Taking Hannah Robertson to dinner would be no hardship. Getting her the right publishing contacts might be. Zach had asked around, and the consensus seemed to be that Ed had a client who was a publishing bigwig. This was the day that Drake Medford would inform Ed that he would probably be losing his corner office come the first of the month. Under the circumstances, Zach thought asking Ed for a personal favor today was just wrong.

So he’d called his cookbook guy and milked that contact for a couple of tenuous leads. It wasn’t much, but it was better than going to dinner empty-handed.

Partly because he didn’t have much to tell her and partly because he kept thinking of how good she’d looked in yellow, he bought a bouquet of daisies and yellow roses before hopping on the bus that would take him to the stop closest to the Pearson. Going to dinner with Hannah was turning out to be the best part of his day. Every time he’d passed Ed’s office he’d cringed at the idea that he was driving the guy out. Although he’d told himself not to worry, he was worrying, anyway.

So dinner was a terrific distraction. He’d made reservations at a Thai place on Restaurant Row, and they could walk there and back from her hotel. He wasn’t opposed to taking a cab, but Mario wasn’t on duty yet and Zach had become picky about his cabs after riding with Mario.

Fire trucks drove screaming past the bus as it stopped where Zach wanted off. When the sirens abruptly quit, Zach paused at the front of the bus, bouquet in hand, to lean down and peer through the bus’s windshield to see where the trucks had ended up. Damn it, the fire trucks, lights flashing, sat smack-dab in front of the Pearson!

Galloping down the steps to the pavement, Zach headed off at a run. The Pearson wasn’t as tall as some hotels, but tall enough, more than thirty stories. The fire escapes were probably old and rusty. A horrible image of Hannah dangling from a rope made of knotted sheets made his stomach churn.