“Mother of God and all the saints…” The sickened prayer came automatically, but Quinn wasn’t relying on divine intervention. Already he had smashed open the door of the last stall, was clambering up onto the back of the toilet tank and hoisting himself to a precarious balance on the metal partition. The open ceiling was crisscrossed with pipes, and he grabbed one to steady himself, even as he wrapped his other arm around Jane’s limply dangling body. He lifted her up to ease the pressure on her neck, and her head lolled over onto one shoulder.
The lights—why hadn’t they gotten the damned lights working yet? Her dress had come undone, most of the buttons that had marched primly down the front probably somewhere below on the floor, and he could feel bare flesh against the forearm he had around her chest.
He had to get her down, lights or no lights. Whatever was around her throat was no longer cutting off her air supply, but if she still had a heartbeat, he couldn’t feel it. One-handed, he couldn’t fumble with a knot in the dark and keep her supported at the same time, which meant he wasn’t going to be able to get her down the logical way.
The building wasn’t new. The plumbing, in the washrooms at least, would be either zinc or lead, and neither of those metals was known for its strength. Judging from the trickle of cold water that was dripping onto him, there was a leaky joint only inches away from her noose. If he let go of his pipe, and grabbed hers as he jumped from the top of the washroom stall, the weight of one oversize Irishman would be more than enough to break the join and send them both, pipe and all, crashing to the floor.
All he had to do was hope the break was clean, and close enough to the knot that she slid straight off. Anything else didn’t bear thinking about.
He had a whole cartload of Belgian nuns praying for him, apparently. Surely that should buy him some grace.
Quinn let go of the pipe that had kept him balanced. He grabbed intuitively for the one that was Jane’s make-shift gallows and again jumped into darkness, his grip around her as tight as fear and muscle could make it.
As his hand found the second pipe, he gave it a massive downward tug, and for a moment he had the terrible conviction that the damn thing was built more solidly than he’d guessed. Then he heard a sharp cracking noise, and all of a sudden it was as if he and the woman he was holding had pitched off the top of a cliff and were riding a waterfall.
It wasn’t much of a drop, and he hit the floor immediately, breaking her fall with his body. The water was cascading from the broken pipe above them, and at any other time he would have taken a moment to drag her away from the icy flow. But he didn’t have moments, Quinn thought grimly. If her heart had stopped beating, he was going to have to get it started again.
He straddled her, pulling the two halves of her dress open and hearing it rip farther down than he’d intended. Impatiently he shoved aside the sodden scrap of cotton bra that was in the way, and bent down to her, listening for the sound he wanted more than any other to hear right now. There was no heartbeat. His own seemed to stop.
So this was how Sister Bertille had felt, all those years ago, he thought coldly, placing the heels of his palms flat on Jane’s chest. It was personal—him against the blackness that already had wrapped around her like a shroud. “I want her to live,” he muttered, pressing abruptly and forcefully down on the fragile bones beneath his hands. “We’ll see who wins.”
The cold water continued to stream down onto his back, turning his T-shirt into a second skin, but he was shielding the brunt of it from the woman beneath him. As seconds turned into minutes, and still he felt no answering echo under his palms, he began to think of her heart as an entity all to itself. As he continued in his desperate attempts to get it started again, he began to address it—not Jane, but her heart.
He was going a little crazy, he knew. He didn’t care.
“She doesn’t remember, but you do,” he grunted. “You must. There would have been a first kiss—remember how you sped up, how you felt as if you were going to melt? There had to have been times when she was a girl, catching the eye of a boy, and looking away. You beat faster then, didn’t you? And tonight when I held her and stroked her skin, and felt that velvety softness beneath my fingertips—don’t tell me you weren’t putting in a little overtime then, because I knew damned well you were. I could feel you, for God’s sake. No matter what she said, you were responding to me, weren’t you? Respond now, dammit!”
Two things happened at once.
Suddenly the lights went on. And as if the surge of power that had run through the electrical system had transferred itself to her, at that instant Jane’s eyes flew open. They were glazed and unfocused, but they were open—and her heart was beating, Quinn realized, all by itself.
Around her neck was a bright yellow nylon rope, like some obscene necklace, and her hands went up to it reflexively. She still hadn’t spoken, and neither had he, but for the minute there was no need to. Sliding his hands gently from her exposed breasts, Quinn pulled the two halves of her ruined wet dress together, his eyes on hers.
“I had to. You understand?” he asked softly. She’d shown panic earlier when his touch had been much less intrusive. He was suddenly worried that after all she’d been through, finding him over her like this would shock her into hysteria.
“Take it—” Her voice was a painful croak. Her eyes held a plea. “Take it off my neck, Quinn. Get it off me.”
The note of hysteria he’d worried about was there, but understandably so. Lifting her cautiously to a sitting position, he pushed aside the swath of sodden chestnut hair that obscured the back of her neck. His mouth was tight with anger as he saw the slipknot that had been fashioned in the yellow nylon. He drew the loose end of the rope through, flinging it as far across the room as he could. To cover his outrage he hoisted her a foot or so to one side, out from under the direct flow from the pipe above.
“Why are we wet? Where did all this water come from?”
She could barely speak, but he knew she needed to. She was distracting herself with non-essentials, trying to keep the horror that she’d just lived through at bay, if only for a few more seconds.
“I broke a pipe to get you down, but that’s not important right now. Do you want the police involved?” He brought his hand to her chin, tipping it up so that her gaze locked on his.
“The police?” She shook her head, violently enough so that wet strands of her hair clung to her cheekbones. “No. I told you before, I—I don’t want them asking questions. I just want to get out of here.”
“I know you do. But what’s happened tonight would make them take you seriously now. If you caught a glimpse of your attacker they could have a sketch-artist—”
“I didn’t see him. All I saw was that—” Her glance darted toward the scrawled message on the mirror and quickly away again. “Then the lights went out and he—and he—”
“Don’t try to talk about it now.” He shot a worried look over his shoulder. “Look, any minute now someone’s going to come through that door. We’d better get moving.”
For the first time she looked down at herself. He was no longer straddling her, but his arm was still around her back, supporting her. He sensed the instant that she finally took in her revealing state and the fact that she was pressed up against a wet male body. Without conscious volition, he glanced down too.
Although he’d tried to cover her up a few minutes ago, the ruined dress no longer could conceal the body beneath it—a body that was all graceful contours and surprisingly ripe curves. Creamy-pale breasts were tipped with a soft wash of pink, that even as he watched deepened to a rose blush. He’d thought of wild strawberries earlier. He was thinking of them now.
And it was a damn good thing he knew how to perform CPR, because he was pretty sure his own heart had just stopped.
“Please—please don’t look at me!”