The bearded man, the FBI consultant, if I believe his lie, hesitates, but he releases me and then cuts right toward a stairwell. Eric is running toward me, but he’s too far to catch the man. The woman darts past me and I reach for her arm but fail. I charge after her. I have to catch her. We have to have answers. We have to end this. I make it all of three steps before Eric grabs my arm and turns me to face him. “What the hell are you doing? Stay here.” He’s barely spoken the words before he’s launching himself forward.
I don’t stay. I spy Savage and I need him to know where to go to help Eric and now Eric’s around a corner. I start running and reach a turn, rounding the corner just as Eric enters the stairwell, but I make it no further. Savag
e grabs my arms. “Stop.” He turns me to face him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Does Eric have a gun?” I demand. “Tell me he has a gun.”
“He’s got a gun. Talk to me. What just happened?”
“That man told me—”
Eric bursts through the stairwell door. “No one is there. They must have exited a flight up.” He eyes Savage. “Get someone looking for them.”
Savage grabs his phone and makes a call while Eric crosses the space between us with lightning speed and pulls me to him. “What the hell happened?”
“This man came up to me and he claimed to be FBI. Or a consultant for the FBI. He gave me a card and I’m paraphrasing here but he warned me that I needed to open my eyes. That everything isn’t how it seems and if I didn’t figure that out, people would die.”
Eric scowls. “Holy fuck, why did I let you come to the coffee shop alone?”
“You didn’t. I went with Mia and—”
He kisses me, his hand coming down on my head and his tongue licks into my mouth, the taste of fear on his lips. “You go nowhere without me until this is over. Do you understand? Nowhere without me.” His voice is low, rough, guttural. “Nowhere, Harper. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I breathe out. “Yes, of course. You don’t go anywhere without me either, understand?”
“We stay together,” he agrees.
“No one has seen them,” Savage interjects, “but we’re looking. What the hell are we dealing with here?”
Eric’s arm wraps my shoulder, his big body sheltering mine as he turns to face Savage. “Tell him everything. Tell us both everything. Start from the beginning. Pretend I know nothing at all.”
I relay every detail I remember about the encounter, down to the color of the man’s beard, and Savage is the one scowling when I finish. “FBI? No. We’re connected to the FBI. Unless this is a rogue agent, and I doubt he’d have a partner if he was, he wasn’t FBI.”
Which isn’t a surprise to me. I knew he wasn’t FBI, and as I stand here now, I’m not rattled the way I was after the warehouse, but I don’t take the time to truly analyze that. “He gave me this.” I hand Savage the card.
He shoots a picture of it. “I’m texting this to Royce, from our team, who is ex-FBI and well-connected there. I’ll have answers for you in about ten minutes.” He types a message and sends the photo and then hands me the card.
Eric grabs it and studies it a minute. “What do you want to do right now?” Savage asks. “Stay or go?”
Eric shoves the card into his pocket and turns to me again, his hands on my shoulders. “We go. We’ll have Walker deal with the police and our reasons for leaving.”
“If they come to the apartment doesn’t that bring attention to you by way of bad press that bleeds over to Grayson?”
His lips thin. “We aren’t staying. We need to regroup.” He eyes Savage and the other man nods and makes a call before he says, “I have men waiting to escort us out when you’re ready to leave.”
“What about Davis, Mia, and Grayson?” I ask.
“We have a man with them now,” Savage assures us. “We’ll escort them out of here and stay with them at their homes.”
Smith appears right then, and in a few seconds, he’s taken up a position behind us while Savage leads the way. Eric keeps me close the entire walk to the elevator, and even inside the elevator car, he uses his big body as a shield. He’s afraid of an attack. This man is willing to take a bullet for me. That understanding for me is as good as another proclamation of love, because, yes, he’s an ex-SEAL. Yes, he’s lived to protect the innocent, but it’s more with us. There’s a history, a family he hates, and yet, he’s always been right here with me, even back on that first night. He warned me away from them. He kissed me and that memory reminded me every day after that there was more out there.
We arrive at the rear door of the hospital and Savage clears the way before we exit. I climb into the backseat of the SUV with Eric by my side. No one is in the driver’s seat yet. We’re alone and once Eric seals us inside, his fingers tangle into my hair. “You were right earlier. We need to be alone. We need to breathe and we need to do it together.” His mouth closes down on mine, his kiss wicked and hungry, an edge to him that I understand. Not once, but twice now, he’s come to my rescue. Not once, but twice now, I could have died. I don’t know why this hasn’t affected me yet. I don’t know why it hasn’t shaken me to the core, but it has him. I feel that in the way his hand presses between my shoulder blades, molding me close. I feel it in the desperate edge to his kiss.
He’s touching me and I’m touching him and it’s as if this vehicle doesn’t exist. I need him. God, how I need him and my hands slide under his shirt, over warm taut skin, when there’s a rap on the window. Eric curses and drags his mouth from mine, his fingers wiping away the dampness there. “Give me just a minute.”
“Hurry,” I whisper, and somehow my hand is in his pocket closing around that business card I’d given him.
He kisses me again and exits the SUV, shutting the door. I stare down at the card and scoot to a spot where the hospital lights beam down on the writing there. I run my hand over the name and I think again, yes, I was freaked out by that man, especially when he grabbed me but I wasn’t afraid in the way I was back in the warehouse. Maybe it was because people were around me and us. Maybe I felt safer; I felt that I had help nearby.