Fatal Heat: A Navy SEAL Novella (18 page)

“Ms. Mason?” he repeated, keeping his voice gentle.

She ducked her head. “Yes, of course. I do apologize. I’ve—been under some stress lately.”

It was the first time he heard her voice. It was as soft as the rest of her, with a musical quality. And a faint British accent.

She was English? Mike dropped his hand when she sat down, then rounded Harry’s huge desk again.

She sat perched on the edge of the client chair, one of the most comfortable chairs in the world. By definition, RBK clients were in trouble, and the company wanted them to be comfortable while they talked it out. Chloe Mason didn’t look comfortable in that chair, she looked tense as hell.

Silence. Harry was still… frozen. Goddamn it. What the fuck was wrong with him?

Mike waited a beat, two. Finally, he broke the silence.

“Ms. Mason. Welcome to RBK Security. My name is Mike Keillor and this is my partner, Harry Bolt.” He shot a glance at the silent statue that was his partner and refrained from rolling his eyes. Had Harry gone back to his pattern of sleeplessness with his little daughter? Was he in a walking coma, or what? “I know you asked for an appointment with Mr. Bolt, but we often work on… cases together. Before we begin, can we offer you something, a cup of coffee? Or tea?” Thinking of that accent.

“Yes, thank you so much.” Her words came out in the rush of loosened tension. “I’d love a cup of tea.”

Right call.

Mike waited a second for Harry to move, to wake up, to fucking get with the program. Finally, he pushed the button to Marisa, their receptionist. “Marisa, do you think we could get a cup of tea in here?”

Ordinarily, Mike wouldn’t ask Marisa to do refreshment detail, but she was the mother hen of their Lost Ones. Marisa’d been a Lost One herself, and had the scars to prove it. She was a fabulous employee, hard-working and loyal. But for the battered women who made their way to the offices of RBK, Marisa went all out. She pampered them and mothered them and protected them fiercely.

“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 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’d 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.

Going 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-f 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 Angelithanagerina 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 was 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.