Overload

“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.”

“If either of us smoked,” he came back dryly, “we wouldn’t have the breath to climb the stairs.”

She chuckled, then saved her energy to concentrate on the steps. Climbing five floors wasn’t beyond her capabilities, but it was still an effort. She was breathing hard by the time they reached the fifth floor, and the darkness was becoming unnerving. Quinlan stepped forward and opened the door, letting in a sweet spill of light.

They parted ways at their respective offices, Quinlan disappearing into his while Elizabeth unlocked hers. The late-afternoon light was still spilling brightly through the windows, reminding her that, in actuality, very little time had passed since the elevator had lurched to a halt. A disbelieving glance at her wristwatch said that it had been less than half an hour.

The flashlight was the most important item, and she searched the file cabinets until she found it. Praying that the batteries weren’t dead, she thumbed the switch and was rewarded by a beam of light. She switched it off and placed it on Chickie’s desk. She and Chickie made their own coffee, as it was both more convenient and better tasting than the vending machine kind, so she got their cups and put them on the desk next to the flashlight. Drinking from them would be easier than splashing water into their mouths with their hands, and she knew Chickie wouldn’t mind if Quinlan used her cup. Quite the contrary.

Knowing that her secretary had an active sweet tooth, Elizabeth began rifling the desk drawers, smiling in appreciation when she found a six-pack of chocolate bars with only one missing, a new pack of fig bars, chewing gum, a honey bun and a huge blueberry muffin. Granted, it was junk food, but at least they wouldn’t be hungry. Finally she got two of the soft pillows that decorated the chairs in her office, thinking that they would be more comfortable for sleeping than the upholstered cushions downstairs.

Quinlan opened the door, and she glanced at him. He had removed his suit jacket and was carrying a small black leather bag. He looked at her loot and laughed softly. “Were you a scout, by any chance?”

“I can’t take the credit for most of it. Chickie’s the one with a sweet tooth.”

“Remind me to give her a big hug the next time I see her.”

“She’d rather have you set her up on a date with that biker who came in after lunch.”

He laughed again. “Feeling adventurous, is she?”

“Chickie’s always adventurous. Was he a client?”

“No.”

She sensed that that was all the information he was going to give out about the “biker.” As always, Quinlan was extremely closemouthed about his business, both clients and staff. On their dates, he had always wanted to talk about her, showing interest in every little detail of her life, while at the same time gently stonewalling her tentative efforts to find out more about him. It hadn’t been long before that focused interest, coupled with his refusal to talk about himself, had begun making her extremely uncomfortable. She could understand not wanting to talk about certain things; there was a certain period that she couldn’t bring herself to talk about, either, but Quinlan’s secretiveness had been so absolute that she didn’t even know if he had any family. On the other hand, he had noticed the gap in her own life and had already started asking probing little questions when she had broken off the relationship.

There was a silk paisley shawl draped across a chair, and Elizabeth spread it across the desk to use as an upscale version of a hobo’s pouch. As she began piling her collection in the middle of the shawl, Quinlan casually flicked at the fringe with one finger. “Do people actually buy shawls just because they look good draped across chairs?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“It’s kind of silly, isn’t it?”

“I guess it depends on your viewpoint. Do you think it’s silly when people spend hundreds of dollars on mag wheels for their cars or trucks, just because they look good?”

“Cars and trucks are useful.”

“So are chairs,” she said dryly. She gathered the four corners of the shawl together and tied them in a knot. “Ready.”

“While we’re up here, we need to raid the snack machines, rather than rely on what you have there. There’s no point in making extra trips upstairs to get more food when we can get it now.”

She gave him a dubious look. “Do you think we’ll be here so long that we’ll need that much food?”

“Probably not, but I’d rather have too much than too little. We can always return what we don’t eat.”

“Logical,” she admitted.

He turned to open the door for her, and Elizabeth stared in shock at the lethal black pistol tucked into his waistband at the small of his back. “Good God,” she blurted. “What are you going to do with that?”

CHAPTER THREE

He raised his eyebrows. “Whatever needs doing,” he said mildly.

“Thank you so much for the reassurance! Are you expecting any kind of trouble? I thought you said the building was sealed.”

“The building is sealed, and no, I’m not expecting any trouble. That doesn’t mean I’m going to be caught unprepared if I’m wrong. Don’t worry about it. I’m always armed, in one way or another. It’s just that this is the first time you’ve noticed.”

She stared at him. “You don’t usually carry a pistol.”

“Yes, I do. You wouldn’t have noticed it now if I hadn’t taken my coat off.”

“You didn’t have one the night we—” She cut off the rest of the sentence.

“Made love?” He finished it for her. His blue eyes were steady, watchful. “Not that night, no. I knew I was going to make love to you, and I didn’t want to scare you in any way, so I locked the pistol in the glove compartment before I picked you up. But I had a knife in my boot. Just like I do now.”

It was difficult to breathe. She fought to suck in a deep breath as she bypassed the issue of the pistol and latched on to the most shocking part of what he’d just said. “You knew we were going to make love?”

He gave her another of those thoughtful looks. “You don’t want to talk about that right now. Let’s get finished here and get settled in the lobby before dark so we can save the batteries in the flashlights.”

It was another logical suggestion, except for the fact that night wouldn’t arrive until about nine o’clock, giving them plenty of time. She leaned back against the desk and crossed her arms. “Why don’t I want to talk about it now?”

“Just an assumption I made. You’ve spent over half a year avoiding me, so I didn’t think you would suddenly want to start an in-depth discussion. If I’m wrong, by all means let’s talk.” A sudden dangerous glitter lit his eyes. “Was I too rough? Was five times too many? I don’t think so, because I could feel your climaxes squeezing me,” he said bluntly. “Not to mention the way you had your legs locked around me so tight I could barely move. And I know damn good and well I don’t snore or talk in my sleep, so just what in hell happened to send you running?”

His voice was low and hard, and he had moved closer so that he loomed over her. She had never seen him lose control, but as she saw the rage in his eyes she knew that he was closer to doing so now than she had ever imagined. It shook her a little. Not because she was afraid of him—at least, not in that way—but because she hadn’t imagined it would have mattered so much to him.

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