Classified Baby. Jessica Andersen
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the support beams were gone. The refrigerator had tipped over, spilling its contents onto the floor. The chairs and tables were all lodged against the far wall, with Evangeline trapped beneath them.
The tall, forty-something blonde was bleeding but conscious. She and Robert locked eyes and she smiled with relief. “You’re okay.”
He made an unintelligible sound, and when he reached out a hand as though he could touch her across the distance separating them, his fingers trembled.
Dark emotion rose up to clog Ethan’s throat, a blend of relief, resentment and hell, yes, jealousy. Not because he wanted Evangeline, but because he hadn’t gotten a second chance with the woman he’d loved, and Prescott seemed to get nothing but second chances.
“I’ll get her,” Robert said. “You check the rest of the offices.” Ethan nodded shortly and turned away, but before he’d gone more than a few steps, Prescott called, “Did your client get out okay?”
Ethan stopped and looked back. “I’m not scheduled to see anyone today.”
“Angel left a message a few minutes ago on my voice mail,” Robert said. “She said a client was on her way up to see you.”
Ethan didn’t bother asking why she’d left the info with Robert—Angel lost half their messages and garbled the other half, but she was one of Evangeline’s projects, so firing her wasn’t an option.
“I haven’t met with anyone all morning,” he said now, a faint alarm stirring in the back of his skull. “Did you get a name?”
“I think she said Nicole Benedict. Ring any bells?”
The faint alarm became a war whoop as the name did more than ring a bell. It sent a lightning bolt through Ethan’s midsection, a mixture of guilt, regret and pure, unadulterated lust.
Air hissed between his teeth at the thought of the woman who’d helped him forget himself for a night, then disappeared. “Yeah. I know her. And if she was on the way up—” He broke off on a second hiss of breath as logic overtook emotion and he remembered that the track for the glass elevator ran along the outside of the building, right beside Evangeline’s office. It would’ve been right in the path of the explosion.
He took off at a dead run, hoping to hell he wasn’t already too late.
NICOLE REGAINED fuzzy consciousness to the feel of something cold and hard beneath her face. For half a second, she wondered what the hell she was doing lying on her kitchen floor. And why were her ears ringing? Was she hungover?
But that wasn’t right. She’d never been much of a partyer, and wasn’t drinking at all these days because of—
The connection sparked in her brain and clenched her stomach in an instant. The baby. Ethan. Prescott Personal Securities. Images blinked through her mind in rapid succession—the office building, the helicopter, the rocket launcher—
The explosion.
Her eyes flew open and she found herself facedown on the floor of the glassed-in elevator. She saw the street far below. Then a thin stream of blackish- gray smoke obscured her view for a moment, and the contrast showed her something far worse than the height. There was a crack in the glass beneath her.
As she watched, it grew longer and branched into two cracks that gave birth to two more in a growing spiderweb that weakened the only thing separating her from a fatal fall.
“Help me,” she whispered, half-afraid the small sound might send her crashing through. When it didn’t, she filled her lungs and screamed, “Help me!”
Incredibly, a man’s voice answered from above. “Hang on, Nicole. I’m almost there.”
“Ethan?” She wasn’t sure how she recognized his voice, ten weeks after they’d spent the night together doing everything but talking, but she knew him instantly, and the recognition brought a fierce rush of relief edged with fear.
“Don’t move.” His words sounded clearer than they ought to, and she heard the whistle of wind.
Fearing what she might see, Nic held her breath and tried to keep her body still as she turned her head to the side. She saw more glass, more cracks, and a gaping hole in the side of the elevator car, where the glass was gone. Beyond that was blue sky, a smudge of smoke and a dangling climber’s rope. She heard masculine shouts from higher up, a mixture of suggestions and curses from whoever was anchoring the line.
She remembered him saying something about rock climbing in his free time. Now he was shimmying down to rescue her. God.
As she watched, a pair of sturdy, brown leather hiking boots swung into her limited slice of view, followed by a hint of tube sock and a pair of strong, muscular legs encased in tough-looking cargo pants and a makeshift climber’s harness. The button-down front of a formerly white oxford shirt appeared next, gaping where a couple of buttons had torn away to reveal a lean, muscular torso.
Then he twisted through the broken section of glass, and she got a clear look at the edgy, masculine face she’d imagined all too often since realizing her period was late.
Hell, she thought, let’s be honest here. You’ve thought about him just about every day since that night at Hitchin’s. And she’d remembered him just right. His dark brown hair was lighter at the ends, signaling an outdoor lifestyle. His face was chiseled, his features as sharp and forbidding as she’d remembered. Now, though, the brown eyes she remembered as being coolly logical and almost sardonic, radiated tension as they locked on hers and he said, “Stay calm. We can do this, but you’ve got to trust me, okay?” He waited until she nodded, then said, “I want you to keep yourself flat and distribute your weight as evenly as possible. Then I need you to slide toward me. We’re going to get you out of there.”
Nic’s breath hissed out. She glanced down and saw emergency vehicles gathering far below. “I can’t… I won’t…” She stopped and sucked in a breath. “Can’t you open the doors from inside the building?”
“Not a chance. You’re—” He broke off, looked up as the rescue personnel shouted something she didn’t quite catch, and muttered a curse. “Look, the explosion knocked the elevator off its track, okay? It’s hanging by a single cable right now. It looks stable enough, but—”
A loud crackling noise cut him off, and the floor shifted beneath Nic. She whimpered deep in her throat and tears stung her eyes. “Ethan, please,” she whispered. “The floor’s going to go. I don’t want to die.”
“Slide over,” he repeated, speaking softly. “Go easy, but keep moving, no matter what happens.”
Heart pounding in her ears, Nic closed her eyes, pressed her cheek to the floor and slid an inch, then another. She heard crackling, but didn’t look at the glass beneath her.
“That’s it. You’re almost there.”
He sounded closer, prompting Nic to open her eyes. He’d dropped lower on the rope, so their faces were level through the broken panel.
His voice might be utterly calm, but his eyes held a strange, dark emotion she couldn’t quite define.
An answering surge tugged in her chest, the same feeling she’d had when she’d offered to buy him a drink and he’d turned to refuse, then accepted instead. Now, though, there was an added layer between them, the echoing heat of sex…and a baby he’d never know about if she fell.
“Ethan,” Nic whispered, heart pounding. “I came to tell you I’m pregnant.”
She might’ve imagined the wince, but there was no mistaking his low curse, or the look that flashed through his eyes before he shuttered his expression to one of utter determination and stretched his arm through the broken side of the elevator car. “We need to get you on solid ground. Take my hand.”
She looked from him to the ground and back again. When her weight shifted, the glass beneath her cracked further.