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FOSTER
If he touched one hair on Adrianne’s head, I would kill him. It was the only thing that I could think when Steven pulled out the gun. He was lucky that he hadn’t pointed it at her. He would already be on the ground if he had. I was positioned at a table some ten feet away, looking directly at them. Ethan and Callan were in different spots, but further away. It would be up to me to get there first if things went badly.
“Steven,” I could hear Adrianne as she pleaded. “Put that away, and we can talk, but I can’t go anywhere with you.”
“It’s too late for talk,” the man insisted. “It’s already been ruined.” He pointed a meaty, menacing finger in her face. “You’re a fucking whore, and you’re going to get up and come with me right now.”
Like hell was he taking her anywhere, I thought, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the gun. “Can we move in?” I said into the tiny microphone looped around my ear.
“Not yet. The police are on their way. It would be better for us if they take him in,” Ethan said gruffly. “But if he points that thing at her or tries to grab her-”
“He’ll be dead before he hits the ground,” Callan growled. “Agreed,” Ethan and I said at the same time.
We knew that whoever was stalking Adrianne was a loner, that he might be socially awkward or snapped out of reality in some way. He seemed to have concocted some kind of story in his own mind about who Adrianne even was, and his relationship to her. In his mind, she really was Dr. Falconi, but whatever his delusion was, it didn’t matter. We weren’t going to lose her.
“We need a plan, Merc,” Callan said in my ear. “Foster’s closest.”
I agreed wholeheartedly. “He doesn’t know we’re here . . . his focus is entirely on Adrianne. If she can distract him long enough, we can rush him.”
“I’ll quit the movie,” Adrianne said, more loudly now and a touch more hysterical. She was losing it, and I couldn’t blame her. There was no way to mentally prepare for something like this, and I knew later that my heart would hurt that she had to experience it at all. But for now, I just wanted to keep her alive. That was priority number one. “I’ll do what you want, but I cannot go with you.”
Steven shook his head, aggressive and angry, but that gun was still pointing at the ground. “You look like her,” he said. “You have to be her for me. I’ll make you be her.”
“You wanted me to quit,” she said, reminding him of the words he’d sent in that letter. “I’ll do that-”
“Get up,” he said again. “That’s what you need to do. Get up, and I’ll let you apologize to me personally for what you’ve done.”
“Merc, I don’t like this. He’s going to grab her,” Callan said. “We need to move. The police are coming too slowly.”
I agreed. “In a restaurant this size, he could take out at least six people with that gun in his hand,” I said. “Let’s not get to that point.”
“Okay,” Ethan said and swore. “Fuck it. Okay, we move in on my signal.”
I reached under the table and drew my Kahr from its holster, keeping it down by my side so that it was out of sight. I stood as quietly from my seat as I was able and started a roundabout approach that kept me out of his line of sight.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Callan start forward as well. His Glock was in his hands, and he wasn’t trying to hide it. He brought the gun up and trained it on Steven, ready and waiting for the signal to fire. Although I couldn’t see Ethan, I knew that he was doing the same, getting into position for a take-down.
Steven was red-faced now, waving his non-gun hand back and forth as he ranted. “Dr. Falconi is a sacred woman,” he raged. “She doles out justice and kindness to the world, and she would never spread her legs like a common streetwalker. She loved Dr. Rutledge. She vowed to never love again when she lost him . . . but she could have loved me. She would have
loved me.” He snarled at her. “But you trampled all over that love. You spat on it!”
“Go, go, go,” Ethan said, and we moved into a strike position. There were shrieks from the other customers. They hit the deck and covered their heads with their arms. Steven realized that we were coming for him and screamed, wordless and angry, and he raised the gun and pointed it in Adrianne’s face.
“No!” Callan bellowed, and as Ethan and I threw ourselves on Adrianne, Callan threw his whole body into Steven. Although Steven was bigger, Callan had solid muscle and skill. He led with his shoulder and rammed it into Steven’s abdomen, knocking the air out of his lungs.
There was the sound of a gunshot as they tumbled backward, and Adrianne shrieked from beneath me. She pushed at me, tried to get me to move, but I shook my head. “Until we get the all-clear, you’re not going anywhere.”
My tone was harsh, but she stopped fighting me. “Tell me he’s all right,” she said, and her voice was thick with tears. “Tell me he’s alive.”
Now that she was out of the line of fire, Ethan climbed to his feet. His gun was still out and pointed. “Cal?”
“Get him off me!” Callan demanded, and I heard Adrianne suck in a shuddery breath.
Ethan toed Steven, who didn’t react, and then he reached out a hand and pulled Callan to his feet. “He hit his head hard when he went down,” Callan said. “He’ll have a headache when he wakes up.” He put a foot on the gun that Steven had let go of and kicked it over to Ethan, who picked it up and emptied it completely.
Now that the gun was gone, I got up, cautiously, and reached down to help Adrianne to stand. “Are you okay?” I asked. Although in shock, she nodded.
“Is it over?” she asked numbly.
The sounds of sirens pierced through the din, and I nearly laughed. Too little, too late, I thought. Except for the clean-up and cart-off. “It’s over,” Ethan assured her.
Callan coughed and clutched at his abdomen. I saw red spreading across his shirt. “Cal?” I asked.
He winced. “He clipped me,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”
“You were shot?” Adrianne panicked and grabbed at him, pulling the shirt up so that she could see. There was a gash and burn, like the gun had gone off between them. Like he’d said, it was only a flesh wound. It didn’t look like the bullet had done more than graze him. But tears rained down her cheeks.
“Callan.” She grabbed at some napkins on the nearest table and began pressing them into the wound to staunch the bleeding.
He put a hand over hers. “I’m fine, Princess,” he said. “It hurts, but I’m fine.”
She glared at him. “Bleeding is not fine.”
Callan conceded on that point. “Bleeding isn’t fine,” he said, humoring her. “But I’m going to be fine. I probably just need a few stitches and some antibiotics.”
There was a long groan, and Adrianne and I remembered Ryan at the same time. We rushed to check on him. He had a gash on his forehead from where he’d been struck by the gun. “Ryan?” Adrianne called to him. “Ryan, can you hear me?”
He moaned again. “Stop screaming at me,” he muttered, and his eyes cracked open. Then, they opened the rest of the way. “Was I brave? Were you impressed?”
If he was joking, he wasn’t going to die . . . but a hospital check-up was in his future to make sure his head was okay and to close up the still- bleeding wound. When he tried to sit up, Adrianne pressed him back to the floor.
“Don’t get up!” He winced at her sharp tone, and she softened her voice a little. “You were very brave. I was very impressed,” she said. “Never be that brave again.”
“Count on it,” he said, and his voice was beginning to slur. “I’m sleepy.”
Adrianne turned to us with wide, panicked eyes. “He’s got a nasty concussion,” I said, looking at Ethan. “He needs a hospital, and Cal needs stitches.”
The sirens were getting louder now. Within a few moments, the place was flooded with cops and paramedics. The police led people out-and put Ethan and me in handcuffs, for now, which wasn’t wholly unexpected, but Adrianne freaked out-and the paramedics loaded up Callan, Steven, and Ryan into different rigs.
“Don’t arrest them,” Adrianne pleaded. “They were protecting me.” There was an echo from the few people they hadn’t managed to lead outside.
The lead investigator pulled out a notepad. “Why don’t you give me your statement, Ms.-”
“Montoya,” she said. “Adrianne Montoya.”
He wrote the name and then looked up, and I could see “starstruck” all over his face. “You’re going to be in the new Falconi movie, right?”
She tried not to wince and failed. “Yes,” she said.
“My kids are such big fans,” he said in a voice that made me think that his kids could care less, but he was the biggest fan ever. “Could I have you sign a napkin or something for me? They’re not going to believe who I met.”
Surreal didn’t begin to cover it. I was never going to get used to working with the Hollywood elite . . . or being in love with one of them. Their world was a lot different from the one the rest of us lived in. “Sure,” she said. “I can do that, I guess.” He handed her a few napkins, and she scrawled her name and a greeting across them.
“Thank you!” he said, tucking the napkins into his vest pocket. He seemed to remember himself and looked around. “Now, what happened here?”
Adrianne told them about her stalker and the creepy gifts that drove her to hiring us as her security team. She told them about the phone calls and the brick that was thrown through her window. She told them about the letter and picture. “What was the picture of?” the investigator asked.
“Me sharing a private moment with someone I care about,” she said, keeping it purposefully vague. Good girl, I thought. “He wanted me to quit the movie because I’d ‘debased’ myself and made a mockery of the character. He saw me here having coffee with a friend. He pulled out a gun, and my security team did what I paid them to do, protect me.” She gestured to where Ethan and I were handcuffed. “Can you please release them?”
The investigator sheepishly ordered us released, and he nearly swooned when Adrianne smiled at him. “Everything sounds in order,” he said. “I will need to get a few statements from your team, but you can bring them down to the station after you collect your friend from the hospital.”
He meant Ryan, but we all were thinking about Callan. “Thank you so much,” Adrianne said.
We were released, and she checked our wrists herself to see if the cuffs had been placed on too tightly. “We’re fine,” Ethan told her. “Let’s go check on Callan, yeah?”
She nodded, and we left the cafe behind us. Luckily, Ethan was able to call the car, and the ride to the hospital was relatively short. When we came through the emergency department’s entrance, we could hear Callan hollering all the way from the waiting room. “I’m fine. Just give me some damn stitches and call it a day!”
We followed the sounds of his major bitching to a small room just off the nurses’ station. Callan was lying on the bed, shirt off, and a nurse was attempting to close his wound with glue. “Glue takes forever to heal, and I don’t want it,” Callan said snarkily. “Just sew me up. Please.”
“Glue will be less scarring,” she said, and Callan laughed.
“Seriously?” He gestured to all of the other scars that littered his torso. “Why would you think a scar would bother me?”
Her eyes mapped his abdomen, and I heard Adrianne take in a short, agitated breath from beside me. “Jealous, Princess?” I murmured in her ear.
She tossed her hair. “Obviously not,” she sniffed.
“Good,” I said. “Because we don’t have eyes for anyone but you.
Haven’t from the second you came into our lives.”
She looked up at me with soft eyes, and although it wasn’t the time for it, I really wanted to kiss her. From the expression on her face, she agreed with me.
The nurse finally broke and went to get a suture tray, muttering all the while to herself about ‘what a waste’ stitches would be. Once we were alone, Adrianne quickly crossed the room and kissed Callan hard on the mouth.
“You’re not allowed to bleed in front of me ever again,” she told him and then looked around at us. “None of you are, got that?”
We couldn’t promise that, and she knew it, but we all nodded along and promised to do our best not to. “We have to go to the police station when you’re done here,” she said. “You have to give a statement.”
Callan sighed. “Of course.” He looked at Ethan. “Are we going to be spending time in jail?”
Ethan shook his head. “I think the investigator saw that it was self- defense and that we protected the people in that cafe, and-”
“And he’s totally a fanboy of Adrianne’s,” I added. “He’d do just about anything to make her happy.”
Adrianne blushed, but she looked mighty pleased with herself. “He’s not wrong,” she said. “I autographed napkins for him.”
The nurse came bustling back into the room with the suture tray. “There’s too many people in here,” she barked, annoyed. “You can keep someone to hold your hand, but the rest have to go.”
Adrianne looked conflicted. “I want to stay,” she said, “but I need to check on Ryan.”
“You go,” I said, shooing her and Ethan out of the room. “You go check on your friend. Once Callan’s patched up, we’ll go deal with the police.”
She smiled at me. “Thank you.”
Once they left, I lowered myself into a chair beside Callan’s bed. “You know she’s not going to numb you, right?” I asked, pitching my voice low.
“I’m aware,” Callan said.
“You need to hold my hand?” I asked teasingly.
“Shut up,” he growled. The nurse brought the tray over, and he tried giving her his best, most charming smile, but she wasn’t having it.
She cleaned the wound and then began stitching the torn flesh back together. Callan gritted his teeth and took the pain that came with it, but he did grab my arm once or twice when she hit a snag.
It took over an hour, but she made as clean a line as she could, still hoping to save him some scarring. She put an antibiotic ointment on the wound and applied a sterile gauze. She handed the rest of the ointment to Callan, as well as a prescription for pain medication. “Something tells me that I don’t need to tell you to change this dressing at least every other day?”
Callan shook his head. “I’ve got it handled, thanks,” he said.
She dipped her head in acknowledgement and declared him done. “There’s paperwork about wound care that I’m supposed to give you,” she said. “Are you just going to throw it away? Because I’d rather not waste it.” “I’ll take it,” I said, and she plucked it off the side counter and handed it
to me. “I’ll make sure he takes good care of himself.”
She huffed and told us that we could leave before she stomped from the room. I helped Callan off the bed. “You really pissed her off,” I said.
He shrugged. “Can’t help it when someone’s attracted to me, you know?”
“Come on, Don Juan, let’s go find our girl.”
Luckily, Ethan and Adrianne were coming out of a room just down the hall at the same time we were. “Are you okay?” she asked, eyes landing on Callan.
“Sore, but I’ll survive,” he said. “How’s Ryan?”
“They’re keeping him overnight,” Ethan said. “He had a little bleeding in his brain that shouldn’t need surgery, but they want to keep an eye on him.”
Shit, I thought. “Do we know if Steven is here?”
Adrianne shuddered. “We didn’t ask,” she said. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
That was fair. The guy obviously had some kind of problem, but it didn’t mean that Adrianne had to forgive him the torment that he’d rained down on her for months. “I’m sure the police are holding him somewhere.”
She nodded, taking the words as the comfort I meant for them to be. “You all need to go make your statements,” she said. “I’d like to get that done sooner rather than later, please.”
We agreed and made our way back out of the hospital. The town car was waiting. “One more stop before we head back to the hotel,” Ethan said to the driver. “The police station.” The driver nodded, completely unaffected by the directive, and pulled out of the parking lot as casually as if we’d asked if he could take us to McDonald’s. I thought we were pretty cool customers when it came to clients, but this guy was next-level.
The investigator who took Adrianne’s statement at the cafe took ours as well, and while he wasn’t nearly as nice to us as he was to her, we didn’t end up back in handcuffs. “Thank you again, sir,” Adrianne said as they let us go.
He all but blushed. “If you need anything at all, Ms. Montoya, extra security or anything, please call me.” He gave her his card.
Once we were all out in the sunshine, Ethan plucked the card from her fingers. “Do you think we’ll need this?” he asked her.
Adrianne shook her head. “But don’t throw it away here,” she said. “That would be rude.” She slid her arm through mine. “Take me back to the hotel.”