Under Fire Read online

  Six drove past, deliberately missing the entrance to Louisa’s curved driveway. While the rational part of his mind told him he was probably blowing this out of all proportion, something about the van and its driver had tripped his senses. After all, if only half of what Louisa had told him was true, the missing sample was dangerous.

  Perhaps things had escalated since their earlier conversation, and he wondered whether Lou would have called him if they had. If that van really was a getaway vehicle of some kind, then there were people in Louisa’s house, possibly armed. The last thing he wanted to do was make them jumpier. With absolute normalcy, so as not to draw attention to himself, he drove around the corner and parked the truck. He tugged his white T-shirt off over his head and fished around in his gym bag for his black hoodie. Quickly he tugged it over his head and put the hood up to hide his blond hair. Under San Diego’s restrictive gun laws, he shouldn’t be able to carry the weapon currently tucked in the glove compartment, but there hadn’t been a rule yet that he hadn’t been able to find his way around. For that he was grateful.

  As silently as possible, he jumped out of the truck and snicked the door shut. He didn’t bother with the alarm because the beep was loud. Six crept in the shadows toward the house and didn’t even think about holstering his weapon. There was nobody out on the street except the idling van driver he wanted to avoid, so he slipped into the neighbor’s driveway and assessed a place to cut through. A border garden separated the two properties. Six looked up to the side of the neighbor’s house and saw wall-mounted lights with sensors pointed to pertinent spots like access to the rear gate and the main driveway. He didn’t want them to come on. Staying low and tight against the shrubs, he headed for a break between the rows of plants, but stopped short of setting foot on Louisa’s driveway. The window at the side of the house was open.

  The van he’d seen wasn’t big, so there couldn’t be too many targets inside, but his primary concern was getting to Louisa. He took a quick picture of the van with his phone and then calmly hurried over to her house and pressed himself up against the wall next to the window. If this was a delivery of shoes or flowers or something, he was going to feel like the biggest idiot on the planet, but something in his gut told him this was all wrong. He’d rather scare the shit out of Louisa by expecting the worst than get them both killed by blindly expecting the best.

  One thing he’d always been told was that taking a sneak peek was a surefire way to get killed. Nine times out of ten there was somebody waiting with a gun pointing in your direction. But in this instance, it was dark and they’d obviously been careful to not be seen, so they certainly weren’t expecting him to creep up behind them like the bogeyman.

  Six dropped to his knees below the windowsill and slowly raised his head to peer into the darkened room. To the right, he could hear the television playing as it had the previous night. If Louisa was in there, she was a sitting duck. He heard a scream, but it came from the opposite direction, from the kitchen. He pulled himself through the window and rolled across the floor, coming to a stop in a crouched position, one knee on the floor, gun in both hands pointed straight ahead. Quickly getting to his feet, Six pressed his back against the wall and blocked Louisa’s screams out. It would be dangerous for both of them if he gave in to panic. Instead, he slipped around the wall that led in the direction of Louisa’s cries. The solid door to the kitchen stood between him and Louisa. The best of his training kicked in as it always did, and he dropped low before pushing the door open and rolling inside. When doors opened, people automatically expected somebody to walk through them, so gunmen would always fire high rather than low.

  As bullets flew over his head, he caught sight of Louisa trapped behind a table. The two intruders had obviously been about to capture her between them, but the smart girl had armed herself and was going to make it difficult for them.

  “What the…?” one of the men cried out. “I thought you said she was alone.”

  Six dropped behind the kitchen island. He didn’t want to shoot because they were too close to Louisa and he didn’t have a clear shot, so he crawled to the other side in the hope that he could reassure her in some way to stay calm. Shots ricocheted off the cupboards behind him. “The police are on their way,” Six shouted. “You’ve got maybe three minutes to get the fuck out of here.”

  One of the men moved in his direction and raised his gun. Six capitalized on the rookie error and fired low, catching the intruder closest to him in the calf. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Louisa drop and crawl under the table. Smart girl. Taking cover was the best thing she could do with bullets flying around. The other guy ran for the open door.

  The wounded assailant screamed out in agony and shouted something in a language Six didn’t understand but that sounded Eastern European. Like his partner, he ran for the door, leaving a bloody trail behind him.

  “You okay, Lou?” he called out as he jumped to his feet.

  “I’m fine,” she shouted as he ran out of the door after them.

  Protecting Louisa—getting the thugs away from her and keeping them away—was his first priority. He ran out onto the street where the van was already making its exit. The guy he’d shot was being dragged in through the open side door as the van turned the corner.

  Six ran back into the house, locked the front door, hurried to what he now knew was the dining room, and closed the window. When he returned to the kitchen, he found Louisa on the phone speaking to emergency services. He pushed down his hood and walked over to her to place his hand on her back.

  “No, I think they’re gone,” she said to the 911 operator, her voice wavering. “Right?” she asked, looking at him.

  Six nodded. “In a black van,” he said, and wrote the license plate down on a notepad on the counter.

  Louisa relayed the information to the operator. “Yes, that’s right.” There was a pause. “Okay, thank you,” she said, and hung up the phone. She let out a gasp and sagged against the island.

  “Holy shit,” she gasped. “Holy shit.” Her breath came quickly and unevenly. “There were men in my house. My home.”

  “Louisa, look at me,” he said, concerned about shock. Home intrusion was often doubly violating because being attacked in the place that was supposed to be the person’s safest haven made them feel incredibly vulnerable. She raised her head. Her cheeks were a bit flushed and her skin a little paler than normal, but beneath it all was the spark of anger.

  “Now do you believe me?” she asked.

  * * *

  “You think I didn’t believe you that something was going on?” Six asked incredulously.

  In truth, Louisa wasn’t sure what to think. Her head was spinning, seemingly filled with both useful and useless information about what had happened. Kind of like all the extra material in genomes that accumulated over time even though it didn’t serve any biological purpose. Two weeks ago, she’d stood in this very kitchen and had eaten breakfast while worrying over a missing sample and planning to tell the head of the lab about her concerns. Now two men had broken into her home, and Six had undoubtedly saved her life. Oh, and there was blood on her kitchen tiles, which she compulsively needed to clean up yet intelligently knew she needed to leave until the police had come and gone. She threaded her shaking hands into her hair and looked around the kitchen that she’d loved, knowing it would never feel the same to her again.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “It did seem like I was overreacting, I guess. But it all adds up to the same, thing,” she said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The police are on their way, so you should go. I’ll be fine. I’m very relieved you swung by when you did.” Her voice cracked on the last words, and any attempt to appear brave disappeared faster than the lab sample had. Tears that rarely fell stung the corners of her eyes, and before she could utter the words to excuse herself momentarily so she could cry in the privacy of the washroom, Six had pulled her into his strong arms and wrapped them tightly around her. They felt safe
, comforting even, and she pressed her cheek against his hoodie and closed her eyes. While she might know the biological reason why adrenaline was pumping through her veins right now, it didn’t make it any more bearable. Her entire body shook with uncontrollable force.

  “It’s not fine,” he said, rubbing her back gently. “It’s not okay that somebody broke into your home. And don’t attempt to dismiss me again, missy,” he teased. “Because while I have a decade’s experience of taking orders for my job, I don’t take kindly to them in my personal life. Also, if you were thinking straight, you would have realized that the police will probably want to speak to the guy who put a bullet in the leg of one of your assailants.”

  They stood silently for a moment as Louisa focused on breathing deeply. She gripped Six’s waist tightly. She supposed it should be awkward, but it wasn’t. It was comforting. She could feel the strength of him, and she knew he wouldn’t let anything happen to her.

  Louisa tilted her head back to look at him. “Do I want to know why you have a gun when San Diego pretty much prohibits concealed carry?”

  Thankfully he didn’t let go of her. In fact, he pulled her closer and leaned back against the kitchen island, placing his legs on either side of hers. “Well, you can thank Sheriff Pike in Alabama for that.”

  His proximity was confusing her. Her body was still on high alert as her hand shook and her body tried to figure out what to do with the chemical instruction to flee. But then another part of her was highly aware of the way they lined up against each other. And how the fact that he’d slouched a little meant they’d lined up in a way that was too intimate. She needed to focus on their conversation and not the way his inner thigh felt so warm against the side of her leg.

  “What does Sheriff Pike have to do with it?”

  “Ever heard of the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act?” Six asked, and Louisa shook her head. “It’s a federal law that’s over a decade old that allows law enforcement people to carry concealed firearms in any jurisdiction in the United States. So I got Sheriff Pike to deputize me—even got the gold star to prove it. And now I carry a gun.”

  “That sounds like a technicality to me.”

  Six smiled. “It kind of is. Now that you’ve got a little more color in your face, and you’ve stopped shaking, you want to tell me who those men were, or what they wanted?”

  Louisa smoothed her hands down the front of his chest to fix his rumpled hoodie and then straightened the hem. Six grabbed her hands in his and stilled them. His hands were the size of baseball mitts compared to hers.

  “I don’t know for sure. They beat you in here by a minute or two at most. They told me that they wanted me to go with them, and that was about it. I don’t want to think this has something to do with the missing sample.”

  Thoughts crowded in almost too quickly to process them all. Things like this didn’t happen to her. It went against the rules. Her rules that said she would spend her life doing research away from all the horrid stuff that went on in the world. And shit like this certainly didn’t happen in Mission Hills. She wondered if it was smart to keep the fact that she’d swapped the two samples and disposed of the one they seemed to be after five days earlier from the police when they finally arrived. But this was a golden opportunity to find out where the police were with the theft in the lab. Obviously Six had saved her life, but she didn’t want him to get into trouble for shooting one of the men. She wasn’t even sure how that would work. It wasn’t like he was defending his home. He was defending hers with a gun he’d brought with him which she wasn’t sure was even legal. Crap.

  “It’s all such a mess,” she whispered against Six’s shoulder.

  “I know. But I’m right here with you,” he said softly.

  Her heart pounded again and her head felt groggy, like mud, as though she was hungover. What she really needed was some silence. She tried to pull away from Six, but he wouldn’t let her move. “Let me go,” she said, blowing her bangs out of her face.

  Six shook his head slowly. “I don’t know what’s going on, but you’ll walk the police through it step by step, and I’ll tell them what I know. Then we’ll figure out how to make you safe tonight. Then in the morning, I’ll help you figure out what you can do to remain safe while this gets sorted out.”

  What if they came back? Oh, God. She hadn’t thought that far ahead. She could go to her mother’s home, but that might lead the people that were after her to her family. Damn. Why had she already decided it was about the sample when it could have been an abduction attempt or an armed robbery, which didn’t make her feel less vulnerable but did quash all the conspiracy theories in her head? What if she was excluding options that were important? She was the daughter of a very wealthy widow. Ransom could be a possibility.

  Six squeezed her shaking hands, bringing her back to the present. “And just so you know, staying safe means learning to protect yourself, sweetheart.”

  “I did just fine,” Louisa huffed, unwilling to take on the mantle of victim she was constructing in her head.

  “You held a rolling pin,” Six said, shaking his head at her. “What were you going to do, Betty Crocker them to death?”

  She pushed her hands against his chest, and this time he let her go. It had never occurred to her that someone would violate her home, but Six was right. If she looked at it logically, she obviously needed to upgrade every element of her home security. She couldn’t even remember when she’d last opened the window in the dining room, but she’d obviously become lax in locking it afterward. And none of her external security lights had come on, which meant they either weren’t effective or the sensors were pointing at the wrong places. And her alarm had the ability to be on for just the doors and windows when she was home but awake, yet she never—

  “What’s going on inside that head of yours?” Six asked. “Because you disappear inside it sometimes and I worry when I see you start messing with things.”

  Louisa looked down at her hands and realized she was restacking the coasters she had placed on the marble. “I was just thinking through what you said. I guess I’ve become a little lazy … I’ve stopped worrying about home security because nothing ever really happens here.”

  “Okay, we’ll look at two things. One, how you protect your home, and two, how you protect yourself in the event that someone makes it past all of your other defenses.” He parted her bangs with his finger, and it made her shiver.

  Since her father’s death, she hadn’t had anyone to count on. Not like this. “Why are you really here, Six? It’s not about my uneven shelves, is it?” she asked quietly.

  Six studied her face, taking in her forehead, her cheeks, and even her neck before meeting her eyes. It was a moment that felt much longer, filled with … something. Potential, maybe. “Because you asked me to help, and—”

  He stopped talking at the sound of wheels pulling onto the gravel. Quickly, he shut off the kitchen light, and it became apparent that the exterior lights were on. With a swift jog, gun drawn, he hurried to take a look out the window. Blue and red beams of light flashed onto her kitchen wall. They were the best thing she’d seen all day, well, other than seeing the door to the kitchen burst open and Six rolling in, looking as deadly as any soldier she’d ever seen. In hindsight, now that the danger had passed, she realized he’d looked hotter than any Hollywood action star in a big blockbuster movie.

  Even as she wondered what other reason he’d been about to give her for being there, she realized that none of his words, or the arrival of the police, meant she was safe.

  * * *

  “So, you said the lab sample was reported missing by you a week ago yesterday.”

  “Yes,” Louisa said as the police officer made notes on his report. “I’m sure Vasilii Popov, the lab owner, has already filed a report, but I can’t tell you when he did it.”

  “Let me just get the details for that,” Officer Meeks said. “Dispatch, can I get a report for a theft at VPN Laboratories?” He add
ed other details, such as the lab address. “Complainant is either a Vasilii Popov or Ivan Popov.”

  Six listened as the police officer repeated the information Lou had given him via his radio to the dispatcher to ask for details and report number. Six couldn’t fault him for this thoroughness. Plus, he’d noticed that Lou was immediately ill at ease with strangers in her house, and the tenured cop had been observant enough to act accordingly.

  For Lou’s part, she was holding herself together remarkably well, but once the adrenaline began to clear her system, he wasn’t sure how she would react. One thing he was certain of was that she wouldn’t be alone.

  “I don’t want Six to get into any trouble,” she said.

  In everything that was going on, she was still thinking about him.

  Officer Meeks’s partner poked his head around the door of the living room. “Forensics are here. I set them up in the kitchen. And I also called Sherriff Pike in Alabama. He corroborates Mr. Rapp’s story.”

  When the police had arrived, Six had exited the building with his hands in the air, identified himself, and informed the police officers of the location of his weapon. In return, they’d been mildly angry about his interference and had lectured him extensively about not treating US soil as a militarized zone, as if they even knew what that meant. But he’d do it again in a heartbeat if Louisa’s life was in danger.

  Officer Meeks looked at Louisa. “Mr. Rapp won’t be facing any charges from us. He is allowed to concealed carry.” He turned and looked pointedly at Six. “We just hope next time he takes a second to call us before things go down rather than after.”

  Six reclined on the sofa and placed his hand on Louisa’s back, rubbing it up and down until she sat up straighter. Hopefully the forensic team would work fast, because while blood and empty shell casings on the floor meant nothing to him, they meant everything to Lou. The longer they’d stayed in the kitchen while waiting for the police to arrive, the more Louisa had stared at the blood trail. It had taken every ounce of persuasion to get her to step away from the crime scene and up to her living room. Seeing little yellow plastic triangles with numbers on them covering the tile in the kitchen certainly wasn’t going to help. The shock would catch up with her eventually, no matter how hard she fought it. And he wanted the police out of her house as quickly as possible because he could pull a plan together way better than they could.