Fatal Heat

by Lisa Marie Rice

  He wasn’t tall but he was immensely broad—wide shoulders, thick arms, strong neck. A bodybuilder, but without that bodybuilder waddle, because he clearly built onto muscles that were already there. His movements were fast, precise, powerful. The strongest man in the room, hands down. And he’d be the strongest man in the room in most rooms.

  Michael Keillor. The K in the RBK. He wouldn’t be billionaire-rich but he didn’t have to be. He was wealthy, successful, dominant. Enough by any person’s measure.

  He scanned the lobby as he walked by, eyes dwelling for a moment on her. He didn’t break his stride, but Chloe knew he was studying her. She met his eyes, fiercely blue, very intelligent, impersonal and cold. Suddenly he blinked—the coldness vanished and something happened, but she didn’t know what.

  When he walked in, he’d launched himself across the room as if it were just a way station as he arrowed toward the offices visible behind a glass-plated sliding door, but now he detoured and stopped for a moment at the desk, elbows on the counter, leaning forward to talk to the receptionist.

  The woman looked startled, then shot a glance at Chloe.

  Her heart gave a painful beat in her chest. He was discussing her? Why? Did he have some inkling of why she was here? How could he? No one on earth knew why she was here. Not even old Mr. Pelton, the family lawyer, knew, because she hadn’t approached him yet.

  Time enough for that if she were successful. Not that Mr. Pelton would ever approve.

  No. Her mission here was completely secret.

  So why was Michael Keillor discussing her with the receptionist?

  It was . . . it was unnatural. Chloe wasn’t used to being the focus of { thfac anyone’s attention. She didn’t remember learning the art of passing under everyone’s radar. It had always been there and she’d perfected it over the years.

  She never dressed outrageously. Her clothes were expensive, but low-key, never too trendy. She was always clean and groomed, but never flashy.

  All her life, people had taken one look and simply forgotten her in an instant, walking on by. Chloe didn’t want attention. Not out of shyness, but because she was afraid of it. Since she could remember, attention had meant danger. If someone looked at her too closely, her heart began pounding, an instinctive and totally uncontrollable reaction.

  Michael Keillor nodded at the receptionist, took another look at her that had her hands sweating, and disappeared through the sliding glass door into the offices at the back of the lobby.

  Nine fifteen. The appointment with Harry Bolt was in a quarter of an hour, if he was a punctual man.

  Chloe sat back to do what she did best—wait. It seemed almost her entire childhood—what she could remember of it anyway—and adolescence had been spent waiting. Waiting for the scars to heal, waiting for the casts to come off, waiting to recover from the last surgery, waiting for the next one. She was the goddess of waiting. If there were a PhD in waiting, she’d have been awarded one years ago.

  She knew exactly how to prepare for a bout of waiting, how to breathe shallowly, slowly, how to distance herself from her body, how to will herself to stillness.

  In college, she’d read up on a number of behavioral and mind-control techniques and found that she’d taught them all to herself instinctively, without knowing they existed.

  Chloe could outwait anyone. Just sink right down into herself until she needed to come back up.

  But right now, it shocked her to realize that none of her techniques worked. Her breath was rapid, almost panting. Her heart trip-hammered in an anxious, uneven rhythm. Her palms were sweaty. There was no way she could will herself back into her well of calm. She kept clutching the manila envelope on her lap over and over again, until the edges were sweat-stained and crumpled. Another sign of huge stress, together with the feeling that there was no oxygen in the room.

  She had waited her entire life for this moment, without knowing it. And now that it was here, she wasn’t prepared. She would never be prepared. She’d thought and thought about what she would say, but nothing occurred to her. Her mind was empty, hollow and shiny with panic. She didn’t even know if she could ta { shaught tlk, her mouth was so dry.

  Think, Chloe! She told herself sternly. She’d done so many hard things in her life, surely she could do this?

  What to say? How to tell if she even should say it? Maybe she’d talk to the man and realize that she’d been insane to rush across the country for this. Maybe—

  “Ms. Mason?”

  Chloe turned, heart pounding. “Y-yes?” she stammered, sliding forward to the edge of her seat.

  The receptionist gave her a kind smile. Considering how upscale this office was, the smile was purely gratuitous. Most receptionists and secretaries in successful big-bucks enterprises were haughty. Certainly Mr. Pelton’s was. In all the visits to her lawyer’s offices, Chloe had mainly seen Mr. Pelton’s secretary’s nostrils as she tilted her head up to look down her nose.

  “Mr. Bolt is free to see you now. Third door to your right down the corridor.” She pointed to the big glass doors next to the reception desk.

  Oh God, this is it!

  Panic keened in Chloe’s head as she slowly rose, hoping her knees would support her. It was a very real fear. Both her knees were complex creations of plastic and steel, and they were as delicate as they were high-tech.

  Everyone’s eyes followed her as she made her slow way across the lobby, which suddenly felt as huge as the Gobi Desert. The glass door ahead of her was so clean it glowed. How was she supposed to—ah. It swooshed open at some invisible command.

  Inside the corridor, the feeling of luxury was even more powerful. The doors were shiny brass, with no door knobs, only built-in flat screens to the right. The rooms must be enormous because it felt like she walked for ages down the gleaming parquet corridor simply to get to the third door on the right.

  Here, too, she was met with a wall as blank as her head. She simply stood there, clutching purse and envelope tightly, waiting for the next step. Any thoughts or plans simply vanished from her head. She felt as if she were walking on some kind of uncontrollable path where she could only stumble forward and never turn back.

  She stared at the shiny brass door, looking blankly at her reflection, mind emptied of thought for a heart {t fcolbeat, two. Then there was a whirring sound, a click releasing some invisible mechanism, and this door too slid open.

  Chloe stood, frozen, on the threshold. She’d been dreaming of this moment all her life, thinking she was insane because it happened only in her dreams.

  When things remained as hopes and dreams you could decide how they turned out. And though not much in her life had turned out well, in her dreams this always had. It had always ended in laughter and joy.

  Only in her head, though.

  Which was notoriously unstable.

  Chloe trembled. Stepping into this room might mean stepping into a new and better life. Or it might forever trap her behind the invisible but oh-so-real wall she’d lived behind all her life.

  It felt as if her entire existence were hanging by a thread, by a step.

  “Ms. Mason?” a deep voice said and she gasped in air. She’d been holding her breath for almost a minute without realizing it.

  Across another vast room, two men were standing, as gentlemen did for ladies. One was Michael Keillor.

  She didn’t want him there. Her business was exclusively with Harry Bolt, and if her business ended badly, she didn’t want anyone else to view her humiliation. But a lifetime of training made her hold her tongue. She didn’t even remotely have the courage to ask him to leave the room.

  The other man was . . . was Harry Bolt. Chloe eyed him hungrily. Much taller than Michael Keillor and almost, but not quite, as broad. Dark blond hair, light brown eyes. Familiar-looking eyes.

  Her heart was slamming against her chest so hard she wondered if they could hear it.

  Chloe was used to observing and interpreting body language, but there was absolut
ely nothing to read here. Both men were utterly still, both were utterly expressionless.

  She had no way at all to gauge their feelings. No way to figure out how this would end.

  Shaking, with a feeling of doom interlaced with wild hope in her heart, Chloe stepped into the room {inter busi.

  She’s scared shitless, Mike thought, glad that he’d horned in on this meeting. This Chloe Mason had specifically asked for Harry Bolt but once Mike had seen her in the lobby, he knew he had to be here, too.

  Because this woman was clearly one of the Lost Ones. A woman in trouble, on the run from some violent asshole. And shit, it made him angry all over again that there were monsters in the world who could beat up on women.

  RBK mainly dealt with corporate security. In the lobby waiting for RBK’s very expensive services, there’d been two CEOs and one head of security for a Fortune 500 company. Mike had read their files, knew what their problems were, and knew how to solve them.

  Those three men alone probably represented about a million dollars in business this year for RBK.

  Chloe Mason represented nothing, because RBK policy was not to accept money from women on the run. If anything, RBK often provided the women with a little nest egg to see them through that first difficult year.

  On average, after the first year, they were safe.

  After last night, Mike really, really wanted to make a woman safe. Wanted to help a woman, particularly a woman like this, soft and gentle and completely undeserving of the sick fuck who’d forced her to come to them.

  This morning Sam was staying home with Nicole, who had bad morning sickness, so the corporate honchos would be divided between him and Harry. Stuff he and Harry could do with their eyes closed. All three of them had an instinctive understanding of security risks—their entire childhoods had been security risks—and they had been trained very hard and very expensively by Uncle Sam to learn how to deal with risks. It was a question of knowledge and reason.But with their Lost Ones, the trembling and broken women who showed up on their doorstep because RBK was their last chance before falling into the abyss . . . when dealing with them, you used both your head and your heart.

  Though the woman in the lobby had asked to see Harry, Mike instinctively knew she was his. He had to be the one to help her.

  Not because she was beautiful, though she was. Astoundingly beautiful.

  But because she looked so lost, so alone. She was slightly built, with pale skin and pretty, delicate features. A slightly overlarge mouth and huge {out lo, light brown, almost golden eyes.

  Her clothes were expensive. So were her shoes and purse. Expensive, elegant, discreet. This was a lady of taste and of breeding, and she looked rich.

  Didn’t matter.

  He and his colleagues had seen a lot of everything pass through their doors. Women who’d been beaten up by low-life drug-addict husbands and lovers, sure. But also wives of lawyers and doctors, and even a senator. The rich weren’t immune to the joys of beating up on women and children. If anything, they were able to hide it better, and for longer.

  The police were also more willing to turn a blind eye.

  The rich wives who ended up as one of RBKs Lost Ones sometimes tried going to the police, but their husbands often wielded enormous power and were able to get away with things poorer men went to jail for. The wives of the rich fucks were just as beaten down as their poorer sisters.

  This woman, this Chloe Mason, belonged to the rich, there was no mistaking it. And not the new rich, either. She had that understated elegance of someone who didn’t need to make a splash, someone for whom good taste came naturally.

  From head to toe she was groomed and lovely. But there was something underneath those pretty, expensive designer duds that was a little less lovely.

  She moved slowly, exactly like someone who’d been punched hard, in a place covered by clothes. That was a little trick fuckhead men who liked beating up on women and kids learned. Their rages might be uncontrollable, but boy they knew enough to reason it out and punch where it wouldn’t show. Last week a banker’s wife had come in without a visible scratch on her. Except, of course, for a ruptured spleen that had required eight hours of surgery six months before. It had followed broken ribs and a punch to the liver so hard the liver had sustained damage.

  Shitheads knew what they were doing, all right. Even in a fucking rage they knew enough to cover their tracks.

  Someone had done something like that to Chloe Mason, who moved so very carefully, as if she would fall down if she didn’t watch it.

  Oh man. Who could do that to someone like her? Who could do it to any woman or child? But especially to Chloe Mason, with her soft skin and gentle features and slender build?

  He glanced {0">of cou at Harry, expecting him to say something, then glanced again.

  What the fuck?

  It was like Harry was frozen. He simply stood there, staring at her. Not in a sexual way. Like Sam, Harry loved his wife fiercely and absolutely. He had zero interest in other women since his marriage. But something about this woman riveted his attention. And blocked his tongue, because he wasn’t saying anything.

  Harry knew as well as Mike that these women needed reassurance. They did not need a male staring at them. Particularly a tall, strong male. That kind of staring came off as aggression and women like Chloe Mason had had a bellyful of that.

  Mike elbowed Harry in the ribs, to no effect. Okay, so Harry was out for the count. It was up to him.

  “Welcome, Ms. Mason,” he said gently to the frightened woman slowly crossing Harry’s office. Since Harry wasn’t moving, Mike walked around the desk and approached her slowly. No sudden moves, just nice and easy.

  She stared up at him and he had to jerk his gaze away because he was staring too, just like his idiot colleague Harry.

  Damn, she was . . . she was lovely. The old-fashioned word was exactly right. Nowadays “beautiful” was the technical term used for a woman who worked on herself, got herself some surgical enhancement—who stood out because of the way she was dressed and was made up.

  Chloe Mason had a different kind of beauty, made up of perfect skin, delicate features, soft blonde hair, huge golden eyes, and none of that—as far as he could see—enhanced.

  So, that’s what she’d look like in the morning. After sex.

  Mike squelched that thought immediately, ashamed of himself. The last thing this woman needed was a man she looked to for help coming on to her.

  She was looking up at him anxiously, then back at Harry, clutching a purse and a big manila envelope, visibly worried because his fuckhead brother had his head up his ass.

  Since she looked like she was about to fall down, Mike chanced it and placed a hand under her elbow, as gentlemanly-like as possible, though he wouldn’t object to carrying her to the client chair.

  No. Not going there, he told himself sternly.

  Women who’d been beaten up had antennae that quivered when men were around and in their space, because men in their space was a situation that often ended badly. He didn’t want Chloe Mason to have even a moment’s anxiety because of him.

  So he did the opposite of what he’d done walking, then running, through a bad part of town last night, trolling for trouble. Last night, his entire body had been one hand curled up in the universal come and get it sign, two bad-ass drugs in his system—alcohol and testosterone. A potent mix that got lots of men into trouble, true. But Mike had been trained by the best to meet trouble head-on when it came his way. He’d bristled with aggression last night. Aggression was his friend, always had been, had saved his life countless times.

  Aggression and sex were his constant companions.

  But not now.

  Now he needed to dial it all down—reassure this beautiful woman, not frighten her.

  “Ms. Mason,” he said, nodding his head at the two client chairs in front of Harry’s desk. “Please take a seat.”

  He had a naturally deep voice, slightly rough due to the drin
king last night. She stood looking at him, swaying slightly, and for a second he wondered how badly she might be injured. Man, if someone had injured her so badly she could hardly stand, he was going to find out who and quietly, privately, beat the shit out of him.

  “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.