Always a Thief - Kay Hooper [88]
“Damn, that hurt.”
Dropping to her knees beside him, Morgan stared incredulously as he sat up, pulling his gloves off and probing his chest with a tender and cautious touch. He wasn't even pale.
“You're alive,” she said.
“Of course I'm alive, Morgana. I never make the same mistake twice.” He pulled the neckline of his black sweater down several inches, revealing the fine but exceptionally strong mesh of a bullet-proof vest. “I've been wearing this thing every night since the bastard shot me the first time. Had the devil of a time hiding it from you that first night at your apartment. Thank God you decided to take a shower before things got intense.”
“You're alive,” she said again.
“Like being kicked by a mule,” he grumbled, getting somewhat stiffly to his feet. Then he reached down, took her icy hands in his, and pulled her up into his arms.
She was crying, Morgan realized, clinging to him.
“I'm sorry, sweet,” he said huskily, holding her very tightly. “I thought he'd probably do that, but there wasn't time to warn you. I'm sorry. . . .”
She could feel where the bullets had struck him, the brutal indentations on the armor plating in the vest, and it was several minutes before she could even begin to stop shaking. He stroked her back gently, murmuring to her, and when she finally lifted a tearstained face from his chest, he rubbed at the wetness with his fingers and kissed her. As usual, when he did that, all she could feel or think about was how much she loved him and how much she wanted him.
Then, with a sigh, he said, “I hate to repeat myself, but what the hell were you doing here tonight?”
Morgan sniffed as she looked up at him. “I thought if I could figure it out, then Leo probably could—and then he'd know it was a trap.”
“Figure what out?”
“Who you really are.”
Quinn looked at her with a smile playing around his mouth, then shook his head a little as if in wonder. “You're a remarkable woman, Morgana.”
She sniffed again and rubbed her nose with the back of one hand. “Yeah, right.”
He gave her his handkerchief. “Use this.”
“Thank you.”
While she blew her nose and wiped away the last traces of tears, Quinn stepped to the desk and used Leo's phone to place a call. “He's on his way, Jared,” he reported. “No, he thinks he killed me. I'll be black and blue tomorrow, but that's all. Yeah. Okay, we'll be there shortly.”
Jared must have asked who “we” was, Morgan decided, because Quinn winced and murmured, “Well, Morgan's here.” Then he jerked the receiver away from his ear—and she could hear unidentifiable sputtering sounds.
Without putting the phone back to his ear, Quinn merely dropped it onto its cradle. “He's going to kill me,” he said with a sigh.
“If he hasn't by now,” Morgan told her beloved, “then he never will. But you'd try the patience of a saint, Alex.”
“I would? Shall we count up how many times you've gone charging into danger, sweet?”
Morgan dismissed that with a wave of his handkerchief. “What I want to know is—what happens next? Leo's on his way to the museum and . . .”
Quinn rested a hip on the corner of Leo's desk and answered obediently. “And—he'll find what he expects to find. That the gas canisters his so-called repairman slipped into the air-conditioning system have laid out all the guards.”
“Not really?”
“No, Wolfe got the canisters out after the guy left earlier tonight.”
“So the guards are just playing unconscious?”
“The regular guards are. The extra ones and all the cops are placed at strategic points throughout the museum. Seems they got a tip that someone was going to try to break in, and after finding gas canisters in the air system, they decided not to take any foolish chances.”
Morgan eyed him. “I see.”
“Yes. So Leo—Nightshade—will cut the museum's electricity, which seems easy enough. He will then call Ace Security and, using all the proper codes and identity numbers, tell them that the system's going to be off-line for about an hour. Which will give