Renegade Alpha (ALPHA 5)

by Carole Mortimer

  If Lijah Smith said she needed to go to the States with him, then that was what she had to do.

  She nodded abrupt acceptance. “So what happens next?”

  Lijah took his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed speed dial before raising the phone to his ear. “Everyone in. Now!” He ended the call. “What happens next, Callie, is I do what I do best.” He gave her a hard and determined grin.

  Callie quickly learned that what Lijah did best was phenomenal.

  Within minutes, it seemed all the offices of Grayson Security were occupied with people on telephones and computers, all talking at once, gathering information, checking and double-checking.

  And all of them reported directly to a Lijah who was brisk and decisive—and nothing like that laid-back, uninterested cowboy Callie had first spoken to just hours before.

  Somewhere amid all that efficiency, he also managed to remember to instruct someone to order a late lunch to be brought in for everyone, and for someone else to go and buy clothes for Callie.

  He also spoke to the owner of the company responsible for security that night at the Hammond Gallery. The conversation had started out politely enough, and ended abruptly after Lijah called the other man an incompetent asshole.

  Callie sat on the sidelines and watched and listened in awe.

  She also learned a healthy respect for a man she already found far too personally disturbing for comfort.

  She hadn’t so much as looked at a man since Michael died, and yet she couldn’t stop watching and listening to Lijah. Admiring him. For the way he cut through any and all red tape, including those airlines that had been so difficult with Callie this past week. The quickness of his mind as he processed and spat out information before anyone else. The easy way he led his team, and in such a way none of them seemed aware he was even doing it.

  Most of all, she couldn’t stop watching the way that he moved.

  For such a big man, he was incredibly light on his feet, catlike, even graceful, muscles rippling in his arms and back, jeans fitting snugly over a taut butt.

  Partway through the afternoon, he had thrown off the Stetson too, revealing very dark overlong hair brushed back from his face and inclined to curl a little about his ears.

  Several busy hours later, Callie realized she had seriously underestimated Lijah Smith, been fooled by his initial appearance and laid-back attitude.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” She stood hesitantly in the doorway to his office, after feeling totally superfluous all afternoon.

  He looked up from where her father’s papers were spread all over his desk, so focused his expression was blank for several seconds as he stared at her, as if he was having trouble placing who she was.

  Then his brow cleared, and he gave her a rueful smile. “We now know your father flew to Washington via Amsterdam and Atlanta, that he spent one night at a hotel near the airport. We’ve even spoken to the receptionist who remembers booking him in. Did you know your father is a handsome devil that women don’t forget?” he added dryly.

  “I did actually, yes,” Callie answered distractedly, stepping farther into the office. It had always puzzled her that her father had never married again, but his reply to that question had always been he had loved her mother too much to ever think of taking another wife. “My father flew to Washington?” she repeated slowly.

  “Via Amsterdam and Atlanta.” Lijah nodded. “No doubt in an effort to cover his tracks. Any idea why he chose Washington?”

  “I believe several of the guests at the gallery that night were from the Washington area…”

  “Twenty of them,” Lijah confirmed. “Twelve of them are men.”

  Callie gave a pained wince. “We can hardly knock on the door of each and every one of them and ask if they stole the Felix Griffith’s jewelry collection and killed Michael. Or if they now know where my father is.”

  “Obviously not,” Lijah confirmed grimly. “But hopefully if—when we locate Peter, he’ll know who we’re looking for. At the moment, we’re still having a little trouble locating which hotel Peter went to after that first one. Any ideas?”

  “He didn’t go to another hotel,” Callie revealed with certainty. “His sister, my Aunt Jane, is married to an American lawyer and owns a house in Georgetown,” she explained at Lijah’s questioning look. “She won’t be there now, though. She and her husband always go to Barbados for the winter.”

  “Shit, I wish I’d known that an hour ago. Daisy!” Lijah called to the outer office, a harassed blonde appearing in the doorway seconds later. “Forget phoning round the individual hotels. Get the address and telephone number of Peter’s sister from Callie here. No, forget that too. Thanks, Dayz,” he dismissed the blonde as he turned to Callie. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  “In my bag.”

  Lijah stood. “Then I think you should be the one to make the call to your aunt’s house. If Peter sees and recognizes your number, maybe he’ll pick up.”

  Callie began looking through her bag for her cell. “And if he doesn’t?”

  His eyes narrowed. “When you and I get to Washington later tonight, we’ll make your aunt’s house our first port of call.”

  Her fingers fumbled slightly on the buttons of her cell phone as she punched in her aunt’s number. It hadn’t even occurred to her before now that her father might be at Aunt Jane’s. Mainly because she hadn’t guessed that her father was in Washington at all.

  Her palm felt damp as she tightly gripped and held the cell up to her ear. Maybe in a few seconds, she might actually be speaking to her father. And, if possible, beg him to come home. “It’s ringing.”

  It continued to ring.

  And ring.

  Callie’s heart sank as the call went to voice mail.

  She put her hand over the mouthpiece to speak to Lijah. “Do I leave a message?”

  “No. Absolutely not,” he instructed grimly. “If Peter isn’t answering, then we have no idea if the location has been compromised.”

  “Compromised?” Callie slipped the cell phone back into her bag.

  Lijah gave a shrug. “That’s military speak for—”

  “I know what it is, Lijah,” she assured him quietly. “I’m a military brat, remember?” She knew compromised meant that her aunt’s house might now be known and infiltrated by the enemy.

  The enemy.

  Dear God, was it possible her father really had managed to find him?

  And if he had—

  “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Callie.” Lijah crossed the room to stand just in front of her. “We have no proof your father even went to your aunt’s house. It may just be locked up for the winter, like you said.”

  And her father might be lying inside that empty house with a bullet through his head, just like Michael—

  “I said don’t.” Lijah lightly grasped the tops of her arms as he looked down at her intently. “Do you trust me, Callie?”

  After what she had witnessed this afternoon? “Oh yes.” With her father’s life. With her life.

  “Then trust me now when I tell you there is no reason to suppose that any harm has come to your father. Peter may just have gone underground. No phone calls, no contact with anyone he knows. It’s what he’s trained to do, remember?”

  She gave a pained wince. “Even me?”

  “Especially you. There is no way that Peter would want this bastard to know anything more about you than he possibly already does, and that includes your telephone number.”

  She looked up at Lijah, searching those deep blue eyes, noting the skin taut over high cheekbones and the stubble having grown even darker on the strength of his jaw during the course of the afternoon. “Do you have family who worry about you too, Lijah?”

  It was as if a shutter had come down over those indigo eyes as he released her and stepped back. “We’ll be leaving in three hours.” He turned away and began gathering up her father’s papers. “I suggest we go back to my place
so that I can pick up a few things, maybe eat dinner too, before driving to the airport.”

  Callie had no doubt that some of those things Lijah wanted to pick up would be a gun and whatever other weapons he favored. Quite how he was going to get them through airport security, she had no idea, but she now had every faith Lijah knew exactly what he was doing.

  “Why were you so tired this morning when I arrived here?” She had realized, as she watched him working today, that the lines etched beside his eyes and bracketing his mouth were caused by fatigue. Not the sort of fatigue from spending a night on the town or in bed with a woman, but a bone-weary fatigue that he ignored so he could concentrate on finding her father.

  “Because I only arrived back in England at six o’clock this morning.”

  She had thought it might be something like that. “From where?”

  “Long story.”

  Callie frowned, having realized this was his stock answer when he didn’t intend saying any more on a particular subject. That perhaps he couldn’t say any more than that. “Did it have a happy ending?”

  “Yeah.” Some of the tension left his shoulders. “It had a happy ending.”

  She gave a pained grimace. “I’m sorry I was so impatient with you when I arrived. I—didn’t realize… I had no idea what you do here.”

  “Pretty impressive, hm?”

  He was pretty impressive.

  Callie had also noted that the subject of his family was a closed book.

  Because Lijah didn’t want to talk about his family, or because he didn’t have any?

  Any more than he would tell her why, as an Englishman, he chose to wear a Stetson and cowboy boots?

  The more time Callie spent with Lijah Smith, the less she felt she knew about him.

  Chapter 4

  She felt that even more when she stepped into his home a short time later.

  “Not what you were expecting?” Lijah taunted as he watched Callie walk slowly about his house.

  Well, house was probably overstating it. Lijah had bought this old abandoned warehouse and turned it into an open-plan living space, except for the bedroom and a bathroom up a dozen stairs onto the floor above. On the ground floor, apart from another bathroom, it was all open; sitting area, dining area, kitchen, games-and-training area. The floors were polished oak, the furniture comfortable rather than fashionable, the bare brick walls covered with an assortment of paintings and photographs.

  From the outside, it still looked like an abandoned warehouse. Deliberately so; sometimes Lijah had to lock up for weeks at a time if he was away on a mission. He had a Grayson state-of-the-art security system installed, of course, but the less inclination anyone felt to break in, the better he liked it.

  “Judo?” Callie looked at the throw mat in the games area.

  “I practice several martial arts.” He shrugged.

  “Disarm or attack?”

  He gave a hard smile. “I’ve been known to do a little of both.”

  “I’ll bet,” Callie acknowledged dryly, doing her best not to think about Lijah wearing only a pair of cotton trousers resting low down on his hips, the bareness of his chest dewed with sweat, dark hair tousled. “Finn Devlin’s?” She deliberately changed the subject as she paused beside six black-and-white photographs.

  Lijah deftly—from long habit?—threw his hat onto the old-fashioned stand in the corner before answering her. “We did some security work for him a few months ago.”

  Her eyes widened. “So you know him?”

  Lijah gave a derisive smile at her obvious surprise at him knowing the world-renowned photographer. “Yes.”

  “These photographs are amazing,” she murmured appreciatively before moving on to the original paintings on the next wall. “You have quite the collection here,” she added admiringly.

  “As I said, not what you were expecting,” Lijah drawled self-derisively.

  He knew what image he presented to the world. Deliberately so. Peter Morgan had helped him discover seventeen years ago that drawing attention to himself by the way he dressed, literally hiding out in the open, actually meant there was less chance of anyone making the connection between Lijah Smith and who he really was.

  Because he didn’t like who he really was, and had no intention of ever going back there.

  Callie’s question earlier as to whether or not he had any family that worried about him?

  None that he wanted to acknowledge.

  Or ever see again.

  “You miss your job,” he stated shrewdly as he recognized the excitement sparkling in Callie’s eyes as she continued to study his artwork.

  That excitement instantly faded. “Yes,” she acknowledged softly.

  “Once we catch this bastard, there’s no reason why you can’t go back. Why not?” he probed as she gave a very definite shake of her head.

  “That part of my life is over now.” Callie moved away from the artwork. “I need to find something else I can do, something that doesn’t come with a whole lot of memories I don’t want to be made to think about every day.”

  “You think about it every day anyway.”

  Yes, she did.

  Callie had been told during her brief counseling sessions that all victims of a crime felt this way. That they questioned themselves, over and over again, as to whether there wasn’t something they could have said or done to prevent what had happened to them.

  She couldn’t speak for other people, but she ultimately knew there was nothing she could have done to prevent what happened at the gallery that night. She had been tied up and helpless. God knew she had begged and pleaded with Michael to tell those men what they wanted to know. He had died anyway. Once he opened the door and let the other man into the gallery, there had never been the possibility of any other outcome. Because, as Lijah and Seth had pointed out, Michael had seen their faces and knew who they were.

  No, there was nothing Callie could have done to change the inevitable outcome of the night that was engraved so graphically in her mind.

  Which didn’t mean she didn’t still wish every day she could go back and do exactly that.

  “I haven’t had a chance to shower or shave since I got back, and I need to do both.” Lijah ran a hand through the heavy darkness of his hair. “Do you know how to cook?”

  “Yes, I know how to cook.” She gave Lijah a knowing smile. She didn’t mind him expecting her to cook. In fact, she would be relieved to have something normal to do after the strain of this past week.

  “Freezer’s full.” He nodded in the direction of the kitchen area. “Help yourself.”

  “Any preferences?”

  He arched one dark and mocking brow. “I’m the only person living here. If it’s in the freezer, I eat it.”

  Of course he did. Callie was just nervous, possibly because she had gone from a reluctance to even talk to this rude and uncommunicative man to inwardly admiring him. She also found him disturbingly attractive.

  And she was now alone in his home with him.

  A home that was far from what she might have expected.

  Despite the wide-open plan of the ground floor, the space had a warm and welcoming feel to it, probably created by the golds and browns of the floors and furnishings. Even the coldness of those bare brick walls seemed homely when there was so much colorful artwork to look at.

  Surprisingly good artwork. Better than good—the paintings were all original, some of them exquisite, as were those Finn Devlin photographs.

  Lijah Smith was a puzzle within an enigma.

  She understood now the reason his clothes were so creased. He could easily have passed for a down-and-out. And maybe he had? Whatever Lijah had been doing before flying back to England early this morning, she doubted he had been sitting on a yacht drinking champagne and eating caviar.

  The inside of this warehouse, the furniture, and the artwork he owned told her that not only was he extremely wealthy but also a connoisseur of art.

  Something she w
ould never have associated with the man she’d met earlier today if she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes.

  Besides that sharp intelligence, she wondered what else Lijah was hiding beneath the battered brim of his Stetson.

  Lijah wasn’t sure what he felt when he came down the stairs fifteen minutes later and found Callie Morgan had made herself completely at home in his kitchen area. The radio was tuned to a classical station, and she was humming happily to herself as she moved economically from the stove to place food on the kitchen table.

  Seeing anyone in his home at all was a novelty.

  His friends all worked at Grayson Security, so he saw most of them on a day-to-day basis anyway. And he never brought the women he fucked here. This was his home, his private space, and he didn’t want an array of women trooping through it on their way out the door the morning after.

  Callie Morgan was here.

  A woman who was an enticing combination of vulnerability and strength.

  She had been beaten down six months ago, her free will taken away from her, and her boyfriend shot and killed in front of her.

  But whether Callie recognized it or not, she was refusing to stay down.

  Lijah was well aware of the courage it had taken for her to travel up to London at all today, let alone approach the men working for Grayson Security. Ex-Special Forces to a man, she would have known they would all be hard, ruthless, and totally uncompromising.

  Out of love for her father, she had come anyway.

  Not only that, but she had refused to be deterred by Lijah’s initial rudeness.

  As for that perfume he’d labeled as inexpensive earlier? Whatever it was, he wanted to buy her a gallon of it and have her bathe in it. That perfume and the warm woman smell that was definitely all Callie had been wrapping themselves about his senses all afternoon. Even more so in the confines of his car on the drive over here.

  By the time they reached the warehouse, his dick was so hard, he could have pounded nails into wood with it.

  How inappropriate was that?