Classified Baby. Jessica Andersen

she reached out and grabbed his forearm, just as the crackling noise crescendoed—

      And the glass gave way beneath her.

      Nic screamed as she fell and then jerked to a suspended halt, dangling in Ethan’s grip, held only by their joined hands. Sobbing, terrified, she grabbed for him with her free hand as a roaring, crumbling noise built overhead, counterpointed by pinging metal.

      She looked up and shrieked, “Ethan! The cable!”

      Overhead, the elevator mechanism was coming apart.

      He twisted his head and shouted to the men leaning out of a window two floors up. “Pull us in, damn it!” His expression remained impassive, but his voice was sharp when he said, “You’re going to have to climb up through the hole in the elevator floor before it goes. Watch the broken glass.”

      The next two minutes were a blur as Nic scrambled, fighting for purchase as he pulled her up and out, helped by the uniformed rescue personnel two floors up, who were cursing and hauling on the rope as fast as they dared.

      Then she was out! She lunged through the open panel and launched herself against Ethan just as the elevator gave way with a horrendous crack and plummeted down, trailing broken cables. Momentum sent them spinning, and Nic hung on tightly as they swung away from the building. She felt Ethan’s strong body against hers, felt his heart drum fast through the fabric of his shirt. Then the arc reversed and they went flying back toward the building.

      “Hang on!” Ethan swung them so he’d bear the brunt, but an errant wind gust caught them and diverted the spin, changing their angle of impact.

      Nic hit first, and she hit hard. The blow drove the breath from her lungs. Her neck whiplashed and her head slammed into the side of the building.

      Starbursts flashed in her head, and then every sensation was abruptly sucked into a black void. Every sensation, that is, except the feel of the man who held her tight.

      Chapter Two

      Ethan’s muscles worked automatically, stabilizing them against the side of the building and cradling Nicole’s unconscious body as the rescue personnel hauled them up, but his brain was jammed full. One part of him cataloged her injuries—she’d taken a hell of a whack to the head—while another, deeper part of him processed her announcement.

      The last thing he’d expected—or wanted—to hear was that she was pregnant.

      Then again, he’d never actually figured he’d see her again. The morning after their night together, he’d filed the memory in the tiny Pleasant Interludes section of his brain and walked away. Maybe he’d thought of her once or twice in the months since. And maybe he’d stuck his head into Hitchin’s a couple of times since. But a baby? God, no. They’d been careful. He’d used a condom, damn it.

      But there was that whole ninety-nine-point-nine- percent-effective thing. Apparently, he’d stepped straight into that point-oh-one of oh, hell.

      “We’ve got her,” a male voice said, breaking into Ethan’s thoughts. He was startled to realize they’d reached the place where a bank of broken windows had allowed him to climb down to the elevator. The rescue personnel almost hadn’t let him go, but he was the one with the rock-climbing equipment and the skills, and there hadn’t been time to wait for the real search-and-rescue team.

      It was just dumb luck he’d had his gear in the office, dumb luck that’d he’d been able to save Nicole’s life.

      Suited firefighters leaned through, reaching to grab her unconscious form and ease her to relative safety indoors.

      “Careful,” Ethan said unnecessarily. “She’s—” Pregnant, he thought, but couldn’t say the word. “She banged her head pretty hard.”

      It’d happened so fast he hadn’t been able to protect her from slamming into the building. She was breathing fine, but she was still unconscious. What had it been, two minutes? Five? Too long.

      Jaw set, he climbed through, shucked off his harness and stowed his gear, then jogged to catch up with the group of paramedics who were carrying Nicole down the stairs, strapped to a backboard.

      As the small group emerged into the early-afternoon sunlight, one of the paramedics glanced up at the smoke that continued to pour from the ruined PPS offices. “Looks like the building will hold, thank the Lord.”

      There was a murmur of agreement from the others, but Ethan didn’t join in. Instead, he scanned the street, which was a scene of barely controlled chaos. Most of the evacuees and onlookers had been pushed back, away from the damaged office building, but dazed-looking people continued to stream from the stairwells. Nearby, several wickedly jagged cement chunks were embedded in a cracked section of sidewalk, surrounded by the glitter of reflective glass shards. Off to one side, a scattering of first aid supplies ringed a dark stain.

      The explosion had taken victims outside the building as well as in, Ethan thought, feeling the acid burn of anger in his gut.

      “Ethan!”

      He turned at the sound of Robert’s voice, and saw PPS’s founder loping across the deserted street toward him. The men gripped each other’s forearms in greeting, the first friendly contact Ethan could remember between them. “How’s Evangeline?” he asked.

      “She’ll need a few stitches, but is fine otherwise. She’s spitting mad. Wants to take a chunk out of the bomber.” The last was said with a touch of pride.

      “I’ll ditto that.” Half his attention on the paramedics, who were busy transferring Nicole to a gurney, Ethan gestured to the stained sidewalk. “Pedestrian?”

      Robert nodded, expression darkening. “Falling debris caught a mother and her two kids. Doesn’t look good for the little girl.”

      “Damn.” Ethan scowled. It had been bad enough when the mastermind had started killing off TCM’s investors one by one. It had been worse when they’d murdered a PPS computer tech and then slapped Evangeline’s name on the list, but at the very least those targets had been logical. Now they’d escalated way beyond that to injuring innocent bystanders… like the mother and her children. Like Nicole, who’d come to tell him he was a father.

      Ethan glanced over at her, seeing the beauty beneath the oxygen mask as the paramedics loaded her into the waiting ambulance.

      Her face had popped into his head more often than he cared to admit in the weeks since he’d met her.

      That night, a friend’s wedding—and the memories it’d brought—had chased him out of the reception and into a tourist-trap bar. He hadn’t noticed her at first, hadn’t had eyes for much other than the glass in front of him. He would’ve had to have been dead, though, to miss noticing when she leaned across him to snag a napkin, pressing against him just long enough to let him know she was looking to play.

      He’d been struck first by her dark curls, then by her eyes, which were a strangely intense shade of blue, bordering on violet. Rimmed by dark lashes, they’d looked moments away from laughter all the time, even when she’d been serious. During those serious moments, she’d caught her full lower lip between her teeth, an action that’d left him hard and wanting.

      Then later, once the small talk was done and they were alone in the hotel room they’d rented because neither of them had been sober enough to drive home, she’d caught her bottom lip in her teeth again at the moment of her climax, prompting him to capture that lower lip with his own mouth and nibble it into submission.

      Afterward, she’d looked at him with a hint of wonder in those violet eyes, a hint of shyness. All an act, he’d thought at first, designed to keep a bar conquest intrigued. But during the long hours of the night, small inconsistencies had added up in his carefully logical brain, leaving him wondering whether that night had been as out of character for her as it had been for him.

      He’d resigned himself to never knowing for sure. Now, it seemed he’d been given a second chance to find out.

      “Did