Angel, his bell sufficiently rung, lost hold of Grafton who leapt across the room. Charles got his hands on Gordy’s dropped Glock and aimed it at Angel’s head. Having shaken off Grafton’s blow, Angel upended the table they’d been standing beside and ducked behind it before… Boom! Boom! BOOM! Charles got off three shots. They all embedded themselves in the wood of the table.
Sonya was in a trance, standing there like an idiot until Angel grabbed her ankle—his hand was big enough to completely encircle it—and jerked her down onto the cold tile floor. She yelped, and the fall knocked her purse out of her arms. Panic grabbed hold of her before she found the leather satchel and hugged it to her chest. She didn’t protest when Angel reeled her in and covered her body with his own as another round slammed into the table. The lead splintered the wood and made Sonya screw her eyes closed.
When she opened them again, she saw Angel scrambling off her. “Fuck!” he hissed, folding himself into a low crouch. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Okay, so now she knew what he looked like when he displayed an emotion other than neutrality. And honestly? It was a little terrifying. His handsome face was pulled into a frown so fierce that instinct had her pushing up from the tile to crouch beside him. As far away from him as she could get and still be behind the table.
“Throw out your weapon!” Grafton’s voice sounded from somewhere on the other side of the room. It was slightly muffled, telling her he’d taken cover behind something.
“Go fuck yourself!” Angel yelled back. That seemed to be his favorite retort.
His gaze flew around the room until he finally found something of interest. Sonya glanced over her shoulder, following his line of sight down to the Perrier bottle. Miraculously, it had survived the fall from the upended table. Angel snagged it and held it by the neck in his free hand.
Now what was he planning to do with that?
“You might not care about your own sorry hide! But you care about Sonya’s! A man with your moral conviction wouldn’t want the death of an innocent on your hands!”
Angel shot her a quick look and popped his jaw. Despite the situation, her mind was thrust back a decade into the past to the second time she’d seen Mark pop his jaw. It was two days after they’d met, and he’d been arguing with the head of the Paris police department over a piece of Intel. After the kerfuffle was over, she’d asked him about the jaw popping.
“It’s a tell my ramsad says I need to work on,” he’d explained. “I unconsciously do it when I’m angry or…”
“Or what?” She’d blinked innocently.
“Never mind,” he’d said, but she’d soon learned he did it when he was angry or horny.
“She is not innocent!” Angel yelled at Grafton, yanking Sonya from the past back to the present. “She works for you!”
Okay, that stung.
“I’ll give you five seconds to toss your bloody weapon out from behind that bloody table before I have my man riddle it with bullets! It’ll be like those old commercials. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Only, in this case, it’ll be how many bullets will it take to bust through that table and get to our fine, fair Sonya?”
“I have two full clips in my pocket!” Charles called. Plenty of lead to make Grafton’s warning ring true.
Sonya gulped. Not that it helped. Her throat was a desert.
“Fuck.” This time Angel’s ragged voice barely raised the word above a whisper. He turned to her. “I have to get you out of here.”
She pursed her lips. “But I work for Grafton, remember?” Was her tone a little snippy?
“Forget that,” he whispered. “That was a bluff.”
She frowned. “You’re good at that.”
Pinning her with his bottomless eyes, his words were so quiet she barely heard them. “Do you trust me?”
Heaven help her. “Yes.”
“Grab on to my back belt loop.”
What-the-huh? Of course she didn’t voice her confusion aloud, simply did as she was told.
“When I say run, you stand up and run with me. Got it?”
She was back to the whole eyes-as-wide-as-fried-eggs thing. What was that strange roaring in her ears? Oh yeah. It was the blood rushing through her veins at light speed.
“Five!” Grafton called, beginning his countdown. “Four!”
Angel reared back and chucked the bottle of Perrier at one of the three front windows in a move that would’ve made a major leaguer proud. It smashed against the glass, creating a spiderweb of cracks in the solid pane.
