Classified Baby

Nic shrieked, “There’s a helicopter outside, and a man and he’s going to—”

Everything exploded.

ONE MINUTE Ethan Moore was in his little-used cube at Prescott Personal Securities, cursing his computer. The next moment, noise blasted around him like a thousand Humvees converging on a single spot, and he was sent flying through the air.

Shouting in surprise, Ethan rolled when he hit, trying to get away from pelting debris, but it was everywhere. Old training and newer instincts kicked in, laced with adrenaline as the floor shuddered beneath him and metal groaned.

A bomb, he thought, though experience told him that wasn’t quite right.

He scrambled to his hands and knees, head ringing. The too-hot fabric of his cargo pants and button-down shirt scorched against his skin. Acrid smoke stung his nose, eyes and throat, and he felt himself coughing but couldn’t hear the noise over the ringing in his ears.

A second explosion ripped through the office. He ducked and shouted with rage. Disbelief. How had the bomber gotten through their security? How had—

Never mind, he told himself. Logic, not emotion. Evacuate first, then figure out who’s behind the attack. Though there was no doubt in his mind Tri Corp. Media was behind the attack. Over the past five months, PPS had been struggling to uncover who was behind a vicious string of murderous attacks on their protectees. Now that they were hot on the trail of several higher-ups at the huge media conglomerate, the faceless mastermind had only sped things up.

Gasping smoke-laced oxygen, Ethan dragged himself to his feet as the noise of the explosion subsided. The smoke and fire alarms cut in, shrilling over the screams and curses that rose up from the other cubes.

“Everyone stay calm!” Ethan shouted in a voice he barely recognized as his own. He looked quickly around the high-tech office space, counting heads. Twelve men and women, all support staff. Most of the other PPS field agents were out chasing leads. Meanwhile, TCM had brought the fight home.

“You!” Ethan pointed to the closest sturdy-looking guy, a computer tech with a nasty gash below one eye. “Check all the cubes. If the wounded are ambulatory, get them out. If not, come find me. And for God’s sake, don’t move anyone who’s down and injured.”

Next, Ethan located their receptionist, Angel, a twenty-something woman wearing black clothes, black lipstick and a diamond stud in her nose. Knowing her penchant for fouling up even the simplest tasks, he kept it simple. “Pop the security doors so everyone can get out. Use the stairs, not the elevators. Got it?”

The terrified-looking receptionist swallowed hard. “Where are you going?”

“To find the boss,” Ethan said, and headed farther into the office suite without looking back.

He wasn’t leaving without Evangeline Prescott.

A few weeks earlier, her name had turned up on a list that included the half-dozen men who’d been murdered over the past few months as part of a deadly billion-dollar oil rights conspiracy. Evangeline was no investor, but the list suggested she was a target.

And the blast had come from the direction of her corner office.

Cursing, Ethan skirted the cube farm, dodging the debris and fluttering papers that swirled on the wind whipping through broken windows. The temperature rose as he headed toward the corner suite, heat crackling on his skin.

“Evangeline, are you in there?” he shouted. “Robert? You okay?”

Ethan called Evangeline’s husband’s name as an afterthought. He didn’t know PPS’s original founder well, and what he knew didn’t impress him much. Robert Prescott had reappeared the previous month after having spent the past two years underground, trying to figure out who’d set him up to die in a rigged plane crash that now appeared to have been one of the earliest moves in the TCM conspiracy, orchestrated by Robert’s former mentor in the world of international espionage. The way Ethan saw it, whether he was a real-life James Bond or not, a man shouldn’t ever let anything except actual death separate him from the woman he’d loved.

Life-and-death danger had a way of leveling differences though, so when Ethan stuck his head through the doorway leading to Robert’s office and called the man’s name, he felt a sharp twist of relief when he got an answer.

“Over here,” Robert said, voice cracking. The room was in shambles, with the desk overturned and wedged against one wall. The founder of PPS was trapped beneath the desk with only his salt-and-pepper hair and one blood-smeared hand visible. The hand waved and Robert’s voice carried the hint of a British accent and the authority of his MI6 background when he ordered, “Get this bloody thing off me.”

Emotion wanted to send Ethan bolting across the room to help his fallen comrade. Logic had him pausing to test the floor, which was tipped at an angle beneath his feet. When it seemed sturdy enough, he crossed the room, looked at how Robert was pinned, and levered a corner of the desk up and away.

After a quick field check for major injuries, Ethan hauled Robert to his feet. “Angel’s got the blast doors open. Take the stairs.”

Robert swiped a hand across a bloody gash on his cheek. “Bugger that. Where’s my wife?”

Though Robert and Evangeline’s relationship had been bumpy since he’d returned from the dead, Ethan heard the raw grief in the other man’s voice. Trying not to resent Robert’s right to that grief, Ethan turned away. “Let’s go find her.”

The men ducked out of Robert’s office, crossed the short distance to Evangeline’s door and stopped dead.

A low groan rattled in Robert’s chest.

Beyond the door, dust and smoke blurred the sight of the mountains in the distance. There was no outer wall. Hell, there was no office. It had become a crater in the side of the building. Heat radiated from the remnants of walls, floor and ceiling. Black soot smeared the carpeting beneath their feet, and the floor beyond fell away to air.

Robert sagged against the door frame.

“God,” Ethan rasped. “I’m so—”

“Don’t say it,” Robert snapped. “Don’t even think it. She’s not dead. She can’t be dead, not when we’ve just found each other again.”

You knew where she was all along, you selfish bastard. An angry ball congealed in Ethan’s gut, alongside the grief. You have no idea what it was like for her, what it feels like to lose someone you love.

But because Ethan did know, he said, “Let’s check the other offices, and the break rooms. The bathroom. Maybe—” He broke off when he heard a faint sound.

Robert heard it, too. He spun and bolted down the hall, shouting, “Evangeline? Evangeline, damn it, answer me!” He skidded to a halt outside the small kitchenette they used as a break room. “She’s in here!”

Then he cursed viciously enough to jab fear into Ethan’s gut.

When he reached the doorway, Ethan saw that the floor tilted away from them and down, as though all 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?