Coming in from the bright sunlight, it took Sloane’s eyes a moment to adjust to dimness as she shoved her sunglasses up onto her head. The air felt dank and close. In the mix of odors that assaulted her nose there was the stench of stale smoke, drowned char, of burned concrete and gasoline. Their footsteps echoed as though they were in a cave.
Nick stepped in behind her. The back of her neck prickled in sudden awareness. Then the room became shrouded in shadow as he closed the door. Sloane forced her attention to the space in front of her, away from the soft sound of his breath.
She blinked, then blinked again.
The scene in front of her was weirdly disorienting, like a surrealist painting or a scene from a psycho movie. There was much that was familiar, but the context bewildered. The space looked like an ordinary living room, if one discounted the fact that the walls and furniture were completely encrusted with soot. There were the familiar shapes of a couch and a coffee table, but instead of rugs, the center of the floor was piled high with gasoline-soaked wood. It was like something out of an arsonist’s daydream—or a firefighter’s nightmare.
“Well, the color scheme’s simple enough,” she said dryly. “Black on black.”
Nick stood motionless by the door, watching her as she moved about the room. “The training people like to simulate a real-life situation as much as possible,” he murmured. “The furniture’s heavy-gauge sheet steel. Watch yourself, by the way. This stuff is coated with soot an inch thick.”
The furniture was absolutely matte black, sucking up all the available light, baffling the eye. It looked both soft as velvet and absolutely solid. Sloane couldn’t resist touching it with her fingertip. She gave a surprised laugh when her finger sank in to the second knuckle, sending soot cascading down in small avalanches.
“I warned you,” Nick pointed out mildly.
“Empirical method.” Sloane tried unobtrusively to shake the soot off her fingers. “I have to experiment and observe. I’m a scientist, it’s part of my profession.” She caught the quick gleam of teeth as he smiled.
Nick pulled a rag from his back pocket and tossed it to her. “Good thing you wore a black sweater. You ought to do a study sometime of the migration and breeding patterns of soot. You’d be amazed at how much of your clothing that little bit will cover.”
Sloane gave a scrub or two to her hands and handed it back to him. “Maybe I’ll turn into one of those people who write fan letters to the detergent companies.”
“Maybe.” He frowned and stepped forward with the cloth. Before she knew what he was about, he’d touched it to her cheekbone.
Sloane jerked back.
“Hold still for a minute. You’ve got soot on your face. You don’t want to look like Tom Brady on game day, do you?”
She felt the touch of the fabric, the heat of his finger beneath. The heat of his body. He was too near, she thought, too solid, too hard to ignore. “Are you done yet?” She glanced up and locked eyes with him and the words caught in her throat. His gaze was intent, as if he were trying to see through her skin. His eyes looked hot and dark.
The silence stretched out. “Well, that’s all we can do here. Come on,” he said abruptly, moving to the far side of the room. “If you like interior design, there’s more to see.”
It was time to get out of this close, dark room. She didn’t want to react to his presence so strongly, Sloane thought as they started down the interior stairs.
She didn’t seem to be able to help it.
In the stairwell, sunlight spilled through an open door high above. Light and shadow, bright and dark. They climbed the stairs in sync, shoulder to shoulder in silence broken only by the hollow ring of footsteps echoing off the cinder block walls, the whisper of hands sliding on the railings, the almost imperceptible rhythm of breath.
“Is this the first time you’ve been in one of these?”
Sloane jumped at Nick’s voice. “Yes. I didn’t expect it to be like this.”
“Are things usually the way you expect?”
You’re not. “Often enough.”
They came to a landing and stepped through a door into another burn room. Light streamed in through the empty window cutout and Sloane breathed a sigh of relief. There would be no repeat of the shadowed intimacy of the room downstairs, no repeat of the closeness of the stairwell. It should have helped.
It didn’t, especially when she saw the furniture. “The master bedroom, of course.” Her voice sounded stilted and strange in her own ears. Her mouth was dry. Silly.
“Not much sleeping goes on in here.”
Sloane walked to the window to lean out of the open cutout, immensely conscious of every movement, every breath. “I didn’t realize we were so high up,” she murmured. “The tower doesn’t look that big from the ground.”
“It’s a lot higher when you’re hanging off it on a rope.”
“No thanks. I hate heights.” Sloane started to turn away from the window, then gasped and jerked backward, knocking into Nick. His hands caught her shoulders automatically; he released her a moment later.
But not before she absorbed the feel of his palms.
Deep in her belly something clenched like a fist.
Adrenaline, she told herself, that was all it was. Whether it was from Nick’s touch or the thing she’d seen, she couldn’t tell. Because she didn’t want to find out, she stared instead at the figure wedged between the bed and the wall. “What in God’s name is that?”
“That?” Nick grinned. “That’s Harvey.”
It lay flat on the concrete, dressed in turnouts and steel-toed boots, one arm stretched out plaintively toward her ankle. It was ridiculously thin and even in its reclining position was tall enough to have been instantly drafted by the NBA, had it only been alive. “Harvey?”
Nick seemed to relax. “Our search-and-rescue dummy. They stash him and his wife, Gladys, in here somewhere before they start the fires. When we send the crew in to search, they’d better come out with both of them. Harvey’s set up to weigh about as much as the average man. Feel.”
Nick reached past her to pick up the outstretched arm. He was near enough that she could catch the scent of male, near enough that she could see the play of muscle through his T-shirt as he bent over. She moved to step away but a stray piece of wood from the fire pile caught her heel and she stumbled backward, arms out to brace against the wall behind her.
And in a surge of terror felt only empty space.
There were moments of absolute clarity in life. One minute Nick was bending down over Harvey, glad of something to do, the next, Sloane’s cry was ringing in his ears. There was no pause for thought, no time for horror. Operating only on reflex, he surged up toward the window cutout even as Sloane’s feet left the floor. Pulling her back in to safety took a flicker of a second. For an instant there was only adrenaline. Then he swept her to him, holding her tightly.
“There was nothing there.” Sloane’s voice wavered. “I just backed up and there was nothing there.”
Four stories. Four stories down. His mind repeated it like a litany of horror. And at the bottom, solid concrete. “It’s all right,” Nick whispered, as much to himself as her. “I caught you. You’re safe now. You’re safe.”
He’d saved lives before. The amazement and rush were familiar, but no close call had ever shaken him this much. All the fragrant luxuries of her, the precious individuality, so fragile and so very nearly snuffed out. She was alive now, though, wondrously, completely