He came toward her, his pace lazy, his eyes never leaving hers.
“It’s Zach.”
“Mr. Castelianos—”
He reached out. Caught one end of the robe’s sash. Slowly, wonderfully slowly, he tugged her toward him.
“What do you prefer? Straight American? Or something more exotic?”
She could feel the color sweep into her face. “What?”
“For dinner. What do you want?”
He smiled. Oh, what a smile he had. And what was wrong with her that she’d even think such a foolish thing about a stranger who was clearly out to seduce her?
“I don’t…” She swallowed. “Mr. Castelianos. Really. I am not—”
“Something exotic,” he said softly. “I’ll bet that’s you.”
“No! It isn’t. I am not—”
The lights blinked. Off. On. Then off again before blazing back on with the ferocity of a thousand suns. A sound louder than thunder, louder than the roar of a jet breaking the sound barrier as it swept low over the Texas plains, swept through the enormous room.
The building seemed to sway.
A scream broke from Jaimie’s throat.
“Shit,” Zach said, as the condo was plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER FOUR
The blonde grabbed him as if he were a tree and she were a morning glory vine.
She wound her arms around his neck and plastered her body to his. She felt warm and supple and it struck him as amazing that he could be aware of that even as his brain was telling him that whatever had just happened was not good.
The lights hadn’t just gone out in here.
The glass walls in the living room framed not a city skyline but the dark grey clouds of an ominous storm.
Zach’s muscles tightened.
An act of terror? Anything was possible, especially for a man who’d seen the things he had. But there was one mother of a storm raging outside, the wind howling like the hounds of hell. Lightning still slashed across the sky.
Look for the simplest explanation first.
The Agency had taught him that. It was a survival skill, a way of looking at things logically, and that was what he did as the blonde clung to him. He look
ed at the situation logically. A huge storm. Lightning. The roar that had been something other than thunder. The blast of light followed by darkness.
The odds were that a transformer had blown. Or a series of transformers. Anything else, the sky would already be lit by flame.
He needed information. Lights. Emergency equipment. Whatever was happening, he needed to take action.
But the woman in his arms was trembling. Her heart was beating as hard as that of a bird he’d plucked from the dirt after an explosion took out a Hummer, most of a building and the poor bastards who’d been inside it back in Kandahar.
He remembered the feel of the creature, warm and shaking in the palm of his hand, remembered wondering which was the greater miracle, that it had survived the blast or that it had survived at all in the fucking hellhole that was Afghanistan.
What was the woman’s name again? Jaimie. That was it.