LITMIR.BIZ

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he actually drop a weapon into her Spanx? She wiggled and a metal finger wedged into the cleft of her backside. Yep. That was a gun.

      Holy smokes.

      She turned to him, her mouth agape. His eyes narrowed in warning; then he looked straight ahead. With her blood pressure skyrocketing, she glanced over her shoulder. A lone woman, dressed in a hotel employee uniform, held a small handgun aimed at Ryan’s back while two men dragged the bodies from the stairwell into the garage.

      Avery whipped her face forward, her eyes counting the number of guns pointed at them. If she and Ryan made it out of this night without being shot, it was going to be a miracle of epic proportions.

      They were shuffled across the garage to an old brown Chevy Malibu. The woman jogged ahead of them and opened the trunk.

      No way. Everybody knew you should never let the bad guys lure you into a trunk. She tugged Ryan’s sleeve. “What do we do?”

      “Chill. I’ve got this,” he whispered.

      “Chill?” she hissed. Sure thing. She’d get right on that after she stopped freaking out that they were being bullied into a car trunk by a bunch of angry men with huge guns who knew they’d killed two of their angry friends on the stairs.

      When they reached the trunk, the man in the valet uniform hollered something in another language that grabbed everyone’s attention. Leaving the woman and an armed man to guard Avery and Ryan, the rest of the men jogged to the top of the entrance ramp, where a black limo idled. The limo driver’s window rolled down. The bearded driver and the valet began an animated discussion.

      Avery darn near jumped out of her skin in surprise when Ryan’s hand settled onto her bare back once more.

      The man and woman who’d been left to stand guard were distracted by the presence of the limo. Even Avery knew this was the perfect window of time to act. But she was scared witless about it. All she could do was hope Ryan didn’t expect her to pull off any moves like she had in the stairwell. She’d used up all her allotted spy powers for the day.

      In one fluid motion, he pulled the gun from her Spanx, shoved her to the ground alongside the car and pivoted toward the man with the machine gun. The man went down with a single shot.

      Next Ryan lunged at the woman, who fired in his general direction but missed, obviously flustered by the turn of events. He paid her gunfire no mind as he took hold of her blouse and pulled her into the open trunk.

      Avery scrambled to her knees. She couldn’t see much but knew there was no way the men talking to the limo driver had failed to hear the gunfire. Sure enough, as Ryan slammed the trunk closed, someone opened fire in a continual staccato of shots.

      Ryan dived to the ground near Avery. “Let’s jam,” he said, cool as a cucumber.

      He gestured with his gun toward the rear of the garage. Avery kicked her shoes off and followed after him, threading in a crouched position between car bumpers and the wall.

      Bullets flew in all directions, crumbling car windows and the concrete wall and ceiling. Avery ran as quickly as she could. License plates tore chunks of her dress off and slashed at her legs, but she never slowed more than an arm’s length from Ryan’s back. Every so often, he’d pause and return fire, buying time for them to dart across empty parking spaces.

      Finally, he ground to a halt behind the passenger door of the last car. Avery fell to her hands and knees beside him. The dress, now ripped to shreds, no longer impeded her movement.

      “What’s the plan?” she asked between breaths. Her voice sounded muffled to her ears, damaged as they were by machine-gun fire.

      Ryan glanced at the stairwell door, then lifted his pant leg, exposing an ankle holster where an extra magazine rested against the inside of his calf. That must’ve been where he’d had the gun he stashed in her underwear, she reasoned.

      As she caught her breath, he exchanged the empty magazine for the fresh one. “I’m going to cover you while you run for the door.” He flashed a set of keys. “I lifted these from that woman. Hopefully one opens the door to the locker room.”

      She had to play his words over in her mind twice to make sure she’d heard him right. “You want me to run? Out in the open?”

      “Yes. Are you ready?”

      Avery gauged the distance from their hiding place to the door and estimated it to be at least fifteen feet. “No,” she answered honestly.

      He blinked at her; then his eyes turned soft and his lips twitched like he was contemplating a smile. He looked playful. Boyish. Like they were back on the employee softball team last November when one of the other agents was razzing him about a missed catch. Like in the next few seconds they weren’t going to risk their lives all over again.

      “I’m not ready for you to make that run, either. But it’s our only option.”

      He pulled the tail of his shirt free of his pants. Strapped to his waist over his undershirt and above his belted pants was a black canvas belt with lots of pockets and zippers. Reaching near the small of his back, he withdrew two small canisters.

      “What’re those?”

      “A decoy grenade and smoke screen.”

      She gaped at the objects in his hand. Unreal. Then she looked into his deep brown eyes, intense but for the slightest touch of amusement, and tried her best not to swoon. Sure, the thrill of the battle was starting to course through her system again like a bizarro happy drug she couldn’t control, but still, they were cornered in an underground garage while being fired at by machine guns.

      Her fingers danced over the decoy grenade as she shot him a sidelong gaze. “You carry gadgets on your belt?”

      She couldn’t help it. She swooned a little anyway. Mr. Tall, Dark and Droolworthy just got even more intriguing.

      Chapter 4

      For someone who’d freaked at the sight of his gun, Avery sure did caress the grenade canisters in Ryan’s hand like they were her favorite sex toys. And calling them gadgets? Ryan didn’t know anybody who referred to grenades as gadgets, but if it gave Avery courage for the life-risking run they needed to make, then she could call them whatever she wanted.

      Fighting a smile, he bought Avery a few more seconds to make peace with what she was about to do by squeezing off several rounds that forced Chiara’s men to scatter for cover. “Yeah, I’ve got a few gadgets. Are you ready to move?”

      Avery gave a thumbs-up and crouched into a sprint starting position. A pulse of admiration for her bravery nearly had him smiling again as he removed the pin from the first grenade and tossed it. It exploded in a screen of smoke.

      The decoy he lobbed at the garage entrance. The hostiles’ gunfire stopped, and Ryan could see them running for cover. Spraying gunfire to cover Avery’s sprint, he gave her back a nudge. “Move!”

      She took off running. Ryan followed, shooting through the smoke screen. Machine-gun fire resumed all around them. Bits of wall and ceiling crumbled over Avery as she threw the door open, but she kept moving like a champ. Ryan slipped in behind her. There was no way to bar the door from opening, but lucky for him, Avery had kept her wits about her and was already working the keys in the locker-room door.

      Ryan held his position near the door, ready to neutralize anyone who dared open it.

      “Got it,” Avery called. She shouldered the door open, kicking her fallen purse in with her.

      Ryan sidestepped her way, gun trained on the parking-garage door until he was at the employee entrance. As he closed his hand over that door, the parking garage door opened, followed by another succession of gunfire.

      He ducked behind the door, paused to squeeze out a half-dozen rounds, then slammed the door behind him. If Chiara’s men had another key, he and Avery had maybe thirty seconds to bolt. If they didn’t, their

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