ARROGANT BRIT (A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE) (73 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
stood quietly in
front of the huge oaken doors at the front of Nathan’s mansion, but I knew
something was wrong even before he opened them. His private security team,
usually quiet and more or less invisible, was out in force. They seemed to be
scouring the exterior of the building, although after a quick glance in my
direction, they completely ignored my presence.

Relax.
Innocent before proven guilty. Don’t just let yourself fly off the handle,
I told myself, trying to calm my nerves.

It
didn’t make sense. Wallace was in jail. O’Rourke was dead. Any Paddie left
would be too busy stuffing their pockets with the leftovers to bother with
retaliation. Nathan didn’t need this kind of security presence, unless there was
another, more sinister reason they were here.

One of
the men walked past, sweeping a long antenna through the air, the business-end
attached to a strange little electronic box. He barely even acknowledged my
presence.

When
Nathan finally opened the door, he looked different. On the courthouse steps he
had seemed a happy man, a braggart and a lover. Now, he carried a look that was
anything but calm. I’d watched him stand up and allow himself to be shot. The
last thing I’d expected to ever see on his face was fear.

Was it
possible to be sexy and scared? Nathan pulled it off. Sort of.

“Get
inside,” he whispered, pulling me through the door and shutting it behind us. I
could hear a mechanical whirring and a high-pitched electronic whine, and I
glanced back to see expensive looking locks sliding into place behind me. They
looked better suited for a bank vault than a front door.

“What’s
going on, Nathan? You’re scaring me,” I said, my hand instinctively moving
toward my purse and the piece of death-dealing metal within. Before I could go
any further, Nathan had grabbed my arm and dragged me through the living room,
past the kitchen, and around near a staircase. Hitting a piece of the wall
paneling, I watched in silence as it slid away, revealing a heavy metal door.
It swung open, and I could see the three enormous metal bolts that had
retracted from the wall.

“Get
inside,” Nathan said fiercely. I complied, despite every instinct in my body
telling me to get the hell out of here. A moment later, the man I had come to
both love and fear in such a short amount of time was standing before me, the
huge metal bolts closing off any hope of escape.

“What
are you doing, Sandra?” Nathan asked, staring down at the gun I’d pulled out
into the open. “Put that thing away.”

“You
just locked me in a dark room and you look like something has you scared to
death, Nathan. You tell me what the hell is going on right now and I’ll think
about putting this away,” I replied, my hand shaking ever so slightly.

What
the hell was he doing? I stepped backward as he moved toward me, one step, then
another, until I was flush against the cold metal wall of our makeshift prison.

“Stop.
I’m warning you, Nathan!” I shouted, holding the gun up. He stepped closer,
reaching out. Every part of me wanted to pull the trigger. Here he was, the man
I thought I could trust, ready to show me how foolish I’d been… But I couldn’t
do it. His hand wrapped the barrel of the gun and pushed it aside as he swept
me up into his arms.

“Oh,
God. I thought I might not see you again,” he whispered, tears streaming down
his face. I didn’t even have a chance to protest as he forced his lips down
onto mine. What the hell was going on? He ran his hands over my body, my gun
clattering to the floor. I pushed him back as hard as I could, separating us.

“What
the hell is this?” I asked, looking around the small space. Shelves lined the
walls, and a phone was wired into one of them. Next to me, a small cot was
pushed up against the side of the space and a laptop sat atop a little table,
open to what looked like a stock market ticker.

“It’s a
safe room, Sandra. Three-foot-thick walls, enough food, water, and air for a
month. I had it built a few months after I moved into this place, as a
precaution…”

“Why
the hell am I in here?” I asked indignantly, staring into his crystalline eyes.
Despite its name, this room made me feel anything but safe. I felt
claustrophobic, like the walls and Nathan were all closing in around me. I felt
like a cornered animal, like a victim waiting to happen.

I had never felt this way with him before. I didn’t
like it.

“Because
I needed a safe place to talk about this,” Nathan said, tossing a small
recording device onto the table. I recognized it immediately. It was a standard
issue t22 short range video and audio transmitter. We used them to listen in on
people during investigations. “There’s dozens of them all over the house,” he
added.

“Of
course there are. You were potentially connected to one of the biggest human
smuggling rings we’ve ever taken down. Do you really think the police wouldn’t
have ears on you?” I shouldn’t have been so open, but I also didn’t like lying
to the man who had stolen my heart. I needed to look into his eyes and know one
way or another if he was guilty.

“I’m
pulling these things out of here. All of them. I’ll live in this goddamned safe
room if I have to. The police offered me protection for my testimony, they gave
me immunity,” Nathan replied.

I
almost smirked. Immunity protected you from past crimes, not the present. The
captain had to be hell-bent on taking Nathan down if he was investing this much
of the budget into tracking and listening in on him. Any little misstep and the
asshole billionaire would be behind bars. Just thinking about the women on that
container ship made my blood boil. I wanted to be the one to slap the handcuffs
on this asshole…

This asshole who made me love him.

“And
there’s this,” he continued, tossing a small box next to the transmitter. This
box was far more chilling. Photographs spilled out onto the table, dozens of
shots from every single angle. My apartment, my car, the inside of my bedroom…

And one of me from just last night, asleep in my bed.

I stared at it for a moment, fear washing over me.

“What
the hell is this?” I asked, trembling in place. I had to maintain my composure.
Nathan was trying to put me off balance. He was trying to make me need him. I
could see right through this game—he’d put someone in my bedroom and had them
take pictures of me. He had to…

“Did
someone hurt you?” he asked, his eyes suddenly alight with an angry, terrified
fire. “So help me God, if someone hurt you…”

“I’m
okay. Nobody hurt me. I didn’t even know they were there,” I whispered, sitting
down on the cot next to him. He seemed sincere, and that set warning bells off
in my mind. Was he playing me for a fool? Was this whole thing an act? Did
Nathaniel Hale have me photographed in my own bed? And if he didn’t, who the
hell did?

I
couldn’t put it past him. Knowing what I knew, what the Captain had shown me,
Nathan was capable of damn near anything. If he was half as cunning as Captain
Pierce had made him out to be, there was no telling what plan he might concoct
to keep me from seeing the truth.

Maybe
he intended to keep me out of harm’s way. Or maybe he wanted me in here where I
couldn’t interfere with his plans, where I couldn’t snoop around and ruin his
schemes. Even if I’d quit the force, he might have suspected that I’d still be
able to put my detective training to good use. Maybe this was intended to be my
prison.

“We can
stop this,” I said, trying to manufacture a reason to get us out of this room.
“The police, the FBI…”

“No, Sandra.
Don’t you see? Someone with a badge has been watching me this whole time.
Things haven’t sat right with me since the courthouse transfer.”

The
transfer… My mind flashed back to the men I’d shot. It played over the chase,
and the way Officer Kimball had sped off ahead.

“There
were two in uniform when they came to pick me up. Everything seemed normal. The
lanky guy, the one with the scar, he gets me in the car and shoots his buddy in
the head, point blank. A couple of the undercover cops tried to stop him, but
it was too late.”

Kimball…
It had never sat right with me. I trusted Officer Kimball, and he’d gotten in
the car with scar-face like nothing was wrong. If he was in on it, why did he
end up taking a bullet?

My mind
went back to the day I shot O’Rourke. I could see Kimball and the way he
greeted the man with the scar. It was as if they knew each other… Or… Maybe he
was expecting someone.

Still,
that didn’t explain why Kimball had sped off ahead. If he was killed during the
pickup, that meant he thought everything was normal right up until the last
minute… He never would have broken from protocol… Unless…

Captain’s
orders… Kimball would have trusted the Captain. If he was ordered to hurry to
the pickup, he would have done it. If the Captain had assigned someone to ride
along with him, he wouldn’t have questioned it.

Captain
Pierce had called Kimball “compromised.” He’d branded him a traitor.

“They’ve
pulled my passport, Sandra. They say it’s temporary, in case I’m needed for any
further questioning. Why?
_The
case is
over.
Peter Wallace is in jail. They’re railroading me,” Nathan
whispered.

Now it
was the captain’s voice ringing in my head as the detective inside me went to
work, putting all the pieces together.

“We
still have a rat, Sandra. Officer Kimball was compromised, and now he’s dead.”

That
son of a bitch,
I thought to myself. It
all made sense. Nathan wasn’t the one who had been playing me all this time. It
was Captain Pierce.

And now
he was trying to turn me on Nathan. If I gave him access to one of Nathan’s computers,
there was no telling what he might do.

But
why? What the hell was his angle? Money? Power? Promotion? Was he working some
kind of vigilante angle? If Captain Pierce had any part in this, then the blood
of thirty-six women, and maybe even more, was on his hands.

There
was still one small problem, though. A container was on an inbound ship, and it
had Nathan’s fingerprints all over it.

“Are you okay? Talk to me,” Nathan said.

“Nathan,
I’m going to need you to be honest with me,” I whispered, staring at him. My
gun was sitting on the floor well out of reach, but I was already making plans
to lunge for it, if necessary. There were so many possibilities surrounding
this whole sordid affair that I still couldn’t rule anything out, and that
included Nathan’s possible involvement.

My
heart told me a different story. It begged me to rush into Nathan’s arms, to
bury my face in his chest and promise to protect him, no matter what. Listening
to it would have been dangerous, but at that moment, it was all that I wanted
to do.

I
forced myself to listen to my brain instead. That way, I was far less likely to
get myself shot.

“I’ll
tell you anything, Sandra,” he replied, his eyes sparkling in the way I’d come
to enjoy. Could he really be the evil man the Captain had made him out to be?
I’d been a detective long enough to know when someone wasn’t being sincere, and
either Nathan was the best liar I’d ever met, or he was genuinely concerned
about me.

“You signed for another container. Didn’t you?”

His
eyes cast to the floor quickly, not wanting to meet my own. He might as well
have come right out and said it: yes, that was his doing. My body was tense,
muscles ready to throw myself to the floor, toward the gun that might be my
only salvation.

“I had to, Sandra. Let me explain.”

“You
want to explain? The last container ended up at the bottom of the ocean. You
just condemned another group of women—
children
—to
death or sex slavery, and you want to
explain
?!”

My mother
would have been proud. Her angry woman voice was channeling through me from
beyond the grave. Maybe Nathan was right; maybe the Captain was trying to hand
his ass over to the Irish, but none of that mattered if this asshole was still
bringing women over. This time, he had no excuse. He knew what was in that
container, but he’d signed for it anyway. This wasn’t a case of willful
ignorance. He was a monster, and he needed to be stopped.