Now, let me think.” She silently tapped one finger against her chin and then made a sound of triumph. “Alvin Thorpe. His name was Alvin Thorpe. Lester told me they were in the war together.”
Brett smiled with grim satisfaction. A name was something concrete to go on, which was more than he’d had so far.
“I can find out who Thorpe worked for,” Ethan said.
“Fine.” Though Hotwire had every intention of finding out for himself as well. He still wasn’t sure he could trust the other man even that far.
“We can compare notes,” Ethan said, telling Hotwire he knew exactly what he was thinking.
“That would be wonderful.” Claire smiled for the first time since the discussion about Lester’s possible murder began. “I think having another investigator would make this situation more manageable.”
“You don’t trust me to take care of it?” Hotwire asked her.
She rolled her eyes. “Please. You are always saying that backup on a mission is a good thing.”
“And you see this as a mission?”
“Don’t you?”
“No. I see it as personal.” He gave her a meaningful look she couldn’t misinterpret. “Very personal.”
Her pretty brown eyes went wide with confusion and damned if she didn’t blush. “Oh.”
He wanted to lean across the table and kiss the lips she had pursed so enticingly in her disconcertment. One more night on the rollaway loomed ahead of him, and he cursed his soft thinking that had made him agree to allow Queenie to postpone her trip to Nevada until the following day.
He spent the rest of lunch in a state of semi-arousal, despite the fact that they did nothing but discuss the case.
He exchanged contact information with Ethan before taking the women back to the hotel.
“It’s too bad he’s going back to D.C.,” Queenie lamented in the car on the way.
“He has to get back to his job,” Claire said.
“Perhaps he will come out and visit again.”
“I don’t see how he could stay away. You’re his last link to the uncle he never knew, but was always curious about,” Claire consoled the other woman.
“I suppose you’re right,” Queenie said, brightening. And then she shot a sideways look at Hotwire. “Why didn’t the two of you tell me about the break-in at Claire’s place?”
“We didn’t want to worry you,” Claire said before he could reply.
“And the less you know, the safer you are,” Hotwire said, knowing Queenie would not take it the way he meant it. Which was that she had a tendency to expose what she knew and dramatize.
“Oh, I see,” she said. “I can’t be forced to say what I don’t know.”
“Something like that.”
Claire shifted nervously in the car seat. Brett had been giving her hot looks all morning, but they’d gone sulfuric since they saw Queenie off at the airport with the taciturn Collins.
She licked her lips. “Um…what’s the plan for today? I thought maybe you could drop me at the library to study.”
He looked at her incredulously. “I’m not leaving you anywhere alone right now.”
“The bad guys don’t know where I am, and I seriously doubt anyone’s staking out the library watching for me.”
“If you need to study—”
“I do,” she interrupted.
“Then you can do so in the hotel.”
“That’s not working very well.” Since the first bout of studying she’d done, she had had abysmal luck at focusing on her work in his much-too-disturbing presence.
“Why not?”
“It’s too distracting.”
“It’s a hotel room.”
“But you’re in it.”
Chapter 11
“D o I distract you, Claire?”
“Yes, and I can’t afford to let you,” she said bluntly. “I’ve worked really hard to graduate this term. I’m not missing out because I flunked all my finals.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Not if I study, no.”
“You’re really worried about this?” he asked, sounding shocked.
“I guess it’s hard for you to understand.”
“Considering how smart you are, yeah.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“I’m not going to end up like my mom. She fell apart when my dad died and it wasn’t just because he killed himself. She had no marketable skills, no education to speak of. When we lost the house and everything, she drank instead of trying to make something better of our life. I never want to be like that.”
“And you’re succeeding admirably, sugar.”
“That’s just it. I want to succeed. Not eke by. I’ve kept a 4.0 grade point average all through. It’s important to me that I don’t falter at the last hurdle.”
“In other words, you need to focus all your energies on acing these exams?”
“Yes.”
In the blink of an eye, he had the sexual fire in his eyes banked and he was wearing the expression he’d worn the few times she’d seen him in work mode. “I’ll help you.”
“But—”
“Trust me.”
“I don’t need help so much as a lack of distraction.”
“You want me to accept Ethan’s help on the investigation, right?” he asked, something in his tone telling her he wasn’t exactly pleased about that.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
She frowned, not understanding his need to ask the question. “Because it will increase your chance of success.”
“I want to increase your chance of success, Claire.”
“So?”
“Doing well on your final exams is important to you. That makes it important to me, and you’ve had a rough week, the kind guaranteed to wreak havoc with your ability to study and even remember what you’ve learned in the short term. Whether you see it or not, you could use my help.”
“But you’ve got your own stuff to concentrate on. You can’t take time to baby-sit me through my finals.”
“It’s not baby-sitting, it’s helping a friend. And I’m not dropping you off at the library by yourself to study. So your choices are limited: study with me, or try to study on your own with me in the room. It’s your call.”
“You’d probably be bored,” she grumbled.
He looked at her once and then back at the road, his features set in stubborn lines she’d learned to recognize. “Your choice,” he repeated.
“I guess we could try it,” she said doubtfully.
She didn’t see how having him study with her would be an improvement in the distraction stakes.
But she was wrong. Brett turned out to be a great study partner. He knew as much or more about most of her subjects than she did. The only post-high school education he’d had was in the military, but he knew just how to drill her for an exam and help her remember important elements from a class. Even when her thoughts wanted to scatter to the four winds because of everything that had been going on.
He refrained completely from alluding to future intimacy between them and seemed to know just when she needed a break to eat or work out, or just watch television for an hour. He made her laugh and he gave her total quiet when she needed that, too.
He spent time at his computer and on the phone, chasing down leads about Lester. However, he refused to discuss them with her, telling her he wasn’t giving her any food for thought to chew on related to anything other tha
n her studies. When she aced her finals would be soon enough for him to brief her on what he’d learned.
She was grateful because he was right. She was able to put it all completely from her mind, knowing he was working on it. And the weekend flew by.
Claire finished writing and laid down her pencil. As of this moment, she was done with her finals. She’d taken one on Tuesday, two the day before, and this was her last test.
She looked at the clock and realized she’d finished in half the time allotted. She grinned. She’d only been working for forty-five minutes, but she was confident of her answers. Brett had drilled her until she knew this stuff inside and out.
She stood up, a feeling of accomplishment rushing through her that made her feel like shouting. She’d done it. Not only had she fulfilled her requirements to graduate, but she was sure she’d aced all of her final exams. No eking by…success all the way.
Not bad for the daughter of a man too weak to continue living in the face of financial failure and a woman who had hidden from every challenge at the bottom of a bottle. With a feeling of supreme triumph, Claire dropped her exam paper on her professor’s desk. He looked up from what he was doing with a vague expression in his eyes.
The only thing that ever elicited sharp and focused interest from this man was his computer. “Done already?”
“Yes.”
“Congratulations. I’m sure you did your usual exemplary work.”
Claire smiled. “Thank you.”
He waved his hand. “Don’t thank me. Wasn’t a compliment. Don’t believe in them. Merely the truth.”
She was grinning when she left the room in search of a bathroom. She’d had two cups of coffee and a large glass of juice at breakfast.
Brett wouldn’t be back to pick her up for at least fifteen minutes. The last two days, he’d shown up half an hour early and waited for her each time. She’d chided him for it, but he’d said he didn’t want her to be alone. She didn’t think using the community ladies’ room constituted being alone. The campus might be sparsely populated at the moment, but many of the professors, like hers, continued to keep office hours.
She had just finished in the bathroom and was zipping up her jeans when the lights went off and everything went pitch black around her.
Claire bit off a gasp of shock and stopped moving entirely. Was it a power failure, or something else? The chills racing down her spine said it was the latter.
Acting on instincts she hadn’t known she possessed, she ducked down as quietly as she could and rolled under the divider into the next stall. It was the handicapped one and had more space, even if it was too dark to see it. She slowly and silently got onto all fours and then paused, listening for sounds in the room around her. She couldn’t hear anything over the running water of the recently flushed toilet.
She sent up a quick prayer of thanks for the tank taking so long to fill.
She started making her way out of the stall, into the main area. She moved an inch at a time, not wanting to make noise and alert whoever was in the bathroom with her. She stayed close to the wall, both to keep her bearings and to minimize the chance she would run into him.
She was crawling along the wall under the sinks when the door to the stall she’d been in slammed open. She had no idea how it had been unlocked from the outside, but she wasn’t sticking around to find out.
The toilet stopped running and in the silence she heard a rush of movement and then a stifled curse. He’d discovered she wasn’t there. She had to get out of the bathroom.
“I know you are in here, Miss Sharp. You’re not going to get away.” The menacing male voice came from her right and the exit was to her left.
Hallelujah!
Without a second’s hesitation, she leaped to her feet and dove for where she thought the door would be. She missed it on her first try, hitting a solid wall in the darkness, but she spread her arms out on both sides and reached for it. She found the door, but as she grabbed the handle to pull it open, he grabbed her. She screamed with ear-piercing intensity until a gloved hand clamped over her mouth.
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
She bit the hand through the glove and the man holding her swore viciously. Then she brought her elbow back with all her strength and hit his chest.
He grunted, but he didn’t let her go. “Settle down. I don’t want to hurt you.”
She wasn’t buying it. A man who didn’t want to hurt her would not have accosted her in a dark bathroom. She struggled wildly against his hold and then thought of kicking the door. No sooner had she thought of it than she started to do it, making as much noise as she could.
He dragged her backward, but she could smell the fear on him, like a pungent, unpleasant odor. “I want the kill book.”
She tried to bite him again, but he was holding her jaw shut, so she kicked backward with her feet.
His arm holding her squeezed painfully. “Tell me where the kill book is. I know you have it.”
She nodded her head vigorously and he lifted his hand from her mouth. She screamed again, this time managing to evade his hand for a couple of seconds.
Someone had to have heard.
Her assailant must have thought the same thing because he roughly shoved her to the floor and she heard him run. The door swung open and a dark shape wearing a ski mask disappeared through it. She got up and ran after him, but when she got out into the hallway, it was completely deserted. There was a door leading outside nearby, several leading to offices, and one that led to another part of the building.
He could have gone anywhere, but her first instinct would be to run outside, so she headed for that door. She shoved it open, but no man in dark clothes was anywhere around. In fact, no one was around at all.
She scanned the area for telltale movement, but saw nothing. Darn it. She’d picked the wrong option and he was probably long gone now.
She went back inside, frustration and fear-based adrenaline pumping through her.
“Claire, what are you doing out of your professor’s office?” It was Brett.
She spun toward his voice and winced when he used a word she’d never heard him say.
“What happened to you?” he demanded, striding forward until his hands were locked on her shoulders.
She told him as succinctly as possible.
He gave her terse instructions to return to the bathroom. “He won’t look for you there again. He’ll assume you ran.”
She nodded.
“I want to see if I can catch sight of him.”
She nodded again, her voice a little too wobbly to use to good effect, and then went back into the bathroom, turning the light on as she went. She doubted Brett would find him, but if anyone had a chance, it was the former mercenary.
She took the time to wash her hands and arms and face. Crawling along a bathroom floor was bound to leave behind major germs. She shuddered at the thought. Far from leaving her more tolerant about dirt, her experiences as a child living with her mom when she hadn’t always had a choice about being clean had left Claire intolerant of even the thought of being dirty.
Brett was back in a couple of minutes, and he walked right into the ladies’ room.
He was all business, his expression hard with concentration. “I didn’t see anything. Let’s go talk to the other people in this building and find out if anyone else did.”
“Okay.” She moved toward the door, but he stopped her.
He touched her face gently, concern softening his features. “Are you all right?”
“I’m getting to be an old hand at getting attacked in the dark.” She gave him a shaky smile.
He shook his head, his lips quirking in response. “You’re a real trooper, you know that?”
The praise warmed her chilled insides, and she followed him out the door. Fifteen minutes later, she knew why no one had come in answer to her scream. The building was virtually deserted, her professor being the only faculty member in his office, and he h
ad been preoccupied with his research.
The campus was deserted as much as it could be, situated where it was in the middle of downtown, as well. The few people Brett and she found to talk to had not seen her attacker, or at least given the limited description she had of him.
They were in the car when Brett turned to her, his expression nowhere near pleased. “Why did you leave your professor’s office?”
“I had finished my test and I had to go to the bathroom. I had no idea the building was as empty as it was,” she said in her own defense. “Besides, how could I possibly guess the bad guys would know I was taking a final exam today?”
“It wasn’t exactly a state secret. We both should have realized the potential for something like this.”
“I thought you already had and that’s why you insisted on driving me and picking me up.”
“That was just routine precaution.”
She bit her lips to keep from smiling. He wouldn’t see the humor in his answer or the current situation. It was only her bent sense of the ridiculous that made it funny to her. But she found it amusing in a really sweet way that he hadn’t expected trouble, but behaved as if he did and was still mad at himself for not expecting it.
Talk about being a perfectionist overachiever. Oh, yes, he fit in with his family just fine.
He started the car and pulled out of his parking spot into the city traffic.
He kept checking his rearview and side mirrors as he drove.
“Are we being followed?”
“Not that I can tell, but I’m not going straight back to the hotel, just to be on the safe side.”
“Okay. Why don’t we go out for an early lunch to celebrate me passing my last final?”
“You sure you passed?” he asked in a teasing voice.
“Thanks to your help, I’m sure I aced it.” She turned her body so she could look at him straight-on. He had such a yummy profile, she almost forgot what she was going to say next. Oh, yes…“I really want to thank you for being so understanding these past few days, Brett.”
“Hey, what are friends for?”
“According to you, making sure other friends succeed.”