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“Is he regularly attacked?” Tasha demanded. “I’m not going anywhere. I know you think you can scare me off, but you can’t. My family runs a security business. I’m not afraid.”
Brian was trying to scare her off? His head was so fuzzy.
Attacked?
“Hey,” he called out.
Tasha rushed into the room. Even through the discomfort and fogginess, she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen. The minute she reached for his hand and knelt down beside him, the world seemed more focused. “Are you okay? Maybe you should lay back. We don’t know what that person used on you.”
“Of course I do.” Brian stood in the doorway, his arms crossed over his chest. “I certainly wouldn’t have left him lying there if I thought he’d been poisoned.”
“Poisoned?” The words didn’t make sense to him. And then he remembered arguing with Brian and the doors to the elevator coming open and… “There was a man waiting for us when the elevator opened.”
“Yes, there was.” Brian moved into the room, looking more serious than he’d seen him before. “He shot you and when I confronted him, he ran. He dropped his bag. That’s how I know the dart he shot into your chest was filled with ketamine. The darts were precisely dosed. I knew it wouldn’t hurt you.”
“Why would someone do that?” He put his free hand to his chest, feeling the soreness there. “Why didn’t he shoot you, too?”
“He wasn’t well prepared,” Brian said. “I believe he thought you would be coming up alone. The gun he was using to deliver the dart only had room for one at a time. I had to fight him. I’m sorry. He got away.”
“How?” Tasha asked. “How would he get away when this is a secure floor? There’s only one elevator, and it requires a key card to operate it. It should have closed and taken Dare down to the lobby. You should have been able to follow the attacker down the stairs.”
His head still hurt, but his girl was making sense. “Yeah, why didn’t I go down to the lobby? What did the cops say?”
Tasha’s head turned Brian’s way. “He didn’t call them.”
“I didn’t call them because getting them involved means getting Dare’s father involved, and I wasn’t sure he would want that,” Brian said quietly. “Not when we don’t know who this guy is and what he wants.”
“That’s exactly why we should call the police,” Tasha insisted.
Damn. Brian was right. Dare sighed and hoped he looked pathetic enough that Tasha didn’t get too mad at him. “I didn’t think about that. My father would surely be informed, and he could pull me out of Sydney and send someone else in.”
That would mean no more freedom. No more Tasha. The idea of losing this time with her… He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t get on a plane and leave her right now. It was stupid. He hadn’t known her for long, but he was willing to risk his life to get a couple of days with her. That probably said more about how crappy his existence was than he liked, but he couldn’t ignore the feeling. “I’m fine, baby. Brian is right. My father might overreact and bring me home. He doesn’t like it when things go wrong, and he tends to blame me whether I caused the problem or not.”
“I don’t understand any of this.” Tasha shifted, sitting on the bed beside him. “How can you be so calm? Someone tried to kill you.”
“I don’t think murder was his point.” Brian walked in and stood at the end of the bed, a weary expression on his face. “I think kidnapping might have been. Dare’s family is wealthy. It’s not unheard of for certain groups to kidnap businessmen in foreign countries.”
“In Australia?” Tasha seemed intent on challenging Brian. “I could buy that if we were in a country where those groups work. Australia is one of the safest countries on the planet, with a healthy CCTV system in public spaces.”
“And the world is changing,” Brian shot back. “Criminal groups are getting more bold. Why else would someone send Dare to nap world? They were either planning on kidnapping him and selling him back to his family or they were going to rob him. The watch on his wrist alone is worth twenty grand, and I don’t like to think about what someone with bad intentions could do with his laptop.”
“It’s password protected.” He wasn’t a fool.
“And it has a biometric get around. Your fingerprint can open it,” Brian pointed out. “It would have been easy to take your key card and your finger and walk right out of here with a whole lot of information about sensitive medical research, not to mention all of Nash’s financials.”
He thought Brian was being paranoid, but then he had recently been taken out with a freaking tranquilizer dart.
