SEAL INVESTIGATIONS: A 5-Books SEAL Romance Series

by Lola Silverman

  From the corner of her eye Jai could see Asif pointing emphatically in her direction. She was busy trying to pretend that she cared what her grandparents were saying to her. A smile and a nod was pretty much all it took to keep them yakking.

  “You will love living in the UAE!” her grandmother gushed. “It is such a rich and beautiful country!”

  “Have you been there?” Jai asked with false eagerness. She tried not to groan out loud as she saw Jabar and Hasim approach her father.

  Her grandfather shook his head. “No, but your father was telling us about the advantages you will bring to the family once you are wed.”

  “Yes, apparently that is a big deal.” Jai couldn’t entirely hide her bitterness over that fact.

  “It was her!” Asif was shouting as he pointed straight at Jai.

  The room went silent as the twenty-four-year-old baby prince squawked with indignation. His brothers glowered at Jai as though they were going to personally see her punished for disrespecting their brother. A chill slid down her spine as she recalled what the man called Sparks had claimed. What if the princes decided to make Jai into a prisoner? Would her family back her up, or would they simply look the other way?

  “She must be punished!” Asif hissed.

  Okay. Enough was enough. Jai turned to face his royal whininess. “Excuse me, but you were attempting to force yourself on me in the hallway!”

  Jai’s aunts and grandmothers all gasped in horror as they lifted their hands to cover their mouths. There was much whispering amongst the assembled relatives.

  It gave Jai confidence. “I haven’t saved my virginity for twenty-three years to have you snatch it in an upstairs hallway just because you can’t take no for an answer!”

  “Jaipriya!” her father snarled. “That is enough!”

  Jabar ibn Armeen al Saud was not amused. He gestured dismissively toward Jai. “Is she always this disagreeable?”

  Her father actually bowed his head! He bowed! As if he were making excuses for her behavior in not allowing this prat to rape her! Then Papa shook his head. “No. Jaipriya is very well-behaved. Yet she speaks true that she has never known a man’s touch.”

  Another round of murmurs went through the room as both her relatives and Asif’s made their opinions on that topic known.

  “This is why you wanted her, no?” Papa raised an eyebrow at Jabar.

  The prince chuckled. “I suppose it is.” He slapped his younger brother on the shoulder. “You will be allowed to fuck your virgin wife soon enough.” Jabar’s words were like an announcement. It made Jai sick to her stomach when she imagined what that might be like.

  Feeling ill, she bowed her head to her father. “Please excuse me. I am overwhelmed by tonight’s events and need a moment.”

  “Of course.”

  The way he waved her off made Jai uncertain whether she should be pissed off or just hurt. It was as if her father didn’t care one bit for her. He had never been so dismissive of her wants and needs. What had happened?

  She exited the drawing room and went upstairs to her bedroom. On the way to her suite she passed her father’s office. The door was still ajar. Her stomach knotted as she considered the possibility that the man named Sparks was right about her papa.

  Jaipriya took a deep breath and held it so that she could listen. The party was still going on downstairs, and there were no noises to suggest that she was being followed. She pushed open the heavy door to her father’s office and stepped inside.

  She took a critical look around, trying to see it not just as a room, but as a hiding place. Sparks had been standing behind the desk. She cocked her head and gave the heavy ornate piece a closer inspection.

  “The dimensions don’t match,” she murmured. “The outside is off. The middle drawer isn’t nearly that deep.”

  Jai moved toward the desk and sat in her father’s chair. She closed her eyes and tried to remember how he sat. If he were hiding something, he would be very careful not to accidentally expose it. Her hands moved automatically to the top drawer on the right side. Jai was never allowed to look in that drawer. She’d gotten a peek once, though, and there was really nothing special in it. What if the reason she wasn’t supposed to get into the drawer was due to its status as a gatekeeper for some hidden compartment?

  Sure enough, Jai immediately spotted a little catch inside the drawer. It was just a piece of trim that appeared to be out of place. She pressed it, and a very shallow compartment opened just above her knees.

  “Oh, Papa,” she whispered. “How could you?”

  There was a file and a tiny little memory stick inside the compartment. Jai took both out and closed the extra drawer. Then she set the file on the desktop and opened it up. The contents nearly made her sick.

  There were tiny photographs of young women, perhaps a hundred or more. Each photo was about the size of a yearbook picture and had a basic list of demographics beside it. The list seemed endless, but what she could barely stomach were the entries that had a destination and price attached. Her father truly was in business with the princes, and they really were selling women.

  SPARKS LOUNGED AT a table in the back of the pub and attempted, for what seemed like the thousandth time, to stop thinking about the tiny Indian woman in the fiery pink sari. Something about her had truly stuck with him. She had been so certain of her father’s innocence in such a scheme. There was no doubt in Sparks’s mind that she believed her parent. It added another layer to the entire situation.

  Sparks had not necessarily asked to be sucked into this investigation. His commanding officer—Alexander Trapp—had received a message from his younger sister’s roommate. The roommate claimed that Rachel had gone missing from a club and that the authorities wouldn’t take her seriously. Now, more than two weeks later, Sparks and his SEAL teammates Yates, Romero, and Bones had been digging deeper and deeper into Rachel’s disappearance, only to discover that there was a very large human trafficking operation operating on the Eastern Seaboard. Worse still, the two Arabian princes, Jabar and Hasim ibn Armeen al Saud, enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

  “You want another beer?”

  Sparks glanced up at his friend Joe. Joe was a former Marine who had settled in the Chantilly area after getting out of the service. He now ran an old-fashioned pub where Sparks stayed when he was in the district.

  “No more beers,” Sparks said heavily. “I have a feeling I’m going to be needing my wits later tonight.”

  That, of course, was code. Joe now knew that Sparks’s earlier excursion had been unsuccessful, and that he was going to go try again. The team needed to get this moneyman. They needed to know what made him tick and how he was related to the princes. It was one of the last pieces in their plan to take down the entire network at once. They had to figure out where the money was and dispose of it.

  One of the women working with their group—Marina Reyes—was all for dispersing the cash to the victims’ families. Sparks figured Marina had a good idea, but they had to actually find the accounts where all of the dirty blood money was being kept before they could make that happen.

  “Hey! I’m looking for a guy.”

  Joe turned around in surprise. In fact, the entire pub was now staring at the door. Sparks felt his jaw drop open. The woman standing inside the doorway was very familiar. Probably because she was still wearing her hot pink sari with tiny beaded slippers. Her hair was falling down, and some of the long tresses reached her waist. She was absolutely stunning in her own unique way.

  “You know that chick?” Joe muttered. “Because some of the guys in here look like they just spotted dinner.”

  “Or dessert,” Sparks agreed.

  He got up and started walking toward the front of the pub. A few meaningful glances sent some of the more confident bar patrons scurrying away. Sparks could feel Joe’s gaze on him and knew his friend was dying to know the story behind this particular situation. Sparks wasn’t even sure he knew the story.

  “Oh g
ood. It’s you,” she said. “That’ll save a little time.”

  Sparks started to speak, but she slapped a manila folder against his chest. He realized what it was and snatched it up. “How about you and I go have a little chat?”

  He grabbed her arm and steered her back toward his table. She didn’t protest, and he wasn’t sure whether he should be flattered or irritated. Hopefully she wasn’t used to being manhandled like that.

  He pushed her into the booth and signaled Joe for another round of drinks. “What’s your name?”

  “Jaipriya Bhatia,” she said distractedly. “But most people call me Jai.”

  “All right, Jai.” He nodded. “My name is Desmond Sparks. People usually just refer to me as Sparks.”

  “You were right.” The bleak note in her tone cut him deeply. “I wish you would just take your information and leave me out of it.”

  “I’m not sure I can do that.” Sparks pursed his lips. “I need to know where your father keeps the money that he launders for Jabar and Hasim.”

  “They’re mean.” She swallowed, and he watched the smooth column of her throat move beneath the silky surface of her dusky skin. “Earlier tonight, after you left, I kicked their youngest brother in the balls.” She looked up at him, seeming defensive. “He was getting very handsy.”

  “Understandable,” Sparks assured her.

  “Jabar and Hasim were angry. They wanted to know if I always misbehaved like that. I felt”—she seemed to struggle with words—“I felt like an animal that they were purchasing. And in a way I think I am.”

  Sparks mulled that over. “You’re to marry the youngest prince?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which will tie your family to the princes’ family.”

  “I guess. I don’t know anything about it.” She shrugged. “They’re assholes. I don’t know why my father cares what they think.”

  He couldn’t even imagine her pain. His parents weren’t very involved in his life. He had never doubted the fact that they thought of him as a burden that wasn’t worth the trouble it took to raise him. Yet this woman had obviously been brought up as a princess within her father’s household. Until now she had thought she knew the place she occupied in her father’s heart.

  “The princes are very rich,” Sparks told her. “And I’m sure they’ve made it impossible for your father to refuse them.”

  Jai snorted. Her dark eyes were filled with fire. “They won’t want me for their whiney baby brother if I’m not a virgin.”

  Sparks was just processing her statement when she stood up. “You can thank me some other time,” she assured him. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to find a volunteer to take my virginity.”

  Chapter Three

  Jai marched to the front of the pub and began waving her hands in the air. She was so short and it was so loud that she had a feeling nobody was paying her a bit of attention. She started jumping up and down. The tiny golden bells and chains on her sari began to chime.

  “Hey!” she shouted at the top of her lungs. “Hey! I want to say something!”

  The raucous noise near the bar stopped as roughly six men turned as one unit to gape at her. Jai had a moment’s misgiving. When she had initially decided to put this plan into action, she was only thinking that by giving up her V card she would render herself unfit for marriage to Asif the Ass. She hadn’t really considered what she might be putting up with instead of Asif.

  There was a guy wearing a lot of flannel who appeared to have boycotted toothbrushes sometime in the last ten years or so. Option number two was a leather-jacket-wearing man with more scars than tattoos, both of which he had in spades. Option three involved a threesome of guys that appeared to put more product in their hair than she did and wore trendy clothes that probably cost about as much as the gross national product of a small third world country. Options four and five weren’t even worth mentioning. They were average guys, but the creep factor was so intense that she felt her skin begin to crawl as they gave her a leering onceover.

  Then someone grabbed her around the middle and lifted her bodily off the ground. For just one moment she was flying. Then she was deposited onto a male shoulder with a rather pronounced “oomph” on her part. Most of the fabric from her sari wound up in her face. She inhaled sharply, and that’s when she realized that it was Sparks who had picked her up. She could smell his distinctive and not unpleasant spicy, male scent.

  “Are you crazy?” he snapped as he clomped away from the bar and toward a set of stairs set back in a corner.

  Jai attempted to shove her sari away from her eyes. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Upstairs to my place so we can talk.” He took the stairs at a quick pace. “And when I say talk I actually mean talk. Is that understood?”

  He said something else, but she couldn’t make it all out. Something about “idiot females”, “silly ideas”, and “virgin, my ass”. She had no idea what he might be referring to, but she took great exception to the notion that he might not actually believe that she was a virgin. As far as she was concerned, even though virgins in this day and age were about as rare as unicorns, that did not make her a liar.

  It took a bit of maneuvering for him to shift her on his shoulder in order to be able to open a door at the top of the stairs. It opened into what appeared to be a small one-room apartment. At least, that was what she could tell around and through the thin fabric of her sari, which seemed determined to suffocate her.

  “Can you put me down now, please?” she asked irritably.

  OH, HE WAS going to put her down, all right. And then he was going to throttle her. Sparks just hadn’t quite figured out how he was going to go about it. She was so damn adorable that she disarmed him just by smiling.

  He swung her down off his shoulder and set her on his feet. Then he took a deliberate step back to put some space between them. Damn, she was adorable. All that dusky skin, and her hair was a tumble of straight dark tresses that reached almost all the way to her waist. Sparks hadn’t been this attracted to a woman in—ever.

  “You know, you’re not bad-looking,” she told him suddenly. “I didn’t particularly notice before, but you have rather pretty eyes, and your body is quite something to look at.”

  She was tugging at her full lower lip while giving him a very obvious perusal. Sparks actually felt the urge to preen. It was an odd sensation. He wasn’t ever particularly worried about what women thought of him. Yet for some reason he cared a lot what this one thought.

  “Not bad, hmm?” He raised an eyebrow. “What would make it better? Taller? I get that one a lot.” He was only five foot eleven, very short compared to the other members of his SEAL team, who were all six feet or over.

  “No!” Her frown indicated that height wasn’t her thing at all. “I don’t like a tall man.” She spread her hands to encompass her small stature. “I am not at all tall, and I don’t like to feel as though I am a child when I stand next to a man.”

  “That’s fair.” Sparks shrugged. Then he realized that she might actually be sizing him up for the virginity thing. “And what is this bullshit about you needing someone to take your virginity? Are you crazy? You can’t stand in a bar full of red-blooded American men and say something like that! You’re lucky I stopped you before they gang-raped you right there in the bar.”

  “Surely not!” She actually sounded dismayed. Was she that naive?

  “Didn’t you go to public school?”

  She frowned. “I haven’t any notion of what that has to do with anything, but no. I attended an all-girls private school in northern Virginia.”

  “Figures,” he grunted. “You didn’t learn anything useful if you’re going to put yourself right in the line of fire like that.”

  “But I wasn’t being facetious,” she insisted. “I do need someone to take my virginity.”

  Sparks sighed. Obviously trying to convince her was pointless. He needed to get to the bottom of this situation. “Why would you need som
ething like that? And that’s assuming you’re really a virgin, anyway.”

  JAI WASN’T SURE what was more outrageous, the fact that he’d just called her a liar, or his attitude. Either way, she couldn’t stop herself from staring at him. Now that she had noticed how drop-dead gorgeous he was, she was completely distracted by wondering why she hadn’t just considered him for the task in the first place. Surely she could seduce him, right?

  Jai began to scratch beneath the bottom of her choli. The fabric was really cutting into her skin. She sighed and tried to adjust her body inside the garment to buy some time. It didn’t work.

  “What are you doing?” he demanded.

  She shot him a withering glare. “Look, my mother made the seamstress sew this top about two sizes too small just to make my boobs look bigger. It’s killing me!”

  “How did you wind up here, or rather”—he looked a little chagrined—“how did you wind up coming to look for me and getting that information I’d been searching for?”

  “You told me what you suspected my father was doing. I knew you’d been looking in his desk. Let’s just say I’m a little better at snooping than you are.”

  His harrumph proved that he didn’t much appreciate her opinion on that topic, but he didn’t argue. Then he gestured to the folder he had deposited on the counter. “I thank you for that.”

  “No problem. I just wish my father hadn’t broken so many laws. It horrifies me to think that he was responsible in part for all of those women going missing.” She shivered a little before looking back at him.

  “And the virginity thing?”

  “Asif wants to marry a virgin. His brothers require it. If I’m not a virgin, I don’t have to marry the spoiled bastard.” She shrugged. “It seemed like a no-brainer when I thought of it.”

  “You’re really a virgin?” He was gaping again. “How does that happen?”