extreme violence. This was no flight of fearful imagination, but a bona fide premonition.
Late warning. Maybe too late. She had to do something.
She blinked fiercely to clear her head. The bank manager’s steely gaze met hers as they waited for a response from the target bank. He knew, too, that they would have to die. And Dani realized if she didn’t try something in the next few minutes, this would-be hero would.
Even as she tried to formulate a less risky plan, her right hand slid slowly up her body, past her breast, so that her fingers barely touched her collarbone. The robber’s attention stayed on the screen. As if reading her mind, Michaels tilted the screen a little more to the right, providing distraction.
Striking like a coiled rattler, Dani’s hand shot up, grabbed the robber’s wrist and shoved the pistol up and away from her head. Several rounds hit the wall to her right. She dug her nails into the nerve at his wrist, felt her nails cut flesh and saw the gun tumble onto the desk.
A backhanded blow knocked her completely out of the chair and slammed her against the wall. Even while she scrambled upright, she focused on the struggle between Michaels and the robber as they fought for the weapon.
Again, it discharged, shattering the tempered-glass window.
More shots! Chaos! The scene that had flashed through her head earlier morphed to reality. Adrenaline surged and gave her strength.
Desperate, Dani attacked from the rear. She leaped onto the robber’s back and clutched her legs around his hips. She dug her fingers into his face, trying to gouge his eyes, anything to disable him. But her hands slid all over his skin, sticky and wet. To her shock, he crumpled to the floor beneath her and lay still.
For a long moment she couldn’t move. Straddling the perpetrator, her hands still locked around his head, she waited for him to recover and resume fighting.
“It’s over. He’s dead,” a calm, deep voice assured her.
Large hands slid beneath her arms and lifted her off the body. Before his words could register, he had turned her around and embraced her, holding her close, pressing her face to the soft cotton of his shirt. His subtle cologne mixed with the tinny smell of blood.
She pushed herself away from the admittedly warm embrace.
“Thanks, but I’m okay,” she stated, but the words came out a little shaky and breathless, not as firmly as she meant them to. “Are you?”
“I’m fine. Why don’t you go in the other office and sit down while I call the police?” he suggested.
“Check the body,” she ordered. “Just to be—”
“Sure,” he said, finishing her sentence and turning her toward the door, his strong arm locked around her shoulders. “Trust me, he’s dead. Come on now, let’s get you out of here.”
Dani broke away. “Hey, I’m not falling apart, Mr. Michaels, and I don’t need any babying. I’m a federal agent and I can handle a little blood, okay? And rule number one—I check to see if the perp is dead or not.”
His eyebrows flew up. “You’re a what?”
Dani puffed out her cheeks and expelled a breath of exasperation. He was looking at her as if she had sprouted two heads. She reached in her pocket for her credentials folder and whipped it out, letting her badge dangle about a foot from his nose. “Danielle Sweet, Homeland Security Intelligence.”
But he was already shaking his head in obvious disbelief. “That’s pretty damn convenient!” Then he squinted at her. “So you were on to this guy? And you led him into my bank? You endangered the lives of my employees?”
“Oh yeah, I was on to him the instant he stuck his gun in my back. And since we were already at the front door, your bank just seemed like a great place to get the goods on him, so I brought him on in!”
The sudden silence seemed deafening. She suddenly realized just how loudly she’d been screaming at him.
Chapter 2
Dani tried to calm down and contain the shakes. Her whole body seemed to vibrate uncontrollably now that the threat was over.
“What were you doing here in the first place?” Michaels demanded.
Dani rolled her eyes. “Hey! Banking, maybe? Am I allowed?”
“You don’t have an account here!”
She threw up her hands, clenched her fists and turned away so she wouldn’t smack him. After a few deep breaths, she faced him again, measuring her words, moderating them into a somewhat mocking semblance of normalcy. Man, she needed some normalcy right now. “I came to open one!”
Defuse this right now, she ordered herself. Say something nice. Another deep breath. He was pacing now, his stride severely limited by the floor space available. “By the way, thank you for not doing something too stupid and getting us killed.”
A muscle worked in his jaw, clenching, unclenching. He stopped pacing and glared at her, his eyes flashing. “Stupid? You mean like grabbing somebody with a gun pointed at your head? Like leaping on his back? Stupid like that? Dammit, he could have taken your head off, you know that? Of all the freakin’, idiotic—”
“Shut up!” Dani snapped. “He was about to kill us both anyway and you knew it! So don’t you rail at me for—”
“Okay, okay!” he interrupted, struggling with his temper. A moment later he had his palms out in a gesture of surrender. “Let’s let it go. It’s over and we’re both alive. Just calm down, all right?”
“I’m calm as a cucumber, Slick. You’re the one going ape. Now, why don’t you do something constructive like get the hell out of my way?”
His intense gaze remained on hers as his breathing evened out. He jerked one hand toward the dead man. “Be my guest, then. Check the body while I notify the police.”
“Fine,” she snapped. “Do that.”
Ignoring him, Dani crouched beside the dead man and felt his carotid for a pulse. Then she saw why he said it wasn’t necessary. There was a bullet hole right between the eyes, which were open and already glazing over. Plus, he had a massive exit wound at the top of his head.
If she hadn’t been so much shorter, she would have seen it when she’d jumped him. With that thought, she suddenly realized her hands were gummy. She examined them and began to worry about contamination from the blood.
“Bathroom’s that way. Better go wash that off,” Michaels said, pointing. He had gone around to the other side of his desk and stood waiting with the phone to his ear.
His perfect features held an expression of worry now. New frown lines forming. Probably his first serious problem, she thought. Men who looked the way he did must have a really easy skate through life. A hiccup like this was enough to throw him off polite behavior.
Dani felt bad about their heated exchange. Adrenaline could do weird tricks with a person’s attitude. Unfortunately, it seemed to have affected them both the same way. She would need to apologize later.
In
