72 Hours

They left the hostages alone for the most, but gave orders now and then that they expected to be followed, a problem since Kate didn’t speak Russian. All the embassy staff did, even the French employees; it was a condition of employment here, just as fluent knowledge of English was a condition of employment over at the U.S. embassy. She was smart enough to copy whatever the others did in response to the commands. It had worked so far, but she wasn’t sure how long her luck would hold out.

“Try something,” Anna, a slightly built, petite young woman whispered barely audibly to her left. She was French and the personal secretary to the ambassador’s wife.

Try something. Brilliant idea. Except that her hands were bound and three nasty-looking AK-47s were pointed in her general direction.

Parker would know what to do. He spoke a dozen languages. And he could always handle tough situations. The way he’d handled an attempted mugging when they’d gone down to Florida for a long weekend came to mind. She supposed he’d had to learn. He visited dangerous parts of the world as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. His continued absence had driven her nuts during their engagement.

She refused to let the memories hurt anymore. She was better off without him.

She pressed her lips together and looked around the room for the hundredth time, trying to figure out a way she could make a break for it and not be shot within a fraction of a second. Okay, Parker. What would you do? The gunshots they had heard earlier didn’t fill her with optimism.

Several embassy guards had been killed within the first few minutes of the attack, as well as the sole civilian-dressed bodyguard who had escorted her over from the U.S. embassy for an unofficial visit with Tanya, the Russian ambassador’s wife.

Tanya had left the dinner table for just a moment to take her two young girls to their nanny when the rebels had rushed in. Maybe they’d been able to escape. The rebels had taken her husband, the ambassador, immediately and herded the rest of the people in here, along with other staff they’d found around the embassy that late in the evening.

It was Anna who had begged the white coat off a cook’s assistant and given it to Kate, warning her not to speak English, not to reveal who she was. And Kate had kept quiet, although she wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. Being a U.S. consul came with a certain amount of respect for the title and the full backing of the American government. Maybe if she’d spoken up, the rebels would have decided they didn’t want to tangle with the U.S. and would have let her go. She shifted on the hard floor. Maybe she should tell them now.

Or maybe not. She still wasn’t over the shock of seeing the bullet rip through her bodyguard’s head. She swallowed and squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to think of Jeff as he’d lain there on the dining room floor in a pool of his own blood. He and the sole Russian guard who’d been inside the dining room were badly outnumbered when the rebels had poured in.

“Pochemu tu…” One of the armed men launched into a tirade.

She wished she could understand what he was talking about, what they were discussing. The lanky one seemed to be whining a lot. The oldest of the three ignored him for the most part. The short, pudgy one kept snapping at him, then finally gave up and shrugged with a disgusted groan.

The whiner swung his rifle over his shoulder and walked out the door, letting it slam behind him.

“Two,” Anna whispered.

They were down to two guards. This could be the best chance they were going to get to try something—disarm them, maybe, and get to the phone on the wall by the gym’s door, call for help. Breaking out of the embassy didn’t seem possible. Too many armed rebels secured the building.

She tried to establish eye contact with the chef who appeared to be in good shape, then with two other guys, tall, beefy and Slavic-looking with hard features and dirty-blond hair. They looked alike, possibly related. They seemed to be the largest and strongest men in the room.

Come on. Over here. She fidgeted and managed to get the attention of one of them. She wiggled her eyebrows toward the guards. The guy looked back nonplussed.

Since her hands were tied behind her back, she couldn’t make any hand signals. She kept wiggling her eyebrows and nodding with her head. The guy smiled.

Probably thought she was coming on to him. Did she look like a complete idiot? Apparently so, because he wiggled his eyebrows back.

She stifled a groan and rolled her eyes in a never-mind look she hoped translated. And felt a hand on hers.

She turned slowly toward the other side and met Anna’s gaze. The woman glanced toward the guards then back at Kate with a questioning look in her large blue eyes. Kate nodded. Yes, yes, that’s what I’ve been trying to do.

“Now,” Anna breathed without moving her lips. She took a deep breath then started to cry.

The pudgy guard yelled at her immediately. Anna stifled her sobs and leaned against Kate as if for support. She tugged on the nylon cuffs that held Kate’s hands behind her back. Then came heat. Under the noise of her crying, apparently she had lit a match or a lighter that must have been hidden in her pocket.

Every snarly thought Kate had ever had about smokers blowing smoke in her face at the cafés that supported her French-pastry habit, she took back.

Ouch. Even a small flame could be pretty hot this close. But the pressure of the nylon eased on her wrists, and in the next second she was free.

“Hurry,” the girl whispered into her shoulder and dropped a lighter into her hands.

But then the door opened and the whiny guard was back, carrying a large box, leading with his back. Or maybe it wasn’t the whiny guard. This one looked bigger. But familiar.

The pudgy rebel barked a question.

“Da, da.” The newcomer mumbled the rest of his answer and kept advancing into the room, groaning, bent under the weight of whatever he was carrying. But the next second the box flew at the older bandit, knocking his weapon aside while the stranger took out the pudgy one with his gun. He had enough time to shoot the other one, too, before that one gathered himself.

Her hands were free, but all she could do was stare at the man dumbstruck, unable to believe her eyes.

Parker?

She pushed to her feet and stepped toward him, but he shook his head slightly and severed eye contact as if he didn’t want anyone to know that they knew each other. He spoke in Russian as he cut the plastic cuffs off people then distributed the rebels’ guns to the hostages, who were asking questions at the rate of a hundred per second.

He answered before he pointed at her, said something else in Russian and ripped the gas mask off Pudgy’s belt, then shoved it into her hand. He dragged her out of the gym, closing the door behind them.

“What’s going on?” She followed him down the corridor since he wouldn’t stop. “What are you involved with now?” He looked even better than he had in her frequent dreams of him. Whoever she’d been with in the two years since they’d broken up, her dreams brought only one man to her: Parker.

He couldn’t be here on assignment. That wouldn’t make any sense. “If the press could get in, why isn’t the rescue team here?”

“Later.” His whole body alert, the gun poised to shoot, he moved so fast that keeping up was an effort. He looked like Parker’s action-figure twin: eyes hard as flint, body language tight and on the scary side. Even his voice sounded sharper.

She’d never seen him like this before. Pictures of the last few minutes flashed into her head, the way he had shot those men. He sure hadn’t looked like a reporter back there. She struggled to make sense of it all. Then, as they rushed forward, her gaze snagged on a security camera high up on the wall—not pointing at the row of antique oil paintings but at the hallway itself.

“Can they see us?” She looked around, bewildered, expecting to run into rebel soldiers any second.

“They’re not working. The rebels took out the security system when they broke in. Phones are disabled, too. I already checked.”

Where? How? She didn’t have time to ask.

Voices came from up ahead. No, no, no. A fresh wave of panic hit just when she thought she was already at max capacity for fear. They were in a long, marble-tiled hallway with a single, ornately gilded door they’d just passed.

Parker pulled back immediately and reached for the knob. Locked. He looked around, searching the corridor.

Why didn’t he just kick the door in? She was about to ask when she realized they couldn’t afford to make noise. Good thing one of them had a clear enough mind to think.

The voices neared. Parker let go of her and hurried to an ornamental cast-iron grid low on the opposite wall, pulled a nasty-looking knife and began to unscrew it.

They were never going to make it. She looked back and forth between him and the end of the hallway. Hurry, hurry, hurry. “They’re almost here.”

He got the heavy-looking grid off and laid it down gently, without making a sound. Then he climbed in, legs first. She was practically on top of him. But he didn’t move lower to make room for her. “Get on my back,” he said.

“What? I can’t. It’s—” She didn’t have time to argue. The rebels were coming.

She went in, legs first like he did, feeling awkward and uncomfortable at having to touch him, having to hang on to him, being pressed against his wide back. He was all hard muscle just as he’d always been. She snipped any stray memory in the bud and kept moving. When she had her arms around his neck and her legs around his waist as if he were giving her a piggyback ride, she stopped, barely daring to breathe. She wasn’t crazy about dark, tight places.

And they weren’t in some storage nook as she had thought, but in a vertical, chimneylike tunnel with a bottomless drop below them.

But just when she thought things couldn’t get more dangerous, he let go with his left hand and reached for the cast-iron grid to lift it back into place. Boots passed in front of their hiding place a few seconds later, people talking.

The men stopped to chat just out of sight. Oh God, please just go.

They didn’t. They stayed and stayed and stayed. Her arms were aching from the effort. She could barely hold herself. She couldn’t see how Parker was able to hold the weight of two bodies with nothing but his fingers.

An eternity passed. Then another. She distracted herself by organizing her half-million questions about his sudden appearance and his complete personality change.

“Hang on,” he whispered under his breath and moved beneath her.

She barely breathed her response. “I think we should stay still.” No need to take any unnecessary chances, make some noise and draw attention.

“Can’t. We’re slipping.”

All her questions cleared in the blink of an eye, replaced by a single thought. They were going to die.

Chapter Two

Kate braced a hand against the wall and realized at once why they were slipping. The brick was covered with slippery powder. She could make out some cobwebs in what little light filtered through the metal grid. She didn’t want to think of the number of spiders that would be living in a place like this. She put the hand back around Parker’s neck.

He slipped another inch.

Oh God, oh God, oh God. Please, please, please. She held her breath, expecting a fall any second. How high were they? And what was waiting for them at the bottom? Too dark to tell.

“Parker?”

“Relax,” he whispered; he could probably feel the tension in her body.

She loosened the death grip she had around his neck. Whatever he was doing to save them, he could probably do it better if she didn’t cut off his air supply.

He was slipping even though he had both hands and feet braced on the side walls. But they had a slow, controlled descent; he was able to achieve at least that much. After the first few moments of sheer panic, she unfolded her legs from around his waist and stuck them out, hoping to take some of her weight off him and help to slow them even more. The less they slipped, the shorter their climb would be back to the opening once the rebels moved away.

She succeeded, but only marginally. They were still steadily going down.

At least they weren’t crashing. She concentrated on the spot of light that was getting closer and closer, coming from the next cover grid on the floor below them. An eternity passed before they reached it.

Hanging on to the cast-iron scrolls, Parker was able to halt their downward progress temporarily.

They listened, but could hear no voices from outside.

“Can we get out?” she whispered.

“Maybe.” He waited a beat. “Looks deserted out there. We still have to be careful. I’m sure they secured every floor.”

“They can’t have people in every hallway.” At least, she really hoped they couldn’t.

“They don’t. They’re set up in strategic control positions.” Parker pushed against the grid, his muscles flexing against her.

The metal didn’t budge.

“Want me to get your knife out of your pocket?” she offered, although his pocket was the last place she wanted to be moseying around.

“Screws are on the outside. Can’t get to them.” He made another attempt at rattling them loose without success. “The offer is tempting, but I’ll pass for now.”

She bit back a retort at his teasing. She could and would let things go. She had learned over the years. “What do we do now?”

“Get to the bottom and find another way up.” He didn’t seem too shaken by their situation.

She, on the other hand, was going nuts in the confines of the tight space. “What is this place?” Her muscles tensed further as they began sliding again.

“The building used to belong to some nobleman back in the day. This is where the servants pulled up the buckets of coal from the basement for the tile stoves that heated his parlors.”

“And you know this how?”

He couldn’t shrug in their precarious situation, but made some small movement that gave the same effect.

Their shoes scraped on the walls that were less than three feet from each other, but the old coal dust muted the sound. She let go with one hand again and tried to find support. Carrying their combined weight had to be difficult even for a man as strong as Parker.

“I think I can do this on my own.” She’d seen rock-climbing done at the gym before, how those climbers supported their weight with nothing but the tips of their fingers and toes.

“We came from the second floor. With the twenty-foot ceilings these old palaces have, the drop to the basement could be fifty feet or more,” he said. “You stay where you are. If you slip, you die.”

She was perfectly clear on the hundred and one ways she could die in their given situation. She was trying hard not to think of them, thank you very much. “What can I do to make this easier?”

“Stop moving.”

She stilled and kept silent for a while before she realized she could probably move her lips.

“How did you get in here? Don’t tell me it’s for a story.”

“I quit that job. I work for the government now.”

He always had been dark and mysterious, something that had drawn her to him at the beginning of their relationship but had ended up driving a wedge between them eventually. Mysterious was fine in a sexy stranger. But when you were trying to build a life with someone, there were things you needed to know. There had come a time when she had realized that he was never going to let her in fully.

“You’re a marine?” The U.S. embassy was protected by marines. She had expected them to come after her eventually. But Parker wasn’t part of that team. He was probably too old for enlistment at this stage. She thought the age limit was twenty-eight. He was four years older than her, which made him thirty-six.

“Something like that,” he said, and in typical Parker fashion, wouldn’t elaborate.

She had a few guesses as to why. So her ex was some kind of special commando. “Something like” a marine. A picture was beginning to take shape in her mind. “Did you know I was here?”

She made sure to hold her elbows in, and her knees, although that wasn’t an easy task since her legs were wrapped around his waist for support. She couldn’t hold herself up by her arms alone any longer. On second thought, her brilliant idea of going down on her own might have been overly optimistic.

She tried hard not to think of the countless times her legs had been wrapped around his waist from the other side. Slow breath in. Slow breath out. The stifling air of the stupid coal chute seemed unbearably hot.

“I’ve been briefed,” he was saying.

He? What about the rest of the commando team? And in that moment, she knew without a doubt that there were no others. The embassy wasn’t being liberated. She was. Through some crazy plan, he was here to rescue her, and they were about to leave all those other people behind.

As if she would ever agree to anything as insane as that.

They were just reaching the landing, had to get down on their hands and knees to crawl out, touching each other way more in the process than she was comfortable with. He had always had an instant, mind-melting effect on her. There should be a vaccination against men like him, something that would give the recipient immunity. She’d be first in line at the clinic.

A dim security light burned somewhere, enough to see that they were both black, covered in hundred-year-old soot. He looked like some Greek hero, sculpted from black marble instead of white. She glanced down at her own clothes, stifling a sigh. She looked like an Old West horse thief, tarred and waiting to be feathered.

“Come on, we don’t have much time.” He moved forward, gun in hand. “I came in through the roof, but we’ll see if there’s a way out through here. Maybe some connection to the neighboring building. Like a secret emergency tunnel for the embassy staff.”

She thought of Anna, who had risked her life to melt the cuffs off her, and the kitchen staff who’d risked their lives to conceal her identity. She thought of Tanya and the two small children, and Ambassador Vasilievits, who had been separated from the others by the rebels.

“Did anyone make it out of the building?”

“No,” Parker said without turning around.

He was a dozen feet ahead before he realized that she wasn’t following and turned around. “What’s going on?” His eyes flashed with impatience.

She had a feeling he was about to get even more unhappy with her. “I’m not leaving,” she said.

WHAT in hell?

“You’re leaving, babe, believe me. You’re leaving if I have to carry you.” His blood pressure was inching up. For some unfathomable reason, she didn’t comprehend that every second counted. Odd really, because Kate Hamilton was one sharp woman.

“I’m not leaving the rest of the hostages to die. As soon as someone goes into the gym and realizes what you did, they’ll be massacred.” She was shooting him an accusing look, standing tall like some movie heroine.

Oh, man. She had that stubborn determination in her fine eyes, the same rich green color as the highland forests of Scotland. And he knew from experience that meant nothing good.

“I left them armed.”

No way was he going to stop to have a fight about this with her. He scanned the basement instead, which seemed closed to the outside, the only exit being a staircase that led up to the ground floor. He could see a few spots on the brick walls where at one point in the past there had been basement windows to the street, but they were walled in. And since the building was an old one, the outer walls were close to three feet wide, solid brick and mortar. They couldn’t even dig their way out.

“They are admin staff and people from the kitchen.” Kate wouldn’t let the subject drop. Her full and delicately shaped lips were set in a strict line of displeasure.

“The rebels won’t kill them. They need someone to negotiate with.” He eyed the stairs and calculated.

“They can negotiate with the ambassador,” she countered, backing away from him as he began stalking her. “The rebels have him someplace else in the embassy. He was taken away from the rest of us at the beginning.”

He stilled.

“Parker? What happened to him?”

And when he didn’t respond, she asked with horror in her eyes, “They killed him? That’s what the gunfire was about, wasn’t it?”

He said nothing.

Her tanned hands flew up to cover the lower part of her face until only her big, luminous eyes showed, glinting with moisture. Her shoulders drooped with defeat.

“Tanya…” Her voice sounded as if she was fighting for air. “How about his wife and the—” She didn’t seem to be able to take in enough air to finish the sentence.

“No idea.” He felt remorseful, but undeterred. “We are leaving. Now.”

“No. It’s my life.”

And his breath caught, because that had been the last thing she had told him before she’d left. It’s my life, Parker. I’m sorry. I have to do what’s best. And he had stood there, without a word, without trying to change her mind, and watched her walk away.

Letting her go had been the single most selfless thing he had ever done in his life. He knew she was better off without him. He was darkness and she was light.

But it had still hurt like hell.

He blinked hard, waited for the tightness in his chest to ease. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“None of your business,” she snapped at him. “I’m not going. I’m serious.”

So was he.

“Kate.” The word came out in a low growl of temper. He hated how quickly she could make him lose his cool. He was frustrated that she wouldn’t give him her full cooperation.

She hesitated another long second. Damn. There had been a time when she had told him everything, had laid her soul bare and shared it. Well, the trust was gone now. He should have expected that.

“I am considering adopting a child from Russia. Tanya has two adopted children. I had some questions about the process and the orphanage she used,” she said with a defensive set of her chin and a hint of vulnerability around her.

That wasn’t the answer he had expected. The words cut him off at the knees. There had been a time when he was looking forward to Kate having his children, although he had tried to tell her that the time wasn’t right just yet, that they would probably have to wait a couple of years. He didn’t want to miss anything. He didn’t want to be an absentee father on active duty. Not that he’d been able to tell her that. He’d had to cook up some stupid story about how he needed a lot of time at that point because he was fighting hard for his next promotion.

A tidal wave of regrets slammed into him. He couldn’t think about all that now. He had to get her out of here.

But she wasn’t done fighting yet. “Listen to me. Chances are they would have let the hostages go at the end. Now that you shot their men, they are going to kill the people we left behind. Because of me. I can’t live with that. I’m not that kind of person. I can’t.” There was urgency and desperation in her voice. “Please,” she added with her unique mix of vulnerability and determination.

She wasn’t a delicate woman. She was vivacious. She had lively eyes, a full mouth and a stubborn jawline. She laughed from the heart and cried from the heart.

He still had a crush on her. The realization caught him off guard. That rush of attraction, the magnetic pull. A crush—that was all it was. He imagined there wasn’t a man who could go within ten feet of Kate Hamilton without developing a little crush on her.

He could disarm a nuclear warhead. He should be able to neutralize some leftover attraction.