Page 102 of Love Undercover
Scrabbling toward the nearest wall, she curled in on herself as bullets screamed back and forth. She cowered against the brick,pressing herself so tightly, the rough texture bit into her exposed skin, scraping like nails on her flesh. She focused on the sting because it kept her from losing her fizzing mind.
The ricocheting sounds of bullets stopped abruptly. She breathed once, twice, then lifted her head from under her shaking hands to look around, finding Zimmerman’s guy sprawled on the asphalt several feet from her. His glassy eyes stared into nothingness, and a stream of blood dripped from the corner of his mouth.
Bodies crowded into her periphery, and she flinched away from reaching hands, zings of terror shooting through her.
“I’m FBI, ma’am,” a man said, his smooth, tan face swimming into her view. He was in full-on riot gear, black from head to toe.
But you’re not Chase, she wanted to say, but there was no strength left in her to say it. All she could do was try to look behind him for the one person she wanted to see.
“Are you hurt?” the man asked.
She blinked and met his eyes, his question shuffling through her head like a riddle in another language. Then her mind unraveled it, and she shook her head. The man slipped his hands under her arms to hoist her to her feet.
Now that she was standing, she tried to crane her neck to look through and over the bodies that crowded the space. There was shouting and frenzied activity, but only the kind that came after a high-stress situation, not during. And if they’d come for her, the immediate threats must have been taken care of. Her heart began to slow its hard rhythm, but she wouldn’t be able to rest until she saw Chase.
Above the din, she caught a couple of words: “Ambulance” and “gunshot wound.”
A knot formed in her stomach, and the adrenaline pumped again, shoring up her strength. “I can walk,” she finally said.
The man gave her a skeptical look, but he let her take more of her own weight, keeping a gloved hand wrapped around her arm just in case, even as she sped up.
People parted, tides moving in a flow of specific directions like ants around their hill, and she caught a glimpse of Chase’s disheveled golden hair. But he was on the ground, and the knot pulled tighter.
“Chase!” His name burst out of her, and she took off before the man holding her arm could react, crashing painfully to her knees in front of Chase.
There was blood, and his face contorted in pain. He was sitting up, though he held a hand against his side, crimson leaking between his fingers.
“Oh, crackers. What happened?” Panic stole the volume from her voice as her hands fluttered over him, fear of hurting him keeping her from touching his body.
“Shot,” he said through his teeth.
“Chase!” she cried, panic shooting through her renewed, and the shaking in her hands started again as she touched his face.
He grimaced. “Got any of that arnica handy?”
She scoffed, the mirthless laugh a little watery as the tears gathered in her eyes. “Not for open wounds, remember? How bad is it?”
“It’s a through-and-through.”
She jerked to look at Carl Kesterson, who’d come to stand over them, his hands on his hips.
“Looks like you got the identity thing cleared up,” he added.
Chase glared up at the older man. “Not that it would matter. Gibson was FBI, too,” he said through his teeth.
It was absurd that they were having this casual conversation when he was bleeding this much.
“Can’t this wait?” she snapped, narrowing her eyes on Kesterson.
He looked Chase up and down, then took in her expression. He gave a tight nod and moved away to speak with another man clad in black protective gear. He held a serious-looking weapon loosely in his hands, the muzzle pointing toward the ground between them. Kesterson, by comparison, looked like a middle school science teacher in his khaki pants and argyle-patterned polo shirt. But he was entirely at ease in the chaos of what was happening around them.
“Are you okay?”
She whipped around to take in Chase’s concerned expression. “Me? Are you serious?”
He just stared at her.
She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine.”
