Читать книгу: «Meet Me at Midnight»

Five past midnight …

Thunder rumbled and lightning flickered, closer this time. As he searched each row in the desolate church, electricity danced along Ty’s skin, seeming ironic in the powerless city.

He glanced at his watch. Where the hell was Liam? Unless he never intended to show up.

He spun and yelled to Gabby, “It’s a trap. Get the hell out of here!”

She took two steps before thunder clapped and the building shook around them, the emergency lights going out, plunging the church into blackness.

He heard a crash up ahead, a woman’s scream, and his heart jolted in his chest.

“Gabby!” he shouted, but there was no response.

A heartbeat later, the lights flickered back to life.

She was gone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say “hi”!

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Gabriella Solaro – The shy computer science teacher protects her privacy – and her secret – by keeping her online romance strictly online… until her curiosity gets the best of her.

Tyler Jones – As a Secret Service agent and a member of the clandestine black ops group Eclipse, Ty is used to putting missions ahead of his personal agenda. But when he meets Gabby, work and play clash with potentially disastrous results.

Grant Davis – The vice-president of the United States of America.

Liam Shea – The electrical expert spent ten years in a military prison for a crime he swears he didn’t commit. Now he’s out, and he’s looking for revenge on the men who ruined his life.

Ethan Matalon, Chase Vickers and Shane Peters – The other three members of Eclipse have each fought their own battles in Liam’s mad plan.

Aidan, Finn and Colin Sullivan – Liam’s sons each play a vital role in their father’s revenge.

Leonore and Tom Wellbrooke – The proprietors of a shelter in South Boston seem like good people, but they have good reason to want the vice-president discredited…or worse.

Meet Me at Midnight

JESSICA ANDERSEN

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Rebecca York, Rita Herron and

Linda Castillo, thanks for being a ton of fun to

work with on this four-book series!

Chapter One

Dear CyberGabby:

I’ve never used a service like Webmatch.com before, so I apologize in advance if I mess up. I saw your picture and read your profile, and I think we have some things in common. My name is Ty, I’m thirty-five, divorced and relatively free of baggage. Like you, I enjoy classic cars and driving fast. I work as a bodyguard because I also like traveling and staying on the move. It’s not as exciting as it might sound, though. I work for a corporate type, so it’s mostly standing outside boring meetings. Which, I suppose, is better than actually attending the meetings. Anyway, I’m looking forward to getting to know you better. I’ve posted my picture and profile (click here). If you’re interested, shoot me a note and we can chat.

[Sent by TyJ; March 17, 1:03:13 a.m.]

9:58 p.m., August 2 7 Hours and 40 Minutes to Dawn

Ty Jones paused in the shadows beyond a small, cobbled courtyard in Boston’s North End, breathing past the tension of battle readiness.

The light from a kerosene lantern broke the absolute darkness, casting warm shadows on the woman who waited for him in the hot, humid summer night. The lamplight should have been almost painfully romantic.

Instead, it was a necessity.

Boston had been in the grips of a widespread blackout for twenty-five hours now. Most of the city’s inhabitants thought there had been a massive failure at Boston Power & Light, but Ty and his teammates knew the blackout had been no accident. It had been a cover. Under the cloak of darkness, a man they’d once trusted had kidnapped Grant Davis, Vice President of the United States.

Now, twenty-five hours later, with Davis’s life hanging in the balance and his captor hinting that a bomb had been planted somewhere in the city, Ty and the others were out of time and options.

Which had brought him here, to a clandestine rendezvous with Internet bombshell Gabriella Solaro.

Ty’s watch chimed softly. It was ten o’clock. Time to meet the one connection he had left, the one woman who could possibly lead them to Liam Shea, the man behind the blackout.

Taking a deep breath, Ty stepped out of concealment and swung open the ornate wrought iron gate that separated the North End courtyard from the narrow street. Pitching his voice low, he called, “Gabriella?”

The woman was facing away from him. At the sound of her name, she turned and lifted the lantern. “Ty?”

Her voice was soft and feminine, just as he’d imagined it during their online conversations, first in a chat room at Webmatch.com, then one-on-one via e-mail and instant messenger. But oddly, she looked nothing like he’d expected.

Her dark eyes complemented full, red-painted lips, and her features were sharp and exotic, but in the lantern light, her hair seemed darker than the fiery chestnut she’d mentioned, and her simple sundress made her figure seem more angular than her self-described curvy-bordering-on-plump.

She was lovely, but she wasn’t anything like the picture in her profile. Then again, why should that surprise him? It was all too easy to bend the truth and become someone else on the Internet.

He should know.

Stepping forward into the circle of lantern light, Ty hesitated, wondering what she’d expect. Should he hug her? Kiss her? They’d met through an online dating service, which carried a certain expectation, and they’d e-chatted long into many nights, forming the illusion of intimacy. But none of it had been real, had it?

More important, their last few exchanges had been increasingly tense, as he’d pressed for a meeting and she’d resisted, which had solidified his suspicions even before Liam had made his move.

Now, though, Ty had a part to play. He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person.”

If he hadn’t been watching her face as he eased back, he would’ve missed the moment her eyes slid beyond him to a deeply shadowed corner where two brick-walled houses converged.

Instinct tightened the back of Ty’s neck.

Someone was watching.

He forced himself not to react, instead smiling easily. “I’m surprised you agreed to meet me in the middle of this godawful blackout, especially with the curfew and all. Heck, I wasn’t even sure my e-mail would get through, or that you’d have enough juice to read it.”

With Liam’s three accomplices, his sons Finn, Aidan and Colin, all out of action—one dead, one comatose, one not talking—Ty had known Gabby was perhaps their last hope for finding the mastermind. He’d broken into a stranger’s car, plugged his handheld into the cigarette lighter and stolen enough charge to send the message. Then he’d waited in the darkness, listening to the sounds of growing violence nearby as the looting continued and the National Guard moved in to enforce the mayor’s new curfew. The mob had almost reached him by the time she’d e-mailed back, arranging the meet.

As Ty had locked the car and slipped away for a quick radio convo with his boss, part of him had hoped she’d agreed to meet him out of curiosity, that the woman he’d gotten to know online was the real deal.

Now, as she glanced into the shadows a second time, conflicting emotions stirred within him—vicious satisfaction that he’d come to the right place and disappointment that she hadn’t been the real deal, after all.

“I got your message on my Blackberry,” she answered. “I was surprised you wanted to meet face-to-face, especially after that last e-mail I sent you, but I was…curious, I guess.” She glanced at him, eyes dark and a little cool with an emotion that was either nerves or calculation. “You didn’t have any problems getting here? Nobody stopped you?”

“I made it okay.” His credentials had gotten him through the first two roadblocks, but he’d ended up ditching his car near the waterfront, where the Guard’s bulldozers and tow trucks hadn’t yet cleared the roadways. Numerous cars had wrecked right after the blackout, when the traffic lights went down, and even more vehicles had been abandoned later, when rumors of a terrorist attack had sent the city’s residents fleeing in panic, only to have them wind up trapped in gridlock, frying in the hot summer sun.

Dull anger kindled in his gut at the thought of so much chaos created by a single ex-con and his sons, but he kept his voice light and friendly when he said, “How about you? No problems so far with the lights off?”

She shifted from one foot to the other, seeming uncomfortable—or was that just part of the act? After a hesitation so brief he wouldn’t have noticed it if he hadn’t been looking, she tipped her head, fluttered her eyelashes and said, “Would you like to sit down and talk for a little bit? There’s a fountain and some benches in the next courtyard over. The neighbors won’t mind.”

She pointed to a secluded spot where the cobblestone path narrowed between two planted areas, no doubt near where her associate waited.

Keeping his weight evenly balanced on the balls of his feet, ready for a fight, Ty nodded. “The courtyard sounds perfect.”

She set the lantern on the edge of a nearby stone planter before starting down the short path. Was it a signal? Ty didn’t know, but he was tense with battle readiness as he followed in her wake.

They’d taken just three steps into the shadows when he heard a rustle and the faint indrawn breath that presaged attack.

“Freeze!” Ty palmed the revolver he wore at his hip and grabbed Gabriella in a single move, spinning her back against his body and clamping an arm across her throat.

She screamed and struggled to escape, her elbows digging into his ribs, her heels drumming against his shins. He could feel her heartbeat jackhammering beneath his forearm, mute evidence that she might be a liar, but she wasn’t a trained operative.

“Be still.” He cocked the revolver, and the click resonated on the humid air, freezing her in place.

He carried a semiautomatic with fifteen in the clip as his primary weapon, tucked into an underarm holster, but he’d long ago found that the six-shooter had the edge when it came to intimidation.

The click said he meant business. Right now his business was finding Grant Davis and locating the bomb that’d been planted somewhere in the city, and to do that, he had to get his hands on Liam Shea.

Adrenaline pounded through Ty’s veins as he leaned close and spoke into his captive’s delicate ear. “Tell him to toss his weapons and come out with his hands up.”

If he was damn lucky, it would be Shea himself. If not, he hoped it was an underling he could lean on for the bastard’s location.

Gabby whimpered in the back of her throat and jerked her head in some semblance of a nod. Tears streamed down her cheeks and she was shaking all over, almost enough to convince him she was for real.

A sliver of compassion twisted through Ty, along with snippets from the hundreds of notes they’d exchanged over the past five-plus months. She’d written about honesty, and about problems with her family, and, damn it, she’d seemed real enough that he’d responded in kind.

Maybe she really hadn’t known what she was getting into, he rationalized. Maybe it had seemed like a game to her, or perhaps she was one of those bleeding hearts who believed in rehabilitation of hardened criminals.

If so, he could’ve told her not to bother. Liam had been a traitor eleven years earlier, and he was a traitor now.

One who damn well belonged back in jail.

When there was no motion from the bushes, Ty raised his voice. “Come out here. Now!” A breath of wind disturbed the hot, humid air, unfurling a nearby flag and making it snap. “You’ve got until three. One…two…”

The bushes moved and a figure stepped out onto the path, nearly lost in the darkness.

“Back up into the courtyard,” he ordered, his pulse accelerating as he tried to assess the risks and control the scene.

“Go on. Easy now.” He marched Gabby along the path in front of him, using her as a shield as the shadowy figure complied, backing into the courtyard with a hitching motion, as though feeling the way. Moments later, the figure stepped into the circle of lantern light, and the illumination chased away the anonymous shadows.

Ty froze.

It wasn’t Liam Shea. It was a woman, and she sure as hell didn’t look like anyone’s hired gun.

She wore cutoff shorts over curvy legs, with a pink button-down shirt knotted beneath generous breasts. Glossy hair spilled over her shoulders, gleaming with rich chestnut highlights in the yellow lantern light. Her eyes were strangely luminous, as though backlit, bleaching from brown at the center to pale at the edges, and her full, moist lips came straight from his fantasies.

Surprise flared through him, laced with something hotter and even more unexpected. Suddenly desire existed alongside anger, all of it complicated with the pounding need to shelter the innocent and rescue the man he was sworn to protect with his life.

He tried for a dry tone, but the words came out harsh when he said, “Hello, Gabby.”

Then he noticed the red-tipped cane in her hand, and saw that she wasn’t looking directly at him with those pale, pretty eyes.

A second major shock hammered through him.

Gabriella Solaro was blind.

“LET HER GO, Ty.” Gabby knotted her hands together, hoping he wouldn’t notice how badly they shook. She couldn’t see the scene—her vision was limited to light and dark smudges on the brightest of days—but over the years she’d gotten good at interpreting sights from sounds.

She’d never before had to connect the sound of a weapon to a friend’s panicked scream, though, and the reality of it made her sick and dizzy with fear.

This was her fault. Her fault for trying to be someone she wasn’t, for thinking she was protected by Internet anonymity, for letting curiosity overrule common sense, for going against everything she’d told him up to this point and agreeing to meet. It was her fault for wimping out and asking Maria to take her place at the last minute. And most of all, it was her fault for being wooed by words on the Braille pinpad she’d designed to translate images from the computer screen to letters she could “see.”

Hadn’t her friends in the neighborhood warned her about the hazards of online dating? “He could be anybody,” they’d said. “He could be a complete jerk. A user. A criminal.”

Gabby had brushed them off, figuring she was an expert in dealing with the first two options, and refusing to entertain the third. “I know Ty,” she’d said, certain they’d made a connection during their late-night conversations. “He’s not like that.”

But she’d still refused to take the relationship any further than on-screen…until tonight, when she’d been feeling a little bit reckless, a little bit wild. As usual, the impulses had gotten her into trouble.

Deep trouble.

Heart pounding in her ears, she raised her voice and nearly shouted, “That’s right, I’m Gabby.”

She was hoping against hope that someone in one of the nearby houses would hear and come help, one of the neighbors she sometimes found overwhelming with their extended Italian-American families and endless dinners, fights and celebrations. But they had ignored curfew and trooped down Hanover Street en masse, banding together to get old Mrs. Rosetti into one of the overflowing hospitals when her oxygen tank ran low and her breathing had gotten bad.

The houses were empty. There was nobody left to hear the tremble in Gabby’s voice, or the drum of her heart in her ears. “Please,” she said quietly, desperately. “Let her go. I’ll do whatever you want.”

The offer made her nauseous, but it came from the lessons she’d learned as a teen, when she’d run the streets of Miami with a hard-partying, hard-fighting crowd. She’d fought to outgrow that rebellious, self-destructive streak in the years since, but she needed some of the brashness now, some of that brazen go-to-hell confidence.

She had to get Maria away from him first. Then she’d try to talk him down. She couldn’t believe the Ty she’d come to know—

Don’t you get it, Gabby? He isn’t that Ty. He’s… She couldn’t even complete the thought. She didn’t know what he was, or who. All she knew was that she’d brought him into her neighborhood, into her haven. Into her heart.

How she’d agonized over his last few messages, debating how much to tell him, what to tell him. In the end she’d broken up with him rather than admit the truth, that she was blind and rarely left the safe, secure confines of her home territory.

Then he’d caught her in a weak moment with his invitation, and the wild child had taken over and pushed the self-destruct button once again.

“Tell me about Liam Shea,” he ordered now, voice low and commanding.

“Let Maria go and I’ll tell you anything you want,” she countered, gripping her hands tightly in front of her in an effort to hold it together.

Moments later Maria was free. She grabbed Gabby’s arm and tried to tug her away, sobbing. “Come on. Please, let’s go!”

But Gabby didn’t need to see the threat to know Ty hadn’t uncocked the gun. He remained in control of the scene.

She pictured him as he’d described himself online—six feet tall and muscular, with blue eyes and blond hair he didn’t get trimmed often enough. Her imagination had added a shaggy lock that fell forward over his forehead, along with smile-creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth to counteract the hint of sadness she’d sometimes gotten from his words.

Now in her mind’s eye his mouth turned cruel and his eyes glittered ice-cold, sending a shiver of fear through her body.

“Please, Ty,” she said quietly. “Let us go. We haven’t done anything to you, and we won’t tell anyone. Just take the gun and go. I’m begging you. If our conversations meant anything to you, you’ll—”

Then she broke off, knowing the conversations hadn’t meant anything to him. Not like they had to her. His words had been lies, hadn’t they? All lies.

She was surprised, then, when moments later she heard the distinctive click of metal-on-metal, followed by a rustle of nylon cloth and catch of leather as he disarmed the gun and holstered it.

“Tell me everything you know about Liam Shea,” he said. “You might know him as Liam Sullivan.”

“I don’t know anyone by either of those names.” Gabby held on to Maria’s arm and felt the tension vibrate through her friend, through them both. “Please go. I told Maria’s brother to give us ten minutes. He’s going to call the police if we don’t check in with him by quarter past.”

The lie earned her a snort of derision. “Nice try, but we both know the local cops are busy. And besides, I outrank them.”

There was another rustle of cloth, and Maria hissed out a breath.

“What is it?” Gabby demanded, trying to ignore a bite of frustration.

“He’s with the Secret Service,” Maria said, her Sicilian accent thickening. “Special Agent Tyler Jones,” she recited, reading from his ID. “Vice presidential protection detail.”

“No he’s not,” Gabby said, going breathless with shock. “He’s a—”

She broke off, realizing that it fit, sort of. “I’m a bodyguard for a corporate type,” he’d said, and Grant Davis, a decorated military veteran-turned-golden-boy politician, certainly fit that bill in some respects. Rumor had it he was the front-runner for the next presidential election, and he’d been in Boston this past week for some glitzy affair at the Hancock Building.

Rumor also had it that he’d disappeared right after the blackout.

“Why are you here?” she nearly whispered, fear and confusion stealing her breath. “Why aren’t you looking for him?”

“I am,” he said bluntly. “I need you to tell me where I can find Liam Shea. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to arrest you as an accessory to the vice president’s kidnapping.”

The ground pitched beneath Gabby’s feet and the world spun invisible circles around her. “I already told you.” She swallowed hard when tears pressed at her throat. “I don’t know either Liam Shea or a Liam Sullivan. Period, end of discussion.”

“You hacked into his Web site on March fifteenth.”

“I never—” she began, then broke off, realizing that her two guilty pleasures—Internet dating and testing her hacking skills against the occasional encrypted Web site—had come to roost simultaneously. And the Secret Service was involved, which meant… Wait a second, she thought. March fifteenth?

Ty had first e-mailed her through Webmatch.com on the seventeenth. St. Patrick’s Day.

Sick humiliation poured through her, nearly dropping her to her knees. “Oh, God. You hit on me because I hacked into this guy’s Web site. You—”

She broke off, nausea building when she remembered all the things she’d told him. She might have hidden her blindness and the circumstances leading up to it, but she’d been open about everything else. She’d told him about her growing frustration with the school and the narrow confines of her life, about how she longed for adventure as much as she feared it. In return, he’d urged her to step outside her comfort zone, to embrace life and focus on the people she loved. He’d told how he’d married his high school sweetheart right after leaving the military, and how he heard his retired-colonel father’s voice in his head, calming him down when he’d been in tight situations. Or had all that been a lie?

She’d thought they had a connection. It hurt like hell to find out he’d only romanced her because she’d hacked into some guy’s Web site.

“Why me?” Her voice cracked on the word and she nearly sagged against Maria.

“Because you hacked into a Web site dedicated to defaming Grant Davis,” Ty said coolly.

“Gabby isn’t a criminal,” Maria said, her accent thickening with anger. “And besides, there must be a hundred Web sites like that.”

“Thousands of ’em,” Ty agreed. “But this is the only one the vice president asked me to monitor personally. He and Liam…let’s just say they have a history.”

Gabby’s lips trembled. “So you thought that gave you the right to pretend that you—” She broke off, unable to continue.

She might’ve ended the relationship, but that hadn’t prevented her from thinking What if. What if they did meet? What if he proved to be a better man than his predecessors, and hadn’t minded that she couldn’t drive or play golf, and that she sometimes fumbled her way around? What if?

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.