and dirty-blond hair. They looked alike, possibly related. They seemed to be the largest and strongest men in the room.
Come on. Over here. She fidgeted and managed to get the attention of one of them. She wiggled her eyebrows toward the guards. The guy looked back nonplussed.
Since her hands were tied behind her back, she couldn’t make any hand signals. She kept wiggling her eyebrows and nodding with her head. The guy smiled.
Probably thought she was coming on to him. Did she look like a complete idiot? Apparently so, because he wiggled his eyebrows back.
She stifled a groan and rolled her eyes in a never-mind look she hoped translated. And felt a hand on hers.
She turned slowly toward the other side and met Anna’s gaze. The woman glanced toward the guards then back at Kate with a questioning look in her large blue eyes. Kate nodded. Yes, yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
“Now,” Anna breathed without moving her lips. She took a deep breath then started to cry.
The pudgy guard yelled at her immediately. Anna stifled her sobs and leaned against Kate as if for support. She tugged on the nylon cuffs that held Kate’s hands behind her back. Then came heat. Under the noise of her crying, apparently she had lit a match or a lighter that must have been hidden in her pocket.
Every snarly thought Kate had ever had about smokers blowing smoke in her face at the cafés that supported her French-pastry habit, she took back.
Ouch. Even a small flame could be pretty hot this close. But the pressure of the nylon eased on her wrists, and in the next second she was free.
“Hurry,” the girl whispered into her shoulder and dropped a lighter into her hands.
But then the door opened and the whiny guard was back, carrying a large box, leading with his back. Or maybe it wasn’t the whiny guard. This one looked bigger. But familiar.
The pudgy rebel barked a question.
“Da, da.” The newcomer mumbled the rest of his answer and kept advancing into the room, groaning, bent under the weight of whatever he was carrying. But the next second the box flew at the older bandit, knocking his weapon aside while the stranger took out the pudgy one with his gun. He had enough time to shoot the other one, too, before that one gathered himself.
Her hands were free, but all she could do was stare at the man dumbstruck, unable to believe her eyes.
Parker?
She pushed to her feet and stepped toward him, but he shook his head slightly and severed eye contact as if he didn’t want anyone to know that they knew each other. He spoke in Russian as he cut the plastic cuffs off people then distributed the rebels’ guns to the hostages, who were asking questions at the rate of a hundred per second.
He answered before he pointed at her, said something else in Russian and ripped the gas mask off Pudgy’s belt, then shoved it into her hand. He dragged her out of the gym, closing the door behind them.
“What’s going on?” She followed him down the corridor since he wouldn’t stop. “What are you involved with now?” He looked even better than he had in her frequent dreams of him. Whoever she’d been with in the two years since they’d broken up, her dreams brought only one man to her: Parker.
He couldn’t be here on assignment. That wouldn’t make any sense. “If the press could get in, why isn’t the rescue team here?”
“Later.” His whole body alert, the gun poised to shoot, he moved so fast that keeping up was an effort. He looked like Parker’s action-figure twin: eyes hard as flint, body language tight and on the scary side. Even his voice sounded sharper.
She’d never seen him like this before. Pictures of the last few minutes flashed into her head, the way he had shot those men. He sure hadn’t looked like a reporter back there. She struggled to make sense of it all. Then, as they rushed forward, her gaze snagged on a security camera high up on the wall—not pointing at the row of antique oil paintings but at the hallway itself.
“Can they see us?” She looked around, bewildered, expecting to run into rebel soldiers any second.
“They’re not working. The rebels took out the security system when they broke in. Phones are disabled, too. I already checked.”
Where? How? She didn’t have time to ask.
Voices came from up ahead. No, no, no. A fresh wave of panic hit just when she thought she was already at max capacity for fear. They were in a long, marble-tiled hallway with a single, ornately gilded door they’d just passed.
Parker pulled back immediately and reached for the knob. Locked. He looked around, searching the corridor.
Why didn’t he just kick the door in? She was about to ask when she realized they couldn’t afford to make noise. Good thing one of them had a clear enough mind to think.
The voices neared. Parker let go of her and hurried to an ornamental cast-iron grid low on the opposite wall, pulled a nasty-looking knife and began to unscrew it.
They were never going to make it. She looked back and forth between him and the end of the hallway. Hurry, hurry, hurry. “They’re almost here.”
He got the heavy-looking grid off and laid it down gently, without making a sound. Then he climbed in, legs first. She was practically on top of him. But he didn’t move lower to make room for her. “Get on my back,” he said.
“What? I can’t. It’s—” She didn’t have time to argue. The rebels were coming.
She went in, legs first like he did, feeling awkward and uncomfortable at having to touch him, having to hang on to him, being pressed against his wide back. He was all hard muscle just as he’d always been. She snipped any stray memory in the bud and kept moving. When she had her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist as if he were giving her a piggyback ride, she stopped, barely daring to breathe. She wasn’t crazy about dark, tight places.
And they weren’t in some storage nook as she had thought, but in a vertical, chimneylike tunnel with a bottomless drop below them.
But just when she thought things couldn’t get more dangerous, he let go with his left hand and reached for the cast-iron grid to lift it back into place. Boots passed in front of their hiding place a few seconds later, people talking.
The men stopped to chat just out of sight. Oh God, please just go.
They didn’t. They stayed and stayed and stayed. Her arms were aching from the effort. She could barely hold herself. She couldn’t see how Parker was able to hold the weight of two bodies with nothing but his fingers.
An eternity passed. Then another. She distracted herself by organizing her half-million questions about his sudden appearance and his complete personality change.
“Hang on,” he whispered under his breath and moved beneath her.
She barely breathed her response. “I think we should stay still.” No need to take any unnecessary chances, make some noise and draw attention.
“Can’t.
