Classified Baby

by Jessica Andersen

  Fearing what she might see, Nic held her breath and tried to keep her body still as she turned her head to the side. She saw more glass, more cracks, and a gaping hole in the side of the elevator car, where the glass was gone. Beyond that was blue sky, a smudge of smoke and a dangling climber’s rope. She heard masculine shouts from higher up, a mixture of suggestions and curses from whoever was anchoring the line.

  She remembered him saying something about rock climbing in his free time. Now he was shimmying down to rescue her. God.

  As she watched, a pair of sturdy, brown leather hiking boots swung into her limited slice of view, followed by a hint of tube sock and a pair of strong, muscular legs encased in tough-looking cargo pants and a makeshift climber’s harness. The button-down front of a formerly white oxford shirt appeared next, gaping where a couple of buttons had torn away to reveal a lean, muscular torso.

  Then he twisted through the broken section of glass, and she got a clear look at the edgy, masculine face she’d imagined all too often since realizing her period was late.

  Hell, she thought, let’s be honest here. You’ve thought about him just about every day since that night at Hitchin’s. And she’d remembered him just right. His dark brown hair was lighter at the ends, signaling an outdoor lifestyle. His face was chiseled, his features as sharp and forbidding as she’d remembered. Now, though, the brown eyes she remembered as being coolly logical and almost sardonic, radiated tension as they locked on hers and he said, “Stay calm. We can do this, but you’ve got to trust me, okay?” He waited until she nodded, then said, “I want you to keep yourself flat and distribute your weight as evenly as possible. Then I need you to slide toward me. We’re going to get you out of there.”

  Nic’s breath hissed out. She glanced down and saw emergency vehicles gathering far below. “I can’t…I won’t…” She stopped and sucked in a breath. “Can’t you open the doors from inside the building?”

  “Not a chance. You’re—” He broke off, looked up as the rescue personnel shouted something she didn’t quite catch, and muttered a curse. “Look, the explosion knocked the elevator off its track, okay? It’s hanging by a single cable right now. It looks stable enough, but—”

  A loud crackling noise cut him off, and the floor shifted beneath Nic. She whimpered deep in her throat and tears stung her eyes. “Ethan, please,” she whispered. “The floor’s going to go. I don’t want to die.”

  “Slide over,” he repeated, speaking softly. “Go easy, but keep moving, no matter what happens.”

  Heart pounding in her ears, Nic closed her eyes, pressed her cheek to the floor and slid an inch, then another. She heard crackling, but didn’t look at the glass beneath her.

  “That’s it. You’re almost there.”

  He sounded closer, prompting Nic to open her eyes. He’d dropped lower on the rope, so their faces were level through the broken panel.

  His voice might be utterly calm, but his eyes held a strange, dark emotion she couldn’t quite define.

  An answering surge tugged in her chest, the same feeling she’d had when she’d offered to buy him a drink and he’d turned to refuse, then accepted instead. Now, though, there was an added layer between them, the echoing heat of sex…and a baby he’d never know about if she fell.

  “Ethan,” Nic whispered, heart pounding. “I came to tell you I’m pregnant.”

  She might’ve imagined the wince, but there was no mistaking his low curse, or the look that flashed through his eyes before he shuttered his expression to one of utter determination and stretched his arm through the broken side of the elevator car. “We need to get you on solid ground. Take my hand.”

  She looked from him to the ground and back again. When her weight shifted, the glass beneath her cracked further.

  “Come on.” His eyes were steady on hers, his outstretched hand unwavering. “Trust me.”

  Heart pounding loud in her ears, she reached out and grabbed his forearm, just as the crackling noise crescendoed—

  And the glass gave way beneath her.

  Nic screamed as she fell and then jerked to a suspended halt, dangling in Ethan’s grip, held only by their joined hands. Sobbing, terrified, she grabbed for him with her free hand as a roaring, crumbling noise built overhead, counterpointed by pinging metal.

  She looked up and shrieked, “Ethan! The cable!”

  Overhead, the elevator mechanism was coming apart.

  He twisted his head and shouted to the men leaning out of a window two floors up. “Pull us in, damn it!” His expression remained impassive, but his voice was sharp when he said, “You’re going to have to climb up through the hole in the elevator floor before it goes. Watch the broken glass.”

  The next two minutes were a blur as Nic scrambled, fighting for purchase as he pulled her up and out, helped by the uniformed rescue personnel two floors up, who were cursing and hauling on the rope as fast as they dared.

  Then she was out! She lunged through the open panel and launched herself against Ethan just as the elevator gave way with a horrendous crack and plummeted down, trailing broken cables. Momentum sent them spinning, and Nic hung on tightly as they swung away from the building. She felt Ethan’s strong body against hers, felt his heart drum fast through the fabric of his shirt. Then the arc reversed and they went flying back toward the building.

  “Hang on!” Ethan swung them so he’d bear the brunt, but an errant wind gust caught them and diverted the spin, changing their angle of impact.

  Nic hit first, and she hit hard. The blow drove the breath from her lungs. Her neck whiplashed and her head slammed into the side of the building.

  Starbursts flashed in her head, and then every sensation was abruptly sucked into a black void. Every sensation, that is, except the feel of the man who held her tight.

  Chapter Two

  Ethan’s muscles worked automatically, stabilizing them against the side of the building and cradling Nicole’s unconscious body as the rescue personnel hauled them up, but his brain was jammed full. One part of him cataloged her injuries—she’d taken a hell of a whack to the head—while another, deeper part of him processed her announcement.

  The last thing he’d expected—or wanted—to hear was that she was pregnant.

  Then again, he’d never actually figured he’d see her again. The morning after their night together, he’d filed the memory in the tiny Pleasant Interludes section of his brain and walked away. Maybe he’d thought of her once or twice in the months since. And maybe he’d stuck his head into Hitchin’s a couple of times since. But a baby? God, no. They’d been careful. He’d used a condom, damn it.

  But there was that whole ninety-nine-point-nine-percent-effective thing. Apparently, he’d stepped straight into that point-oh-one of oh, hell.

  “We’ve got her,” a male voice said, breaking into Ethan’s thoughts. He was startled to realize they’d reached the place where a bank of broken windows had allowed him to climb down to the elevator. The rescue personnel almost hadn’t let him go, but he was the one with the rock-climbing equipment and the skills, and there hadn’t been time to wait for the real search-and-rescue team.

  It was just dumb luck he’d had his gear in the office, dumb luck that’d he’d been able to save Nicole’s life.

  Suited firefighters leaned through, reaching to grab her unconscious form and ease her to relative safety indoors.

  “Careful,” Ethan said unnecessarily. “She’s—” Pregnant, he thought, but couldn’t say the word. “She banged her head pretty hard.”

  It’d happened so fast he hadn’t been able to protect her from slamming into the building. She was breathing fine, but she was still unconscious. What had it been, two minutes? Five? Too long.

  Jaw set, he climbed through, shucked off his harness and stowed his gear, then jogged to catch up with the group of paramedics who were carrying Nicole down the stairs, strapped to a backboard.

  As the small group emerged into the early-afternoon sunlight, one of the pa
ramedics glanced up at the smoke that continued to pour from the ruined PPS offices. “Looks like the building will hold, thank the Lord.”

  There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Ethan didn’t join in. Instead, he scanned the street, which was a scene of barely controlled chaos. Most of the evacuees and onlookers had been pushed back, away from the damaged office building, but dazed-looking people continued to stream from the stairwells. Nearby, several wickedly jagged cement chunks were embedded in a cracked section of sidewalk, surrounded by the glitter of reflective glass shards. Off to one side, a scattering of first aid supplies ringed a dark stain.

  The explosion had taken victims outside the building as well as in, Ethan thought, feeling the acid burn of anger in his gut.

  “Ethan!”

  He turned at the sound of Robert’s voice, and saw PPS’s founder loping across the deserted street toward him. The men gripped each other’s forearms in greeting, the first friendly contact Ethan could remember between them. “How’s Evangeline?” he asked.

  “She’ll need a few stitches, but is fine otherwise. She’s spitting mad. Wants to take a chunk out of the bomber.” The last was said with a touch of pride.

  “I’ll ditto that.” Half his attention on the paramedics, who were busy transferring Nicole to a gurney, Ethan gestured to the stained sidewalk. “Pedestrian?”

  Robert nodded, expression darkening. “Falling debris caught a mother and her two kids. Doesn’t look good for the little girl.”

  “Damn.” Ethan scowled. It had been bad enough when the mastermind had started killing off TCM’s investors one by one. It had been worse when they’d murdered a PPS computer tech and then slapped Evangeline’s name on the list, but at the very least those targets had been logical. Now they’d escalated way beyond that to injuring innocent bystanders…like the mother and her children. Like Nicole, who’d come to tell him he was a father.

  Ethan glanced over at her, seeing the beauty beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

  Her face had popped into his head more often than he cared to admit in the weeks since he’d met her.

  That night, a friend’s wedding—and the memories it’d brought—had chased him out of the reception and into a tourist-trap bar. He hadn’t noticed her at first, hadn’t had eyes for much other than the glass in front of him. He would’ve had to have been dead, though, to miss noticing when she leaned across him to snag a napkin, pressing against him just long enough to let him know she was looking to play.

  He’d been struck first by her dark curls, then by her eyes, which were a strangely intense shade of blue, bordering on violet. Rimmed by dark lashes, they’d looked moments away from laughter all the time, even when she’d been serious. During those serious moments, she’d caught her full lower lip between her teeth, an action that’d left him hard and wanting.

  Then later, once the small talk was done and they were alone in the hotel room they’d rented because neither of them had been sober enough to drive home, she’d caught her bottom lip in her teeth again at the moment of her climax, prompting him to capture that lower lip with his own mouth and nibble it into submission.

  Afterward, she’d looked at him with a hint of wonder in those violet eyes, a hint of shyness. All an act, he’d thought at first, designed to keep a bar conquest intrigued. But during the long hours of the night, small inconsistencies had added up in his carefully logical brain, leaving him wondering whether that night had been as out of character for her as it had been for him.

  He’d resigned himself to never knowing for sure. Now, it seemed he’d been given a second chance to find out.

  “Did you hear me?” Robert said, tone sharp.

  “Sorry,” Ethan said without looking at his boss. “How about I meet you and Evangeline at the hospital?”

  “You need a ride?”

  “I’m all set.” He strode toward the ambulance they’d loaded Nicole into, only to stop and turn back when Robert called his name. “What?” he said, voice edgy with impatience and something more, something he didn’t want to analyze too closely.

  Robert looked from Ethan to the ambulance and back. “Who is she?”

  “She’s—” Ethan broke off, not sure what she was. She wasn’t a friend, wasn’t his lover, yet she’d come to tell him she was carrying his child. “She’s not a client,” he said shortly, and headed for the ambulance.

  They’d figure out the rest once she woke up.

  TERRIFIED, Nicole screamed and batted at the blurry shadows around her, fighting the feeling of weightlessness, of falling.

  Then she was on the ground without hitting bottom, and something was pressing her down, trapping her arms and legs. She screamed again and fought the hold. “Let me go!”

  A man’s voice said, “Nicole, you’re okay. You’re safe. Calm down and listen to me. You’re in the hospital, not the elevator. You’re okay.” The words were more rough than soothing, but they calmed her while sending up a strange shimmy inside.

  She woke further, feeling warmth where his hands gripped her forearms. The voice and touch were familiar, but she couldn’t think of his name, couldn’t picture his face, and that brought a spurt of renewed panic, which took up residence alongside a pounding headache.

  Opening her eyes, she squinted into the night-dim lights of a hospital room and saw a tall man wearing wrinkled khaki bush pants and a smudged white button-down missing a couple of buttons. His dark brown hair brushed over his forehead, streaked with highlights she imagined might be gold in better light. His eyes were dark brown and intelligent beneath heavy brows, his nose aquiline, his jaw chiseled. The whole effect was compelling and more than a little distant.

  And it was a stranger’s face.

  “Why am I in the hospital?” she demanded. “Who are you?”

  Before he could answer, the hallway door swung open and a white-coated, dark-haired female doctor entered. Her expression softened when she looked at the bed. “It’s good to see you awake, Miss Benedict.”

  Panic pounded through Nic as she pointed to the man. “I don’t know him.”

  The doctor pursed her lips, leaned down and flashed a penlight in Nic’s eyes. “Follow this.” She kept up a background monologue as she ran through a quick exam. “I’m Dr. Eballa—that’s with an a and two l’s, please, not Ebola like the virus.” She paused and wrote something on a clipboard, then said, “Your vitals are good and everything checks out normal, but you’ve got a good-sized knot on the back of your head and you were out for quite a while.” She straightened away from the bed. “What’s your full name and what are your parents’ names?”

  “Nicole Antoinette Benedict,” Nic said immediately. “My parents are Lyle and Mary Benedict. They live back in Maryland where I grew up.” The easy answers calmed some of the panic and she shifted and lifted a hand to the back of her head, wincing when she found a tender, raised bump the size of her palm. “What happened?”

  “What is the last thing you remember?”

  “I—” Nicole broke off, her stomach twisting when she realized that while she remembered lots of things, they weren’t in any sort of order. She could picture a greenhouse full of plants, but she wasn’t sure if it was a memory from last week or last year. Panic spiked through the pounding headache, and her voice trembled when she said, “I don’t know.”

  The doctor touched her wrist, maybe in reassurance, maybe a quick check on her pulse. “That’s not uncommon after a concussion such as yours. Things should start to clear up over the next few hours or days, though you may never remember the actual attack.”

  Nic’s blood iced in her veins. “I was attacked?”

  “Not you personally,” the man said. “You were in an elevator when the building was bombed.”

  “Bombed!” Something shivered just out of Nic’s mental reach, a flash of sunlight on a dark shape, there and then gone so quickly she wasn’t sure it had ever been. She closed her eyes for a second, scared an
d frustrated at the same time. “I don’t remember.” She glanced at him. “And I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Are we…” She trailed off, not sure what she meant to ask.

  As she fumbled, Dr. Eballa stepped away from the bed and adjusted the lights higher. The man turned and scowled in the doctor’s direction.

  Instantly, his image was overlain by another in her mind’s eye. It was the same face but a different setting—a bar, crowded, noisy and dark. He’d turned and scowled at her, but his brown eyes had warmed with reluctant interest when she’d said something clever—she didn’t remember what it had been, but no matter. She remembered him stretching out a hand, remembered the warmth and the faint electric buzz when they shook and he’d said, “I’m—”

  “Ethan!” she said aloud in the hospital room, making him jump.

  A flash of relief glinted in his eyes, tainted with something more complicated. “You remember.”

  “I remember meeting you in a bar, and…” She trailed off as other memories reconnected. The bar hookup. The hotel room. Hot sex. A plus sign on the home pregnancy test when she’d been praying for a minus. “Oh,” she said, then more forcefully, “Oh! Oh, no. I have to talk to you. In private.”

  He turned away, as though he didn’t want her to read his eyes when he said, “You already told me about the baby.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed hard and tried to fight through the headache and a growing swell of nausea. “I don’t remember that.” What did I say? she wanted to ask. What did you say?

  “What is the last thing you do remember?” he demanded, and she had a feeling there was more to the question than him judging the extent of her partial amnesia.

  “I remember getting up this morning.” She glanced at him. “Is it Tuesday?” When he nodded, she felt a small measure of relief. “Then I remember getting up this morning. I read the paper and made a few calls for a project I’m working on.” Pitifully unsuccessful calls, she remembered. “Then I drove into the city to see you. I can picture myself parking somewhere and walking into a big building, but I’m not sure if that’s a memory or a logical guess.”