Praise for bestselling author Lora Leigh’s
HEAT SEEKER
“Leigh’s pages explode with a hot mixture of erotic pleasures.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
MAVERICK
“A phenomenal read.”
—Romance Junkies
“Scorching-hot sex, deadly secrets, and a determined assassin add up to another addicting Leigh thriller. Leigh’s ability to credibly build damaged characters who are both intriguing and intense gives her stories that extra punch.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
“Sex and violence power the satisfying second installment of Leigh’s Elite Ops series.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Full of wrenching emotion and self-flagellation by the hero, the new series of Elite Ops promises to be even better than the sexy Seals at this rate.”
—Night Owl Romance
“With her customary panache for emotionally intense, sensual characters, the author attracts readers into every world she creates. This fabulous follow-up to Wild Card is no exception to the rule.”
—A Romance Review
WILD CARD
“Highly emotional and addicting…an intoxicating first installment of a brand-new series.”
—Romance Junkies
“Ferocious passion!” —Romantic Times BOOKreviews
…and the novels in her sexy SEALs series
KILLER SECRETS
“A smoldering hot new espionage tale.
This chapter of Leigh’s SEAL saga reverberates
with deadly danger.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
HIDDEN AGENDAS
“Treachery and intrigue combine with blistering-hot sensuality in this chapter of Leigh’s SEAL saga. The title of this book is particularly apt, since many of the characters are not what they seem, and betrayal can have deadly consequences. Leigh’s books can scorch the ink off the page.”
—Romantic Times BOOKreviews
“An evocative and captivating read.”
—Romance Junkies
DANGEROUS GAMES
“A marvelous novel of suspense and raw passion.”
—Romance Junkies
“Lora Leigh ignites the fire...with steamy heat added to a story that makes you cheer and even tear up.”
—Fallen Angel Reviews
“Leigh writes…tempting, enchanting romance[s] that readers are certain to devour.”
—Romance Reviews Today
St. Martin’s Paperbacks Titles By
Lora Leigh
Elite Ops Series
Heat Seeker
Maverick
Wild Card
SEALs Trilogy
Killer Secrets
Hidden Agendas
Dangerous Games
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Black Jack
Copyright © 2010 by Lora Leigh.
All rights reserved.
For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4299-5513-3 | ISBN-10:1-4299-5513-9
Printed in the United States of America
St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition / March 2010
St. Martin’s Paperbacks are published by St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated most thankfully and with the utmost love to my daughter, Holly, and my son, Bret, who are growing up much too fast.
You are two of the most enduring and most special lights in my life. You bring me laughter, joy, and love, and I thank God for the very special gifts he sent me when he sent to me my babies.
Black Jack
Lora Leigh
St. Martin's Press
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to CO2 Donna, a nearby correctional officer, for the information on the modified Glocks. Any mistakes I’ve made in the translation are my own.
Special thanks as well to Randy, the owner of Friendly’s Sports Bar at Franklin and Walnut Streets in Hagerstown, Maryland, for the use of his bar. Good friends and good bars are wonderful research sources, and he has one of the best. And the food is out of this world.
Try the Chicken Wings.
Chapter 1
Two months later
a steady, rain-filled wind whipped around the dark helmet covering Travis Caine’s head, sang around the leather pants and jacket he wore, and whispered a caress over the full, face-shielding helmet he wore. Heavy boots covered his feet, protecting him against the elements as rain poured down from the skies, and lightning lit the darkness with jagged forks of power.
The Harley he rode roared down the open highway, throbbing with the increased power it had been customized with. The display beneath the handlebars was lit with a muted glow indicating speed, time, and location. The embedded electronics in the night-vision shield of the helmet provided other readouts considered imperative in his line of work.
According to that information, he was growing closer to his destination and a mission he still wasn’t certain he was prepared to be a part of, because of the woman he was partnered with, because of a night they shouldn’t have shared.
He shouldn’t have loved her.
No, he shouldn’t have fucked her, he corrected himself. He immediately felt an edge of distaste at his attempt to make that night into something unemotional. Something less powerful than it had been.
It was a night he hadn’t been able to forget. In the past two months it had tormented him, torn at him, and left him hungry for more of her in ways he had never hungered for another woman before. She was the last woman he should have ever touched.
What the hell was she doing to him?
Elite Two and the women that were a part of that team were a hidden, rarely mentioned section of Elite Ops.
The Ops was more than the one team Jordan commanded, Travis had learned. For years he and the other agents under Jordan’s command had believed that Elite One was the only sanctioned operation and that the women they had helped train were meant to be backup, nothing more.
They hadn’t realized just how good those women were.
Elite Two had hidden even the slightest sign that they, too, were agents. No one had told Elite One what those women’s true purpose was, nor had anyone explained the full extent of the Elite Ops and the units that comprised it until after the Warbucks mission months before.
Warbucks had been stealing and selling top-secret military weapons as well as agents’ identities. He’d managed to infiltrate government agencies as well as the companies his father had had interest in to acquire the stolen resources.
Elite Two had gathered the information that had led them to Warbucks because of their covers as very exclusive, well-trained escorts.
Once the mission had revealed Warbucks’ identity, Elite Two had also managed to reveal his associates, his buyers, and his silent partners in many of the sales.
It was then he and the other agents had begun questioning the organization that had taken them in, that had saved them, and created new lives for them.
They’d learned it was much more extensive than they could have imagined. And the missions were drawing together slowly, linked by a thread of information here, a suspect there. Travis could feel it edging toward a single denominator, which made him begin questioning all the missions they were given.
This latest one had him questioning ev
en himself.
It was a damned dangerous game he was getting ready to participate in, and thinking about it left a sour taste in his mouth. Despite all the good it was doing, there were times the Elite Ops had little tact and even less taste. To use a woman in the manner they were prepared to use her had his back teeth clenching in anger and a sense of injustice rising inside him.
The fact they were using his woman, despite her agent status, only pissed him off more.
And he was damned if he could figure out why he was letting it bother him. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t learned the hard way how easily a woman could betray a man. He’d “died” with that lesson pounding in his head years ago, and when he’d been reborn, he’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t forget it.
He’d lost everything in his life because he’d trusted a woman and it wasn’t a lesson he cared to repeat. It was one he had sworn time and time again he wouldn’t repeat. But the minute he’d learned how the Elite Ops was forcing this woman to face her past, he’d become enraged.
Lilly was different, his heart swore, though his mind fought that instinctive knowledge.
He shouldn’t have been surprised, though. He should have expected it at some point once he’d managed to uncover her former identity. She was the perfect asset to use to find the individual or individuals involved in the death of the powerful, influential Lord Harold Harrington, Lilly’s father.
But they were prepared to use her in a way that Travis feared would end up destroying her. Returning her to her old life, to the family she had left behind, wouldn’t be a cakewalk for her.
Sure, Lilly had already been training to follow in her father’s footsteps as an MI5 agent before her “death.” But even then, she had been a Harrington and had been entrenched in that blue-blood life. She had been raised to be a lady and to assume all the responsibilities that entailed. However, once she had joined the Elite Ops, she left all of that behind and had become someone else entirely. An outsider, a rebel . . . a lost soul who had seen and done things others only saw in their nightmares. Like him, she no longer belonged in that rarefied world. And making her face what she had been forced to leave behind was damn cruel.
Facing it himself wouldn’t be easy. There was an added painful element for Lilly, though. They were returning to investigate the death of Lilly’s father and the attempt on her own life when she had been Lady Victoria Harrington. Lilly remembered very little about that final night of her old life. She remembered seeing her father lying in a pool of blood when she entered his study, and nothing more.
The next day Lord Harrington’s body had been pulled from his car, which had gone over a cliff. The fuel line had cracked upon impact, and in a matter of minutes the car exploded. Harrington’s body had been burned beyond recognition. They’d had to identify him by his dental records. Lilly’s body had never been found. It was believed that she had been thrown from the car upon impact and that her body washed out to the sea at the bottom of the cliff.
They believed that whoever shot Lord Harrington had tried to cover up the crime by making it look like he and his daughter had gotten into a horrible car accident. And because he had been wealthy and titled, and because MI5 would have preferred not to have anyone looking too closely into why Lord Harrington might have died, he had been laid to rest quickly and Lilly had been declared dead. Unfortunately, the ones responsible still had not been identified.
As a covert agent for MI5, Lord Harrington had been investigating the electronic theft of thousands of pounds from trust funds and legitimate companies in England. The situation came to his attention when he had launched a probe into his own company when funds had gone missing.
Those funds had been diverted to accounts overseas, transferred again and again until they disappeared entirely in dummy accounts. That’s when Elite Ops had become interested in the case.
No one could track who was doing it, how they were doing it, or who would be targeted next. Until Lord Harrington had sent a message to MI5 that he had figured it out. Before the agency could send anyone out to his estate to pull him in, he had turned up dead, and his daughter had disappeared. However, money was still disappearing, and they had finally managed to track it to several terrorist accounts and it looked like someone among England’s very wealthy was involved, which made it a delicate situation for MI5. And though they might hesitate to investigate England’s upper crust, Elite Ops had no such compunction.
Pulling beneath the wide receiving area of the Marriott, Travis cut the power to the Harley, unclipped his helmet, and swung his leg over the seat before striding through the electronic doors to the reception desk.
The tired young woman who checked him in paid a little too much attention to the wet leather he was wearing. The glint of lust in her eyes assured him that if he needed any company when she got off her shift, he only had to let her know.
Hell, he should take her up on it, he thought as he strode to the elevator. He would have, if he wasn’t damned sure that he’d end up disgusting himself. Once a man saw heaven in one woman’s arms, then nothing else would do. And that scared the shit out of him, the thought that no other woman but Lilly would do.
Sliding the security key card into the electronic slot, Travis waited for the green light before stepping carefully into the room, his fingers curled around the butt of the gun holstered beneath his shirt.
The room was empty. The sense of vacancy that filled it wrapped around him. It was pure loneliness. Hell, he would have almost preferred an assassin.
Closing the door behind him, Travis tossed his leather bag to the empty chair beside the bed and stared around the darkened room for long moments before moving to the lamp and flipping it on.
Turning, he came to a hard stop at the sight that met him in the shadowed corner on the far side of the room.
“Hell, I didn’t even sense you.” Travis raked his fingers through his hair as Jordan uncurled himself from the chair next to the small round table. “I thought we were meeting later.”
Jordan was an enigma to him, as well as to the rest of the team. Even his nephew, Noah Blake, admitted that his uncle was damned complicated. Travis knew he had never worked with another man as dangerous, nor as completely icy, as Jordan Malone.
“We need to talk before we meet with the commanders from Elite Two. You’ll be accompanying them to Switzerland, and I wanted to brief you first,” Jordan informed him as he moved to the tiny kitchen station in the corner and pulled open the door to the box refrigerator.
“I could have used a nap first,” Travis grunted.
Why the hell Switzerland? The last he heard he was heading to England.
He could have used some time to think about this one.
“You want the nap or full disclosure?” Jordan asked as he pulled free two beers, uncapped them, and handed one to Travis before returning to his chair.
Full disclosure from Commander Tight-ass? Now that would sure as hell be a change.
Setting the bottle on the dresser behind him, Travis threw the helmet to the bed before peeling off his wet jacket and throwing Jordan a dark glare.
“Since when do you give full disclosure?” he asked.
Bright blue eyes flashed with a hint of anger as Jordan lifted the bottle and took a long drink of the beer. When he set the beer back on the table, his expression was once again cool, composed.
“Since we’re using a noncombatant,” Jordan stated, his voice harder than normal.
Travis watched him carefully now. “Night Hawk isn’t a noncombatant, Jordan,” he reminded him. “She’s an agent.”
Jordan took a long sip of his beer, his expression thoughtful before saying, “Not any longer.”
Travis froze. He’d never heard of an Elite Ops agent being released from duty. It was a life sentence. Try to run, try to hide, even dare to think of revealing the truth about
your life, and it was fatal.
“What do you mean, not any longer?”
The only way she could have managed release was death. And she couldn’t be dead. She couldn’t.
Leaning forward, Jordan braced his elbows on his knees and stared back at him, his expression remote, but Travis felt the tension emanating from the other man.
“We believe Night Hawk has been compromised,” Jordan said. “Two months ago she was shot outside of Elite Two’s headquarters. She was struck in the head.”
Two months ago. She would have just been returning to England. Two months and he was just now learning what had happened to her.
Travis felt ice form in his veins. For one everlasting moment bleak darkness seemed to flow through him, to slice into the hardened shield he’d placed around his heart.
Night Hawk. She was tiny as hell, fragile, slender. There were times she appeared almost broken inside. She was the type of woman that a man wanted to protect, to wrap in cotton batting and hold close to his heart forever.
The fact that she was a trained sniper with a rating that other snipers would envy never failed to amaze him. She didn’t look strong enough to carry the rifle he knew had been customized for her. She sure as hell didn’t look merciless enough to use it, though he knew she was.
She was filled with regret, with bitterness. There was a dark, overwhelming agony that lived in her eyes, and a hunger that went far beyond the lust he knew she felt for him.