“Yes, I am.”
She turned to look at him over her shoulder as she continued walking. “I’m not cattle that you have to herd.”
“Never said you were.” He pointed toward the door that was still standing ajar. “Now, just go.” It was an order.
She didn’t care for his tone. Still looking over her shoulder, she was about to tell him just that when she tripped over the briefcase he’d dropped. Thrown off balance, Ramona stumbled and pitched forward. Not wanting to smash her head against the concrete floor, Ramona grabbed the first thing she could to steady herself. The last thing in the world she wanted was to fall flat on her face in front of him.
Unfortunately, the first thing she managed to grab was the steel handle on the vault door. She yanked it toward her. The next moment, she heard an awful clicking sound. Her stomach seized up as she realized what she’d done. Praying she was wrong, she tried the door. And paled when she found it wouldn’t budge.
“What are you waiting for? Go ahead,” Paul ordered. He’d almost grabbed her himself when she was falling and was glad he was spared. He was fairly certain that it would have been the beginning of a huge mistake.
“I can’t,” she told him through gritted teeth.
He was in no mood for games. She was looking particularly gorgeous tonight, but she was becoming damn irritating. “Listen—”
“You said that when the building was constructed, this vault was left intact. Did anyone consider using it for a panic room?”
What an odd question. And one that could be asked far better outside this enclosed area than in. “Not that I know of, why?”
She sucked in air before answering. Was it her imagination, or was she choking? There was distress in her eyes as she turned around to look at him. “The door’s locked.”
His eyes narrowed. She had to be pulling his leg. He hadn’t thought that her sense of humor would be on this low a level. “What do you mean ‘locked’?”
“As in ‘won’t open.’ As in ‘trapped.’” Did he really need any more synonyms? “I—accidentally pulled it shut when I tripped.”
She was putting him on to see his reaction, Paul thought. “No, you didn’t.”
“Fine.” She stepped to the side and gestured toward the steel door. “Have it your way. You open it. I really hope you can,” she added.
But he couldn’t.
Chapter Eleven
Paul had hoped against hope that Ramona was mistaken—that she hadn’t pulled the door shut all the way when she’d grabbed it. But one fruitless tug told him she had.
He turned away from the immobile steel and looked at her. “It’s locked.”
“That’s what I said,” Ramona retorted, her voice quavering. With effort she desperately tried to keep her voice from cracking. Panic was waiting just beyond the perimeter to grip her in its bony fingers.
Damn it, he’d been meaning to put in safeguards against this very thing happening, but it was one of those nonpressing things he felt comfortable about putting off. He was far from comfortable now.
Searching for a way out, he found none. “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” he told Ramona.
“It’s locked. I got it,” she said sharply. “I told you.”
Ramona took in a shaky breath. She needed to calm down. But confined places made her think of graves. It was only because she was so desperate to get the information she needed for her mother—and to secure the information that would give credence to the rumors that her editor had her investigating—that she’d even stepped into the tomblike room.
She looked at Paul hopefully. “But you can override it, right?”
“Override it?” Paul repeated. What did she think he was, a magician?
“Yes, as in making it open up again. You know, with a code or a master card or something like that.” She was beginning to sound like a babbling loon, she chided. With effort, she got hold of herself. “You’re the chief of staff,” she argued when he continued looking at her as if he was still waiting for her to make sense. “You’re supposed to have some kind of extra power over the rest of us.”
“I must have missed that in the manual,” he quipped. “No ‘extra powers’ to speak of.”
Oh, please let him be kidding. “Then you can’t open it?”
“It’s a converted bank vault,” he needlessly pointed out.
“I know what it is.” She banked down the hysteria that was beginning to enter her voice. “But I still thought—”
“That means,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken, “it’s on a timer.”
A timer. A timer meant that it was set to a specific hour. Like every hour on the hour or something like that. She could handle an hour. Maybe. “So when does it open again?”
He glanced at his watch. There were times when he forgot not only the time, but the day. His watch had both. “It’s Friday.”
“Yes. So?” she prodded, waiting for him to tell her something she could cling to.
Paul realized that he was going to be stuck with this woman for an entire two days and three nights. He met the prospect with conflicted feelings. Some he understood and others he didn’t want to understand. They were far too personal, far too stirring. They had no place here.
“The vault opens again at 8:00 a.m. on Monday morning.”
“Monday morning?” It was all Ramona could do to keep from screaming out the words. “You’re kidding, right?”
“Unless someone comes and overrides the timer from the outside, no, I’m not kidding,” Paul told her. “The door won’t open until Monday.”
“But we can’t stay here that long.”
Although he liked the idea of being alone with this woman, having her trapped in order to do it was definitely not what he would have had in mind. “I don’t think there’s much choice.”
For a moment, desperation reduced her thought process to nothing, freezing it in place as panic encroached upon her. Focusing every fiber within her, she willed herself to calm down. Once she did, she remembered. She had her cell phone with her.
“There’s always a choice, Doctor,” she retorted happily. Flipping her phone open, she tapped out 911, only to get nothing. She tried again before she looked at the tiny illuminated screen. “There’re no signal bars,” she noted numbly. “There’re always supposed to be bars.” She looked up from her phone to Armstrong’s face. “They promised bars,” she lamented, referring to the commercials about her service provider. “Why aren’t there bars?”
“That’s probably because they never tried to use their phones in an underground vault.”
She wasn’t going to accept defeat. She couldn’t. “Do you have your cell phone on you?”
He always kept it in his pocket. “Yes, but the result will be the same,” he warned her.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there was something wrong with her phone. She didn’t care what the reason was, she just wanted a signal.
“Try it,” she ordered. She was no longer an employee trying to curry his favor—she was just a woman on the verge of a breakdown for a completely embarrassing reason and she knew it—which made it all the worse to bear.
Rather than argue, Paul took out his phone and tapped out the three numbers. “Nothing,” he declared in response to the quizzical look in her eyes.
She could feel the panic in her chest. “You seem awfully calm for someone locked in a vault until Monday morning,” she accused.
Maybe he was doing this to teach her a lesson for snooping where he didn’t want her to, she thought. Ramona grasped on to the slim sliver of hope, praying she was right.
“Panicking isn’t going to help us any,” he pointed out.
She still didn’t want to give up. “Isn’t there some way to signal someone?” she wanted to know. “What about the security guards?”
Paul reviewed the men’s responsibilities in his mind. “There’re video cameras throughout the building. They monitor them in the security room.” The room was off
to the side of the building.
Oh, thank God. “Well, there you go,” Ramona said, relief coating every syllable. “They’ll come down when they see us.”
“If they see us,” Paul corrected. “There’s no camera in here. Hardly anyone ever comes down to look through the archives,” he pointed out.
Ramona could almost feel her heart sinking in her chest. She looked around the room as if the walls literally were starting to close in on her. Thoughts of suffocation began to crowd her head. “How much air do we have?”
“That’s no problem,” Paul was quick to assure her. “The original designer made sure there’d be plenty of air circulating through here so that whatever people had in their safe-deposit boxes wouldn’t eventually dry out. My father maintained the system for the files he had stored here.”
For a second, she closed her eyes and murmured, “Thank God.” And then her eyes flew open as other, possibly insurmountable problems occurred to her. “What about other things?”
“Other things?” he repeated, not following her line of thinking.
“Food, water…” She didn’t feel like getting personal right now, but there was no way around it. “Bathroom facilities,” she concluded uncomfortably.
“There’s a watercooler behind the last cabinet.” He pointed to the right. “And for reasons I never understood, there’s also a powder room located on the far side.” He indicated the opposite wall. “As for food—” Well, there they struck out. “Nobody was ever supposed to be down here long enough to get hungry.”
Two whole days without food. People didn’t starve after two days, right? She tried to make the best of the situation. “Oh well, I’ve been meaning to go on a diet,” she murmured. Her biggest problem wasn’t food, it was keeping her thoughts under control and not panicking.
Paul’s eyebrows drew together as he looked at her. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because I’m overweight.” According to her scale, she was three pounds over her ideal weight. She’d been meaning to cut back a little. She just hadn’t thought about doing it while locked in a safe.
When she looked at Armstrong, he made no secret of the fact that he was still scrutinizing her. “No, you’re not.”
In the midst of her mounting panic, Ramona paused to look at the chief of staff in surprise. She wouldn’t have thought that he’d even notice something like that. She realized that in his own unassuming way, he’d just given her a compliment—while sealed inside a vault.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
There was air, there was air—he’d told her so and he wasn’t the kind of man to lie, she tried to console herself. So why did she feel as if she was suffocating? Was it just her mind playing tricks on her?
“Won’t someone wonder where you are?” she asked hopefully.
It was Friday evening. Everyone he knew had plans. Plans that didn’t include him. His time was usually spent working or making plans for the coming week’s work. This weekend, like most, he was going to spend by himself.
“No,” he told her quietly. And then he looked at her as the same thought occurred to him. Just because he wasn’t panicking didn’t mean he wanted to be here until Monday morning. “How about you? Someone’s going to miss you if you don’t show up tonight or tomorrow morning, am I correct?”
Since she had such a sporadic work schedule, she knew her mother would just assume she was working. Katherine Tate wouldn’t dream of interrupting her when she was working, so there wouldn’t even be an attempt to call her.
Not that that would lead to anything anyway, she thought, looking at the nonreceptive cell phone in her hand.
She shoved the phone angrily into her pocket. “No,” she answered, “I don’t.”
“I find that impossible to believe.”
Ramona looked at him. Armstrong wasn’t being sarcastic, he was serious. She repressed her fraying temper.
“You have no idea how much I wish you were right. But you’re not.” Her voice sounded ragged to her own ears as she asked him, “What are we going to do?”
Paul studied her for a moment. It wasn’t his imagination. There were now beads of perspiration forming along her hairline. It still wasn’t hot enough in here for that sort of reaction.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “You look a little—” Paul searched for the right word. “Spooked,” he finally said. “Definitely agitated.”
“I’m fine,” she retorted. This was not the time to reveal a weakness. She didn’t want to have the fact that she had claustrophobia getting around.
But it seemed to be too late. “No, you’re not,” he countered. And then he realized what he was seeing. “You’re claustrophobic, aren’t you?”
“No,” she snapped. And then she drew in a lungful of air. What was the point of denying it? He was going to find out soon anyway. She didn’t know how much longer she could maintain this facade. “Yes. Yes, I’m claustrophobic,” she retorted.
It didn’t make sense. “But I’ve seen you in elevators.”
Yoga and a few other crutches had taught her how to cope within a situation for a limited amount of time. “I can usually keep it under wraps as long as the confinement is for a short period of time.” She glanced around the room again like a caged animal. “Not eternity.”
“Unless you’re a fruit fly, Monday morning is hardly an eternity away,” he told her, hoping that putting things into perspective would help her cope.
Ramona made no answer. Instead, she looked down at her palms, which were growing progressively sweatier. She rubbed one hand against the other in an attempt to dry them off. The sweatiness continued.
He was a doctor, Paul reminded himself. His first obligation was to his patient and while Ramona was not his patient, in the typical sense of the word, it took no stretch of the imagination to see that Ramona Tate was sorely in need of a physician to help her cope with the predicament they found themselves in.
“The first thing we need to do,” he told her, taking her hand and leading her away from the steel door, “is get your mind off the situation.”
Was he delusional? “We’re in the situation,” she reminded him sharply. “In a small, steel-walled, ‘situation’ that could at any minute suffocate us. Snuff us out just like that.”
“Not unless the air stops being pumped in,” he pointed out.
She looked up to the air vents. “There’s a thought.” Her throat tightened in fear.
“There’s a backup generator in case this one fails,” he told her.
She searched his face. His eyes were kind. She shook her head. “You’re just saying that to make me feel better.”
“Yes,” Paul admitted. “I would. But luckily, I don’t have to. My father left nothing to chance,” he assured her. “The basement is hooked up to the system that runs through the rest of the institute. There are backup generators in case of a major power failure. Don’t forget, we have donor eggs and sperm stored here. We can’t afford to have the refrigeration system break down, even for a small amount of time. If we actually lost power, any stored embryos we have would be destroyed in a matter of hours. Even a short amount of time would likely have an adverse effect.”
All right, so there was air. That still didn’t keep the walls from feeling as if they were closing in on her, but at least she’d die breathing.
She slowly took in a breath and then released it just as slowly in an attempt to calm her erratic pulse.
“Better?” Paul asked her gently. He was still holding her hand.
He was trying to be nice, she thought, feeling somewhat guilty for what she’d been up to. She knew she couldn’t blame him for this situation since it was really her fault they were locked in. The fact that he wasn’t blaming her said a great deal about his character. Paul Armstrong was a really decent man, she decided.
“Better,” she acknowledged in a quiet voice.
She was lying, Paul judged. The beads of sweat were still there, dampening her bangs. But at le
ast she wasn’t breaking down yet. Maybe he could still divert her attention, get her mind on something else.
There was an old sofa, a castoff from one of the consultation rooms, pushed up against one of the walls. It had been placed here rather than thrown out so that when someone did come down to the archives, they could go through the files and read whatever they needed in comfort. He led her over to it now.
“Why don’t you sit down here and talk to me,” he encouraged.
She stared at him blankly. Was he going to interrogate her? Did he suspect what she was actually doing down here? “About?”
As he sat down, he lightly tugged on her hand, silently urging her to take a seat, as well. “Anything you want.”
Ramona sat down. She licked her lips, thinking about the fact that she’d skipped lunch today and her stomach was reminding her that it felt damn empty.
“How do we get out of here?”
“Monday morning, the time lock will be released,” he told her patiently. She looked away. He saw the building panic in her face. “Look at me, Ramona. Look at me,” he repeated more firmly but still kind. When she did, he continued, his voice reassuring, patient. “It’s going to be all right. Fear is just a trick our minds play on us. This is a big room, just a big room, nothing more. Not a tomb,” he said, looking into her eyes. “A room.”
“Are you sure there’s no way to get someone down here?”
“I’m sure. Everyone but the security guards is gone. We had an emergency earlier, but we managed to stabilize the woman enough to transport her and her husband to the hospital. She’s resting comfortably now and, more important to her, she’s still pregnant,” he added.
He had a nice smile, she thought. Why hadn’t she noticed that before? “You really are into this, aren’t you?”
She had a way of hopping around from topic to topic. He wasn’t sure what she was referring to. “Into what?”
“Making couples into parents.”
“Yes.”
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