Riley felt a glimmer of hope. So maybe I’m getting all bent out of shape for nothing. Maybe the bastard won’t say a word about Jeff’s phone.
Hope sputtered.
Then again, maybe he will.
And died. Maybe he won’t have to, because maybe these guys already know I have it. Maybe they know everything.
She battled the urge to wet her lips.
Bradley was still focused on Bax. “Where is he now?”
“Houston PD took him, and, by the way, they want Mrs. Cowan to come down and formally identify him. I said I’d collect her, and we’d bring her.”
Bradley looked at her, and then at Bax. “She look like she’s up to going down to police headquarters tonight to you?”
Bax looked at her, too. Riley had no idea what she looked like, but he frowned. “I can call them, get them to set it up for tomorrow instead. They’ve got plenty to hold him on overnight.”
They were talking to each other, like she wasn’t right there.
Riley said, “I have to work tomorrow.” And it occurred to her that going to police headquarters to identify her attacker gave her a really good excuse to get out of the apartment and away from Bradley. Before he got a chance to get going with whatever he’d come to talk to her about. “I’d rather get it out of the way tonight. If you’ll both excuse me, I’ll just go and get dressed.” She looked at Bradley. “Thank you for what you did. I think you probably saved my life.”
Clutching the bedspread closer, she stood up as she spoke. She intended it to be a dismissive gesture. Unfortunately, the room immediately tilted sideways. It was all she could do not to stagger. If she hadn’t felt this overwhelming need to get rid of them, she would have sat back down again, hard.
Bradley stepped close, caught her arm. She couldn’t help it: she swayed as the room whirled, then as he stepped closer still she leaned into him, grabbing his waist, melting against him, allowing him as the nearest solid object to take her weight.
“You’re welcome,” he said dryly as her forehead came to rest on his chest and she closed her eyes to stop the spinning. His arm came around her to steady her. She registered the sheer size of him, along with the taut muscularity of his waist and the solidness of his chest and the hardness of his arm and could only be thankful he was there. Then as she continued to lean against him because the room was still whirling and there was just nothing else she could do, he picked her up again as if it were the most natural thing in the world and started walking with her.
“Call an ambulance,” he said over his shoulder as he carried her into her bedroom. “We need to get her checked out.”
“I’m fine,” Riley protested, although it was beginning to occur to her that maybe she wasn’t.
“There’s already an ambulance here.” From the sound of his voice, Bax was right behind them. “The crew’s down the hall, checking out this old guy who started having chest pains when he heard gunshots. Cops are here, too, taking statements. Building’s crawling with them. They’ll probably be knocking on the door wanting to take Mrs. Cowan’s statement soon.”
“Go get a paramedic. Wait, pull these covers back first.”
“What do you think’s wrong with her?” Bax sounded anxious as he did as he was told.
“Don’t know.” Bradley laid her down on the bed. Riley was surprisingly glad of the solid surface beneath her. Her surroundings, including the large man looming over her, were still moving, and keeping perfectly still seemed like her best bet. “Maybe shock. Maybe something else. We’ll see.” He looked over his shoulder. “What are you waiting for? Go.”
Bax went.
Leaving her still wrapped up in his jacket and the bedspread, Bradley pulled the top sheet and satiny blanket over her, tucking them around her as efficiently as any nurse. He was leaning close, and she was able to focus on his face—his mouth was grim, his jaw tight—and that made her realize that the room’s shimmying had stopped.
“I got a little dizzy, that’s all,” Riley said as he straightened away from her. As the pillow embraced the back of her skull, the tender spot from her fall made itself felt once again. She winced. Moving cautiously, she turned onto her side, pillowing her cheek on her hand as she waited to see if the vertigo would recur. It didn’t. For a moment she thought about trying to get up, but under the circumstances that didn’t seem like the smartest idea.
“Twice now,” he observed.
“I’m fine as long as I don’t stand up. It’s probably because he banged my head into the back of the tub.”
“That would do it.”
Standing over her, Bradley looked . . . formidable. He was frowning down at her, and once again Riley found herself wondering exactly what he knew. Her gut twisted.
He said, “You seem to be remarkably hard to kill.”
“What do you mean?”
“Drowning somebody should take about three minutes tops. Hold ’em underwater until they pass out, keep ’em there until you’re sure they’re dead. For a man of his size dealing with a woman of yours, especially since you were already in a bathtub full of water, it should have been a piece of cake. But he had to bang your head into the back of the tub, and you managed to get his ski mask off and then stab him. With a comb. And you got away.” His eyes met hers. “Most forced drowning victims panic and spaz out for less than a minute before they go limp. Sounds like you were able to keep it together a lot longer than that. Long enough to put up an ultimately successful fight. Pretty impressive.”
Riley tried to keep her face from revealing the damning truth that the reason she had survived long enough to put up a successful fight was that her attacker had been trying to extract something from her before killing her.
She chose to take the battle to the enemy. “You seem to know a lot about forced drownings.”
Again that slight uptick at the corner of his mouth that appeared to be what for him passed as a smile. “I know a lot about a lot of things.”
Holy hell, she had to stop reading unspoken meaning into everything he said. She was afraid he would be able to see the guilt that surged through her in her eyes.
Forget about taking the battle to the enemy. She just wanted the conversation to end.
“I was fighting for my life,” she said with dignity.
“Yeah.”
There was absolutely no inflection to that, which of course made her start to read all kinds of nerve-racking things into it. Fortunately, he was no longer looking at her. Instead, he was glancing around the room. Riley felt a tingle of alarm as she tried to work out what he could see. Not Jeff’s phone, which was tucked away inside a shoe in her closet, not concealed in a locked drawer in her desk as she had told her attacker.
She’d put it there right after discovering Jeff’s body, before she’d gotten the call that officially informed her of the terrible tragedy and sent her speeding to Margaret’s house.
“You going somewhere?” Bradley’s eyes were on her small suitcase, which rested on the carpet near the bed.
“I came home to pack some clothes so I could spend a few more days with my mother and sister-in-law.” Reminded of what she’d left Margaret’s house to do, Riley did a lightning calculation: she hadn’t yet been gone long enough for Margaret to start to worry, but that time was rapidly approaching. She needed to give Margaret a call . . . It was then that a horrifying thought occurred to her. “Oh, no, I’m going to have to tell Margaret what just happened. She’s already been through so much. She’s going to go insane.”
“Margaret’s your ex-mother-in-law, right? I’m surprised you’ve stayed on such good terms.” There was absolutely no discernible emotion in his voice. His eyes as she met them were that same calm, unreadable blue.
He wasn’t doing anything at all that could be even vaguely construed as threatening, yet he was giving her the heebie-jeebies.
Riley abruptly realized that she was being interrogated by an expert.
This man was even more dangerous than she’d
thought.
“She’s always been very kind to me.” This time Riley didn’t resist the urge to wet her lips. She had every (legitimate) reason in the world to be anxious about Margaret. “Jeff’s death has just about destroyed her. I hate to have to tell her about this.”
Before he could reply, the sound of someone entering her apartment distracted them both. The indistinct murmur of approaching voices presaged Bax’s arrival in the room by just a few seconds. Behind him came a pair of blue-uniformed paramedics.
“Right there.” Bax motioned in her direction.
As the paramedics bustled to her bedside, Bax, who’d stopped beside his fellow agent, said to Bradley, “I got news. You aren’t going to like it.”
Overhearing, Riley shamelessly tried listening in on their conversation even as one of the paramedics plopped a medical bag down on the bed beside her and said cheerfully, “I hear you’ve been feeling dizzy.”
“Yes,” Riley responded, and at the same time heard Bradley reply in a resigned tone, “So what else is new?”
Then, as one of the paramedics produced a penlight, which he no doubt meant to shine in her eyes, Bradley glanced at her. For the briefest of seconds their eyes met.
Then he looked back at his partner.
“Let’s give them some space,” he said to Bax.
Riley could do nothing but surrender to the paramedics as the FBI agents left the room.
— CHAPTER —
SEVEN
“They let him go.” Bax was bursting with the enormity of it. They’d moved far enough away from the bedroom door that they were in no danger of being overheard, but he kept his voice down anyway. “Diplomatic immunity.”
It was a surprise that Finn absorbed in frowning silence. After a moment he asked, “What country?”
“Ukraine.”
“If he’s entitled to diplomatic immunity, then George screwed over a government agency or somebody connected with the government there on a pretty high level.” He’d already run the man’s face through his own internal database of bad actors, and drawn a blank. Which meant the guy was either new, or deep cover enough to have not shown up on his radar before now. If the latter was the case, then whoever had sent him was sufficiently concerned about the situation to be deploying the big guns. In other words, some foreign fat cat’s ass was in a sling. And that foreign fat cat had enough pull—or knew enough people with enough pull—to get his boy instantly released from police custody.
“Good thing you happened to see a man walk past her window.” Bax thrust his hands into his pants pockets, rattling the change there.
Happened to see nothing. Finn had been intently watching the aforementioned windows with binoculars from a vantage point on the roof of the building opposite, which was two stories lower than Riley’s apartment. He hadn’t been able to see a great deal, even with the curtains open and the lights on. But he had seen the shadowy figure of a man moving through her living room, and as a result had immediately hot-footed it over to her building and grabbed an elevator, meaning to go low-tech and listen at her door.
The moment he’d stepped out of the elevator, her scream had brought him running.
“Yeah,” Finn replied. “The receiver functional yet?”
While Finn had been up on the rooftop and then racing through apartment buildings, Bax had been on the phone to tech support trying to verify the status of the receiving unit.
“Nothing wrong with it,” Bax said. “Cynthia said it’s working fine.”
“Okay.” Finn wasn’t surprised that Bax knew the tech support person’s first name. Bax had that same geeky cyber-wonk persona that they did, as well as a lot of relationships with a lot of people he’d never actually met. Finn was equally not surprised to discover that there was nothing wrong with the receiver. It had been patently obvious from almost his first conversational exchange with Riley that she was hiding something. He wasn’t quite sure what it was, but one thing he was now sure of: she’d disabled her own and Jeffy-boy’s cell phones.
And she wasn’t talking about it.
“So what we’ve got here is a Ukrainian with diplomatic immunity who was trying to kill Mrs. Cowan.” Bax looked thoughtful while trying his hand at case analysis, which Finn had already discovered wasn’t his strong suit. “The question is, why? You think he was hoping to use her to send another message to George?”
“Don’t know,” Finn replied. He had no real quarrel with Bax, other than the fact that the powers-that-be had set him up to be his minder, but there was no need to go filling his head with too many possibilities. Finn wasn’t sure how much Bax was passing on to his superiors, but he was passing on something, and Finn wanted to remain in a position to control just what that something could be.
Knowledge is power. It was also leverage. At some point Finn meant to use it to trade for what he wanted, which was his life back. Permanently, this time.
“By the way, what happened to your coat?” Bax rattled the change in his pocket again. Finn narrowed his eyes a little. The sound was annoying, but right then that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it provided a distraction. He didn’t like being reminded of why he was missing his coat. That took him to the way Riley had looked when he’d heard her scream and taken off running and she’d come flying down the hall toward him.
Naked.
In those few seconds he’d registered everything there was to register about her body: full round breasts with strawberry nipples, firm but not too firm to bounce; slender waist curving out into unmistakably feminine hips; flat stomach; long, shapely legs. The small patch of hair between them that left no doubt that she was a natural redhead. The smooth sheen of her creamy skin.
He’d unwillingly discovered that her skin was as satiny soft as it looked—and a great many other things about her besides—the instant he’d grabbed her and whirled her around to put his back between her and the gun.
None of those impressions were anything he cared to remember, or be reminded of.
Bottom line? A beautiful woman was a dangerous distraction. A beautiful naked woman who might or might not know where to find what he was looking for? Suffice it to say, he wasn’t going there. Not with his mind, or anything else.
He was on board to do a job, and then get the hell out.
Finn shrugged. “She was cold.”
Thankfully, he was saved from any further explanation as, at that moment, the paramedics exited the bedroom.
“Could you close the door please?” Riley called after them. Her voice was still huskier than Finn was used to hearing it, and he wasn’t sure if it was from screaming or from something that had been done to her during the attack. He caught a glimpse of her, all curled up in the middle of her bed with the blanket he’d spread over her tucked closely around her, her hair vivid as a splash of scarlet paint amid a sea of white, as the trailing paramedic complied.
“What’s the damage?” Finn asked the paramedics when the door was closed and they started walking away from it. They paused, looking at him as he moved toward them. There was a moment there when he could tell they were debating about whether they should reveal any of her medical information to him, but his assumption of authority, bolstered no doubt by the shoulder holster and weapon that shouted law enforcement, carried the day.
“The main thing is, she’s got a concussion,” the lead paramedic said. “Apparently she took a hard blow to the back of the head: she’s got a bump the size of an egg. In addition, she has considerable bruising all over. She’ll be sore, but aside from the concussion there’s nothing of concern.”
“The concussion’s the cause of the dizziness?” Finn asked.
The paramedic nodded. “I’d keep her in bed tonight, keep her quiet tomorrow, and she should be fine. If, in the morning, she’s still getting dizzy when she stands up, or if any additional symptoms present themselves, you should take her in to see her doctor for a check-up. Or call 911.”
Finn didn’t reply. Stepping into the breach,
Bax said, “We’ll do that,” and then, as the paramedics left, followed them to the door. After closing it behind them, he turned to look at Finn, who hadn’t moved from his spot in the middle of the living room.
“What now?” Bax asked, rattling the coins in his pocket again. Finn’s lips tightened fractionally. Bax continued: “Do we stay with her? We have to, don’t we? If the guy who just tried to kill her is on the loose, we can’t just leave her here on her own.”
Asset recovery was another field that wasn’t exactly Bax’s strong suit. He had no real idea how to go about it. Which suited Finn just fine.
“We’re not babysitters,” he replied, and considered his options. As the attack on her had shown, Riley was a prime target for more interested parties than just himself and Bax. If she hadn’t been before, she certainly was now aware that she was on the radar of those who were seeking the missing money. If she had it, or knew where it was, she should absolutely be thinking about ways to protect herself and the funds. She would almost certainly notify her confederates, if she had any, of what had occurred. His presence, and Bax’s, in her immediate vicinity could only gum up the works. Nobody was going to come after her while they were with her—even if no one outside their own small group knew his true identity, the presence of two supposed FBI agents was a considerable deterrent to the kind of attack that was meant to extract intelligence from a target—and, more important, Riley herself couldn’t make any moves while they were with her.
Therefore, they were going to go. And stay out of sight. And keep watch.
He said as much to Bax.
Bax said unhappily, “But the perp might—”
He never finished.
The bedroom door opened. They both looked around in surprise to find Riley walking through it. She was fully dressed in a black T-shirt with a pair of white jeans and—surprise, because he’d pegged her as a high-heels-on-every-occasion kind of woman—flat sandals. Her hair, which had puffed out in a cloud of vivid waves around her face as it had dried, had been tamed again and was twisted into a loose updo that made her look younger and more vulnerable than Finn would have liked. She had one hand curled around the handle of her small silver suitcase, which she was pulling along behind her. His coat was folded over her arm.
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