Classified Baby

There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Ethan didn’t join in. Instead, he scanned the street, which was a scene of barely controlled chaos. Most of the evacuees and onlookers had been pushed back, away from the damaged office building, but dazed-looking people continued to stream from the stairwells. Nearby, several wickedly jagged cement chunks were embedded in a cracked section of sidewalk, surrounded by the glitter of reflective glass shards. Off to one side, a scattering of first aid supplies ringed a dark stain.

The explosion had taken victims outside the building as well as in, Ethan thought, feeling the acid burn of anger in his gut.

“Ethan!”

He turned at the sound of Robert’s voice, and saw PPS’s founder loping across the deserted street toward him. The men gripped each other’s forearms in greeting, the first friendly contact Ethan could remember between them. “How’s Evangeline?” he asked.

“She’ll need a few stitches, but is fine otherwise. She’s spitting mad. Wants to take a chunk out of the bomber.” The last was said with a touch of pride.

“I’ll ditto that.” Half his attention on the paramedics, who were busy transferring Nicole to a gurney, Ethan gestured to the stained sidewalk. “Pedestrian?”

Robert nodded, expression darkening. “Falling debris caught a mother and her two kids. Doesn’t look good for the little girl.”

“Damn.” Ethan scowled. It had been bad enough when the mastermind had started killing off TCM’s investors one by one. It had been worse when they’d murdered a PPS computer tech and then slapped Evangeline’s name on the list, but at the very least those targets had been logical. Now they’d escalated way beyond that to injuring innocent bystanders… like the mother and her children. Like Nicole, who’d come to tell him he was a father.

Ethan glanced over at her, seeing the beauty beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

Her face had popped into his head more often than he cared to admit in the weeks since he’d met her.

That night, a friend’s wedding—and the memories it’d brought—had chased him out of the reception and into a tourist-trap bar. He hadn’t noticed her at first, hadn’t had eyes for much other than the glass in front of him. He would’ve had to have been dead, though, to miss noticing when she leaned across him to snag a napkin, pressing against him just long enough to let him know she was looking to play.

He’d been struck first by her dark curls, then by her eyes, which were a strangely intense shade of blue, bordering on violet. Rimmed by dark lashes, they’d looked moments away from laughter all the time, even when she’d been serious. During those serious moments, she’d caught her full lower lip between her teeth, an action that’d left him hard and wanting.

Then later, once the small talk was done and they were alone in the hotel room they’d rented because neither of them had been sober enough to drive home, she’d caught her bottom lip in her teeth again at the moment of her climax, prompting him to capture that lower lip with his own mouth and nibble it into submission.

Afterward, she’d looked at him with a hint of wonder in those violet eyes, a hint of shyness. All an act, he’d thought at first, designed to keep a bar conquest intrigued. But during the long hours of the night, small inconsistencies had added up in his carefully logical brain, leaving him wondering whether that night had been as out of character for her as it had been for him.

He’d resigned himself to never knowing for sure. Now, it seemed he’d been given a second chance to find out.

“Did you hear me?” Robert said, tone sharp.

“Sorry,” Ethan said without looking at his boss. “How about I meet you and Evangeline at the hospital?”

“You need a ride?”

“I’m all set.” He strode toward the ambulance they’d loaded Nicole into, only to stop and turn back when Robert called his name. “What?” he said, voice edgy with impatience and something more, something he didn’t want to analyze too closely.

Robert looked from Ethan to the ambulance and back. “Who is she?”

“She’s—” Ethan broke off, not sure what she was. She wasn’t a friend, wasn’t his lover, yet she’d come to tell him she was carrying his child. “She’s not a client,” he said shortly, and headed for the ambulance.

They’d figure out the rest once she woke up.

TERRIFIED, Nicole screamed and batted at the blurry shadows around her, fighting the feeling of weightlessness, of falling.

Then she was on the ground without hitting bottom, and something was pressing her down, trapping her arms and legs. She screamed again and fought the hold. “Let me go!”

A man’s voice said, “Nicole, you’re okay. You’re safe. Calm down and listen to me. You’re in the hospital, not the elevator. You’re okay.” The words were more rough than soothing, but they calmed her while sending up a strange shimmy inside.

She woke further, feeling warmth where his hands gripped her forearms. The voice and touch were familiar, but she couldn’t think of his name, couldn’t picture his face, and that brought a spurt of renewed panic, which took up residence alongside a pounding headache.

Opening her eyes, she squinted into the night-dim lights of a hospital room and saw a tall man wearing wrinkled khaki bush pants and a smudged white button-down missing a couple of buttons. His dark brown hair brushed over his forehead, streaked with highlights she imagined might be gold in better light. His eyes were dark brown and intelligent beneath heavy brows, his nose aquiline, his jaw chiseled. The whole effect was compelling and more than a little distant.

And it was a stranger’s face.

“Why am I in the hospital?” she demanded. “Who are you?”

Before he could answer, the hallway door swung open and a white-coated, dark-haired female doctor entered. Her expression softened when she looked at the bed. “It’s good to see you awake, Miss Benedict.”

Panic pounded through Nic as she pointed to the man. “I don’t know him.”

The doctor pursed her lips, leaned down and flashed a penlight in Nic’s eyes. “Follow this.” She kept up a background monologue as she ran through a quick exam. “I’m Dr. Eballa—that’s with an a and two l’s, please, not Ebola like the virus.” She paused and wrote something on a clipboard, then said, “Your vitals are good and everything checks out normal, but you’ve got a good-sized knot on the back of your head and you were out for quite a while.” She straightened away from the bed. “What’s your full name and what are your parents’ names?”

“Nicole Antoinette Benedict,” Nic said immediately. “My parents are Lyle and Mary Benedict. They live back in Maryland where I grew up.” The easy answers calmed some of the panic and she shifted and lifted a hand to the back of her head, wincing when she found a tender, raised bump the size of her palm. “What happened?”

“What is the last thing you remember?”

“I—” Nicole broke off, her stomach twisting when she realized that while she remembered lots of things, they weren’t in any sort of order. She could picture a greenhouse full of plants, but she wasn’t sure if it was a memory from last week or last year. Panic spiked through the pounding headache, and her voice trembled when she said, “I don’t know.”

The doctor touched her wrist, maybe in reassurance, maybe a quick check on her pulse. “That’s not uncommon after a concussion such as yours. Things should start to clear up over the next few hours or days, though you may never remember the actual attack.”

Nic’s blood iced in her veins. “I was attacked?”

“Not you personally,” the man said. “You were in an elevator when the building was bombed.”

“Bombed!” Something shivered just out of Nic’s mental reach, a flash of sunlight on a dark shape, there and then gone so quickly she wasn’t sure it had ever been. She closed her eyes for a second, scared and frustrated at the same time. “I don’t remember.” She glanced at him. “And I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Are we…” She trailed off, not sure what she meant to ask.

As she fumbled, Dr. Eballa stepped away from the bed and adjusted the lights higher. The man turned and scowled in the doctor’s direction.

Instantly, his image was overlain by another in her mind’s eye. It was the same face but a different setting—a bar, crowded, noisy and dark. He’d turned and scowled at her, but his brown eyes had warmed with reluctant interest when she’d said something clever—she didn’t remember what it had been, but no matter. She remembered him stretching out a hand, remembered the warmth and the faint electric buzz when they shook and he’d said, “I’m—”

“Ethan!” she said aloud in the hospital room, making him jump.

A flash of relief glinted in his eyes, tainted with something more complicated. “You remember.”

“I remember meeting you in a bar, and…” She trailed off as other memories reconnected. The bar hookup. The hotel room. Hot sex. A plus sign on the home pregnancy test when she’d been praying for a minus. “Oh,” she said, then more forcefully, “Oh! Oh, no. I have to talk to you. In private.”

He turned away, as though he didn’t want her to read his eyes when he said, “You already told me about the baby.”

“Oh.” She swallowed hard and tried to fight through the headache and a growing swell of nausea. “I don’t remember that.” What did I say? she wanted to ask. What did you say?

“What is the last thing you do remember?” he demanded, and she had a feeling there was more to the question than him judging the extent of her partial amnesia.

“I remember getting up this morning.” She glanced at him. “Is it Tuesday?” When he nodded, she felt a small measure of relief. “Then I remember getting up this morning. I read the paper and made a few calls for a project I’m working on.” Pitifully unsuccessful calls, she remembered. “Then I drove into the city to see you. I can picture myself parking somewhere and walking into a big building, but I’m not sure if that’s a memory or a logical guess.”

“You don’t remember being in a glass-walled elevator?” he persisted.

She shook her head, then winced and pressed her fingers to her temples when the headache spiked.