“Yes, sir, right away.”
The little interlude relaxed Chloe Mason.
Telling their story was a real ordeal for some women. They were all somehow ashamed, though how they could possibly be ashamed of ending up as someone’s punching bag was beyond Mike. This moment out of time was a respite for Chloe. Her breathing pattern evened out. A little color came back to her pretty face.
The door to Harry’s office slid open and Marisa walked in with a tray. She’d done them proud. A big teapot, three cups, milk, and home-baked cookies brought in by Sam’s wife Nicole, baked by their housekeeper.
“Harry.” Mike looked at his brother, barely refraining from poking him in the side with his elbow again. “You want to pour?”
Harry started slightly, as i {ligghtf he’d actually been asleep and had suddenly woken up. “Sure, ah. Sure.” His gaze locked onto the woman’s face. “How do you take your tea, Ms. Mason?”
She smiled gently. “Dash of milk, one teaspoon of sugar, thank you.”
It was the first time Mike had seen her smile. She was clearly under enormous stress, probably terrified, and yet the smile was genuine, blinding. And transformed her face from quietly lovely to otherworldly beauty. A real looker. She didn’t catch your attention the first time or maybe not even the second time, but when she did catch your attention—watch out.
Mike felt a tug somewhere in his chest he didn’t ever remember feeling, like someone was pulling at a hook.
They were going to take care of this lovely woman. Keep her safe, take her away from danger.
And then, well—forget about beating the guy up. Mike was going to find the fuckhead who’d hurt her and kill him.
Into the Crossfire
San Diego
June 28
Well, well. Look at that.
Sam Reston leaned his shoulder against the wall of the hallway of his office building and simply drank in his fill.
There she was.
His own personal wet dream, standing there in the hallway between his office and hers, desperately scrabbling through a huge, expensive-looking purse.
Everything about her was expensive, classy. Top of the line. Real high maintenance, too. The kind of woman he stepped right around without a second thought because he didn’t have the time or the inclination, but shit, with her he’ ~o" cod of womand make an exception.
Any man would.
Nicole Pearce. The most beautiful woman in the world. Certainly the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, hands down.
He remembered every second of the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. Two weeks, three days and thirty minutes ago. But who was counting?
He’d been under cover, infiltrating a gang of smugglers and thieves working the docks. His client, a big shipping company, had found it impossible to get a handle on the losses incurred during transhipment at the docks, which last year had totaled almost $10 million.
The police had gotten nowhere and the company suspected that someone somewhere was being bought off. Sam hoped it wasn’t in the police department. His brother Mike was a SWAT officer with the San Diego PD and incredibly proud of it.
Someone had definitely dropped the ball, though. So the ship owner had decided to go private.
Smart move.
For a hell of a lot of money, Sam had gone under cover, working the night shift as a stevedore, spreading word around that he wasn’t averse to some under-the-table money. He’d been contacted, and had quickly made his way up the hierarchy of the Bucinski gang, finally rising to the point where they had included him on two major hauls. He’d been wired to the teeth and had about a hundred photographs nailing gang members, their scumbag boss, and three corrupt Port Authority employees.
The fuckheads had not just been stealing cargo, they were involved in sex trafficking, too, bringing in kidnapped young girls hidden in the holds of legitimate ships, the owners of the ships entirely unaware of their human cargo.
The whole gang was going down. The shitheads deserved the needle but wouldn’t get it. Each of them would, however, spend the next twenty to thirty being some gangbanger’s newest girlfriend, which might even be better.
So Sam had looked like a scumbag the day he first saw her. Being a scumbag had been his job for the previous two weeks.
When San Reston did something, he did it well.
Goin"#0fong under cover wasn’t like in the movies. You ate, dressed, acted and even smelled the part. While under cover, he rarely washed or shaved, and wore the same clothes for days at a time. He knew he smelled ripe and looked dangerous. Well, hell. He was dangerous—he was murderous with rage at the thought of fuckheads willing to rape little girls spending even one day out of jail.
He’d been up thirty-six hours straight and was just coming into the office after another all-nighter to shower, change and grab a few z’s on his very comfortable office couch when he’d seen her.
Actually, he smelled her before he saw her. The elevator pinged, the doors opened and some floral . . . thing that traveled into men’s heads through the nasal passageways and fucked with their brains reached out and walloped him.
He saw her a second later and froze. Simply froze. Later, when he’d untangled his head from his ass, he’d been amazed. He’d been a SEAL until his eardrum blew, and he’d been a damned good one.
SEAL training beats surprise right out of a man. You have to have good, solid nerves just to think of trying out for BUD/S. If you were the easily surprised type, you were weeded out fast.
Nothing took him by surprise, ever.
Except Nicole Pearce.
Sam had known that the tiny studio office across the hall had been rented out. The building’s manager had told him. To a translation agency—though Sam had no fucking idea what that could be—run by one Nicole Pearce.
He hadn’t thought more about it.
That particular morning he was more exhausted, filthy and pissed off than usual. He smelled, too, of sweat and beer. He was in a shitty mood, ready to cut the job short simply to get the top guys into the slammer fast. But he knew better. With the evidence he was getting, the entire operation would go down and that was worth a few extra days or weeks living with slime.
A second after that amazing, womanly smell chock-full of pheromones went straight to his dick, he saw her, and his entire body seized up. He was unable to move, unable to breathe, for a second or two.
Midnight black, glossy shoulder-length hair, enormous, uptilted eyes the exact color of the cobalt glass sculpture he’d turned down as too expensive for his office, eyes with lashes so long and thick they could stir up a breeze, slightly overlarge mouth with that Angelithted ina Jolie dent in the bottom lip, perfect straight little nose, creamy skin.
Fuck-me shoes.
Incredible hourglass figure poured into a demure blue suit that exactly matched the color of her eyes and hugged curves guaranteed to make any male within a one-mile radius salivate.
She sure had the two moving guys salivating, as she directed them carrying in a heavy teak desk and a tiny antique sofa. They were doing her bidding like two puppy dogs hoping for a bone.
She turned to look at him directly, at the ping of the elevator, and Christ, all he could do was stare at the dazzler with the deep blue eyes.
Eyes that watched him warily.
Sam was exhausted, but a man would have to be dead not to have all his hormones wake up at the sight of the most beautiful woman on earth. And, hell, his hormones weren’t the only thing to wake up.
Instant boner, right there in the upscale hallway of the very expensive building he’d chosen as headquarters of his new company.
Shit.
Thank God he had on his tightest jeans because she was already looking alarmed at the sight of him. Who could blame her? He’d put a lot of care into looking like a scumbag, walking like a scumbag, thinking like a scumbag, even smelling like one.
And he was enraged down to the bone at the sex trafficking he’d discovered. That wa
s something that was hard to switch off.
A woman like this would have antenna way out there where men were concerned. She’d be able to read men like other women read fashion magazines. It was a fact of her life. She was stunning, with the kind of natural good looks that would carry her through from childhood to old age as a beauty. So she’d grown up with the background buzz of hot male attention and she’d have learned to filter out the bad ones, the dangerous ones pretty quick.
He wasn’t bad but he was dangerous and he carried that with him, like a shroud. He’d had a brutal childhood and had learned street fighting before he could read. By adulthood, he was really good with his fists, with a knife, hell—with a rock. Uncle Sam had taken what he was by nature, refined it, armed him up and spent ove anoodr a million dollars turning him into a killing machine.
He’d made his living as a soldier leading hard men, and now as a civilian he made his living being tougher than most.
He’d come straight into the office after working the night shift on the docks, then sharing a beer with the man who’d recruited him for Bucinski, Kyle Connelly. Sam had nursed one beer to Connelly’s ten, and laughed while the pusbag told him about the perks of the job. Extra money, all the drugs you could snort or shoot up and sex. Sam had had to listen while Connelly bragged about handcuffing a twelve-year-old Vietnamese girl to a steel post and raping her. Sam had even had to commiserate with the fucker, whining because he’d been sore afterward, after popping the girl’s cherry.
Listening to this, laughing, slapping him on the back in sympathy, had been one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do in his hard life. His hands had literally itched to draw out the garrote wire in his belt and rip the fucker’s head right off.
So he’d been fighting mad when the doors had opened and—whoa. The world’s most beautiful woman, right there in front of him.
He’d actually had to rub his eyes, sure that what was right before him had to be some kind of vision, maybe some kind of compensation for the horrible night.
Her eyes had widened when she’d seen him. He knew what she was seeing—a very large, very strong, hugely pissed-off man, dressed like a bum and smelling like one, too.
Well, he couldn’t shave, wash and change his clothes right then and there and there was nothing he could do to kill those deadly pissed-off vibes so he’d merely walked down the corridor and entered his office.
Her huge cobalt blue eyes had followed him warily every step of the way. She’d actually stepped back as he approached, which pissed him off even more. Goddamn it, the last thing he’d ever do was hurt a woman.
Though, in fairness, she couldn’t possibly know that. Probably every cell in her single urban female body was screaming danger. He knew she was single because though he saw she had some fancy rings on those pretty hands of hers, none of them were on her left-hand ring finger.
She absolutely had to be single because Sam couldn’t even remotely imagine a man married or even engaged to a looker like that who wouldn’t put a rock the size of her head on her finger, to warn other men off her. And what husband or fiancé wouldn’t be around to help his womanhelwho move into her new office?
She couldn’t know that his rage wasn’t in any way directed at her, of course, but at the system. He wanted to nail the gang right now and send them all into the slammer five minutes later, special treatment reserved for one Kyle Connelly, child rapist.
But what you want and what you can have are very different things. No one knew that more than he did. So he’d had to stay under cover, sick at heart, wondering if some other little girls were being raped while he put together enough evidence to put the fuckers away. And to do that he had to stay in Scumland for another couple of weeks.
So every time Nicole Pearce saw him, he’d been tired and grim and dirty, inside and out. Dealing with the scum of the earth was filthy work.
He knew that while he was on this mission, there was no room for anything else, certainly not something as beautiful as Nicole Pearce, so he’d waited.
But all that was now behind him and life had just handed him a big fat present all wrapped up in a fancy bow, to thank him for his patience.
Nicole Pearce, outside her office, looking as beautiful as ever, even with a ferocious scowl on her face, rifling through her bag and jacket pockets, looking for her keys.
The keys to the flimsiest piece-of-shit lock he’d ever seen. When he’d signed the lease on his office, he’d been happy with the space and the location and—though he ordinarily didn’t give a shit about his surroundings—the classiness of the building. It was the kind of building that made clients relax, which was crazy to him. What the fuck difference did mellow earth tones and fancy designer junk make?
But to most people it made a difference. A huge one. He’d noticed that. Noticed tense clients start unwinding after entering the building, with its liveried doorman, elegant brass and teak fittings, slate floors, expensive floral arrangements scattered around.
The building supervisor had given him the name of some office designer, who’d come in, taken measurements of the huge space he’d rented and come back a week later and outfitted the office so it looked like a spaceship. A designer spaceship, sleek and comfortable. It all cost a fortune but it was worth it, to see his clients’ faces as they walked in.
Anyone who came to Reston Security by definition needed relaxing, and it was good that his office did the trick because Sam wasn’t good at putting people at ease. He had no charm and no small talk in him.
When Sam came across a problem, he wanted it solved yesterday. He became an arrow shooting straight at a solution.
That attitude had worked real well for him in the Teams, where problems and possible solutions were clearly stated and no one’s goddamned feelings ever came into anything.
Civilian life had been a bitch, as Sam found himself tussling with clients who were afraid to say what they wanted, who kept intel from him, who had hidden agendas. Christ.
So the upscale, soothing premises had come in real handy.
Not to mention Nicole Pearce, right across the hallway from him, right now scrabbling for keys that weren’t there.
Well, he could do something about that. For a price.
“Need some help?” he asked, and suppressed a smile when she nearly jumped right out of that gorgeous skin of hers.
“Need some help?” the scary lowlife who worked for the security company across the hallway asked.
Nicole Pearce’s head whipped around, heart kicking up into a hard panicky beat in her chest. Oh God, there he was, long and broad and dark and grim. And frightening as hell.
He hadn’t been there a minute ago. Everyone on her floor came in well before her company’s opening time of 9 A.M., so she had been sure she was alone as she scrabbled in her purse, quietly freaking out.
How could such a large man move so quietly? Granted, her head was completely taken up with the tragedy of no key, but still. He was huge. Surely he’d have to have made some noise?
Come to think of it, the times she’d seen him coming and going from what she assumed was his workplace across the hall, he’d been utterly silent. Frightening.
She looked at him warily, hands still in her large purse that often doubled as a briefcase.
He was standing with arms crossed, leaning back against the wall, looking completely out of place in the elegant hallway. Tall, immensely broaimmAdobed-shouldered, grim and unsmiling. Just perfect if Central Casting had sent out an urgent call. One thug. Huge. Intimidating. Report to set.
But it hadn’t. Central Casting populated the Morrison Building in downtown San Diego with perfectly nice, perfectly tame office workers, some a little flamboyant if they were in the advertising business, but otherwise harmless.
Lowlife had absolutely no business here, staring at her out of dark, steady eyes, gaze still and unwavering, completely out of place in the context of the cream and teal accents, the expensive Murano wall sconces and the faux Louis XV Phili
ppe Starck Plexiglas console with the very real calla lilies in the Steuben vase.
She’d chosen to pay premium rent for a tiny office in the upscale building near Petco precisely because its classy, elegant design had appealed to her and because, well, it shrieked success so loudly she hoped no one could hear the crackling sound of financial distress underlying her new company.
Everyone in the building bustled in and out in morning and evening waves, well dressed, well groomed and busy busy busy. Even after the stock market crash, they all made an effort to look sleek and prosperous and successful, which was why Lowlife was so out of place.
The rent took a big chunk out of the earnings of her brand-new company, and her office was the size of a thimble, but she loved it. She’d signed the lease half an hour after the realtor had shown it to her.
That was, of course, before Lowlife started haunting the halls. Every time she turned around, it seemed, he was there. Enormous, dressed like a biker. Or how she imagined a biker would dress—what would she know? Bikers had been scarce growing up in consulates and embassies around the world.
He had a uniform of torn, filthy jeans, a formerly black tee shirt washed so many times it was a dirty gray, and at times a black leather bomber jacket.
Overlong black hair and a heavy, scruffy black beard, nothing at all like the chic designer stubble sported by the guys working at the ad agency two doors down. No, this was a man with a heavy beard who didn’t shave for weeks at a time.
But beyond not following the yuppie dress and grooming code, Lowlife was different in other ways from all the other people in the building.
She would never forget her first sight of him in the elevator, leaning one-armed against the wall, head down, looking like a warrior who had just come in from battle.
Only there was no war going on in downtown San Diego that she knew of. He’d disappeared into the office across the hall, passing some pretty fancy security, so she’d imagined he worked there.