Meet Me at Midnight
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Never once had she thought, What if it turns out he was only pretending to like me?
“I’m sworn to protect the vice president with my life,” he said. “So, yeah, I’m going to do whatever it takes to keep him safe, including joining a dating service to get close to a woman who hacks through trilevel security like it’s nothing.”
Maria tugged on her arm. “Let’s go. You’re not saying another word until you’ve got a lawyer and this guy’s got a warrant or a subpoena or whatever Secret Service agents need.”
But Gabby stood her ground, shaking her head. “I don’t need a lawyer.” She lowered her voice, willing Ty to believe her when she said, “I teach computer science at the Edmunds School. That’s a school for the visually impaired, in case your background research on me missed that little tidbit. I visit a ton of Web sites, and yes, sometimes I hack into the more challenging ones, just to prove I can. But that’s it. I’m not connected to anyone named Shea or Sullivan, and I have nothing against Vice President Davis. I swear it on my sister’s life.” She didn’t know where that had come from, but although she hadn’t seen Amy in over a decade, it was a binding vow. The love remained even though her family had cut her off.
Tears gathered now, welling from the pain in her soul. “As for hacking into encrypted Web sites, you can be sure I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t be Web surfing anymore. You never know what kind of jerk you’ll meet.”
A tear spilled over and tracked down her cheek when she realized that even though she’d tried to end the relationship rather than meet him in person, some small, unrealistic part of her had hoped for something more when he’d e-mailed earlier, begging for a meeting.
Her voice shook when she said, “Please go.”
Ty cursed under his breath and said, “Listen, Gabby—”
But she didn’t want to hear his lame excuses, didn’t want his pity as the swirling emotions coalesced into a hard, hot ball in her chest and the tears surfaced.
Not wanting him to see her cry, she turned and fled into the darkness.
Ignoring Ty’s startled shout, Gabby ran along memorized paths. It was five long steps to the iron gate, twenty across the next courtyard over, then a sharp right-hand turn into the narrow alley between the Robinsons’ two-family and Gino Vinzetti’s house.
The sounds, smells and shapes of the neighborhood were familiar, grounding her in the realities of her life.
Then footsteps sounded behind her and Ty shouted, “Gabby, wait!”
Sobbing with anger and embarrassment, she hooked a left down Hanover Street, keeping one hand on the rough building faces and using the other to sweep her cane back and forth just in case. She tripped once and nearly fell, but regained her balance and kept going all the way to her apartment, which took up the ground floor of a three-family nestled between a seafood restaurant and a pastry shop.
She was grateful that none of the neighbors were home to see her tears and the way her hands shook when she unlatched the wrought iron gate that led to her side entrance. Hopefully, Ty wouldn’t know where she’d gone. She could trust Maria not to tell him.
But he was a federal agent. No doubt he’d known her home address all along.
She blew out a teary breath and let herself inside. She leaned the cane against the door frame, knowing every inch of the apartment without its help, and headed down the entry hall toward the living room, with its soft, embracing couch and familiar, homey smells of cinnamon-scented candles and chocolate chips.
Wanting nothing more than to throw herself onto the couch and scream, she hurried across the room.
Halfway there, she tripped and fell.
Gabby cried out as she slammed her hip into the corner of her coffee table and crashed to the floor. A wave of pain washed through her, radiating from her right hip and elbow.
Dazed, she waited a moment for her head to clear, and then struggled to her hands and knees and felt around. Within moments her fingertips connected with the familiar outline of an antique doorstop cast in the shape of a sailing ship.
A prickle of fear shimmied in her stomach.
The ship was one of a half-dozen iron doorstops she had carefully placed around the apartment. Perhaps they were a strange collector’s item for a legally blind person, but she knew where each one was, just as she knew the placement of every wall, every piece of furniture and all the other odds and ends in her space. Everything in her world had its place.
This ship belonged beside the kitchen door, not in the middle of the living room.
Heart pounding, Gabby searched the room by touching each object with trembling fingers. The sofa and coffee table were exactly where they belonged, and nothing else seemed wrong until she levered herself to her feet and felt for the desk. Out-of-place papers crunched underfoot, and there was a blank space where her computer should have been.
“Oh, God.” Her throat closed on panic, on denial. “Oh, no. No, no, no. Please no.” Her specially outfitted computer, her lifeline to the rest of the world, was gone. Worse, she realized, as she felt frantically along the tabletop, the jumble of half-assembled electronic components was missing, too. She’d been working on a new prototype, a device that could reproduce Web site graphics in three dimensions, allowing blind people to “see” them.
Someone wanted the design, she thought, her mind leaping ahead to seemingly impossible possibilities. Someone who knew what I was working on, who—
She spun when she heard the noise. It might have been a quiet cough, or the shift of a shoe on her kitchen tile, she wasn’t sure, but she suddenly knew she wasn’t alone in the apartment. “Ty?”
“Not exactly,” an unfamiliar masculine voice said from the kitchen. She heard footsteps, sensed him move to block the front hallway. “And you can’t see me, can you? That’ll make this easier than I thought.”
The next thing she knew, he was coming straight for her.
Chapter Two
Dear TyJ:
You know how you said the other day that honesty is very important to you? Well then, I’d better be honest with you. I’m not exactly the hotshot computer jockey I made it sound like in my profile, or even in some of our earlier private messages. I teach programming at a small college in the northeast, which is about as exciting as it sounds. As in ‘not.’ So trust me, the bodyguard gig has me beat by a mile in the ‘cool jobs’ department, even if you do spend most of your time standing around waiting for something to happen.
[Sent by CyberGabby; April 3, 11:32:32 p.m.]
10:21 p.m., August 2 7 Hours and 17 Minutes until Dawn
Ty stumbled to a halt in the middle of the dark, deserted street and let his flashlight sag, hopelessly lost in the mazelike passageways, courtyards and narrow streets of the North End.
Gabby had outdistanced him easily, moving ghostlike in the darkness. Without backup and an earpiece or, hell, even a functional handheld, he lacked access to the maps and information he normally had at his fingertips.
Which had no doubt been part of Liam’s plan.
They’d all learned the theory during Special Forces training—isolate the target and then make the kill. Liam had used the blackout to isolate his former teammates, then he’d moved in for the kill.
He’d sent his sons after those former teammates—Frederick LeBron, Grant Davis, Chase Vickers, Shane Peters and Ethan Matalon. The only unaffected teammate had been Commander Tom Bradley, who’d escaped revenge by dying; the heart attack had taken him before Liam could get to him. LeBron had been in his alpine kingdom in Beau Pays, but the Sheas had gone after his precious daughter, Princess Ariana, and the LeBrons’ priceless sapphire. Thanks to Shane, the Sheas hadn’t been successful. They’d been equally unsuccessful with Ethan and Chase, whose families had been threatened but returned safely. Still. Liam remained at large, in control of the hostage, Grant Davis, and the bomb.
Ty scrubbed his hand over his face, trying to ignore the feeling that he was running out of time, that he was letting himself get sidetracked. But he couldn’t stop flashing back on the look in Gabriella’s eyes when she realized why he’d hooked up with her on Webmatch.com.
It wasn’t what you think, he’d wanted to say, but he hadn’t, because it would have been a lie, and he didn’t want to lie to her anymore.
“At least, not if she’s telling the truth about Liam,” he muttered to himself.
From behind him, a woman’s voice said, “You’re damned right she’s telling the truth.”
Even before he turned and shone his flashlight toward the approaching figure, he knew it wasn’t Gabby. The voice was too high, and it rolled with strains of Italy.
Maria scowled and crossed her arms over her chest. “She doesn’t know anything about your kidnapper, Mr. Secret Service. If she did, she would’ve told you right up-front. That’s the sort of woman she is.”
“I need to speak with her,” he said. “Please.”
She stared at him for a long minute, as though trying to interpret a motivation he couldn’t even name. Then finally she gestured with her chin, “Over there. First floor, door’s around the side.”
“Thanks.” He loped across the street, pushed through the wrought iron gate and followed a cobblestone pathway around to the side of a neat, narrow, brick-walled three-family.
His gut tightened when he touched her door and it swung inward. Adrenaline spiked alongside a jolt of concern. Then both were lost as training kicked in and he clicked over to soldier mode. Quiet. Efficient.
Deadly.
He left his revolver holstered and pulled the semiautomatic, then flicked off the flashlight. Muscles tense, senses almost painfully alert, he eased through the door, then paused and listened, not sure whether he was walking into an ambush or something else.
The pitch-black inside the apartment made him wish for a pair of night-vision goggles as he eased along, carefully testing each step. Finally he cursed and clicked on the flashlight, using his fingers to muffle the glow and let only a small beam shine through.
He uttered a low curse when he saw the condition of her apartment, and the scale tipped away from ambush ever so slightly.
A doorway to his left opened onto a small kitchen, where the refrigerator door hung open, its contents in disarray. A head of lettuce had rolled beneath a small butcher-block table; most of the cabinet doors and drawers were open; and the single counter held a jumbled mess of papers and canned goods.
The kitchen wasn’t just messy, Ty thought on a bite of rage. It’d been tossed, and by someone with a temper.
The back door off the kitchen hung open. Was it a sign that the intruder had gone, or was it set up for a quick getaway? He didn’t know, and that worried him more than it should have, making him wonder about a woman who’d hacked into a murderer’s Web site but claimed it was on a lark, a woman who just happened to live in the same city where the kidnapping had gone down, yet professed innocence. It just didn’t play, he told himself yet again. There were too many coincidences for her to be innocent.
Problem was, he was starting to think she was exactly that.
Gut tight, he checked the kitchen closet and glanced out into the alley. There was no sign of the intruder. There was also no sign of chestnut hair and feminine curves. Where the hell was she?
Refusing to consider the worst-case scenario until he’d thoroughly searched the place, he worked his way back through the kitchen and further into the small apartment.
Three more doors opened off the narrow hallway. The first led to a closet; the second opened into a sitting room.
The desk was in shambles, and an expensive-looking computer and an array of electronics lay in the corner, smashed to pieces. Oddly, though, the TV and the high-tech sound system appeared untouched.
This wasn’t a burglary, then. But what exactly was it?
And why?
Though the timing seemed coincidental—there was that word again, coincidence—Ty shoved his gathering suspicions aside and focused on the priority, which was finding Gabby and making sure she was okay.
Tension hummed through him as he eased toward the last of the three doorways. He flashed back on the moment after the blackout, when the emergency lights had come up at the John Hancock building to reveal a party in shambles, the president and vice president missing. Though President Stack had been found nearby, drugged and confused, VP Davis had not.
Had Gabby been taken hostage, as well?
There’ll be hell to pay if she has, he thought out of nowhere, as he eased through the last door into her bedroom.
There he hesitated for a half second before letting the flashlight beam play over her bed. Unlike the other rooms, which he noted, were devoid of color this room was vibrant. The king-size bed had a fluffy duvet draped with a woven afghan in the deepest of jade greens, and pillows of every shape and size formed a drift against the plush, padded headboard, all in vibrant jewel tones visible even in the wan illumination.
It was, he realized, as unexpected heat burned through his veins, almost exactly as he’d imagined it during their online “dates.” He let his gun hand sag—
And the moment of hesitation nearly cost him everything.
A blur came at Ty from the side. He turned and ducked in a single motion, and the blow glanced off his shoulder. His attacker cursed and kicked out, sending Ty’s gun and flashlight spinning away.
The light smashed into the wall, plunging them into darkness. The gun clattered somewhere off to their left, momentarily lost.
Ty lunged for the other man and they went down on the floor beside Gabby’s bed. “Where is she?” he grated, landing a gut punch that had the other guy wheezing. “Where is Grant Davis? If you’ve hurt either of them, I’ll kill you.”
A blow caught Ty at the temple. His head snapped back, and he saw stars where there weren’t any. Fury spiked. Roaring, he grabbed for the bastard, got a fistful of his shirt and punched him hard in the face. The impact bruised his knuckles and sang up his arm.
“You want to get back to basics?” he grated. “How’s this for basic?” He landed a second punch and thought he felt bone give.
The other man went limp. An atavistic thrill ran through Ty, a surge of victory, of rage. He shifted his grip and reached for the handcuffs he wore on his belt.
With a roar, his opponent exploded into action beneath him, reversing their position and driving his fist into Ty’s jaw.
He saw stars again.
Then blackness.
BREATH SOBBING in her lungs, Gabby tugged at the bars on her bathroom window. When she’d first rented the place, she’d considered them a necessary security measure.
Now they were a trap.
She heard another crash in the bedroom, followed by a pained shout from a second man. She thought it was Ty’s voice, but how could she be sure? She’d barely met him.
“Come on,” she hissed, and yanked at the unyielding bars again, knowing it was futile but unable to make herself stop trying. “Come on!”
Behind her, beyond the bathroom door, the fighting sounds abruptly cut off.
Gabby froze. She strained to hear what was happening out there, needing to know who’d won.
She heard only silence, followed by the sound of footsteps in the bedroom.
Ty would’ve called her name, right? He would’ve said something to let her know he was okay.
Unless he wasn’t okay.
No, Gabby thought as the footsteps paused and she heard the sound of her closet door opening and clothes hangers being slid aside on their metal bar. Oh, no. Her fingers fell away from the window grate and her throat clenched until only a trickle of oxygen got through.
The footsteps resumed, drawing nearer.
A weapon. She needed a weapon.
Nearly wheezing with fear, she groped near the wall until her fingers found a smooth plastic shaft, like a length of pipe. She closed her fingers and tested its weight, then decided it would have to do.
A click of metal on metal signaled the turn of the bathroom knob. Gabby braced herself and raised her weapon.
The door opened. She screamed as loud as she could, and attacked. She lunged toward the sound and swung, yelling, “Get out of my house, you bastard!”
Her first blow missed the intruder and slammed into the wall. The impact sang up her arms and numbed her fingertips, but she couldn’t stop now. When she heard a rustle of cloth and felt motion nearby, she yelled again and swung.
This time she connected with flesh. She felt the blow land, heard a man curse.
Then he grabbed her, banding one strong arm around her torso and clapping the other across her mouth. “Shh! Quiet. Knock it off!”
She swung and connected with the back of his head. He swore and shook her. “What is wrong with you? Can’t you see—” Then he broke off. “It’s Ty, Gabby. It’s Ty. You’re okay.”
He repeated the reassurance a few more times, but she’d already stopped struggling, letting herself go limp in his grasp as his words played through her mind. Can’t you see?
No, I can’t, damn it. Anger spurted—at him, at whoever had broken into her house, her sanctuary. But beneath the heat of rage was another warmth—the feeling of being held in a man’s arms. In Ty’s arms.
That last thought shouldn’t have mattered. He’d lied to her, damn it. He’d used her emotions to pursue a lead. It hadn’t been about romance for him. It’d been the job.
Trouble was, her body didn’t seem to care.
“Shh,” he whispered against her temple, his breath ruffling her hair. “I think he’s gone, but I’m not positive. I needed to make sure you were okay before I went after him.”
They were pressed back to front, with the solid wall of his chest braced against her shoulders, the strong columns of his thighs touching intimately against the backs of hers.
Seeming to realize it, he shifted away and loosened his grip on her body. “You done screaming?”
She nodded against the hand that still covered her mouth. When he released her, she said, “Sorry, I thought you were…whoever that was.”
“I know. Lock yourself in here while I search the house.”
“Wait.” She put out a hand and touched his forearm, which was warm and solid beneath a layer of cotton shirt. “Does this mean you believe that I’m not involved with the man you’re looking for?”
There was a long pause before he said, “I haven’t decided yet.” Then he exhaled. “The mess out there certainly strengthens your case, except for two things.”
“What things?”
He turned away from her, distance muffling his voice. “For one, I don’t get how he’d know to toss your place while we met, unless he knew about the meeting.”
“Maybe he was following you,” she said, but that wouldn’t have worked with the timing. “Even better, maybe he’s monitoring your e-mail.” She shrugged. “I could do it.” Right about now she was wishing she’d back-hacked his account and taken a look. It would’ve saved her a little bit of heartache and a whole lot of embarrassment.
It might’ve saved her computer, too. If she’d told him to take a hike when he first started e-mailing her…she would’ve missed some very good times, she admitted, and hated him for the truth of it.
Why couldn’t he have been the man he’d pretended to be?
“We can talk about it later,” he said, and for a moment she thought he meant they could talk about the so-called romance they’d conducted. Then she realized he was talking about whether she was involved in the vice president’s kidnapping, and reality returned with a vengeance.
Her house had been ransacked. She’d been chased into her own bathroom. Ty had been attacked in her bedroom. For all they knew, their attacker was still out there.
“Take this.” She pressed her bludgeon into his hand.
There was a short pause, then a snort. He returned the weapon, and there was a thread of laughter in his voice when he said, “I’ve got a gun. You keep the toilet plunger.”
TY’S AMUSEMENT was short-lived, though. Once he was back out in Gabby’s bedroom, sweeping the flashlight to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, he was all business. He wasn’t thinking about the blazing fury that’d pounded in his chest as he’d struggled with the intruder, or the way Gabby’s curves had felt nestled against him.
Or if he was thinking those things, he shoved them deep inside, where the emotions couldn’t distract him from the most important things, couldn’t deflect him from the job.
“Where are you, Liam?” he said quietly as he worked his way out of the bedroom and back down the hall, retracing the path he’d taken only minutes earlier, though it felt like he’d aged a year in that brief space of time when he’d thought Gabby was gone.
Focus, Tyler, his father’s voice said in Ty’s head. Keep your mind in the game.
And though Colonel Jones had been speaking about high school sports, and the words had come long before Ty had followed family tradition by enlisting, the advice held true now.
It was past time for Ty to focus on his priorities—finding Liam, liberating Grant Davis and neutralizing the bomb threat. It wasn’t about the woman. It had, quite possibly, never been about her.
Ty searched the house, flashlight and gun both held at the ready, but there was no sign of the intruder, and the streets outside were dark and deserted.
Convinced the place was clear, he returned to the ransacked bedroom and knocked quietly on the bathroom door. “Gabby? It’s okay. You can come on out. I need to ask you a few questions.” Like what was missing. Who she thought had been in her house.
And why the break-in had coincided with their rendezvous in a courtyard down the street.
The door opened and Gabby stood at the threshold for a moment, lit by the warm yellow beam of his flashlight. Her chin was up and defiant, her pale eyes clear. That, coupled with her lovely hair, which gleamed even in the feeble light, combined to make her seem ethereal. Magical. More, somehow, than the woman he’d imagined during their late-night conversations, when the line between lies and reality had begun to blur.
Focus!
Ty scowled. “Look, I think we need to get something straight here. I never—”
The digital ring of his handheld interrupted, surprising him. He’d thought the battery too low to grab a signal, not to mention the lack of cell coverage twenty-five hours into the blackout.
Figuring it was Chase, Shane or Ethan with new information, he flipped the phone open, welcoming the faint blue glow. The four of them comprised Eclipse, an under-the-radar black ops group that had grown out of their military service. Work with Eclipse had taken them to every hellhole on the globe and made them the best of friends. The kind you trust with your life.
It took Ty a moment to realize it wasn’t a call, then another moment to read the text message in the fading glow of the dying battery.
“Nice punch. You got lucky, but your luck is about to change. If you want to see Grant Davis alive, bring your girlfriend and at the O—”
That was all he got before the battery quit.
GABBY HEARD his hiss of indrawn breath, and immediately tensed. “What is it?”
“It is, or rather was, a text message.” He repeated it aloud, not bothering to hide his irritation, or the way his voice went dry on the word girlfriend.
Hey, she wanted to tell him, this isn’t my fault. Which made her realize that the reverse was true. Anger flared in her chest and she snapped, “That guy broke in because of you, didn’t he? Because he saw us together.”
“Maybe,” he said neutrally. “Or maybe you and he were working together and something backfired.”
“Don’t be stupid.” Her breath hissed between her teeth. “I didn’t ask you to come here. In fact, I’m pretty sure I tried to end it between us. I would have been perfectly happy never meeting you in person.” Or if not happy, at least content. Safe and secure in her little world, which no longer seemed quite so safe. “This man—Liam was it? He came here because of you. He wrecked my things. He took my computer, for God’s sake. Do you know how much that thing cost me, and how long it’s going to take me to rebuild the Braille translation hardware? I’d finally gotten the peripherals exactly where I wanted them.” She broke off, aware of his silence and nearly palpable tension. “And you don’t care about that, do you?”