“Don’t you guys know I’m older than my years and my personal life’s in the shitter?” His comment had them all laughing. He snatched the phone on the second buzz and brought it to his ear.
“Ross Wynton.”
“Uh…Ross?” The feminine voice came off as breathy, but maybe it was the music drowning her out.
“Yes, who is this?”
“It’s Pippa.”
He froze. He only knew one woman named Pippa.
“Pippa Hamlin.”
His brain threw up a mental file of her containing her image and description. Pippa, daughter of his father’s best friend. Last he’d heard, she graduated Yale or some other Ivy League school with magna cum laude and a degree in molecular something or other. He hadn’t seen her since a big family barbecue when her family came from Seattle to visit his in Stone Pass, Montana. He couldn’t recall much about that last gathering besides her being in that colt-like stage of her teens where guys didn’t take notice.
That and she’d taken a fall off a horse, despite convincing him and his brothers that she could ride.
“Pippa?” He stood and wove his way through the club to the exit so he could hear her better. Passing several dancers who stopped to wink at him, he listened to the silence projecting into his ear on the other end of the line.
Once he burst outside into the cold, pine-scented Montana air, he said, “Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
Her voice still came out too soft.
“Is everything all right?”
A beat of silence followed. Then she said, “No. All wrong. I’m boarding flight 68 to Montana right now. I need you to pick me up at the airport.”
His protective senses kicked in. “Pippa, where are you? What’s going on?”
Another long pause and then her whisper sent shivers through him. “I’m being followed, Ross.”
* * * * *
Pippa gripped the armrests as the jet angled toward the runway. She hated landings. And taking off. She hated planes, and now she had a brand-new terror of airports.
Fleeing Detroit was the only option, though. At first, things came up missing in her office—her favorite pair of earrings that her momma gave her after she graduated from Yale. She shouldn’t have left them on her desk, but nobody went in the small, cramped space off the lab where she worked.
Next, a photo on her corkboard vanished. Since it was a photo of her with an old girlfriend on a camping trip, she started looking to the men in the lab. Maybe one was interested in her or the friend? Or perhaps the tack fell out and the cleaning personnel swept up the photo.
But then came the notes. Two in total, which wasn’t many, except they shot her through with black fear, and she was pretty sure the company frowned upon death threats.
When she spotted the slip of paper on top of her data printouts, she’d nearly passed out.
I got rid of others like you.
Breathing hard, she crumpled the paper in her fist, and heart pounding, looked at her surroundings, but nobody had been around her at the time.
Then the second threat hit this afternoon. This one couldn’t be mistaken for somebody wanting to foist her from her job overseeing a special gene project. I will kill you was pretty self-explanatory.
With her bowels watery and her heart racing, she’d quickly gathered her belongings from her office and left for the day. She even managed not to run out the doors and across the parking lot to her car, though in retrospect, she didn’t know how when she was so shaken.
The only thought burning through her brain was to find a person to help her. The police would ask a lot of questions she didn’t have answers to. They’d stir things up at the lab by interrogating her coworkers. In the end, one name popped into her mind.
Ross Wynton.
His name had been brought up at Thanksgiving dinner at her parents’ house in Seattle. He’d started some security company specializing in personal protection, and it’d taken off immediately.
She didn’t stop to think when she ran to her apartment to throw some clothes in a bag and purchase a flight before hastening to the airport. She hadn’t considered calling Ross first. But holding a calm phone call with the man to share her fears wasn’t possible—not when someone in her city, her lab wanted her dead.
After she was on her way and felt she could breathe a little easier, she was attacked.
When she heard something heavy like a trash can being shoved across the airport restroom floor, she didn’t question why. Her logical brain told her it was a janitor taking out the trash. But the minute she opened the stall door and faced a man, all logical thought flew out her ear, and her reflexes kicked in.
He yanked her out of the stall and locked an arm around her neck. She still felt her heels dragging across the tile floor. With her air cut off and stars blasting in front of her eyes like a fireworks display, her training kicked in. She hadn’t spent two years studying with top scientists in her field in Japan without learning a martial art.
Aikido came to her rescue, and with all her strength, she’d used her body as a lever to lift the man and flip him. When he slammed off the floor and lay still, she feared she might have killed him.
No such luck.
In a blink, he came at her a second time, this time with a handgun with a long barrel, and she’d seen enough action flicks to know it was a silencer.
She could turn and flee, but he’d only come after her. So she steeled herself for round two, and when he lay on the floor again, this time with his eyes rolled up in his head, she didn’t hesitate to run.
The long strap of her computer bag stuck out from under the stall door. She grabbed it and fled, leaving behind her carryon. Since she’d already gone through security, she was clear to board, and she jumped on that plane faster than she ever thought possible.
Which was how she ended up in Bozeman Airport with bumps, bruises and only her precious laptop with her personal research concerning the new gene project and a miasma of fear clouding her.
The jet taxied and came to a stop. Long minutes later she followed the rest of the passengers down the aisle, throwing covert glances around her for more attackers. She gripped her bag tight and pushed down the burning bile from everything that happened.
In the airport, she paused to throw a look around. She didn’t expect Ross to be standing there holding a WELCOME PIPPA sign, but seeing his face would be nice.
Releasing a shaky sigh, she followed the herd of people to the baggage claim. There was safety in numbers, right? Nobody would jump out and attack her with a chance of being caught.
Though she didn’t have any luggage, Ross could be waiting there for her, just as his family had waited for hers in the days when they visited.
The last time, she’d been fifteen. Seeing the huge, hunky Wynton boys hadn’t eased her gawkiness or shyness one bit, and she hadn’t set eyes on any of them since. She finished high school a year and a half early and went straight into college. While her family continued to see the Wyntons for fly-fishing trips, she hadn’t made it.
So she’d taken a huge chance on Ross being the good man his father was and coming to her rescue.
Being above average height for a woman, she didn’t have to crane her neck to see over the group. When she spotted a white cowboy hat, her lungs gave out and she couldn’t find any air to draw back in. Two people in front of her moved, giving her a clear view of Ross Wynton.