And he had to call Lane—not just because he wasn’t going to be able to make it to the exit. If he didn’t reach his brother soon, the man was liable to get impatient, break down the damn door and blow their cover.
Bracing himself, Edward rocked forward once … twice …
On three, he heaved his torso up, drawing on some reserve of strength he didn’t know he had.
It was ugly. His bones literally rattled together under his skin, hitting one another hard without any buffering of muscle, but he did manage to snag the receiver from its cradle—and drag the rest of the phone forward on the desk until it fell off the edge and landed in his lap.
His hands were shaking so badly that he had to dial a couple of times because he kept messing up the sequence, and he was near to blacking out when he finally put the handset up to his ear.
Lane answered on the first ring, bless his heart. “Hello?” the guy said.
“You need to come and get—”
“Edward! Are you okay? Where are—”
“Shut up, and listen to me.” He gave his brother the code and made Lane repeat it. “I’m behind the desk in Father’s assistant’s office.”
He hung up by slapping the receiver around its base until it found home, and then he closed eyes and sagged against the drawers. Funny, he’d been laboring under the misconception that sweeping out the barn aisles regularly meant his stamina and mobility had improved. Not the case. Then again, his pretzel-under-the-desk routine might have been a challenge for anyone.
As he heard the rear door open and shut for a second time, he had a sudden urge to re-try the whole get-to-his-feet thing, just so that he and Lane could be spared the embarrassment that was about to come. But the flesh was unwilling even as his ego got up on its high horse.
A moment later, he cut Lane off before the man spoke even a syllable. “I got it,” he said roughly. “I got what we need.”
He had to salvage his pride somehow.
Lane’s knees cracked as he crouched down. “Edward, what happened—”
“Spare me. Just get me up into that chair. I need to log out or we’ll be compromised. Where has Father gone? I know he left out the back.”
“He got in his car with the driver and I watched him leave. He’s off to the track.”
“Thank God. Now get me up.”
More ugliness, with Lane grabbing him under the armpits as if he were a corpse and dragging him off the imperial purple carpet. When he was finally seated, a sudden drop in blood pressure made him lightheaded, but he shook that off and turned on the monitor again.
“Go to his desk,” he ordered Lane. “Top drawer in the middle. There’s a sheaf of papers in there. Don’t bother reading them, run to the Xerox machine and get us a copy. He just signed them.” When Lane only stood there, as if he were wondering whether he had a medical emergency to deal with first, Edward slashed his hand through the air. “Go! And put them back exactly where they were. Go!”
When Lane finally got his ass in gear, Edward refocused on the computer screen. After transferring one final document, he began signing out of the network carefully, closing everything that he had opened.
Lane hightailed it back no more than a second after he was finally finished.
“Get me out of here,” Edward said roughly. “But set the phone back up here first.”
It was the height of impotence that he required his strong, able-bodied younger brother to put things back in order and then heft him to his feet and shuffle him out of the office like he was a geriatric.
And what do you know, Lane gave up trying to help him walk just as they came across that family crest in the carpet. “I’m going to have to pick you up.”
“Whatever you must.”
Edward turned his face away from his brother’s shoulder as his weight was popped off the floor. The ride was a rough one, his pain level ramping up and shifting to all kinds of new places. They made better progress, however.
“What was the paperwork for?” Edward demanded as they moved fast down that hall of conference rooms and offices.
“You’re going to have to walk once we get outside.”
“I know. What was the paperwork about?”
Lane just shook his head as they came to the back door. “I need to put you down.”
“I know—”
The grunt of pain was nothing he could hold in, much as he would have preferred to. And he had to wait to be sure that his legs accepted his weight, his hand biting into Lane’s forearm as he used his brother’s steady body to help stabilize himself.
“You okay?” Lane asked. “Are you good to get over to the truck?”
As if he had a choice.
Edward nodded and pulled the baseball hat down lower over his face. “Check outside first.”
Lane popped the door and leaned out. “Okay, I’m taking your arm.”
“How chivalrous.”
God damn him, but Edward got his legs moving toward that truck like the business center was on fire and that old F-150 was the only shelter he had: No matter how much it hurt, he just gritted his teeth and made it happen.