by Joanne Rock
God knows, he would not risk his glamour queen by moving another inch. Lexi in danger made this worse than the worst moment he’d ever had on the job. For her, he’d have to bide his time. Wait until his eyes adjusted and he could see what the hell he was doing.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Josh raised his arms, gun still in his hand.
“Throw down your weapons where I can see them.”
Josh traced the voice to the far corner of the room as he tossed aside his gun. Squinting into the shadows, he spied the outline of a man in a light-colored suit and a woman huddled behind him.
Anton snorted. “No offense, Winger, but I’m going to have to check to make sure you’re not packing a few more pistols.”
The teenager Josh had seen in the parlor materialized at his side. The boy found Josh’s knife and another gun, the only weapons Josh had carried.
Except, of course, for his fists. And frankly, Josh had never relied fully upon any other weapon. He could take Anton and whatever teenage army was hiding in the dark cellar, if only he could get Lexi safely out of here.
“You know me.” Josh stalled while he started making mental note of his surroundings—wine racks, casks, barrels. Yet on the other side of the cellar, he could discern the outline of rolling racks and fabric bolts, the same tools of a designer’s trade that Amanda Matthews kept at the loft.
“You took care of blasting one of my traitorous lieutenants this summer, remember? I figured you were probably still on my case when I saw you talking to Lexi last night at the Dance for Children.”
The woman sobbing next to Anton cried louder, drawing Josh’s attention back to the two figures at the back of the room. Now that Josh’s eyes had fully adjusted to the lack of light, he studied the bent figure carefully, scared that Lexi had somehow injured herself in her struggle with the elder Bertrand.
Only the sobbing woman wasn’t Lexi.
“Where the hell is she?” Panic and fury rose up in equal parts. He started forward, fully prepared to strangle the rich-boy scumbag if Lexi was already—“If you hurt her—”
No threat sounded dire enough for what Josh would do to the man if he’d harmed Lex.
Before Josh could tear apart the Ivy League criminal along with his three-piece suit, Anton curled an arm around his sister’s head and buried the barrel in Simone’s tangled blond hair.
At the same time, the soft click of a safety going off registered in his consciousness from somewhere behind him. No doubt the teenager had a gun pointed at Josh’s back.
“Not a chance in hell you’ll shoot your own sister.” Nevertheless, Josh halted his forward momentum. Simone’s face had gone as white as her platinum curls.
“I spent all night celebrating my latest importing mission with a variety of designer drugs and some of the wine cellar’s finest offerings. Now I’m hungover, slightly high and desperate. Do you really think I care who I kill today?”
The guy had all but admitted to his crimes, and Josh didn’t feel the slightest bit of triumph. Only one concern resounded in his mind.
Josh raised his hands a little higher, needing to make sure this situation didn’t get out of control. “I’m cool. I just want to know where Lexi is.”
He reminded himself to breathe, to think. In over a decade of being a cop, Josh had never sweated out a moment like this. But then, nothing had ever threatened a woman he loved.
A hell of a time to realize he loved her, damn it, but maybe he had needed the knockout punch to help him figure it out.
“She got away,” Anton admitted, absently stroking his sister’s cheek with one hand while he held the gun to her head with another. “For all I know, she’s hiding in the wine racks. Brad, I’ll cover the cop. You find the girl.”
Anton hadn’t hurt her.
Relief, hope washed through him.
In the background, he heard Duke pounding on the door to the wine cellar. And somewhere in his mind, he recognized the fact that Anton was getting scared, maybe even stupid.
But Josh’s first order of business was scanning the cool, dry cellar for any sign of Lexi. If he was going to ensure her safety, he needed to know if she was down here.
He’d done a lousy job of protecting her up until now, but starting today, that was all going to change.
“Just a minute, pig!” Anton shouted toward the door, toward Duke on the other side of it. “I’ve got a cop at gunpoint in here, I don’t think you want to piss me off.”
Josh shook his head. Bad move, Anton. He was about to warn the strung-out smuggler against bluffing the NYPD, when he saw her.
Lexi.
His eyes rested on an industrial-size bolt of orange silky fabric lying on its side in a pile with several other bolts. Only this bolt had one lone black curl springing through one end of the roll to trail down the yards of bright silk.
Smart woman.
It was all Josh could do not to smile, he was so relieved. He just hoped she knew enough to stay put and remain hidden.
Because now that he knew where Lexi hid, he could go about saving her.
And after all she’d done for him, by God, he owed her that much.
SAVE ME.
Lexi chanted the words in her head as Brad moved closer to her hiding spot, not caring if that made her the world’s most desperate, needy woman. In fact, she felt pretty damn desperate and needy as she listened to her longtime friend saying he didn’t care if he killed his own sister.
If Anton would shoot Simone, he surely wouldn’t wince at killing Josh. The thought paralyzed her.
She’d escaped from Anton with a quick chop to the family jewels, a move she’d perfected on the dummy in self-defense class. Of course, she could also run like hell, and that had helped her lose Anton in the cellar.
But now, all she could do was hide, unless Josh could somehow save her. If Anton found her, he was going to be more than a little upset with her.
Panic twisted her insides now, but despite the icy claw of fear around her throat, she heard Josh’s words filter through her cardboard cocoon.
“…forget looking for Lexi, Bertrand. She’s probably halfway back to Manhattan by now.”
The rifling around in the wine cellar seemed to stop.
“The door locks automatically when it’s shut,” Anton argued. “She couldn’t have gotten out of here.”
“She’s probably smarter than ten of you put together, bud. I wouldn’t count on it.”
Lexi surprised herself by choosing that moment to smile. She was still scared, but Josh’s words soothed her just a little.
Anton snorted. “Don’t tell me you’re a sap for the ice princess, too. You and James can sing her praises all you want. She’ll always be a Jersey girl trying to pass herself off as a Manhattan socialite.”
The two-faced traitor. Bad enough he was terrorizing her with a gun. Now he was going to trash her Jersey roots? Anger replaced a little more of her fear.
“Lexi’s no ice princess. Maybe she just hides—” Josh paused a split second “—her feelings. She has good sense keeping her emotions out of sight in her line of work.”
Out of sight.
Josh was sending her a message. Telling her to keep hidden. She could feel it in the tension of his words, the off-kilter syntax of his speech.
“Besides, Lexi’s the toast of the town and she’s going to single-handedly raise enough money to cure cancer. Why the hell would she need a place in the social register?”
Her heart did a back flip. Josh had spoken the words for her. To her. Because he knew she was listening.
“Now, why don’t you let Simone go and hand over the guns. There are probably a truckload of cops on your lawn by now, and the media, too.”
Anton laughed. “Lucky for me, the wine cellar has an exit in the rocks over the North Shore. I’ll wave to your cop friends from my boat as Simone and I speed out of Long Island Sound.”
There was a scuffle in the wine cellar. A scrape of shoes on concrete, the sound of people mo
ving around.
Lexi edged herself upward in her cardboard tunnel, needing to look out at what was going on. No matter what Josh had said about staying hidden, she wasn’t about to let him get hurt.
Peering over the edge of her hiding place, Lexi could see Anton pushing Simone across the room, his gun tucked under her jaw. Brad kept his gun on Josh, but he, too, shifted positions to stand near a door in the floor Lexi guessed must lead to the beach and the escape boat.
What if they shot Josh in order to get away?
She had no choice but to ignore Josh’s warning. Scooting to the end of the bolt, Lexi pushed herself out into the cellar again, careful to remain in the shadows of rolling racks and piles of fabric.
Tension gripped her as she kept her eyes trained on the sleek metal of the guns. She needed to be ready in case—
Josh made his move just as Anton released Simone to pry open the door in the cellar floor.
He dove for Anton’s weapon, heedless of the armed and nervous teen behind him.
Brad lunged for Josh, jumping on his back like a monkey before he cracked Josh in the head with his gun.
Simone shrieked in time with Lexi’s squeal. As Josh fell sideways with the kid still on top of him, Lexi ran to the wine rack and yanked a bottle from its cradle.
Without any real plan in mind other than to distract the bad guys, Lexi smashed the bottle against the rack, shattering the glass and sending a shower of shards and merlot around the room.
“What the—?” Anton’s head swiveled toward her like a compass to due north.
In fact, for that split second, all eyes were on her in the center of the wine cellar. But for the first time, Lexi had no clue what to do, now that she had the limelight. She stood there with a broken half of a glass bottle, wine dripping down her arm and cuts on her fingers, waiting for guns to start firing.
They didn’t.
Josh rose from the floor like Lazarus from the dead, a welt the size of Texas on his eye and a glower on his face unlike any she’d ever seen before.
In the space of two seconds, he raised both his arms and clotheslined the two gun-wielding smugglers, falling on top of them like an avalanche.
Two guns went flying in separate directions on the floor.
Out of Lexi’s peripheral vision, she noticed Simone scurry to pick them up. But Lexi couldn’t seem to take her main focus off Josh the Avenger wreaking havoc with the men who had scared the hell out of her.
Why did the man carry a gun if he had fists that fast? Right hook and down went Anton. Left hook and down went Brad.
Ding, ding, ding. End of round two.
The crooks were clearly down for the count, and Josh was the undisputed champ.
“Are you okay?” He turned to her, her warrior hero with the swollen eye, his glower fading into something that definitely resembled concern. Worry. Fear.
God, maybe even something more.
Before Lexi could pinpoint the look that made her heart palpitate, the entrance behind them filled with cops. Simone held the arched wooden door for the flood of men in blue led by Duke and Otis.
Lexi might have smiled at the tender way Otis lifted the guns out of Simone’s hands, or the way the rookie cop scrounged a blanket to wrap around her shoulders. But she was too busy trying to figure out if she’d really seen something soft and warm in Josh’s gray eyes a moment ago.
She squinted through the suddenly crowded room for a glimpse of Josh, but he was encircled by a wall of blue. His cop friends hauled Anton and Brad out of the cellar in handcuffs, making Lexi very grateful for those clever metal rings for the second time in her life.
Detectives were already searching the wine racks and exploring the casks and barrels for goods Anton might have smuggled.
She needed to see Josh. Wanted to touch him, make sure he was okay. But she’d lost her shoes somewhere along the way and shattered glass still covered the floor. She also felt lost, alone and utterly ignored, until a big shadow fell over her.
“Jesus, woman, are you okay?” Josh put his hands on her shoulders, then tipped her chin up to look at him.
“I’m fine.” Relief, warmth flowed through her.
Gently, he lifted her wrist and extracted the broken wine bottle from her hand. She’d forgotten she was even holding it.
“I was never so scared as when I saw you running around here when those guys were all over me. Didn’t you understand I needed you to stay hidden?” He set the remains of the bottle in an empty wine cradle behind her.
“How could I, when you were in trouble?” His swollen eye reminded her how close he’d come to really getting hurt. Badly. Permanently.
“How could you not, Lex? You might know everything there is to know about fashion, but you don’t know the first thing about fending off lethal criminals.”
Incensed, she sent him a look that had made lesser men run for cover. “I know enough to flip you butt-backward over my shoulder, don’t forget.”
He swiped a hand over his jaw, maybe in a fit of impatience, maybe to hide a smile. She couldn’t be quite sure.
He shook his head. “You caught me off guard.”
“I caught them pretty off guard today, too.”
“I’ll say. You scared the hell out of me, too, when you blasted that bottle into five million pieces.” His hands settled back on her arms, sliding up and down the sleeves of her jacket as if he were assuring himself she was really in one piece.
“I can cause quite a distraction when I want to.”
“Lady, you distract me all the time.” He cupped her chin in one hand, oblivious to the busy swarm of cop activity around them. “I probably don’t want to know, but what did you think you were going to do with that broken bottle?”
She traced one finger along the scar on Josh’s cheek, just below his black eye, trying really, really hard not to throw herself in his arms. “You might be able to fend off broken glass, but a lot of people wouldn’t be able to.”
He halted her tentative touch with the vise of his hand. “We need to talk, Lex. But not here. Not now.” He scooped her off her feet and into his arms, carrying her over the shattered remains of the bottle through the cellar. “I need to find enough evidence to lock up Bertrand for a lifetime, and I can’t do it with you standing there, making me want to think other things.”
“Wait, Josh.” She didn’t need to be hauled around like a sack of potatoes, but then again, she rather liked the sensation of being tucked up against his chest.
Too bad he dumped her off with James, as her old teacher and friend was coming down to the cellar. “James will find you a cup of coffee until I finish up down here. You’ll be more comfortable upstairs where you can’t step on any broken glass.”
With that, he pivoted and rejoined the fracas of swarming New York police detectives at the crime scene.
Lexi’s eyes burned. He was worried about broken glass? The oaf obviously had no clue he’d just delivered a more painful blow than anything she’d experienced in the cellar with Anton.
He’d dismissed her from his world.
Again.
Her time as Sherlock Holmes had clearly come to an end, and Josh had little use for a limelight-seeking fashion critic. But no matter how many times she repeated “his loss” to herself, she couldn’t help but think she’d been the one to lose something irreplaceable today.
16
JOSH HAD NEVER taken less pleasure from tying up a case.
The process of gathering evidence seemed interminable, but finally they’d secured a red cashmere sweater from Anton’s closet that looked like it would match the fibers Lexi’s dog had found at the arson scene. It was a man’s sweater, not a woman’s. But sure enough, the label read Valentino, just as Lexi had predicted, and there was a tear along the hem.
Smart woman.
Josh jogged up the stairs and through the Bertrand mansion, eager to find her, eager to beg her to be his.
He found the butler in the kitchen, picking up teacups and
piling them in the sink.
Josh slowed his pace. “Where’s Lexi?”
“Her cab just arrived. She’s headed back to Manhattan.” James’s stern look communicated to Josh how badly he’d screwed up by depositing her in the kitchen for the past hour and a half.
Shit.
Josh ran to catch her, stealing a glimpse of the bright yellow car out the window before he sprinted through the front door.
He shouted and waved, attracting Lexi’s attention, along with that of a bevy of reporters milling around the lawn.
The media thronged him, quickly cueing in to the presence of the lead detective on a late-breaking case. They stuffed microphones in his face, flashed camera bulbs in his eyes and shouted one question on top of another.
Welcome to the circus.
His first instinct was to plow through the press ranks and make a last-ditch effort with Lexi before she cruised out of his life forever. Talking to the media had never been his forte.
Then again, he’d never really given it a shot.
A camera bulb flashed in his face, in time with the lightbulb slowing going off in his head. A plan came to him with startling clarity—a way to show Lexi he was ready for a life with her.
Public or private.
LEXI PAUSED, waiting for Josh to snarl at the crowds, disperse them with one heartfelt glower from his bruised face.
Maybe in some recess of her mind she thought it would be easier to leave if she saw him send cameras flying and reporters scurrying. She told herself that once she had that proof that they could never mesh their worlds, she’d be able to slide inside the cab.
Oddly, there didn’t seem to be a stampede. In fact, the reporters now moved out in a more organized circle, giving the man in their midst a little more space.
Curious, Lexi asked the cabdriver to wait, then slammed the door shut behind her. If anyone else were in the center of that ring of news journalists, Lexi would assume the person was getting ready to give a press conference.
But this was Josh Winger, undercover man. No way would he be—
“I’d like to make a statement, if I may.” Josh’s voice boomed over the lawn, broadcast via someone’s microphone and a makeshift sound system the press had organized collectively.