Extreme Danger

by Shannon McKenna

  He kissed her again. They held each other, and every subtle sway, every sigh, every clasp and pulse and squeeze was a sultry bloom of pleasure, bursting open to astonish them. Revelation after revelation.

  He pulled his lips away. “Don’t leave me,” he said.

  “I won’t,” she promised. “Not ever.”

  Rain pounded down, a shower of sweet sensation, an outburst of pure emotion straight from the sky to cool their molten bodies.

  “I mean it,” he said, emphasizing each hoarse word as if she might not have understood. “I mean for keeps. For life. Marry me.”

  “Yes. All yours,” She was laughing, weeping for joy. “Everything.”

  He clutched her. She wrapped her legs around him. They were a single entity, poised on the edge of the world.

  In a state of utter grace.

  Chapter

  25

  Becca spooned up the last bit of hollandaise sauce from her eggs Benedict and tried both numbers again, for the tenth time. Carrie, then Josh. Both numbers, still turned off. Very unlike them. All three of the Cattrell siblings had strong feelings about the importance of being connected. The niggling pinch of fear in her belly eroded even her sweet glow of euphoria from that amazing night with Nick.

  And guilt, too. That she hadn’t tried harder the day before.

  “What’s wrong, babe?”

  Nick had paused in shoveling the last scraps of what was left of his enormous ham, cheese and vegetable omelette. He was frowning.

  “My brother and sister,” she said. “I can’t reach them.”

  He swallowed a big bite of toast, and glanced at his watch. “It’s 10:40 on a Sunday morning,” he offered. “I’d have my phone turned off too, if I were them. Try them when we’re back in town.”

  She nodded and sipped coffee, trying to dismiss this full blown case of the heebie-jeebies. It was probably just a function of the extreme stress she was under. Not some psychic premonition of disaster.

  Of course not. Nothing so woo woo. She wasn’t that kind of girl.

  She’d already tried Carrie’s dorm, but no one had seen her in days. Same with Josh. None of the guys at his bachelor pad, known affectionately as the HellHole, remembered seeing him that weekend. Damn, she was going to be glad when she spoke to them, and could feel embarrassed about these creepy crawlies. In fact, she could hardly wait for the crushing embarrassment to descend. Bring it on. Anytime.

  “What’s on your agenda for today?” she asked him.

  “I’ve got Alex Aaro to cover for me for another few hours,” Nick said. “I’m going to go see Diana Evans.” He tapped his finger on a manila file folder that lay next to his plate. “Davy found her for me. Mathes, too, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to interview him.”

  She blinked at him. “Wow. Can I…maybe not. She’d probably recognize me. I passed her in the hotel and the parking lot both.”

  “Yeah. That’s exactly why you should hang out in the hotel. Better yet, I’ll leave you at the SafeGuard headquarters. That’s the best place.”

  She sighed and shook her head. She and Nick had already had this argument this morning, more than once. Heartfelt declarations of love and marriage proposals were great and romantic, but they did not soften the guy up, or make him any more manageable. On the contrary, he seemed more protective and prickly about her safety than ever.

  But since she had no idea how long this stressful state of alarm was going to continue, she was reluctant to give in to his bossing and set a dangerous precedent. She had no intention of living her life in an airless box, Zhoglo or no Zhoglo. She would grit her teeth, lift her chin, stick her tits out and go about her business like normal.

  At least until she had clear and obvious reason to hide.

  “I have my own errands to run,” she told him. “I need to take back my rental car, I need to get money from my account, I need some fresh clothes from my apartment—”

  “So I’ll take you to do all that stuff when I get back,” he said. “And then we can go out and shop for the ring.”

  His eagerness gave her a warm, fuzzy glow. She reached up and touched his cheek, smoothing his spiky brush of hair. “We can wait on the ring,” she told him. “There’s no rush. If you’re low on money—”

  “I want to see it on you,” he said. “I can’t wait.”

  They grinned at each other. A couple of giddy fools in love.

  The groom, Sean McCloud, sauntered by, looking tousled, sleepy and very pleased with himself. He winked at Becca, and slapped Nick on the back. “Marriage is excellent,” he informed them. “You’re next, man.”

  “Damn straight,” Nick said. “Get ready.”

  Sean’s eyes widened. So did Nick’s grin. “Whoa,” Sean breathed. “Uh, you mean, like, you two—you’ve already, uh—”

  “Yeah. Done deal,” Nick said. “Go ahead. Congratulate me.”

  Sean blinked and ran his hands through his blond hair, making it stick straight up into the air. “Wait, wait. Didn’t you just pull this chick out of a swimming pool, what, just a couple of days ago?”

  “Like Venus rising from the foam,” Seth said with a snicker, as he passed by, bearing a tray heaped with food. “Dripping wet, and a gun to her head. I’m telling you, gets ’em every time.”

  “Hot damn!” Sean’s grin was incandescent. “That’s great news!” He leaned over Becca and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “And she’s so cute, too. She adds to the scenery, big-time. I gotta tell Liv.”

  He bounded off to the table where his bride was still eating breakfast, and within seconds, smiles and thumbs-up and sentimental glances were flashing their way from every side.

  Becca clutched her coffee, and tried to breathe. Whew. She hadn’t been quite ready for a big announcement. It was so new, and she’d have preferred to treasure the secret for a while, but it wasn’t as if she’d communicated that preference to Nick. She hadn’t had time.

  It occurred to her that Nick’s restless drive to get on with it, the way he was so hot to buy a ring even when his funds were tapped out, the way he was so eager to tell everyone…it was sort of like the way she’d been when she got engaged to Justin. It hadn’t felt real to her, so she’d carried on and told the whole world to make it feel more real.

  So he was still feeling insecure. And after what they’d gotten up to all night, too. Wow. She had her work cut out for her to soothe this guy.

  A rush of tenderness came over her for Nick, and for the lonely, vulnerable boy he had once been. She was going to make him realize that this thing was for real. That she was for real. Starting right now.

  She got up, circled the table, and sat down on Nick’s lap. She cupped his face in her hands, and slowly, tenderly, publicly kissed him.

  There were wolf whistles, cheers, even some scattered applause. She ignored it all. She could hardly help doing so, especially when he dug his fingers into her hair and returned her kiss as only he could.

  When she finally came up for air, his eyes were closed with bliss, his face had hot streaks of red along his cheekbones, and his erection prodded her bottom. “When was check-out time, anyhow?” he muttered.

  “Eleven,” Becca informed him.

  He glanced at his watch. “Great. Let’s go back on upstairs.”

  She started to laugh. “Oh, come on! We’ve already brought down our bags, and it’s only twelve minutes, so—”

  “Who needs bags? Twelve minutes is enough. You done with breakfast?”

  “Yes, but I—” She squeaked as he stood up, dumping her off his lap and dragging her up the big staircase that curved up right outside the entrance to the grand dining room.

  They got on the road considerably later than they’d planned. Twelve minutes stretched to thirty-five, and he’d even tried to follow her when she retreated into the shower. She’d had to shove her lust-crazed Romeo bodily out the bathroom door, and lock it, just to get a few minutes’ peace to put herself back together.

  She sat in the tr
uck, on her tingling, tenderized bottom and sneaked amazed peeks at him as he drove. God, he was handsome.

  And he was her fiancé. He loved her. Wanted to be with her forever. It was like a dizzy dream, and she never wanted to wake up.

  Nick was not happy with the situation as it stood.

  Another fierce, heated argument in the hotel parking lot had gone nowhere. Becca was in danger and she clearly did not yet know what the fuck she was dealing with, despite a good, long look on that goddamn island. But he was hog-tied, for the first time in his life, by the effort to meet her halfway. To act like a fucking team player.

  To act like a fiancé. A husband, even.

  He couldn’t throw his weight around now. He wanted to marry her, for fuck’s sake. She had the upper hand. It was making him nuts.

  He’d had a really bad moment when she’d driven off in her rental car, waving at him. A stab of panic, like he might never see her again.

  Ease down, bozo. He had to stay mellow. No panic, no freak-outs. Things were relatively mellow right now, and he had to be too, or risk scaring her off. He would not fuck this up. Not now that he was almost convinced that something so good might actually be in his grasp. That he might have more going for him than he’d ever dreamed possible.

  That amazing, sweet woman. With him. Every day. Wow.

  Engaged. His heart practically jumped out of his chest whenever he thought about it, which was every other second, if not more. It was like the positive equivalent of pressing down on a bruise. Instead of pain, he got a rush of pleasure, a tangle of random erotic images, a tingle in his balls. He wanted a ring on her finger. To marry her quick, before she had a chance to come to her senses and change her mind.

  Love. He’d thought it was something that happened when a guy’s glands went nuts. When hormones tragically overtook him. A dangerous chemical imbalance that led a man into life-destroying choices.

  Well, his glands were nuts. He was overtaken by hormones, and he wanted to stay surrendered to them for all time, flat on his back, crying uncle, with Becca on top of him, riding him like a cowgirl. With that smile on her face that made him laugh and cry like a fucking idiot.

  A fucking happy idiot.

  He wondered what kind of ring she would choose. That thought was quickly followed by wondering how he was going to pay for it. Maybe he could sell one of his motorcycles. Or a couple of guns.

  He put all that mental noise gently aside as he approached Diana Evans’s block. He circled the big, comfortable 1930s bungalow style house, surrounded by trees, rhododendrons and hydrangea bushes. A deep-set porch girdled the entire house.

  Nick parked on the next block and assessed the other houses as he walked by. Not much activity. No kids playing, no one washing cars or trimming hedges. The approach to her house was screened by foliage.

  He had a bunch of possible cover stories ready on the tip of his tongue as he climbed the stairs to the front porch. But when he knocked on the door, it gave way, swinging inward at the pressure, and he had a sudden, cold premonition that he wasn’t going to need them.

  One last glance over his shoulder to make sure that no one was watching, and he pushed the door open with his knuckles and went in.

  The place had been tossed. Completely trashed. He walked slowly through the wreckage, careful not to touch or disarrange anything.

  Room after room, the same thing. The silence was absolute.

  He climbed the stairs, his neck crawling and his stomach rolling.

  He found her in the master bedroom, sprawled half-in, half-out of the adjoining bath. He stared down at her slender, twisted white form.

  She was naked. The length of her hair, her coloring—she did look like Becca, superficially. Apart from the fact that she was very dead.

  Her face was grotesquely distorted. She had been strangled. Her face was livid, her eyes bugged out, her tongue protruding. There were marks on her throat.

  He kneeled down, for a better look, although the gesture was more ceremonial than anything else. She was stone cold, her skin already taking on a greenish tinge. He found a washcloth, not wanting to leave any accidental trace of himself and lifted her wrist. Stiff as a board.

  So they had come for her yesterday sometime. He thought of the conversation with Mathes that Becca had recounted, how the man had bullied Diana into doing something that scared her to death. Of her distress later in the evening. The drinking, the vomiting, the weeping.

  So the woman hadn’t been mean and cold enough to suit them. This was to her credit, but he would withhold his sympathy for now.

  Greed had gotten her into this, after all. It was always greed.

  He had absolutely no desire to involve the cops in his problems, but he didn’t have it in him to just leave Diana Evans’s body there, without announcing her death to anyone. She’d paid the ultimate price for whatever hellacious shit she’d gotten herself mixed up in. She deserved for her mortal remains to be treated with respect. At least.

  He finished his sweep of all the rooms, just to be thorough, and ran down the stairs again. He picked up the phone using his own sleeve to cover his hand, and dialed 911.

  The dispatcher answered the emergency line. “I’m at Number 5958 Whittaker Street,” he said. “A woman has been murdered here.”

  He laid the phone down, leaving the line open, the dispatcher’s voice still squawking out high-pitched questions, demanding more info.

  He walked out the door. Still no one around. He went swiftly to his truck and got the hell away from the place. He was feeling woozy, queasy and emotional. Him, Nick Ward, the so-called ice man. Christ, what was his problem? He fell in love, and turned suddenly to slop.

  He wanted to hear Becca’s voice. He wanted comfort. He yanked out his cell, pulled her up.

  Damn. Her fucking phone was busy. He wanted to throw the worthless piece of junk right out the window.

  Becca smiled as she drove off in her rental, thinking of Nick. She was a big girl. She had to learn to act like an alpha female, or he would stomp all over her.

  The first stop after the bank machine was her apartment. It felt odd, as if she were visiting a place she remembered from when she was very small. The sights and smells were familiar, but it had shrunk. She was a bigger person now. The ceiling felt lower, the furniture cramped.

  She poured some water on her plants, tossed her dirty clothes into the hamper, pulled out fresh clothing, as much as would fit in the suitcase. She tried to think of anything she might conceivably need in the next couple of weeks, and tossed it higgledy-piggledy into the bag.

  She hauled it out into the front room, feeling vaguely anxious and twitchy. Goaded by some inner urge to move, move, move.

  She stopped in the living room and tried to breathe the jittery feeling down, but as she looked around, her back prickled coldly.

  She looked around again. What was it? Something wasn’t the way she’d left it. She never pushed the phone to the exact middle of the table. She never propped the pillows in that particular way.

  Someone had been here. Someone had touched her stuff. She felt an ice-cold churning, wonky and unstable in her lower body. She stared around, wondering if this was just stress, psyching her out. Making her nuts. And then her eyes focused on the stuffed animals on the shelf.

  Bingo.

  She always had Carrie’s threadbare pink bunny with the long arms embracing Josh’s tortoise on one side, and Carrie’s Goldilocks bear on the other. But the bunny was flopped forward, one long pink ear draped across the bear’s lap. Arms out, in dangling supplication.

  She reached up, pulled the animals down. Her blood ran cold.

  A small, squat black video camera sat there, its gleaming round eye regarding her coldly.

  Her mind whirled. Stomach, too. The Spider had found her. He knew where she was, and who. Which meant that he knew about Josh and Carrie, too. She wanted to throw up. She didn’t have time. She was being watched. Right now, as she stared up with horrified eyes.

/>   She swallowed hard. Lifted her hand. Gave the camera the finger.

  And with that act of empty defiance, she pulled the camera down and shoved it into the kitchen garbage, with the tinfoil and the coffee grounds. The garbage was ripe and nasty after three days of neglect.

  And now? She stepped out onto the porch with her suitcase and ran her eye up and down the street. Would she be shot or abducted? Or simply followed? She tried to memorize every make and color of car in sight as she hauled her suitcase down the stairs. Her legs shook beneath her.

  No one appeared to follow once she turned onto the big street, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. It meant she’d been fooled. She’d been fooled before. She tried Josh again, then Carrie. Still nothing.

  She was unnerved, shaking, on the verge of tears as she drove. She wanted to call Nick, but he would just go bananas on her, and at this point, there was nothing he could do. She might as well proceed with her day’s agenda. Ditch that damned rental before it bled her dry.

  She called a cab as soon as she started in on the paperwork at the rental place, and told it to meet her at a nearby intersection that was a couple of blocks the wrong way down a one-way street. She hoped that was a crafty enough evasion technique to fool seasoned mobsters, as she puffed down the sidewalk, dragging her suitcase behind her.

  She finally managed to breathe once she’d slid into the back of the cab and slumped down out of sight in the seat. She dragged out her phone again and pulled up Josh’s number.

  Wonder of wonders. It was ringing. “Hello? Becca?”

  “Josh! You scared me to death! Where the hell have you been?”

  “Oh, well…” His voice trailed off. “I, um, I met someone.”

  His evasiveness in the face of her own stark fear made her furious. “Do you have any idea how worried I’ve been? Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m at my new apartment,” Josh said cheerfully. “I’m moving in with Nadia.”

  “Nadia? Who the hell is Nadia?” Her voice cracked.