“We need to get out of here.” He glided his thumb over her lower lip until it trembled open. He had calluses on his fingers, she thought inanely, assuring her this man was no desk jockey. He probably used his gun on a daily basis without blinking, terrifying women for a hobby, and she’d been a fool to trust him, but she’d had no choice.
Still didn’t.
Before she could dwell on that, he tugged her out of the maintenance closet and back into the open, which nearly gave her a coronary. Her entire body twitched, and she felt more vulnerable than she’d ever been.
“There.” Pointing to the first condo, he stayed at her back, practically hunching over her, protecting her body with his.
She’d been imagining the damage a bullet could do, the way it would tear into her, but she didn’t like imagining it tearing into him, either. Clearly he wanted to go through a condo to the front of the street rather than all the way around the long line of the building.
But where then? To her car, whose tires had been slashed? To where some unknown guy waited with a gun?
“Go,” he said in a rough whisper as he rushed her over the low fence—she didn’t fall this time; she couldn’t have, not with his hands guiding her, slipping around her waist to help her—and into the tiny backyard of the first condo, which she happened to know belonged to Mrs. Tokimoto, a seventy-year-old woman with a tendency to mind everyone’s business but her own.
But that worked in their favor, because the older woman had left her sliding glass door slightly ajar. By the time they slipped inside, Jade was practically hyperventilating with fear and panic. Please don’t be home, she prayed silently, not wanting another innocent person to enter the nightmare that was her life. Please.
One quick look into the living room, neat as a pin with furniture that looked as if maybe it’d been around since the early seventies, and she took a breath of relief. No sign of the innately curious Mrs. Tokimoto.
Grabbing her hand, Will pulled her silently through the living room, past the pristine plastic-covered green and orange velour couches and glass coffee table, past the pear and peach wallpaper. They were heading past the open staircase with the light green walls, making their way toward the front door, when a noise came from above.
“Hello?”
Mrs. Tokimoto. Before Jade could register that fact and up her stress—already at a Prozac level—Will grabbed her, propelled her beneath the staircase and against the wall, and held her out of view with his body.
She didn’t need the caution in his gaze to know she should swallow her scream. She didn’t need anything but the knowledge that if she brought attention to herself, or Mrs. Tokimoto, she might get them all killed.
Chapter 5
“Is someone there?” Mrs. Tokimoto’s voice trembled with age as she leaned down over the stairs. “Hello?”
Jade’s nerves were shot. She trembled, and her teeth rattled in her head. Delayed shock, she was certain, but she couldn’t catch her breath to save her life.
Will’s hands squeezed her waist in warning, his broad shoulders blocking the view of anything but him, and his intense, see-all eyes. Locked onto those, she held herself absolutely rigid, her mouth clamped down hard on the scream building deep inside of her from the tension, from the fear that any second the men chasing them would come crashing through that slider, guns blazing.
Will’s eyes told her not to move, not to breathe.
Not a problem. But she craned her neck, trying to see the glass door, needing to know when the end came.
“I locked the slider,” Will breathed in her ear. “It’s going to be okay.”
Okay? How in the world was anything going to be okay ever again? She just shook her head. It didn’t matter if he locked the door; this hell wasn’t over.