Hush (11 page)

“Right there.” Bax motioned in her direction.

As the paramedics bustled to her bedside, Bax, who'd stopped beside his fellow agent, said to Bradley, “I got news. You aren't going to like it.”

Overhearing, Riley shamelessly tried listening in on their conversation even as one of the paramedics plopped a medical bag down on the bed beside her and said cheerfully, “I hear you've been feeling dizzy.”

“Yes,” Riley responded, and at the same time heard Bradley reply in a resigned tone, “So what else is new?”

Then, as one of the paramedics produced a penlight, which he no doubt meant to shine in her eyes, Bradley glanced at her. For the briefest of seconds their eyes met.

Then he looked back at his partner.

“Let's give them some space,” he said to Bax.

Riley could do nothing but surrender to the paramedics as the FBI agents left the room.

“T
hey let him go.” Bax was bursting with the enormity of it. They'd moved far enough away from the bedroom door that they were in no danger of being overheard, but he kept his voice down anyway. “Diplomatic immunity.”

It was a surprise that Finn absorbed in frowning silence. After a moment he asked, “What country?”

“Ukraine.”

“If he's entitled to diplomatic immunity, then George screwed over a government agency or somebody connected with the government there on a pretty high level.” He'd already run the man's face through his own internal database of bad actors, and drawn a blank. Which meant the guy was either new, or deep cover enough to have not shown up on his radar before now. If the latter was the case, then whoever had sent him was sufficiently concerned about the situation to be deploying the big guns. In other words, some foreign fat cat's ass was in a
sling. And that foreign fat cat had enough pull—or knew enough people with enough pull—to get his boy instantly released from police custody.

“Good thing you happened to see a man walk past her window.” Bax thrust his hands into his pants pockets, rattling the change there.

Happened to see nothing
. Finn had been intently watching the aforementioned windows with binoculars from a vantage point on the roof of the building opposite, which was two stories lower than Riley's apartment. He hadn't been able to see a great deal, even with the curtains open and the lights on. But he had seen the shadowy figure of a man moving through her living room, and as a result had immediately hot-footed it over to her building and grabbed an elevator, meaning to go low-tech and listen at her door.

The moment he'd stepped out of the elevator, her scream had brought him running.

“Yeah,” Finn replied. “The receiver functional yet?”

While Finn had been up on the rooftop and then racing through apartment buildings, Bax had been on the phone to tech support trying to verify the status of the receiving unit.

“Nothing wrong with it,” Bax said. “Cynthia said it's working fine.”

“Okay.” Finn wasn't surprised that Bax knew the tech support person's first name. Bax had that same geeky cyber-wonk persona that they did, as well as a lot of relationships with a lot of people he'd never actually met. Finn was equally not surprised to discover that there was nothing wrong with the receiver. It had been patently obvious from almost his first conversational
exchange with Riley that she was hiding something. He wasn't quite sure what it was, but one thing he
was
now sure of: she'd disabled her own and Jeffy-boy's cell phones.

And she wasn't talking about it.

“So what we've got here is a Ukrainian with diplomatic immunity who was trying to kill Mrs. Cowan.” Bax looked thoughtful while trying his hand at case analysis, which Finn had already discovered wasn't his strong suit. “The question is, why? You think he was hoping to use her to send another message to George?”

“Don't know,” Finn replied. He had no real quarrel with Bax, other than the fact that the powers-that-be had set him up to be his minder, but there was no need to go filling his head with too many possibilities. Finn wasn't sure how much Bax was passing on to his superiors, but he was passing on something, and Finn wanted to remain in a position to control just what that something could be.

Knowledge is power
. It was also leverage. At some point Finn meant to use it to trade for what he wanted, which was his life back. Permanently, this time.

“By the way, what happened to your coat?” Bax rattled the change in his pocket again. Finn narrowed his eyes a little. The sound was annoying, but right then that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because it provided a distraction. He didn't like being reminded of why he was missing his coat. That took him to the way Riley had looked when he'd heard her scream and taken off running and she'd come flying down the hall toward him.

Naked.

In those few seconds he'd registered everything there was to
register about her body: full round breasts with strawberry nipples, firm but not too firm to bounce; slender waist curving out into unmistakably feminine hips; flat stomach; long, shapely legs. The small patch of hair between them that left no doubt that she was a natural redhead. The smooth sheen of her creamy skin.

He'd unwillingly discovered that her skin was as satiny soft as it looked—and a great many other things about her besides—the instant he'd grabbed her and whirled her around to put his back between her and the gun.

None of those impressions were anything he cared to remember, or be reminded of.

Bottom line? A beautiful woman was a dangerous distraction. A beautiful naked woman who might or might not know where to find what he was looking for? Suffice it to say, he wasn't going there. Not with his mind, or anything else.

He was on board to do a job, and then get the hell out.

Finn shrugged. “She was cold.”

Thankfully, he was saved from any further explanation as, at that moment, the paramedics exited the bedroom.

“Could you close the door please?” Riley called after them. Her voice was still huskier than Finn was used to hearing it, and he wasn't sure if it was from screaming or from something that had been done to her during the attack. He caught a glimpse of her, all curled up in the middle of her bed with the blanket he'd spread over her tucked closely around her, her hair vivid as a splash of scarlet paint amid a sea of white, as the trailing paramedic complied.

“What's the damage?” Finn asked the paramedics when the door was closed and they started walking away from it. They
paused, looking at him as he moved toward them. There was a moment there when he could tell they were debating about whether they should reveal any of her medical information to him, but his assumption of authority, bolstered no doubt by the shoulder holster and weapon that shouted law enforcement, carried the day.

“The main thing is, she's got a concussion,” the lead paramedic said. “Apparently she took a hard blow to the back of the head: she's got a bump the size of an egg. In addition, she has considerable bruising all over. She'll be sore, but aside from the concussion there's nothing of concern.”

“The concussion's the cause of the dizziness?” Finn asked.

The paramedic nodded. “I'd keep her in bed tonight, keep her quiet tomorrow, and she should be fine. If, in the morning, she's still getting dizzy when she stands up, or if any additional symptoms present themselves, you should take her in to see her doctor for a check-up. Or call 911.”

Finn didn't reply. Stepping into the breach, Bax said, “We'll do that,” and then, as the paramedics left, followed them to the door. After closing it behind them, he turned to look at Finn, who hadn't moved from his spot in the middle of the living room.

“What now?” Bax asked, rattling the coins in his pocket again. Finn's lips tightened fractionally. Bax continued: “Do we stay with her? We have to, don't we? If the guy who just tried to kill her is on the loose, we can't just leave her here on her own.”

Asset recovery was another field that wasn't exactly Bax's strong suit. He had no real idea how to go about it. Which suited Finn just fine.

“We're not babysitters,” he replied, and considered his options. As the attack on her had shown, Riley was a prime target for more interested parties than just himself and Bax. If she hadn't been before, she certainly was now aware that she was on the radar of those who were seeking the missing money. If she had it, or knew where it was, she should absolutely be thinking about ways to protect herself and the funds. She would almost certainly notify her confederates, if she had any, of what had occurred. His presence, and Bax's, in her immediate vicinity could only gum up the works. Nobody was going to come after her while they were with her—even if no one outside their own small group knew his true identity, the presence of two supposed FBI agents was a considerable deterrent to the kind of attack that was meant to extract intelligence from a target—and, more important, Riley herself couldn't make any moves while they were with her.

Therefore, they were going to go. And stay out of sight. And keep watch.

He said as much to Bax.

Bax said unhappily, “But the perp might—”

He never finished.

The bedroom door opened. They both looked around in surprise to find Riley walking through it. She was fully dressed in a black T-shirt with a pair of white jeans and—surprise, because he'd pegged her as a high-heels-on-every-occasion kind of woman—flat sandals. Her hair, which had puffed out in a cloud of vivid waves around her face as it had dried, had been tamed again and was twisted into a loose updo that made her look younger and more vulnerable than Finn would have liked. She had one hand curled around the handle of her small silver suitcase,
which she was pulling along behind her. His coat was folded over her arm.

Having swept her, Finn's gaze returned to her face.

“Going somewhere?” he asked. It was a question, nothing more. Whether or not she went haring around with a concussion was of no concern to him. He was there to find the money, and that was it.

“To Margaret's.” She held out his coat to him. “Thanks for the loan.” Their eyes met as he took it. As he'd noted when he'd first gotten a good look at them, hers were a green-flecked hazel, wide and innocent-looking. If she felt self-conscious about the fact that he'd seen her naked for a considerable period of time, she wasn't showing it.

“Anytime.”

He shrugged into his coat—it was a little damp and smelled vaguely of roses, but the object was to keep his shoulder holster out of sight, and any stray thoughts about the body it had so recently covered he immediately pushed out of his mind—and she resumed walking, moving past him toward the table with the kind of carefully calibrated, deliberate gait that told him she was having to work to keep it steady. Her jaw was set with the effort of it. Her mouth was downright grim.

“You're supposed to stay in bed,” Bax said. His eyes were glued to her, too. “Because of the concussion.”

“I can't.” Picking up her purse, she slung it over one shoulder, glanced at them both, and added, “Margaret's expecting me back. I thought about calling her and telling her I'm going to spend the night here but then she'll want to know why, and I can't tell her about what's happened over the phone. And I have
to tell her.” She wet her lips, and not for the first time, Finn noticed. And deliberately glanced away.

As far as her calling her ex-mother-in-law was concerned, it probably didn't help that she'd disabled her cell phone: Finn welcomed the thought for the distraction it provided.

What he said was, “You're right. If the idea behind the attack on you was to kill you as a way of sending a message to George, then his wife and daughter are also at risk, and they should know it. In fact, I'm surprised the guy didn't go for one of them instead of you.” He smiled at her. “To send a stronger message.”

The slight widening of her eyes was all he needed to be convinced that she knew exactly what the motive behind the attack on her was, and it wasn't to send a message to George.

“They let him go,” Bax told Riley. He looked, and sounded, worried. “The guy who attacked you. Diplomatic immunity. You really should stay here tonight. One of us can—”

“What?” Her sharp exclamation cut Bax off in midsentence. She looked at Finn, and he gave a nod of confirmation. “They couldn't have!
He tried to kill me
.” Something in Finn's expression must have convinced her that it was true, because she added on a note of horror, “What if he tries again?”

Interesting to note how concerned she generally seemed to be about her mother and sister-in-law's well-being, while in this particular instance, when the threat of a murderous attack on one of them should have seemed especially immediate and real, her own safety was her paramount concern. Which Finn translated as an indication that the attack on her had to do with something she, personally, was connected to. Something that the attacker didn't associate with the others.

Like, say, Jeffy-boy's phone.

“He's not likely to,” Finn said. “If all he wanted to do was send a message, just the fact that he attacked you was enough to do that.”

Bax frowned at him. “Don't we deport people with diplomatic immunity who commit a crime?”

“Usually,” Finn replied. “But this guy hasn't been convicted. He hasn't even been tried.”

The whole time they were talking, Finn had been watching Riley turn a whiter shade of pale. It was clear that the news that her attacker had been freed was scaring her to death, and he couldn't blame her: she was damned lucky to be alive. Under other circumstances he would have set her mind at rest. The truth was, he had every confidence that the perpetrator would be rushed out of the country within the next few hours, before any other interested party—like, say, himself—could catch up with him and make inquiries into who he worked for and what he was after.