Dangerous Proposition

by Jessica Lauryn

  In the upstairs room, he’d have secret meetings with Lucas Ramone and his men. Behind a locked door they would pass along information and count their profits. If someone passed them in the street, they might have mistaken them for college students cramming for an examination. But had they looked closer, they would have seen that they were actually power-hungry thieves, men who would stop at nothing to achieve some ultimate level of self-fulfillment.

  But not him. Not Colin Westwood. He’d done what he had to protect people. To give them a second chance at life, an opportunity to thrive in a world where men lived only to destroy one another, particularly those whose backgrounds and skill sets didn’t match their own. He was the good guy, the defender of the weak. That was all he had ever tried to, or ever wanted to be. Why then was Tucker in such serious danger?

  He shook his head, forcing himself to focus on the issue at hand. This place could very well be the break he needed. But it was also his last resort. Meaning that if he didn’t find what he was looking for here, he could kiss all hope of finding Tucker good-bye.

  Brushing the dirt from his way, Colin peered through the glass window. There appeared to be no furniture on the first floor of the building, though the house was five stories tall and he was only looking at a couple of rooms. If he went inside, it was very possible that he would still find something of significance.

  Walking up the front steps, he took the key from his pocket and inserted it into the lock. He took a deep breath and stepped through the door.

  Making his way inside, he was greeted by a large space containing nothing but walls and floor paneling. The surrounding area was filthy, and it smelled of dust and mouse droppings. Much to his relief, he didn’t see any fresh footprints.

  He entered the next room, which appeared to be in the same condition as the first. Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in a thick layer of dirt. Continuing on, he discovered a series of spaces, all of which contained nothing more than the scent of musty air. There were cobwebs in the corners and on the ceilings, an indication that no one had been there in a good, long while. He started up the stairs, and his phone buzzed, causing him to shake.

  Glancing at the screen, Colin saw that Ian Hauser had sent him a text message. He and Aaron Jones were standing outside.

  Almost grateful for the diversion, Colin descended the steps. Glancing toward the upstairs, he shook his head then walked back the way he’d come.

  Outside, Ian was hunched over on the sidewalk. He was examining the area in front of the porch steps. Another man, shorter than his counterpart, was working a few feet away.

  “I think I found something,” Ian said, walking toward Colin with an outstretched arm.

  “What am I looking at?” Colin asked. He stared at a dirty set of keys as it was placed into his hands.

  “I found them on the ground,” Ian explained. “I could run a check on them.”

  “Do it,” Colin said. He turned to Aaron, whom he was hoping had found something that was a little more of a smoking gun.

  Aaron, who had been working as a dishwasher before joining Colin’s team, gestured for Colin to get beside him. Aaron was smart, and he had a knack for finding needles in haystacks. The stocky man was standing beside the garbage can on the street corner.

  As Colin stepped toward it, Aaron removed something from inside. It was a bloody shirt. From the look of it, the stains hadn’t yet dried.

  “The shirt was lying on top,” Aaron said, “which makes me wonder whether someone wanted us to find it. Let’s get it analyzed and see if the blood is a match for what we found in Tucker’s office.”

  “There’s no need.” Colin shut his eyes. “The shirt is Tucker’s. I’d know it anywhere.”

  “Goddamn,” Aaron muttered. “These pricks aren’t playing. It looks as if they gunned the old dude right in the heart.”

  “Or whoever planted it here wants us to think they did.” Slipping into a pair of rubber gloves, Colin took the shirt in his hands. Fumbling his way around the fabric, he examined it for bullet holes. There were none to be found.

  He tossed the shirt down, the stench of blood having thoroughly nauseated him. Staring at the red-soaked flannel, he decided that perhaps he ought to have the blood checked out anyway, as it was more than likely that someone was playing a game with him. Though, he supposed that was more probably the case, whether the blood proved to be Tucker’s or otherwise.

  It didn’t seem like Griffin Strycker’s style to leave such a striking clue behind. What it did seem like was Lucas’s.

  A wave of bone-chilling fear swept through Colin. The entire time he’d worked with Lucas he had slept with one eye open. The two of them had been alike in many ways, but Lucas’s greed had driven him to do things Colin would have never even have considered. Lucas had been indirectly responsible for the deaths of countless men. Though none other than Dexter Scott, the man Alec had been assigned to kill, had actually been sentenced to death, plenty had met their demise on his watch. The way Lucas gloated after someone on his team had taken care of a “problem” made Colin wonder whether the guy got some sort of demented kick out of it.

  When Lucas died, he had almost been relieved. The man he wasn’t entirely sure was all there could no longer hurt him or anyone else.

  But lately, he had been exhibiting the same behavior he had when Lucas was alive. Waking up in the middle of the night, talking to himself. He’d been reassuring himself for weeks that no one could have survived the fall Lucas had taken, that their body would have been so smashed up, they wouldn’t have made it until the paramedics arrived.

  But he and Alec had never found Lucas’s body. And now that he was starting to experience doubts regarding his late partner’s death, he was seriously regretting not having taken the suicide climb down the ledge.

  “Did you find anything else?” he asked, turning to where Aaron was standing. “In the house or out back?”

  “Nothing,” Aaron answered. “But the shirt speaks for itself. Whoever put it there didn’t do it very long ago, probably just in the last couple of hours.”

  “Almost as if they’re leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.” Colin spoke more to himself than his counterpart.

  Looking up into the window above him, his focus became distracted. His mind drifted as the sun reflected against the glass, taking him back to that stormy night so many years ago.

  “Are we keeping you from a previous engagement, Dr. Westwood?” Lucas growled, thrusting a pen across the enormous table in Colin’s direction.

  Colin clenched a fist. It was late on a Thursday night in mid-January, and though he was no longer an ever-punctual employee of Westwood Enterprises, it hadn’t exactly been a cinch for him to get from New Hampshire to New York City in less than two hours. Chartering a jet wasn’t so easy when you no longer owned one. Though the weight of the world had been lifted off his shoulders, he felt as though he were saddling the universe.

  His knees knocked hard against one another as he stared at the contract before him. If Leighton Westwood knew what the firstborn son he’d disowned was about to do, the old man would drop dead on the spot.

  Colin stared at the pen in his hand. It was nothing but a standard gold ballpoint, but it felt like a lethal weapon about to be plunged into his heart. If he signed that agreement, there was no going back. No second chance, no way of resurfacing from the gutter. He’d be free of Leighton Westwood, but he would also be a criminal. And he would forever know that he had sacrificed his younger brother Alec to get a footing in an illegal enterprise.

  “What’s this?” he said, reading over the third paragraph a second time. “It says that I agree to take only a fifty-percent cut of Project Gemstone’s profits. And if at any time during the duration of our partnership I attempt to take more, our arrangement will be immediately null and void. What’s the matter, Lucas?” He turned the document in the direction of his soon-to-be partner. “Don’t you trust me?”

  “Why shouldn’t I trust a man who just
blackmailed me into giving him half my assets? Sign the goddamn paper!”

  Colin snatched back the document. He wasn’t getting cold feet now. Not when he was this close to having everything he’d ever wanted. He was forging a destiny. Not a path set out for him at birth, but one he paved himself, one in which no one could ever force or coerce him into doing anything. He scribbled his signature, thrusting the contract back at Lucas.

  “Satisfied?”

  “I will be.” Lucas reached into his pocket. He took something, setting it down on the table between them. It was a ring, with a symbol of a cougar inside. “Take it,” he said.

  Colin picked up the ring, grasping it between his fingers.

  “This means you’re all in,” Lucas said. “That Project Gemstone and all of its secrets are now your domain. You wear the ring at all times. If you’re ever in trouble, you take it and bring it here, to this house. Put it in the box in the corner of the room, under the floorboard. My men will know what to do.”

  Colin stared at the ring. Knowing all it symbolized—the danger, the power—he hesitated a long moment. Taking a deep breath, he placed it onto his finger.

  As he stared at his hand, he realized somehow that everything had changed. That innocence, in every sense of the word, was gone.

  “The box,” he said, snapping his head in Aaron’s direction.

  “Box?” the heavier man repeated.

  “Upstairs,” Colin said, heart slamming against his ribcage. He looked at the window, the sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach intensifying. “I haven’t had a chance to get up there. Have your men checked out the fifth floor?”

  “Ian and I were up there earlier,” Aaron said. “We found the upstairs empty, same as the downstairs.”

  His men didn’t know about the floorboard, or the box hidden beneath it. No one did—it had been carved so securely into the ground Colin doubted a real FBI forensic technician would have found it. Even the room itself was hidden and difficult to find if you didn’t know where it was. Without explaining, he raced into the house and charged up the staircase.

  As he stepped onto the fourth floor of the building, Colin approached the bookshelf in the farthest corner of the room. Like everything else in the house, the shelf was covered in a thick layer of dust, making it difficult to tell whether anyone had recently touched it.

  Placing his fingers around the book in the right hand corner, he took a deep breath. He pulled the book toward him. The shelf moved away from the wall, turning sideways. The entrance to a dark room was revealed.

  Colin entered the room, approaching the staircase that stood in its center. He walked up the stairs. Reaching the top, he went to the corner by the window.

  He bent to the ground and removed the floorboard. Breath held, he gazed into the compartment below. The box, the one he’d been instructed to use all those years ago, was there, just where it had been the last time he’d seen it.

  Heart in his mouth, Colin picked up the box and pried back the lid. Inside was a ring, like his, only the symbol of the cougar was black, and the background was red.

  It was Lucas’s ring.

  The sound of his phone vibrating nearly gave him a heart attack. He brought the phone against his ear. “What?”

  “There’s a problem, sir,” Eric Mason said on the other end.

  “And what problem would that be?” Colin demanded.

  “Julia Dyson is gone.”

  Chapter 20

  He had to be hearing him wrong. The surprise of finding Lucas’s cougar ring had sent him into shock, or else the stress of searching for Tucker had finally put him over the edge. Julia was safe, sitting beside the hotel pool, sipping a margarita. He couldn’t possibly have allowed her to leave the protection of his security team a second time.

  Colin gripped his phone, leaning back against the wall. Taking several deep breaths, he did all he could to keep himself from exploding. “For your sake, Mason, I had better be hearing you wrong.”

  His guard hesitated. When he did speak, his voice was tense and frantic. “Sh–she told me she wasn’t feeling well. J–Julia said she needed an aspirin, and sh–she couldn’t take the g–generic brand. She said she was going to—”

  “You let her walk out of the hotel room? Alone? Goddamit, Mason! Why in God’s name didn’t you go with her? I told you that leaving the room was the first thing Julia was going to try. She’s clever and cunning—you can’t trust her, not for a second!”

  “I–I’m sorry, Dr. Westwood. I had no idea that she’d—I didn’t realize that she’d try to—”

  “I don’t want excuses, Mason! I want to know why. Why the hell you would let Julia Dyson go anywhere by herself when I specifically instructed you not to do so? You’re a bodyguard, a pathetic excuse for one for certain, but that doesn’t change the fact that you had a responsibility. One you clearly fail to understand the significance of!”

  “Please, Dr. Westwood, I—”

  “Save it. You’re fired, Mason.” Colin hung up.

  Replaying what he’d just done in his mind, he caught his head in his hands. He rubbed his temples and stared at Lucas’s ring, his whole body growing cold. There were a million different reasons why that ring could be in the box. But none of them seemed more logical than the most obvious.

  Colin had kept his own ring for thirteen years. It was rather like a ball and chain. The night he learned Tucker was missing, he’d taken it from his dresser. It hadn’t left his person since.

  He put the lid on the box. Coming to his feet, he started for his car. As he hopped inside, he revved the engine. His nerves were shot, but his adrenaline was kicking into high gear.

  So was his fear. Swallowing, he prayed he got to Julia before she got herself into something he couldn’t get her out of.

  * * * *

  Looking up at the building before her, Julia drew a breath. The tall brick structure wasn’t much different from the others in New York City—high-rise, covered with graffiti. But unlike the other places she and Colin had visited during their stay in the Big Apple, this one was located in a highly questionable area, one that made Griffin Strycker’s penthouse seem like the inside of a church.

  Taking a step back, she glanced at the surrounding structures. There were several buildings positioned along the street, all pinned up against one another. They were filthy, and each one was covered in its share of street art.

  Two young women, who couldn’t have been older than fifteen, were standing on the corner. The girls wore plastic skirts that didn’t extend much farther than their navels. Their make-up—eye shadow the color of shamrocks, lipstick fire-engine red—could be seen from a mile away.

  Even if she hadn’t lived in New York City before, Julia doubted she wouldn’t have realized what they were shopping for. She watched as one of the girls waved to a passing car. The black Range Rover pulled to the curb. The driver rolled down his window, sending a cloud of cigarette smoke the young ladies’ way.

  Turning her attention back to the building, Julia swallowed the lump in her throat. She had been hesitating to come to this place for weeks, and somehow she’d finally worked up the nerve. Still, something held her back. She wanted to believe that something was fear. But a gnawing in her gut told her that fear was only half the answer.

  Picturing Colin’s face, the look of concern in his eyes when he’d saved her from that locked room, thinking of how he’d taken care of her when he brought her back to the hotel last night, and all the other times he’d shown concern for her, she winced. In the short time they’d been together, something between them had changed. And it wasn’t just because they’d made love, though God knew that being with Colin, coming together in a fiery tangle of passion, had been the most incredible experience of her life.

  But something more than morning-after glow was plaguing her. It was deeper, that feeling she got whenever Colin protected her, when he saved her from the latest trouble she’d gotten herself into. It was that feeling she’d had when sh
e admired Colin as a teenager. And it had grown astronomically in the time they’d been together.

  Julia couldn’t be sure of what that feeling was. But one thing was for certain. That feeling, whatever it meant, had kept her from doing what needed to be done for far too long.

  As she looked up into the building’s only window, her stomach turned a somersault. If Griffin Strycker was telling the truth, then she was about to find out everything. Why these bastards had taken her father, whether or not he was alive. She was pretty confident they hadn’t killed him, but there was no way of knowing for sure, not until she walked through that door, that was.

  Julia steadied her shaking knees. No matter how afraid she was, she needed to do this. Following through on this lead might be the only way to rescue her dad. And protect Colin.

  The men who had her father were the same men who were trying to kill Colin—that much she was sure of. And Julia was positive that wasn’t because Colin worked for the FBI. It was because of something else, something Colin had always hesitated to tell her. A secret he seemed to guard with his life.

  But in spite of her curiosity, she no longer cared what that secret was. She’d be lying if she didn’t say she wasn’t still intrigued—how could she not be? But she’d gotten to know Colin during the last month. He wasn’t the man she’d first thought. He was arrogant for sure, his motives highly questionable. But she was certain beyond a doubt that he was a good person. She’d seen the way he’d helped Byron Murdock. And her—he had rescued her from countless brushes with death.

  Colin cared about people. More than most people she’d known. She sometimes got the feeling he didn’t want others to know that about him. But the truth was written on every part of his being.

  Opening the glass door, Julia entered a lobby similar in shape and size to the one she and Colin had walked through the night of that first party. The ground was covered in cheap plastic tiles. Nothing else was in the dimly lit room, short of a well-worn carpet.