Midnight Vengeance (22 page)

The biker disappeared. Lauren didn’t dare swivel her head to see if she could catch a glimpse of him. Her heart gave a sharp punch in her chest. Had something happened to him, happened to Jacko? Had he crashed that big bike? Conditions on the road were horrible, the tires barely gaining traction, visibility down to a few feet. A car was heavier than a bike and this car was barely holding on to the road.

Was Jacko even now lying in a ditch, bleeding out? And—could that have really been Jacko or was she hallucinating, the drug making her see what her heart wanted to see? Jacko, alive and here with her.

Of course it wasn’t Jacko. Now that the fog in her head was clearing, she distinctly remembered his being shot. Maybe twice. Things were fuzzy in her memory so she didn’t remember exactly how many times he’d been shot, but that he’d been shot was beyond doubt.

Everything else was hazy but that image—it would stay with her for the rest of her days, however long she had left to live. The man pulling up his arm with a gun at the end of it, shooting Jacko. Jacko knocked off his feet, sprawled on his back, eyes closed, bleeding.

That was her last image of him before the man had plunged a needle into her neck.

So how could the rider be Jacko? The biker was someone who had to be after the driver, an enemy somehow. Had to be. It had nothing to do with her.

She heard tapping then the driver talking. The glow of a cell phone was reflected in the windshield. “Yes,” the man said impatiently. “I know the weather is deteriorating.
When
are they closing down the airport? Shit. Okay, I’m not far. I’ll be there in about half an hour. Be ready to take off immediately.”

Airport? Take off?

Oh God. He was taking her to a plane? A plane could fly anywhere. Doubtless he’d drug her again and she’d wake up who knew where? No one would know where she was. She’d be lost, friendless. At least in Portland she had Jacko’s friends and colleagues. They’d look for her; they’d care. John Huntington has said she was “one of ours.” Outside Portland...outside Portland she had literally no one in the world.

She had to escape before this terrible man put her on a plane. Her life was lost if she didn’t. But she didn’t have anything. Her hands were literally tied. How could she...

Another huge thump, the hardest yet, from the other side of the car, the driver’s side. He almost lost control of the car. Lauren could smell him now—the tangy acrid sweat of fear. She heard him fumbling with his coat and saw him draw something out, a familiar shape in the reflection of the windshield.

A gun!
He lifted the gun, driving one-handed. The gun was positioned across his chest, aiming out the window at the biker. Lauren finally turned her head, not caring if the driver caught on that she was awake.

She didn’t give a damn because awareness flooded through her. The man on the motorcycle keeping pace with the car was Jacko and the driver was going to shoot him. There was no way Lauren was going to let that happen. She’d die first. She quietly unlatched her seat belt. The driver’s arm lifted...

“No!” she screamed and launched herself at the driver. She used her body, her teeth and fists. She swung her tied fists at his face, straight at his nose, screaming at the top of her lungs. He lifted an arm, eyes so wide she could see the whites of them. He had a berserker where he thought he had a drugged woman. Screaming at the top of her lungs, she batted at him, trying to hurt him with every cell of her body. He shouted when she latched onto his ear with her teeth, snarling and tugging until she felt cartilage in her mouth coated with the salty taste of blood. The space was so small he couldn’t defend himself against her as she writhed and swatted and crashed against him, bringing her tied hands up to his eyes, thumbs gouging.

The driver knocked her hard with his elbow and for a second she saw stars but her rage was stronger than the blow. With a wild primitive cry she launched herself against him again and the car slid, almost floated in a soundless free fall and then they left the road and tumbled, rolling over and over down a hill.

Lauren instinctively tried to brace herself but there was no possibility of it; it was like being a towel in the spinner, crashing helplessly against the ceiling, the dashboard, the door...

When they finally came to rest upside down she hung from the seat belt. A silence that felt like death and then blackness.

She came awake to the sound of a man cursing in a deep voice and metal tearing. The narrow beam of a flashlight illuminating the wreckage. Tears ran down her cheeks. She lifted a hand, saw something dark on the palm. Not tears. Blood.

And then her door was yanked open and the swirling snowstorm entered the car, the bitter cold hitting her like a wall. Something flashed—a knife?—and she was freed from the restraining straps of the seat belt and fell painfully, curled on the roof. A man was tugging at her arm, pulling her out, away from the car, over the frozen snow to a flat surface.

She could barely breathe, limbs paralyzed. She stared up at the night sky, snowflakes falling on her face.

An alien had rescued her, bigheaded, with scales on his chest and no face. She blinked against the snow.

“Lauren!” Something lifted and she saw Jacko. A pale Jacko, skin nearly bloodless and white, not the rich color she loved. Deep lines bracketed his mouth. He was breathing hard, wheezing. “Say something!”

It hurt but it had to be done. She lifted a trembling hand, touched his skin. It was him. Not an illusion. It was Jacko, a trembling wounded Jacko, but alive. Could she smile at him? She tried to but she couldn’t control the muscles of her face.

“Talk to me!” His voice was deep but weak.

“Jacko.” Her voice was weak, barely carrying over the wind.

“I love you,” he whispered and closed his eyes, falling forward onto her, torso covering her, shielding her from the snow, from all bad things, even from death.

And that was how Metal found them—unconscious, Jacko protecting her even close to death.

Epilogue

Two weeks later

“They’re
gorgeous
.” Lauren lifted a pair of red Louboutin stilettos—red!—by the ankle straps out of the box. In the past two years she’d become used to ballerinas and running shoes and it would probably take a little practice to walk on them, but who cared? They were beautiful and she was going to wear them every chance she got. They were sitting on her sofa and Jacko’s arm was around her. If his stitches bothered him, he didn’t show it.

“Glad you like them.”

“Did you have help choosing them?” Because Lauren had some difficulties imagining Jacko in the upscale shoe store, pondering colors and style.

He winced.

“Not a good memory?” she smiled.

“I cheated. Suzanne bought them for me.”

“Well, always go to the expert, right?” She was grateful. Jacko had fantastic qualities but probably good taste in shoes wasn’t one of them. “Suzanne’s taste is exquisite.”

He breathed what felt like a sigh of relief.

Lauren stole a glance at him. “When I wear these I’ll be taller than you are.”

Jacko snorted. “In your dreams.”

Yes, in her dreams. Even in her nosebleed shoes the top of her head would barely reach his nose. Still, it was fun teasing him. “That made you smile.”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “It did. ’Cause it was so preposterous.”

Lauren laughed. Of all the things she thought might happen while living with Jacko, laughing often wasn’t one of them. And yet... She found herself laughing several times a day. He had a wild, dry sense of humor that had totally escaped her notice while she was escaping a killer, before they’d nearly been killed. It was one of the many, many things about him she loved.

Like the fact that he would think to buy her red Louboutins. That earned him serious credit.

Jacko nudged the box with his knee. “You might want to look more carefully inside that box.”

Lauren’s eyes rounded. “There’s something else?”

“Hmm.” It was a noise she was familiar with. A sort of deep hum that made her diaphragm vibrate, and it could mean a million different things. In this case it meant
yes
.

The other thing she’d told him she wanted was a puppy but there definitely wasn’t one in the box. Puppies and Louboutins didn’t go together. She scrambled around, pulling out the tissue paper, frowning...and there they were.

“Jacko!” She held the tickets in her hand. The latest Cirque du Soleil show, in town for only a week. She’d heard they were impossible to find. “Did you have to shoot someone to get them? Because if you did, that is totally justified.”

He gave a lazy half smile, watching her pleasure out of slitted eyes. Suddenly the smile stopped and he watched her carefully. A big hand fell on her shoulder. “You gonna be okay with it? Because I can always dig up the bodies and give the tickets back to their heirs.”

She clutched the tickets to her chest. “No way!”

She still had some problems with being in large crowds but it was getting better. And, well, Cirque...

The trouble was over. She knew that intellectually. Everyone who could possibly want her dead was dead. Through lawyers she’d renounced the entire Guttierez estate and had no connection with any part of the criminal empire that was going to keep public prosecutors busy rubbing their hands with glee for the next decade.

So that was Jorge.

For Frederick Rydell it had all been about her mother’s jewels. The man after her had confessed for a reduced sentence. He’d been hired to kidnap her so she could get her mother’s jewels. There’d been more than she had imagined. Lauren had had the key to her mother’s safe deposit box at a bank in Palm Beach. She refused to leave Jacko’s side so she’d hired another lawyer and given him a proxy to open the box, together with a copy of the key.

Inside had been a fortune in historical jewels.

The jewels, assessed at forty million dollars, were slated for an auction organized by Sotheby’s and she had already earmarked everything but one million dollars for art scholarships. The one million she was going to keep was for buying her house and establishing college funds for the three kids Jacko didn’t know they were going to have.

He’d just have to deal.

So, really, no one at the moment wanted to kill her.

There was no reason for her to be afraid ever again, but the instincts she’d honed on the run were hard to shake. The first time they’d gone to the mall she’d started trembling and hyperventilating. Though she’d insisted she was fine, Jacko took her home. The second time she went she lasted half an hour before the shakes started. But two days ago, looking for a new couch, she completely forgot about her agoraphobia.

Through everything, Jacko had been a rock. He never said a word, just noticed when she started panicking, though she tried to hide it, and quietly took her home. She’d had a couple of nightmares and he held her and loved them away.

Every day she felt stronger. More like her old, pre-Jorge self.

She nestled her head against Jacko’s left shoulder, careful to keep away from the slight swell of bandages on the right side of his chest. Luckily his chest was about an acre in size. He picked up her hand that was holding the tickets. “You want to go out to eat before the show?”

Lauren turned her head to kiss his chest. “There’s a new Cuban restaurant not far from the theater. You okay with spicy?”

“Hmm,” he said. But there was a gleam in his eye. “On a dare in Thailand I ate a curry that was sixteen million on the Scoville scale. Nothing can scare me again. I’m immune to chili peppers. The experience changed my DNA.”

Lauren rolled her eyes. “You’re lucky you still have taste buds. That’s like an atom bomb.”

“We trained for hot chili peppers in the SEALs,” he said with a straight face. “So let’s go to the Cuban—”

The refrain of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” sounded. Jacko dropped a kiss on her hair while picking up his cell. He got up and walked to the door. “Metal. Coming up the driveway. He’s taking the staples out.”

Lauren sighed. Jacko trusted Metal more than he trusted the hospital doctors. Said Metal had way more experience with gunshot wounds than any hospital doctor could ever have. Maybe so. Though Metal had such huge hands...not a surgeon’s hands at all.

Metal walked into her living room, dressed in a tee and jeans jacket though it was freezing cold outside. Like Jacko, he never seemed to feel the cold. He brought in energy and the metallic smell of snow with him and was carrying a doctor’s medical case.

“Lauren.” Metal bent low to kiss her cheek, cocked a thumb at Jacko. “So how’s my patient? He been good? If you don’t make a fuss when I take out your stitches I’ve got a lollipop with me.”

Jacko shot him the bird and Metal laughed. He settled Jacko in the kitchen, washed his hands thoroughly with an antiseptic soap that smelled like a hospital, and snapped on latex gloves. “Show the nice lady your muscles, Jacko,” Metal said as he brought out a big gauze square and started laying out instruments on it.

Jacko shrugged out of his shirt. Lauren took it from him, placing a hand on his shoulder. Touching him always thrilled her but she also wanted to reassure him. Not that he needed it. Jacko looked bored with the procedure. One thing she’d discovered while Jacko was in the hospital—he hated being sick. She knew he couldn’t wait to get the stitches out.

Metal’s hands were big but gentle as he carefully removed the bandage. He checked the bandage and grunted in satisfaction. The inside of the bandage was pristine white. No bleeding or even scabbing. Jacko had told Lauren that SEALs had special super-healing powers and she’d laughed. But he was healing remarkably well from two bullet wounds, so maybe SEALs really did have special powers.

Metal placed cotton in the grip of forceps, bathed the cotton with antiseptic and cleaned the wounds, both of which were closed with staples. Then he picked up a strange-looking set of curved scissors and started prying up the first staple. “Ouch,” Lauren said in sympathy as Metal took the first staple out of Jacko’s chest and dropped it into a stainless steel tray. Jacko himself would probably have his teeth pulled without benefit of anesthesia rather than make a sound. He didn’t even wince.

Macho idiot.

She stretched to kiss his cheek. “That
ouch
was for you since you’re not going to say it.”

Jacko turned his head and his face was no longer impassive. She knew that look very well and it was always a precursor to blinding pleasure.

“Not now, kids,” Metal said mildly as he dropped another staple into the tray.

Jacko’d almost died. Metal had found them in the nick of time. The doctors said that Jacko had lost nearly four liters of blood, almost incompatible with life. They started infusing him in the ambulance as they raced through the snowy streets.

The doctors had said that Jacko’s chest muscles were so dense, it was almost as if he’d been wearing armor. That, and the fact that the bullet aimed at his heart ricocheted off a rib, had saved his life. Still, he’d been in surgery for three nail-biting hours.

The doctors had wanted to keep Lauren overnight but against medical advice she’d signed herself out and sat vigil in the hospital waiting room.

One by one all the members of ASI had come trickling into the waiting room where Lauren and Metal held vigil. Suzanne and John had arrived after Jacko had been in surgery for an hour. Suzanne had rushed to her and hugged her, and that was when Lauren had broken down. Douglas and Allegra, Claire and Bud and all the ASI operatives came. Lauren discovered just how beloved Jacko was.

Absolutely. He deserved love. He was brave and loyal and smart. She prayed every second he was in surgery that he’d come back to her.

When a deeply exhausted surgeon came in at three in the morning to say that Jacko would live, her legs gave out and only Metal’s lightning reflexes kept her from crumpling to the floor.

Another staple fell with a clink into the tray. “Jesus,” Metal grumbled. “Staples. What is this? 1999?”

Lauren looked at Jacko’s chest, absolutely determined to do it clinically, totally ignoring how hot he looked shirtless. She bent to his chest and examined the scars closely. The doctors had done a really good job. No redness, no infection. Jacko’s dark skin was clear. He looked exactly as he’d looked before only with scars.

She smiled at him. “Scars are kinda sexy.”

He smiled back. The first couple of times he’d smiled at her she’d been startled. But he was smiling more and more lately. Looked good on him. “I get points, don’t I?”

She stroked his arm on the uninjured side. “Absolutely. About a billion points. You saved my life. Doesn’t get more heroic than that. You have my lifelong gratitude.”

“Sounds good,” Metal said, removing another staple. Jacko had ten of them. “Lifelong gratitude from a pretty lady who will bite a guy’s ear off for you and who is also filthy rich. Pretty good deal.”

“Not
that
rich,” Lauren said. “Not any more.”

“We’re going to buy this house,” she told Metal, looking at Jacko. “And then—”

Someone pounded on her front door.

Startled, Lauren looked at Jacko. “Another present?”

But Jacko and Metal were up with guns in hand. These days Jacko was never more than one step away from a gun. He even kept one on the bedside table on his side of the bed.

When they had kids, he was going to have to do something about that.

Metal beat Jacko to the door. They all looked at the security monitor. Lauren blinked. Outside on her porch was a very pretty blond woman, face pinched and sickly pale, cold sweat coating her face, looking up at the security camera. She was shaking.

Metal pushed the button to activate the speaker.

“Lauren?” The girl’s voice was weak, slightly distorted by the speaker. “Runner?”

“Felicity!” Lauren rushed to the door, opened it. The woman stumbled over the threshold. Metal caught her before she could fall to the floor, laying her gently on her back.

Her entire left side was wet with blood. Metal was gently opening her coat and shirt underneath.

He probed carefully and looked up. “Knife wound and it’s serious. We need to get her to a hospital. She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“No!” Felicity’s voice was weak but fierce. She grabbed Metal’s wrist with a bloodstained hand. She looked at Metal then at Lauren then back at Metal. “No hospital!
Please.
He’s after me! He’ll find me in a hospital! I just escaped from one and he—” She coughed, fresh blood welling from her side. “He was there!”

Lauren kneeled down, took her hand. It was cold. “Honey, we need to get you to a doctor.”

Felicity’s pretty face was scrunched with pain. “Please, please,” she whispered. “He’ll kill me.”

Metal was examining the wound. “I can take care of her,” he said. “At least stop the bleeding. There’s a clinic I know where we can do X-rays, operate if necessary, completely off the grid.”

He turned to Felicity. To her credit, she didn’t recoil at Metal’s face and size. He looked terrifying if you couldn’t see the kindness in him. However terrifying he looked, though, the guy after Felicity must have been even more terrifying because she didn’t flinch.

“Yes, yes. Keep me off the grid.” Her hand tightened on Metal’s wrist and he turned his hand to hold hers. “Please.” Her voice was barely audible. A shudder ran through her and her eyes closed, then opened with effort.

“You’re safe,” he said, deep voice reassuring.

“That—that sounds nice. Not true, but nice.”

“It’s true,” Metal said gently, gesturing urgently to Jacko to bring his medic kit.

Felicity looked at Lauren, tried to smile. “Nice to meet you, finally.” She wheezed, coughed. “You know, I’ve always wanted to say this.” She looked at Lauren, one hand clutching Metal’s hand so tightly the knuckles were white, the other reaching out. “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You’re my only hope.”

And then she fainted.

* * * * *

Look for MIDNIGHT PROMISES coming from Lisa Marie Rice and Carina Press in early 2015!

For up-to-date news on Lisa Marie Rice’s book releases, visit
www.lisamariericebooks.com