“Madrid?” her voice said in his ear, and for a moment he thought the sound was his subconscious chastising him for sneaking out before she awoke.
Then he realized he wasn’t imagining her. She was standing right behind him in line.
And she was furious.
His heart ached in his chest as he reached out and touched her face, tracing the curve of her cheek with his fingertip. “I don’t want to fight, Evie.”
She grabbed his wrist, and he half expected her to push his hand away. Instead, she tightened her fingers and pressed her palm to his cheek. “Me neither. I wanted to tell you to be careful.”
Which only made him feel worse as the line crept toward the desk, where attendants were double-checking passports and tickets. He tried for a smile and nodded to the ticket envelope poking out of her coat pocket. “Going somewhere?”
“I bought the cheapest international flight I could find, so I could get onto the concourse. They almost stopped me for a search because I didn’t have luggage, but I guess I’m not the first person who ever decided to hit Cancun on a whim.” She shrugged, trying for nonchalance even as her eyes filmed with tears. “The thing is, the last time you snuck off before dawn to catch a plane, you didn’t come home.”
Robert’s breath whooshed out on a sucker punch of guilt. “Oh, hell. Evie, I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She shrugged again, a jerky motion that let him know just how not okay she was. “I’m a big girl. It just…hit me, you know? When I woke up this morning and you were gone, I freaked. I thought I was past all that, but I guess I’m not.” She looked away from him, a faint blush staining her porcelain skin. “Sorry.”
“No,” he said urgently. “Don’t be.” He pulled them both out of line, moving into the lee of a wide pillar beyond the gate area. He dropped his carry-on so he could take both of her hands as he searched for the words. “I didn’t think, I just…” He paused as her brimming tears prompted an unwelcome realization. “I haven’t been part of an ‘us’ for so long, I’m out of the habit of thinking about anyone but myself. I didn’t want a scene, so when I got the call that Cameron got a line on Clive, I buggered off before you woke up, not stopping to think how you’d feel.” He squeezed her hands. “I’m so sorry.”
“But you’re not going to ask me to go along with you.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I can’t.”
“You won’t,” she countered, but her shoulders slumped. “And even if you did, I need to stay here. The support staffers don’t know their way around the Vault, which means there’s going to be a burn-in period.”
When she pulled away, he let her go. “We need to finish this,” he said. “We need to take down Clive and whoever else is involved in the attacks. When we do, we’ll go away for a few weeks, someplace we can talk. I promise.”
Her smile turned sad. “I think we’ve gone beyond talking at this point, Robert.” Before he could ask what she meant by that, she’d leaned up on her tiptoes and pressed a cool, chaste kiss to his lips. “Fly safe and call me when you land.”
Then she was leaving, walking away from him with those swinging, unhurried strides that covered more ground than it looked like they should.
When he called her name, she didn’t look back.
NIC SUPPRESSED a shiver as Ethan drove his Jeep through a concealing screen of brush into an angular tunnel formed of poured cement. Cut into a hillside that looked like every other hillside in the area, the access had been invisible until they were practically on top of it. The tunnel ran a few hundred feet, then opened up into a shallow vehicle bay that led to an armored door. Staring at the door, Nic said, “It’s a vault, all right.”
And it felt as though once they went in, they were never coming back out.
“Evangeline told me it was a bomb shelter of some sort.” Ethan popped his seat belt and slid out of the Jeep. “Wait here while I buzz us through.”
He crossed to a hardwired unit bolted beside the door. When he pressed his palms on a flat screen, then bent close and stared into an optical eye, Nic realized it was a sophisticated ID system.
The realization loosened something inside her, letting her know that she was more worried about the danger than she’d let on, even to herself.
“We’ll be safe here,” she said aloud, trying to believe the words as Ethan returned to the Jeep.
“Evangeline is going to meet us inside,” he said. He swung back into the vehicle and popped it into gear while the armored door parted at the center, grinding back into recessed pockets and revealing another tunnel.
Ethan sent the Jeep down the second tunnel, which descended at a shallow angle. Behind them, the armored doors groaned back into place.
For no good reason, something inside Nic whispered, Abandon hope all ye who enter here, making her shiver. Ethan glanced over but didn’t comment. Moments later, the tunnel opened up to a startlingly normal-looking parking garage. A dozen other vehicles were parked in a cluster, and Ethan added his Jeep to the end of a row before turning to her. “It’s going to be okay, Nicole. Nobody will bother you here.”
“I know,” she said, and she knew they weren’t just talking about the people trying to kill her.
He nodded as though they’d just agreed to far more than had been said aloud. “Come on. Let’s get you settled.”
She trailed him across the garage to a high cement wall with a small inset door along with another security station. He went through the same palm-and-eye-scan routine and the door swung inward, revealing another, smaller cement corridor. The walls were covered with a layer of ivory paint, and a no-nonsense brown carpet lined the floor.
Ethan stepped aside and gestured her through. “After you.”
He steered her down one long corridor and up another, where they began to see signs of life. Three people wearing jeans and T-shirts were clustered around a bank of laptops and a snarl of cables in one room opening off the hallway. In the next, a dark-haired woman barked into a landline phone, speaking fluent Spanish.
“There’s no wireless signal down here,” Ethan said, turning them down another corridor, where the doors were more regularly spaced and numbered, and had touch pads that served as keys. “No cell phone signal, and all the computer stuff is hardwired.”
“You’ve been here before?”
He shook his head. “Evangeline gave us a quick briefing on what to expect, along with maps of the facility and our room assignments. This one’s yours.” He tapped a quick sequence onto the keypad and the door unlocked with a click. “All the doors are coded to 1234. Evangeline decided to keep it simple, since there’s so few of us, and we’re all working toward the same goal.”
He pushed open the door, revealing a room that was maybe ten feet square, with no windows or bathroom. A narrow bed rested against one wall, made with utilitarian neatness and sharply folded corners, and a small desk was pushed against the opposite wall, bare save for a lamp. The walls were painted that same ivory-cream color, and the short, coarse carpeting was of the same indeterminate gray-brown as the hallway.
Ethan grimaced. “Sorry. Evangeline warned me that the accommodations were pretty sparse. Guess she wasn’t kidding.”
“It’s fine,” Nic said, but a hard lump gathered in her throat, a sharp yearning for her multicolored afghan and the piles of pillows that formed drifts on her sofa and bed at home. “Just like camping.”
Ethan snorted. “You camp at federal penitentiaries often?” He paused, then glanced over his shoulder at the hallway. “I need to meet with the team and get up to speed, but I’ll check on you in a few hours. The mess hall is down the corridor to your left, the bathrooms are clearly marked, and there’s a TV in the lounge off the mess. If you need anything, track down our receptionist, Angel—she’s a sweetheart under the black makeup and general incompetence. I’ll let her know that you’ll need a computer and a landline phone in here.” His eyes went serious, and his voice dropped a notch. “If you call anyone, just promise me you w
on’t tell them where you are, not even a hint. The signals are scrambled to hell and back, so there’s no way the call could be traced, but we have to assume that whoever is after you, whether it’s Clive or TCM or both, is very smart. Smart enough to take a few clues and put them together into a location.”
Nic stifled the shiver and nodded. “Gotcha. No hints or clues. I appreciate the access, though. I’ve got some serious scrambling to do pulling together funding for my pet project.”
“Biofuel.”
Surprised and foolishly pleased that he’d remembered, Nic nodded. “That’s right. My sponsor backed out, school starts next month, and…” She trailed off, realizing that nothing was the same as it had been. There was no guarantee she’d be safe when classes started, and what was she going to do about that? Even if Ethan and his team managed to negate the danger, there was still the question of what she was going to do next spring as her due date approached.
Never mind the year after that, when she’d have a baby, but no husband or family support.
Suddenly, fears that had been submerged by the immediate danger flared to the forefront of her mind. As much as she wanted the baby, with or without Ethan’s involvement, she was equally worried about how the next year—heck, the next fifteen or twenty years—would play out.
“Hey,” Ethan said, correctly interpreting her wince. “I meant what I said before. I’ll help with the finances. I make a good living.”
She looked away. “Go to your meeting. When you get a chance, let me know what I can do to help, okay? It’ll only take me an hour or so make the calls I need to for the biofuel project. After that, I’ll go nutty if I’m stuck in here with nothing but online solitaire to keep me company.”
He nodded and smiled, though the expression didn’t make it to his eyes. “Will do.”
She let the door swing shut in his wake, closing out the drab hallway. When she sank to the narrow bed, she found it springier and more comfortable than she’d expected, and felt the tired ache in her bones and behind her eyelids drawing her down. She collapsed onto her side and closed her eyes, expecting to find the tears that had hovered at the edges of her consciousness ever since the wee hours of the morning, when Ethan had come to her rescue, willing to be a short-term hero, but wary of anything longer than that.
She expected tears. Instead, she slept.
ETHAN FIGURED the meeting would be packed with the PPS staffers who’d agreed to remain in the Vault for as long as it took to bring Clive Fuentes and the TCM conspirators to justice. Instead, he found Evangeline sitting alone in the conference room with her face in her hands.
He paused for a moment before crossing to her and touching her shoulder. “Hey. Need someone to lean on? That seems to be my specialty this week.”
She unfolded to look at him, and a faintly wistful expression crossed her face before she shook her head. “Thanks, but it’s not your problem, and I don’t think either of us really wants it to become your problem. Things are complicated enough as it is.”
“True.” They’d never really talked about the hint of attraction that had laced their friendship since the very beginning.
He’d been at the lowest of the low, six months after Caro’s death, when he’d met Evangeline through a mutual acquaintance and she’d offered him a job. After he’d turned her down three or four times, she’d offered him a freelance assignment instead. When he’d completed the protection detail, she’d given him another. And another. By the time he realized he’d become one of the lost souls she was determined to save, it was too late for resentment. He and Evangeline had formed the sort of bond that developed between the survivors of horrible tragedies, though he’d told her only part of his story.
It was more than he’d told anyone else, and he valued the friendship, so he gave her hands a squeeze and dropped into the chair beside her. “So how is your day going?”
She blew out a breath on a half laugh. “Crappy. Really, really crappy. Robert’s in Spain, where the others think they have a bead on Clive. When he called to say he’d landed safely, Angel dumped the call and forgot to give me the message.” She shot him a sidelong glance. “Let’s just say I owe her an apology for my reaction when I found out.”
Ethan shrugged. “She seemed fine when I asked her to rustle up a computer and phone for Nicole.” Which brought his thoughts circling back around to a soft-haired, violet-eyed place they had no business being. He cleared his throat. “Any word from the team in Madrid?”
“Robert is supposed to rendezvous with them first thing in the morning. John is positive Clive is holed up in a little village up the coast. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they don’t have anything new connecting him to TCM, the murders or the oil scheme.”
Ethan blew out a breath. “Which means we’re still not even sure how many shadows we’re actually chasing.”
“It’d help if we knew what Nicole saw up in that elevator. From the speed of the hospital attack, I have to believe she saw something important, something that could lead us to the answers we need.”
“I know.” The needs of the investigation pushed against Ethan’s desire to protect Nicole, not just from her attackers, but from the memories her mind had locked away. Climbing down the side of the building to rescue her had been bad enough, and he’d had belay ropes firmly attached and a couple of beefy firefighters spotting his climb. She’d had nothing but a cracking pane of reinforced glass between her and thin air.
“If she saw something that could help us ID whoever attacked the offices, she’d be saving lives,” Evangeline reminded him.
Ethan nodded. “I’ll talk to Dr. Eballa and see what she suggests. Hypnosis, maybe, or sodium Pentothal. No,” he corrected himself, “not Pentothal. No drugs with the, um, with the pregnancy.”
When that earned him a sharp look from Evangeline, he grimaced. “We barely know each other. I picked her up at a bar, we got a room and now she’s pregnant. Logically, that’s not the basis for a lasting relationship.” He stood and began to pace, talking as much to himself as to her now. “Caro and I planned on having kids, but that was different. We’d chosen each other first and the baby was going to come after, once we were absolutely sure we were ready. Then—” When grief and guilt balled hot in his chest, he broke off, already regretting his uncharacteristic outburst. “Sorry. Not your problem.”
Evangeline tilted her head. “It might not be a problem if you gave her a chance.”
Because he was almost tempted, Ethan’s answer came out harsher than he’d intended. “No. I don’t want the baby, and I don’t want her.”
At that, he heard a small sound from the doorway.
Gut fisting on a surge of guilt, he turned to see Nicole standing just inside the room, her hand still on the doorknob. Her eyes were wide and dark in her pale face.
Damning himself, Ethan took a step toward her. “I didn’t know you were there. I’m—”
“Don’t,” she said, lifting a hand to cut him off. “You’ve been honest—if not quite that blunt—with me already. You don’t want to be a father. I get it. I’m not here because I’m trying to change your mind, I’m here because someone’s trying to kill me.” She jammed her hands into the pockets of her ragged jeans, and continued. “No offense, but the accommodations aren’t exactly cushy, so I think we should do whatever it takes to figure out what I saw the other day.” She looked from Ethan to Evangeline and back. “So what’s the plan, hypnosis?”
Evangeline nodded. “That’s one possibility.”
“Let’s do it. The sooner I get my memory back, the sooner I can get on with my life.” She spun on her heel, then paused and glanced back. “In the interim, I’m going to need to borrow some clothes. Preferably not Angel’s.”
Then she was gone, the door shutting firmly in her wake.
Ethan stared after her for a long moment before he blew out a breath. “Well. That was bad timing.”
But though he regretted hurting her, it wasn’t fair to let her t
hink they had a future together.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, the clock on Nic’s borrowed laptop said it was close to lunchtime when Angel came for her.
“This way.” The receptionist led Nic past the conference rooms and back out to the garage, where Evangeline waited in a sleek black BMW.
“We’re leaving the Vault?” A spurt of unease dampened Nic’s pleasure at the thought of non-recycled air.
“We can’t compromise the security of the Vault by bringing in outsiders.” One corner of her mouth kicked up. “Besides, those jeans are all I have to loan you. Even with the drive time, we’ve got an hour to spare before the hypnotist and sketch artist are meeting us at the station. I thought we could find ourselves a mall.”
Nic’s heart lifted fleetingly at the thought of doing something normal like hitting a department store. “You’re on.”
Thirty minutes and a couple of hundred dollars later, Nic paid for her purchases in cash Evangeline had taken from an emergency stash. But although she had a badly needed change of clothes, Nic was far edgier than she’d been back at the Vault.
Evangeline constantly surveyed their surroundings with a professional’s eye, which made Nic stare at the passersby, wondering if one of them wanted her dead. In addition, there was Ethan. Neither woman mentioned his name, but he lingered just beyond their desultory conversation, bringing an added tension that had a vicious headache prickling behind Nic’s eyeballs by the time they returned to the BMW and loaded their bags in the trunk.
Once they were back on the road, Evangeline popped the center console and dug out a distinctive red-and-white bottle. “You want a Tylenol? I brought some along.”
“Thanks.” Nic downed a tablet. “That was thoughtful of you.”
“They were in case my arm started bugging me.” Evangeline flexed halfway, stopping with a wince. Then she sent Nic a sidelong glance. “And Ethan asked me to look out for you.”
Instead of asking what he’d said, or where he’d been since the day before, Nic stared out the passenger-side window, seeing nothing. “How much further to the station?”
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