Hot Intent (Hqn) (21 page)

She ran after him, but he’d already left the apartment. Crap, he was fast. She threw open the front door. The elevator was on its way downstairs already. She headed for the stairwell and flew down it, taking huge chunks of steps with every bound. This was her last chance to have her say. Once he left the building, she would never find him again.

She tore out into the lobby with the intent to head for the driveway to block his car from leaving the parking garage. But as she raced outside, she spotted his silhouette striding down the street. He was on foot. She tore after him.

“Alex Peters! I have one more thing to say to you!” she shouted.

She heard the gunshot, a sharp clear sound piercing the silent night. Felt something hot slam into her chest. Was aware of being spun around and thrown into the door at her back. Registered the sound of shattering glass and remembered the pavement rising up to meet her.

But then everything started to fade, gray heading toward black. And truth be told, she was kind of glad for that. She probably couldn’t have watched Alex walk out of her life for good, anyway. Poor Dawn. Poor Alex. Who would love either one of them now?

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A
T
THE
SOUND
of the gunshot, Alex spun down behind a car and whipped out his pistol. Sonofabitch. He’d been so furious with Katie he’d barged out here right into the damned line of fire. Of course, the CIA had sharpshooters out here to take him down.

He scanned the rooftops looking for sniper perches. Where were the sight lines to him? Too many. He had to move to better cover. He spied a vestibule to the building next to his about twelve feet away. He could make it. He gathered himself, sprang forward and dived low, rolling into the deep doorway.

Huh. No gunshot. Why hadn’t the sniper taken the shot? Surely the guy’d had time to get a bead on him and knew Alex would head for better cover quickly.

He eased forward, staying in the shadows, but close enough to the street to scan the area. If there was a shooter out there, the guy was hidden too well for him to spot. Deep, waiting silence settled over the street.

Into the night, he heard a faint sound. A moan.

He was not a trauma surgeon for nothing. He’d heard that sound a thousand times. A semiconscious person in severe pain. Who in the hell was moaning out here...?

Knowing exploded across his brain with the force of the gunshot.
Katie.
The shooter had taken out Katie. The bastard was using her as bait to draw him out.

He should walk away from here. Let her bleed out. He owed her nothing. He wasn’t a gullible amateur to fall for such a thing. And yet, he checked out a route back to his building’s entrance that would give him maximum cover.
What the hell.
The act of moving back toward her should cause the sniper to take another shot at him and reveal his position.

He darted from the safety of the doorway to the side of a parked car. No shot. Hmm. The sniper must be off to the side and not have a clear shot yet. Alex moved behind a steel trash can built around a tree trunk. He had significantly less cover here. The shooter should be able to get a bead on him from most of the street now. He braced for the hit, covering his head with his arms to prevent an outright kill shot.

Still no shot. What was up with that?

He looked around and spied Katie lying facedown in a spray of broken glass. Blood was spreading from underneath her, a river of red among the crystalline shards.

Frowning, he moved away from the trash can toward her prone form. Why was the shooter waiting? Surely there was a sanction out on him by now, a kill-on-sight order. Even if the order was just to bring him in, they had to know he was armed and dangerous. At a minimum, any half-decent sniper would want to wing him. To drop him and take him out of commission. And yet, no shot was forthcoming. Had the sniper fled already?

Why in the world would the sniper shoot Katie and then leave the area without shooting him, too? Unless...

Oh, holy God. No.
Swearing violently, Alex moved over to Katie fast and rolled her over. She was bleeding from a wound in the upper left quadrant of her chest.

He worked quickly, his movements practiced as he ripped away her shirt to expose what turned out to be two wounds—an entry and an exit wound. He used the torn cloth to fashion makeshift pressure pads. Pressing down hard on the wounds and making her moan more loudly, he used his left hand to pull his necktie free. He bound the pressure pads in place rapidly, and then grabbed her arms and hoisted her over his back in a fireman’s carry.

He took off jogging down the street toward a major thoroughfare. When he reached it, he started watching for a taxi and urgently hailed the first one he saw.

The cabbie slowed and rolled down his window to yell, “Hey, buddy. I’ve got a fare, but I’ll radio for another cab to head over here!”

Alex nodded his thanks and kept moving. Mustn’t stop. Mustn’t make himself and Katie any easier targets than they already were. God, he felt naked out here like this. Every cell in his body screamed for him to take cover. To go into full stealth mode. But Katie was shot and unconscious, and he had no choice but to run along a damned city street for all the world to see.

That fucker had shot at Katie.

Why in bloody hell was
she
the target and not him?

As desperate as he was to get the hell away from her, his gut told him it was vital to answer that question before he disappeared.
Goddammit.

*

K
ATIE
WOKE
UP
SLOWLY
. Her left shoulder felt like it had been smashed with a baseball bat. It throbbed horribly and felt stiff and swollen. She reached for it but her right hand encountered tape....

Her eyes flew open and she craned to look down at herself.
A bandage?

She looked around. She was lying in a double bed in a plainly furnished room. It didn’t look like a hotel room or a hospital. Someone moved beyond the doorway and she sat up carefully. Crap. The room spun around her for several unpleasant seconds. It finally settled down and she stood up cautiously. No more whirligig, thank God.

She felt strangely weak and light-headed as she shuffled to the doorway and peered out. A plain living room furnished with only a sofa, coffee table and television on a stand unfolded before her. There was no carpet on the dirty wood floor, and plastic roller blinds on the windows were pulled down.

Off to one side a small, dingy kitchen was visible. She caught movement in there and headed for it.

Alex looked up from a glass of orange juice he’d just poured. “How do you feel?” he asked emotionlessly. Professionally. Like a doctor talking to a patient.

“Like crap.”

“Drink this. You lost a fair bit of blood.”

“What happened?”

“Sniper took a shot at you. An inch lower and he’d have killed you. Must’ve been a long-range shot for him to have missed. You should be dead.”

That last sentence was delivered with all the sympathy of a robot. Which was almost more upsetting than the news that she’d been shot. She’d almost died, apparently, and even that wasn’t enough to break through the damned walls Alex had thrown up against her. He really was lost to her, after all. The grief of it hurt almost worse than her wounds. She took the juice and downed it all.

“More?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

“How’s the pain on a scale of one to ten? Can you function?”

Seriously? He could make polite doctor conversation with her like he wasn’t shattering her world with every unemotional, detached word he uttered? She forced herself to consider his question. “A six. It hurts a lot, but if I had to walk or run, I probably could for a little ways. Where are we?”

“Safe house.”

“Still in Washington?”

“Close by.”

“You have a safe house in Washington in addition to your fortress of a condo?” she asked, startled.

“Never can be too careful.”

“Or paranoid.”

“It’s not paranoia if people are really shooting at you.”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Speaking of which, who’s shooting at you?” He turned fully to face her and met her gaze directly for the first time.

“They were shooting at me?” she echoed blankly.

He nodded once, tersely. “I gave the bastard a clear shot at me and he didn’t take it. The sniper was definitely targeting you. Probably thinks he killed you, too.”

“Um, that’s good?” she tried.

“It is good. Gives us a window to figure out who in the hell sent someone to kill you before they come after you again.”

“They’ll come after me again?” she squeaked.

He made a “don’t be stupid” face at her. Okay, she deserved that. If she were under orders to kill someone and realized she had failed, she would go back to finish the job off. She sighed. “Unlike you, I don’t have a long list of enemies eager to do me in.”

“Do you have any enemies at all?” he asked a shade derisively.

“Actually, no. I mean, there were a couple bitches in high school who hated my guts for no apparent reason, but I highly doubt any ex-hormonal teens are climbing on rooftops and taking potshots at me after all this time.”

“This is serious,” he snapped.

“I am being serious,” she snapped back. “Kindergarten teachers don’t run around making mortal enemies.”

“Apparently, you do.”

“This isn’t about Dawn again, is it?”

“Doubtful. I called your dad while you were sleeping. He said there’s been no unusual activity up their way. He had a couple of your brothers come over to the house to beef up security around Dawn for now.”

Wow. That was actually pretty thoughtful of him. So unlike him in his current asshole-ish frame of mind. “Uh, thanks,” she mumbled.

He shrugged.

“Don’t attempt to use your left arm or move it. The bullet passed through just above your left lung and below the shoulder joint. You were lucky the guy didn’t use a hollow point round. The exit wound in your back is only a few millimeters larger than the entry wound, so I’m guessing he went with a Teflon-tip bullet. Which means we’re looking at a pro. Snipers prefer hard-tip shells—they fly truer.”

She truly did not care what type of bullet had nearly killed her. At the moment she was less interested in his spy self than his doctor self. “What did you do to fix my shoulder?” she asked.

“Cleaned the wound mostly. Had to cauterize a small artery and then stitch it all up. You really were incredibly lucky.”

Yeah. Incredibly lucky that a trauma surgeon with tons of experience treating gunshot wounds happened to be a few yards away from her when she got shot. Incredibly lucky that he had actually turned around and came back to help her. Incredibly lucky that he kept a crash pad nearby and usually traveled with a wide array of medical gear in his luggage.

“Thanks for saving me, Alex.”

His answer was quick. Sharp. “Don’t thank me. I only came back because I thought the sniper was using you as bait. I needed him to take another shot so I could get a position fix on him.”

Jerk.
But after her reflexive reaction, she paused to actually consider what he’d said, tilting her head to study him. Was he being honest, or was he just covering up the fact that he’d cared enough about her to come back for her?

God, he was harder to read than ever. She was really getting tired of that cold shell the real Alex was hiding behind. Assuming this robot of a man wasn’t the real Alex nowadays.

“Now what?” she asked.

One corner of his mouth turned up reluctantly. She supposed it was just like old times for her to be asking him that.

He answered, “Now I do some poking around. Figure out who wants you dead.”

“What kind of poking around?”

“Computer poking to start with.” To that end, he moved past her, being careful to avoid physical contact. Was he being considerate of her injured shoulder, or was he just loath to touch her?

Frowning, she followed him into the living room. He sat down on the sofa, propped his feet on the coffee table and cranked up a laptop computer.

“Can I help poke?” she asked reluctantly. She was still furious with him, but the guy had saved her life. It was hard to hate him after that.

He shook his head absently, already typing away. Truth be told, he probably did know just about every important detail of her life already. Her life was pretty simple, and she’d always been an open book to him.

She picked up the TV remote off the coffee table and channel-surfed, bored. Every now and then a sharp pain knifed through her shoulder, but she suffered in silence. She’d be damned if she’d whine to Alex Peters. Sometimes, having the McCloud stubborn streak truly sucked.

In between dealing with the bouts of pain, she fretted over Alex’s earlier accusations back at the condo. She was an anchor around his neck? He’d been wrong to trust her? She’d betrayed him? She didn’t have the first idea how to convince him he was wrong, now that he’d fixed the ideas in his head as fact.

Personally, she didn’t think she’d performed too badly in Cuba. Things had gotten pretty dicey there for a while, and she’d followed his instructions and pulled her weight while they were together. She had managed to make her way to Guantánamo all by herself, too, which was no small feat. And then there was his rescue. Although it was probably an unrepeatable, minor miracle that she’d pulled it off, still, she’d pulled it off.

Now that she stopped to think about it, she hadn’t done half-bad for being just a kindergarten teacher. A trained field operative couldn’t have done much better. “Tell me, Alex. How could I have performed any better than a trained spy in Cuba? I stayed alive, I didn’t get you killed and, furthermore, I managed to rescue you. What else did you want from me?”

He stared at her silently, a stubborn look on his face. She would take that as tacit admission that she had a point.

As for the rest of it, the not trusting her and believing so easily that she would betray him—those accusations concerned her more. They spoke to his core distrust of all women. She was more convinced than ever that she
had
to find his mother and unravel that mystery if she was ever to salvage him from the morass of his broken soul. Of course, he would tell her to forget trying. To let him stew in his own private corner of hell.

It was tempting to walk away from him. His problems loomed larger than she felt like she could conquer. And his verbal attack earlier at the condo had been almost more than she could absorb. She might have been strong enough to save his life in Cuba, but she doubted she was strong enough to save his soul.

But then he had to go and save her life. To come back for her after she was shot. The McCloud men took owing someone their life pretty seriously. And no surprise, it turned out she felt the exact same way. Even if Alex was doing his best to deny the debt she owed him.

How could one man send so damned many mixed messages in so short a time? She fell asleep fretting about it on her end of the sofa and without finding any answers.

*

W
HEN
SHE
WOKE
UP
, the apartment was silent and dark, lit only by the flickering light of the television. Alex was nowhere in sight. Alarmed, she bolted to her feet and raced for the bedroom.