The woman turned, and oh hell.
“Oh.” Camila’s deep brown eyes flared wide at the same time Roman took a step back in surprise. Funny, the move didn’t seem to endear him to her. “What are you doing here?”
“I bank here,” Roman said, because a) it was true, and b) he couldn’t get a more cohesive thought past the image of her perfect, peach-shaped ass still burning through his brain.
Camila pursed her lips, which didn’t help the state of affairs in his pants. “So do I.”
“I got that part,” Roman said. He’d been trying to lighten the mood, but her expression told him in no uncertain terms that he’d missed the mark.
“Hm.” She straightened her shoulders, her chin tilting upward in a way that shouldn’t be sexy, but really fucking was. “Well, I’ve got a lot of errands to run this morning, so…”
Some unexplained and very unexpected urge screamed at him to tell her to stop. Okay, so he couldn’t entirely blame her for the chilly treatment. He really had stiff-armed her advances after hours of flirting so intense, they might as well have been foreplay. But it wasn’t as if he’d taken her number and ghosted her, or—worse yet—slept with her, then ghosted her. She didn’t have to be so frosty.
Roman opened his mouth, fully prepared to tell her so. But he was interrupted by a gruff male voice, raised high enough for everyone in the lobby to hear.
“Nobody move! This is a robbery.”
4
Camila had redlined on adrenaline and it wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning. For a split second, her brain couldn’t make sense of anything in front of her. Not the gorgeous, broody FBI agent who’d squashed her ego like a bug last year. Not the startled cries of the other bank patrons, all of whom were wild-eyed and stunned into place like statues. Not the man standing in the main entryway of the bank, his face entirely covered by a black tactical mask but his voice still clear and loud as it pushed past the fabric barrier.
“Nobody move! This is a robbery.”
Just like that, running into Kai Roman wasn’t the worst part of her day.
The man was flanked by two others, all three of them decked out in black combat gear, and moving through the bank with near-military precision. Camila’s pulse ricocheted, pressing so hard and so fast at her throat that oxygen was suddenly at a premium. The leader stopped in the center of the lobby—oh, God, they were all carrying assault rifles, and shit, was that body armor?—raising his weapon high enough for everyone to get a good, terrifying look.
“Hands where we can see them. Nice and high. Now, lace them around the back of your heads, thank you,” the man said as both of his accomplices fanned out, lightning-fast, to gather the bank managers and customers who had been on the opposite side of the space. “The security cameras and silent alarms have been disabled,” the leader said to the two tellers behind the bullet-resistant barrier. “Your cell phones have been jammed and the rear exit has been blocked. You can try testing the limits of that glass, if you like.” He shrugged, glancing down at the high-powered weapon in his grasp. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Oh, God. This isn’t happening.”
Camila realized two things belatedly. One was that she’d actually spoken the words out loud, albeit in a panicked whisper, and two was that Roman had, at some point in the last five seconds, shifted to put his body in front of hers. He dropped his voice to a barely audible murmur that slid from the corner of his mouth.
“You’re going to be okay, Camila. Just breathe.”
His words penetrated the fear that had been keeping rational thoughts from forming. Camila forced herself to take a breath, although her throat was still knotted and the hands she’d laced behind her head had to be visibly trembling. It was enough, though. She’d worked in a middle school for three years now. Yeah, it might be her fifth—and probably not last—career path, but she’d done active shooter training in a dozen different scenarios. She was smart. Qualified. Prepared. She knew the key to survival was staying calm.
And she was going to survive.
Taking another breath, Camila tried to focus, to see what was in front of her like a drawing. The other two men, one hulking and the other smaller and lean, had forced everyone from the opposite side of the lobby into the space where she and Roman were standing, in front of the tellers’ counter. She counted five people—two bank employees, one middle-aged man, and a woman clutching the hand of a terrified-looking preteen. The sight of the young girl bolstered Camila’s resolve to stay calm so they could all get out of this situation unharmed, and she forced her hands to stop shaking so she could think. Roman remained perfectly quiet in front of her, but his muscles had tightened ever so slightly. Camila clocked his line of sight and realized he must have seen the crying preteen.
The girl was clearly terrified, her steps shaky and small, and the woman with her wasn’t faring much better as they stuttered into place on Roman’s other side. Camila heard his voice, too low for her to catch the words but not for her to miss the calm certainty in his tone, and the woman nodded almost imperceptibly.
The two robbers didn’t waste so much as a millisecond after bringing everyone to the counter, moving toward the security door to bring the pair of tellers to the lobby with everyone else—God, they were so fast—and before Camila could register another thing, the leader pointed his gun at the security guard, who looked even more dazed than the rest of them.
“We’re going to need that weapon.”
The guard, whose hands were already up and pressed against the back of his head, didn’t protest as the muscle-bound robber stripped him of the handgun on his hip. Slipping the weapon into the utility belt slung over his hips, the robber grabbed the guard by the back of his shirt, shoving him toward the cluster of patrons so roughly that the man stumbled and fell to his knees.
The leader’s head whipped toward his accomplice, but his only words were to the guard. “Stay there.”
Oh, God. Oh, God, the man was unarmed. Would they hurt him anyway? And what could she possibly do if they did?
Wait. Wait. Roman was an FBI agent. Maybe he had a weapon. Or, at least, a plan.
Camila’s eyes zeroed in on Roman’s torso, her heart thundering in her ears, but she didn’t see a holster or a service weapon beneath his suit jacket as he stood in front of her with his fingers laced behind his head. She’d been around her brother and everyone in the Intelligence Unit enough to know that most cops didn’t run their errands armed, so it made sense that Roman didn’t seem to be.
It was the only thing that made sense right now, and as weird as it was, Camila clung to the fact that Roman was beside her like a freaking lifeline. If staying calm was part of his plan, she had to make it part of hers.
She had to make it out of this alive.
Past the mouth covering on his tactical mask, the leader said, “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. We have several goals for the next few minutes. They don’t include hurting any of you unless you give us good reason to. Don’t do anything stupid, and you’ll all walk out of here.”
The tension in Roman’s shoulders relaxed at that, if only by a tiny fraction, and okay, that must be a good sign. Camila might not have any love lost for the guy, but he was a freaking FBI agent. He’d stared down buckets full of danger on the case he’d worked with the Intelligence Unit last year that had saved her best friend Delia’s life.