Exciting. Oh, so incredibly exciting…
“Something wrong?” Alessandra had said the next day, and Bianca had said yes, unfortunately she’d have to cancel going on to the Flying Eagle because she’d had an email from New York and one of the other psychologists in her practice had fallen ill and they were desperately shorthanded.
Alessandra had looked at her in a way that said she didn’t believe a word of the story, but she’d said that of course she and Tanner were disappointed and maybe another time…
To visit the Akecheta ranch? Definitely. To see Chay Olivieri? Not even if the end of the world was imminent.
No woman in her right mind would want to see the lieutenant again.
She was willing to admit he was probably a superb warrior. All that toned muscle. All that attitude. The sense of command. What was it he’d said about being part Lakota Sioux? Back in the Old West, women would probably have gone crazy for him.
Some probably still did.
Maybe most probably still did.
But an independent I-am-in-charge-of-myself female? No way.
Bianca glared at the elevator door, reached forward and pounded the call button. What was taking so long?
The lieutenant had the attitude that came of male privilege. Yes. Warrior privilege. Insisting she dance with him. Insisting she ride the Harley. Insisting they have sex…
Except, he hadn’t insisted. All he’d done was kiss her.
And she’d responded by wrapping herself around him.
She’d loved everything he’d done. The possessive way he’d kissed her. The urgency of his need. The way he’d taken her, hard and deep and fast.
And then, afterward, the overwhelming sense of guilt. Of self-loathing.
Why?
Because, the scientist in her said crisply, he’s everything you dislike in a man. That’s the reason you’ve spent six weeks lying to yourself, the reason you accused him of forcing himself on you when you knew it was a lie.
What the scientist in her couldn’t explain was why she’d wanted sex with him in the first place. It was a little late in life to develop a thing for bad boys.
Ding.
At last! The elevator had arrived.
“Finally,” Bianca said on a long, grateful breath.
The doors slid open. She took a step forward.
And stopped.
The car was dark. Not unlighted. The overhead chandelier, part of the building’s original nineteenth-century décor, was fully lit.
It was the car itself that was dark. How come she’d never noticed it before? It was because of the mahogany-paneled walls, another holdover from the past. The wood was so old, so highly polished, that it was almost black.
And why was the car empty? It had stopped at other floors.
Idiot. It’s empty because whomever had pushed those call buttons had left the building.
And why was the car swaying?
It always sways. Remember? Lacey joked about it. She said standing in this car was kind of like standing on the deck of a ship. Stop procrastinating and get mov—
Flicker. Bzzz. Flicker.
Wait.
A bad storm. Lights that were all but typing out an SOS, and she was about to get into an elevator? Laughter burst from her lips. Okay. Shaky laughter, but laughter nevertheless. Only the heroine in a Grade B horror movie would do such a foolish thing.
Well, she was not the heroine in a movie, Grade B or otherwise. She might be foolish when it came to men, to one man, but she wasn’t foolish when it came to weighing the facts and making a logical choice.
Quickly, she turned away from the elevator and headed for the fire stairs. Nine flights down was nothing. She worked out on a treadmill. Not every day, but so what? She could run, never mind walk, and walking down the stairs was what she’d be doing. It helped that she had on comfortable shoes. Black nubuck flats. Not sneakers, but almost as good as sneakers.
The door was directly ahead. Fire Stairs, the sign said. To Be Used in Case of Emergency.
Bianca grasped the doorknob, pulled the door open…
And the lights went out.
All of them.
The ones in the hall. In the stairwell. Even the always-on, always-dim nighttime lights that were lit 24/7 in all the offices.
The first slimy whisper of panic danced along her spine.
Easy.
She had to stay calm. She wasn’t a child. She didn’t believe in monsters or bogeymen. She wasn’t afraid of being alone in a place where she couldn’t see anything, not even the floor or the walls, not even her hand when she held it in front of her eyes.
She wasn’t afraid…
But she was as good as blind.
And she was alone.
Wasn’t she?
What if her patient, her former patient…
“Stupid,” she said briskly.
She was stuck in a power failure. For all she knew, the power wasn’t just down here, it was down in the entire city. Hadn’t something like that happened to one of her half-sisters? Yes. To Jaimie. And Jaimie had gotten through it intact.
But, of course, Jamie hadn’t been alone. She’d been with a strong, powerful man who’d been able to protect her…
Enough.
Light. She needed light. And… Bianca caught her breath. And she had light. Her smartphone. She’d downloaded an app that provided a steady beam of light if you needed it, and she surely needed it now.
She dug into the tote bag. Laptop. Keys. Kindle. Notebook. Pens. Comb. Why on earth did she carry so much garbage? Where was the…
There!
Her hand closed around the phone. She pulled it free of the tote. Felt for the Home button. Found it. She knew where the light app was. She’d read an article in the Times.
Place vital icons where you’ll be able to locate them easily.
Yes. She’d done that. The light icon was the top left one on the screen.
Bianca pressed her thumb to the screen. Moved it around a little. And then, yes, the light came on. She pointed the beam at the stairs. Its field of illumination was narrow, but it was bright, more than adequate to get her down nine flights to the lobby.
The thing was to stay calm. She took a breath, exhaled, took another. Then she started down the stairs.
It seemed to take a long time until she reached the eighth floor, but that was okay. All she needed was steady progress—and for the light on her phone to hold out.
Seventh-floor landing. Good.
Sixth. Excellent.
Fifth, then fourth, then third. Perfect. She had to concentrate on the stairs, not on the sound of her footsteps, the hiss of her breath or the thud of her pulse. She’d left the silly heroine of a thousand and one overdone horror films way back on the ninth floor.
Besides, in real life, there were no Freddy Kruegers.
But there were Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys. There were men like her former patient, but he was in treatment. Wasn’t he? And if he was, why would he have made those recent so-called hang-ups? If he’d made them. But really, wasn’t it a logical assumption that he had?
“Stop it,” she said briskly.
Another set of stairs completed. Only one more to go. And then, hurray! The lobby floor. All she had to do was grasp the doorknob, like this, pull the door open, like this. Dammit. The door was heavy. She’d have to tug hard to open it fully. The best she could do at first was to crack it an inch at a time…
A long, ululating scream burst from Bianca’s throat. Or it would have if she had not gone mute with terror.
Quickly, she shut the door. Swung the phone down towards the floor. The light from it had barely reached the shadows in the lobby, but she’d seen something.
Someone.
A man was standing in the corner next to the main
entrance. Tucked into the corner, hiding. A man who was tall and thin and ohGodohGodohGod…
Bianca drew back. Plastered her shoulders against the wall. A dozen urban myths, a dozen newspaper headlines sprang to full blood-soaked life in her mind. All those, plus an image of her former patient, a man who was tall and thin…
The man in the corner hadn’t seen her yet, or surely he’d have been on her by now. Grazie a Dio that she’d only been able to open the heavy door a couple of inches.
What now? The door had no lock. If he hadn’t seen her, she could get away. Race up the stairs. But if he had seen her, if he was waiting her out…
She was trembling.
What if she opened the door again, no wider than before, and said—and said, Hello? Is someone there?
Brilliant, Absolutely brilliant. Someone was there, that was the point, hiding in the corner, and someone hiding in a dark and empty building wasn’t about to say, Why, yes. There’s someone here.
Bianca took a steadying breath.
She could do better than this. She had years of training. She’d read dozens of textbooks and scholarly articles. She’d sat through endless lectures given by the best people in her field. What she had to do was figure out, fast, the best way to approach a criminal or someone criminally insane.
And then Chay was in her head again. Chay, repeating what he’d said when she’d balked at riding his Harley.
The best way to deal with fear is to face it.
Yes. That was the only way—but it wouldn’t hurt to have some kind of weapon.
Carefully, never taking her eyes from the man in the corner, Bianca switched her cellphone to her left hand and dipped her right hand into the tote. The keys. The keys… She had them! There was a pocketknife on the keychain. Calling it a knife was pretty much a joke. It was a tiny thing that folded up into nothing. Scissors. Nail file. Knife. No blade was more than an inch and a half, two inches long, but the guy in the corner didn’t know that.
She just had to make the first move. Make it count.
Whoever was waiting for her had his own agenda.
Now, she had hers.
Dio. If her heart beat any faster, it would leap out of her chest.
The best way to deal with fear is to face it.
She moved forward, her steps purposeful. Phone in one hand. Joker of a knife in the other. Fumbled with the doorknob with the hand that held the phone.
The door opened.
The phone fell to the floor.
She almost cried.
Now the light was useless. Worse than useless. The beam was pointed straight up, illuminating her, not the man, but the door was open. He had to know she was there, meaning it was too late to change tactics.
The best way to deal with fear is to face it.
“Step forward,” she said. “Whoever you are.” Amazing. She sounded strong. Authoritative. If only she felt that way. “Do you hear me? Step forward and identify yourself. I’m going to count to five and then—”
Blink.
The overhead lights blazed on.
Bianca stared into the corner. Then her knees gave out and she sank to the floor.
She’d been talking to a janitor’s mop and pail.
Laughter erupted from her throat. “A mop,” she said shakily. “And a pail.”
She laughed until she was breathless, until the wild laughter became sobs of relief. At last, she swiped her hands over her eyes, picked up her phone, rose to her feet and almost ran to the front door. She could hardly wait to get the hell out of this building, leave what had moments ago felt like a prison or maybe the set for an old Hitchcock movie.
Was it still raining?
Yes. Standing on this side of the door that led to the street, she could hear it beating down.
She’d be soaked by the time she got to Cuppa Joe’s, and what she needed was a drink, not a latte, but the latte was going to have to do unless the man she was supposed to meet tonight had given up and gone home. She’d have to check. That was the courteous, the professional thing to do, but if she was lucky, Noah had built himself an ark and left.
She really didn’t want to interview anybody tonight, and she certainly didn’t want to interview a man who might have the wrong idea of what the meeting was all about.
The only man she’d want to see tonight was the one who had just given her the courage to deal with reality and not only was he thousands of miles away, there wasn’t the slightest possibility he’d want to see her.
Which was all for the best. Nothing about her was right for him, nothing about him was right for her, and it was time to get moving.
She pulled open the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
The rain was coming down as if some gigantic hand had turned on a celestial faucet. She was soaked in a heartbeat, but the downpour felt wonderful, a magical, mystical cleansing after the nightmare of the last half hour.
Bianca lifted her face to the rain, opened her arms and whirled in a little circle. There were people on the street and they probably thought she’d lost her mind, but for the first time in her life she didn’t give a damn what strangers …
“Baby?”
Her heart leaped into her throat. She stood still, then swung towards the sound of that low, familiar voice.
The lieutenant, her lieutenant, was running towards her.
“Chay,” she said, and flew straight into his arms.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She was wet.
A brilliant assessment, Olivieri.
Of course she was wet. She was soaked, but why wouldn’t she be?
The rain was as heavy as anything he’d seen during a monsoon-season stint in Pakistan. The unlucky pedestrians caught in the storm were keeping close to the side of the building in a mostly useless effort to avoid the worst of the downpour.
Not Bianca.
The lady who was self-conscious on a dance floor had been dancing in the middle of the sidewalk.
At first, he’d had trouble believing his eyes. Maybe it wasn’t her. Maybe it was a lookalike. But the closer he’d come, the more he knew that the sweet curves under the water-drenched clothing could belong only to one woman. He hadn’t really seen her naked that night on the beach, but the feel of her against him was stamped on his memory.
Finding her dancing in the rain had only been his first surprise.
The second?
She’d flung herself into his arms.
All during the flight here, he’d tried to imagine how she’d react to seeing him. This—Bianca in his embrace—hadn’t even made the list.
Telling him to take a long hike on a short bridge kept emerging as a logical winner.
That was why he hadn’t called to tell her he was coming. Well, that and the fact that he didn’t have her number. Okay. That and the fact that six weeks had gone by, six very long weeks, and he’d have bet not even Miss Manners or Emily Post could tell a man what to say if he phoned a woman he’d made love with and never seen again.
Hi, how’ve you been and, by the way, I need to ask you a question…
“Inadequate” didn’t come close.
She was shaking. Why? The rain was pouring down, but it was a warm rain. Maybe not warm enough for her, he decided, and he started to step back so he could peel off his jacket and wrap her in it.
But she clung to him.
He liked it. A lot. Enough to keep holding her a little longer. But the rain was relentless and finally he clasped her shoulders and eased her away.
“Wait,” he said. “Let me take off my jacket.”
He got the jacket off. It was denim, too heavy for a hot summer day but right for tossing into his carry-on, and he’d been glad he had it when the skies opened up just as he’d reached his hotel. The outside of the jacket was wet but the rain hadn’t penetrated the fabr
ic. He wrapped her in the jacket, helped get her arms into the sleeves, then closed all the buttons right up to the collar even as she protested.
“You’ll get soaked.”
“Heck, no problem. I can skip showering tonight.” She laughed, but she was still shaking so he gathered her into his arms again. It took a couple of minutes, but finally she stopped trembling. “Better now?”
She nodded. “Much. Thank you.”
He hesitated. The last thing he wanted to do was make her feel awkward about that little rain dance.
“When I came along,” he said, “you looked as if you were thinking about joining my people.”
She tilted her head back and stared up at him. “What?”
“That rain dance.” He smiled. “Not that the Sioux are much into rain dances. That’s pretty much a southwestern Indian thing, but you were doing a good job. In fact, now I’m wondering—does Manhattan have you to thank for this downpour?”
She blushed, but that was okay because she also gave a quick little laugh.
“I was celebrating. The power went off in my building and I was the only one left.”
“In the entire building?”
“Uh-huh. As far as I know, yes. I was stuck there, alone in the dark on the ninth floor and—and—” She paused. He could see a question forming in her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Half a dozen answers ran through his mind. In the end, he decided the honest one was best.
“I came to see you.”
Now she looked surprised. Well, why wouldn’t she? They’d had sex six weeks ago and hadn’t exchanged a word since.
“You came to see me?”
“Yes.”
She was still in his arms, but he could sense walls going up around her, and for the first time it occurred to him that what he hadn’t felt comfortable asking over the phone wasn’t going to be any easier to ask now, especially while they stood on a busy street in a rainstorm.
“Look,” he said, “how about getting get out of the rain before we discuss this? We can grab a taxi. My hotel is only—”
“Your hotel?”
Uh-oh. Talk about walls going up…
One quick step and she stood free of his embrace.
“It’s been nice seeing you again, Lieutenant, but I don’t have time for chatchit.”
Privilege: Special Tactical Units Division: Book Two Page 10