Killed coffeemaker. Be back soon. I’ll bring some home. Left at 10 a.m. Don’t feed the cat.
As notes went, it was succinct. A to-the-point missive about where Quinn’d gone and, more importantly, how long ago he’d broken loose of his restraints and was out wandering the city, open for a crazy’s attack.
“Son of a fucking bitch.” Rafe had other words, harder words, but they would have to wait. Putting his keys on a table next to the front door so he could find them later, Rafe stopped himself and took a breath. “Phone. Try the phone first. Text him. See where he is. Use your brain, Andrade.”
A few short keystrokes, a couple of panicked words Rafe backspaced over, and the text was sent.
Seconds later, he was still standing in the foyer looking at his damned phone with no answering text.
“God damn it, Quinn. What part of stay the fuck inside didn’t you understand? I can’t… fuck, don’t end up like Brigid. Please.” Pacing across the foyer, he debated the wisdom of hunting Quinn down.
He flashed to Brigid’s lifeless body sliding across her sedan’s backseat, Rafe helplessly trying to press down on the gaping hole in her chest as Quinn drove like a madman through red lights and around slowing cars. They’d picked up a cop car, sirens blaring, then two, loudspeakers ordering them to pull over and get out of the car, and all the while, Quinn sat stern-faced and pale, a cold block of stone putting the car through the ringer to get to the hospital.
The smell of Brigid’s blood was still in his nose, and he’d scrubbed his nails until they were raw, needing to get them clean. Quinn’d finally pulled him out of the shower, muttering something about Macbeth and damned spots.
“Couldn’t have gone far.” Rafe’s hand closed on the door handle, and he jerked his shoulders up, Quinn’s note sinking in further. “Home. He called here home. Well, shit yeah.”
His mind must have been on Quinn… all of his mind, because Rafe didn’t see the shadow looming in the hall outside his door. Not until it was too late. A second after stepping out to take the elevator down, the shadow struck, and Rafe toppled forward onto the hall floor, the penthouse’s locked front door closing behind him.
WHYBORNE’S WAS only a few blocks away. At the most, it should have taken Quinn about half an hour to go to the shop and back with two cups of coffee. Maybe add in another three or four minutes for a scone or three, but just a hair over half an hour.
Plenty of time to get back to Rafe. Probably before he even woke up.
And considering Quinn’d done everything he could to make sure Rafe was still sound asleep when he snuck out of the penthouse to get a moment of freedom, coming back before Rafe woke up was optimal.
What he hadn’t planned for was a pregnant woman in a minidress who’d been five steps ahead of him when her water broke as she tottered down Nob Hill.
And Quinn would have thought it was funny that there didn’t seem to be a cop car within five hundred miles of a pregnant woman huffing and puffing in the vestibule of an Italian restaurant with a Peruvian cook screaming at him from the kitchen about needing more ice.
What the fuck ice had to do with helping a woman get a baby out of her womb, Quinn didn’t know, but the Peruvian was insistent they needed more.
Luckily for his nerves, the ambulance arrived before the infant, the now relieved Peruvian cook was packing up a travel jug of coffee for Quinn, and he’d gone to the restaurant’s employee bathroom to wash up.
Where he found the ice, lurking in wait for the moment Quinn turned on the faucet and stuck his face into the stream.
By the time he got the feeling back in his cheeks, the cook had the coffee ready to go and threw in a few biscotti for good measure. It was only then Quinn checked his phone and saw Rafe’s text.
“Mierda!” He must have cursed in Spanish, because the cook looked alarmed at the outburst. He’d been speaking it for nearly an hour since he’d first begged the cook for help through the restaurant’s front door, but then after the panic of water, blood, and screaming woman, Quinn didn’t blame the man for being a little bit jumpy. “Lo siento. No era mi intención asustarte.”
“You’re welcome,” the cook replied slowly. “Now, you go. Got to clean the front of the house. Owner’s not going to like this shit.”
The coffee was a little hard to handle, a thick-bodied cardboard-and-plastic construct built like a square milk jug, but Quinn was glad for it. Even if the cook brewed up the crappiest coffee in existence, he was running late—way too late to expect Rafe to still be asleep.
“A blow job. That would have done it.” Oddly enough he got a strange look from a passing woman, and Quinn smiled broadly as he edged around her. “No, really. A blow job. That would have made him sleepy. It always makes me sleepy.”