Midnight Kiss (Men of Midnight #7) - Lisa Marie Rice Page 0,88
a powerful man but she had never heard a word against his character, unlike some of the contractor types she’d worked with at the NSA. He’d never cheated or corrupted, that she was aware of, in a business rife with corruption. It seemed like every month a contractor went to jail for trying to game the system. Which made sense, because the PMC business was huge.
No one ever so much as breathed a word against Jacob Black, which meant he was either clean or so ruthless no one dared open their mouths.
But Luke was easy with him and that counted for a lot with her.
She must have looked like a dork, standing there, lost in her thoughts because Luke took her gently by the arm. “Come on. I think this calls for alcohol. We’ll talk it over and do what you think is best.”
What was best? Her thoughts were such a jumble.
She made a living, and a good one at that, by thinking clearly. Her thinking was usually linear, rational, logical and she was capable of keeping a lot of data in her head while making decisions. But now there were all these elements and she didn’t know what relationship they bore to each other. Her mother wasn’t the mother she’d known but a woman she didn’t remember, Lucy. Her father was a warrior and the son of a man who was immensely powerful and might become the most powerful man in the world. He also might have killed her mother and tried to have her killed. Or maybe it was his father. Her uncle was Frank Glass.
And then there was Luke.
There was nowhere to put these thoughts in order. No way to draw conclusions and no way to understand what to do next.
Luke walked her over to a cabinet with some high-end liquor bottles and cut glass tumblers turned upside down to avoid gathering dust.
How do you keep a safe house where no one lived clean? Did regular cleaners come in, say, twice a month? Or just after it had been used as a safe house, to clear out the pizza boxes?
It was an organizational issue, she thought as he poured out a glass with a finger of amber liquid. But surely a safe house was used on an irregular basis so there’d have to be a data base that —
It happened all at once, in slow motion. The pretty cut-crystal glass on the sideboard blew up in a cascade of red. She turned to Luke but he — he wasn’t there. He was diving to the floor and taking her with him. She landed on her back, the breath driven right out of her by his heavy weight on top of her. He looked so lean yet he was really heavy. It was hard to breathe and she tried to push him off but her hands kept slipping in something red …
And time, which had slowed down, suddenly rushed back in like a tide held back. Someone had shot at them! And she’d been hit! She looked at her red hands but couldn’t figure out where she’d been hit.
She hadn’t been hit. But Luke had.
“Luke!” Hope tried to get him to lift up a bit to see him better but he pushed her down, arms over her head, protecting her. “You’ve been shot! Let me see!” she cried. Pushing hard, she couldn’t budge him. Her hands were bright red and sticky with blood. “You need medical care!”
He wasn’t listening, focused on his cellphone. Of all the times … but then she saw what he was looking at. It was a view of the surrounding area around the house, in windows on the cell screen. It looked similar to the app she had for security for her apartment.
She frantically searched his screen but it was empty of people. The images were a greenish ghostly tint which she recognized as night vision. “Who shot at us? I don’t see him.”
“Neither do I, damn it. And I don’t understand how he could aim and hit me, we were away from the windows and the curtains are drawn anyway.”
She was studying the static images carefully. “Thermal?”
“Fuck,” he said. “Yeah. We don’t dare stand up. We’re relatively safe on the floor but we can’t stay here forever. Listen, stay here for a second while I go get thermal blankets, that will hide our thermal signature. You’re okay here behind the couch. The shot came from the front.”