Then the second man got an elbow free and drove it into Wes’s jaw, and the balance of things shifted in a way that snapped her out of it completely.
She couldn’t just stand here.
Wes had come through that door for her. Now she had to help him.
She frantically looked around the kitchen.
Then she saw it.
The first man’s jacket had ridden up when Remington hit him. The holster at his hip was unsnapped, the weapon partially visible. In the chaos of trying to get the dog off him, his hand had gone to Remington’s collar instead of the gun.
The weapon was right there.
Three feet away.
Rowan had never held a real gun in her life. She’d held props—rubber and resin and carefully weighted replicas that the armorers walked her through on set. She’d learned to look comfortable holding them, to keep her finger indexed along the frame, to point without aiming because the camera could always cheat the angle.
This wasn’t a prop.
She dove across the floor anyway.
Before she could think about what she was doing, she grabbed the man’s gun. It pulled free of the holster.
She pushed herself backward across the floor until her back hit the cabinet on the other side of the room.
She got her feet under her and stood.
The gun came up with her, both hands wrapped around it the way she’d been shown a dozen times by a dozen different armorers who’d never imagined she’d need to actually use one in real life.
Her arms shook. She couldn’t make them stop.
Across the room Wes still had the second man against the wall. But the man had gotten an arm free. The balance of the struggle shifted in a way that made her stomach drop.
Remington had the first man pinned but not neutralized. The guy kept fighting, kept driving at the dog with both arms in a way that was going to matter soon.
Lauren shrank into the corner near the refrigerator, her eyes moving from Rowan to the gun and back.
Rowan planted her feet.
Her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
But she didn’t care.
She’d stood on stages and sets and red carpets in front of thousands of people and never once lost her nerve.
She couldn’t lose it now either.
CHAPTER 49
The elbow caughtWes across the jaw hard enough to blur his vision for one white second.
He shook it off and drove forward, strapping his arm across Window Man’s chest before he could use the opening.
The man was strong—stronger than his build suggested—and he’d been trained to absorb punishment and keep working. That made him exactly the kind of opponent Wes least wanted to be wrestling in a small kitchen with no room to maneuver.
“No one move!” Rowan yelled.
Everything seemed to stop all at once.
