by Fiona Brand
* * *
Contents:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
Epilogue
* * *
* * *
Chapter 1
^ »
The shot snapped through the humid Sydney night air, slicing through the cheerful hum of conversation as a steady stream of people exited the cinema complex. The flat one-two echo syncopated with the flash and burn of neon, a sharp counterpoint to the gentle nostalgia of rhythm and blues, the rich scent of coffee, the cloying vanilla of doughnuts and the edgier undernote of car exhaust and city grime.
Roma Lombard was jerked backward. The movement was violently at odds with the instant freeze-frame of humanity as the crowd, high on the latest romantic comedy, became eerily still, reacting as one creature with instincts that were ancient—primitive—at odds with the sleek, sophisticated cars lining the street, the expensive glitter of shop windows.
Her arms flailed as she fought to regain her balance. Her elbow glanced off the warm solidity of muscle; then a heavy shove sent her backward in an awkward sprawl, loose hair flinging in a dark veil across her face. The back of her head connected with concrete, detonating a burst of hot light behind her eyes.
For a dazed moment she lay stunned, held in thrall by the dazzling shift of colour, the shock of the fall; then something heavy slammed into her chest, punching all the breath from her lungs.
For long seconds she couldn't breathe, couldn't see, couldn't feel beyond the pain spiking her head, the stifling panic of being blinded by her own hair and the heavy weight pinning her—Lewis's weight, she realised.
He moaned. The sound was oddly soft, distressing, sending fear and adrenaline kicking through her veins. The sharp crack had been a rifle shot, and Lewis wasn't moving. Roma knew she hadn't been hit. Confusion and bruises aside, she'd simply been knocked off balance, but Lewis … Lewis was hurt.
A fierce sense of disbelief gripped her as she dragged her hair from her face, her mouth, logged the sting of grazes on her elbows, the blur of movement as the street cleared, followed by a spreading silence, as if the whole city was holding its breath.
Her isolation registered, and all the small hairs at her nape lifted on a cold ripple of awareness as she struggled to push against Lewis's weight. She didn't know how badly he was hurt, but suddenly even that consideration was secondary. They were stranded on the empty sidewalk, spot-lighted by the glare of cinema lights, an easy bull's-eye for even an amateur gunman. She had to get them both off the street.
She shoved at Lewis. The throb in her head kicked savagely, and she broke out in a clammy sweat. The heat she'd loved just seconds ago now closed around her like a vice. Time crawled—oddly suspended—she could feel the weight of every second as if it were her last, hammering in time with the thud of her heart, equated each beat with another shot from the rifle.
She wrenched upward, stomach muscles straining as she braced herself for more leverage, thankful her arms and shoulders were strong, her body tight and toned from regular exercise and the occasional workout with weights. Lewis wasn't a heavy man, but he was tall—a gangly computer nerd rather than a muscled athlete. It didn't matter; Roma wasn't much over five foot five, so shifting him was like pushing against a mountain.
Gritting her teeth, she shoved again, twisting as she did so. Fear gave her the extra strength she needed to move Lewis's bulk enough that she could shimmy free and roll him onto his back.
He moaned again and stirred. His eyes flickered, half opened. "Roma?"
His voice was croaky, a thread of his normal light baritone. His eyes were unfocused, his breathing fast, face pale and shiny with sweat as he clutched at his shoulder and winced. Blood leaked from between his fingers, the spreading patch dark against his ridiculously cheerful Hawaiian shirt.
"Don't move." Roma wrenched Lewis's hand away and forgot about diving for cover, forgot there was a gunman. Her mind spun into overdrive as she shoved the heel of her palm against his shoulder, planted her other hand on top of the first, and leaned into the wound, using her weight to apply pressure. She'd done first aid courses—she knew the theory—but she'd never seen a gunshot wound before, and the violent reality of it was paralysing. She had to force her sluggish brain to think past the frightening blankness, to remember.
She began talking, her voice hollow, jerky, rising over Lewis's high-pitched moan as he tried to curl into a foetal ball, almost dislodging her hold as she explained what she was doing, that he had to be still, that she would get help.
Help.
Her head jerked up, gaze swinging wildly as she searched for assistance. She saw with a renewed sense of shock that she and Lewis were alone except for a couple crouched behind a nearby car. There were people huddled in the cinema complex; she could see faces peering out from behind movie posters. A man made eye contact with her and pointed at his cell phone as he talked rapidly into it.
Roma felt like closing her eyes against a raw punch of disbelief. She was shaking with reaction and the aftershock of adrenaline, her arms and shoulders aching from the strain of her position, yet just minutes ago she'd been relaxed and happy, enjoying the upbeat atmosphere of the movie crowd, the balmy evening and Lewis's terrible jokes. She could still hear music, smell coffee and doughnuts. The city, the street, the night, were the same, yet in a split second everything else had changed. The protection of the crowd had melted away, leaving her kneeling, solitary and exposed, over Lewis.
Blood continued to well. In desperation, Roma wrenched off her shirt—not caring that she had only a bra on underneath—wadded the soft, white cotton into a pressure pad and jammed it over the wound, fisting it down tight.
The ambient air temperature was warm, she should have been fanning herself against the heat, but she didn't feel warm now. A slight breeze flipped hair across her face, slid over her almost-naked back, roughening her damp skin with the chill of invisible fingers. She noted that Lewis was no longer conscious, and fear formed an icy knot inside her.
Roma knew guns, knew how to handle them, break them down, clean and reassemble them. She knew how it felt to fire a gun, to ache in her arms and shoulders and wrists from spending long hours at shooting ranges. She knew more about guns than she had ever wanted to know, but she'd shied away from learning anything more than she had to about the damage they could do. The wound in Lewis's shoulder didn't look big, but that was no cause for celebration. Small-calibre rounds didn't make huge entry wounds, but they had a tendency to travel in the body, ricocheting off bone and causing immense soft tissue damage.
Her heart squeezed tight in her chest as she crouched over Lewis with all the fierceness of a lioness protecting her only cub. "Don't die," she commanded, her voice still husky, hollow.
His eyelids flickered, and she decided he'd heard her. He wouldn't die. She wouldn't allow it.
Lewis was her friend.
She could count the friends she had on one hand, and she cherished each and every one of them; they were as precious as family to her. She wasn't going to lose Lewis.
Briefly she closed her eyes against the hot sting of tears and sent up a prayer. He needed an ambulance—fast.
The distant wail of a siren jerked her head up. She craned around, dark gaze homing in on the direction of the siren, as if she could make help come faster with the sheer force of her will.
The street was completely empty of movement now, and unnaturally hushed. Traffic must have been cordoned off. Across the road, darkened apartments loomed over the bright facade of shop-fronts. Roma had barely, if ever, noticed those apartments, but in the aftermath of the shooting, they took on a faceless, menacing aspect. She'd consciously blocked the thought that the shot could have originated from any one of those blank windows.
She'd been running on adrenaline, reacting rather than thinking, but now cold logic and a growing awareness of being watched, began to register.
She froze, head still craned at a painful angle, gaze still fixed in the direction of the siren. She'd felt that same creeping sensation before, the tension in the pit of her stomach, the abrupt sharpening of her senses, but she'd always dismissed it as paranoia.
The warm breeze swirled, turned chill against the taut curve of her throat, the naked arch of her back, so that she tensed against the convulsive need to shiver. The skin along her spine tightened with an almost painful sensitivity, twitched, as if a gun was now trained on the centre of her back, the gunman's finger stroking the trigger.
In that moment she felt her semi-nakedness, the sheer vulnerability of pale, exposed skin, the softness and fragility of flesh and bone.
A shudder rocked her and she had to fight the wild urge to fling herself flat on the pavement, belly-crawl behind a car and hide.
She hated the shattering sense of vulnerability, the cowardly impulse to save herself and leave Lewis bleeding on the sidewalk. She was a Lombard—for her, the threat of violence was no novelty—but she had never before felt directly threatened, never before felt so utterly powerless.
Images and impressions tumbled through her mind as the nightmare visions of a past that had haunted her since she was fifteen flooded back, swamping her.
Nine years ago Roma's eldest brother, Jake, and his fiancée had been kidnapped and shot by a terrorist group headed by a man named Egan Harper.
The shock of their deaths had hit her hard. She hadn't been able to turn off her imagination or erase the brutal details from her mind. She'd swung wildly between impotent rage and an icy fear of the same thing happening again to another member of her family.
She'd had counselling. It had helped, but no one had been able to give her back the older brother she loved, or the fragile illusion of safety. Harper had shattered a basic innocence in them all that day.
In the years that followed, her family's vulnerability had been reinforced when Harper had continued to stalk them and had attempted to kill another of her brothers, Gray, and the woman he'd married, Sam. They had all breathed a collective sigh of relief when Harper had been the one to die in that last encounter.
Through it all, Roma had worked to achieve a level of happiness and peace, unwilling to let Harper take anything more from her than he already had. She'd done a number of things to take control of her life, including keeping fit, and taking martial arts and gun classes, but the fact remained that safety was only an illusion. Harper was dead, but he wasn't alone out there.
Roma didn't see herself as paranoid. She was a realist. The entire Lombard family was a target, not only because of their wealth and high media profile, but because a branch of the family business was tied up with the development of hi-tech arms and communication equipment for the military.
For them, it wasn't a matter of if trouble would strike, it was a matter of when.
Lewis stirred, his eyes flickering. Roma stared numbly at the grey pallor of his face, and rage built steadily inside her at what had been done to Lewis—bright, inoffensive, fun-loving Lewis, who wouldn't hurt a fly. Roma had the odd, fragmented thought that if she'd stayed at home, read a book or watched TV, instead of going out looking for bright lights and fun, tired of her own company, Lewis wouldn't be bleeding on the sidewalk now. No one would have gotten hurt.
The wail of the siren grew louder, then stopped, the abrupt silence punctuated by the shallow rasp of Lewis's breathing, the rapid thud of her heart shoving blood through her veins in short, shuddering bursts. For an oddly distorted period of time Roma was unable to breathe, as if a giant fist had closed around her lungs, squeezing them tight, shutting them down, so that her vision narrowed and dimmed, and sensation faded, as if she were no longer completely connected with her physical body.
So this was what it was like to go into shock.
She could have done with never finding out.
* * *
Chapter 2
« ^ »
Two days later.
Ben McCabe strode across the car park of Auckland's international airport. A gust of warm wind broadsided him as he stepped up on the kerb, forcing his already gritty eyes to narrow against the sting of dust whirling off the pavement. The acres of glass fronting the main terminal tossed his reflection back at him: crumpled T-shirt, jeans that were ripped at one knee, stubbled jaw and tired eyes.
There was a stain on his shoulder.
A disgusted groan scraped from Ben's throat as he passed through the doors and headed for the Arrivals lounge. The stain was small—little more than a narrow streak—but, on a white T-shirt, orange was definitely orange.
So much for looking like a hotshot security consultant, but he'd been too tired, in too much of a hurry—and too ticked off with the way Gray was calling in this favour with close to zero notice—to care what he'd looked like. He'd been pulled in from a camping trip with his daughter, and after driving half the night, he'd simply dropped Bunny at his mother's place, gone home, showered and crashed. When the alarm had rung, he'd gotten dressed in the dark. He'd hardly noticed what he'd shoved his arms and legs into.
Gray was one of the best friends he'd ever had, but in Ben's opinion, spending the next week playing bodyguard to his kid sister while she sashayed around all of Auckland's best society parties was more in the line of a pain in the ass than actual work.
By anyone's standards, Roma Lombard was rich and spoiled. She was the pampered only daughter of the wealthy Lombard hotelier family. Baby Roma hadn't been born with a silver spoon in her mouth; it had been diamond-encrusted platinum.
Ben wasn't impressed. He'd seen rich and spoiled, and he didn't like it. He should know. Once he'd been dumb enough to marry it, and his ex-wife, Nicola, had given him a crash course in hell he was in no mood to repeat.
A flash of dark humour momentarily lightened his mood. Not that he would be marrying Roma Lombard, just riding herd on her for the next couple of weeks. But in some ways personal bodyguarding was more intimate than being married. There was no walking out, no slamming doors—they would be stuck together, for better or worse, until he delivered her back to her doting big brother.
The information board confirmed that the red-eye flight from Sydney to Auckland had landed just minutes ago, along with a number of other flights. Ben scanned the steady stream of passengers pushing luggage trolleys. It was summer—school holidays—and the place was crazy with people flying in for a slice of Pacific paradise.
Ben couldn't get excited, not when he'd had to cancel his camping trip with his daughter and it looked as though he would be spending the next week with a spoiled brat.
His stomach rumbled, reminding him that dinner last night had been sketchy and he hadn't had time for breakfast. On top of everything else that was about to go wrong with today, he was hungry. Cursing beneath his breath, he began to pace.
Roma strolled with her brother, Gray, toward the luggage carousel, her mood going from bad to worse. She had a headache. She never had headaches. "I don't need twenty-four-hour protection," she said flatly. "I can't help Evan fund-raise with a bodyguard vetoing me at every turn."
"You're getting protection. It'll be discreet."
Discreet? Roma reined in her disbelief. After the scare just two days ago, her family had rallied around her like a bunch of hens around their only chick. As much as she loved them all, she'd had enough of all the concentrated attention and concern.
She knew she had to accept a certain level of security, but she hadn't bargained on a bodyguard. Unfortunately, her only alternative was to catch the next flight home, and there were two very good reasons why she wasn't going to do that. The first one was walking beside her. Any more of Gray's security precautions and she would go crazy. The second reason was that she'd given Evan diVaggio her promise to help months ago, and she wasn't backing out on him at the last minute.
&nbs
p; Normally she didn't go near high-profile social events, because she hated the media attention, but Evan's crusade to fund a children's cancer ward was a special case. He was a long-time friend of the family, and she'd shared in his grief when his small nephew had died of an inoperable brain tumour. "Evan's not going to be happy." Massive understatement.
Evan was artistic and temperamental; a successful fashion designer with his own exclusive house. He was a lot of fun—when he got his own way.
"The hell with Evan. Your safety's more important than his damn fashion show."
Gray gripped her elbow, guiding her through the thickening knots of people waiting to collect their bags. Roma did a slow, silent count to three, then disengaged Gray's hold with a practised twist of her arm. Her brothers had always treated her like a piece of delicate bone china, despite the fact that she'd been a tomboy ever since she was old enough to lace up a pair of sneakers and tag along after them. She'd never quite figured out their logic. They remembered she was female—usually at inconvenient times—but they seemed to forget that she had camped out with them, that she could outshoot the lot of them at pool, and that she had the meanest pitching arm in Lombard history. "My safety hasn't been directly threatened. And I gave Evan my promise months ago. I'm not letting some suit prevent me from meeting my commitments."
The set of Gray's jaw didn't alter. He'd been as upset as anyone about the loss of Evan's nephew, but she knew that, for Gray, his own family's safety was paramount. "We've already had this argument, honey. You're getting protection." His mouth quirked, the first sign of humour she'd seen in him for days. "I promise I haven't got you a G-man this time. Come on, let's find your bag. I don't want to miss my flight out."
Roma's eyes narrowed, her suspicions aroused by his comment. "Is he old?"
"Does it matter?"
