Stranger in My Arms

by Madeline Harper

  After a long moment, the footsteps moved on, but not far, just to the unit next to hers. That was enough for Kasey. It gave her time to think, and act. Slowly, quietly, she inched open her door, exposing a narrow slit of light. Then she saw him, his back silhouetted against the light. It wasn’t Carl but a tall man, big and muscular. He had a weapon in his hand, a long, dark instrument of death.

  Kasey did the only thing possible—pushed open the door, surged out of her storage cubicle and ran like hell for the gate.

  “What the—”

  Kasey heard his astonished voice and then a thud behind her as the door hit him. She didn’t stop running until she reached the steel gate and burst through, slamming it behind her. She was safe, for the moment, but he was on her heels. Never mind. The gate would stop him. She raced for the elevator and hit the button. She could hear it descending. He must have reached the gate by now. Kasey dared to cast a quick look over her shoulder.

  Then darkness descended on her.

  The bare bulb over her head blinked and went out. The elevator whirred to a stop somewhere high above her. Kasey’s knees went weak, and she leaned back against the wall. Fear coursed through her, the deep primeval, instinctual fear of the dark. Blackness wrapped around her like a thick blanket, engulfing her, smothering her.

  The intense silence was broken only by the rasping sound of her breath. Where was her pursuer? What was he doing?

  It wasn’t Carl; she knew that now. But someone else had followed her into the basement, and when she got away, he’d somehow caused the electrical system to shut down! But how? Why?

  Kasey’s mind was racing furiously. There wasn’t time to worry about what had happened. Darkness surrounded her, but it surrounded him, too! This was her chance to escape.

  She groped along the wall, searching for the stairwell door. If she could make it to the stairs ahead of him, she had a chance.

  Her hand found the knob, and she turned it frantically. The door didn’t budge. She pounded on it, hoping for help, and was suddenly flooded in light.

  She turned around and looked toward the light, her eyes blinded. Whoever was after her had a flashlight. She covered her eyes.

  “Turn it off, please! I’m not going anywhere.”

  The light moved away, and as she stood frozen, it danced erratically around the basement, searching the corners of the hall. Then it went out.

  She wanted to scream, but her throat had constricted. The flashlight flicked back on. Whoever was holding it wasn’t moving toward her. He wasn’t moving at all. She suddenly realized that when the lights had shut down, so had everything else electrical. He was trapped behind the steel gate!

  She breathed a sigh of relief and managed to call out, “Who are you? Why are you chasing me?”

  The voice that answered was low and husky. “I could ask you the same question.” She knew that voice. It was the man from the elevator, Will Eastman, and the weapon in his hand wasn’t a gun but a flashlight! She felt like an idiot.

  “But I know who you are,” he said. “The woman in the elevator.”

  “Y-yes,” she stammered. “Kasey. Kasey Halliday.”

  “But I don’t know why you locked me in the storage room.”

  “Because, because...you chased me,” Kasey told him. She still hadn’t moved from her place against the wall.

  “No...Kasey,” he said. “You tore through the door and almost knocked me down.” Then he apparently noticed her very clear body language and added, “You’re really scared, aren’t you?”

  “Of course I am, with you skulking around—”

  “Skulking? Me?”

  “What are you doing in the subbasement, anyway?” she challenged.

  “The same thing you are, I imagine. Putting some things in storage. This is the storage area, right?”

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  “And I’m locked in. Because you closed the gate.”

  “I was afraid. I didn’t know who you were, or what you were doing down here. All right,” she admitted, “maybe I overreacted a little.” She felt embarrassed but still defensive. “I had no idea the power would go off. You can’t blame me for that, too.”

  “What do you mean, ‘too’?”

  “You acted as though it was my fault we were trapped on the elevator, and now you’re blaming me again.”

  “I’m not blaming you and, by the way, I’m the one who’s trapped,” came the sardonic response.

  Kasey bristled. “I’m not staying here by choice. The elevator’s gone out...”

  “What about the stairwell?”

  “I tried it. The door’s locked.”

  “Well, if I could get out of here...”

  “What would you do that I can’t?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Something. Hell, I could be in here for hours.”

  “That’s possible,” Kasey agreed. “We both could. Since everything seems to be knocked out, it could be more than just this building...”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The weather has been unusually hot, everyone’s running air conditioners...”

  “You mean, a total power failure?”

  “It happened last summer. I remember...” Kasey caught herself. Given their situation, she was sure, he wasn’t interested in her stories about the last power outage.

  “A total power failure,” he repeated. “Great. Just great.”

  “I don’t like it any better than you do,” she said in frustration.

  “But you’re out there. And I’m in here.”

  For a moment, Kasey thought about that. She was both glad and sorry. If he were outside the gate, maybe he could help her find a way to escape; on the other hand, she felt somehow relieved that the gate separated them. Why, she didn’t know. Fear, maybe. Or...what? She shook off the unexplainable feeling.

  “Could you come over here, at least, so I don’t have to shout?” he asked.

  “I...I can’t see...”

  He shone the flashlight at her feet and then moved it backward, slowly, as she left her place by the wall and walked closer to the gate.

  “Kasey Halliday,” he said as she got close to him.

  “Yes?”

  He chuckled softly. It was a low seductive sound that sent a little prickle of anticipation along her spine.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Us.” He laughed again. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

  Kasey responded to his teasing voice and laughed too. She could feel the tension begin to drain from her. “Sorry I snapped at you. I usually don’t behave that way. None of this is your fault—or mine.” She was standing a few feet from him, separated by the locked gate.

  “Ironic, isn’t it?” he asked her. “We’ve been imprisoned twice by Bartow Tower. Fate seems to be throwing us together.”

  “I’d call it spooky, but that’s the wonderful charm of Bartow. The unexpected,” Kasey said sarcastically.

  “I’m catching on to the place. You’re right—it’s a horror show of sorts.”

  Tired of standing, Kasey sank next to the gate and leaned back, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  Will sat down by her on the other side of the gate. He turned off the flashlight, and they were enveloped by impenetrable darkness. But she could sense his nearness. She could hear his slow, even breathing and the shifting of his body as he made himself comfortable. There was the same sensation of ambiguous intimacy that she’d felt on the elevator with him, an undercurrent of excitement that she couldn’t deny. Will’s voice came softly through the darkness. “I’ve even had a mysterious intruder.”

  “Someone broke into your apartment?” Kasey was truly startled. Despite its many problems, Bartow had been almost crime-free.

  “Not someone. Something. A damned cat. Sort of beige color—”

  Kasey laughed. “It’s only Lo Mein. He belongs to a neighbor, and one of his favorite tricks is to jump from balcony to balcony. He also likes to visit.
If you leave your doors open, he’ll go right into your living room.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Will replied dryly.

  “You won’t be bothered this weekend,” Kasey reassured him. “Glenna, the cat’s owner, has gone to the shore, and I’m keeping Lo locked up. In fact, you and I and the cat are probably the only tenants on the floor this weekend. A couple of apartments are vacant, and the Kramers always go to—”

  She broke off. Smart, Kasey, she chided herself. Very smart. Announcing that you and Will are alone on the nineteenth floor. Judy would have a fit if she heard you’d told him all that.

  “The Kramers, you were saying...” His face was close to hers, separated only by the wire gate.

  She shuffled a little and moved a few inches away.

  “Sometimes,” she lied, “the Kramers go to their cabin upstate.” In fact, they went every weekend in the summer, but she wasn’t going to tell him that.

  “I’ve noticed that the city clears out on weekends.”

  “Especially in the summer.” Now it was her chance, she realized, to find out more about Will. “How about you? Do you usually stay in town on the weekends?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Well, that question had got her nowhere, she thought.

  He shifted again, and she saw the illuminated dial of his watch glow in the darkness. “How long did the last one of these power outages last?” he asked.

  “Um...about...three hours.”

  He groaned.

  “But it may not be a citywide outage. Or even a West Side one. It could be only Bartow Tower.”

  “Even worse,” he reminded her.

  She laughed. “True. But even the elevator was only out for a few minutes. Most of the computer problems here don’t last very long.”

  “Maybe not. But they make up for that in their frequency. I’ve lived here for five days, and I’ve already been stranded twice. Maybe it’s time to take the owner to task—if not to court,” he suggested.

  “That in itself is a problem. He lives out of the country, in the Bahamas. So he’s virtually unreachable.”

  “What about the management company?”

  “They make a lot of promises but do little. We have a pretty strong tenants’ association, though, and we try to keep the pressure on. Maybe you’d like to join?”

  He chuckled again. “Nope. I don’t think so. I’m not much of a joiner.”

  Kasey wasn’t surprised to hear that admission from a man who came across as the quintessential loner. Still, she was determined to learn more about him. And maybe this was the perfect place. They were close, almost touching. But the gate kept her safe from him and from herself, from the mixed feelings that coursed through her, a tantalizing blend of safety and danger.

  She struggled to clear her head and come up with an interesting question. But before she could pose it, the lights flickered on, then off, and finally on again.

  Will was up in a flash, pushing at the gate. It didn’t budge. “Quick, input the code before everything goes down again.”

  Kasey rushed to the console and started to hit the numbers. Then, for a split second, she hesitated.

  “Kasey—” The lights were flickering again.

  Trying to ignore her suspicions, Kasey tapped in the code and heard the click as Will opened the gate.

  Then the flickering lights went out. Kasey couldn’t see Will in the dark, but she could hear him moving toward her. Oh, Lord, what had she done? She froze, waiting.

  3

  WHEN WILL REACHED for Kasey, she quickly moved away, and he withdrew his hand. This wasn’t the time to make her more nervous. Instead, he waited quietly beside her until the lights went back on. Then he said, softly but firmly, “Let’s get to the elevator while there’s still power.”

  “The storage room... I haven’t finished—”

  “Neither have I. Do you want to go back in there now?”

  “Yes, I— That is, no.”

  “Okay, then, we’ll come back when everything’s working. For now, let’s grab the elevator to the nineteenth floor.” He motioned her to walk ahead. She did, tentatively, still anxious, he noticed, darting glances over her shoulder.

  As they waited for the elevator, quietly, side by side, she seemed to relax a little, but there was still a tenseness in the way she held herself. Was she edgy about being alone with him in the subbasement, or was she actually afraid of him? He hoped it wasn’t that. He wanted her to trust him, but he had to admit that the circumstances of both their meetings had sinister overtones.

  She smiled nervously at him, and Will was reminded of how damned good-looking she was. Her honey-colored hair was short and curly, and even her skin had a golden sheen. Her eyes were the clearest blue he’d ever seen. They were the kind of eyes that reflected everything she was thinking, guileless eyes that couldn’t lie, blue, blue eyes that a man could get lost in.

  “I hear the elevator coming now,” he assured her. “It shouldn’t be much longer.” Almost as soon as he spoke, it arrived, and the door slid open.

  Kasey breathed deeply after they got in and the car began to move upward. “Now if we can make it to nineteen,” she joked.

  “Every day’s an adventure at Bartow Tower,” he said lightly. This time she smiled without anxiety, looking at him across the confines of the car; it was the speculative, even intimate gaze of a woman who had shared a brief, if artificial, closeness with a man.

  Suddenly, vividly, the sensory memory of being close to her in the darkness enveloped Will. He remembered the warmth that emanated from her body through the gate, the scent of her freshly shampooed hair, the aroma of her perfume.

  Then he thought of the rest of the day, and night, that stretched before him. He didn’t look forward to spending it alone, shut away from the world. Hiding.

  “Would you like to go out to dinner tonight?” He surprised himself by blurting out the invitation.

  Her blue eyes widened in surprise. “Dinner?”

  She seemed confused, and he didn’t blame her. As far as she was concerned, the invitation came out of the blue. She didn’t know that he’d been thinking about her since the elevator incident, wondering when he would see her again.

  “Just a thought,” he added quickly.

  “That’s very kind, but I work nights.”

  “Every night?” He quirked an unbelieving eyebrow.

  “Yes, until the manager gets back from vacation.” Her face was ingenuous, and her eyes met his evenly. “Maybe another time,” she said politely as they reached their floor and stepped into the hallway. “Dinner sounds nice.”

  Nice. His mouth curled sardonically. It wasn’t a word usually associated with him. “Maybe so,” he replied.

  She stood for a moment as if unsure of what to say next. “Well,” she finally managed to say, “so long, Will.” She moved to her door and fumbled with the keys. He thought about calling out to her and inviting her for Saturday or Sunday lunch. Then he caught himself. It was best to let well enough alone.

  * * *

  MUCH LATER that evening, around midnight, Will pushed himself away from the computer, stood up, stretched and poured a glass of brandy. He opened the balcony doors and stepped into the night air. The city lay before him, still wrapped in lights even at this late hour. The air had cooled and there was a faint breeze blowing.

  He felt an unexpected wave of loneliness. It hit him hard. How was it possible, he wondered, in a city of more than ten million people, to feel so alone? Easy. It had been a long time since he’d had a decent conversation, shared a meal or talked late into the night with another person. The only one he knew in the building, other than the doorman and superintendent, was the woman next door, Kasey Halliday with deep blue eyes and a swirl of blond hair. Vulnerable, appealing. He’d tried before not to think of her. It hadn’t been possible then; it wasn’t now.

  He took a swig of brandy, savoring the rich mellow flavor. It was expensive, but tonight that was no comfort. Drinking alone was
n’t a good sign, and it wasn’t what he wanted.

  Maybe it was just as well that Kasey had turned down his dinner invitation. It would be dangerous for him to get involved with anyone now. He’d been crazy to spout off about fate throwing them together and even crazier to ask her out. He shrugged. What the hell; even though he didn’t believe in fate for a moment, it was a good line.

  Not that she’d fallen for it. She’d been edgy and skittish as if sensing something dangerous about him. He downed the brandy, went inside and poured another one. The night was long, and the darkness seemed to stretch endlessly before him.

  * * *

  KASEY WOKE UP at seven on Saturday morning, looked at the clock and turned over, closing her eyes. Why was she awake so early? She’d gotten home late the night before and had expected to sleep in. It hadn’t worked. Something was the matter. She was keyed up, unable to relax.

  Maybe it was the stress of her new job...or concern about Carl. Or maybe it was those recent adventures with her new neighbor. Whatever it was, getting back to sleep was impossible now. The morning shimmered with heat. She lay in bed and watched hazy sunlight sneak through the slits in her bedroom blinds. She could almost feel the rays. It was going to be another sizzler.

  She rolled out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, slipped into her sneakers and searched for a T-shirt. She tossed aside her favorite, the black Phantom of the Opera shirt, remembering that dark colors attracted the sun, and chose a white one decorated with the logo of Walk-by-Windows. She planned to be outside today, walking off restless energy.

  Other New Yorkers weren’t as eager as she was to get out of their air-conditioned apartments, Kasey realized as she walked along a strangely deserted West Seventy-second Street. There wasn’t even an early-morning jogger or a person walking a dog to share her solitude. It wasn’t unusual for her neighborhood to be uncrowded on a summer weekend morning. Anyone who could afford it left the city, and those remaining stayed inside. But this morning, the street was more than uncrowded—it was totally empty.