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“Are you hurt?” he asks, his thumbs—those sexy appendages that I love— graze across my cheeks, then run down my arms, scanning for injury.
“I’m fine,” I assure him. “Are you okay?” I look him over, certain there must be a bullet wound somewhere on him, but he appears unscathed. Jack doesn’t answer me, just pulls me against him again, holding me tenderly and yet so fiercely. His lips press a kiss onto the top of my head.
“I have never been more terrified in my whole life,” he breathes. “I thought I might lose you when I’d only just gotten you back.”
“But you seemed so calm and in control,” I murmur, nestling myself further into him. Safe.
“Yeah, well…the only plan I had was to keep her talking, so I pulled myself together and made it happen. Luckily,” he adds wryly, “Stella is prone to talking too much.”
“True.” I agree. The sense of betrayal I’d been stifling in the name of survival rears its ugly head. My friend tried to kill me tonight. Sure, she expressed regret over the deed, but I’m not sure that makes it any better.
“She fooled me too, you know,” Jack says, correctly interpreting the direction of my thoughts.
Tears spark my eyes.
“It’s not as if Stella and I were best friends or anything,” I tell him. “She was my work friend, you know? Someone to eat lunch with and complain about Ian with. Still, friends we were. And all along she was plotting a murder.”
“Which means she was the one in the wrong, not you.”
“That’s one way to look at it.”
“It’s the only way to look at it,” he says firmly. He reaches down, using one finger to tip my chin up until I’m looking straight into his gray eyes. “Understood?”
Speech evades me, and I can only nod.
“Good.” Jack releases my chin and I settle back against him, breathing in his scent. Now that we’re back together maybe I can finally throw my emergency Dove shampoo away.
“So what happened?” I ask, my voice muffled by his chest. “Did you,” I swallow, “shoot them?”
“I shot at them,” he replies, “but in the end it was your siege by office supplies that took them down.”
“Wait, really?” I pull my head off his chest only to find him smirking fondly at me.
“Sorry, Babe Ruth,” he teases, “but while your efforts were valiant, their impact was…indeterminable.”
“Indeterminable!” I exclaim indignantly. “I’m pretty sure that the paperweight I threw did some damage.”
“That it did,” he agrees, then he takes me gently by the shoulders and turns me to face the doorway. I gasp. There’s a paperweight-sized gash in the wall by the door. Below that, scattered across the floor, are all of the items I thought I was hurling at Stella.
A pitcher I am not.
“Well, obviously I was setting up a booby trap should Stella or Sven have decided to try and breach our citadel.”
“Oh yes, obviously,” he says with a laugh, pulling me back against him and placing another kiss on my head.
“Okay, fine. So I didn’t help much,” I relent.
“You helped plenty,” he corrects. “You got me my gun didn’t you? And without it I wouldn’t have been able to hold them off until the cavalry arrived.”
“The cavalry?” I query. As if on cue, Stafford sticks his head in the room.
“They finally stopped hugging, guys,” he calls over his shoulder. A second later Montgomery, Anderson, Lucy, Emily, Mel, Becca, and some guy I don’t recognize appear, trickling one by one into the office.
“The cavalry,” Jack says wryly.
“Oh my gosh, Nora! You’re okay!” Lucy exclaims. “You scared us half to death! And then Reynolds made us all wait to come in here and check on you!” She rearranges her face into a stern expression, mouthing, “Give us a minute!” while waving a finger in the direction of the door.
Jack waved them away? Yeah, totally missed that. Probably because I was too busy sniffing him and lusting after his thumbs.
