by Paula Graves
She knew the first-floor door opened onto a narrow corridor from which a person could either head down the hall to the front lobby or go out a side door to the parking lot. She’d gone that route earlier that morning, when a couple of the conference coordinators had taken her out for breakfast.
If they got her to the first floor, they’d be out to the parking lot before her screams could grab anyone’s attention.
She tensed her muscles and glanced upward again, hoping to see Scanlon’s ghost. But he didn’t make a reappearance. She tamped down a rush of sorrow.
Now, she thought.
She let herself sag heavily against the two men holding her upright. The sudden shift in weight caught them by surprise, giving her an opening.
Swinging as hard as she could, she jabbed her elbows into their crotches and pushed to her feet, jerking free as they reacted to the pain of her blows.
The door to the second floor was right in front of her, shimmering and undulating. She pushed through it, ignoring the ruckus behind her.
“Get her,” she heard one man say, his voice a pained croak.
She didn’t look back, racing down a writhing, spinning tunnel. There was still enough sense left in her drugged-out brain to realize she was running down the second-floor hallway of the hotel. She gave a half second’s thought to banging on the doors, looking for help, but she suspected the people inside those rooms, even if they answered her knocks, would see her swaying and drunk-eyed and slam the door in her face.
Worse, the men she heard pounding down the hall behind her might kill anyone who answered.
She found her strength flagging, and even though she had put a fair amount of space between herself and the men running behind her, she knew they must be gaining.
She had blown past the elevators, knowing she couldn’t risk waiting for one to arrive, but there was a second set of stairs at the end of the corridor that led down to the parking lot. It was on the opposite side of the hotel from where she’d parked her little green Ford Mustang, but at least she’d be outside with more room to maneuver.
She hit the door to the stairwell at a dead run, stumbling into the railing and nearly pitching headfirst down the stairs.
She heard footsteps pounding from above her, coming down a flight of stairs at a clip. Had one of them circled back, anticipating her destination?
She started running down the steps, but whatever they had injected into her neck was hitting its stride, making her head swim as if she’d just spent the last ten minutes riding a tilt-a-whirl. She stumbled a few steps above the landing and pitched forward, landing hard.
The air whooshed from her lungs, making her vision go black. As she struggled to breathe again, she heard a thudding of footsteps racing down to where she lay.
She tried to push to her feet, but she didn’t have the strength. She felt a pair of strong, warm hands drag her to her feet. She blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.
The ghost of Ben Scanlon stared back at her, his blue eyes soft and so beautifully familiar that tears filmed over her eyes, blurring his features.
“Scanlon,” she whispered.
“No time, sugar,” he answered in Scanlon’s voice, the cocky Texas twang she’d first hated, then grown to love.
But he was dead. She’d seen the aftermath of the explosion. Examined the autopsy report. Watched his casket lowered into a grave in the tiny town of Maribel, Texas. Held his mama’s hand as she’d cried.
She was hallucinating. One of her captors had found her and grabbed her again. That was all it could be.
But she didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. The appearance of Scanlon’s ghost seemed like a mercy, one last chance to be with her partner again before she met whatever fate her captors had planned for her.
Giving in to the fantasy, she stopped resisting and let Scanlon’s ghost lead her quickly down the stairs and out into the blinding sunlight.
He slipped a jacket over her shoulders as they reached the side of a dark green van. Dragging her around until her back met the solid wall of the panel van, he pulled the cap off his own head and shoved it onto hers.
She blinked with confusion, opening her mouth to ask what he was doing. A strange halo limned his body, an aura of brilliant blues and dazzling greens. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life.
His hands cradled her face, his touch crackling like electricity. His bent head blocked out the sunlight as he touched his mouth to hers.
Fire flowed from his lips into hers, poured through her veins in a flood of bright sensation, immolating her from the inside out.
She wound her arms around his neck and pressed closer until she melted into him, their bodies melding until she no longer existed outside of him. A low groan rumbled through her. She didn’t know which of them had made the sound.
The world disappeared into a brilliant pinpoint of light, pulsating with colors that throbbed and danced until they finally exploded like supernova.
The fireworks fell away, fading into a cold, black void, and it was a long time before Isabel formed a conscious thought again.
Chapter Two
Consciousness returned in sickening waves, crashing against a wall of agony in her head. Even the small effort of opening her eyes seemed beyond Isabel’s strength, so she suffered awhile longer in a dark cocoon, willing the nausea to subside.
Where was she? Why so much pain? Why had she been asleep?
Movement nearby forced her to open her eyes. Wincing as light needled into her brain, she bit back a moan and focused on a man standing with his back to her as he stirred something in a battered pot on an old gas range.
Scanlon, she thought, even though she knew it couldn’t be so.
Then he turned to grab a spice tin from the counter beside the range, making her gasp. The aquiline nose and stubborn chin definitely belonged to her former FBI partner.
Her dead partner.
He turned around at her gasp, his blue eyes soft. “Hey there, Cooper. Back among the living?”
She shook her head, seized by fear. Had she lost her mind? Was that why she couldn’t remember where she was or why she was here? “You’re dead.”
“Cooper—”
“No, you died! Six months ago! I saw footage of the explosion. I—I read the autopsy report.” She swiped tears from her cheeks with a jerk of her hand. “I held your mama’s hand as we buried you—”
Pain flickered across his expression. “I know.”
“I don’t believe in ghosts!” If she wasn’t dreaming, then she was crazy. Loss could do that, and she’d been hiding her own grief all this time, trying not to worry her family or even admit to herself how important Scanlon had been to her—
“I’m not a ghost.” He crouched beside her, threading his solid fingers between her own. The warmth from his hands worked its way up her arm into her chest. Hot tears burned her eyes and she let them fall, staring at him in disbelief. She reached up to touch his stubbled jaw, wondering if her hand would slide right through him. But he was solid. Warm.
Alive.
He caught her face between his hands and made her look into his eyes. “I know it’s confusing, but I’m here. I didn’t die in the explosion. I was there, but I escaped.”
An ache settled in the center of her chest. “But you let me think you were dead.” The buoyant happiness that had kept her upright for the past few seconds fled as suddenly as it had arrived, supplanted by a rush of anger. She pushed against him. “You were alive and you let me think you were dead!”
“It’s complicated—”
“How could you do that to me? We were partners! You don’t do that to your partner!” Growling, she tried to throw off the patchwork quilt tangled around her legs, but the pain in her head grew excruciating. She jammed the heels of her hands into her temples, certain her head was going to explode.
The bed beneath her shifted, making the world roil around her again. Scanlon’s hands closed around her upper arm
s, steadying her. “You have to calm down. You’re still suffering the effects of whatever they gave you.”
An image darted through her brain. A flash of light on the point of a needle. A corresponding sting pricked the side of her neck. The alarming memory did more to dispel her escalating rage than anything Scanlon could have said.
“Somebody shot me up with something.”
“I know. There’s a needle mark near your carotid, and you were hallucinating before you passed out.” His voice emerged as hard as steel. “Stupid cretins could have killed you.”
“Who?” Why couldn’t she remember anything more than the needle? It felt as if she’d walked into a solid wall, nothing but blankness wherever she looked. “Who did this to me?”
“I’m not sure.” He dropped his hands from her arms and averted his gaze. She realized he wasn’t telling her the truth.
But why?
She changed tacks. “Any idea what they shot me up with?”
“Not sure about that, either.” He stood and crossed to the saucepan on the stove. “Food will help, whatever it was. Dilute the effects, at least.”
She wasn’t sure her rolling stomach could handle a glass of water, much less whatever it was he was pouring from the saucepan into a bowl. As he pulled a sleeve of plain crackers from a nearby cabinet, he asked, “You want to eat in bed or do you feel like sitting up at the table?”
“I don’t know if I can hold anything down.”
“Give it a try, at least.” He brought the bowl of steaming liquid to the bed, which she now realized was actually a futon sofa that took up half the wall in the small room. The rest of the room was cramped by the furnishings—a stove, a sink and a refrigerator, plus a card table that seemed to serve as a dining table, sat across from her. A door, the futon and a small bookshelf took up the wall behind her. The narrow end wall was just large enough to accommodate a low table with a television set that looked decades old.
“Where are we?” she asked.
He placed the bowl of soup on a portable tray table pulled from the narrow space between the stove and the refrigerator. “Soup first. I’ll tell you everything in a minute, I promise.”
She eyed the bowl, a little freaked out at being suspicious of Ben Scanlon. “What is that?”
“Chicken noodle soup.” He set the tray table in front of her. Up close, she noticed for the first time a wicked-looking scar on the back of his left hand.
He saw her reaction. “I didn’t escape the bomb entirely.” He turned his hand over, palm up, and she saw that the scar extended to his palm as well. “A piece of bomb shrapnel went straight through my hand. Hurt like hell.”
Any hint of appetite fled. “Any other injuries?”
“Scrapes and cuts. I got knocked into the river by the blast. Lost consciousness and damned near drowned before I came to and coughed up the water I’d inhaled.”
“They said they identified your body—” She shuddered, the memory of that day flooding back with fresh sharpness.
“Brand arranged it.”
She stared at him. “Adam Brand knew you were alive the whole time?” The SAC—Special Agent in Charge—had been one of the few people who’d seemed to understand her difficulty in dealing with Scanlon’s murder. Brand knew she’d felt guilty when she learned her partner had intercepted a note meant for her and gotten killed trying to protect her. He’d even understood her choice to leave the FBI.
So he wouldn’t have to lie to her face every day?
“We couldn’t let anyone connect me to what I’m doing here.” Scanlon slanted a guilty look at her. “Even you.”
Especially me, she thought blackly. “Where is here?”
“First, let’s get a little chicken noodle soup into you before you keel over on me.”
“Not until you tell me what the hell’s going on.” She pressed her lips together.
Scanlon sighed. “Where do you want me to start?”
“The explosion,” she said flatly. “That message was left on my desk. Morelli told me that much. You took my message from Morelli and met with my informant. Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you call me, at least?”
Scanlon’s scarred hand stretched toward her for a second before dropping back to his lap. “I thought it was a setup.”
“So you went in my place? Without any backup?”
“Brand was with me, watching in case anything went hinky.”
She tamped down her simmering anger, trying to be dispassionate. “Did you trigger a booby trap?” That was the finding after an exhaustive postmortem of the explosion. But now she wondered if anything Brand had told her was the truth.
“It was on a delay—meant to give me time to get all the way inside before it blew. But I saw—something—” He frowned, as if making a mental effort to return to that moment in time. “I had a concussion from the blast. It seems to have erased my memories of what happened when I stepped inside the warehouse.”
“Then how do you know you spotted something?”
Scanlon’s mouth curved slightly. “I was wired for sound, at least until I ended up in the river. Brand told me I said something about a trap and then all of a sudden I was hauling butt away from the place.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees as Isabel pictured, not for the first time, what those last few seconds before the blast must have felt like for him. At least, this time, she could add a happier ending.
If he’s telling the truth, a bleak voice in the back of her head added.
She needed to talk to Brand. She had trouble believing he’d known this whole time. He had been so supportive—
“I quit the FBI within two weeks, you know,” she said aloud. “It was hard enough to go into that office every day and see your empty desk. When they brought in a new agent—”
“I know. Brand told me.” Scanlon leaned toward her, his expression troubled. “Go back to the Bureau. Brand will take you back—I know he will. As soon as we get you out of here.”
The last thing she wanted was to go back to the FBI, especially if Scanlon was telling her the truth. The idea that people she believed she could trust would lie to her this way…
She felt completely betrayed.
“I’m working with my brother now,” she said aloud. “At the security company. We’re doing good things there.”
“I thought you weren’t happy about your brother’s security company when he first came up with the idea.”
She hadn’t been thrilled. Her experiences with private security firms while working for the FBI had been more negative than positive. But Jesse’s concept for the security firm appealed to her. The big jobs they undertook financed the low-cost and pro bono cases Cooper Security chose on an individual, need-by-need basis.
“Things have changed,” she admitted.
Scanlon’s eyes narrowed. “I guess they have.” He waved at the bowl of soup. “At least have a bite or two. It’ll help your body fight off the effects of what they gave you.”
She forced herself to eat a few bites of the soup, knowing Scanlon had a stubborn streak that was nearly impossible to thwart. If she wanted answers, she’d have to play along with his rules, even if a bowl of chicken noodle soup was the last thing she wanted at the moment.
But she managed to finish half the bowl and even nibble on a couple of crackers by the time Scanlon had poured the rest of the soup into a plastic container and put it in the small refrigerator next to the stove.
She had so many questions racing through her mind, she felt overwhelmed, especially since the food had done nothing to ease her raging headache. She couldn’t think with her pulse pounding in her ears. The lights inside were dimmed, and heavy curtains shut out whatever light might be coming from outside the windows, but her eyes still ached from the glare.
“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. To her alarm, the words came out slurred.
Scanlon crossed quickly to the futon and helped her up. Tugging her hand away from hi
s when he showed every sign of walking with her to the bathroom, she said, “I can handle this myself. Just point me in the right direction.”
He stared back at her, his expression hard to read.
Unease fluttered in her stomach. “Please don’t tell me the bathroom’s outdoors.”
His expression cleared. “No. Through that door, take a right down the hall and it’s the first door on the left.”
She followed his directions and entered the tiny bathroom. It had a toilet and an ancient pedestal sink on one side of the room, and an even more ancient claw-foot tub on the other. She looked longingly at the tub, tempted by the thought of a nice, hot bath, but settled for running cold water in the sink and splashing it on her hot face.
As she was about to head back to the front room, her gaze caught on the window next to the toilet. It was closed off by thick green curtains. She eased the curtains open and took a peek outside, squinting as bright daylight assaulted her eyes.
There were woods outside, dense with new growth. The house seemed to have very little in the way of a yard.
Movement outside caught her eye. A man, she realized. His dark green baseball cap came into view first, dipped forward as the wearer looked down, watching his footing.
Instinctively, she narrowed the opening in the curtains to a crack. As he emerged into the clearing behind the house, the man in the cap looked up, directly toward the window.
Her heart gave a little flop.
She’d seen him before.
He wore a black T-shirt under a faded denim jacket. His jeans were equally faded. His sandy hair curled lightly around the edge of the cap.
Where had she seen him before? She could picture him in her mind, sandy hair, black T-shirt, faded jeans—
No cap. He hadn’t been wearing a cap. Not then.
The door behind her opened, making her whirl around in alarm. The sudden movement made her vision swim, and she had to grab the sink to keep from toppling over.
Scanlon rushed in, cupping her elbow to steady her. “Go to my bedroom. Now. Hide in the closet. No time to explain—”
“There’s a man outside. I know I’ve seen him before—”
