Avenging Angel

by Janzen, Tara

  “Well, Ms. Lane, I’m not giving you a choice either.” He pulled a gun on her, and she knew she wasn’t in the presence of a saint.

  They were in a standoff, until Dylan stepped into the picture.

  “Drop it, Charlie.”

  “Dylan!” Charlie smiled, but he didn’t lower his gun. “Tell the woman to relax, will you?”

  “She’s a lawyer, Charlie. She doesn’t know how to relax.”

  Johanna didn’t spare Dylan a glance. She was staring at Charlie’s gun, wondering what would happen if she squeezed her trigger and missed him. Who would get hurt? Would she or Dylan die?

  “This is no good, Dylan,” Charlie said.

  “I know about Austin,” Dylan countered. “I know you left the Bureau to work for him. I should have figured you couldn’t have bought your fishing boat on what the government was paying you, not the way you spend money.”

  “Get out of here, Dylan. Go.” Charlie gestured with his free hand. “I only made a deal for the woman, not for you. We were together too long, partner.”

  “Dammit, Charlie. You know it doesn’t work like that.”

  The distant sound of people running up the stairs gave them all pause.

  “Get out of here, Dylan!” Charlie cried. “I saved your life too many times to watch you die tonight! Get out!”

  Dylan didn’t waver, and Johanna knew time had run out. Her hands trembling uncontrollably, she squeezed the trigger—and missed Charlie by a mile.

  He swung on her, his gun leveled, and Dylan shot him. Two men broke from the stairway just as she was grabbed and dragged down from behind. She twisted her body to face her attacker and felt fear well up inside when she saw him. His black hair was slicked back off a decidedly Latino face, and all she could think was that he looked like somebody from a Colombian cartel, one of the Morrow Warner connections mentioned in the weekend newspapers.

  With great difficulty he dragged her with him behind an empty wooden stall. She fought him all the way, until he managed to pin her beneath him and flash his identification.

  “FBI, Ms. Lane. Stay down.”

  The marketplace sounded like a shooting gallery on the other side of the stall. Her heart was racing furiously. She didn’t want to stay down. She had to know what was happening to Dylan.

  The blast of the shotgun told her where he was. In the next instant he was almost on top of her as he slid into the place between the stalls.

  “There’s too many men out there,” he said, talking to the FBI agent who was still holding her. “Your reinforcements have arrived, but I can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys. I’m going after Austin!”

  “Dylan, no!” She lunged for him, but the man gripping her arm didn’t give her a chance. Dylan slipped away from her, running for the stairs. He almost made it.

  One second he was in control, and in the next he was knocked sideways by the bullet that hit him. She rose to her feet in slow-motion horror, watching as he fell, and fell, endlessly down the stairs, until he fell out of view.

  “Dylllan!” she screamed. “Dyllllaaaan!”

  Sixteen

  “There never was a Dylan Jones, Ms. Lane, as I have already told you on numerous occasions. The man you knew was Dane Erickson, and he is dead.” Chief Watkins was as polite as always, icily polite. “Your prying into this area will get you nowhere. If anything, I would think you’d be relieved to know the man who abducted you is gone.”

  Johanna knew he was gone. He’d been “gone” for two and a half months. But she didn’t think he was dead. Austin Bridgeman was dead, though the account of his demise that the papers had given did not match up with the facts Johanna knew. Charlie Holter was dead, shot down by a man who’d trusted him implicitly and been betrayed, shot down to save her life.

  But a man who had never existed couldn’t die. That was the flaw in their reasoning, or a sign of her derangement. Most days she wasn’t sure which.

  She missed him with an ache that left her only in her dreams. She had gone on with her life, spending long weekends in Chicago with her parents, and the other four days in the newly redecorated offices of Wayland and Lane and in her apartment in Boulder. She wasn’t sure why she kept coming back to Chicago, other than to harass Chief Watkins and to remember what it felt like to be safe. She didn’t feel closer to Dylan there.

  She had fallen in love out west, and after another weekend of trying to crawl back into the womb, she decided it was time to go home for good and stop leaning on her mother and father like a three-day crutch every week.

  The plane ride back to Colorado was beginning to feel like a bus trip across town, she’d made it so many times since August. The holidays were coming, and she was going to try not to travel until they arrived. She’d never spent Thanksgiving or Christmas with Dylan, so the time of year shouldn’t have been bringing extra sadness. It was, though. She could feel it creeping up on her with every passing day.

  He’d told her not to forget him, and sometimes in the middle of the night she despaired that she never would be able to forget him. Their time together had been too intense, his leaving had been too sudden, too unresolved.

  I love you, Johanna. You have to know that.

  She knew it, and it was breaking her heart. She couldn’t forget him. She couldn’t let go of him. All she could do was find him.

  * * *

  “This is crazy, Johanna,” Henry said, dogging her steps into her office, crumpling the current page of their appointment calendar in his fist. “You can’t have that man come here. Everybody will think we’re involved in something sleazy.”

  “I am involved in something sleazy,” she said, ignoring the pained expression her words brought to her partner’s face. “A man who saved my life has either died or disappeared and nobody cares except me. It doesn’t get much sleazier than that, Henry.”

  “You know what I mean.” He threw the balled-up page into her wastebasket, then thought better of the action. “Having Albert Nathans come here is bad business. It doesn’t look good.” He bent over to retrieve the page, but apparently had no luck finding it. After tossing a few other papers out, he swore and went down on his knees to search through the basket.

  “Mr. Nathans is an information broker, Henry. He is not a felon.”

  “Only because he hasn’t been caught.” Finding the recalcitrant page, he stood up and flattened it on her desk, smoothing it with his hand. “It’s merely a matter of semantics.”

  “We’re attorneys, Henry,” she said dryly. “It’s always a matter of semantics.”

  Using a pen off her desk, he began methodically blacking out the words detailing her two o’clock appointment. “I’m going to put this back on Mrs. Hunt’s desk, in the appointment book. I will be in my office when Mr. Nathans arrives, and I will remain there until after he leaves. My mother will be taking dictation for the hour.”

  “I think that’s a good idea, Henry.” She watched him scribble on the appointment page, then cast her eyes heavenward. Sometimes she didn’t understand herself. How could she have possibly chosen Henry Wayland as her best friend and partner, then gone and fallen in love with a man like Dylan Jones?

  Two weeks later the only question she was asking herself was how much longer she would keep trying before she accepted the truth. Mr. Nathans’s highly unorthodox and probably illegal investigation had turned up five Dylan Joneses, none of whom had been her Dylan Jones.

  He’d also found out that the FBI agent on the scene, Rodrigo Aragon, had been reassigned to some netherworld department in Washington D.C.

  It was more than Watkins ever would have told her, but it wasn’t what she’d wanted to know. She wanted to know where Dylan was—alive or dead. She had to know.

  * * *

  “The woman is damned persistent,” Watkins said to the man across from him.

  “How’s the senator?”

  “He’ll come out in one piece, unless the Ethics Committee decides to actually do something.” Watkins laughed, a
deliberately wry sound. “Given that, if I was a betting man, I’d bet he’ll come out in one piece and probably enjoy many years of continued service to the American people, except for the particular citizens he’s giving us to hang on the Bridgeman cross.”

  “She’s out of it, though, right?”

  “You mean Johanna Lane?” Watkins asked.

  “You know who I mean.”

  Watkins lowered his gaze for a moment before meeting the other man’s eyes. “If everything you’ve given me pans out, she’s home free. But it’s going to cost you your job.”

  Now it was the man’s turn to laugh as he pushed away from the table. “Don’t do me any favors, like trying to get me reinstated. Okay?”

  Watkins watched the man walk the length of the downtown Chicago restaurant, his stride taking him past highly polished dark wood tables laden with linen and crystal. Dressed in a suit and tie, he fit into the popular businessmen’s lunch spot and watering hole like a hand into a glove. But Watkins knew it was all a facade. What he didn’t know, what he would probably never know, was whether Dylan Jones had gone bad with his ex-partner and managed to cover his tracks, saving himself from Leavenworth by the skin of his teeth, or if he’d really been out there on his own for all those months.

  * * *

  Johanna hung the last ornament, a fragile crystal star, on her Christmas tree and stood back to survey her handiwork. She should have gone to Chicago. She shouldn’t have stayed in Boulder with only Henry and his mother to fill in the empty places. She’d made some friends in the last few months and had a number of parties coming up, some social, some political, some business, most all three. She’d had her first Colorado date three weeks earlier, with a Boulder real-estate developer, an occupation, he’d explained, that made him a living contradiction. Everybody who moved to Boulder wanted to close the door behind them and shove home the dead bolt.

  The date had been fine. The man had been charming, intelligent, and funny. He had not been Dylan Jones.

  She was seeing a therapist again, trying to come to grips with a plaguing sense of loss, trying to find closure where there had been none. It was a long process at a hundred bucks an hour.

  She took another step back, but it didn’t help. Her tree looked exactly as it had the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that. She should have gone to Chicago.

  The phone rang, and she reached behind her to answer it, keeping a critical eye on the tree. She was sure it looked exactly as it had the year before, which should have been impossible. Maybe she needed new ornaments.

  “Hello?”

  “Johanna.”

  The voice coming over the phone was unique, soft and gravelly, and it made her knees buckle. Her hand came up to her chest. She slowly lowered herself to the floor, before her legs gave way completely.

  “It’s Dylan,” he said when she didn’t say anything.

  She nodded as if he were in the room.

  “I’d like to see you.”

  “When?” she managed, forcing the word out around the million and one questions whirling through her mind.

  “Tonight. Now. I’m only a block from your apartment. Did you have other plans?”

  “No.” She felt breathless. Dylan was alive.

  “May I come over?” he asked after a short hesitation.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll see you in a minute.”

  He hung up on his end, but Johanna forgot to do the same until the phone started beeping. Her hands shook as she placed the receiver back down where it belonged.

  There were a hundred things she could do to get ready, and there was absolutely nothing she could do to prepare herself for seeing him again. In the end, nothing won out, and she was still sitting on the floor when her buzzer sounded.

  She scrambled to her feet and raced for the intercom.

  “Yes?” she asked, pressing the button down.

  “It’s Dylan.”

  She rang him up and stood by the open door, waiting for the elevator. When he stepped out, her knees weakened again.

  It was Dylan.

  She covered her mouth with her hand to keep back a sob. Then he had her in his arms, holding her, the two of them rocking together, with her crying and him talking to her softly.

  “I’m sorry, so sorry,” he said. “I wanted to call you so many times.”

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked between the tears. “If you were alive, why didn’t you come to me? You promised you would call.”

  “For a long time I didn’t have a phone.”

  She lifted her head and looked into his eyes. He wasn’t lying to her. There was nothing in his gaze except honesty and regrets.

  “Why? Where were you? What happened that night?” Her questions tumbled over one another.

  “Can we go inside first?” The barest smile touched the corners of his mouth.

  They walked inside, still holding each other, and when the door was closed, she turned to him.

  “If you want to kiss me, you better do it now, Dylan,” she said, “because I’m going to be too damn mad at you later.”

  In answer his mouth came down on hers. He shrugged out of his overcoat and let it fall to the floor while he wrapped her in his arms.

  It was a homecoming, the smell, and taste, and feel of her. She was everything he’d been without for too long. So he kissed her, and he kissed her again, and when she didn’t resist, he slid his hands up under her shirt. He held her breasts in his palms, caressing the heavenly weight and softness of her, and he told her once more that he loved her.

  She whispered his name and sparked a need inside him he didn’t want to fight.

  He hadn’t intended to walk into her apartment and ravish her. He wanted to talk with her, and hold her, then make love with her if everything felt right. He wasn’t sure what they had together, and he didn’t think it was possible for her to know either.

  But the heat of her response told him that like him, she needed more than a kiss to remake the closeness they’d shared. The warmth of her skin beneath his hands was the sign of life he’d sought in his mind all those months without her, and the way she trailed her lips over his face and neck was more than a physical gesture of desire.

  “Shh,” he whispered, kissing the tears off both her cheeks. “I’m not leaving until you ask me to leave. We have all the time you’re willing to give.”

  “I missed you. I missed you so terribly, and now you’re here, and I can’t believe it, and it hurts. I’m so angry I could hit you.”

  She was babbling, her head buried into the front of his shirt, but she was entitled. They needed time. He held her and kissed her face and let her go on and on.

  And on and on.

  Eventually they moved to the couch, then Dylan managed to make a pot of coffee in her very fancy kitchen while she took a bathroom break. Later on they made sandwiches together. He told her about being shot in Pike Street Market and falling down the stairs, the concussion, the pain when he’d come around and found the agent in charge leaning over him, trying to decide if he’d live or not.

  She told him Rodrigo Aragon had taken her out of the market the other way, back up the hill. They had cordoned off the stairs, refusing to allow anyone through. Henry had shown up the next morning and immediately asserted her rights.

  “They took me to a Seattle hospital,” Dylan said. “I was there for a week before they moved me to Chicago.”

  “How did your stitches heal?” she asked, curling her feet under her on the couch and taking another sip of coffee.

  “Pretty good.”

  “Can I see?” She touched the front of his shirt, and his hand came up to cover hers.

  “If you start taking my clothes off, counselor, I’m going to want to take you to bed,” he told her, his voice growing husky.

  A trace of color spread across her face, and she withdrew her hand. It wasn’t the reaction he’d hoped for, but it was the one he’d half expected. She did have a shy s
treak, and that was okay. Life was stretching out before him brighter than it had in years. He could wait.

  “What happened in Chicago?” she asked.

  “Basically I was arrested. But they didn’t have good evidence against me, and I had a whole lot of information they wanted. I told them I would give them everything they needed to get the senator talking to them, if they would give me you.” He looked down at her and ran his hand over her shoulder. “I think I made a good deal. Of course, the Feds don’t like their own people cutting deals with them, so I’m officially unemployed.”

  “I wondered why I hadn’t heard from anybody about Morrow Warner,” she said.

  “You will, but only to a point. If it goes beyond verifying information, I can get it stopped.”

  She lowered her lashes and was quiet for a long time. “Where do we go from here, Dylan?”

  “Nowhere, I hope.”

  Her startled gaze flew up to meet his, and he hastily explained.

  “I mean that literally. I want to stay right here, on this couch, in this apartment, with you. But I know that’s a lot to ask.”

  “You want to stay here with me?” she asked, surprise evident in the lift of her eyebrows.

  “It’s crossed my mind a few times,” he admitted, then added slowly, “Especially tonight, though not necessarily on the couch.”

  Her color deepened, and he brushed his mouth over the tender skin between her cheek and ear.

  “I’d like the chance to get worn-out making love to you,” he said, kissing her even more softly. “I’d like the chance to get real bored watching you brush your teeth, and to reach my limit on sitting around reading with your feet in my lap. I’d like the most exciting thing in my life to be the moment I wake up and realize you’re lying next to me . . . preferably naked, and warm from where I’d held you all night.”