Knowing Reed and Kyle would be straining to listen, she told Damien everything. The conversation she’d overheard between Chuck and an unknown man, Bennett and Perrelli’s attack on Reed, her own capture and subsequent escape.
By the end of her explanation, Damien was looking at her as though she were demented. “Gunrunning?” he said. “Jim? And Chuck? Celia—”
“You don’t believe me.”
He threw up his hands. “How can you expect me to believe this? Sweetheart, it’s very late. Are you sure you weren’t dreaming?”
“No, I wasn’t dreaming. Jim Bennett grabbed me and threw me in a storage room! Look at my hands.” She held her hands out for his inspection. Her filthy palms were deeply scraped, and smeared with blood—her own and Reed’s. She’d been trying to ignore the painful stinging. She knew her knees were bruised and scraped, as well, from her contact with the concrete storage room floor.
Damien caught his breath. He took her wrists gently in his hands, examining the painful-looking wounds. “We have to clean these,” he said. “They look terrible. How did you hurt them?”
Celia exhaled gustily. “You aren’t listening. Jim Bennett threw me in a storage room—a storage room full of guns. I hurt my hands when I landed on the concrete floor. Now Bennett and Perrelli are locked in there, and Chuck’s probably tied up somewhere, but there may be others roaming around that we don’t know about. Mark—or Evan—even Enrique, any of them could be involved.”
“Celia, you have to understand how incredible this all sounds. These are my friends you’re talking about, my employees. You really expect me to believe they’ve been involved in something like this without my knowledge?”
“I know how it sounds. But it’s the truth,” Celia said quietly, laying a battered hand on his arm. She looked up into his eyes without smiling, willing him to believe her. “It’s the truth,” she repeated.
He started to shake his head, studied her expression, then seemed to slump. “You really mean this, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Damien. I know it hurts you.”
He sighed and covered her hand with his own. “What do you want me to do?”
Celia was just about to suggest that they call Reed in when she heard a noise behind them. She and Damien turned at the same time.
Mark Chenault was standing in the doorway to Damien’s living room. And he was holding a gun.
“Mark?” Damien looked stunned. “What are you doing?”
“I’ve gotten myself in a bind, boss,” Mark replied, sounding oddly breezy and matter-of-fact, considering the circumstances. “I find myself in need of your assistance.”
“Since when do you ask for my help at gunpoint? What the hell is going on here, Mark?”
Chenault motioned with the gun toward Celia. “You can blame your two-timing little girlfriend, here. And her new boyfriend. You really shouldn’t have invited her here this week, Damien. I tried to tell you it wasn’t a good time.”
“You said you thought we were too busy to be entertaining,” Damien snapped. “You didn’t say anything about selling guns.”
Chenault flicked Celia a cool glance. “So she’s been talking to you. And you believe her?”
Damien looked from Mark’s face to the dark, deadly weapon in his hand. “Looks like I’m going to have to believe her.”
Aware that Reed and Kyle were outside, Celia tried to stay calm. Reed would do something, she told herself, no longer in doubt that he would know how to handle this. She remembered the ease with which he had overtaken Bennett and Perrelli. Whatever it was he did for a living, he was no mild-mannered tax accountant.
“What is it you want, Mark?” Damien asked, and there was so much pain in his voice that Celia automatically laid a sympathetic hand on his arm. She knew this must be hurting him. Damien placed a very high value on loyalty and friendship.
“I want your helicopter here in less than half an hour. I want your plane and your pilot on standby to take me to Central America. And I want enough cash to support me in style once I get there. You can arrange all that for me, Damien.” Mark flashed a smile that made Celia shiver. “It’s so nice to have money and power available for one’s every whim, isn’t it?”
He looked at Celia then. “You really were very stupid to choose a bumbling cop over our wealthy friend here, Celia. Damien would have given you anything you wanted, for as long as his interest in you lasted—which, I’m afraid, wouldn’t have been long. What’s your cop friend got to offer, hmm? A federal employee’s salary? Doesn’t run to Mercedes and luxury vacations, I’m afraid—especially if he’s one of that rare breed known as an honest cop.”
“He is,” Celia said. She didn’t even know for certain that Reed was a cop—or a federal agent, or any of the other possibilities that had crossed her mind during the past half hour—but if he was, she was sure he was an honest one. “I don’t care how much money he has.”
“Then you’re an idiot,” Chenault said contemptuously. “Money is the only thing that matters in this world. With it, you’re everyone’s best friend. You can’t do anything bad enough that you can’t buy forgiveness, can you, Damien? Without money, you’re just someone’s ‘valued assistant.’”
The scorn in his final words made Damien flinch beneath Celia’s hand. “You were more than that to me, Mark,” Damien protested. “You were my friend.”
“Yeah, right. You were the one who had the big money, the pictures in the paper, the invitations to the White House and the bedrooms of the most beautiful women in the world. Money is power, and I wanted my share. I wanted to be the head of my own organization.”
“And you were using my business as cover.” Damien sounded thoroughly appalled.