“Your neck. The muscles are tightening up. Maybe I can help loosen them up.”
Eryn hesitated, but agreed. Her neck did hurt and she wanted to be in better shape as they progressed in their search. But she found she was also hungry for Callan’s touch.
Tentatively at first, Callan put his hands on her neck and began kneading her neck. His efforts were painful at first, almost to the point that she couldn’t stand it. Then the heat of his hands took some of the pain away. She relaxed and gave herself over to him, to the strength that worked at her forcefully and tenderly.
When she closed her eyes, the stress over Daniel Steadman’s kidnapping almost disappeared. A warm lassitude crept over her and she felt more calm and at peace than she could ever remember.
“Stand up. Let’s get your back straight and work a deeper massage.”
Quietly, Eryn stood and rested her hands on the back of the chair. Callan continued working his hands along her neck, spreading out to her shoulders now. The heat and pressure was the most wonderful thing she’d ever experienced. She didn’t realize she’d leaned back against him until she felt his hard body against her.
When she turned around, she meant to tell him she’d had enough. The massage was definitely having more of an effect than she had counted on and she wanted it stopped. Or rather, she told herself she should stop.
Instead, when she turned around to Callan, she looked up into those slate-gray eyes behind those aviators and saw the hunger in his gaze. She reached up, placed a palm against his face and pulled him down toward her. Their lips met and the warmth she’d been feeling suddenly cascaded and flooded her body and her mind. She couldn’t think of anything except his lips on hers.
His kiss was hot and forceful, demanding and overpowering. Her senses swam. For a moment she thought her knees were going to buckle. Then he wrapped an arm around her and cupped a hand behind her head, pulling her even closer. His breathing was ragged, more strained than it had been even after the fight at the club.
Eryn felt the strength in him and knew that he desired her. The sense of power within him was all consuming. Before she knew what she was doing, she slid her hands under his pullover and ran them over his flat stomach and broad chest. She tried to stop. At least, she told herself she tried to stop. But the flat planes of hard muscle and heated body were too much.
He continued kissing her, but his hands were busy, too. He slipped one under her shirt and his fingers caressed her belly and cupped her breast. When his hand closed over her breast, she moaned and bit at his lower lip. He kissed her harder.
Then someone put a key in the condo’s front door lock.
Callan peeled away from her like morning mist before the sun. He’d been there, then he was gone. She was only a half step behind him when he headed for the door, though. His pistol was in his hand, and she had hers an instant after him.
At the door, Callan took up a position to one side and waved Eryn back behind the small panel that set off the living room area from the rest of the condo. Eryn was painfully aware that the panel wouldn’t stop bullets. She also knew that she could get arrested for breaking and entering. But she didn’t want to die. The men they were after didn’t hesitate about shooting. She held her pistol, her left hand wrapped tightly over her right so she could create the push/pull necessary to operate the semi-automatic weapon’s recoil. That had been drilled into her at the firing range.
Leslie Harris walked through the door still talking to the man behind her. The guy was muscular and dressed in dark clothing.
“Seriously, Sam, I don’t see why I have to leave my home. I’m safe here.” Leslie reached for the light switch.
“I told you already. Dylan thinks we’ll all be better off disappearing for the night. I shouldn’t have let you come back here.”
“You’ve still never said what this is about.” Leslie flicked the switch on and the bright light filled the condo.
Sam’s gaze lit on the panel that separated the living room area from the rest of the condo. Too late, Eryn realized the panel held inset windowpanes and that her shadow was revealed through the translucent glass.
Striding forward quickly, Sam yanked a big pistol from a cross-draw holster on his belt. The pistol swung up in Eryn’s direction and the man started firing immediately.
Thunder filled the small room. Bullets ripped through the glass panes and the thin wood. The panel offered no protection. Panicked, struggling to control her fear, Eryn threw herself forward and dropped to the floor. The impact knocked the wind out of her and caused her neck to flare with pain. Concentrating, she tried to pull her pistol up, already knowing she was going to be too late.
Callan stepped out around the door and thrust his pistol forward. Sam cursed and threw himself to one side, turning quickly to bring his weapon up and around. Coolly, never flinching, Callan shot the man twice as Sam’s rounds tore the air around him. One of the bullets ripped through the collar of Callan’s jacket, leaving it in tatters.
Blood sprayed across the wall behind Sam and over Leslie Harris as she cowered on her knees with her hands wrapped over her head. She screamed, but the noise barely penetrated the cottony numbness that filled Eryn’s ears.
In a couple long strides, Callan reached the man and took the gun from his limp hand. He turned to Eryn. “Are you hit?”
Cautiously, Eryn stood. Splinters and broken glass tumbled from her and dropped to the floor. She checked and couldn’t believe she hadn’t been hit. “No. I’m fine.”
Callan focused on the woman. “Where are they holding Daniel Steadman?”
Tears rolled down the woman’s eyes. She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. She sat huddled on the floor with her arms around herself. Then she started rocking, gently thudding her head against the wall.
Callan thrust the captured pistol into his jacket pocket and holstered the other one. He knelt in front of the woman. Without warning, he slapped the woman.
The blow shocked Eryn and she started forward, anger already boiling. Then she realized that Callan hadn’t struck the woman with any real force, just enough to get her attention.
He repeated the question in a calm voice.
Leslie Harris shook her head and drew back against the wall. “I don’t know anything about that.”
“Was he involved in the kidnapping?”
Personally, Eryn had no doubts about that. The guy had pulled his weapon too quickly and started blazing away.
“I don’t know.” Leslie wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. Mascara smeared. “I was out clubbing with a girlfriend. She went off with some guy we’d just met and left me there. I was too drunk to drive home. I called Sam and asked him to take me home. He did.”
Eryn didn’t know if the woman was lying or not. The part about getting drunk rang true.
Evidently Callan didn’t believe her. He shoved his face in closer to the woman’s. She tried to draw away but there was nowhere to go. “Tell me about the kidnapping.”
Leslie gulped air. “Okay. Okay.” She swore but Callan didn’t back away. “Sam told me they were gonna take down some high roller, but I didn’t know who and I didn’t know when they were gonna do it. After Sam picked me up at the bar, I asked him about it. He didn’t want to tell me anything, but I saw the news about the kidnapping and I kept pushing him when he came to pick me up. He told me he and Dylan had kidnapped Daniel Steadman. That’s all I know. I swear!”
For a moment Eryn thought Callan was going to hit the woman again. She almost wouldn’t have blamed him, but she also knew she wasn’t going to allow it to happen again.
With a brief growl, Callan stood and walked away from the woman. Kneeling again, he went through the dead man’s pockets. Eryn knew Sam was dead. Both of Callan’s shots had gone into the man’s chest less than a hand’s breadth apart.
He stood once more and looked at Eryn. “Let’s go.”
Eryn was surprised she could move, but she could and she did. She’d never before see
n someone get shot. And she couldn’t believe Callan had shot the man so dispassionately. He’d done it to save her, she knew that. It would have been better to have the man alive to talk to, but he’d killed the man to keep her safe.
That makes you responsible for that man’s death. Guilt nipped at Eryn’s conscious mind, becoming a definite ripple that wouldn’t be denied. If she had been in a safe spot, Sam would never have been killed. She tried to swallow, but her throat was dry.
She trailed after Callan and joined him in the elevator. Only then did he put his pistol away. Remembering that she was holding her own weapon, Eryn holstered it as well.
The doors closed and Callan punched the button for the second floor. “We get off one floor above the lobby and walk down the stairs.” He tapped the emergency evacuation map on the cage wall. “We take the stairs down, then get out through the emergency exit here.”
Eryn nodded, not trusting her voice.
Callan sorted through the wallet he’d taken from the dead man. He took out a driver’s license, gun permit, medical card and insurance verification on a new Camaro. All of them had the same address.
Eryn didn’t need a crystal ball to know where they were headed.
Chapter 17
Samuel Anthony Wickham’s apartment wasn’t as nice as his girlfriend’s digs were. The one-bedroom was a typical bachelor’s home. No pictures hung on the walls. The television was a large, wide-screen plasma and had a collection of porno DVDs and an Xbox 360 game console. The sink was filled with dirty dishes. Take-out cartons and pizza boxes filled the trash to overflowing.
Looking at the mess, a twinge of sadness shot through Eryn. Sam’s life hadn’t amounted to much, but it had been his. And now it was gone, ripped away in white-hot blasts. His body was probably still cooling in Leslie Harris’s apartment while the police poked around. Eryn shook off the thought. She couldn’t dwell on that. Daniel Steadman was still out there and he definitely didn’t deserve to die.
Callan moved like a machine. He sorted through Sam’s mail, through the man’s effects and through the trash. Eryn could scarcely think as she worked hard to mirror Callan’s efforts. In her mind, she watched Sam jerk again and again as Callan’s bullets hit him while the rolling thunder blasted her hearing. Her hands shook as she rifled through the debris on the table.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Callan’s tone was quiet and somber.
“No.” She wasn’t sure if he was talking about Sam’s death or the mutual attraction that had popped up in the bedroom. She hoped he was talking about the shooting, but she wanted to know what his thoughts were about what had happened in the bedroom, too. Before she talked with him about that, though, she needed to know where her head was. She wasn’t like that, not the kind of woman to get so attracted to a man in so short of a time.
And she was attracted. She had no choice but to accept that and deal. Attractions were not good things for her. Or anyone else, in her opinion. Those feelings couldn’t be monitored and usually made a mess of someone’s life. She’d seen it happen. It had happened to her in the past. She didn’t want that to happen to her again, and knew that it already had.
Ever since she’d popped out of that cake, her life hadn’t been her own. She took a breath and let it out. That wasn’t being fair to Callan, and it wasn’t true. He’d offered to cut her loose from everything. She’d stubbornly clung to him.
Now look where she was.
And his life had changed, too. She wondered if he thought she was a complication that he didn’t need. Judging from Ilsa, his track record with the opposite sex wasn’t a winning one, either.
“Callan.” She turned to face him.
He turned around to look at her and said nothing.
“I know you had to shoot that man.” Her voice felt tight and sounded strained. “I get that. If things had gone differently, if you hadn’t acted so quickly, I’d probably be dead right now.”
He hesitated and she was certain that lying about the situation crossed his mind. Then he shrugged and nodded. “Maybe.”
“And if you hadn’t shot him, I was going to. I didn’t want to die, Callan.” Tears spilled from her eyes then and she hated them. “I just wasn’t fast enough to save myself.”
His voice gentled. “Next time you’ll be fast enough. You hesitated this time. Next time you’ll know when you have to shoot someone and you’ll do it without freezing up.”
“I don’t want to have to shoot someone.” Her voice rose. “I don’t want to be in those kinds of situations.”
“No one does. The situation we’re in now could be the case that causes you to shoot a person.” Callan was silent for a moment. He looked away from her, but he didn’t turn away. “Every life you take touches you. Even when you don’t know who that person was. You’d think it would be easier than that if you didn’t know them, but it’s not true.” He inhaled. “If I ever get to where I don’t feel it when I take a life, I won’t be in this business anymore. But I can’t allow myself to become debilitated by what I have to do, either. Then I can’t act when I need to.”
Silence filled the room for a moment.
“Thank you for saving me, Callan.”
A small smile tinted with sadness twitched at his lips. He nodded, didn’t say any more and went back to his search.
Eryn relaxed a little then. It was good to know that Callan felt the way he did. She also appreciated the fact that he chose not to notice her tears or try to console her. She needed to get around her feelings herself.
She found a small digital camera buried in the debris of porn magazines and motorcycle catalogs on the table. The camera’s battery charge was low, but it was operational. She brought up the menu then cycled back through the pictures. “Callan.”
“Got something?”
“Yeah. This camera has photographs of the rooms where the bachelor party was held.” Eryn had taken a moment to recognize the rooms because they looked barren without the party setups that had been there. But now that she had identified it, the certainty it was the same suite of rooms was absolute.
Callan joined her and she felt the heat of him again. A craving stole over her and goose bumps covered her neck when she felt his breath brush against her skin. She shivered a little and had to resist the temptation to turn into his arms.
Focus.
She did, but it was hard.
Eryn flicked through the menu and brought up the time/date stamp. “The pictures were taken five days before the bachelor party. When were the reservations made?”
“I don’t know.” Callan leaned in more closely. “Can we enlarge those pictures?”
“My computer’s out in the car. I can pull the SDRAM card from the camera and slot it in my computer, put the pictures on the monitor. They should blow up easily enough. The setting’s for high res.”
“Let’s do that. I don’t think we’re going to find anything here, and the police might be by this apartment to investigate after they find out I took Sam’s personal effects.”
In the car ten minutes later and a mile away, Eryn used her notebook computer to bring up the pictures on the SDRAM card. There were thirty-seven in all. She opened up a notepad window on one side of the screen and made notations concerning how many people were in the pictures. She knew Sam’s name, so she tagged each of his appearances and who he’d been with.
They took time to cycle back through the other hundred nineteen pictures on the media card. Several of the men were shown again, but the circumstances were different. Those pictures had been shot in casinos and concerts and restaurants. There were even a dozen or so that looked like they’d been taken in an office.
All told, there were seven different guys in the group. Several of the pictures taken in the bachelor party suite didn’t have anyone in them. Those focused on the room size and arrangement. Occasionally some of the men had mugged for the camera, grinning like idiots and making obscene gestures.
“They obviously didn’t think grabb
ing Daniel was going to be a problem.” That bothered Eryn a lot.
“It wasn’t.” Anger and disgust rumbled in Callan’s voice. He pointed to the screen.
“Felony made the party, too.” Several of the photos included Leslie Harris in chic clothing and wearing a come-hither smile. She’d put on a mock strip show that the photographer, presumably Sam, had captured.
“The redhead’s not a dancer. How do you think she fits into this?”
Eryn sorted through the images till she found the redhead. The woman was in two of the shots, always hanging on to a guy with short black hair and a soul patch that was also conspicuously missing from most of the images. “She’s not a dancer. That’s the feeling I get. She’s aware of her body, likes to have other people look at her, but she’s not got a professional vibe.”
Callan nodded in agreement, then Eryn went on.
“Felony was aware of her body, too. She was throwing it all over the place. The redhead is different. She’s not putting on a show. She’s exactly what she wants to be, and most of that is aloof. None of these shots show her face. She knew where the camera was at all times and avoided it. See how she keeps herself apart from the others? Except the one guy.” Eryn tapped one of the images. “She hangs with Soul Patch because he’s the alpha male in the group.”
Callan nodded. “He’s the guy who ran the crew that broke into the bachelor party. You don’t know him?”
“No. I knew of these guys, but I’d never met any of them.” Eryn studied the man’s lean, wolfish face. The man hadn’t willingly been in any of the pictures. Sam, or whoever the photographer had been, had caught him off guard.
“This guy takes his work seriously. Makes you wonder.”
“What?”
“Why the redhead was there when she doesn’t play well with the others, and why Soul Patch let her come when he’s all about the business.”
Looking at the man’s hooded, dark eyes, Eryn agreed. The man had an intensity that leaped through the computer monitor. She knew without actually seeing the man that he’d be dangerous.
Best Man for the Job Page 17
