Heartbeats Amidst Chaos, Part 3

1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

E lio had been waking slower than he used to, and this morning was no different. Being caught in an explosion and suffering a head injury changed more than one might expect. The nightmares had come as no surprise, but he still wasn’t used to the way waking forced him to swim up and out of a deep, dragging darkness.

Sometimes, by the time he was fully awake, he was gasping with panic. Occasionally, he even found himself sitting bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding in his chest.

This morning, he felt disoriented but calm as the fingers of sleep reluctantly fell away.

Finally prying his eyes open, he lay still, taking inventory and trying to figure out where he was. He lay on his side in a cheap hotel bed—the thin, coarse sheets were a dead giveaway. What did give him pause was the woman in his arms.

Rissa’s back was to him, her ribcage rising and falling with deep even breaths beneath his forearm. Her dark hair was splayed across the pillow, tickling his chin and smelling of pineapple.

Elio’s breath quickened as he tried to remember the night before. Slowly, it came back to him. The office and Rissa spinning before him in her tiny black undergarments. Bringing her to orgasm on the desk. His dick began to rise just thinking about it.

But there was also the before and the after. The police showed up and his near arrest. The mysterious group opened fire—either on them or the cops; Elio wasn’t sure. And his and Rissa’s final decision to go on the run together.

He remembered saying it was safer that way and thinking that they had no one to trust except each other.

However, as Rissa had wriggled back into her thong and dress and they’d walked back to the car, he began to suspect that she didn’t really trust him either. She had grown silent and pensive, turning her head away from him to stare out the window as they drove through the night to this hotel. And, he admitted to himself, he still wasn’t positive he trusted her. She could have brought the police to their rendezvous. She had not outright denied it.

Slowly, quietly, Elio eased himself away from her, sitting up on the edge of the bed. The shabby little room’s air conditioning was noisy, but it wasn’t working very well. It was hot, and they had tossed off the thin upper sheet and coverlet in their sleep. Rissa lay slightly curled in on herself, wearing only her thong and bra, her long legs and slim torso tan against the white sheet.

Elio forced himself to look away, his mind returning to the night before and the way they had tacitly admitted their mutual distrust by agreeing to share the bed. That way, neither one could slip away or make a call during the night.

Rumpling his hair and sighing, Elio tried to remember when he had put his arms around her and pulled her close, but it must have been after they’d both fallen asleep. Well, then, Rissa never had to know about it.

Elio sat in only his briefs. It had simply been too hot to try and keep clothes on while they slept. He recalled the way Rissa removed her dress for the second time that night—soberly, without fanfare—draping it over the single chair in the room before slipping under the sheet. He had followed suit, falling asleep almost immediately despite expecting tension over their unusual circumstances to keep him awake.

He was glad for the rest. Now that the final foggy vestiges of his strange, post-trauma sleep were falling away, his mind felt clear and ready for action.

All he had been truly sure of last night was that the city was no longer safe for either of them. They needed to go on the run, and he wanted them to do it together. This morning, he realized they needed a plan. Where were they going to go? What were they going to do? And who were they going to be?

He stood up and stretched, wincing at the pain that still lanced through his side and leg when he moved too quickly. He visited the bathroom, pulled on his pants, and shuffled toward the door, pausing once to glance back at Rissa who had not moved.

Stepping out onto the narrow balcony that connected all the upper-level rooms to the stairs leading down, Elio was hit with a blast of hot, humid air. It was only six o’clock, but the sun was already hard at work.

He pulled the burner phone from his pocket and dialed the number of one of his grandfather’s colleagues, a man whose talents were in high demand among the lawless of the city but whom Elio had never expected to contact on his own behalf.

Chauncy answered on the third ring.

“What’s so important so early in the morning?” the man’s gravelly voice grumbled. “Don’t you people know I work nights?”

“I know you work nights, Chauncy,” Elio said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

He could hear the new alertness in the forger’s voice as he asked, “Who is this?”

“Elio Accardi,” Elio said. “I’m in need of your expertise.”

“Elio Accardi.” There was a good deal of unsaid information in Chauncy’s simple repetition of the name. His tone told Elio that he knew exactly who he was and exactly why he needed Chauncey’s services. But Chauncy simply asked, “What can I do for you?”

Elio ran through his needs briefly, told Chauncy where he could find pictures of both him and Rissa online, and then hung up and used his phone to wire over the price Chauncy had named. He then dialed the diner he could see on the other side of the road and ordered breakfast for both him and Rissa, tipping ahead of time and asking them to leave it outside the door to their room.

He paused for another moment, looking around the quiet motel parking lot and the road that stretched straight and flat in both directions. He had reserved their room over the phone and Rissa had then gone in to get the key. No one had seen him, and she wasn’t yet wanted by the law—at least, not publicly. Thirty miles outside town, on the road to nowhere, they were safe.

For now.

Reentering the room, Elio found Rissa sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking down at her phone. Her hair fell in disarray around her bare shoulders and across her breasts. When she looked up at him with sleep-hazed eyes, he knew he had never seen anything more beautiful. He wanted to cross the room in two strides, push her back down on the bed, and kiss her until she begged him for more.

“Good morning,” he said.

“Morning,” she replied. He couldn’t tell if she was glad, surprised, or disappointed to see that he was still there.

“Are you up for some breakfast?”

“This place serves breakfast?” Rissa raised her eyebrows in surprise.

“No,” Elio said. “But the diner across the street does.”

There was a knock on the door, and Rissa started to get up.

“Stay put,” he said, feeling almost shy as he added, “I’ll bring it to you in bed.”

He went to the door and waited a second to be sure the delivery person had left. Once certain, he opened it and picked up the boxes, bags, and two Styrofoam cups of coffee. Turning back into the room, he was glad to see that Rissa had done as he’d asked. She propped the pillows against the headboard and scooted backward so that she could lean against them—still cross-legged, still in her underwear.

Elio brought the food to the bed and sat down beside her. He handed over her coffee and then divvied up the cinnamon sugar donuts, egg bagels, fruit cups, and home fries between the two Styrofoam trays. All the while, Rissa watched him with a curious smile.

“What?” he said finally as he tucked the foot of his good leg under his opposite knee, keeping his other leg outstretched. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Rissa shook her head, dropping her attention to the food in front of her.

“Nothing, I just—well, I was thinking that I’m supposed to be the one with the caretaker personality, right? I’m the doctor. But you kind of have a thing for feeding people, don’t you?”

Elio shrugged and nodded. “I take care of the people I care about,” he said.

I just admitted that I care about her.

His heart sped up slightly as he watched for her reaction. Rissa’s hand stilled over her steaming home fries. Then, she picked one up and popped it into her mouth, tossing her hair back and turning her face toward him with a tiny smile as she chewed.

Elio was unsure what to make of her response. Forcing his attention back to his own food, he picked up the egg bagel and took a large bite.

Rissa swallowed her fry.

“I just listened to a message from my friend, Reagan,” she said.

“The investigative journalist?” Elio asked around his mouthful, and she nodded, frowning slightly. He immediately regretted reminding her that he knew things about her that she hadn’t told him.

“A contact of hers was able to find out that the detectives investigating the fundraiser bombing started with two main leads,” she said. “One was security video footage of you entering the concert hall with a black bag.”

Her gaze bore into him, and he almost choked swallowing his bite.

“It was money,” he mumbled. She raised her eyebrows, her expression intimating that this didn’t make things look much better for him. But she was still sitting in bed eating breakfast with him, which must mean she didn’t really still suspect him of being the bomber. Right?

“Reagan’s informant told her that the other lead has been brushed under the rug in favor of going after you,” Rissa continued. “It’s a car caught on security cameras exiting the parking garage just before the explosion. It was the only car they were unable to match with one of the concertgoers, musicians, or fundraiser personnel. However, before the lead was buried, they were able to trace it to a lakeside vacation resort about two hours from here. Apparently, it was a ride service provided by the resort.”

“Someone took a taxi from a resort?” Elio asked, his bagel forgotten as he processed the information that a lead was actively being buried by the police. It was just as he had thought: With him for a fall guy, they didn’t need to search for the real bomber.

Rissa shrugged. “Possibly.”

She tucked a silky strand of hair behind her ear as she picked up one of the fruit cups and an individually packaged plastic fork, opening the cellophane wrapping with her teeth. Elio watched her, half mesmerized by the sheer gracefulness with which she seemed to do even the most mundane activities and half occupied with piecing together a plan from the fragments of certainty he still retained.

“That’s where we should go,” he said. “The resort. Even if whoever rode from there to the concert is no longer there, maybe we could pick up their trail. And it would give us a place away from the city to lay low in the meantime.” His words came more quickly as he warmed to the idea and prepared to spill the fact that he had already taken steps to implement part of it. “We’ll pose as a newly engaged couple on a getaway,” he said. Keeping his voice steady required an effort. “I already have a guy getting papers for us.”

Once more, Rissa’s eyebrows shot toward her adorably mussed hair, but it wasn’t his choice of cover that she questioned first.

“Secret identities?”

Elio nodded. “They’ll help us disappear for as long as we need to and allow us to hide in plain sight.” He shrugged. His relief that she hadn’t immediately decried his plan was surprisingly intense, but he tried to hide it beneath casual confidence. “If we’re going to go on the run, we might as well do it right. That’s how I usually like to do things.”

As he said it, he let his gaze run briefly over her body before returning to her face. She had obviously caught his innuendo, and he noticed her cheekbones flush as she tilted her chin upward, a small smile curving the corners of her lips.

With a good night’s sleep behind them and a solid plan taking shape before them, Elio thought he felt a cautious return of the harmony that had existed between them before they had both started overthinking things the previous evening. He felt a rush of hope and elation at the prospect of spending an uninterrupted stretch of days and nights with the woman sitting beside him on the bed, studiously eating everything but the papaya chunks from the fruit cup in her lap.

He didn’t know what exactly he was hoping for—just that Dr. Rissa Mahoney was somehow at the very center of it. Picking up his bagel, he took another large bite, knowing it would not satisfy his body’s real craving.