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Quinlan crossed rapidly to the guard’s desk, which was unoccupied. Elizabeth frowned. The guard was always there—or rather, he had always been there before, because he certainly wasn’t now.
When he reached the desk, Quinlan immediately began trying to open the drawers. They were all locked. He straightened and yelled, “Hello?” His deep voice echoed in the eerily silent lobby.
Elizabeth groaned as she realized what had happened. “The guard must have gone home early, too.”
“He’s supposed to stay until everyone is out.”
“He was a substitute. When he called the office, Chickie told him that I would leave before four. If there were other stragglers, he must have assumed that I was among them. What about you?”
“Me?” Quinlan shrugged, his eyes hooded. “Same thing.”
She didn’t quite believe him, but she didn’t pursue it. Instead she walked over to the inner set of doors that led to the outside and tugged at them. They didn’t budge. Well, great. They were locked in. “There has to be some way out of here,” she muttered.
“There isn’t,” he said flatly.
She stopped and stared at him. “What do you mean, ‘there isn’t’?”
“I mean the building is sealed. Security. Keeps looters out during a power outage. The glass is reinforced, shatterproof. Even if we called the guard service and they sent someone over, they couldn’t unlock the doors until the electricity was restored. It’s like the vault mechanisms in banks.”
“Well, you’re the security expert. Get us out. Override the system somehow.”
“Can’t be done.”
“Of course it can. Or are you admitting there’s something you can’t do?”
He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled benignly. “I mean that I designed the security system in this building, and it can’t be breached. At least, not until the power comes back on. Until then, I can’t get into the system. No one can.”
Elizabeth caught her breath on a surge of fury, more at his attitude than the circumstances. He just looked so damn smug.
“So we call 911,” she said.
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why? We’re stuck in this building!”
“Is either of us ill? Hurt? Are we in any danger? This isn’t an emergency, it’s an inconvenience, and believe me, they have their hands full with real emergencies right now. And they can’t get into the building, either. The only possible way out is to climb to the roof and be lifted off by helicopter, but that’s an awful lot of expense and trouble for someone who isn’t in any danger. We have food and water in the building. The sensible thing is to stay right here.”
Put that way, she grudgingly accepted that she had no choice. “I know,” she said with a sigh. “It’s just that I feel so…trapped.” In more ways than one.
“It’ll be fun. We’ll get to raid the snack machines—”
“They operate on electricity, too.”
“I didn’t say we’d use money,” he replied, and winked at her. “Under the circumstances, no one will mind.”
She would mind. She dreaded every minute of this, and it could last for hours. The last thing she wanted to do was spend any time alone with Quinlan, but it looked as if she had no choice. If only she could relax in his company, she wouldn’t mind, but that was beyond her ability. She felt acutely uncomfortable with him, her tension compounded of several different things: uppermost was anger that he had dared to pry into her life the way he had; a fair amount of guilt, for she knew she owed him at least an explanation, and the truth was still both painful and embarrassing; a sort of wistfulness, because she had enjoyed so much about him; and desire—God, yes, a frustrated desire that had been feeding for months on the memory of that one night they had spent together.
“We don’t have to worry about the air,” he said, looking around at the two-story lobby. “It’ll get considerably warmer in here, but the insulation and thermal-glazed windows will keep it from getting critically hot. We’ll be okay.”
She forced herself to stop fretting and think sensibly. There was no way out of this situation, so she might as well make the best of it, and that meant staying as comfortable as they could. In this case, comfortable meant cool. She began looking around; as he’d said, they had food and water, though they would have to scrounge for it, and there was enough furniture here in the lobby to furnish several living rooms, so they had plenty of cushions to fashion beds. Her mind skittered away from that last thought. Her gaze fell on the stairway doors, and the old saying “hot air rises” came to mind. “If we open the bottom stairway doors, that’ll create a chimney effect to carry the heat upward,” she said.
“Good idea. I’m going to go back up to my office to get a flashlight and raid the snack machine. Is there anything you want from your office while I’m up there?”
Mentally she ransacked her office, coming up with several items that might prove handy. “Quite a bit, actually. I’ll go with you.”
“No point in both of us climbing the stairs in the dark,” he said casually. “Just tell me what you want.”
That was just like him, she thought irritably, wanting to do everything himself and not involve her. “It makes more sense if we both go. You can pilfer your office for survival stuff, and I’ll pilfer mine. I think I have a flashlight, too, but I’m not certain where it is.”
