Avenging Angel

by Janzen, Tara

  * * *

  Dylan eased himself into a chair outside the bathroom and rested the shotgun across his knees, promising himself he’d get up in a minute. He had a lot to do before the comfort of sleep could be his. He closed his eyes for a moment and took three deep breaths. Each one hurt in a different way. God, he was tired.

  Stifling a groan, he leaned sideways in the chair and dragged the grocery bag closer to him. He ripped the paper bag down the middle with one hand, spilling the contents over the desk. His first choice out of the pile was a quart of milk, something healthy and wholesome. In between long, gulping swallows, he devoured one of the sandwiches and three candy bars, hoping to give himself a sugar rush without making himself sick. Something about profuse bleeding always made him nauseous.

  Next he downed four aspirin and three ibuprofen tablets, wondering why, out of all the bad guys he knew, he had to be the only one who didn’t have a stash of illicit drugs to fall back on in an emergency—because he was certainly facing an emergency. His gaze dropped to the sewing kit for an instant before he looked away. Time enough for that later.

  He grabbed the bottle of sport drink and twisted off the top. After drinking half of it, he set the bottle aside and checked his watch. He’d give her five more minutes.

  She opened the door at his third knock and gave him a scathing once-over, one eyebrow lifted in haughty disdain.

  He would have laughed if he’d had the strength. “Right,” he drawled, agreeing with every nasty, low-down thing she was thinking about him.

  She started to sweep past him, but he blocked the door with the shotgun.

  “You don’t have to leave,” he said. “All I need is a shower, and I’m not shy.”

  At first Johanna didn’t understand, but as his meaning sank in, her cheeks flamed. He couldn’t be serious.

  Proving that he was damn serious, he sidestepped into the bathroom and slowly closed the door behind him. She heard the lock click into place.

  “Let me out of here,” she said, her tone low and a little unsteady.

  He shook his head. “I’m going to need help.”

  “You can go to hell.”

  He shrugged out of his long, khaki overcoat, wincing in obvious pain.

  “I am not bathing you,” she warned him, taking a step back.

  “No, you’re not,” he agreed. “But you’re safer in here where I can keep an eye on you, and when I’m done, I’m going to need some help.”

  “Help yourself.” She took another step backward and came up against the sink. An edge of fear skittered across her nerve endings.

  His coat fell in a pile at his feet, and her gaze dropped down his body. He was soaked through, his black T-shirt clinging to lean, solid muscles and the flat, hard plane of his abdomen. His jeans rode low on his narrow hips and encased the length of his legs in soft black denim down to where they broke across his boots.

  He moved to lean the gun against the wall, drawing her gaze back to the weapon and his arm. Cords of muscle slid smoothly under his skin, but it was the blue star tattooed halfway between his elbow and his wrist that riveted her attention. Her heart started pounding too fast as she stared at the indelible design marking his skin. She’d seen that tattoo before, exposed by the rolled sleeve of an impeccably white shirt—in Chicago.

  Against her will, her gaze traveled back up the length of his torso and locked on his face. The light was very good in the bathroom, bright and sharp, delineating the curves of his cheekbones and the sharper angle of his jaw. She looked into his eyes and swallowed. Within those dark, feral depths was something she’d once felt too intensely ever to forget.

  His hands went to his belt buckle, and Johanna’s panic stirred to full flight. She knew who he was.

  Four

  Dylan knew the instant she recognized him. His hand stilled on his belt, and his gaze slipped away from hers. He wished she hadn’t remembered.

  A mocking voice inside his head called him a liar. He’d made a career out of being invisible, but some part of him liked to think that no matter how deep he went undercover, he was still Dylan Jones. He liked to think he wasn’t the only person who saw beyond the bad-guy surface to the good guy underneath. He liked to think that when a man bared his soul and nearly risked his life for a kiss, that the woman he’d risked it for would remember.

  Well, she remembered all right. His gaze lifted as he finished with his buckle and pulled his belt free. Memories and stark disbelief were written all across her pretty, pale face, and it terrified her more than when she’d thought he was a stranger.

  “You,” she gasped, the word less than a whisper.

  He swore silently, wondering what to do next.

  After a second’s hesitation he said, “You don’t need to be so frightened. I’m with the FBI.” At least he thought he was still with the FBI. It had been a while since he’d heard from anybody on the other side of the law, from anybody on the right side. He heard from the wrong side every hour of every day. He lived, breathed, and would probably die on the wrong side of the law. He’d accepted that fact weeks ago.

  She slowly shook her head and backed farther away from him, wedging herself between the vanity and the bathtub. It was as good a place as any to his way of thinking.

  “If you want to sit next to the sink, that’s fine with me,” he said, walking toward her, his boots making soft scraping sounds on the tile floor of the bathroom.

  “I want to leave.” She tried to move away, but there was no place left for her to go. He saw the panic come back into her eyes.

  No doubt about it, he made a hell of a hero.

  “Sit on the counter,” he commanded her, his voice gruff, his patience at an end. He didn’t have the time or the strength to coax her into anything, and in truth there was little need; he already had her cornered. He slowly reached for her hands, pinning her with a glare he hoped would keep her in her place. “If you fight me, you’re the one who is going to get hurt, and I really don’t want you to get hurt.”

  His words must have sunk in, because when he finally closed his hand around her wrist, she didn’t struggle. He made a loop with his belt and slipped it over both of her hands. He tightened the loop with a quick jerk, just quick enough and tight enough to remind her he was in charge.

  “Dane . . .” The name whispered from her mouth, catching him unaware. He swore and his fingers trembled as he tied the belt back through itself. That was what she’d called him that night, Dane, the name she’d known him by.

  “My name is Dylan Jones.” And so help him God, he wanted it back.

  “Dane Erickson,” she said, her voice gaining a small measure of steadiness.

  He didn’t have the strength to argue with her. He bent down and got the tape out of his coat pocket. Within minutes he had her secured to the shower rod with a length of doubled and twisted cloth tape. She could continue to stand if she wanted to, but he’d given her enough slack to sit on the vanity, a kindness he doubted he would be thanked for providing.

  Letting out a deep breath, he dropped the roll of tape to the floor and checked to make sure the shotgun was within easy reach of where he’d be in the shower. No one was going to get to her without going through him first.

  Despite the smallness of the space they were in, he managed to ignore her presence as he struggled with getting out of his clothes. His boots went first, then his socks. Before he attempted the more difficult stuff, he leaned over the bathtub and started the water running.

  Johanna stood stock-still in her prescribed area, stunned into silence by her realization and the situation. She’d been kidnapped by Austin’s private bodyguard, Dane Erickson, and he was stripping in front of her, taking off his clothes piece by piece.

  She swallowed hard, watching him and feeling complete mortification sink through every pore in her body. She had never expected to see him again, of all men, let alone see so much of him.

  Color rose hotly in her cheeks. Dane Erickson had always been impeccably
groomed, not like this man with his shaggy, raked-through hair, beard stubble, and bruised and cut face. But it was Dane, unbelievably. She had to stop him from taking his clothes off. She couldn’t just stand there and watch him get naked—not him.

  “You—you can’t do this,” she stammered. The immediacy of her current problem completely overrode her concerns over being kidnapped.

  He ignored her and tugged his T-shirt out of his pants.

  Desperate, she tried a new tack. “Whatever happened between you and Austin shouldn’t involve me. I’ve got my own problems with him. He’s not going to like that you’ve taken me.”

  “I don’t give a damn what Austin doesn’t like.”

  Despite his thoughtfulness with the chocolate, Johanna got the distinct impression he didn’t give a damn what she didn’t like either, because she certainly didn’t like watching a man over whom she’d made a fool of herself undress.

  And it was him. The smile had been a dead giveaway, but she’d been too frightened to put the feelings together with the right facts. Dylan Jones moved with the same controlled grace, the same efficiency, the same hint of wariness and threat that had set Dane apart from all the other men around Austin. Once, in an attempt to impress her, Austin had told her how much he’d had to pay to get Dane. The quiet, dangerous ones, he’d told her, always placed the highest price on their services. If they were also intelligent, the price went through the roof. The lesson, of course, hadn’t really been about how good Dane was, but rather how powerful Austin was. He bought men like Dane; he could buy a woman like Johanna. At the same time she’d known he was wrong about her. Now she knew he’d also been wrong about Dane.

  The man in front of her had obviously never been bought, not even at Austin’s outrageous price. Groaning softly, he straightened, his hands sliding to the front of his pants. He slanted her a quick glance.

  “I don’t recommend watching,” he said in a flat tone.

  Horrified to have been caught staring, she squeezed her eyes shut. Lord help her. She’d really gone and done it this time, gotten herself kidnapped by a man who had a reason to think she might actually enjoy the experience. Logically she knew the work she’d done for Austin was the reason for her abduction. When she considered her abductor, though, she knew her imagination was also to blame. It and a wayward curiosity had led her into one regrettable indiscretion she was sure he hadn’t forgotten. And if by some outside chance he had forgotten, her uncontrollable, blossoming sexual awareness of him was bound to remind him.

  It wasn’t a pleasant sexual awareness. Quite the contrary, it was particularly unpleasant and heavily laden with guilt. She was aware of every breath he was taking in the small room, every movement he made, and exactly where all those moves were taking him—naked into the shower.

  The awful thing was that she’d imagined him naked at least a dozen times during her last weeks at Bridgeman, Inc. He had the kind of body that did that to a woman, made her imagine all sorts of things. None of the other female attorneys or secretaries had seemed to notice, at least not to the same degree, or so they’d said whenever Johanna had gotten up the nerve and nonchalance to mention Austin’s newest bodyguard. A couple of the less observant women hadn’t even known who she was talking about.

  He did have a chameleon’s talent for blending into his surroundings, for being inconspicuous. But Johanna had noticed him the first time he’d shown up next to her employer, and she had never been able to disconnect her awareness of him. The last time she’d seen him had been proof enough of an attraction that had gone too far.

  She had analyzed the events of that night a hundred different ways and had never come up with a reason for his actions. She had come up with plenty of reasons for her own actions, and none of them showed her in a very good light.

  “Desperate female attorney makes pass at willing bodyguard” was as close as she could get to the truth. Except in the end he hadn’t been willing, and she’d never been completely satisfied that the pass had been hers.

  She had been working late in Austin’s office, checking a last, necessary contract for the next day, when he had walked in, as silently as always. She had often wondered how long he’d been watching her. Of course, knowing wouldn’t have made any difference to what had happened.

  He’d almost kissed her . . . almost, and she hadn’t forgotten how good “almost” had felt.

  She’d been exhausted from overwork and feeling too alone, too abandoned to the night. The last person she’d been prepared to deal with had been Dane Erickson. From the beginning, he had been intriguing, compelling, and too damn good looking, with his street toughness barely concealed by a veneer of sophistication, as if he’d just stepped into Austin’s plush office from the wild side of town...

  * * *

  Johanna leaned back in Austin’s deluxe leather chair and stretched her feet up to rest on a corner of the teak desk. A sheaf of legal documents filled her lap. Fortunately, from what she’d seen so far, the papers were in order. Austin Bridgeman had taken to playing rather fast and loose with the law. She never knew what to expect from him anymore, which was why she had decided to leave. Looking over the contracts for him on such short notice was a final thank-you on her part for the opportunities he’d given her.

  She perused the papers, rubbing the nape of her neck with one hand and yawning. She needed to exercise, or get a chiropractor, or a massage. All the tension in her life seemed to settle in her neck and shoulders. The muscles there were tighter than iron bars. Her mother thought she worked too hard and needed a husband and children. Her father thought she needed to come to work for Lane, Lane, and Sullivan, or give him a son-in-law for the firm, and her sister thought all she really needed was a lover. Lovers, she explained, were where husbands came from.

  And vague language is where lawsuits come from, Johanna thought, drawing a line through a paragraph and making corrective notes in the margin. After another yawn, she propped her chin on her hand and continued reading.

  Working less or working for her father—as much as she loved and admired him—were out of the question. She had followed in his footsteps, but she didn’t want to step in exactly the same places. A love life didn’t seem to be much in the running either, though she’d been thinking about it more than usual lately. Unfortunately the man she’d been thinking about was out of the question.

  She flipped a page, a small smile curving her lips. She was definitely out of line in that area. Too many long days and an equal number of lonely nights had gone to her head. An enigmatic bodyguard with midnight-dark eyes, blond hair, and rare but sinfully suggestive smiles would give her whole family a collective heart attack. But then, her family and acceptable suitors had been her problem all along in finding a Mr. Right. Appropriately perfect men left her cold, and when she did find a man who warmed her imagination, he was totally inappropriate.

  She had talked to a therapist about it once, asking the doctor if she thought it was some residual, latent, adolescent rebellion she hadn’t worked through. Two sessions later there had been no definitive answer, but Johanna had come away from the therapy determined to put her family’s matchmaking to a halt. That had left her with little to do except ignore the whole issue of her nonexistent love life.

  Then Austin had hired a new bodyguard.

  Her finger paused halfway down the page. She read the paragraph again, trying to concentrate. The man had been having that effect on her since the day he’d arrived, and no one could have been more inappropriate for a Chicago Lane than Dane Erickson. Unfortunately no one had ever appealed to her so strongly.

  With effort, she finished the paragraph and moved on to the next one. Another yawn and her concentration wavered, shifting to a much more pleasant subject than the contract in her hand.

  Dane Erickson was so serious most of the time, and so seriously fascinating. It was more than just his looks, though he exuded a sexual magnetism she found impossible to ignore. When he walked into a room, her awareness heighten
ed, and she invariably found herself searching him out. He’d caught her staring at him more than once, much to her embarrassment. The brief but potent smiles he’d given her on those occasions had nearly been her undoing. She was supposed to be above such knee-weakening reactions.

  He was safely off limits for reasons besides his occupation. Office romances were inevitably messy, disastrous affairs, and Austin had called him dangerous. That was part of his appeal, she was sure, but it was also reason enough for her to hold tight to her common sense. There would be no passionate fling between herself and Dane Erickson—no matter how many times the idea came to mind.

  Sighing with exhaustion, she put her pencil down and rubbed the bridge of her nose. She did work too hard. It was time to go home.

  By touching a panel on the desk, she was able to turn out all the lights in the office except for the desk lamp. She set the papers down and swiveled around in the chair to look out over the city. The view from Austin’s office was magnificent, one of the many things she knew she would remember and sometimes miss.

  She was heading to Boulder, Colorado, to a new partnership with an old friend, and Dane Erickson would remain a mystery. All for the best.

  Damn, she thought. That’s the way it always worked in her life. The job came first and fascinating men came last. Resigned to the inevitable, she turned the chair back to the desk.

  “Miss Lane.”

  She jerked her head up, surprised to find the object of her fascination standing in the doorway. The contract papers slid out of her hand and across the desktop.

  “Mr. Erickson.” She managed to speak with difficulty, then quickly looked down and busied herself with the spilled papers. “I . . . uh . . . didn’t think your work kept you at the office so late.”

  “I didn’t think yours did either.”