Dangerous Attraction Romantic Suspense Boxed Set (7 page)

Rather than answer, he began dragging her in the opposite direction. She stumbled, realized she’d lost a shoe and glanced back. It was nowhere to be seen, swallowed up by the mob still gathered on the sidewalk, holding their hands to their faces in horror and disbelief, some crying and wailing. The sounds made her skin crawl in primal reaction. Fire trucks and police vehicles were beginning to show up on scene, sirens and lights going. “Wait,” she insisted, yanking against his hold. His fingers were like iron bands around her upper arm.

“We’ve gotta get the hell out of here,” he shot back, walking faster. Khalia kicked off her other shoe to save herself a broken ankle as she struggled to keep up. “Suicide bombers like to wait until the first responders show up to the initial blast and then—”

More screams. Hunter jerked his head around and she followed his gaze just in time to see a second white delivery truck racing toward the stricken building. A scream built in her throat, but never escaped.

Hunter swore and tackled her again, this time bringing her down to the sidewalk with a bone-jarring thud. She cried out as he landed on top of her, slamming her ribs and hip bones into the unforgiving concrete. His arms came up over her head to shield her, the force of them scraping her cheek and temple against the rough surface. Before she could draw breath another explosion tore through the air, even stronger than the first one. Her teeth clacked together when the shockwave rolled through the ground.

More screams. Closer this time. Terrified and blood curdling. Heavy things slammed into the ground nearby. The heat of the blast washed over her, stinging her skin. Hunks of burning metal whipped past them, gouging out chunks of pavement and concrete where they landed. Khalia was too afraid to move. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

Seconds later Hunter got up and lifted her once again. Her heart was slamming out of control. She grabbed hold of his shoulders for support and cowered against him, darting glances around to see what was happening. She saw people stumbling around with burns and bleeding wounds. The carnage was horrific. Her whole body started shaking.

He grabbed hold of her hand, clamped his long fingers around hers and yanked forward, away from the scene. She fell, scraping both knees and her free palm. He scooped her up again, tossed her over one broad shoulder, and ran. Khalia clung to the back of his shirt for balance. Every running step sent her midsection slamming down on his shoulder. All she could do was tense her stomach muscles and hold on. She kept her eyes closed and fought the urge to cover both ears with her hands because she needed to keep her grip on Hunter or she’d fall.

Through the weird numbness creeping over her she could still hear those terrible screams rising up and shuddered. Hunter was talking to someone over the walkie talkie, shouting instructions she didn’t catch. Her hands dug into his shirt, fingers frozen there like talons. Were more bombers still coming? Did they have other targets in mind across the city? Any courage she’d thought she had was gone. She should never have come here. What the hell had she been thinking?

After an unknown amount of time Hunter stopped and slid her off his shoulder to her feet, steadying her with a firm grip on her waist when she swayed. She blinked up at him, trembling all over. They were now blocks away from the bombing site, on a road with hardly any traffic.

He leaned his face close to hers. “You’re okay. Gage is right there,” he panted, skin streaked with sweat and grime, not a hint of fear anywhere in his expression. She followed his pointing finger down the road to see the two black SUVs roaring up. “Come on.”

When he grabbed her hand and pulled again, she followed, her legs wooden but at least functioning. Together they ran to the waiting vehicles. Gage jumped out and popped open the back door before climbing back behind the wheel. Hunter shoved her headlong into the backseat and climbed in behind her, slamming the door shut behind them.

The instant it closed he was on top of her again, flattening her facedown against the leather seat. She squeezed her eyes shut.

“Hold on,” Gage said as he reversed and shot the vehicle backward at an alarming speed, the engine revving high and loud. Above her, Hunter took her hands, setting one against the doorframe and the other against the back of the front seat.

“Brace yourself,” he commanded.

For what?
she wanted to yell but couldn’t get the words out and did as he said. A second later Gage cranked the wheel hard to the right. The truck spun in a sickening half circle, sending Khalia sliding along the slippery leather toward the door.

She cried out and pushed back with her straightened right arm, but Hunter was there. He caught her, bolstering her with his weight and strength as he struggled to hold them in place against the wild swing of the vehicle. The squeal of tires registered for a moment, then she heard Gage shift the transmission and they were driving forward once again, racing away from the scene.

A tense minute passed before Hunter finally let her up. She slowly peeled herself off the seat and pushed into a sitting position with shaky arms. Her scraped cheek and palms stung and she’d be covered in bruises by morning, but at least she was still alive and in one piece.

She still couldn’t comprehend what had just happened.

A hard arm reached around her waist to drag the seatbelt across her body and snap it into the buckle. Immediately she wrapped her arms around herself in an attempt to stem the violent shivers wracking her and risked a glance over at Hunter. His gaze was intense, the look in his eyes frightening, but that didn’t scare her as much as what she heard him mutter under his breath when he looked away from her to stare out the window.

“Welcome to Pakistan.”

Chapter Five

Khalia somehow managed to put one sore bare foot in front of the other despite the rigidity in her muscles as Hunter steered her into her hotel room. The lock clicked into place behind them, sounding overly loud to her heightened senses. Her heart rate still hadn’t normalized. She took slow, deep breaths to calm herself. It wasn’t working.

“Let’s take a look at you,” he said, ushering her into the bathroom with a solid hand on the small of her back. The warmth of his touch registered more than his voice did. She winced when he flipped a switch and bright white lights flooded the room. With a nudge forward he settled her on the closed toiled lid and grabbed a facecloth from the rack above it. He ran the tap and moistened it before turning back to her. “Here. Clean up your cheek while I check your feet.”

Feeling stiff all over, Khalia turned her head to look at herself in the wide rectangular mirror above the vanity. Her eyes looked huge in her too pale face and the side of her right cheek was scraped up to the temple. It was raw and oozing from being mashed against the sidewalk. And it could easily have been so much worse.

Lowering her gaze, she pressed the cool cloth to her cheek, ignoring the sudden sting. Hunter was crouched at her feet, one bronzed hand reaching for her left ankle. She put out an arm to stop him, recoiling from the intimacy. She was a heartbeat away from bursting into tears. Having him touch her right now, even if only to check for injuries, would be too much. “They’re fine.”

He raised his eyes to hers, that steady gaze sending a jolt of heated interest through her overloaded system. “They’re bleeding. I want to make sure there aren’t any bits of shrapnel in them.”

She repressed a shudder and pulled her foot back. “I can do it.”

He brushed her hand away with an impatient motion and grasped her ankle in a warm grip. “Just sit still and let me look.”

Pushing out a sigh, Khalia allowed him to cradle her foot in his hands, unsettled at the way his touch sent streaks of sensation up her legs. How could he be so calm and steady when it felt like she was going to shake apart? It was easier to keep a leash on her emotions when there wasn’t any physical contact between them.

The way he touched her, so gently despite his rough exterior, made her ache to lean forward and wrap her arms around that sturdy neck. She longed to feel his strong arms around her in return, locking out the rest of the world. She wanted that so badly she almost gave into the urge to reach for him.

He killed the impulse by stretching an arm out above her for another facecloth, wetting it also before turning his attention back to her right foot. “It’s scraped up some.” After wiping the sensitive bottom of her foot he took the left one in his large hand, holding it up so he could see the sole in the light. “There’s a splinter of something,” he murmured, and a moment later pulled something sharp out of her foot.

Her toes pointed in reflex and she sucked in a breath. A tiny shard of metal glinted between his fingers as he held it up for her to see. Then he turned her left hand over and set it in her scraped palm before going back to search for others.

She stared at the fragment with detached revulsion, wondering where it had come from. The building? One of the exploding trucks? A first responder’s vehicle? Feeling sick again, she dumped it on the counter with a tiny rattling sound.

“One more, but it’s deeper. Hang on a sec.” He shifted onto one knee and dug in his back pocket, coming up with a jackknife loaded with all sorts of tools. With a pair of tweezers at the ready he took hold of her foot again and looked up at her. “This is gonna hurt, but I need to get it out before it buries itself in there and causes more problems.”

Khalia nodded and clenched her hands in the folds of her dress. The light blue cotton was torn in several places and stained with dirt from where she’d hit the ground. The right shoulder seam was barely holding together. She pressed her lips together and fought not to wriggle when the tips of the tweezers dug into her tender flesh.

“Sorry,” he said without glancing up at her, forehead furrowed in concentration. “It’s a ways in there.”

“It’s fine,” she murmured, wishing he’d just hurry up and get it over with already. Having him kneeling at her feet made her feel silly and only intensified the need for the feel of his arms around her. But he’d made it clear where the line between them stood, so she wanted him to leave so she could lock the door and be alone for a while to get herself together.

It took a few minutes for Hunter to get the remaining fragment out of the side of her instep. This one hurt more than the other and she tensed. He set the shard on the vanity and she relaxed, ignoring the painful stinging. “Your tetanus vaccines up to date?”

“Yes.” This was such an insane conversation. Untold numbers of people had just been blown up, and she and Hunter almost with them. If they’d been any closer to the blasts… She swallowed and wrapped her arms around herself, fighting off another bout of shivers that kept rolling through her.

Hunter didn’t miss her reaction. “If your legs are steady enough after this I’d recommend a hot shower. It’ll help with the shaking,” he offered, again without looking at her. She was glad for the small amount of privacy it afforded her. The truth was she was freaking terrified and barely holding her emotions in check. Only the fear of humiliating herself in front of Hunter kept her true reaction at bay. He’d protected her with his own body and she hated the thought of seeming weak and emotional in front of him. He was calm, decisive, had been even during the bombings. His hands were completely steady as he tended to her feet. The pulse in his throat was slow and steady.

It was as though the explosions hadn’t affected him at all.

She didn’t even want to think about what sort of training, or what he must have seen in the field during his time in the military that would enable him to compartmentalize such a horrific event so easily.

After pulling a third and final fragment out of her skin, Hunter pressed the washcloth to her foot until the bleeding stopped, then stood and rinsed the tweezers in the sink. His elbows were raw and bloody, the heels of his hands scraped raw. Her impulse was to tend to him in return, but knew he’d rebuff her help with some gruff comment that would make her feel even worse so she stayed silent.

He searched her eyes before speaking again, as if gauging her emotional state. She bit down hard to stop her jaw from trembling. “Make sure you wash out all those cuts and scrapes as best you can when you shower. With soap if you can handle it.”

Yeah, she could handle the sting of soap in her cuts and scrapes. What she couldn’t handle was what had just happened—what could have happened if they’d been any closer—and his calm apathy right now. She lowered the facecloth from her cheek, tossed it onto the granite vanity with a fleshy plop, and asked the question burning a hole in her brain. “That wasn’t… You don’t think that had anything to do with Fair Start, do you?”

Hunter shook his hands in the bowl of the sink and reached for the hand towel hanging from a ring in the wall next to the light switch. In the mirror, he met her gaze. “Highly doubt it. There are a lot of foreign dignitaries in town, so maybe the government buildings were a temptation too great to pass up. Whoever did it had it planned well in advance though. Packing two separate trucks with that amount of explosive and finding their way to an open route in that mess?” He shook his head, the light casting bronze-tinted highlights in his dark hair. “Either they got lucky with the accident clogging up traffic, or they set it up that way in the first place. My money’s on the second guess.”

She shivered at the certainty in his voice, in his eyes. She looked away before he could see the fear in her own. “Thanks for getting those splinters out.” Her feet stung and throbbed along with the rest of her, but mostly she just felt cold and tired and…numb.

Rather than answer, he leaned a hip against the edge of the vanity and folded his arms across his chest, regarding her in silence. After a long pause she looked up at him.

“You okay?” he asked quietly. The genuine concern in his voice nearly undid her.

Not even close.
“Yeah.” What did he expect her to say? It had to be obvious how rattled she was. Maybe she was crazy, but for a second she thought she saw a gleam of admiration in his eyes.