by Lora Leigh
She could hear them talking. It was a hollow sound, a sound that indicated a cavernous area, perhaps a warehouse. She was lying on a cot. The drug would be given through an IV. She remembered that. It had been part of her training when she had worked with the Mossad years ago. It was the drug known to break her the fastest.
Bastards! She bit back the tears, the fury. If she let it take her over now, then she was going to break before they ever inserted the IV.
“The drug will be here within the hour,” one of the men spoke up.
“I don’t like this,” said another, the one she’d heard called John. His tone was irate, and had been growing more so since they had arrived at the location.
“Chill,” another voice advised him softly. “There’s no pain involved. It’s humane and efficient.”
Why would killers worry about humane and efficient?
“Fuck your humanity and efficiency,” John growled, his voice still low. “Let her the fuck go.”
“Her people are on their way,” he was told. “We’ll wait for them outside, lead them in, then begin the interrogation. You keep an eye on her.”
Her would-be knight had also been the same interrogator who had called her “cheap meat” hours before. Threatening to sell her to the local dog food company. But she’d heard the amusement in his tone, heard the playfulness.
Nostalgia had almost washed over her at the sound. If he’d had an Australian accent. If he had light gray eyes rather than dark, if his hair was a lighter blond. If he were another man and another time, then she would have known she was safe. If he were the lover she had lost, Trent Daylen, rather than John Vincent, a suspected arms dealer and killer, then she wouldn’t fear the outcome here.
But Trent was dead. She had to force herself to remember that, to let that pain wash through her again. Trent had been killed in Australia.
Trent was gone.
She heard the men leave, but she was aware there was one still watching her. John. The arms dealer.
He was an agent, she knew he was. They all were. It was the only thing that made any sense. If they drugged her, she’d forget all this. She would forget their names, their identities, and the operation being conducted here. It would all be gone.
She felt movement around her, a brush of air against her cheek a second before the gag was dragged down over her chin.
She stayed silent. At the moment, she decided silence was the better part of valor. It could be her smartest move.
“Picked yourself a hell of a fight here, didn’t you?” His voice was low, filled with anger.
“What do you care?” She kept her own voice equally low.
He breathed out roughly. She felt a low sizzle of electricity as he gripped the back of her neck.
How odd. That reaction was rare. It was a reaction she had only known with Trent. She closed her eyes again and forced herself to breathe through the knowledge that she was truly alone. She had no partner, she had no agency backing. Hell, her own agency was turning against her for these men.
What the hell was going on here?
“I shouldn’t care,” he assured her. “You’ve asked for this. You could have given us what we needed and gone your way.”
“Bullshit.” She gave a hard mocking laugh. “Going my way wouldn’t have taken me very far. Orion is mine,” she hissed. “His death belongs to me.”
“That isn’t going to happen, baby,” he assured her. “The bastard nearly killed you in Russia. Let it go now.”
She couldn’t let it go.
“You’re lucky.” Orion’s voice washed through her memories. “The right people want you alive, for the moment. Don’t make the same mistakes your family has made, little girl. Go home. I cross you again, and I’ll drink your blood for breakfast.”
The right people wanted her alive. People she hadn’t cared to associate with since she was eighteen years old. The right people, those with too much money and too much power. People who hired this man’s services and gave him his orders.
“I can’t let it go.”
She should have lied about it. She could have promised him the moon; what the hell difference would it make in the long run? She should give him what they wanted and bargain for her release and just fucking run.
She’d been running for more years than she could count. A few more surely wouldn’t make a difference.
“What does the drug do to you?” he asked as she felt his fingertips running down her arm.
She wanted to smile. Trent used to do that when he wanted information from her, that or her attention, or just to touch her. The backs of his fingers over her arm.
These weren’t Trent’s fingers, even though the sensation was the same. There was a fine webbing against his flesh, as though his fingers were scarred or had suffered some trauma. He touched her as Trent once had, though, causing her chest to tighten with pain.
Her handsome, courageous Trent.
The blindfold eased slowly from her eyes and she found herself staring into the storm-ridden grays of John Vincent’s. They were eyes that swirled with turbulence, with anger and desire, with lust.
He was rugged, rough. His face was sun-bronzed with creases at his eyes as though he had once laughed a lot but rarely did so now. His upper lip was a bit thin, his lower lip a bit full. They were kissable lips. Lips that would know their way around a woman’s body. Lips that knew how to kiss, how to caress.
“Are you going to let me go?” Bailey could feel her heart racing in her chest as he hunched in front of her, staring into her eyes as though he were trying to figure her out.
“I shouldn’t,” he whispered. “I should never have walked into this little trap.” She could sense the but in that sentence and would’ve loved to have known what he was thinking.
“What trap?” she asked, wondering at the swirl of emotions in his eyes.
“The Bailey Serborne trap.” He sighed. “Big ocean-green eyes and the face of an angel. A face that traps a man’s soul and never lets it free.”
He sounded serious. Bailey wanted to sneer, but she couldn’t work up the mockery, the sarcasm needed. It wouldn’t slip past the pain that pulled at her heart and left it aching.
“I know who you are,” she whispered. “You’re no more an arms broker than I am.”
He laid his fingers against her lips. “You never want to say that again. Don’t even think it. Don’t become a risk, Bailey, or I’ll never be able to protect you.”
She tilted her head to the side. “Since when did I become your responsibility?”
Familiarity flickered in his gaze, confusing her. He watched her as though he knew her, as though he had touched her, and for a moment she could actually feel that touch.
His lips thinned, holding back whatever he wanted to say as he rose to his feet and dug his hand into the snug pocket of his jeans. He pulled free a small penknife, opened it, then moved around her.
A second later he was curling her fingers around it.
“I can give you five minutes,” he told her. “There’s a car parked at the back door, the keys are in the ignition. Drive out slow and easy and keep driving, baby. If you’re taken again, I won’t be able to save you. I won’t be able to keep this from happening to you.”
She stared back at him as he moved around her, her fingers gripping the knife as she made a decision she couldn’t have imagined making.
“The information you wanted,” she whispered.
His eyes narrowed.
She gave him the brief details he needed, most importantly the location of Orion’s handler, information it had taken her years to track down. She would have known his voice in a heartbeat, but she wouldn’t hear it again. She described the handler’s voice as well as Orion’s quickly while she worked the knife through the ropes. She ran through the list of details she had, reciting the last one as the ropes fell away from her wrists.
She dropped the knife and moved. Jackknifing from the cot, she swiped his legs out from under him an
d sent him rolling before sprinting to the back door.
She was almost there. Her hands were reaching for the latch when she was suddenly grabbed from behind and jerked around. She bounced against the cement wall. The only thing that protected her head was the hard male hand that covered it. The only thing that dimmed the shock of the impact was his lips suddenly covering hers.
The fingers of his free hand gripped her jaw, keeping her from biting the tongue that swept across hers. Not that she would have bitten. Not that she could have bitten. She was shocked, held amazed, lost in a riot of sensations that she had felt only once in her life, and only with one other man. A dead man.
“Try that again.” He jerked back from her, releasing her. “You can play dirty all you want to, baby, but remember, I’ve got your number, and I know damned well how to use it.”
She flashed him a daring smile. “I expect to hear from you soon then.”
Sliding the door handle down, she slipped out the crack she made in the double doors and escaped into the night. The car was waiting, the keys in the ignition. Within seconds she was pulling sedately down the alley and checking her rearview mirror.
He was watching her. Standing there beneath the moonlight, illuminated in an eerie glow cast by the nightly orb and the lights that struggled to ease the dimness in the alley.
And for a second, just the briefest second, it wasn’t the arms broker/unknown agent John Vincent she saw. For just a breath of time, it was Trent. For a single heartbeat she saw him, felt him.
“Trent.” She whispered his name as he turned and stepped back into the warehouse, dispelling the fantasy forever.
Trent was gone. He was dead. She couldn’t ever let herself forget that.
Or was he?
Her eyes narrowed as she pulled the vehicle into Atlanta’s traffic. She had her suspicions where her cousin David Abijah was concerned, because God’s truth, Micah Sloane could be no one but the Israeli cousin that she had believed was gone forever. She knew his voice, his movements, and the man who had interrogated her earlier could be no one else.
Micah Sloane was no more a former Navy SEAL than she was. He was a man without a true past. A man who moved like her cousin, a man who carried himself like the only family she could have called her own.
Bailey knew voices, she knew faces, she knew characteristics and movements. It was her strength as an agent. And she knew her cousin David, just as she had known her lover Trent. And now two men, one supposedly a dangerous criminal, both with the same characteristics, the same “feel,” and they were working together?
She didn’t believe in coincidence and she sure as hell didn’t believe in an overactive imagination. She wasn’t overly imaginative. She was fact-based. She knew herself. She knew the people she loved.
She was betrayed. It was a betrayal that struck into her soul and left her shaking in anger. A betrayal she wondered if she could ever forgive. John Vincent couldn’t be Trent Daylen, but she knew for a fact that Micah Sloane and David Abijah were the same.
It was a betrayal she drove away from, just as her cousin had walked away from her. Just as Trent had been taken away from her.
As the night wore on and the car ate up the miles to DC, Bailey knew where she was going from here. She had spent too many years fighting other people’s battles. It was time she fought her own.
CHAPTER 1
One years Later
IT WAS A WORLD BAILEY HADN’T expected to ever enter again. She had left home fifteen years before, vowing she would never return. After her parents’ deaths seven years ago, there had never been a reason to return.
She stood beneath expensive crystal chandeliers, outfitted in a brilliant emerald designer dress and high heels, with emeralds and diamonds at her throat and ears. Diamond pins held her hair in place and a single emerald ring graced her hand as she lifted a champagne flute to her lips to sip.
Not cheap champagne here. This was some of the best she had sipped in her life. Perhaps better than her own coming-out ball when she had turned sixteen and her father had definitely splurged on that.
She stared around the ballroom, let the orchestra’s music drift around her and pretended it was just another assignment. That she was still with the CIA, that the op she was on was blessed by its director, and that backup would be waiting if the shit hit the fan.
She knew better. In this world there was no backup. There was just Bailey Serborne, the Serborne heiress. The prodigal daughter without a family to welcome her back into the fold. Only the enemies surrounded her here.
“Bailey, how good to see you again.” She lifted her cheek and allowed yet another vapid smile to cross her lips as a kiss was brushed against her cheek.
Janice Waterstone. She was in her sixties and still looked forty. Plastic surgery and cosmetics could accomplish miracles.
Janice was one in a long line of welcoming elite in attendance at the Serborne mansion, which Bailey had reopened a year ago.
She’d returned home, supposedly with her tail tucked between her legs, her pride smarting from her dismissal from the agency. And the dismissal was nothing more than the truth; she could still hear her director screaming at her in his office. Milburn Rushmore’s face had been neon red, flushed and perspiring, he’d been so pissed at her.
“It’s good to see you again, Janice.” The smile was as patently false as the other woman’s.
Janice was no more happy to see her here than Bailey was to be here. It was the social lie that mattered, though, the persona, the facade presented to the world.
The Serborne fortune was one of the twelve largest in the world. In more than three hundred years it had never dwindled, only grown. And her family had always remained in the top tier of the social elite. The cream of the crop so to speak. American royalty.
She stared around the ballroom, remembering her mother’s balls here. The exquisite parties, the months of planning that had gone into them. Angelina Serborne had been an exacting hostess. Her parties were always enjoyed, and invitations were always envied.
“You have quite a crowd here.” Janice looked around with a smug smile. “I believe I even saw Sheik AbdulRhamadin and his bodyguard. Not to mention several of this year’s hottest actors.”
“Every invitation was accepted.” Bailey shrugged her bare shoulders.
“Of course they were.” Janice blinked back at her. “A Serborne invitation hasn’t been issued in seven years. No one was going to miss this party, even if it was such short notice.”
In other words, it hadn’t been planned a year in advance.
“I’m home. I wanted to remember the good times,” she stated simply. “Mother loved the parties.”
Janice paused at the mention of Angelina, then finally nodded as though her thoughts were pleasant for a change.
“Angelina and I used to plan her parties together.” Janice sighed. “I’ve missed her.”
Bailey finished her champagne. It was instantly snagged by a waiter and replaced with another. Reminiscing about the past wasn’t on her list of priorities tonight.
“Pardon me, Janice, I see someone I need to talk to.” Bailey excused herself before making her way across to the room to her nemesis.
Some men were so power-hungry that they would do anything to achieve the position they sought. One of those men was Raymond Greer, a former CIA overseas operative.
Raymond had managed to slide into the elite by the way of marriage to one Mary Grace Altman, a widow he’d met on a European cruise while undercover. Bailey wondered if Mary was aware that at one time, she was the former agent’s mark.
Raymond stood an easy six four, but he lacked the breadth and muscle that would have made his height attractive. His face was shaped rather like a weasel’s, and she could honestly say she had never seen a real smile cross his lips.
“Hello, Raymond, I’m glad you could make it.” She stepped up to the former agent and continued softly, “You’ve done very well for yourself.”
“N
ot all of us are born into wealth.” His smile was tight, almost angry, as he spoke back just as softly. “Some of us definitely have to work for our retirement.”
Bailey’s brows arched as she glanced several feet from where they stood from Raymond’s delicate wife.
Mary was one of the sweetest people Bailey knew and one of the few who understood the word sincerity. She was a sister to one of the men Bailey hated most in the world and the aunt to the girl who had once been Bailey’s dearest friend.
“Some things should never be considered work,” she stated softly as she turned back to him.
He glared back at her.
“Really, Raymond, I’m your hostess, don’t you know you’re supposed to kiss my ass.” She brought her glass to her lips to hide her own gloating smile. “You’re letting your roots show, my friend. That’s considered impolite.”
“What do you want?” He ran a hand over his thinning brown hair, and his hazel eyes flickered back to her in suspicion.
Bailey shrugged at his question. “We should be friends. We’ve come from the same world in some ways. The same dangers. We could trade war stories.”
Not in this lifetime and she knew it. Raymond despised her for her birth, just as she despised him for his arrogance. But that arrogance had been an inborn trait of his. He was finally where he had felt he had belonged all along. It didn’t matter how he’d had to lie, cheat and perhaps even kill to get here.
Raymond’s gaze narrowed on her at her suggestion. “Funny, you were never interested in discussing anything with me before.”
She smiled at that. “We never had anything in common before. We’re both a part of this society; we see each other often. We should make the best of it.”
“You’re not interested in returning to the agency then?” he asked her, a hint of calculation in his voice and in his gaze. “After a year I’d assume you’ve missed it.”
It was a question she had been asked several times over the past months since returning home.
“You don’t have to insult me,” she informed him coldly. “I think we’re both aware that’s never going to happen.”