Dangerous Proposition

by Jessica Lauryn

  Chapter 5

  “What happened after I left last night?” Desmond asked later that morning. With the most aggravating look of suspicion in his eyes, he turned toward Colin, taking his hands from the pile of papers he was sifting through on the floor of Tucker’s office.

  Colin grunted, brushing past his absentminded underling with an exasperated huff. Scooping up a pile of fresh papers, he walked to the desk and slammed them down—hard.

  He’d just spent the last two hours sifting through paperwork, trying to determine what, if anything, was missing among the pile of documents. It was as if Tucker’s abductor had come there looking for something, and when he hadn’t found it, he’d taken Tucker as a consolation prize.

  Glancing Desmond’s way, he considered the best way to answer the question he’d posed. Ordinarily, this would have been the part where he bragged about last night’s conquest. Hell, a beautiful woman had snuck into his bed—what man wouldn’t be pleased? But the evening hadn’t exactly ended the way he would have liked. And the more he thought about how Julia Dyson had circumvented his advances, acted as though he could have been hit by an oncoming truck for all she cared, the more livid he became.

  “Nothing of consequence.” Colin sifted through the papers on the desk. “Dyson’s daughter is proving to be more of a problem than I anticipated. She showed up last night. At my home.”

  “No kidding,” Desmond said, taking a seat in Tucker’s chair. With a smile that was quite unsettling, he said, “What happened?”

  Colin supposed there was no point in keeping this part to himself. “She snuck into my bedroom and hid while you and I were talking. This may sound strange, but I think she intended to ambush me. She has her father’s phone, with my name all over the caller history.”

  Desmond bit back a smile. “And you just let her walk away?”

  “Let’s just say she had some very spot-on tactics for making her escape.”

  “Man, she’s better than I thought.”

  That was certainly the understatement of the year. Julia Dyson was proving to be craftier than several of his recruits. Colin wondered whether that was a good or bad thing.

  “She’s a pistol from hell is what she is.”

  “I’m sure you’re exaggerating.”

  “I wish I was. The truth is, Julia Dyson could really mess things up for me if I’m not careful. But I think I’ve found a way to handle her.”

  Desmond’s smile faded. “You don’t mean…you wouldn’t actually…kill Dyson’s daughter, would you?”

  “Kill her?” Colin’s shock turned to indignation. He could hardly believe Desmond thought he would do something so depraved as to actually kill a woman. “Good God, no. I’ve asked her to accompany me on her father’s search. That way I can keep my eye on her while I locate Tucker, and make sure she doesn’t make trouble for me.”

  He nodded, affirming his statement. Keeping Julia Dyson at his side was essential. It was the one surefire way of controlling what she did and who she talked to. And it wasn’t as though he minded the idea of taming the little shrew. He was dying to touch her soft skin again and wanted very much to finish what they’d started in his bed.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Desmond asked. “What makes you think Julia’s going to go along with your plan, a woman who broke into your house and snuck into your bedroom? I wasn’t going to mention it, but I saw someone running from the mansion last night. Long red hair, curves that could drive a guy to distraction?”

  Had the event been televised? “She found her father’s phone and decided to confront me about it. I thought it was best if I offered her a compromise.” Colin sighed, hardly believing what this had come to. “It was the only way I could keep her from going to the authorities.”

  “This is worse than I thought,” Desmond said. “I would’ve pegged the girl for having smarts like her old man, but I never would have believed she’d put all of this together overnight.” Glancing toward the ceiling, he said, “On second thought, it might be nice to have someone on our side who can accomplish things in half the time it takes most of our men.”

  Colin sneered. Julia Dyson was smart indeed. She’d made a shrewd deduction about her father’s disappearance in a short amount of time. He had no intention of admitting the fact to Desmond, but he was rather turned on by her sharp mind.

  “I have no intention of involving Ms. Dyson in her father’s investigation,” he said. “Under my wing, she’ll know only what I choose to tell her.” Or whatever it is I make up to tell her…

  “I don’t understand,” Desmond said. “The girl is brilliant. Why not use her ingenuity to help us?”

  “I’m not involving her for her help,” Colin answered. “The plan is to keep her close-by and prevent her from putting any more of the pieces together, lest she should get any more ideas about trying to expose me. This will prove a lot easier if she’s under my nose, instead of out dusting for fingerprints in the middle of the night.”

  Desmond nodded. His stare was distant, as though he was holding something back. “You’re the boss,” he said.

  “And?” Colin drummed his fingers.

  “Well…”

  “Just spit it out, Desmond.”

  “I only hope you aren’t bringing the woman into more danger than she can handle,” Desmond said.

  “I don’t doubt that she can’t handle it. But my options are fairly limited, considering she has Tucker’s phone with my name all over the caller history.”

  “Just be careful, all right?” Desmond started for the door. “I’ve got a bad feeling about all this. For you and for Julia.”

  As if he gave a damn about Julia. She was rude and uncultured and about as exasperating a woman as he had ever met. He was doing the right thing—the only thing. That was, if he cared about keeping his ass out of prison.

  Colin watched as Desmond shut the door. He got to work on the papers in front of him. Sometime later—he wasn’t sure how many minutes had passed—he took his vibrating phone from his hip. With a groan he brought it against his ear. “Go ahead.”

  “Well if it isn’t Dr. Colin Westwood,” a deep voice on the other end answered. “I’m betting this is one call you didn’t have scheduled into your Verizon Wireless Blackberry. John Rizzo.”

  Rizzo. Colin clenched a fist. The bastard did work for him technically, but he had reported directly to Lucas before his late partner’s unfortunate brush with death. The dolt was taking a hell of a chance, calling him from a line that wasn’t secure. He would have to be terminated for it.

  “I seriously hope I’m mistaking you for someone else, John. Understanding the nature of your job, you’re well aware of the proper channel used to contact me. This isn’t it.”

  Rizzo snickered and whispered to someone in the background. “What exactly are you going to do, Westwood? Let me go?” More snickering followed. “Every one of us knows that you don’t have the balls to follow through on one of your threats. Besides, I have information you’ll want to know. So I have a feeling you’ll want to be keeping me on the payroll a little longer.”

  As he stepped into the hall, the thought briefly struck Colin that maybe Rizzo was Tucker’s abductor. The jackass wasn’t particularly intelligent, but it was clear enough he wasn’t working alone. He entered the stairwell. “You’ve got one minute.”

  “Ramone kept a recording of his last conversation with you. He told me if anything ever happened to him, to make sure it got into the right hands.”

  Yet the imbecile had waited three years to produce it? The hand Colin held the phone with shook slightly. “Destroy it.”

  “Nice try. I want five hundred grand, Westwood. Otherwise this tape gets where it was going.”

  Colin stopped short in front of his Mercedes. There were few men who had the nerve to threaten him, which rather made him wonder who was pulling Rizzo’s strings. This sort of thing had happened to him only a handful of times during the thirteen years he’d been in the business. He ke
pt his tone cool. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “Just try me if you think I’m playing,” Rizzo snapped. “There’s a party going on tonight. Twenty-two, West Fifty-Fifth Street in the city. You bring me the money. And I’ll give you what you need to keep your ass in one piece.”

  Colin got into his car and slammed the door shut. At sixty miles an hour, he sped from the empty parking lot. “I’ll give you a hundred. That’s more than generous.”

  “Think I don’t know what you’re worth? You’re lucky five hundred K is all I’m asking for. Nine o’clock, Westwood. Show up one minute late and the deal’s off.” With that, Rizzo hung up the phone.

  Colin clamped down on the expensive leather beneath his hands. That had done it. There was no way in hell he was changing his plans for these ass wipes. He’d make the pit stop, but he was going ahead with Tucker’s investigation. And Julia Dyson was coming with him.

  Having been playing this game almost as many years as it had taken him to get his MD, there was little doubt in his mind that he could take care of this bump in the road, find out what these dunderheads knew about Tucker’s disappearance, and keep Julia Dyson from messing things up for him along the way.

  As far as her being frightened by some of the things they would see, she had all but asked for this when she’d threatened to expose him to the authorities. And if the vixen was especially traumatized by something that occurred, he would be more than happy to comfort her in her hour of need.

  For a moment, Colin wondered whether there was another choice, whether or not he was doing was the right thing. But as he took the car up to ninety and sped out onto the highway, the thought escaped his mind.

  * * * *

  Spotting a lone shopping cart between two parked cars, Julia smiled in triumph. She tossed her handbag into the child’s seat and gestured to Abigail, making her way toward the automatic door that stood at the entrance to the supermarket.

  As she entered the air-conditioned store, Julia slipped into her denim jacket and released a stifled yawn. She was exhausted from another long year of teaching elementary school. To boot, last night’s events had left her running on less than two hours of sleep. She would have just stayed home, curled up on the couch, and taken a well-deserved nap had Abigail not insisted that they were overdue for a girls’ night. Too exhausted to argue, she’d agreed.

  Abigail did always know when she needed an ear. And after hearing Colin Westwood’s asinine proposition, Julia most definitely did.

  With a smirk that was as wide as the state of Texas, the man had looked her straight in the eye and told her he wanted her to be his personal call girl. And instead of telling him to go to hell where he belonged and reporting her theory about his crimes to the cops, she’d done nothing. Nothing, that was, except helplessly envision doing what he had suggested.

  When she was sixteen, her fantasy had ended with Colin Westwood carrying her up the hotel staircase. But now, she could see it all clearly in her mind. Colin beside her, his hands cupping her face, the sensation shooting from skin to core as his thumb smoothed across her bare, sensitive nipple…

  “I think you should do it,” Abigail said, jolting Julia from her thoughts as she reached for a bag of potato chips.

  Assuring herself she hadn’t heard right, Julia did an appraisal of the aisle. She released a breath, almost relieved to see that no one had been around to hear her friend’s preposterous suggestion.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she exclaimed, thrusting her shopping cart forward. “Colin Westwood all but admitted that he belongs behind a set of steel bars. Either way, I would never be some guy’s live-in bimbo.”

  She nodded, placing a bag of pretzels beside the chips. As she’d said, Colin’s baby blues were a death trap waiting to happen. The thing was, she wasn’t entirely sure she didn’t want to be locked inside of them.

  Abigail said nothing as they cruised the remaining aisles, piled their purchases onto the checkout counter, and walked back to the car. Sliding into the driver’s seat, Julia began to think she was home free. But as an indicative smile formed on her best friend’s face, she realized Abigail’s words of wisdom had barely begun.

  “What if you only pretended to be Colin’s mistress,” Abigail said with a clever smile.

  Julia turned sharply. “I kind of think the guy would notice if I’m not joining him for midnight romps between the sheets.”

  “Not if you played your cards right,” Abigail said. “You can tease Colin and let him think you intend to sleep with him, while all the while figuring out what he knows about your dad’s disappearance. I think it’s the perfect way to get back at the guy for being such a presumptuous pig.”

  A smile formed on Julia’s face. The idea wasn’t half bad. Deceiving a guy as slick as Colin Westwood would be a challenge for sure, but there was little doubt in her mind that she could pull it off. Abigail was right—he deserved to be punished, left out in the cold, and then some. So long as he kept his hands to himself, she could easily do the same. But what if he tried to seduce her?

  Julia’s cheeks burned with heat. She recalled with vivid clarity what had happened to her the last time she and Colin got up close and personal. The way he ran his fingertips along the groove of her neck, the tender way he’d moved his mouth over hers. If he kissed her again, she wasn’t entirely sure she could persuade him to stop. She wasn’t sure she could persuade herself to stop. Get a grip, Julia.

  “Much as I’d enjoy showing the guy where he can stick it, I really don’t think it’s best to tempt fate a second time.” Rounding the bend, Julia pulled into her driveway.

  After she turned off the engine, Abigail followed her out of the car. Her friend took a few of the bags from the trunk then tailed her as she walked across the porch and stepped inside the house. “Maybe I’m off base. But other than the cell phone, we have no other clues about your dad’s disappearance. Colin Westwood might very well be our only chance of finding him. At least give it some thought.”

  Julia set her bags on the counter. She had given this thought. A lot of thought. And other than climbing up the side of a three-story mansion, posing as a maid, and stealing some sort of evidence the cops would consider admissible, she honestly didn’t know what to do.

  She looked Abigail’s way with hesitation. It didn’t seem as if she was getting out of this without at least considering her friend’s suggestion. Though, she definitely wasn’t keen about being away from town for any length of time, even if the school year didn’t begin again for another three months. She shrugged her shoulders. “I guess it could be worth a shot.”

  “It’s ingenious,” Abigail said, removing a bottle of soda from one of the bags. “You’ll call Colin and tell him you’ve decided to accept his offer. Once the two of you are living under the same roof, you’ll have a world of opportunities for gathering information right outside your bedroom door.”

  That seemed true enough. But Julia wasn’t about to dive headfirst into the frying pan without considering every angle. She folded the bag Abigail had emptied. “What makes you think Colin isn’t going to demand I make good on my end of the bargain the minute I walk through the door? The guy is a vulture who practically crushed me to death. He’s either horny as sin, or else he gets a twisted kick out of scaring women out of their minds and pinning them against his mattress.”

  Abigail offered a cynical glance. “The threat of a little danger has never stopped you before. I bet it wouldn’t even take that long. If I know you, you’ll have what you need within twenty-four hours. That is, unless there’s some other reason why you don’t want to do this. Like maybe you don’t think you can handle another kiss from the arrogant mouth of Colin Westwood.”

  “Of course I can handle it,” Julia snapped impatiently.

  With a grin that was highly unnerving, Abigail took an apple from the bowl on the counter. Biting into it, she said, “Then I guess you know what you’ve got to do.”

  Julia shook her head. Sh
e knew what she had to do all right. She only wondered what “handling the situation” really would entail.

  Chapter 6

  Late in the evening, Colin sped down Fox Hill Lane. He turned the wheel of his Mercedes and parallel parked in front of Julia Dyson’s cabin. Made of stone and probably worth less than a hundred grand, the place wouldn’t even have been noticeable if it weren’t the only house on the block.

  Colin shifted into neutral, holding his foot on the brake. Darkness settling around him, it was just after five—nearly three hours after Julia’s phone call telling him that she’d decided to accept his offer.

  As he turned off the engine, he smiled to himself. He released a slow breath, allowing the tension of the last twenty-four hours to seep through his nostrils.

  His plan was working out nicely. So nicely, in fact, that he’d surprised himself. When he’d learned Tucker was missing, he’d had little to no idea of how he was going to find him. But now that John Rizzo had given some direction, he was feeling a glimmer of hope.

  Eyeing the wooden door that stood at the entrance to Julia’s home, Colin grinned. It had been a good long time since he’d been this intrigued by a woman. Julia Dyson was extremely attractive, and not just because of her exceptional good looks. Her bold personality ignited his engine like a fire starter to a candle wick. He was disappointed they wouldn’t be spending more time with one another, but he planned on pushing her buttons thoroughly during the course of their evening together. And per the terms of their “agreement,” they would be ending the night at the apartment he kept in the city, Julia warm and willing in his bed.

  Stepping onto the cabin’s miniscule porch, Colin considered peeking through the window above the door. Last time, he’d enjoyed the look on Julia’s face almost as much as he had enjoyed watching her drop her phone and bend to retrieve it. He stepped forward, lifted his brows, and peered through the glass.

  To his disappointment, there was nothing in the living room but a pile of junk mail and an orange cat. Both were scattered across a small sofa, the fabric of which was covered in bright-yellow daisies. In front of the hideous object stood a small white coffee table. Shaking his head, he took a deep breath and knocked on the door.