Midnight Promises (Midnight series)

  Midnight Promises

  By Lisa Marie Rice

  In their race for the truth, love must prove more powerful than America’s worst enemy...

  When a gorgeous, bleeding woman on the run falls into the arms of Sean “Metal” O’Brien, the former SEAL medic knows just what he can do. Heal her. Tend to her. Keep her safe.

  What he can’t seem to do is keep his guard up. Something about the haunted, hunted beauty knocks down all his defenses.

  Felicity Ward is no stranger to secrets. Raised in the Witness Protection Program, her whole childhood was a lie. But she couldn’t have known that her family’s secrets—secrets she didn’t even know she was keeping—could spark a nuclear war.

  And nothing could have prepared her for the tough, sexy warrior who first saves her life and then vows to protect it, no matter what.

  75,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  Happy New Year! As always, I’m eschewing any sort of formal resolution because I know it would be abandoned within a month (and probably by January 2nd). Instead, every year, I promise myself that I’ll continue to read widely and generously, across publishers, authors and genres, and that I’ll never apologize for either what I read, or how much time I spend doing it. I hope you’ll all join me in promising the same to yourself this and every year!

  This month, Washington, D.C., power couple Sam and Nick are back in Marie Force’s romantic suspense Fatal Scandal. This is a series it’s never too late to dive into and find out what thousands of readers rave about. Pick up Fatal Scandal today or go back to the beginning with Fatal Affair.

  Joining Marie in the D.C. setting is Emma Barry with Party Lines. In this contemporary romance, as a presidential campaign rages and a reckless affair becomes a relationship, a cynical Democrat and an ambitious Republican will have to choose between party loyalty and their hearts. Recommended for those who love Scandal, opposites-attract romances, or a book where a happy ever after seems impossible because the lives of our characters are just too different.

  Looking for a hot alpha male and a smart, self-sufficient heroine in a cracktastic contemporary romance read? Meet Metal: he’s trained to kill and to heal. So when a beautiful, wounded woman falls into his arms, he can save her and defend her against the ruthless enemies after the secrets in her head. Midnight Promises by Lisa Marie Rice delivers a sexy, page-turning read!

  Speaking of sexy, Jeffe Kennedy’s Under His Touch is sure to heat things up. Unable to resist each other, a reserved Brit and his much younger colleague defy common sense and convention to indulge in a very kinky secret affair in this erotic romance.

  For mystery fans, Shirley Wells is back with Dead Simple, which sees P.I. Dylan Scott put his personal problems aside to hunt down a killer and find justice for an old friend. See how the Dylan Scott Mysteries started in Presumed Dead.

  In Anna Richland’s paranormal romance The Second Lie, when an immortal Viking thief tries to scam a California wine merchant, he discovers he picked the wrong woman to rip off. Stig knows escaping their kidnappers won’t be easy, but gaining Christina’s trust is even harder.

  Also in paranormal romance this month is Broken Shadows by A.J. Larrieu, in which a telekinetic who’s lost her gift finds new purpose as a supernatural neutralizer—if only the man she loves wasn’t susceptible to her altered powers.

  Historical romance fans will be happy to see a new offering from Susanna Fraser. In Freedom to Love, a British officer wounded at the Battle of New Orleans is rescued by a mixed-race Creole beauty—and when he discovers she has dire troubles of her own, his honor as a gentleman demands he rescue her in turn.

  Last, we say goodbye to a beloved character and series in Transmuted, the last installment of Karina Cooper’s St. Croix Chronicles. She might have won the battle, but Cherry and her companions will risk it all to see the Karakash Veil’s threat finally ended. Don’t miss this wonderful conclusion, or start the journey now with Cherry and pick up Tarnished, available from Avon.

  Coming in February 2015: the first in a new erotic romance trilogy from Lynda Aicher, and three incredible new authors bring us Russian skaters, post-apocalyptic love and a fresh new adult mystery.

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month—and a wonderful year—of books you love, remember and recommend.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  This one is dedicated to my son, starting his life as a creative. Good luck, my love.

  Acknowledgments

  Immense thanks to Christine Witthohn and Angela James

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Manhattan

  February 20

  One young woman could hold the key to a new world order and a resurgent Russia. The daughter of a traitor. All he had to do was find her.

  Vladimir Borodin stood at the window of his presidential suite at the sumptuous Court Place Hotel, looking down Fifth Avenue. It was snowing lightly and the streets were thronged with expensively dressed men and women hurrying on their way to dinner or the theater. The shop windows gleamed, filled with expensive items. Though Borodin couldn’t hear them through the double glazed windows he knew the streets would be filled with the sounds of rich happy shoppers making dinner plans.

  All was well with America.

  But twenty-five years ago, when instead of being an oligarch, the CEO of Intergaz, the largest energy corporation in Russia, he’d been Colonel Vladimir Borodin of the Komitét Gosudàrstvennoj Bezopàsnosti, the feared KGB, he’d been so very very close to destroying this country. It would have taken America a generation, maybe two generations, to come back to a semblance of nationhood, to claw its way back up to a third-rate economy.

  And the Soviet Union would have become the most powerful nation on earth. Right now, if things hadn’t gone wrong, Russia would be sending blankets and powdered milk to the teeming masses of poor in America. The Soviet Union would still be alive, strong and rich, bestriding the world.

  Instead, the Soviet Union had fallen and a much reduced Russia had risen from its ashes.

  They had counted on Nikolai Darin for the means to destroy America. Tragically, Darin died twenty-five years ago before finishing the task. Or so they thought. But he hadn’t. He had died a few years ago in America. And he had a daughter who went by the outlandish American name of Felicity Ward.

  She held the key to everything. There was still time to implement the plan that had been born a generation ago. Catch the woman and make her talk. Make her tell him where they were.

  Borodin checked his watch. It was 5:00 p.m., soon it would be time to call for room service. After dinner, while waiting for word that Felicity Ward was caught and on her way to him, he’d treat himself to an Armagnac. He could taste it already. He’d come to the States with a team of five men, four of them pilots. His assistant, Anatoli Lagoshin, together with a pilot, had been dispatched to intercept the woman at the Portland, Oregon airpo
rt. Anatoli was flying cross country in one of Intergaz’s corporate jets and he would land before Felicity Ward.

  He’d nab her, fly her back to New York with the same plane and with a little persuasion, they’d get what they came for.

  And if Felicity suffered it was only fair. Her father had cost Borodin twenty-five years and their motherland, the Soviet Union, had been wiped off the map. If Darin hadn’t betrayed his country, they would now be masters of the world.

  Felicity, his daughter, should suffer. And she would.

  Chapter One

  Portland International Airport

  Feb 20

  Safe. The word kept rolling around in Felicity Ward’s head. Safe. Safe. Safe. The word seemed odd when she repeated it over and over. Like a sound with no meaning. Like the word itself, really. Safe didn’t exist. It never had for her.

  But her friend Lauren had used it so often lately. And it sounded as if, after being abducted by a crazy guy for money and saved by her lover, a former Navy SEAL—well, it sounded like Lauren was more or less as safe as you could be in this dangerous world.

  Felicity Ward, aka Alina Darin, aka Katrin Valk knew all about the world being dangerous. Her father, Nikolai Darin, a world-famous Soviet nuclear physicist, had defected to the United States before she was born. He’d defected the night he’d won the Nobel Prize for Physics and the CIA had orchestrated a fake car crash. He’d planned it under the nose of the KGB. If the KGB had suspected his defection, they’d have sent a wet team.

  Ironically, her parents really had died in a car crash, only it was nineteen years later in America.

  Which just went to show that though most dangers came from other human beings, there were also natural dangers such as accidents and fire and snowstorms. Like the one raging now.

  The sky outside the enormous airport skylights was unnaturally dark and snow flurries swirled against the hundred-foot-high windowpanes.

  She needed to get to the taxicab stand fast. Her flight from Burlingham, Vermont via Chicago and Denver had been one of the last to land. If the snowstorm continued like this the roads would close down. She didn’t want to be stuck overnight in this airport, however pretty it was.

  But it was hard to move fast when she was so distracted.

  Felicity spent most of her time—well, all of her time—indoors in her apartment. The colors and sounds and smells of the airport nearly overwhelmed her. Shop after shop after shop of bright things—clothes and shoes and electronics and makeup. Felicity never went to shopping malls. She ordered everything online, and this was so distracting and enticing. So much to see.

  And the people! When was the last time she’d been in a space with so many people? They were fascinating. You could make up stories about them forever. That was one of the things she did for a living—inventing online and paper personas for people on the run. The crowd milling around the airport wasn’t on the run but you could read their stories in their faces, in their bodies.

  That man there, in the expensive rumpled suit, frowning and checking his wrist watch for the third time in a minute. Maybe he’d just gotten off a flight from Hong Kong and was waiting for his driver to take him to the meeting he was late for.

  And that woman over there in a luxury store, fingering a beautiful cashmere shawl. She had a very sad look on her face. Was she expecting someone who wasn’t coming?

  But that girl emerging from the exit area Felicity had just come from—she had someone waiting. Tall and lanky with a huge grin on his face and a bouquet of wilted daisies in his big hand.

  Fascinating.

  She felt like a puppy that had been let out in the garden after a winter indoors. All these colors and shapes and sounds...

  And purses! She walked by an upscale purse shop that made her think wryly of her own beige five-year-old canvas bag. For this trip she’d just put documents and keys and lipstick and flash drives in her laptop backpack, not even bothering with her canvas bag. Why didn’t she buy herself new purses? Just look at them in the window!

  She stopped and all but pressed her nose against the shop window. Such pretty pastel colors—had pastels just come in or had they been in for years and she hadn’t noticed? Soft leather, exquisitely fashioned details, shiny brass studs. She sidestepped and stood in front of the open door. A shop assistant in the back who’d been putting away a stack of scarves in every color of the rainbow looked up and smiled. Felicity made an I’m just looking gesture and the shop assistant nodded.

  She pulled in a deep, delighted breath and smelled leather and newness and style, if style had a smell. Portland was bound to have purse shops. Oh man, she was going to hit every single one and spend some money. It wasn’t as if she didn’t have any. She had plenty of money, she just never spent it.

  Maybe Lauren would go shopping with her. That would be...fun. Shopping with a girlfriend. Something she’d never done before. Her parents had discouraged friendships throughout her school years. At MIT her friends had mostly been men and they barely washed, let alone shopped.

  So many things she’d never done. Why hadn’t she done them? That was about to change, big-time.

  This crazy trip to Portland was sort of a test. A test to see if she could live a normal life. Go out like other people did. Take trips, go to the movies instead of watching Netflix on her seventy-eight-inch curved screen. Go shopping in RealSpace, eat out instead of ordering in. Everyone else did, why shouldn’t she?

  So this was going to be her new life. Maybe. With luck.

  Traveling to see friends, because when you went out you made friends. That was the way it worked, right?

  Right next door to the purse shop was a cosmetics shop and heavenly smells came from it. Perfumes and lotions and lipsticks and creams. Another deep breath to pull it all in, then on to the next shop.

  Shoes! Oh yes! Just look at those soft ankle boots, a fabulous shade of purple, she’d have to pull up the Pantone scale to discover the exact name, but it was gorgeous. Would it hurt to walk in for a few minutes? A glance out the windows told her that the weather—

  “Don’t move,” a voice said. Low, male, vicious. A hard thump on the back made her stagger. One big strong hand held her shoulder, another pushed something sharp against her side, at the edge of her laptop backpack straps. “Don’t turn around, don’t fucking breathe,” the voice said. “You feel this?”

  This was a knife, sharp-pointed. It had cut through her coat and sweater and the point was pressed against her skin. Any move she made would result in the knife slashing her side.

  “Yes.” Felicity tried to keep her voice even. She scanned the hall but there was no help coming. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, hurrying this way and that and not one paying her the slightest bit of attention. What would they see, anyway? A woman with a man at her back. He could be her husband, her boyfriend, her brother. “I feel it.”

  “Good. Now, this is how it’s going to work. We’re going to take the escalators down to the street level. Then head outside. You’re going to walk in a straight line the fifty meters to the escalators and be very quiet. You are not going to attract anyone’s attention because by the time you have caught someone’s attention, I’ll have sliced you open. Do you understand me?”

  She nodded.

  “Say it!”

  “I understand.”

  He spoke English well with a slight British accent and something underneath that. An accent very similar to her mother’s only better English than her mother had ever learned. Russian? Ukrainian? And he calculated in meters. Lots of people did, though, including the million and a half members of the US military plus the eight hundred thousand in the reserves. But what did she know? Linguistics weren’t her forte. Computers were.

  Computers had saved her life, were her life. Maybe...

  Another hard thump from behind to propel her forward, the
man’s hand painfully gripping her shoulder. Felicity started walking as slowly as she dared.

  Because in here, in the bustle of the crowd, there was safety in numbers. Once they had gone down to street level and exited the airport, once he’d herded her away from the crowd, any hope of rescue would be gone. Though it was only midafternoon, the sky was dark. The weather outside would make everybody walk around in a little cocoon of self-preservation, eyes slitted against the snow, watching their feet, not noticing anyone else.

  If she could make an escape it would have to be here, inside. Outside the doors of the airport, she’d be lost. Whatever this man wanted from her, he’d get. Whatever this was, it might end with her body dumped by the side of the road.

  She slowed down slightly, head bowed, dejection in every line of her body. She watched people moving, some fast, some slow, and calculated trajectories. A watch-and-sunglasses kiosk with stand-alone revolving displays was coming up on her right hand side.

  Felicity lunged and a line of fire sliced down her side. She was cut, maybe badly, but she was free of the heavy hand on her shoulder, of the knife held in the man’s other hand. However badly she was hurt, she’d be in worse shape if he caught her again.

  He wanted quiet, he wanted to grab her without any fuss, so he wouldn’t shout out.

  If he had help—if there were other men around as backup—she was in trouble. There was no way of knowing. She could only implement the crazy plan that had blossomed between the shoe store and the watch kiosk.

  The line of fire, as if someone had pressed a hot piece of steel down her side, turned to pain. Hot, searing pain that made her gasp.

  Passing the watch-and-sunglasses kiosk she shoved really hard at the two displays, happy they tumbled, scattering watches and sunglasses everywhere.

  Felicity didn’t dare look around to see where he was. All she could do was run. She took off, dragging her carry-on and realized instantly it would slow her down in the crowd. She abandoned it. She had the only thing she really needed in her backpack—her specially designed laptop, worth over fifty thousand dollars and now worth her life. She barreled forward, pushing and tripping people, leaving as much confusion behind as possible.