Jameson (In the Company of Snipers #22) - Irish Winters Page 0,38
were his wallet and everything else. His brand-new badge. Dumbasses had emptied his pockets.
Okay then. Plan B. Since Maddie was still cuffed and wouldn’t be able to break those plastic ties… On second thought…“Put your wrists together,” he told her. “Hurry.”
If a man could do it, so could a woman. Once she complied like he’d asked, he jerked the ties on her wrists tight until she hissed, “That hurts. Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. I need you to focus. You’re a strong, capable woman, and I know you can do this. Put your heart and soul into flexing those gorgeous biceps and breaking these restraints. They’re just plastic. They’ll snap off if you do it right. I promise. You’ve got this.”
“Is that what you did?”
“Yes. You can do it, too. I know you can.”
He could hear Maddie breathing through her nostrils, and not once had she said she couldn’t. But damn. After three tries, he could smell the blood. Her wrists were bleeding. The ties were too tight, and either she wasn’t strong enough, or she didn’t believe in herself. Jameson called time-out. Plan B it was.
“Tell me what you see.” His heart was hammering by then, but adrenaline did that.
Maddie was shaking plenty, too. “It’s dark, but there’s light coming under the door. I can see. You lost your glasses. Oh, my gosh, the back of your neck is burned.”
“Tell me something I don’t know. What can’t I see?”
“Okay. Umm, well, we’re in a room without windows. Looks like a basement. Smells like somebody’s dirty bathroom. Concrete floor. One door directly behind you. Simple hollow core with four-square molding. But no doorknob on this side. A wooden workbench to my right. It’s full of holes.” She must’ve looked upward because her voice shifted slightly away from him. “High ceiling. One large vent over the door. Two screws.”
“Now you’re talking. How big’s that vent? On the ceiling or in the wall?”
“The ceiling. Maybe two by two.”
That was something he could work with. “Could you fit through the opening if I helped you reach it?” He already knew she could. The moment they’d collided in that explosion, he’d gotten an armful of delicate femininity that just might save their lives tonight. Or today or whenever the hell it was.
“Yes,” she said with determination. “I’m small enough. But I don’t get it. Why would loan sharks kidnap us? They won’t get their money that way.”
“That’s not who’s after us, and this isn’t about your ex. Lucy Shade planned this. I heard her and some Irish dipshit talking. This was supposed to be a publicity stunt, where we died in the fire, while her stooge rescued her from whoever allegedly blew up her jet. Then… she said…” Damn, his pounding head made remembering the exact wording difficult. Think! “… he’d set the charges wrong, that the jet exploded too early. That he’d thought kidnapping us instead of her was smarter.”
Jameson ran a quick hand over his aching head, but stopped short of rubbing his blistered skin. “Shade doesn’t know what to do with us. So let’s get you up into that vent and out of sight before they come back. I’m relying on you to be extra-quiet moving through the ductwork. This place is old. You might run into spiders or mice or—”
“They’re going to kill us, aren’t they?”
She needed to know, so he nodded. “Unless we get away. We’re supposed to be dead already. We’re just loose ends.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Why would kidnappers still be in a jet they intended to blow up?”
“She needed two dead bodies. That way she could claim she got away from us before the jet exploded. There’d be no one left alive to contradict her story. It’d be big news. She’d be the reporter who escaped wicked kidnappers, the next big star.”
He could hear Maddie’s heartbeat soar and the sound of her dry swallowing. “You’re not coming with me?” she asked.
Jameson came to a full stop. The tone in her question was blatantly plaintive and frightened. She’d never been in combat, much less what they’d lived through today. He could smell her fear. “Babe, I—”
What could he say? That he meant to stay behind and kill Miss Shade and her stooge to give Maddie time to get away? That he meant to die before he let anything happen to her? That this had been, hands down, one of the best days of his life, and all because he’d met a waifish Protocol Officer who had once