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“Damn it, Chase, what’s taking you so long?” he grumbled.

He considered continuing on to meet the senator without her. Let her explain to the boss why she had no shots of the politician at his construction site. Cole imagined their editor’s face turning a mottled red as he chewed her out. But, of course, that was just a fantasy. The man adored her, just like everyone else did. No doubt, he’d shrug off her unprofessionalism without one reprimanding word and somehow blame Cole for leaving her behind.
 

Groaning, he pulled out his phone and started punching in her number while he trotted back down the block he’d traversed only a minute or two ago. If the senator got impatient and left because they were late—

The thought broke off as he rounded the corner and saw an empty sidewalk. Where the hell had she gone? Her cell began to ring in his ear, and he picked up his pace, scanning the empty streets, the closed shops, with growing alarm. When he drew abreast of the alley between a bookstore and a hair salon, he froze. Holy shit.

Bailey, her head leaning back against the wall, blinked up at him. Her smoky green eyes looked unfocused. “Some guy just stole my camera equipment.”

He knelt beside her, his heart in his throat and his hands already shaking. Too much blood was smeared across the hem of her white T-shirt, shimmering red and wet between the fingers of the hand she held just below her right breast. Her skin, usually so tan and healthy, was pale and gleaming.
 

“How bad is it?” He had to clear the croak out of his throat.

“Can’t be that bad. I haven’t passed out.” Her normally raspy voice was barely a whisper.
 

Not yet.
He reset his phone so he could call 911. His hand trembled, and he had to start over when his thumb hit the wrong key.
 

“Who are you calling? Just help me up. I’m fine.”

“Stay still. I’m calling 911.”
 

“No! I can get up.”

“You really shouldn’t move.” He put a hand on her shoulder to stop her just as the 911 operator answered. “I need an ambulance,” Cole said. “Downtown, near the corner of Broadway and Main.”

Bailey gripped his arm, her strength surprising him. “I don’t need an ambulance.”

“What’s the nature of your emergency?” the operator asked.

Cole shushed Bailey, pushing her back against the wall even as she struggled against him to rise. Her weak resistance alarmed him as much as the whiteness of her face. She kept one palm clamped to her side, where blood seeped sluggishly between her fingers.
 

He swallowed hard against nausea. “My friend has been stabbed. She’s bleeding pretty bad.”

Bailey snorted. “My
friend
?”

“You need to do what you can to stop the bleeding, sir. Is there something you can use to fashion a pressure bandage?”
 

“Hang on.” He set the phone down so he could shuck his suit jacket and shirt.
 

“What are you doing?” And then she sagged against the wall, apparently conceding the effort to get up. “Wow. Look at that. You’re ripped.”

He might have laughed if she weren’t so pale and he weren’t so freaked out. Instead, he wadded his shirt. “Move your hand.”

Surprisingly, she obeyed, and he pressed his shirt to her bloody side while retrieving his phone with his free hand. “Okay,” he said to the 911 operator. “What else?”

“I’m sending the police and paramedics. Is your friend conscious?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t need an ambulance,” Bailey said, louder this time. “I’m fine. Let me talk to them.” She made a grab for the phone.
 

He jerked back out of her reach. “Would you knock it off?”

“I’m fine,” she repeated loudly, as if trying to be heard over him. “Cancel the ambulance.”

“She’s not fine,” he told the operator. “She’s sweating.”

“It’s hot out here,” Bailey said. “Put it on speaker.”

“And shivering,” Cole added.

“That’s shock,” the operator said. “You need to keep her warm. She should be lying down, with her feet elevated.”

Cole maneuvered Bailey away from the wall and down, shifting to cradle her head in his palm to keep it from striking the concrete if she passed out. She clasped his forearm with one hand, her grip strong with panic. “I don’t want to—”

“It’ll keep you from fainting.”

“Ah, God, that hurts.” She closed her eyes and swallowed convulsively, her body rigid.
 

“Okay,” he said into his cell. “What else?”

“The paramedics should be there any minute. Try to keep her conscious. I’ll hold on the line until they get there.”

“Great, thanks.” To Bailey, he said, “Just hang on.”

“Right,” she murmured. “No problem.” Her eyelids drooped.

Alarmed, he gave her cheek a light tap. “Hey, where are you going?”

“Into the light.”

He took her ability to joke as a good sign. “Didn’t I hear you took some fancy self-defense class a couple months ago?”

Her eyelids fluttered again as she struggled to keep them open. “Yeah, so?”

“So didn’t you learn how to protect yourself?”

“I could take your butt, easy. You might be buff, but I bet you fight like a girl.”

“You think so?”

“Hell, yeah.”

“Is that a challenge?” The woman was down for the count but still managed to trash-talk. Amazing.

“Any time.”

“All right, then. Bring it on.”

Her laugh ended on a choked moan, and her grip tightened on his fingers. “Don’t make me laugh.”

He glanced toward the entrance to the alley. Would the paramedics be able to find them here? Should he go out to the street and look for them? But, no, he didn’t want to leave her. Damn it, how could downtown be so deserted at this time? Didn’t anyone around here come to work early? “Where the hell are they?”

“They’re less than a minute away,” the operator said.

He strained his ears to listen for sirens and heard nothing but the breeze scraping palm fronds together in the park down the street.
 

Bailey tried to push herself up. “I don’t want to lay down anymore. I’m fine.” She froze to stare at his blood-soaked shirt pressed to her side. “Oh my God. Is all that mine?”
 

She sagged so fast he barely managed to prevent her head from thudding against the pavement. Cole’s heart skipped several beats. “Hey, don’t do that. Chase?”

She didn’t answer.

He fumbled for her pulse. “Come on, Bailey, come on.”

Chapter 3

James Chase paced the spacious office, clenching and unclenching his fists at his sides. Everything about this place annoyed him. From the plush ocean-blue carpet to the wall-length window that framed a view of palm trees and the Gulf of Mexico to the massive desk made of pale Egyptian wood. The entire office screamed money. If James hadn’t needed cash so desperately, he might have appreciated the décor.
 

Pausing before a bronze sculpture of a tiger, he wondered how much it was worth. Of course, there was no way in hell he would have been able to hide it under his white linen shirt. Which was drenched with sweat, not because he was hot. He was
terrified
.

If Bailey found out …
 

He closed his eyes and took a steadying breath. Whatever happened, he had to keep his sister from finding out about this. She already watched him like a hawk, waiting for the moment when he’d screw up again. And, with her, it wasn’t a question of if but when. She’d known all along that he’d blow it again, and now he had.
 

If the son of a bitch kept him waiting one more minute, he was going to explode.

As if the thought summoned him, Payne Kincaid opened the door. He was elegantly dressed, as always, in a dark Italian suit with a fancy silk tie—yellow today. He had Robert Redford hair—thick and blond laced with gray. It always looked as if he’d just run his fingers through it. He appeared more youthful than sixty, mainly because the many hours he devoted to tennis and golf every week kept his craggy features tan and his body lean.

He gave James a tight smile. “How are you, James?”

James fisted his hands at his sides. “You know I messed up.”

Kincaid’s expression didn’t change. “Yes, I’m aware of the situation.”

“I couldn’t do it. I know I said I would, but I couldn’t.”

Kincaid directed him to one of the black suede chairs before the desk. “Sit. We’ll talk.”

Sweat raced in an icy trickle down James’ back. “I don’t want to sit. I couldn’t make the deal. I’m sorry. I just … I … if I got caught, I’d go back to jail. And Austin ... I can’t risk it. I’m sorry.”

Kincaid pursed his lips, brown eyes narrowed. “This would all be fine, James. Except for the money I’ve already paid you to do a job you didn’t do.”

James swallowed hard. Pain hammered at his temples, and nausea had a tight grip on his stomach. “I don’t have it anymore.”

Payne Kincaid was an expert at hiding his anger, and now was no different. He calmly gestured at the chair again, cool as ever. “Sit.”

James obeyed this time. His knees had started to shake anyway.
 

“We have a problem, James,” Kincaid said as he settled behind his fancy desk. Leaning back in his big leather chair, he linked his hands over his flat stomach. “What are we going to do to resolve it?”

James shifted, conscious of his shirt sticking to the chair’s back. Kincaid’s lack of emotion was scaring the hell out of him. James knew from experience that the more unaffected Kincaid appeared, the more furious he was.

The man hadn’t always intimidated him. When James had been a kid, he’d looked up to his father’s best friend like a second father. He was tall and strapping and had always been full of rugged energy as he’d told stories about his adventures in whatever exotic locale he’d last visited, his soft, deep voice belying his dynamic presence. As a child, James had never seen him angry. Now, though, James sensed that rage simmered just below Kincaid’s cool surface, like a volcano that steamed for days before it violently erupted.
 

“I’ll repay you,” James said. He didn’t know how, but he’d find a way.

“Doing what? You can’t think I’ll give you another chance, do you? You kept a potential client waiting while you were busy having a nervous breakdown. All you had to do was meet with the man, make the exchange that I’d already arranged and be on your way. But not only did you not bother to show up, you didn’t call so I could get someone to replace you. It was a simple task that even a preschooler could have done. A task, I might add, that you were severely overpaid to do. Do you know how bad you’ve made me look? You cost me a customer. It’s my own fault for trusting you, James, but I believed you when you said you wouldn’t let me down again.”

“I’ll make it up to you,” James said. “I’ll do something else, anything you want.” He took a breath. “I want to—” He broke off. He wanted to do the right thing. He wanted to have a normal life, one where he didn’t have to constantly look over his shoulder or worry about how the ugliness of his past would spill over onto his family.

“You want to what?” Kincaid asked, his voice hard.

James had no doubt that they wouldn’t be having this conversation if he weren’t the son of the late Elliott Chase. He would have been dead long ago. “I want to make it up to you.”

“You
can’t
make it up to me. You can’t make
anything
up to me, James.”

“I can try to—”

“I gave you this opportunity because you begged me, because you said you needed help getting back on your feet.” Anger flashed in Kincaid’s eyes as his iron control slipped. “Now you’re telling me that not only did you screw me over with an important customer, but you also no longer have the fifteen grand I advanced you.”

James hesitated, then nodded.
 

“What did you do with it? So help me God, if you bought drugs, I’m going to take your head off.”

“I used it to pay … a debt.”

“A loan shark?”

James swallowed. “Yes.”
 

Kincaid’s mouth tightened, as if he bit the inside of his lower lip to keep from lunging across his desk.

James didn’t elaborate on the whys of going to a loan shark. He didn’t say that part of the loan had covered tuition for the technical classes that were required for the job he’d just landed. Part of it paid the security deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment that had a badly needed second bedroom for his son. Some had bought used furniture for that bedroom. And the rest had paid for the ancient Toyota parked outside, because the Toyota he’d traded in had been even older.
 

He didn’t say that his new job, once he started, promised a hefty signing bonus that he’d planned to use to settle some of the loan, knowing that as soon as he started getting his new, heftier paycheck, he’d have plenty to pay his bills and make payments on the loan.
 

He didn’t say that just before he was due to get his signing bonus, his new employer had discovered his felonious past and given him the heave-ho.