Dr. Marta Hale reached for her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I was shocked when that car took off with you in it. It took me a full second to realize he’d left without Draco.” Her fingers tightened around Cate’s. “When it crashed into that light pole...” She shook her head, drew in a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I’m just glad you weren’t hurt.”
“Me, too,” Draco said. “I think I lost a week off my life between the time the driver took off with you and the crash.”
Cate laughed without mirth. “I lost a year off mine.” She shivered again. “And like you,” she said to Marta, “it took a full second for it to dawn on me that the driver had left Draco on purpose. The locked doors were my clue.”
“What are the odds of being kidnapped twice in as many weeks?” Marta wondered.
“I don’t know.” Cate’s free hand clenched into a fist. “But I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.”
“Forcing the driver to crash was brilliant,” Crusher said.
“And incredibly dangerous,” Draco said, his tone tight, his lips tighter. “You could’ve been thrown through the windshield.” The arm around her shoulder tightened again.
“Thankfully, I wasn’t. But I’d rather go through a windshield than be captured by another lunatic bent on bioterrorism.”
“Any idea who might have done it?” Crusher asked the same question the Zurich Polizei officer had asked.
Cate didn’t have any more of an answer for Crusher than she’d had for the law enforcement officer. “I mean, I was kidnapped the first time as ransom to get my father to send a rescue team to find Dr. Hale in Colombia.”
“We wrapped up that debacle in Vienna,” Crusher said. “Why would someone go after you now?”
“Why me and not Marta?” Cate asked. “I’m not the scientist.”
“They targeted you,” Draco said, his tone flat.
Cate nodded. “Yeah. I think it has something to do with the case I was working on before I was kidnapped. I was about to book a flight from London to Zurich when Pieter Teuling’s thugs took me.”
“You are going to tell us what all that was about, aren’t you?” Marta asked.
“I will,” she said. “Now that we’re here, I can do that.”
The car pulled to a stop at the curb in front of the restaurant where they were to meet the rest of Draco’s Stealth Operations Specialists team and members of the Brotherhood Protectors International. She’d heard about the Brotherhood Protectors from her father, but she hadn’t known the organization had begun conducting international operations. SOS was another operation altogether.
Formerly a secret organization within the US government, similar to the military special forces, SOS had handled highly sensitive, top-secret operations her father hadn’t been permitted to brief her on. Her father had worked with members of SOS, including the two men sitting with her in the car. That’s how she’d met Draco months earlier. When SOS pulled up stakes and left the US government and the DC area, Draco had moved with them to Texas without bothering to talk with her about it. He’d just left.
Now, he was here with her in Zurich. He’d been there when the SOS team had busted Marta and her out of Teuling’s factory, and again when they’d cornered Teuling at the convention in Vienna, where his plan to introduce a pandemic to unsuspecting populations had been blown wide open and stopped before he could initiate it.
As the driver shifted into park, Draco sprang from the vehicle and held out a hand to help Cate out.
“I can get out on my own, you know,” she murmured at the same time as she placed her hand in his.
“I know,” he said.
She let him pull her to her feet. After the car had taken off and crashed, Draco had been there to pull her out of the wreckage. He’d held her together when she’d thought she might fall apart. Her legs still shook as she stood, and she didn’t have much fight left to argue over a stupid door. “Thank you,” she said, more attitude than gratitude. As soon as she was steady, she put a little space between them.
He closed that space and rested a hand against the small of her back.
“You’re like a helicopter,” she groused.
“How’s that?” he asked.
“You’re hovering over me,” she said with a heavy frown.
“It’s not hovering,” he assured her. “I’m escorting you.”
“Is that what you call it?” she asked. “Feels more like hovering.”
“My mother taught me that men tend to act like baboons, thinking they have to prove their strength and dominance to get the girls.” He retracted his arm and made a pounding motion against his chest. “You know, like this.”
