He looped one arm over the hook and reached down with the other. He felt for a handful of cloth, an arm, something he could use to drag her to the surface.
A strong hand clasped his wrist.
“She’s conscious!” he shouted. “Pull me up, quick! No,” he contradicted himself, “Slowly. Very slowly.”
He didn’t want to lose his grip. More importantly, he didn’t want to hurt her. The hold of the cement was stronger than he’d expected.
He reached down and grabbed her upper arm, near where it joined her body. As though they’d discussed the plan, she wrapped her arms around his legs and hung on tight.
This time he welcomed the burn of pain that shot up his right hip.
“Okay, pull!”
The crane engine revved above him and the weighted hook lifted. Erik’s shoulder joint popped.
The hook rose, but he didn’t. A human anchor weighted him down. She was stuck fast, and the seconds counting down in his head told him she didn’t have much time left.
Indeed, he felt her grip slacken, sliding in the grit and the grime.
Then her hands fell away. Her body went limp against him and the image of her peaches-and-cream complexion went gray in his mind’s eye.
No!
The hook continued to lift. Erik’s shoulder and arm burned, but there was no give from below.
He needed more lift, more strength, more leverage. The man he’d been before would have had the tools and the skills, but the man he was now had nothing but a mangled leg.
With a roar of anger at things he couldn’t change no matter how much he wanted to, he let go of the trapped, unconscious woman and reached up to grab the ascending hook with both hands. He dragged his legs forward and wrapped them around her body. He locked his good ankle around his bad calf and hung on tight.
If the pins and screws that ached in the dark of winter nights had ever served a purpose, now was the time.
“Lift hard!” he shouted to the operator, and tensed every muscle in his body. The moment the engine surged, he scissored his legs forward, curling his body up in an effort to break the cement hold on her body.
Nothing.
As the clock ticked down past “too late” in his head, he tried again, summoning all of the strength he’d retained, and maybe some remembered from back when he was whole. He pulled himself up toward the hook with his arms and dragged the woman with him, legs vised around her torso.
He felt a shift. A give. And then he was moving upward, toward street level, toward safety.
And he brought Meg Corning along with him.
He heard cheers from the crowd, whoops of sirens and the shouts of local cops creating order. The crane operator lifted him above the crowd, then back down, lowering Erik and his limp burden onto a hastily cleared section of pavement near the broken barrier.
Uniformed officers reached up to take the unconscious woman, who was immediately swarmed by emergency personnel. They left Erik to jump down on his own.
He did, then staggered and nearly fell.
“I’ve got you.” An overweight, balding stranger grabbed him by his sodden suit jacket, righted him, and shoved his cane into his hand. “Here. You’ll need this.”
Erik stared at the cane, at the ring of polished wood near the handle that made it stronger and weaker at the same time. “You can say that again. Thanks for hanging on to it for me.”
“No sweat. I owe you one.”
Erik glanced up. “Do I know you?”
“It’s not a big deal if you don’t remember me, Mr. Falco.” The stranger grinned. “You bought out my father’s company a couple of years ago. Celltronics. Gave him enough money to retire to a big-assed boat in the Caribbean, and put all the grandkids through college.”
“Glad it worked out,” Erik said automatically, though he barely remembered the deal, which had been one of too many acquisitions, all aimed at an impossible goal.
Or maybe not so impossible anymore. Not once he got his hands on the NPT technology.
At the thought of the technology and its creator, he turned toward the knot of rescue personnel nearby. To his surprise, he saw that Meg was conscious, sitting up without assistance while chunks of half-set cement dribbled from her lab coat and dark hair.
And she was glaring daggers at him.
DAMN IT, Meg thought. The bastard had lied to her. And then he’d rescued her.
How was she supposed to react to that?
The aftershocks raced through her body, remnants of those long seconds that she’d been submerged in the cement. She’d told herself to be calm, to remember her old training. Count your heartbeats, her skydiving instructor had told her. It’ll keep the panic away.
And it had. Mostly.
Then Erik Phillips had come for her.
Only he wasn’t Erik Phillips. He was Erik Falco, head of FalcoTechno, which was one of the largest technology conglomerates on the eastern seaboard.
And one of the highest bidders trying to buy her upcoming patents.
Piercing blue eyes fixed on her, Falco crossed to where she sat on the bumper of an ambulance, huddled beneath a scratchy wool blanket. “How do you feel?”
“Alive, thanks to you.” She tightened the blanket around her shoulders. “I’m not sure why you made the effort, though. It’d be much easier for you to push the deal through with me out of the picture.”
He nodded, acknowledging his identity, as well as the standoff that had been handled through lawyers and the hospital administration up to that point. But his expression darkened as he said, “You think I’d let you drown to get the deal done?”
She shrugged, feeling the rasp of drying grit against her skin. “In my experience, the human element doesn’t matter much to commercial drug developers.”
“Oh. You’re one of them.” He rolled his eyes. “You’re one of those researchers who think academia is the only pure science. God forbid someone make a profit off research.”
She sniffed. “Let’s just say I’ve had better luck with the university types.”
“Why? Because your mother left you and your father for a man with a bigger house and a better bankroll?” Falco stopped and cursed. “I apologize. Please forget I said that.” He waved to the hovering paramedics. “Let’s get you transported to the ER so the docs can check you out.”
“I’m fine.” She stood stiffly, feeling her suede skirt and pretty green pullover crackle with the motion. “And no, I won’t forget what you said. Don’t think you know me because your people did a few background checks. And don’t think you can order me around because you saved my life, or because you think that little charade with—” She broke off. “Oh, hell. You’ve got to get Raine—if that’s even her name—back here.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Cautious of patient privacy, Meg said, “Not here. Have your wife—” She saw the shift in his expression and pressed her lips together. “Another lie. Who is she?”
He didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “Raine Montgomery, vice president of my pharmaceuticals division.”
“Lucky for you there was a pregnant woman handy. And lucky for her, too. Have her meet me in the lab in ten minutes.”
He scowled. “You won’t be in the lab in ten minutes. You’ll be in the ER.”
Temper fraying