Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  She turned to face him and winced at the expression on his face. She knew that particular cocktail of emotions. And it inevitably spelled the end of any chance at a real relationship with him.

  Oh, God. No.

  The knowledge that she’d lost Max made her want to clutch her middle and fold in half in agony. She’d been so close to finding a man she could have a real relationship with. But then she had to go and blow it and be honest with him. Would she never learn? This was all her fault, but that didn’t make it hurt any less.

  She fell back into the flimsy chair, too devastated to stand and look at him any longer.

  No sooner had she sat back down than Max jumped to his feet and paced a lap around the tiny apartment, which took about ten seconds total. He stopped, looming over her. “I don’t know how you knew so much about my past that I never talk about to anyone. Maybe you did your homework insanely well on me.”

  A frown flitted across his features, and she could tell that he was trying to figure out who’d known about him being abandoned in the bayou naked, or who might have known about the beatings.

  She ached to tell him her gift was real. That no one else knew about his private anguish and humiliation. That his secrets were safe with her. But she’d learned over the years that the harder she tried to convince someone that her talent was genuine, the less they believed her. She simply had to wait in an agony of impatience for him to decide for himself if he could accept that she knew things about him that no normal human being could reasonably know.

  He took several more laps around the apartment and at length stopped in front of her again. “I’m willing to accept that you know stuff about me. Whether you have a real psychic talent or you’re a gifted charlatan, I don’t know. And I’m not sure I care which it is. But right now I could use your help. Did you see or hear—or divine—any information about a man, a shadowy figure, who is in charge of a lot of the people at that party?”

  “I didn’t see any faces that anyone was trying to conceal from me. But now that I know what to look for, if you could put me in close enough proximity to your boss to touch him, I might be able to pick the face you’re looking for out of his mind.”

  “In the first place, is that how it works? You come into physical contact with someone and you get stuff on them? Is that how you got the face of that girl? From Julio G.’s noggin? And is it how you picked up that stuff about me? No. Don’t answer that.”

  Max was babbling, a glaring indication that he was rattled. She started to speak, to promise that she would never reveal his secrets to anyone else, but he cut her off.

  “In the second place, I’m not letting you go anywhere near Peter Menchekov again. He’s too dangerous.”

  She reeled as she caught a mental glimpse of an order to kill her. An order given to...ohmigosh...Max. “Would you really do it?” she whispered, stunned.

  “Do what?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing. Just my imagination getting the better of me. It’s a hazard of the profession.”

  “So here’s the thing. Peter believes that you’re as psychic as your aunt reportedly was. He’s terrified that you’re going to have a vision of the apex predator at the top of his organization. Peter has asked me to keep a very close eye on you and make sure you don’t ‘see’ anything you shouldn’t.” He made air quotes with his fingers as he said the word see.

  Ahh. That was where the order to kill her must have come in. If she “saw” Peter’s boss, Max was to kill her. Was that what had happened to Callista? Had she identified a man who was willing to kill to keep his identity secret? Would the same men ultimately kill her, too?

  “Do you suppose she saw him, too?” she asked.

  “You’ve lost me.”

  Oops. She often had that problem. She would have silent conversations with the voices in her head and forget that other people couldn’t hear them. “What if my aunt had a vision of a face that’s not supposed to be seen? Would your boss wire my place to make sure I don’t do the same thing?”

  Max glanced down at the monitors and back up at her. “I doubt Peter has the power to order a crew that professional, and hence expensive, to put high-tech surveillance gear in your place...” His voice trailed off.

  “But you know who does have that kind of clout, don’t you?”

  “Yes. And no. The man I’m trying to identify would have that kind of money and resources. If word got passed up the chain of command to him from Peter that a new psychic is in town, he may be trying to find out just how good you are and how much of a threat you pose to him.”

  She glanced down at the monitors of her now empty shop and apartment. She knew full well from her previous work with the FBI that a person powerful enough to send armed men to her house to wire it for surveillance surely had the resources to have the same armed men kill her.

  In a small voice, she asked, “What are we going to do?”

  He stared at her grimly. She didn’t need to be psychic to know she wasn’t going to like what he had to say next. “I think we need to go back to your apartment and act like nothing’s wrong.”

  “Excuse me?” she blurted.

  “Let them watch you. Let them see that you’re perfectly normal and you don’t talk to the ghosts in the corner. That you don’t have visions or see faces. Show them you’re a fake and no threat at all to them.”

  She frowned. It was what she’d planned to do when she’d moved here. But now that she wasn’t being given a choice in the matter, she liked the idea of hiding her abilities a lot less than before.

  Max was speaking again. “Another problem. Peter ordered me to keep a close watch on you. He may have told his boss he gave me that order.”

  “Why is this a problem?”

  “Whoever is on the other end of those cameras may expect to see me hanging out with you constantly.”

  Her pulse leaped. Max was going to be spending a lot of time with her, then? She failed to see much of a downside to that. And to think she’d been ready to kill him less than an hour ago. She might be weird, but wild mood swings had never been part of her gig before. At least not until she met a man who completely swept her off her feet.

  “So what are we supposed to do when we go back there?” she asked him.

  “We play house like any other perfectly normal, boring couple.”

  She snorted. The two of them were a lot of things, but normal or boring didn’t make the list.

  “And in the meantime, you keep an eye out for me to start describing or drawing strange men’s faces, and you’ll tackle me if I start doing anything along those lines.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And if I don’t go along with this plan?”

  “Peter or his boss will have those guys with the guns come back and kill you.”

  She stared at him, appalled. “And you work for these people?”

  “I’m infiltrating these people to take them down. And I need your help.”

  “How long have you been undercover with them?”

  “Approaching two years.”

  Her jaw dropped. “And you don’t have enough to send them all to jail by now? What makes you think you’ll ever get enough to put them away if you don’t already have it?”

  He sighed. “I have plenty to take down all the little guys. In fact, a few of the low-level street thugs have already been taken out. This bunch was using a human-trafficking ring to finance some of their other extracurricular activities. A stop has already been put to that.”

  That was good news, at least.

  “But it’s the top man I’m after. And he has yet to show his face. It has taken me a while to work my way up the organizational ladder far enough to get a shot at him and to gain people’s trust along the way.”

  “How have you protected your soul from them f
or so long?”

  He looked at her as if he didn’t know how to answer the question. Warning bells went off in her head as he continued to stare blankly at her.

  She threw him a lifeline. “So how is this acting like a normal couple thing supposed to work?”

  He frowned, thinking hard for several seconds. Then his face lit. “I’ve got it! I’ll help you renovate your place. It’ll give me an excuse to spend a lot of time with you.”

  Her heart jumped before she reminded it that the whole thing would be just an act. “Since I don’t seem to have any choice in the matter, I guess I’ll have to accept your offer, then.”

  “Look. I’m sorry to have dragged you into this. I really wanted to keep you out of it. But your aunt worked for these guys for so long that they established her shop as their main dead drop location for all of their most important information exchanges. They don’t want to mess up the routine if they don’t have to.”

  “Callista was involved with the Russian mob?”

  “Up to her eyeballs, apparently.”

  “Did they murder her?”

  “How certain are you that she was murdered?” He clearly was asking if she had special knowledge of a crime. Air quotes around the word special.

  “I’m not positive, of course, because I didn’t witness the crime. But I have a feeling—” She broke off. Then she started again, this time telling the truth. “Fine. Her ghost has been whispering to me. Sending me dreams. I don’t normally do the whole whispering ghost thing, but I’m pretty sure it’s her. And she wants me to find out how she died.”

  To his credit, Max only rolled his eyes a little. “If she can tell you all of that, why can’t she just tell you how she died?”

  She threw him a withering look. “Because I obviously have to have proof of how she died for some reason that counts in this world.”

  “Well, yeah. If we can show that she was murdered to the police, we can force them to open a murder investigation and possibly expose the guy I’m after.”

  “There you have it,” she declared. “Callista was no dummy in life. She wouldn’t be one in death.”

  Max looked as though a headache was starting up behind his eyes and hammering at his temples. She might be mad as hell at him for watching her, but he was still a human being, and still trying to look out for her.

  She moved around behind him to massage his shoulders and neck. It was like kneading rocks. But gradually, some of his terrible tension eased. It wasn’t exactly a truce, but it also wasn’t open warfare.

  He sighed and said, “I’ve called in a few favors. An autopsy’s going to be performed on your aunt’s remains. This long after her death, it may not show much, but it’s worth a look.”

  It seemed as if her jaw was destined to be perpetually sagging open today. “Well, okay, then. Um, thanks.”

  For the first time since they’d come into this surveillance headquarters, he looked her square in the eye. Apology was packed into every corner of his gaze. Her indignation softened even more. Gradually, the apology warmed, shifted. Turned to heat, and then to blazing fires of need.

  It was darned near impossible to stay mad at a man who looked at her as though he wanted to crawl into bed with her for a week, not sleep a wink and never crawl out.

  He tore his gaze away from hers reluctantly. “If you’re going to go back into your apartment with me, there are a few things you need to know.”

  Rats. They were back to business.

  “First, don’t ever look for the cameras. You won’t find them anyway, and it would tip off whoever’s on the other end that we know the cameras are there. If you’re tempted to peek, come talk to me instead. I promise I’ll distract you. I’m not giving these bastards any excuse to hurt you.”

  That last bit was delivered with such fierce protectiveness that her heart broke a little. After everything she’d revealed to him, he was still willing to walk through fire for her? Tears pricked at her eyelids, and she sniffed loudly, fighting them off.

  “Second,” he continued more gently, “you really do have to try to act natural. Just be yourself.”

  Apparently, her natural self was a weepy mess at the moment. He stopped his lecture and gathered her against his big, comfortable chest wordlessly. He probably didn’t even know why she was crying, and he was still willing to stroke her hair and hold her until she felt better.

  At length, she gathered the shreds of her composure around her and stepped back from him. “You were saying? Something about acting natural.”

  “It’s a thousand times harder to do than it sounds. You’ll essentially become an actor pretending to live your life. It feels weird, so expect that. If you make a mistake, just move on. Don’t try to backtrack or explain yourself. People misspeak all the time. Got all that?”

  She nodded to indicate that she at least caught the gist of what he was saying. She figured it was going to take just diving into the deep end of this pool to really figure out the whole living-on-hidden-cameras thing.

  “If it turns out to be too much for you, we do not have to play out this charade,” Max added.

  Charade? It would all be a charade with him? Such a soft word, but its sharpened edges cut into her flesh, making her bleed inside. Maybe it was for the best. He lived some sort of double life that involved a lot of danger. She didn’t need to get mixed up in that.

  Except she was apparently already mixed up in it without even knowing it. What had Callista been thinking to drag her down here and throw her into the middle of a giant mess like this?

  She stared at Max, and he at her, each lost in their own thoughts. Finally she asked, “And when does this home renovation party commence?”

  “Now. I’d suggest we go downstairs and get my truck, make a run to a home improvement store, and return to your place with some tools and supplies that will explain our abrupt departure from your place this morning.” He glanced down at her feet. “And we’d better get you some shoes. Nobody goes shopping in fuzzy socks.”

  He made it sound so simple. Just act normal. Spend time with the attractive guy who was so hot he made her toes curl. Do some renovations. How hard could it be?

  Why, then, were warning bells clanging wildly in her head as if the whole city were burning down around them? What wasn’t he telling her? What else was going on here?

  CHAPTER 9

  Max carried in the last load of PVC pipes and dropped them on the floor of Lissa’s living room with a clatter. He’d already spotted two of the surveillance cameras. But he knew what to look for, and with her place gutted like this, spots to hide the tiny gadgets were not plentiful.

  In a way, he felt bad for the guys who’d been sent to wire the place for sight and sound in three minutes flat. They had to have sworn up a storm when they saw what they had to work with. They had made the best of it, though, and chosen the same spots he would have. Which told him volumes about just how well-trained those men had been. After all, his own training had been world-class.

  “What’s first?” Lissa asked cheerfully.

  He glanced up quickly. Was she that good an actress, or was she that ignorant of just how dangerous a game they were playing? One slip. One hint that they knew they were on Candid Camera, and those guys with the guns would be back so fast that even Lissa’s special powers wouldn’t be enough to save them.

  “Plumbing and electric repairs. Then we can put your walls back together.”

  “I don’t know anything about either of those.”

  “Lucky for you, I do.” He was no contractor, but he’d watched the ones in his condo closely. And for right now, all he had to do was fake looking competent. He just had to stay busy. Not think too much about those damned cameras. But how could he not, with Lissa’s life hanging in the balance?

  He enlisted her help in measuring and s
awing sections of pipe. Rather than pull out the old copper pipes, he was just going to install PVC pipes in the walls beside the old ones. She caught on quickly how to prime, dry fit and glue plumbing fittings together, and they actually finished replumbing both the bathroom and kitchen before it got dark outside and Lissa called a halt for the day.

  They ordered pizza, and when it arrived they sat on her couch, eating it directly out of the box with cold beers.

  “When are you planning to open the shop again?” he asked conversationally.

  “As soon as I can get iron bars for over the windows. I’m not having any more thugs break into my shop.”

  He looked up quickly at her. Careful, Lissa. Although he supposed it was something she could be expected to complain about. “I can help with that. The same guy I got that front door from salvages wrought iron from all over the city. I’ll take some measurements in the morning and see if he’s got something that would work for you.”

  Lissa laid aside the pizza box and scooted forward on the couch until her knees touched his hip. She threw her arms around his shoulders and kissed him soundly on the mouth. “You are the best boyfriend ever.”

  Startled, he kissed her back. “I am, aren’t I?”

  “Are you too tired to drive home tonight, by any chance?” she asked cajolingly.

  “You want me to stay?” He was genuinely surprised by that.

  “Yes,” she answered firmly. “I feel much safer when you’re around.”

  Ha. For good reason. He was no less lethal than any of the men who’d planted the cameras in her place. “All right, then. A slumber party it is.”

  “Want me to tell you some ghost stories?” she joked.

  “I’m not sure I want to hear the stories you could tell me.”

  She waved a breezy hand at him. “All that psychic mumbo jumbo is just for show. Callista’s longtime customers expect it. Doing the whole woo-woo thing is purely a stunt to keep sales up.”