Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [53]
“All right, all right—calm down.”
“I am perfectly calm,” Quinn said in a voice so sharp it had edges.
Jared sort of sighed. “Yeah. Okay, we'll talk about this later. I gather I'm here to relieve you?”
“If you don't mind.” Quinn sighed as well—though his sounded a bit ragged. “I'm not expecting anything else to happen tonight, but I'm not sure enough to leave the place unwatched. I need to take Morgan back to her apartment and make sure she's going to be all right.”
“No problem.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure.” Abruptly, Jared sounded amused. “How're you going to get her home?”
“Carry her.”
“Down five floors, across four blocks, and up another three floors?”
“She's not very big,” Quinn replied a bit absently, his voice even clearer now because he had knelt beside her.
By that point, even if Morgan could have opened her eyes she wouldn't have. Completely aware but utterly boneless, she felt herself gathered up and held in arms her body recognized instantly—simply by the touch of them. She heard an odd little noise escape her, something that sounded embarrassingly sensual, even primitive, and wondered uneasily if Jared heard her. Bad enough if Quinn heard . . .
She had the sensation of descending, even though she heard nothing, and realized that Quinn managed to move almost silently even down a fire escape and carrying her. It made her feel very strange to be carried so effortlessly by him, and that probably delayed her recovery from the chloroform a good five minutes or more.
When Morgan finally managed to force her heavy eyelids up, the fire escape was behind them and Quinn was striding down the sidewalk right out in the open. She concentrated fiercely and managed to raise her head from his shoulder, and though the nausea was horrible, she managed not to get sick.
“I—I think I can walk,” she told him, sounding decidedly weak to her own ears.
Quinn looked at her without breaking stride. His face was completely expressionless in the illumination of the streetlights, and his voice was unusually flat. “I doubt it. Your right ankle's badly bruised.”
Since she was wrapped in a blanket, Morgan couldn't see her feet. She tried to move the right one experimentally and bit back a sound of pain. Remembering, she realized she must have banged that ankle hard against the fire escape in her struggles to escape her attacker.
Cradled in Quinn's arms, she gazed at his profile and wished miserably that she hadn't let her reckless anger make her go charging out after him. She'd had every right to be mad as hell, dammit, but now this had happened, and with him carrying her home—on her shield, so to speak—she felt ridiculously defensive and at fault. But then, even as the feelings surfaced, another realization made her feel a little better.
If she hadn't blundered into whoever that was on the fire escape, he might have been able to sneak up on Quinn—and he might not have simply put the cat burglar to sleep.
. . . either to watch me or else to get rid of me.
Morgan shivered and felt his arms tighten around her.
“Almost there,” he said.
She let her head rest on his shoulder once more and closed her eyes against the waves of nausea. And, apparently, feeling sick wasn't the only aftereffect of chloroform, because she dozed off again. Only a few minutes this time; when she opened her eyes again, Quinn was unlocking her apartment door. He must have at some point gotten her keys from her shoulder bag, she mused vaguely.
Inside the apartment, he lowered her to the couch so that she was sitting sideways, her feet up on the cushions. He was gentle enough, but she still caught her breath when her bruised ankle touched the firm cushions. The pain