Why, indeed?
Because she’d never been a killer.
That’s not true.
Her palms tingled, echo of the sweat already prickling across her shoulders. Slicking down her spine.
That was a warning she knew. She took a deep breath, fought the need to cough against the dust swirl, the pressure in the air. How would she explain?
When the words came, they surprised her. “Even if I leave you,” she heard herself say with utter certainty, “you’ll get out. You’re smart. You’ll find a way.”
“Hunh.” Not so much a word as a grunt.
“If I leave,” she told him, frowning, “your hatred will be more than justified. So . . .” All at once, the weight vanished, sucked out of the air and leaving her grasping for her next words, fighting the urge to squirm under his gaze. “I don’t hate you, Shawn. I’m furious, I’m betrayed, but I don’t want to see you dead, hurt, or . . .” He flinched under her hand, a sudden tightening of muscle away from her probing fingers. His breath hissed out. “Sorry.” She closed her eyes, the better to focus on the tender flesh beneath her fingertips. The ragged edge of his shirt rasped against them.
“Or what?”
“Does it hurt if I—”
He ignored her concern. “Dead, hurt, or what?”
What did she have to lose? “Humiliated,” she whispered. “I’m not like that.”
His chest stilled. Jerked as he sucked in a shallow breath. “Is that what you think? That I’m like that?”
He hadn’t left her anything else to go on.
As if aware of it, he hissed, “Fuck.”
Kayleigh’s snort took in more dust than comfortable. It turned into a cough, and she opened her eyes, squinted when they stung. Swiping at one didn’t help; the dirt encrusted on her skin only forced her to blink hard.
The dark was bad. The dust bit. But the freaking glow made her prefer dark and dust to the certainty of ocular deterioration.
Something shuddered in the distance, sending vibrations all along the slanted wreckage. Shawn’s lips peeled back around his clenched teeth as the cement shifted.
Without thinking, she laid one hand over his forehead. The ends of his hair tickled her fingers, but his skin felt warm. Vividly so. “You aren’t going into shock,” she murmured. The doctor part of her brain, the one that remembered how to function, took over. “Good. Keep breathing, slow it down. We don’t want you to hyperventilate.”
He flinched as her thumb found the swelling at his eyebrow. “Listen to me. I didn’t mean to humiliate you.”
She froze.
He stared across the awkward circumference of his prison, gaze banked. Rigid with pain, but intensely direct and as even as his low, rich voice as he offered a quiet, “I’m sorry.”
Sorry? That was almost worth another attempt at a laugh. How could she possibly tell his truth from his lies?
Her mouth tightened. “I have no reason to believe you.” She pulled her hand back, wiped her palm against her hip without consciously making the choice. It didn’t help. Her palm radiated heat, fingers detailing every second laid against his skin.
He had the grace to wince. “I know. I blew that about five different ways.”
At least he understood.
“This is how it’s going to go, Shawn Lowe.”
He waited in silence, broken only by labored breathing.
“No more kissing.” She braced both hands against the rock. His gaze flicked to them, then back to her. Narrowed. “No unnecessary touching, no arguments punctuated with your oh-so-virile masculinity.”
Humor sliced behind his eyes, and his lips hitched at one corner.
“That was sarcasm,” she added flatly.
“Or what?”
The repetition of his earlier demand gave her pause, and Kayleigh frowned at him. “What?”
“No unnecessary touching, or what?” His shoulders shifted, knuckles white in the hand braced against the hunk of wall. “You don’t want me dead, remember? Or hurt.”
“No.” That much was true. Kayleigh tipped her head back, gathering her tangled hair over her shoulder as she studied the vast emptiness overhead. “But I can sure make you as uncomfortable as possible for as long as I can. I can make your life a living hell while you keep me here, and if you kill me, well . . .” Her smile was wan. “I’d be beyond caring, wouldn’t I?”
His eyebrows rose. “You drive a merciless bargain, Dr. Lauderdale.”
“Take it or leave it.”
He didn’t disappoint. “You have a deal.” The lines his almost-smile carved into the corners of his eyes softened his hard features. Made him look almost human.
Her stomach pitched.
She stood, blowing back dust in her wake. “And when you’re out of here,” she added, too loudly in the dank quiet, “you’re going to let me go home.”
He blew out a shallow breath that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. His head fell back, propped against the cracked wall behind him, and he closed his eyes. “No.”
Just that one word, a single syllable. He was so good at it.
“What are your options?” she demanded.
“Make you watch me die,” he returned evenly, as if it didn’t matter one way or another, “slow and painful.”
Augh. The urge to stamp her foot grew. Instead, pressing a fist to her forehead, one to her stomach, she considered her own alternatives.
There was no real choice here. As she studied the obstacle, forcing herself to focus—to ignore the racing palpitations of her heart and twisting burn in her guts—she told herself this was the only choice that mattered.
He’d lied to her, made her like him, laugh with him. She’d trusted him. Then he’d kidnapped her, imprisoned her. Sure, he’d apologized, but what good was an apology when he wasn’t going to let her go?
Kayleigh didn’t know.
He’d acquiesced to all her demands but one. Freedom. That should have been reason enough to leave him here, but could she?
He hadn’t hurt her. He hadn’t killed her. She was made of stronger stuff than that.
She took a deep breath. “Fine. You’re a lucky man, Mr. Lowe.”
His snort strained.
“This chunk of death got caught on that outcropping. If it hadn’t snagged up there . . .”
“Paste, yeah, I get it.” He threw back his head, staring hard into the shadows hanging over the wreckage. “And?”
“And,” she repeated slowly, circling the block, “all I need is something for a lever and I see a way out.” With this much scrap and debris around, finding the fulcrum for her makeshift lever was as easy as shoving at a hunk of metal and bonded cement until she’d wrestled it into place near the cement pin.
Shawn watched her silently, nostrils flaring with every shallow breath.
“Basic physics,” she said, dusting her palms off against each other.
“Great.” It was little more than a wheeze.
Kayleigh took her time searching through the nearby rubble and debris. She walked carefully, picked up various bits of metal, discarded them when they were too short, too flexible, not strong enough.
It took her five dedicated minutes to find what she needed: a perfect piece of rebar, twisted but solid. Smaller hafts of metal wrapped around it, and as she tucked it against the corner of a crumbling bit of rock and tested the durability, it didn’t so much as flex a millimeter.
It’d have to do.
The rough metal scraped her palms as she lugged it back to Shawn’s impromptu prison.
“Got it. This should—” She didn’t realize he watched her until she looked up, her gaze clashing with the dark intensity of his own. Her voice halted mid-assurance. Her heart thudded, suddenly too loud in her ears.
The shape of his jaw, hard with the pain she knew he must be feeling, shifted. “Kayleigh.”
It was the first time he’d used her name.
It shouldn’t have mattered. Shouldn’t have meant anything. But she flushe
d, looked away. At the long haft of twisted steel in her hands, the scrap hunk of metal she intended to use as the base for her impromptu lever. Anywhere but at him. “A-anyway,” she continued, striving for brisk. “Don’t move until there’s enough space between you and the rock. I don’t know if that anchor will hold, so be ready to move fast.”
“Kayleigh, I meant it when—”
“No.” She snapped it off, shook her head when his teeth came together, a muscle shifting in his jaw. “I don’t need to go over it, okay? Just . . . don’t move until I say so.”
He closed his eyes. A bead of sweat trickled from his temple, barely even carving a line through the bloody stain across his cheek. “Got it,” he managed.
He’d better. They’d only get one chance at this.
Kayleigh dragged the heavy rebar to her chosen brace, slid it over the peak and under the concrete weight. It rocked, enough that Shawn flinched, cursing tightly.
She halted, held her breath.
“Keep going,” he ordered, voice tense. His eyes, stark and intense, met hers. Held. “You can do it.”
He was reassuring her?
She wanted to laugh, but there was nothing funny about it. Because, as she braced her feet against the rock-strewn ground and prepared to shove all her weight against the bar, she realized she needed it.
His reassurance. His encouragement.
Any reassurance.
“Brace yourself,” she murmured.
“Do it.”
Kayleigh grasped the edge of the rebar in both hands. Tightened her grip until the metal bit, and pushed. Hard. Harder. When the opposite end of her lever ground against the concrete, she grunted with the impact. When it refused to budge further, she sucked in a breath, clenched her teeth, and threw her body weight onto the far end.
The concrete shifted.
Fragments peppered the ground, scattered from the building that braced it. The anchor that held it. She groaned with the effort, threw herself into it with everything she had. Her hands ached, nerves pinched until she felt the strain in her shoulders, her back, her legs. Her hair fell over her face as she bent nearly double, and somewhere beyond her shell of awareness—the effort and the raw grit—she heard him encouraging her. Goading her.
Praising her.
The block groaned. Concrete gave, just in time. With a screech of sliding metal against metal, the fulcrum collapsed.
Between one instant and the next—one wild heartbeat—the rebar slammed to the ground. Kayleigh toppled, fell on top of it, and barely registered the crack of one forearm against steel, gravel grating against her palms.
Dust billowed all over again, rocks bounced and shimmied. The light dimmed as she shoved her hair out of her face, squinted through the haze. Panic gripped her. “Shawn?”
Oh, God, had she killed him? She clambered to her feet, fist curled as sparklers of pain and shock licked through her forearm, and called louder, “Shawn!”
Please, please, please.
A cough tore through the ruins.
He loomed out of the billowing cloud, covered head to toe in gray and brown. One arm cradled the other, and he staggered, hacking out the choking particles.
Kayleigh couldn’t help herself. Despite everything, despite the kidnapping and the fear and the pain, she darted into the miasma, flung herself at him so hard, he had no choice but to catch her with one arm.
Her cheek found his chest, his heartbeat loud and steady under her ear. “Thank God,” she whispered. “I thought . . . I thought . . .”
It didn’t matter what she thought. He was alive. Free.
She wasn’t stranded in Old Seattle by herself.
A rough hand cupped the back of her head. Slid to her nape and tightened. “I’m fine,” he rasped, his voice rough. Gritty. “Thanks to you.”
At least he gave her that much.
She raised her head, frowned as she realized his face hovered only inches from hers. That she could rise on her tiptoes, close that distance, and—
And maybe she could avoid giving him mixed signals? Fool. “Sorry,” she said quickly, easing away. The arm around her lower back tightened.
Cold metal banded her wrist, sent sparklers of pain up her arm as it dragged across the abrasions she hadn’t had time to wrap. Click.
The tiny sound stole the rest of the question from her brain. Her eyes widened.
Features intent, unreadable beneath the layers of dirt and grime, Shawn held her gaze as he guided her hands together at his chest. As he locked the other metal cuff around her other wrist.
“But . . .” Her brain flailed. Why? All her vast intelligence, and the only thing Kayleigh could say was, “But I helped you.”
His mouth hiked into a hard slant. Not really a smile. Wry, angry. “So you did,” he said quietly, stroking a finger down her cheek. Tendrils of her hair slid free from the sweat trapping them in place, but it wasn’t a tender gesture.
He wasn’t capable, was he?
“You’re unbelievable,” she breathed, tears gathering through the irritated burn in her eyes. She blinked hard. “I can’t believe I trusted you. Again!”
He spun her around, slid a hard hand around her upper arm. “You said no unnecessary touching.” He pushed her. Gently, but impossible to resist. She didn’t have it in her to try. “No kissing. Let’s not make this more than it is, all right? You don’t trust me—”
“With good reason!”
“And I don’t trust you,” he finished over her. “Now let’s get somewhere more stable.”
The dust swirled around them in eddies of gold and mud brown. As she stumbled up the steep incline, half supported by his unbreakable grip, Kayleigh called herself every version of stupid she could think of.
Whatever her idiotic hopes, Shawn Lowe was, after all, just an asshole.
Chapter Eleven
She managed to hold her silence for an eternal hour. Kayleigh’s sense of time had always been good, honed by countless hours fighting to sleep and failing.
Down here, where no sun shone to note the passage of it and she had no access to her digital reader, marking the approximate length of every minute gave her something to focus on.
Something besides the angry ache at her leg and arm, or the uncomfortable position of the broken wall at her back. Or the gnawing hunger that had replaced the pain in her stomach.
She was starving.
Shawn hadn’t done anything to break the silence, short of muttering a terse, “This is fine,” once they’d found a fairly high vantage point near the utter ruins of his original hideout.
She was pretty sure he sulked like a champion.
She was damned sure she was tired of feeling like anything she said, anything she did, would earn his snarl. She’d saved his life, for God’s sake!
At this rate, a kiss might just be preferable to this leashed aggression. At least his lust was honest.
She raised her cheek from her upraised knees, squinting automatically. When the light flickering up from the base of the hill didn’t coalesce into any sort of haze, she breathed a sigh of relief.
Whatever was going on with her eyes, whatever ocular issues she needed to get diagnosed, she had a reprieve.
Then again, despite her location in the death trap of Old Seattle and her predicament as kidnap victim, she wasn’t feeling all that stressed at the moment.
Even her stomach had settled.
She almost laughed at the incongruity of it—a forced holiday at the hands of a man who only wanted to trade her for ransom proved a viable vacation, after all.
But as her gaze settled on him, as it skated over the slanted breadth of his shoulders angled against a wide pillar and followed the taut line of his deceptively casual posture, the urge to laugh faded.
In its place, an ember flickered.
She had no right to be surprised, but she could go for angry.
She raised her cuffed hands, scraped back her hair from her face. “So.” Kayleigh drew the word out until there
was no doubt she demanded his attention. Old Seattle plucked the syllable from the air, tossed it around for a while before the shadows swallowed it.
His head tilted.
“I don’t suppose you have some bandages?”
“I used all I had on your leg.”
Of course he did. “Thanks for that, by the way.” His wordless sound, almost a grunt, was so stupidly male in inflection that she sighed. “For the record, the leg was the earthquake’s fault. If I die of some bacterial infection caused by your kidnapping,” she pointed out matter-of-factly, “I’m going to haunt your every waking moment.”
He didn’t laugh. He only looked at her, scraping his hair back from his forehead. “How bad are you hurt?”
The visual reminder of his own scabbing injury above his eyebrow just made her wounds hurt more. He could have looked for himself, but she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “Never mind,” she lied sullenly, looking away. “It’s fine.”
“Fine.”
It wasn’t fine. She was hurting and stupidly upset and the warm edge of her anger would last for only so long.
See if she ever saved his life again.
“What’s your plan, then?” An innocent enough question. One she sharpened deliberately. “Wait around for a few days until my father drops off a few thousand dollars?”
The light wasn’t ideal, but Kayleigh bit down on a surge of triumph as the silhouette of his jaw tightened. He didn’t reply.
Fine. Again. “Is a few thousand dollars enough?” she persisted, deliberately leveling sheer scorn through her calculated needling. “I don’t know how you people live under the sec-lines—” Her voice hitched as he pushed off the pillar, turned on her with a look of such animosity that her heart slammed into her throat. Beat wildly.
She swallowed it down. This one, she’d win.
“Topside, that’s not that much money,” she added casually, as if her guts weren’t suddenly churning in a pit of their own acid. What was she doing?
Promoting communication.
Karina Cooper - [Dark Mission 05] Page 11