Artistic License (2 page)

Breathe. Oh God, she couldn’t breathe.

A whooshing mechanical thrum shook the floor and slowly, thankfully, the smoke began to dissipate as industrial ventilators chugged into action, the power apparently restored. The first thing she saw through a bluish haze of anxiety was her unintentional assailant down on the floor in a squat, his knee pressed into the back of a wool blazer, his large hands snapping cuffs around tethered wrists. He swung free and rose, jerking the other man to his feet and shoving him in the direction of the blonde woman. Sophy couldn’t hear his words over the horrified hub and hum.

Her short nails were clawing at the wooden floor. She barely jumped when hands seized her from behind in a gentle hold and began to tug her upright. She looked up into the concerned blue eyes of the sandy-haired guard. He was speaking, asking her – something. Her chest was working frantically and she could hear her heartbeat thumping in her ears. It was a moment before she realised that a familiar short squeak was coming from her throat, as if the cavities of her lungs, empty of air, were rubbing together in protest.

Oh no, of all the times
–

Another presence at her side, another voice, and this time she heard the deep tones.

“Is she winded?” Those sharply-hewn features, more familiar than they ought to be from a mere ten minutes of sly gawking and tracing, appeared in her line of sight. Her vision was starting to leak into haze at the edges as if a filter had been applied in Photoshop. “Miss?” He sounded roughly impatient. “Are you all right? I’m sorry; I didn’t have time to dodge around you.”

“Jesus,” said the younger guard suddenly, his grip tightening on her shoulder. “Her fingers are turning blue.”

The man in the leather coat glanced at her hands and let loose with a creative stream of profanity that would have quite impressed her at any other time.

“Ambulance,” he snapped over his shoulder. “Now.”

Sophy could have cried with frustration and annoyance at herself, if imminent unconsciousness didn’t seem a more likely outcome. She never left the house without an inhaler, but it was securely tucked into her shoulder bag, currently in the care of the hotel receptionists. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would need it on her person. Her asthma attacks were intermittent, usually severe when they struck, and were almost always brought on by exercise. She hadn’t planned to jog from exhibit to exhibit or do push-ups as she admired the William Morris prints. Strangely, she hadn’t anticipated that a conservatively dressed lunatic would let loose with a smoke grenade.

Unable to reach her bag or pull enough breath to instruct on its whereabouts, her inhaler took on the dual importance of a floatation device to a drowning man and a security blanket to a frightened child. She didn’t have it and her growing panic exacerbated her struggle for air. Her grasping fingers seized on to firm flesh and muscle and squeezed tight. She was shaking his thick wrist from side to side in her distress. After a brief hesitation, his free hand came down against the side of her neck, and his head ducked to meet her flickering, unfocused stare.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said, the words a blend of discomfort, concern and calm reassurance. “The ambulance is on its way and will be here in a few minutes. You’re going to be all right.”

Considering that she couldn’t pull in enough air to inflate the lungs of a mouse, that type of comment usually made her want to kick the perpetrator in the balls, but for once she was surprisingly comforted by another’s presence. Her panic eased the merest fraction, enough that she was able to hold his gaze for another six minutes and regulate her breaths to tiny, even gasps until the cavalry arrived with a distant clash of sirens. His eyes were the darkest grey. She was teetering into semi-consciousness when black leather was replaced with the reflective safety gear of the paramedics. A recurring thought circled through her mind and then faded out like a banner news headline scrolling across a TV screen.

Tell him. She had to tell him…

Too late. He was gone after a last squeeze of her hand. The appalled faces of Don and her classmate Lisa were hovering above the stretcher. She had the vague impression of police officers, the flash of light from a digital camera.

“The woman…” she tried, but the words disappeared into the vacuum of the nebuliser mask.

***

The girl had the reflexes of a suicidal tortoise and some serious art chops. She had captured his ugly mug with a stick of charcoal and the worst attempt at covert surveillance he had witnessed since his days of pubescent Army training. Mick grimaced and gently closed the sketchbook, his careful handling entirely out of respect for her work. He didn’t think much of her choice of subject.

It seemed almost inevitable that his gaze would snag on Jennifer at that moment, standing near the doorway with Anya for a debrief with Robert Calhoun, the head of hotel security. Both women intercepted his look. Anya had the decency to blush and find considerable interest in the buttons of Calhoun’s jacket, but Jennifer merely tossed her blonde ponytail and continued to rattle on.

Mick shrugged off the residual anger with an effort and returned his attention to the task at hand. He tucked the sketchbook under his arm, intending to leave it at reception for the little sneak with the smudged fingers and terrified eyes. Her name was scrawled on the cover in an appealing, loopy script: Sophy James.

He suspected it would be some time before he lost the memory of those eyes fastened on his with an intensity of need that rivalled her grip on his wrist, of watching her fight for each breath during ten of the longest goddamn minutes of his life.

“Sir. Hollister.”

Antony Gale was walking briskly toward him, his taser back in his holster and a surveillance monitor clutched in one fist. He was a recent recruit from the Australian Air Force and couldn’t yet be persuaded to drop the “Sirs” when addressing the senior consultants. Mick thought it was only a matter of time before he forgot himself so far as to salute.

“The police have identified the assailant as a William Darvie, New Zealand citizen, usually resides in Auckland. No clear motivation yet, but no weapon was found on his person. He was carrying nothing but the smoke grenade. We’ve made a sweep of the rooms and all of the items are accounted for. None shows any obvious signs of interference.” Gale dropped the military formality long enough to shrug. “What do you think? Heavy-handed attempt at theft?”

“Pretty woeful one, if so.” Mick shoved back his jacket and propped his fists against his hips as he surveyed the room again. The police had taken statements from all witnesses – all the ones who
didn’t
scare the shit out of people by threatening to expire in a heap of disturbingly soft skin – and they had emptied the space of all but Ryland Curry personnel. More of the security team had arrived from the peripheral business interests, but Ryland himself had decided to obey sensible orders for once and remain out of the fray until they’d decoded the nature of the threat. An assassination attempt ten weeks earlier outside a London theatre had at last installed a bit of common sense in the man. “He wasn’t carrying, pulled the grenade in full view of five security consultants and made no attempt to move toward any particular item.”

“What was the point, then? Just to dick about and cause trouble?”

“Been known to happen.” Mick’s arm clenched tighter against Sophy’s sketchbook. “Point scored, in that respect, and the outcome could have been even worse.”

“That reminds me,” said Gale. “I asked Wilson to put through a call to the hospital and make sure the girl is okay. You took her down harder than a rugby scrum.” He managed a grin, before his short-lived amusement faded. “Jesus, I thought she was going to croak right in front of me.”

Mick ironed a slight flinch into professional distance.

“The man with her, the lecturer, said that she’s a brittle asthmatic. The smoke obviously brought on an attack.”

Seriously compounded by having the wind knocked out of her when you smashed her against the ground like an eggshell, you clumsy bastard.

“There’s something not quite right here.” Calhoun joined them, his mouth set firmly beneath the iron-grey wisps of moustache. “It doesn’t smell like theft or petty vandalism to me. What the hell was the point?”

Mick silently agreed. Instinct and experience were firing off needles of adrenalin and caution through his body.

“And he was competent enough to override our cameras and the electrics in the hall for a good four minutes before detonating the device.”

And wasn’t that a fact that burned like acid in their Europe-trained gullets.

“Mick.” Sean Mitchell, his closest friend since the days of striped blazers and lingering corporal punishment at grammar school, shoved past Jennifer and Anya with uncharacteristic roughness and stopped a short distance away, a frown etching grooves into the clean lines of his face. “Wilson just rang the local medical centre to check on the woman who had the asthma attack.”

“Is she all right?” Mick couldn’t hold back the interruption.

“She’s doing much better, apparently, although they’re going to keep her hooked up to the mask for a while. But she can talk now and the nurse said she’s been pretty agitated that a message get to the “man in the leather coat”.” Sean grinned briefly. “I will assume that she’s talking about you, my fashion-averse friend.”

“A message for me?” Mick wasn’t sure what he was feeling at that moment. “What is it?”

Sean was serious again.

“She’s saying that she noticed Darvie earlier, outside the hotel, and he was with a red-haired woman with some kind of deformity of the ear. She claims that she saw the same woman in this room a few moments before Darvie detonated the grenade and that she was hovering near the ceramics display.”

Oh, Christ. 

Mick was already striding toward the central pedestal and the display of fiddly cups and saucers that were worth more than his car.

They found the bomb three minutes later.

Chapter Two

A
bomb.

Sophy shivered and picked up the remote control, switching from the evening news to the entertainment channel. She tended to feel her brain cells curling at the edges like dying leaves after too many consecutive hours of reality TV, but there was something oddly comforting about watching other people’s crises when they revolved around men and makeup. Nobody tried to blow anyone up, for one thing.

The incident had made the first five minutes of the news programming, trumped only by the breaking sex scandal surrounding a Member of Parliament. Presumably an actual explosion would have pushed the town to top billing. The police experts disabling a minimal-impact device with hours still left on the timer was obviously not the stuff of cinematic thrillers.

The news anchor had stated, in tones Sophy considered inappropriately upbeat, that a second perpetrator had been arrested off-site and it was believed that the artworks had been the target, with the bomb scheduled to detonate at a time when the display hall would be closed for the night. The display hall, however, was still located within a fully occupied hotel and likely had a constant security presence. Only the completely callous or moronic would assume that the explosion ran no human risk.

She was glad that he – that
they
were all okay.

As it happened,
she
had supplied the only casualty and the biggest drama for the reporters to seize upon like a bunch of hungry rat terriers. The footage of her gasping person being loaded into the ambulance, trailing medical tubes and fretful friends, had been played three times during the clip. The brunette with the perky voice and perkier boobs had managed to skip any dull details about smoke inhalation and instead make it sound like she’d laid down and expired from sheer terror. And some utter cretin had given the Press her name, which naturally resulted in every person she had ever met texting to see if she was still alive. Her parents and Melissa had run interference with those who had come in person, letting in only Don and a couple of co-workers from the bar where she worked three nights a week.

They hadn’t been able to keep out the police, who had stormed the medical centre while she was still hooked up to the nebuliser. They had requested a description of the red-haired woman at the exhibition, as detailed as she could manage, and had left with a charcoal sketch that the officer in charge, who looked about twelve, had pronounced “wicked good”. She supposed she ought to take these positives where she found them. 

The on-call doctor’s insistence on keeping her in overnight had tipped a historically bad day over into complete nightmare territory. She couldn’t stand hospitals. Her aversion was not quite as strong as it was to, say, almost suffocating to death on national television, but it was up there.

Sophy glanced up at the wall clock. Not quite half past six. The sun was still beaming brightly through the windows; it didn’t start to get dark until after nine these days, which was still a nice change after the bleakness of the last winter. Food had been delivered promptly at five, shortly before her last visitor had departed, probably scared off by the sight of her main course, which the menu card claimed was quiche. That fact was yet to be verified. She picked up her fork and poked dubiously at it. It moved with a suspiciously gelatinous wiggle. She sighed, thinking of the leftover lasagne in the fridge at home. And the wine. There was wine in the fridge at home too.

Crappy,
crappy
day.  

A single short knock on the door brought her head up with a jerk. Substantial arms, monstrous shoulders and a definite shortage of neck filled the doorway. It really was a physique that would have the beefiest All Black crying with shame. Sophy’s heart began to behave in a very unreliable manner in her chest.

It was not a rush to the loins of instant, overwhelming lust.

It was sheer horror.

She wasn’t sure what it was about the man, but he reduced her from a shy person with manners and a brain to the walking personification of a blush. On her personal scale of social terror, he was more intimidating than the senior art lecturer, a man who drove most of his students to either drink or copious amounts of cake. And he ranked only marginally below the snotty shop assistants in Parisian boutiques, one of whom had once pinched the flesh of her hip and
tsked
after a fifteen-second acquaintance. To be fair, he
was
working a general demeanour of humourless, sleep-deprived assassin. And there was the culture shock of encountering a flesh-and-blood mountain of testosterone, when frankly she was more accustomed to the twig-like variety of male in skinny jeans and paint splatters.

“Miss James?” Earlier that day, his voice had been her sole point of focus in a frightening spiral out of controlled consciousness. It was already as familiar to her as that of many a long-term friend. “May I come in for a moment?”

Sophy managed to nod, even if she’d forgotten how to speak. She was suddenly intensely aware of the strands of sticky hair around her face, her reading glasses, the well-washed cotton gown that was blessedly closed down the back but also stamped all over with the words “Hospital Property”, as if to dissuade any light-fingered fashionistas who might be tempted.

The smell registered as he came fully into the room, hesitated awkwardly for a moment by the visitor’s chair and remained standing. It wasn’t cologne, although she could detect a faint whiff of something yummy and expensive there. She couldn’t wear fragrances because they aggravated her asthma, so she tended to be jealously observant of other people’s scents. In this case, it wasn’t the man who was inciting her envy: it was the aroma coming from a paper bag clutched in his hand.

The bastard had come into her room with Thai food when she was faced with the prospect of rubber quiche and a carton of Dora the Explorer yoghurt.

With difficulty, she pulled her eyes away from the food as he began to speak, and managed not to drool on the quilt.

“How are you feeling?” he asked abruptly. He sounded both genuinely concerned and also as if he’d rather be getting a root canal or a colonoscopy than having to talk to her.

His palpable discomfort actually eased her nerves.

Social misfits unite.

“I’m fine,” she said, and hoped that her voice conveyed reassurance and polite welcome. She suspected that her reluctance to play nicely was about as evident as his own. “It’s always pretty scary, but not a new experience, unfortunately. And you got help to me so quickly. I was hoping that I would get the chance to thank you.” From a distance, in a nice card. “I should have had my inhaler in my pocket, but I just didn’t even think about it.”

“It was my fault.” He moved his shoulders like he was shaking off a cramp. He had ditched the gorgeous but unseasonable leather jacket at some point, she noticed, and was now down to the Henley shirt with the sleeves pushed up. It was obscenely tight. A light scattering of hair dusted the corded muscles in his forearms. Not for the first time, she realised how disconcerting it was to see a person that…
large
outside of a comic book or a televised boxing ring. What would it be like to have that much physical presence, to never have to be intimidated by
anybody
?

Fantastic, probably.

Sophy realised that he was now offering a rather stilted apology for steamrolling her into the hall floor. She immediately, vehemently, shook her head.

“Absolutely not,” she stated. “You were doing your job. I was – I don’t know
what
I was doing. I should be apologising for getting in your way.” She could feel the pink flush deepen in her cheeks. “Um, my reflexes aren’t always so hot.”

He looked as if he was about to agree before tact belatedly caught up with him. One hand went up to his collar, turning an incipient nod into an unconvincing neck rub.

A genuine smile tugged at her mouth.

“So, I’m sorry, Mr…” She trailed off, looking at him questioningly.

He looked a bit taken aback for a moment – and, really, he should have come by earlier when the media had been pestering for an interview, because the sheer inanity of this conversation would already have put any eavesdroppers into a coma.

“Hollister. Mick Hollister.”

Mick put the bag of temptation on her bedside table, where it could silently mock her own feeble dinner, and extended a hand to her. As her fingers were enveloped by a cool, callused hold, she noticed the object tucked under his left arm. His gaze, fixed on her face with an unreadable expression, followed her line of sight. His left brow rose again in that familiar quirk. Releasing her, he neatly flipped the sketchbook from the curve of his elbow into his hand, and offered it without a word.

Damn it. He’d looked at it.

She felt the same awful rush of embarrassment that she’d experienced as a young teen, when she’d suffered some kind of brain aneurysm and written a fairly explicit love letter to a cute boy at the bus stop without even knowing his name. She hadn’t been so far gone as to actually
give
it to him, but putting it in her suitcase instead of the nearest rubbish bin had resulted in her mum finding it as soon as she’d gone home for the school holidays. Her mother had thought it adorable; she had considered it the biggest invasion of privacy since the Watergate scandal. She felt similarly nauseous now. In this case, it was compounded by the fact that the privacy infringed upon was
his
, really, and she felt like she’d been caught with an eye to a peephole.

She winced as she looked up at him, her fingers absently tracing the doodles and snatches of sketches on the cover.

“I suppose I ought to apologise for this too.”

Mick’s features were naturally severe, but she thought they softened slightly as he looked down at her. One shoulder lifted in a half-shrug.

“I can’t say I’d be thrilled to see my face hanging in a gallery,” he said evenly, “but I can’t fault the skill behind the drawing. I think you got me in every unfortunate detail.”

Unfortunate?

After a lifetime of agonising over every second sentence before it left her mouth, to the point where she usually ended up saying nothing at all, Sophy chose that moment to speak without thinking.

“I think your face is beautiful.”

The statement was honest, sincere and absolutely mortifying.

She wanted to drop through the floor.

Mick’s expression was difficult to interpret, but the emotions involved didn’t come close to pleasure or gratitude. A slow suffusion of anger snuffed out a mere flashing hint of hurt and surprise. Sophy thought he looked a bit like a predator reluctantly intrigued by a harmless creature of prey, only to have it leap up and unexpectedly bite him on the nose. 

Oh Lord, this was why she shouldn’t be let out to interact with the public.

He clearly thought she was making a mockery of his looks. And she was a bit astonished by how very
much
it mattered that she had hurt him, however unintentionally.

She didn’t even know him. She didn’t
want
to know him. She wanted him to take his horrible paper bag of deliciousness and leave her alone to a cringing inner replay of their encounter.

“I’m in a hospital bed,” she instead heard herself saying. “Because I went to an art exhibition, almost caused the escape of a lunatic would-be bomber and had an asthma attack on the evening news. This has not been a good day for me. And yet telling a total stranger that he has a beautiful face is probably the most embarrassing moment so far. But I wasn’t making fun. I only draw people whose faces I find attractive.”

Mick blinked.

Okay, that was worse.

“I mean – not
attractive
attractive. A-art-artistically attractive. I don’t – um – I mean…”

Good grief. She was stammering and
babbling
. She never babbled. Usually the worse her nerves, the quieter her voice became, until she ended up speaking at a level that could only be heard by people with elephantine ears and NASA-quality hearing aids. Melissa’s ex-boyfriend Dale had once joked that for the first month he and Sophy had hung out, he’d thought he was gradually going deaf.