“Hey, sweetheart, are you ready to get out of here?”
Romero’s low voice startled her so badly that she nearly lost her hold on the beam. He was actually on the same damn beam, about twenty feet away from her! The sight of him was such a relief that she almost started weeping. She had to suck in a bunch of air to hang onto her composure.
“How?” she asked. It was the only word she could verbalize.
“The ropes.” He made a vague gesture behind him. “You know, from gym class? They attach them to these beams. That’s how we’re going to get down.” His smile was so normal that she could have decked him. How could none of this insanity affect him?
“I don’t know if I can do that,” she told him. She felt almost frozen in place.
“You can.” He held out a hand. “You’ve come this far. Just scoot your way toward me. Don’t look down, just hang on and move your feet in little bitty steps.”
“Okay.”
She did as he said, taking baby steps along the narrow lip of the beam. She moved her hands methodically as she went, changing points and handholds until she had reached him.
“See, sweetheart? You can do this.” He gave her an encouraging smile. “I’m going to turn around. You follow.”
“Okay.”
Her heart was in her throat the whole time. He moved as if they were on solid ground. His footsteps were so sure and certain, and the way he held onto the beam was almost casual. It was sort of sexy in a bizarre, alpha male kind of way. And because she was such a freaking girl, it also annoyed her to no end that he was so much better at everything that she was.
Chapter Twelve
Finally, Cassidy and Romero managed to reach the ropes dangling from the beam. She could see the long length of brown rope dangling to the ground. Romero stepped past the anchor and then turned around. He smiled and beckoned her forward. Cassidy wondered if it would change how he felt about her if she vomited all over the floor right now. Surely that would make her way less attractive. Right?
“Okay. So you need to turn around, and start inching your way down toward the rope. I’ll help you adjust your handholds until you can get a leg around the rope and then lower yourself.”
“You’re insane,” she whispered. “I can’t do that!”
“You can.”
Cassidy knew she had no choice. In fact, at any time those idiots could come storming back in here in a hail of bullets. She needed to put on her big girl panties and just hurry up before she got them both killed.
She turned and began inching down toward the rope. She was so focused on finding the rope with her leg that she didn’t even notice that she was essentially dangling thirty feet off the ground in midair. She twisted her foot in the rope the way she’d seen other people do and then proceeded to try to get her hands on it.
“I’ve got you,” Romero murmured.
He helped her move her hands from one part of the beam to another until she was hanging off the lip. Her hands were sweating profusely with nervousness. She felt herself slipping. She squeaked, and then her hands slipped off.
Romero lunged, but couldn’t grab her. With one leg twisted in the rope, she fell backwards. Now her head was hanging down, and she felt a wave of vertigo as her anxiety made it seem as though the floor were rising up to meet her face to face.
“Hang on,” Romero said urgently. “I’ll come down and help.”
“No!” she protested. “I’ll fall. I know it!”
“All right, then you need to try and grab the rope with your hands. Hold on tight.”
“Okay.” She clenched the waxy rope between her palms until they felt as though they were burning with the effort.
“Now tighten or loosen your calf muscles to use your legs to go down. You can control the speed with how tight or loose your legs are. Just slide down nice and slow.”
“You’re crazy,” she muttered.
“You’ve got this, Cassidy.”
She felt the pressure of tears as she hung there and waited to fall. Then she loosened her legs just a little and began to slide toward the floor. It was horrifying. Just one mistake and she was going to fall face-first and land on her head.
Soon she found a rhythm. Hand over hand above her head, the rope sliding against the denim material covering her calves. She could only be glad she was in jeans and not shorts. She could still feel the warmth from the friction of the rope against her legs.
“That’s it,” Romero encouraged. “Now. When you’re about a body length from the ground, just let go with your legs and kind of flip over.”
“Insane,” she muttered. “What am I? A circus performer?”
She couldn’t believe what an eternity it took to get down! When she was finally there, she did as he suggested and let go with her legs. She tumbled to the ground and wound up on her knees. It hurt, but certainly not as bad as it would have if she had fallen on her face from thirty feet up.
He waved and made a gesture to indicate that he was coming down. She stood back, expecting him to take just a little less time than she had and wondering if they were going to wind up getting caught in here by the murderous firebugs.
Apparently Romero didn’t share her fear of descending a rope from that height. He swung down to the rope, grabbed on, and slid to the ground in about three seconds or less.
She glared at him. “Did you have to make it look so easy?”
“We need to hurry, come on.”
She pulled against his hold. “Don’t we need to find out who those men work for?”
“If you think I’m going back in there with you, you’re insane. I’m not putting you in that kind of danger. I don’t care what sort of intel they have.” His tone and expression were all belligerence.
She gave him a squinty-eyed glare. “Well, I want to know if they can help us find Rachel.”
“They can’t.”
“You’re just saying that to make me leave.”
He growled. “Do you have a death wish or something? It seems like every time I turn around you’re jumping in headfirst to something that’s going to get you killed!”
She slugged him in the shoulder, which wound up hurting her hand more than it probably did his arm. “No, but I want to find my friend, and I’m tired of people putting a target on my back and not even explaining why.”
He grumbled something about women and no sense, and then he grabbed her hand and stomped—silently—toward the back doors of the gym. There was an exit there that led to the hallway just below her second floor classroom.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
“Don’t blame me when you die.” His surliness didn’t bother her. He was doing what she asked, and she really couldn’t expect any more than that.
ROMERO COULD NOT believe that he was taking Cassidy back into danger. There had to be something wrong with him. What sort of man risked a woman’s life like this?
The two of them crept through the hallway back in the direction that he had just come. Considering the bonfire the two idiots had going, he didn’t expect they would be someplace different. Behind him, he could hear Cassidy’s breathing. He knew she was nervous, but she seemed to have a good grip on her emotions. It was a pretty impressive feat considering everything that had just happened.
He cocked his head, listening closely. Turning, he looked at Cassidy and intentionally touched his ear. She nodded. She heard it too. The men were arguing, yelling at each other in fact. The hallway was filled with smoke. Somewhere distant, Romero heard a fire truck. The problem was that protocol stated you couldn’t send firefighters into an active shooter zone until the threat was neutralized. So they’d have to stay out there and spray from a safe distance.
Romero put his back to the wall and took a deep breath. He kept low. The air above them was a seething mass of smoke, but so far it didn’t seem to be overwhelming the hallways. The wide open, high-ceilinged space was helping with that.
With Cassidy behind him, he moved quickly to the doorway o
f the classroom. He pulled out his tiny camera. He knew Cassidy expected him to go in and neutralize the men or something equally heroic, but there was just no point in starting a fight. Instead, he leaned around the doorway and snapped off as many photos as he could.
He gave Cassidy a firm motion to stay and then spun quickly to move to the other side of the open doorway. He snapped off a few more pictures, and that’s when the men really started spilling.
“This is stupid, Hobbs,” the first man said irritably. “Where do you think she’s going to come out at? It’s not like she can just drop through the ceiling into the fire.”
Hobbs grunted and gave a hiss as he got too close to the quickly burgeoning flames. “She’ll come out.”
“She probably already has. Or she’s dead of smoke inhalation up there.” Romero leaned out, wanting to get a quick look at his quarry. The man was shaking his head. “You’ve screwed this up bad, Hobbs. Forbes is going to kill you tonight. You know that, right?”
“Shut up!” Hobbs snarled. He got right in the other man’s face. “It’s going to be fine!”
“If fine includes you dead, then yeah.”
Romero watched in fascination as Hobbs dove at his partner. The two men went down and rolled on the floor. Their bodies rammed right into the towering pile of desks, and the entire poorly built pyre collapsed on top of them. The fire seemed to come alive. It leaped up, devouring the ceiling tiles and racing through the room like a hungry beast.
Romero grabbed Cassidy’s hand and began running down the hallway. “Time to go, sweetheart. Things are about to get hot.”
She actually started to protest until she saw a fireball come belching out of the doorway. Still, the stubborn woman dug in her heels. “My keys and wallet! I can’t leave that stuff!”
“Leave it!” he ordered.
She dropped his hand and sprinted toward her classroom. Romero cursed and gave chase. As he passed the burning classroom, he dropped to his knees and slid as close as he dared to the door. Fortunately it opened out and not in. He shoved it closed, hopefully keeping the fire at bay. Inside he could hear the men screaming as they burned. The scent of charred flesh filled the hallway.
Cassidy was just ahead of him. He could see her ducking into her classroom. He gained his feet and followed at a dead run, nearly mowing her down when she stopped abruptly just inside the door.
“Cassidy, we don’t have time for this. The building is on fire.”
“He’s dead.” She was staring at the body of the teacher. “He was a pervy little asshole, but he didn’t deserve to die.”
“Most people don’t, sweetheart. Please hurry!” He was already striding toward her desk to retrieve the personal items she’d left on top.
“This place is going to burn to the ground, isn’t it?” she asked mournfully.
“With us in it, if we don’t get a move on.”
He started out the door, but she got ahead of him and grabbed his hand. “This way. It’s not like I haven’t done a million fire drills.”
They turned, and she pulled open a door that led into a stairwell. The two of them pounded down the steps. They passed the landing, and then Cassidy grabbed the breaker bar as if she intended to just burst outside. At the last second, Romero snatched her away from the exit.
“Hey!” she protested. “You said we needed to get out!”
“And there’s an active shooter command tent out there, about twenty snipers with itchy trigger fingers, and a whole slew of SWAT,” he told her tersely. “We have to go out slow. All right? Hands in the air, and make sure they know you’re a friendly.”
“Oh.” Her eyes grew wide. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Believe me, people go flying out of buildings in these scenarios all the time, but I’m not taking chances.”
She gave a grim nod. He took her hand and held it in his. Then Romero kissed her knuckles. He pushed open the door and heard a thousand clicks as the task teams turned their sights to see this new potential threat. Romero lifted his and Cassidy’s hands and then raised his other one in the air. He started walking, Cassidy just behind him. His goal was the command tent and the man with the clipboard.
He could see what looked like an entire platoon’s worth of fire trucks parked as close as they dared. They were hosing down the building in an attempt to stem the spread of the fire.
“We’re unarmed!” Romero shouted. “I’ve got a teacher with me!”
They were utterly swarmed by law enforcement once they got within twenty feet of the barricades. Romero didn’t have to ask to see the clipboard guy. The man came to him.
“My God, I can’t believe you got in and out of there!” The guy shook his hand. “What can you tell me?”
“The teachers you were looking for are dead. There are three civilian bodies in the upstairs hallway of the history department. There were two gunmen in a classroom. They started the fire to smoke her”—he gestured to Cassidy—“out of a ventilation shaft. The last I saw of them, they were on fire themselves.”
“So it’s clear?” The clipboard man looked relieved.
“If you can send SWAT with the firefighters up to that hallway, I think you can check the spread of the fire, and you’ll find your bodies,” Romero suggested.
“Can I get a statement?” Clipboard guy was reverting back to by-the-book mode, and Romero had no time for that.
“We’re going home,” Romero said with a shake of his head. “Clean up the mess and you’ll find all the statement you need.”
Romero turned. Still holding Cassidy’s hand, he began walking quickly toward the parking lot. “Let’s get your car and get out of here before something else goes wrong.”
“You have those pictures? Right?” She was looking more than a little shell-shocked. “So we can find out who did this?”
“We’ll find out,” he told her gently. “I promise.”
Chapter Thirteen
Cassidy was freaking out. She was glad Romero had agreed to drive her little car. There was no way she was safe to operate a scooter, much less a car. It was as if she’d been running on pure adrenaline for the last hour or so, and it was now totally gone.
“Take deep breaths,” he murmured.
The low rumble of his voice was soothing. In fact, everything about the man was soothing. He had found her, come in after her, and pulled her ass out of the fire, literally. If someone told her that he was capable of capturing the moon and handing it over on a platter, she would have believed it possible at this point.
“They killed Jones,” she said, feeling helpless. “He was standing right in front of me, and they just shot him.”
He reached over and took her hand, giving it a squeeze. “There was nothing you could have done, sweetheart.”
“And those other teachers.” She put her hands over her face, feeling the tears start, disgusted with herself for being so weak. “I saw the bodies. I didn’t even stop to on who it was. I just kept running. And they’re dead, and I’m not, and I can’t understand why.”
He didn’t speak, but he didn’t have to. On some level she recognized that he understood what she was feeling. He just squeezed her thigh with his hand and offered his comforting presence. She wasn’t alone. That was really important right now.
The car pulled up in front of her apartment building. It was difficult to reconcile the idea that she had left here only a few hours before feeling so optimistic. It felt like a million years had passed since that moment.
“Let’s go inside and regroup, all right?”
“What if they’re up there, waiting for us?” She felt a momentary sense of panic. She was never going to feel safe again.
“I promise I’ll look,” he told her calmly.
Cassidy looked at him in confusion. “You’ll look?”
“Yes. I’ll check for intruders. I promise.”
“Oh.”
She waited while he got out and went around to open her door. It might have seemed as though he
was the perfect gentleman, but she suspected he knew that she couldn’t walk under her own power for the moment.
Romero helped her up the stairs. She could feel his vigilance. He was watching everything as they moved through her building. Finally they came to her apartment. He used her keys to open the door. She didn’t even ask how he’d known which one was the correct key.
“Don’t move,” he told her softly. “I’m going to do a quick run-through.”
She slumped against the doorjamb. “Believe me, I’m not going anywhere.”
He was only gone for a few minutes, but by the time he got back she was absolutely trembling. She wasn’t afraid. Or was she? It was impossible to unravel her feelings and get an accurate read on what she felt or thought.
“Okay, sweetheart, let’s go lie down for a minute.” He took her hand and started to lead her into the apartment.
She sagged against him, completely unable to walk. Romero swung her up into his arms and carried her through the door. He nudged it closed behind him and then reached down to lock it. She rested her cheek against his chest and felt her body begin to relax. This was Romero. Jase. She could trust him. As long as he was around there was nothing that could happen.
He held her weight in one arm and reached down to pull the covers back. She didn’t want him to let go. The relief she felt when he climbed into the bed beside her was profound. She curled up beside his warm bulk and buried her face against his chest. The soft cotton of his T-shirt smelled faintly of smoke. That didn’t matter. She could smell the unique scent of Romero there too.
“You’re going to be all right, Cassidy,” he whispered. Wrapping his arms around her, he pressed his lips to her forehead. “This is all normal. You’ve had a huge rush this morning, and now you feel weak and indecisive, and maybe even more than a little overwhelmed. I’d be worried if this wasn’t happening.”
SEAL INVESTIGATIONS: A 5-Books SEAL Romance Series Page 8
