“Doesn’t matter, sweetheart. Just do what I said.” He did his best to ignore the tears on her face. There would be time to hold her later, to reassure her. But now he needed to focus. “Then find Eric Lestap in my contacts, and tell him the exact same thing. He’s captain of the North Coastal Station, and we served together. Tell him what happened and that I’ll call him when we get somewhere safe. Tell him to contact Officer Meeks at SDPD.”
He took a hard right onto the South Coast Highway, past La Paloma Theatre with its ornate ticket booth, where he’d take her one day. He weaved back and forth through side streets and then looped back to connect with the I-5. With one eye on the rearview mirror, he listened as Louisa pulled herself together enough to make the calls.
“I need to apply pressure to your gunshot wound,” she said.
It throbbed like a bitch, which made him think the bullet was still in there. “Gym bag in the back of the cab. There’s a towel in there.”
Louisa slipped off her seat belt before he could warn her not to. He was driving right now with full-on evasive maneuvers, and he sure as shit didn’t want to brake hard while she was wedged between the two seats. He wouldn’t stop now, not even for the police. The kind of men who were following him were ruthless in their pursuit and would think nothing of killing cops to get what they wanted.
“Got it,” she said, breathlessly as she flopped back into her seat.
“Fasten your seat belt,” he said.
“When I’ve taken care of you,” she said, leaning toward him, but he batted her hand away.
“Lou, please. Fasten your seat belt so I don’t have to worry about driving like a maniac.”
“For fuck’s sake,” she huffed, pulling the strap over her shoulder.
“Did you just swear at me, Louisa North?” Expletives coming out of those lips just seemed wrong. He looked behind them. Still no sign. He must have lost them back in Encinitas.
“I’ll do more than swear if you don’t let me look at your side,” she said, leaning over him. She pressed the towel so hard against him that he gasped. “I have a gun sitting right here, and I’ve already shown I can use it,” she said, her laughter sounding like it was half genuine, half nerves.
He placed his hand on top of hers.
“We’re fine, Lou. Remember what I said about being alive. It’s the only thing that matters.”
Except you. Because she was beginning to mean more.
* * *
Mac flung open the door to Eagle Securities as Six pulled the truck into the parking lot. For somebody who usually hated people, Louisa had never been more relieved to see anybody in her life. Especially when that person was clearly armed to the teeth. She’d protested that Six should pull over and let her drive, but he’d given her a look, one that said it was never going to happen. Then she’d campaigned hard for having Six drive straight to a hospital for treatment, but Six had explained that Mac had trained as a medic and was more than capable of dealing with a gunshot wound, except, as he put it, “without the six-figure price tag.”
A black car screeched up alongside his truck, and Louisa screamed. She grabbed the gun she’d placed on the floor and held it toward the window, ready to shoot again if she had to.
“No,” Six shouted, snatching the gun from her hand. “It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s Cabe.”
Tears threatened to fall as shock and relief and panic all unfurled within her. Six did something to the gun. What, she wasn’t sure—probably released all the bullets or chamber or whatever the hell it was called.
“Don’t fall apart yet,” Six said quietly. “We’re going to get inside, get safe, and get cleaned up. Three steps. I know you can hold it together to do that.”
Cabe jumped quickly out of his car, hurried to Six’s door, and yanked it open. “What the hell happened?”
Six killed the engine and removed her hand from the towel. “It’s time to go, Lou. Step one. Remember? Get inside. But wait for Mac to come get you and give you some cover. I’m pretty sure we lost them, but we can’t be too careful.”
He turned to drop out of the cab, and she could tell by the way he let all of his weight hang in his shoulders and arms that he was trying to limit his movement as much as possible.
“Jesus Christ, get him inside,” she heard Mac say, gun in hand, as he made his way over to her.
She pushed the door open and lowered herself to the ground. Mac shielded her with his body as he pushed her forward toward the building.
“Keys,” Cabe said, holding out his hand toward Six.
Six pulled them from his pocket and dropped them into Cabe’s palm.
“I opened the side door,” Mac said, nodding his head toward the side of the building. “He’s going to pull your truck inside, just in case you did gain a tail.”
Action was going on all around her. Cabe ran outside, slamming the main door behind him. Mac locked everything down and then offered his shoulder to Six, who was leaning on the front desk, leaving a bloody smear with one hand while the other pressed the towel to his waist.
“Let’s get you into those medical rooms,” Mac said. “Nice of you to have given the paint the chance to dry before you got yourself shot up.”
“Funny, asshole,” Six replied. When he turned and winked at her, she could see the sweat on his brow and the way his skin had taken on a pallor. It was taking a lot for him to remain standing, she could tell, and she wondered how much of that was for her benefit. She should feel safe in a secure compound with three men trained to kill. Without Six’s intervention, she would certainly be in the hands of the people who wanted her. Her entire body shook at the thought. But they’d nearly killed him. She’d seen the bullet wound with her own eyes. Ten inches higher, and his heart would have been in a whole world of trouble. Part of her wanted to tell them that the contract was canceled, that she didn’t want their help in protecting her if it put Six’s life at risk. But she was too much of a coward to go it alone, and too smart to truly consider it.
She shuffled after them, still wearing her pajamas, through another key-coded door, down the hallway, and then through a wide-open space. It had the proportions of a small airplane hangar, but that couldn’t be possible given its location so close to the university. Six’s truck roared into the building through the wide-open door, and no sooner had Cabe brought it to a stop than he was out of the cab and lowering the heavy roller shutter into place.
They passed through a small gym into a series of rooms at the back that looked, and smelled, like a locker room. Six pushed the door open to a room that looked part medical, part dorm. At Mac’s instruction he hopped up on the bed.
“Here.” Cabe dropped a large fleece around her shoulders. “We don’t have any women’s clothes, but it will help you get warm.”
Louisa struggled to get her brain to function. It was hot outside, yet she was frozen. She watched, almost impartially, as Mac cut away Six’s shorts and then stuck a needle into his side. Over the years, she’d dissected animals and even humans, but somehow the sight of Mac fixing Six made her feel ill. Despite how cold she felt, she needed air. She turned and ran into the gym before throwing up in a garbage can.
“Lou?” she heard Six shout. But she needed a moment before she went back to see him. You’re fine. He’s alive. He’ll be fine. It will all be fine. Except it wasn’t fine. She threw up again.
Once she’d finished heaving, she wiped her mouth with the sleeve of the fleece and sat back on her knees.
“Here. Drink this.” Cabe offered her a bottle of ice-cold water, and she placed it against her forehead. “You’re doing great, Louisa. Stressful night for everybody.”
“Lou?” Six yelled again.
“She’s fine, Viking. Stay where you are,” Cabe shouted back.
“They shot him,” she blurted. “So I shot one of them. He’s on the floor. I think I killed him.”
Cabe sat down on the floor next to her, resting his forearms on his knees. “Yeah. That happens sometimes.
And it’s really rough that you experienced it. But if you hadn’t, what do you think the outcome would have been?”
“They would have killed Six and taken me.”
Cabe fiddled with the watch on his wrist. “You’re a scientist, right?”
Louisa nodded.
“So you know all about how to design experiments, alter variables, and trade off options, right?”
She took a sip of water. “I’d like to think so,” she said quietly.
“Well, here’s the thing. In the moment you stepped up to fire that gun, your brain had already made the decision that Six’s life and your safety were more important than the other guy’s life. And from what you told me, there were more of them than there were of you. All those shots did was even the scales. You didn’t do anything wrong, Louisa. In fact, for someone who hates guns—and yeah, Six told us how much you don’t like ’em—I’d say you did everything right.”
In the past, Louisa had never had any difficulties putting emotion to one side to look at things clinically. Despite her deeply personal connection to Huntington’s disease, she’d never felt panic in her attempts to find medication to help people living with it. Certainly she’d spent a number of years feeling a burden of responsibility to find a treatment quickly, but never had she felt the torrential river of feelings that currently coursed through her body.
She finally understood what Six had been trying to keep from her. It was this. This feeling, the images she would never get out of her head, the way her stomach flipped at the memory of Six and the assailant fighting. She looked down at her hands and saw Six’s blood all over them.
“You did what you had to do to stay alive, and there is no crime or shame in that,” Cabe added. “Why don’t you go into the locker room and get cleaned up? There are towels on the counter, and I left some shorts and a T-shirt in there. I’ll tell Six what you’re up to. He’ll cope a lot better if he knows you aren’t losing your shit.”
The sound of a groan came from inside the medical room.
Louisa stood. “I should be with him,” she said, and headed toward the door, but Cabe stopped her.
“No, you shouldn’t. First, you hurled when you saw what was going on. Doctor or no. Second, that isn’t a fully equipped med room. We don’t have morphine or those kinds of painkillers. Six is probably only just holding his shit together. Third, let Mac do what he needs to.”
Cabe moved between her and the door and folded his arms. Like the guardian at the gate, he wasn’t going to let her through.
“Fine,” she snapped and turned for the locker room. The shower would give her time to pull her own shit together. There were police to talk to, and new plans to make.
But once she came out, she was going to see Six.
And there was no way Cabe was going to stop her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Six looked down at the gauze that covered his side. The bullet had skimmed through his waist, leaving a wound that hurt like a bitch while Mac stitched it, yet the whole time he’d been worried about Lou. He might possibly have the luckiest freaking torso on the planet, surviving two gunshot wounds, and now he’d have matching scars on either side of his body. Only this time, nobody was going to be lining up to give him a medal. But the way Lou had paled as she’d watched Mac poke him broke his heart. He’d seen the color drain from her face. And it was impossible to miss the way she’d started to sway on her feet. He’d almost been relieved when she’d run out of the room. When he’d told her there where things she’d never be able to unsee, he hadn’t imagined she’d be faced with the sight of him banged up on a table. Now, every time she looked at the scar, she’d be reminded of this time in her life.
Cabe had jogged out after her, and Six had wanted to know how she was. But nobody had passed him word. At least not immediately.
He looked across the room now to where Louisa was curled up on the bottom bunk in a pair of shorts that were so long on her that they looked like capris and a T-shirt so large that the neckhole kept slipping off her shoulder. As always, she let go in sleep, and he wondered if she realized just how different her energy was when she was like this.
When Cabe had eventually told him that she’d been sick in the gym, he’d felt like shit that they’d left her that exposed. Their team was still small, with other jobs on the go, and there hadn’t been enough men to put an extra patrol on their house that night. Overly confident that there was no way of tracing Lou back to his house and that the key players were locked up, they’d made a bad call. Now all that mattered was figuring out just how the assailants had found her, and later, as a company, they’d have to talk about how to expand or they’d never be able to manage multiple jobs at any one time.
In the meantime, he was going to have to deal with the guilt he felt at letting her down. Had he not been naked with her in her bed, but in his own room across the hall, closer to the garage, maybe he would have heard them sooner. Every time Cabe had said she was a distraction, he’d been right. He should have kept her at arm’s distance and waited until it was all over, but his dick, which had nearly been blown off by his own shortcomings, had been doing the thinking for him.
Not that he could go back at this point. His heart hurt at even the thought of it. The thought of leaving her in somebody else’s care stung worse than the bullet hole in his side. But in the morning, he was going to find somewhere safe for them to stay while they figured out what to do. If he had to fly her somewhere, he’d do it. Call in a favor with one of his buddies who had their own planes and get her somewhere without any kind of paper trail.
He was embarrassed that he’d let it come to this. He was better than this. More capable. And yet he’d messed up. The sensation didn’t sit well.
“She doing okay?” Cabe asked quietly as he walked into the room.
Six drew his eyes from her sleeping form. “Yeah. She’s strong,” he said, attempting to keep the admiration out of his tone. They’d spent hours dealing with the police, the FBI, and updating their CIA contact. He’d been completely truthful with Officer Meeks and with Detective Pitt who’d been assigned to the case about what had gone down at his house. He’d told Pitt how Louisa had hired his company to figure out what the hell was going on.
Kovalenko wasn’t talking, knowing he’d be killed by the end of his first day in prison if he revealed any secrets. And they only had the testimony from the driver, which was unsubstantiated; they still didn’t have any real proof of Vasilii and Ivan’s involvement. As for Mitkin, he’d lawyered up tight, leaving them with a whole bunch of nothing.
Lou had done what was needed. She’d gone inside, gotten safe, and gotten cleaned up. Then she’d answered questions like it was lunchtime rather than three thirty in the morning. The first freaking day in September. Two more days and all their jobs were meant to kick off. Hell, two more days and Cabe would be on his way to Sierra Leone with half the team.
“I think we need a change of plan,” Six whispered, boosting himself up on the bed.
“Yeah, well, we weren’t anticipating this kind of job in our first week of operation. Slow start, we said, remember?” Cabe raised an eyebrow at him, and he knew they were going to fight.
“Louisa is paying a shit ton of cash to do this,” he hissed, looking over to where she still slept peacefully. The last thing he needed was for her to be privy to Cabe’s thoughts. “And what, she nearly gets taken? Again. On our watch.”
“Okay. One. It was your watch. And two. If you weren’t so wrapped up in her, you’d have recognized this deal for the cash cow it is and kept your dick in your pants.”
Six’s legs were swinging off the bed before he knew it, gunshot or no gunshot. “Fuck. You,” he spat. He and Cabe had had their fallings out in the past, but he had a feeling there’d be no coming back from the one they were about to have. “One. It was our watch. And two. We let her down.”
“Well, maybe if you two weren’t knocking boots, you would have had any eye on the job instead of her pussy.
”
At that, Six ripped the drip of antibiotics from his arm, and despite the pain that ripped through his side, he stood. “You want to say that again, asshole?”
Mac marched into the room, his first look over at Louisa and his second between the two of them. “She’s our client,” he hissed. “Outside, now.”
Six marched out the door, not giving a shit if Cabe was behind him or not. In fact, better for him if he wasn’t. Because Six was likely to go off any second, and Cabe was going to feel the brunt of it.
“Okay,” Mac said once they were in the gym area. “You two are both idiots. Should we ream off the litany of stupid shit you just pulled? Arguing in front of a client, asleep or not? That’s got to be the most stupid business decision.” He turned to face Cabe. “You—if you can’t see that this is different, then you need to go get those eyes of yours tested, because anybody with half a brain can see Six is halfway in love with the girl, even if he doesn’t have the balls to admit it yet.” Mac then looked straight at Six. “And you. She isn’t the kind of client we want. She isn’t even the kind of work we really want to do, but we’re doing it because you asked us to. And we needed the money. So pull your neck in. It wasn’t like the Norths of San Diego couldn’t afford it. So why don’t we talk about what we are going to do.”
“We could always ask Lou for more.” Cabe stubbed his toe into the ground. “Think about it. She floats us more cash, we can hire some more guys. Screw starting small and quibbling over which of us gets the day off.”
“What if she already has plans for her money?” he said, thinking of the business plan he’d seen scattered all over the desk. True North Industries.
“Then convince her to back us,” Cabe said. “You can be persuasive if you tried.”
“You know what,” Six said, walking a little away from the guys to sit down on the leg raises station. His stitches were at risk of coming open, and he had a mild case of the spins, not that he’d ever admit that to anyone. Losing that much blood had obviously taken its toll, leaving him adrift. “I don’t need to be persuasive. I’m sure she’d give me money if I asked her—”
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