On the fringes of the law, but not prosecutable. And there was no denying that her dad’s consulting business was a natural fit. Before his forced retirement, he’d spent his adult life working as a professional burglar, specializing in infiltrating commercial properties and cracking safes.
He’d trained Mallory at his knee from as far back as she could remember. By age thirteen, she’d taken her place as a member of his crew, starting off by scouting egress routes and disabling telephone lines. Eventually she’d graduated to disarming motion and heat sensors and had been training to monitor video stations when they’d been busted.
As Duke Hunt’s only child, she’d had an unconventional upbringing that she wouldn’t have traded away one second of—except for the four years her dad had spent in prison.
All because of her run-in with Jake Trinity.
“How’d Trinity hear about you?” her dad asked.
“From the work I did with Triple Safe.”
Duke shot her a smile that epitomized a pride in her abilities that far surpassed normal parental standards. “You were prime on that job, babe.”
She returned the smile. She had been prime on the Triple Safe job. The company had lucked into a chance to bid on a large account here in Atlanta. They’d contracted her to consult, and she’d blown meteor-sized craters in their proposal and helped them redesign their entire system. They’d won the account, established themselves in the industry and generously added to her portfolio and reputation in the process.
“Trinity’s prototype has a few new features. Of course I won’t have a bead on how new until I see the specs,” she said, hoping a minimum of information would satisfy his curiosity. “I did notice in his proposal that he was minimizing the risk of false alarms by using passive infrared and active microwave sensors together in the same units.”
“Sounds good. Nothing worse than a twitchy alarm.”
“You’re right about that.” Twitchy sensors could activate an alarm at the most inopportune times—a major inconvenience.
“Think you’ll accept the job?”
“Don’t know until I talk to the man.” The lie tumbled off her lips easily, considering she didn’t usually lie to her dad.
“Well, here’s hoping he offers you a challenge, then. No doubt you’d love the chance to blast holes in his new system.”
No doubt. And while Mallory appreciated her dad’s vote of confidence in her abilities, the simple truth was there was no such thing as a fail-safe security system. People designed the systems, and people weren’t fail-safe. Clever burglars—and accomplished security specialists like herself and her dad—could always find ways around new precautions.
Jake Trinity, CEO and founder of Trinity Security Services, known throughout the industry as TSS, might be Atlanta’s golden boy in the security industry, but he wasn’t any more fail-safe than his systems.
Mallory intended to prove just how fail-safe he wasn’t.
“Did Lance ever make it home last night?” she asked to divert her dad from his interrogation.
“How’d you hear?”
“Polish Paul called me on my cell. He wanted to know if Lance had contacted me.”
“Had he?”
“No.”
Duke frowned, and Mallory knew he was worried about their friend’s seventeen-year-old son. Polish Paul had been part of her dad’s crew since long before Mallory had been born, and he’d crossed the line to become family-by-love somewhere along the way. He’d stuck by her dad’s side through thick and thin, through flush years and lean, and was still sticking around ten years after Duke had retired from burglary.
Mallory wished Lance had contacted her. Once upon a time, they’d been close, too. Or as close as a young boy could be to an older almost-sister. While they weren’t related, they had lived together for a few years after Polish Paul had sprung Mallory from foster care during her dad’s incarceration.
“Well, don’t worry, babe. Paul promised to call as soon as Lance shows up.” He exhaled heavily. “Damned kid is going to be the death of him yet.”
Mallory wished she had some reassurance to offer, but she didn’t. Lance had grown into an angry teen who was determined to buck his father at every turn. He’d shut out all the people who cared for him, all of Duke’s crew and her, too. Once upon a time, they’d all been one big happy family—the only family she and Lance had ever known. But time and circumstance seemed to be pulling them all in different directions.
“Just call me when he shows up, okay?” she said.
“And you let me know if you accept Trinity’s offer. Working with TSS will look good on your résumé.”
“You think?” She swallowed back a sigh. They were back here again. “I kind of thought my endorsement on Trinity’s new system would look good on his résumé.”
Her dad gave a hearty laugh, tossing his head back in a gesture that would have knocked most climbers off their center and sent them gliding toward the floor.
Her dad wasn’t most climbers.
“Opal was right. You’re getting cocky.”
“And that surprises you? I’m your daughter.” Mallory didn’t care for the word cocky, but she’d earned the right to be satisfied with her work, as both her dad and Opal knew.
“Watch out, babe. Arrogance has been the downfall of too many good men.”
“And women?”
“Job hazard,” he said, a little too seriously.
“Is that why you’ve sicced Opal on me? Are you worried I’m heading for a fall?”
Opal was another of her dad’s crew who’d been around for longer than time—although Mallory would never have dared to phrase it that way to Opal. On the down side of fifty-five, Opal liberally contributed to her plastic surgeon’s portfolio in an effort not to look older than forty.
So far she was succeeding admirably.
But even more importantly, Opal was the closest thing that Mallory had ever had to a mother. Not that she would have ever said that to Opal’s face, either. The term connoted an age difference that simply wasn’t part of Opal’s vocabulary.
Nevertheless, she’d graciously played the role through the years, stepping in whenever Mallory had needed some motherly advice that Duke’s never-ending, constantly-changing stream of girlfriends couldn’t provide.
Mallory’s own mother had abandoned her husband and infant daughter for an opportunity to perform in a Las Vegas show—her first stop on the road to stardom. Unfortunately, life hadn’t cooperated, and she’d wound up dead in a car accident before leaving Vegas for Hollywood.
“I’m not worried you’ll take a fall,” her dad said. “And I haven’t sicced Opal on you, as you so eloquently put it. She’s just helping you out with your administrative tasks.”
“And keeping you informed about the clients I take.”
“A job perk.”
He delivered that one so matter-of-factly Mallory rolled her eyes. Her dad had never been one to pull any punches.
“Are you telling me you don’t need the help? With all the work you’ve been juggling lately…from where I’m standing, it looks like you should open a real office and hire a staff.”
“I have a real office. Just because it’s in my house doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“You have voice mail, a pager and a computer.”
“Okay, a small office. My space is much better put to use in the workshop.” She chanced a glance away from the wall to look at him, suddenly realizing what this conversation was really all about. “The police work is bothering you, isn’t it?”
He looked away from the wall, too, meeting her gaze with those inky-black eyes that shouldn’t have been able to look warm when he smiled, but did.
At the moment he wasn’t smiling.
“You’re worried,” she said.
“Let’s say I’m reserving judgment about your latest career move. You’ve been consulting for law enforcement.” He spoke the words as though they scraped over his tongue.
“I’m a consultant, Dad. I consult.”
He still eyed her stoically.
“I have no intention of turning down perfectly good money. Besides, I like the work. I feel like Nancy Drew solving mysteries.” She didn’t say that she also got a kick out of the police relying on her.
“You also enjoy being one of the ‘experts’ that prosecution calls on for testimony in court?”
She smiled, hoping to lighten the moment. “It makes me feel…expert.”
“I’d rather see you focus on normal jobs.”
She might have argued that consulting for Jake Trinity wouldn’t be anything resembling normal. She didn’t. Her dad didn’t need to know she’d been so preoccupied with the man that she could see him in memory without even closing her eyes.
Though, in all fairness to her, Jake Trinity had been a good-looking guy with tawny hair and a sculpted bone structure that would look handsome whether he was nineteen or ninety. Ten years ago he’d screamed clean-cut good breeding with his wire-rimmed eyeglasses and preppy name brands.
Mallory remembered thinking he’d been too good-looking to be allowed. Then again, she’d been sixteen at the time and impressionable. Had she not been so impressed with the gorgeous young man who’d popped up on the job unexpectedly, she might never been tempted to approach him.
Nope, time hadn’t dimmed that memory. She still recalled every detail of that night with perfect clarity.
The Commercial-Cam Monitoring Network Prototype.
Ten years ago this video surveillance system had been state of the art. One of Innovative’s major competitors had paid her dad big bucks to acquire the prototype before the system officially launched onto the market.
The job had been meticulously planned and about as fail-safe as any job could be—they were sort of like security systems and people, never one-hundred-percent perfect. But this particular job had been going off like clockwork, until a very handsome man who shouldn’t have been in the building showed up while she secured the egress route for her dad’s escape.
Mallory should have hightailed it back up the rope to her own egress route on the roof. She should have radioed Polish Paul and told him she’d been made, so they could have aborted the job. That had been the backup plan. They always had a backup plan. Getting out of a building was just as important as getting in, Polish Paul always said.
But Mallory hadn’t done either of those things. She’d confronted that handsome young man instead, thinking she could stall him long enough to buy her dad the extra minute and a half he needed to complete the job. And she had. Almost.
But almost hadn’t been good enough. In this instance, almost meant that Jake Trinity had gotten to the silent alarm and changed their lives forever.
Almost everyone had gotten out of the building by the time the police had arrived.
Except for her dad.
He’d lied and said he’d tripped the alarm. She hadn’t believed him, of course. Neither had anyone else. Duke Hunt didn’t make those kinds of mundane mistakes. Mallory knew he simply hadn’t wanted her to feel guilty about ignoring the backup plan. He hadn’t wanted her to feel responsible for him going to prison or for the crew being forced into retirement. And his lie hurt almost as much as knowing she was responsible.
Almost as much as watching him handcuffed and thrown into the back of a police cruiser.
Almost as much as learning that the world she’d always believed perfectly normal wasn’t normal at all. To hear the police and the child welfare people tell it, her world was an illegal and morally ugly place.
That had confused Mallory at sixteen.
At twenty-six, it still did.
She was Duke Hunt’s beloved daughter, well-loved and cared for. She’d always thought being loved was a good thing whether she’d grown up on the fringes of the underworld or not.
With maturity, she’d come to understand that the real world wasn’t quite as black and white as the authorities painted it. The real world was an unpredictable place filled with good guys and bad guys. Not the classic depiction of white hats and black capes, either, but a place where the boundaries between right and wrong were often blurry and the bad guys could be more charming and gallant than the good guys.
No, her upbringing hadn’t been conventional, but burglary aside, it hadn’t been morally bankrupt either.
Which had led to another life-altering change.
During a visit to the prison where she’d gotten to see her dad through a four-inch-thick sheet of protective glass, she’d been informed that they were all retiring from the family business. The way her dad saw it, four years in prison wasn’t such a raw deal after an illustrious twenty-odd-year career. He’d made Mallory and all of his crew promise to turn their lives around and go legitimate.
Thanks to his business acumen and foresight, he’d provided the means for her and his crew to do exactly that. Nowadays, his crew was sitting pretty with legitimate businesses. Polish Paul owned a tattoo parlor; Eddie Gibb a pawn shop. Only Opal, who’d opted to spend her share of the nest egg on a nice house and expensive plastic surgeries, didn’t own a business. She worked as Eddie Gibb’s office manager instead, squeezing work for Mallory into her free time.
All in all, life was good.
Except for this love-hate thing she had for Jake Trinity.
She loved the fact that she and her friends had gone legit. Well, reasonably legit. She hated being responsible for making the decision that had changed all their lives.
Both occurrences began and ended with a very self-righteous man she couldn’t seem to get out of her head no matter how much time passed. He’d had a dramatic impact on her life, and Mallory had never been able to decide whether to love him or hate him for his interference. Taking this job for TSS would give her the perfect opportunity to decide which it would be.
The way she saw it, Mr. Straight-and-Narrow would benefit from being knocked on his holier-than-thou ass. And if he wound up taking a hard look at his own morals to see if they held up under temptation, then she’d be honored to provide the temptation.
“Damn.” Her dad’s voice blasted away the image of Jake Trinity quicker than a bait pack exploding in a rigged safe.
Mallory smiled, released the last handhold and tagged the ceiling to end her climb. “Hunt Junior rules the day.”
She didn’t signal her belay partner, waited instead while her dad scaled the last few feet between them, muscles bunching in his powerful arms, sweat pearling at his salt-and-pepper temples, black eyes flashing.
“Great climb, babe.”
“You, too.”
She liked that about her dad. She’d kicked his butt fair and square, and he appreciated a job well done. Although, truthfully, his chances of winning today hadn’t been good. Not only did Mallory have the advantage of thirty-plus years on her side, but her adrenaline was pumping double-time in anticipation of her upcoming consultation.
“You will give some thought to what I said about working for law enforcement.” He didn’t ask, just leveled a steely expression her way. “Don’t let them become your full-time job.”
She nodded.
His expression softened, and she knew he was satisfied. “Shall we?”
“Let’s do it.”
After signaling her belay partner, Mallory kicked off from the wall, stomach lurching at the rush of a ninety-foot drop. The air whizzed past her ears, and she laughed, the excitement as thrilling as the prospect of seeing Jake Trinity again.
2
THE WAY Jake Trinity saw it, Mallory Hunt owed him one and the time had come to collect. Angling his sport utility vehicle into a parking spot along the street in front of her upscale brownstone, he glanced at the dashboard.
Ten fifty-seven.
Three minutes to get upstairs and he’d be right on time for their eleven o’clock appointment.
Grabbing his briefcase, he stepped out of his SUV into the bright morning sun just as a low-slung black convertible cruised past him, the dr
iver’s ponytail whipping out on the wind behind her. He quickly pulled in his door so she didn’t take it off as she wheeled into the driveway and came to a sharp stop with a flash of red brake lights.
Mallory Hunt.
Jake knew her name. He knew a great deal about her, in fact, mostly from his preliminary research and references from industry associates who’d contracted her services. But he’d never seen her without a ski mask.
Even if he hadn’t known her address, he’d have known instinctively that this was the woman who’d boldly kissed him ten years ago. He wasn’t exactly sure how he knew, but he did. Even with a sidewalk and a neatly kept yard between them, he felt the same awareness he had on that long-ago night, that same chemistry, as if every nerve in his body had been wired to react to her just by being in the same vicinity.
It was crazy, really, but the moment slowed to a crawl, his every sense heightening as her door swung wide and his mystery woman emerged.
A slim booted foot touched the pavement, and Jake’s gaze traveled up the very shapely length of bare leg as she stepped from the car, the shorts she wore giving him a choice shot of sleek thighs.
She was as delicate as he remembered, but that was where memory ended—the black coveralls she’d worn ten years ago hadn’t molded her curves anywhere close to the way these khaki short-shorts and skin-tight T-shirt did now. The thin—wet?—cotton hugged a trim waist and full breasts in a way that made him drag his gaze over her appreciatively.
Her hair had been pulled back from her face in a thick black ponytail that fell halfway down her back. She swung the door shut, an efficient, graceful motion that brought the memory of the sensuous way she moved crashing back in vivid detail. Then she turned to him….
Jake stopped breathing.
A decade had passed since he’d crossed paths with this woman. She’d blown into his life for a few minutes and the fallout had left him stunned for years. And yes, resentful of her intrusion into his meticulously planned life.
But he’d never had more than an impression of the woman herself, a faceless memory of bold confidence, a lithe body and sensual movements….
Over the Edge Page 2