Before Dawn by Ann Bruce Page A

She’s sworn off relationships with men, so you’re safe. Besides, I don’t think anything permanent would work with you.” She paused. “I was thinking more along the lines of a fling.”
     
    “Jesus Christ,” Jake muttered, running a hand down his face. “You’re pimping me out.”
     

Excerpt from Deadly Fall
     
    “Damn it, Ethan,” Nick Markov muttered, trying to steady his drunken partner and keep him from falling flat on his face and doing permanent damage to it. “Your wife’s going to have my ass for this.”
     
    Ethan Murtagh’s scowl bordered on a pout more suited to a two-year-old. “I can walk on my own two feet,” he said, his words only slightly slurred. He stumbled, nearly taking them both down.
     
    Nick grunted and muttered, “Right.”
     
    It was several frustrating moments before Nick managed to strap his partner into the passenger seat of the black SUV parked in front of the bar. Ethan had been, once again, trying to drink himself into a stupor. He didn’t handle disagreements with his significant other well. The current dispute was over the photographer who had shot his wife’s swimsuit spread the previous week in the Bahamas.
     
    “You’d better hope Torie’s asleep when I get you home,” Nick said, getting behind the wheel.
     
    A disgruntled sound came from the sprawled figure beside him. Nick answered with a grunt of his own as he pulled out. At almost one in the morning on a Wednesday night, it was relatively quiet in the Sixties on the Upper East Side, so it was a few short minutes before he was turning onto Fifth Avenue. Deciding it wouldn’t take long to get Ethan upstairs and into his nineteenth-floor condo, Nick stopped the SUV in front of the building, killed the engine and flipped down his visor to display his credentials. He released his seat belt buckle, then reached over for his partner’s. Ethan mumbled a protest, swatted at Nick’s helping hand and fumbled with the door handle. Suppressing the urge to roll his eyes, Nick grabbed a fistful of his partner’s jacket.
     
    “Stay put,” Nick said. “You open that door, you’ll land on your pretty face and Torie will never forgive me.”
     
    Ethan fell back in his seat, head tilted back, eyes closed. Satisfied, Nick opened his door, got out and made his way to the passenger side door. Ethan didn’t move when he pulled the door open. Nick silently groaned at the possibility of having to carry his less-than-petite partner upstairs.
     
    Before Nick could reach for his semiconscious partner, small pebbles pinged the roof of the SUV and bounced off his head and the sidewalk. Frowning, he skimmed a hand over his hair and his gaze across the roof of his vehicle. The pebbles glittered faintly under the mellow glow of the streetlight.
     
    Not pebbles. Glass shards.
     
    Nick glanced up—and froze, his gaze transfixed by the body above him.
     
    With a faint sense of incredulity, Nick stared, breath trapped in his lungs, as the blurred line of stark paleness grew larger and sharper as gravity closed the distance between its victim and the sidewalk. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the white face seemingly directly above him. For timeless seconds, that was all he saw, but his mind filled in the rest with disturbing clarity. He saw the wide open mouth and the rounded eyes, filled with the horrifying knowledge of one’s own imminent death.
     
    Nick was wrong about two things—the body wasn’t directly above him, and the ground wouldn’t stop its free fall.
     
    It was directly above the SUV.
     
    His own eyes widening at this realization, Nick fisted his hands in Ethan’s jacket, hauled his partner from the vehicle and jumped back, grunting when the edge of the door caught his shoulder. Ethan stumbled and both men went down hard as the body met metal.
     
    The sickening thud was nearly drowned out by the explosive crunching of metal and shattering of glass as the SUV gave like an aluminum pie plate under