Dangerous Passion Read online

  They went down like felled trees: one-two-three-four. She still hadn’t registered what she’d seen when the man straightened, and—completely non-winded, completely in control—pulled out something sleek and black from his pocket and spoke into it quietly in a language she didn’t understand, then flipped it closed.

  Leather Coat lay on the ground in a fetal position, his desperate gasps for breath echoing off the walls of the alley. The man who had attacked Dark Hair was on his side, eyes rolled up in his head. The man in the fleece track suit lay still, unconscious, his arm bent at an unnatural angle. The man in the bomber jacket had gleaming white bone showing through his jeans, blood pooling under him. The kick had smashed his femur. He was bleeding profusely, the rain sluicing the blood-red water under him into the drains.

  Grace stood in the rain, shocked and shivering.

  The dark-haired man looked down at the four men for a heartbeat, his face cold and remote, then bent calmly and snapped their necks with an efficient twist of his huge hands. She could hear cartilage crack, four times. Then he calmly scooped up his two guns and his knives.

  Grace bent over, ready to vomit her guts out, when a strong hand took hold of her arm. “We don’t have time for that,” the dark-haired man said. “Sorry.”

  She straightened and looked him full in the face, wincing, expecting a monster, expecting to see brutality and savagery. What she saw instead was a weary kind of gentleness and what looked an awful lot like remorse.

  “I’m so sorry.” His deep voice was low as he wrapped a huge hand around her arm. “For everything. But now we must go.”

  Though his voice was calm, he moved fast. In a moment, they were at the mouth of the alley, moving out into the street. He still had his hand around her arm. He wasn’t holding her tightly enough to hurt, but he seemed to be able to propel her forward through the rain as if she had wheels instead of feet.

  In an instant, they were out on the sidewalk and the man was checking the street carefully, the kind of survey a soldier would give to enemy terrain.

  The bell over the gallery door rang and Harold appeared in the doorway. He clutched the doorjamb for support. One eye was swollen shut and his face was blood streaked. He blinked, then saw her. Grace’s heart clenched as she saw relief flood his face. His free hand reached out to her, shaking, half in and half out of the doorway. “Grace. Oh my God, you’re alive.” Harold’s trembling voice cracked, barely audible over the rain.

  Tears flooded her eyes. Harold, her friend. She started forward and was held back by the dark-haired man’s strong hand around her arm.

  She met his eyes. “Let me go.” She wanted to shout, but her voice came out a hoarse whisper. She pulled against his hand, but it was like pulling against a steel pillar. He wasn’t letting her go.

  “Grace,” Harold quavered, hand outstretched.

  Every muscle in her body was tense and shaking, including the muscles in her throat. She had to cough to speak. “Please.” She was trembling so hard she could barely stand. “Let me go to him. He’s wounded, he needs help.”

  The rain was pelting down hard now, moving in sheets down the street. She was soaked and chilled to the bone. She was scared and she wanted to get to Harold right now. If she was scared and hurting, he would be doubly so.

  The man had maneuvered himself so that he was between her and the street. His shoulders were so broad she couldn’t see around him, he blocked off her entire visual horizon. He scrutinized the surrounding buildings again.

  The rain was making the blood on Harold’s face run, his white shirt splashed with pale pink color, plastering his sparse gray hair against the skull. He swayed.

  “Oh God.” Grace’s heart was pounding. She put her hand over the man’s where he was grasping her upper arm, his hand so big it met around her arm, coat and all, and nearly snatched her hand away at the heat. It was freezing cold outside, but his huge hand was so hot it felt like an iron against her wet coat. “Let me go to him, please.”

  Another tug, the man’s hands tightening further, and then suddenly…Harold disappeared. Or his head did. Where his head had been there was a pink mist dissipating fast in the rain. Half a second later, Grace was facedown on the sidewalk and a ton of male was on top of her. Something was pinging, gouging holes in the pavement, in the walls of the gallery. Shards of concrete rained down on her.

  Grace was so shocked, it took her long seconds to realize what the sharp cracks were.

  “Goddammit. A sniper.” The deep, low voice was speaking right into her ear, so close she could feel the puffs of his breath. He lifted and pulled her closer to the curb until she was resting against the front fender of a big black vehicle. “The engine block should stop a bullet. Stay here and don’t move.”

  Another crack sounded and his heavy body jolted.

  Grace lifted her head slightly to look at him. She didn’t process his words in any way. She looked back down the street to where a limp collection of clothes lay sprawled across the doorway to the gallery, the rain washing red, then pink, into the gutter. None of this made any sense, least of all the remains of her best friend, a shattered mass of pink-and-gray flesh.

  “Harold,” she whispered, her voice shaking so hard she could barely articulate.

  “Is dead,” the man said brutally. “Now we have to stay alive. No, dammit.” He brought an arm like iron over her back. She’d been blindly trying to rise up, putting her shaking hands on the ground to lift herself up to…to go to Harold.

  To do something.

  “Stay down, dammit,” the man on top of her hissed. One huge hand covered the back of her head and pressed until her cheek lay on the rough pavement. She watched the big raindrops ping and bounce off the concrete, her mind completely blank, empty.

  The heavy man on top of her shifted and started talking in a low, deep, urgent voice. What was he saying? Whatever it was, there was no possible response in her. She was too shocked to make out more than a few words here and there. Sniper…west side of Lexington, second-story window, come from Park…

  It took her several seconds to realize that he wasn’t talking to her but into a cell. He was discussing some kind of strategy. The words flew into her head and then right back out again. The only thing that penetrated the fog in her head was the deep calm of his voice, the assurance. He could have been a man discussing the menu of that night’s meal. It was amazing to think that voice came from a man under fire.

  Even his body was calm. His coat must have been open because she could feel the heat of his wide chest against her back. His heartbeat was strong and steady, unlike her own trip-hammering one, beating wild and high in her chest. His breathing was calm, regular, while she was gulping in great gasps of air that choked her and burned her lungs.

  A click and the cell phone closed.

  Tears were running down her face, lost in the rain.

  “My men are coming.” That deep, calm voice next to her ear again. It was insane, but somehow it calmed her, just a little. “I’ll get you out of here, I promise.”

  A huge hand planted itself next to her face on the pavement. He was holding his gun, big and black and oily-looking. Something else caught her attention. A big pool of deep red forming underneath her, spreading and turning pink in the rain.

  She was shot! Oh my God, she’d been shot!

  Grace stopped breathing for a moment, trying to take stock through her shattered senses. She was freezing, lying in a puddle of red-tinged water, her cheek grinding against the rough pavement, trying to breathe, though the man on top of her weighed a ton. She was cold and shocked and terrified.

  But not wounded.

  The amount of blood that was now flowing freely down into the gutters was from a serious wound and wasn’t coming from her. Couldn’t. She’d have felt a wound that deep.

  “You’re—” Her voice wasn’t coming out at all. She tried again. “You’re wounded.”

  He grunted in answer and shrugged, the movement sending a fresh welling o
f red onto the pavement.

  Grace chanced a look upward, trying to gauge how badly he was wounded. God, if he was dying, what could she do?

  But he didn’t look like he was dying. His face didn’t in any way betray that he was wounded. He wasn’t grimacing in pain, he wasn’t pale. His skin was that same smooth olive tone as before and he looked as if he were trying to figure out a particularly difficult chess problem, not as if he were in a life-or-death situation with a hole in his chest and a man with a rifle just waiting for them to show. Shockingly, when he met her eyes, he even smiled.

  It was faint and over almost before it began, but it was definitely a smile. Dying men don’t smile. Or at least she imagined not.

  Only one way to find out. “Are we going to die here?” she whispered.

  “No.” His jaws clenched. “Nothing will happen to you, I swear. I won’t let it.”

  He rolled away from her, gun at the ready. Grace twisted her head to watch him. His parka had a big hole in it and underneath that, a big hole in the shoulder, oozing blood.

  “My God,” she whispered. “That’s serious.” Her fingers scrabbled for her purse. It had fallen in the middle of the sidewalk, the long strap facing them, thank God. She caught the tip and started pulling it toward her. “I’ve got a scarf in my purse. I can use it as a pressure bandage to stop—”

  The world blew up in her face. One second her purse was inching its way to her and the next there was a big crater in the pavement and tiny pieces of black leather floated in the air.

  Grace’s ears rang as all outside sound was cut out. Her face and neck hurt. When she put her hand to her face, it came away wet and red.

  All her senses were gone. She was screaming but she couldn’t hear herself. She’d lost all sense of up or down and it was only when the man’s face came into view that she realized she’d been blown on to her back.

  His mouth was moving, the strong cords in his neck were standing out, so it was entirely possible he was shouting, but she couldn’t hear a thing. It was like being dead, or halfway into a coma. Large hands were frantically touching her all over. His long fingers sifted through her hair, feeling every inch of her skull.

  She winced when he touched the back of her head. It was incredibly painful. Maybe she wasn’t dead, after all.

  The man threw his black parka onto the sidewalk and when that was blasted away, he lifted himself up, big black gun in hand. He grasped the gun with both hands, sighting over the top of the roof of the car, and shot three times. She couldn’t hear anything but she could see his hand buck slightly with each shot, then come straight back to the position it had been in before. Three pretty, bright brass casings twirled in the air. One fell on her hand and she jerked to roll it off. It was hot and burned her.

  Then suddenly she was lifted to her feet, an iron arm around her waist, and she was half carried to a waiting car on the street. Men were all around her now, in a tight circle, backs to her. Big men, dressed in black, all carrying weapons.

  She was literally thrown into the backseat of a large car, her head banging against the far window. Another body piled in, the door slamming closed just as the car took off so fast it pressed her against the seat.

  A second later, the car took a corner violently. She bounced off the door and would have fallen to the floor if an arm hadn’t come around her shoulders, anchoring her to a hard male body.

  The car raced through the streets, veering wildly around corners. Grace would have been tossed brutally around if she weren’t clamped to the man’s side.

  She burrowed into him, the one steady thing in a wildly careening universe. She’d seen five men killed, she’d seen her best friend’s head blown off, someone had shot at her. It was as if she’d entered another dimension, a world of darkness and danger, feral and lethal.

  A deep, calm voice sounded in her ear. “It will be all right.”

  No, no it wouldn’t be all right. Not ever again.

  She closed her eyes and clung to him as they raced through the streets. The big car had excellent suspension and the driver was superb. They were traveling as fast as an ambulance or a police car racing after a suspect, but of course without the siren, so the driver had to zip around other cars like a crazed man. It was a miracle they didn’t crash and burn.

  Grace was in a fog of pain and shock, with barely the energy to hope that the car wouldn’t run into a light pole or overturn at a corner. She rocked against the man holding her as his blood soaked through her coat. When she felt the wetness she pulled away, horrified to see the front of her coat wet with his blood. She looked up at him, at that calm, strong face. He looked as if absolutely nothing was wrong. As if he hadn’t been assaulted, shot at, wounded.

  But the wound was real, she could see the mangled flesh. “You need to close that wound with something or you’ll bleed out.”

  What to use to staunch the wound? The scarf in her purse was long gone. A shrug and her coat was off. The lining was a silk and polyester blend. Maybe that would do as a pressure bandage, though she didn’t know the absorption properties of polyester. Still, it was the only thing she had, so she started ripping the lining. Her hand was covered by his broad, olive-toned one.

  “Not necessary.”

  “You’re bleeding!” Grace could hear the hysteria in her voice. Of all the horrible things that had happened since she’d walked into Harold’s gallery, this was one she could do something about. Not much, but something. “We have to stop the bleeding.” She batted his hand away, crumpled up the back panel of her jacket, pressed it against his wound and held it tightly.

  Surely she was hurting him, but he gave no sign of that, not even a grunt. He just closed his eyes when she pressed against his shoulder.

  “Sorry,” she whispered. He looked a little pale now, though it was hard to tell in the darkened cabin of the car. “I know I’m hurting you. But we’ll be at the hospital soon and they’ll stitch you up. It will be okay, you’ll see.”

  She threw his words of comfort right back at him. The usual cheery words, words that were often overused and were often untrue. Life sometimes opened wounds that never healed. She hoped this one would. He’d saved her life.

  The man leaned his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. One big hand came up to cover hers. It was still shockingly warm, considering they’d been in the freezing rain and that he’d lost a lot of blood. “Not going to the hospital,” he said softly. “Not safe.”

  Grace waited a few beats while what he said penetrated her weary brain, then jerked when she realized what he’d said. “That’s insane. Of course we have to take you to the hospital. You’ve been shot.”

  His eyes opened suddenly, looking at her intently. Their faces were only inches apart. His eyes were chocolate brown, intelligent, weary. He reached up a hand to touch the scrapes and cuts on her face. His fingertips came away red and he held them up, studying them. “And you’ve been shot at.” Something flashed in his eyes, something hot and dangerous. “I’d kill them again for this. I’m sorry it was quick.”

  Grace shivered. It was as if someone had opened a window and let in the chill winter air. “Never mind that, they’re all dead. Now we have to deal with your wound.”

  “Yes, and yours. Just not in a hospital.”

  Grace blinked. “If not in a hospital, then where?”

  He glanced out the window, jaw muscles jumping. “Here.”

  The car took a sudden turn into a garage entrance, plunging full speed down a ramp, braking inches from a concrete wall. Grace would have fallen to the floor if the man hadn’t braced her. The car was still rocking when the passenger doors were wrenched open and Grace was lifted out by two men.

  Armed men surrounded the car and she found herself in the middle of a little phalanx, together with the dark-haired man. The armed men moved fast, as a unit. In an instant they were in an elevator. It was large enough to accommodate the team, and rose quickly. Grace looked up above the door to see what floor they
were going to, but there was nothing. No indication of what floors they passed. She glanced to the side, to the big shiny brass panel with the CLOSE DOORS button. It was the only button on the panel. They were in an elevator that only stopped at one floor. At the top of a building, apparently, because they rose at an ear-popping pace.

  The men stood at attention, surrounding them with their bodies, weapons drawn.

  One of the men, tall and very fit, with a white streak in his black hair, turned to the man with her. “Glad you’re safe, Drake.” He glanced down at the shoulder wound, unflinching, as if he’d seen many of them. “Dr. Kane’s on his way, just like you asked.”

  Drake. The man’s name was Drake. She had no idea if that was his first name or his last name.

  She had no clue who he was, or where she was. All she knew was that she had been caught in the middle of what looked like an assassination attempt in which her best friend had violently lost his life. She was now in an elevator in the middle of a group of hard-looking armed men and had no idea what plans they had for her.

  All of a sudden, it occurred to Grace that she was a witness. A witness to four murders. Five, counting Harold. Actually, six, assuming this Drake had killed the sniper. And they were definitely not headed toward the nearest police station so she could testify to what she’d seen.

  She looked around, her heart starting to pound. Every man there was taller than her, way bigger than her, immensely tougher. They looked strong and dangerous, none more than their boss, the man they called Drake.

  He hadn’t threatened her in any way, it was true. Indeed, the threat of harm to her had been used against him.

  But she was in an enclosed space with him and this small army of men, who looked perfectly capable of violence, and she knew for a fact that Drake was capable of terrifying, swift and terrible violence.

  If he meant her harm in any way, she was as good as dead. Nothing she could do could stop him or even slow him down. She didn’t even know where she was, and no one else knew where she was.