Overload

“I’m impressed,” he said.

Wryly she said, “So am I. It’s been years.”

“You were on the college gymnastics team, huh? You never told me that before.”

“Nothing to tell, because I wasn’t on the college team. I’m too tall to be really good. But I took classes, for conditioning and relaxation.”

“From what I remember,” he said lazily, “you’re still in great shape.”

Elizabeth wheeled away and began walking briskly to the stairs, turning her back on the intimacy of that remark. She could feel him right behind her, like a great beast stalking its prey. She pushed open the door and stopped in her tracks. “Uh-oh.”

The stairwell was completely dark. It wasn’t on an outside wall, but it would have been windowless in any case. The hallway was dim, with only one office on that floor having interior windows, but the stairwell was stygian. Stepping into it would be like stepping into a well, and she felt a sudden primal instinct against it.

“No problem,” Quinlan said, so close that his breath stirred her hair and she could feel his chest brush against her back with each inhalation. “Unless you have claustrophobia?”

“No, but I might develop a case any minute now.”

He chuckled. “It won’t take that long to get down. We’re on the third floor, so it’s four short flights and out. I’ll hold the door until you get your hand on the rail.”

Since the only alternative was waiting there until the power came back on, Elizabeth shrugged, took a deep breath as if she were diving and stepped into the dark hole. Quinlan was so big that he blocked most of the light, but she grasped the rail and went down the first step. “Okay, stay right there until I’m with you,” he said, and let the door close behind him as he stepped forward.

She had the immediate impression of being enclosed in a tomb, but in about one second he was beside her, his arm stretched behind her back with that hand holding the rail, while he held her other arm with his free hand. In the warm, airless darkness she felt utterly surrounded by his strength. “I’m not going to fall,” she said, unable to keep the bite from her voice.

“You’re sure as hell not,” he replied calmly. He didn’t release her.

“Quinlan—”

“Walk.”

Because it was the fastest way to get out of his grasp, she walked. The complete darkness was disorienting at first, but she pictured the stairs in her mind, found the rhythm of their placement, and managed to go down at almost normal speed. Four short flights, as he had said. Two flights separated by a landing constituted one floor. At the end of the fourth flight he released her, stepped forward a few steps and found the door that opened onto the first floor. Gratefully Elizabeth hurried into the sunlit lobby. She knew it was all in her imagination, but she felt as if she could breathe easier with space around her.

Quinlan crossed rapidly to the guard’s desk, which was unoccupied. Elizabeth frowned. The guard was always there—or rather, he had always been there before, because he certainly wasn’t now.

When he reached the desk, Quinlan immediately began trying to open the drawers. They were all locked. He straightened and yelled, “Hello?” His deep voice echoed in the eerily silent lobby.

Elizabeth groaned as she realized what had happened. “The guard must have gone home early, too.”

“He’s supposed to stay until everyone is out.”

“He was a substitute. When he called the office, Chickie told him that I would leave before four. If there were other stragglers, he must have assumed that I was among them. What about you?”

“Me?” Quinlan shrugged, his eyes hooded. “Same thing.”

She didn’t quite believe him, but she didn’t pursue it. Instead she walked over to the inner set of doors that led to the outside and tugged at them. They didn’t budge. Well, great. They were locked in. “There has to be some way out of here,” she muttered.

“There isn’t,” he said flatly.

She stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean, ‘there isn’t’?”

“I mean the building is sealed. Security. Keeps looters out during a power outage. The glass is reinforced, shatterproof. Even if we called the guard service and they sent someone over, they couldn’t unlock the doors until the electricity was restored. It’s like the vault mechanisms in banks.”

“Well, you’re the security expert. Get us out. Override the system somehow.”

“Can’t be done.”

“Of course it can. Or are you admitting there’s something you can’t do?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled benignly. “I mean that I designed the security system in this building, and it can’t be breached. At least, not until the power comes back on. Until then, I can’t get into the system. No one can.”

Elizabeth caught her breath on a surge of fury, more at his attitude than the circumstances. He just looked so damn smug.

“So we call 911,” she said.

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? We’re stuck in this building!”

“Is either of us ill? Hurt? Are we in any danger? This isn’t an emergency, it’s an inconvenience, and believe me, they have their hands full with real emergencies right now. And they can’t get into the building, either. The only possible way out is to climb to the roof and be lifted off by helicopter, but that’s an awful lot of expense and trouble for someone who isn’t in any danger. We have food and water in the building. The sensible thing is to stay right here.”

Put that way, she grudgingly accepted that she had no choice. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just that I feel so…trapped.” In more ways than one.

“It’ll be fun. We’ll get to raid the snack machines—”

“They operate on electricity, too.”

“I didn’t say we’d use money,” he replied, and winked at her. “Under the circumstances, no one will mind.”

She would mind. She dreaded every minute of this, and it could last for hours. The last thing she wanted to do was spend any time alone with Quinlan, but it looked as if she had no choice. If only she could relax in his company, she wouldn’t mind, but that was beyond her ability. She felt acutely uncomfortable with him, her tension compounded of several different things: uppermost was anger that he had dared to pry into her life the way he had; a fair amount of guilt, for she knew she owed him at least an explanation, and the truth was still both painful and embarrassing; a sort of wistfulness, because she had enjoyed so much about him; and desire—God, yes, a frustrated desire that had been feeding for months on the memory of that one night they had spent together.

“We don’t have to worry about the air,” he said, looking around at the two-story lobby. “It’ll get considerably warmer in here, but the insulation and thermal-glazed windows will keep it from getting critically hot. We’ll be okay.”

She forced herself to stop fretting and think sensibly. There was no way out of this situation, so she might as well make the best of it, and that meant staying as comfortable as they could. In this case, comfortable meant cool. She began looking around; as he’d said, they had food and water, though they would have to scrounge for it, and there was enough furniture here in the lobby to furnish several living rooms, so they had plenty of cushions to fashion beds. Her mind skittered away from that last thought. Her gaze fell on the stairway doors, and the old saying “hot air rises” came to mind. “If we open the bottom stairway doors, that’ll create a chimney effect to carry the heat upward,” she said.

“Good idea. I’m going to go back up to my office to get a flashlight and raid the snack machine. Is there anything you want from your office while I’m up there?”

Mentally she ransacked her office, coming up with several items that might prove handy. “Quite a bit, actually. I’ll go with you.”

“No point in both of us climbing the stairs in the dark,” he said casually. “Just tell me what you want.”

That was just like him, she thought irritably, wanting to do everything himself and not involve her. “It makes more sense if we both go. You can pilfer your office for survival stuff, and I’ll pilfer mine. I think I have a flashlight, too, but I’m not certain where it is.”

“It’s eight flights, climbing, this time, instead of going down,” he warned her, looking down at her high heels.

In answer, she stepped out of her shoes and lifted her eyebrows expectantly. He gave her a thoughtful look, then gave in without more argument, gesturing her ahead of him. He relocated a large potted tree to hold the stairway door propped open, handling it as casually as if the big pot didn’t weigh over a hundred pounds. Elizabeth had a good idea how heavy it was, however, for she loved potted plants and her condo was always full of greenery. She wondered how it would feel to have such strength, to possess Quinlan’s basic self-confidence that he could handle any situation or difficulty. With him, it was even more than mere confidence; there was a certain arrogance, subtle but unmistakably there, the quiet arrogance of a man who knew his own strengths and skills. Though he had adroitly sidestepped giving out any personal information about his past, she sensed that some of those skills were deadly.

She entered the stairwell with less uneasiness this time, for there was enough light coming in through the open door to make the first two flights perfectly visible. Above that, however, they proceeded in thick, all-encompassing darkness. As he had before, Quinlan passed an arm behind her back to grip the rail, and his free hand held her elbow. His hand had always been there whenever they had gone up or down steps, she remembered. At first it had been pleasurable, but soon she had felt a little smothered, and then downright alarmed. Quinlan’s possessiveness had made her uneasy, rather than secure. She knew too well how such an attitude could get out of hand.

Just to break the silence she quipped, “If either of us smoked, we’d have a cigarette lighter to light our path.”