Harlequin Romantic Suspense March 2016 Box Set

by Carla Cassidy

  That made him laugh.

  “So, are you going to come over here and help me christen this gourmet delight?” she demanded.

  “I’ll bring the steaks if you’ll cook them.”

  “Deal.”

  He added, “There’s someplace I want to take you after dinner, though.”

  She had time for a quick shower before he arrived, and she stepped out of her bedroom feeling refreshed to the sound and smell of steak sizzling on the grill-top feature of her new gas range.

  Max pressed a glass of wine into her hand and recruited her to help tear fresh herbs into a salad. She’d just finished tossing the lot when Max plated up two magnificent steaks at the brand-new kitchen island with its matching bar stools.

  “Wow,” she remarked. “This is so civilized, I’m not sure I can handle it.”

  “Stick with me, kid. I’ll have you brushing your teeth in a real bathroom and sleeping in a bedroom with actual walls in no time.”

  She stuck her tongue out at him before diving into the delicious meal. Max didn’t seem to be in a talkative mood, which was just as well with her. She was starving after skipping lunch.

  But after the meal was over and the plates were rinsed and deposited in the dishwasher—with the appropriate amount of fanfare—Max headed for the stairs. “C’mon.”

  She followed him downstairs and outside, where she was surprised to see his truck and not Lola. They hopped in and headed into evening traffic, which was still heavy after rush hour. She became aware of Max paying close attention to his rearview mirror. “Are we being followed?” she finally asked.

  “Doubtful. But I’ll take evasive measures anyway.”

  Unlike television, it didn’t involve much dodging in and out of traffic or red light running. He did wind all over downtown New Orleans. But eventually he got onto a highway and accelerated.

  She had to confess to being disappointed when they pulled up at the gate of a storage facility. It was a multistory indoor place with a security guard and a bunch of protocols Max had to go through before they were finally let into long hallways lined with gray metal doors.

  Max unlocked the door of a dark room. She stepped into the long, narrow space while he closed and locked the door behind them. She commented, “If you’re planning to kill me, may I compliment you on your precautions not to get caught.”

  Shelves lined the space, crammed floor to ceiling with books and plastic bins full of gadgets, notebooks and papers. Four tall filing cabinets took up the corner, and it was to these that Max moved.

  “What is this place?” she asked. “And what’s all this stuff?”

  “Welcome to my father’s personal and private effects,” Max replied.

  “And we’re here why?”

  “I’m looking for some information that might be pertinent to you. And I thought you might like to get out of the surveillance spotlight for a few hours.”

  “What on earth could your father have had that would apply to me?”

  “The identity of your birth father.”

  She stared at Max in shock. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Didn’t see that one coming?” he asked drily. “I thought for sure your psychic mojo would have warned you.”

  Nope. The powers-that-be had apparently thought it would be hilarious to spring that bombshell on her.

  He opened a file drawer and rummaged through it, emerging with an old ledger. He moved over to the tall workbench in the opposite corner and turned on the work light over it.

  “What are you hoping to find in there?” she asked.

  “Lists of names. My father took notes on everything and everyone he saw and met.”

  And somehow Max was going to know which of those names was her birth father’s? More agitated than she wanted to admit, she moved beside him. He threw open the book, and she stared down at meaningless scribbles. They didn’t even look like letters. How in the hell was that jumble supposed to reveal the identity of her father?

  “What’s that?” she blurted.

  “A code,” Max answered shortly. “And, yes. I know how to read it. My father taught it to me.” He scanned the pages, turning them quickly until he found what he wanted. Drawing one finger across the lines of scribble, he seemed to be deciphering whatever was on the page.

  Did she even want to know who her father was? The statute of limitations had long ago expired for prosecuting the man. And her mother certainly wouldn’t want anything to do with the bastard at this late date. Probably not even to punch him in the face. Lissa’s stepfather might get some satisfaction from shooting him, but that would be the extent of her family’s interest in the guy.

  “This isn’t necessary, you know,” she declared. “I don’t really need or want to know who he is.”

  “I need to know.”

  Okay, color her surprised. “Why?”

  “I think he may be the man I’ve been trying to identify for the past two years.”

  “You mean the head of the big crime ring you’ve infiltrated?”

  Max looked up from the ledger. “I don’t think it’s just a crime ring. I think whoever’s running the outfit is a spy. The obvious conclusion is that the ringleader is doing it for Mother Russia.”

  “You think my biological father is a Russian spy?” she exclaimed.

  Max grimaced and then muttered, “Welcome to my life.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He looked up, a chagrined look on his face, as if he’d just revealed a lot more than he’d wanted to.

  “Your father was a spy? For Russia?”

  He stared at her for a long moment. Long enough that he didn’t have to answer her question aloud. The truth was all too clear on his face and in his thoughts. Which, of course, her Max-amplified powers were having no trouble picking up at the moment.

  “Yes,” he answered heavily. “My father was a spy for Russia. My mother, too.”

  She was so shocked at the revelation she blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Are you kidding me?”

  “You have no idea how much I wish that were a joke.”

  The pain in his reply was almost too much for her to bear. She actually had to take a physical step back from it.

  Max’s expression darkened, and abrupt violence blossomed in his thoughts. “And now their legacy is going to cost me you, too, isn’t it?” he asked bitterly.

  Oh, dear. He’d interpreted that step back as her rejecting him. “Max, it’s not like that—”

  “Don’t,” he bit out sharply. “Don’t give me lame excuses and try to explain away your horror with some logical argument. I get it. Traitor’s blood runs in my veins. Like father, like son, and all that rot.”

  She had no immediate retort for that, and he turned his back on her, hunching over his father’s notebooks, shutting her out both physically and emotionally. She stared at his back thoughtfully. That certainly explained a lot. Like how he knew so much about surveillance and taking down thugs and losing a tail. But it also opened a whole new can of worms in understanding who he really was.

  She asked cautiously, “And you? What about you? What country are you loyal to?”

  He turned slowly on the stool and stared at her, rage and resignation swirling in his gaze. She wasn’t sure he would answer her.

  But eventually, he spoke grimly. “God knows, I had plenty of opportunity to follow in my parents’ footsteps. But they made one serious miscalculation in raising me. I was born in America and grew up here. My dad took me back to Moscow when I was about twelve, and that was all it took for me to know where my heart and loyalty would always lie.”

  She needed to hear him say it. This was too important for her to rely solely on her psychic impressions of what dwelled in his heart. “And where does it lie?”

 
; He looked at her candidly. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know how much better life is in this country than in Russia. I fundamentally believe in this way of life and not the ones my parents grew up in. I’m American all the way to my bones.”

  He returned to perusing the coded text.

  “Well? What are you reading?”

  “I’m reading about my father’s financial dealings with the Russian mob twenty-seven years ago. He laundered money for them by buying art at auction for large sums of cash. This is a record of transactions. But he’s made a number of notations about his various clients. I’m interested in those.”

  “Did something in my aunt Callista’s journal make you think my father is Russian and/or a mobster?”

  Max winced as he looked up at her. “Your aunt wrote about her long-standing affair with a man she only called by the English letter Y. She made it clear that she believed him to be a member of a Russian crime syndicate. She thought it was very swashbuckling and romantic.”

  Lissa rolled her eyes. “She always did have a special fondness for pirates.”

  Max snorted. “She made it clear that her lover knew your father. He claimed that your father was untouchable after the attack on your mother because of his high rank within the mob.”

  An uncomfortable feeling crawled up her spine. The more she focused on the idea, the more certain she was that Max was exactly right. Her birth father had been a high-ranking member of the New Orleans mob run by Russians. She’d known all along, deep down in her gut, that he was a dangerous man, and the revelations from her aunt’s journal only confirmed that long-held feeling. But then something else dawned on her.

  “Are you telling me Callista knew who my birth father was?”

  “I got that impression, yes.”

  “And she never told my mother?” Lissa demanded in outrage.

  “Did your mother actually want to know who it was? DNA testing was available to determine paternity,” Max replied gently. “Every guy at that party could have been tested pretty easily.”

  Lissa had to set aside her knee-jerk anger to think about Max’s question. Her mother never talked about the rape, never questioned who did it, never expressed any desire whatsoever to know who Lissa’s father was.

  Max continued. “It might have been incredibly dangerous to your mother—and you—to know who her attacker was. If he’s who I think he is, the man is a cold-blooded killer. It’s entirely possible your mother suspected that.”

  Was it possible her mother had known her attacker was someone powerful and violent? Was that why she hadn’t pursued discovering his identity? Did she fear for her own, or her child’s, safety? She couldn’t fault her mother for the sentiment. If Lissa thought that pursuing her attacker’s identity would endanger her own child, she would back off pretty quickly, too.

  In the rare instances when the topic of her rapist’s identity had come up over the years, her mother’s only response was to insist—adamantly—that Lissa’s stepfather was her real father.

  Which was true for the most part.

  Except for the little bit of both her parents that could never forget how Lissa had come into being. Oh, they’d never blamed her for being the daughter of a rapist. But it had always been there between all of them, the unspoken gorilla in the corner that kept her from feeling entirely loved and accepted.

  “Why so quiet?” Max queried cautiously, startling her out of her depressing thoughts.

  “How much does it bother you that my father is a rapist?”

  He frowned. “Not enough to blame you for something you had nothing to do with.” He paused. “My father was a spy and a murderer. How much does that bother you?”

  “Not enough to walk away from you. You’re nothing like your father.”

  She glimpsed a dark shadow filling Max’s troubled gaze as he turned away to study the ledger some more. What on earth? She could fully believe that Max was a spy of some kind. But a murderer? The protective, funny, considerate man she knew? Every instinct she had shouted that it could not be.

  Or was that just desperately wishful thinking?

  She’d seen the way he’d taken down Julio G. when the guy had mugged her. Max had been efficient and violent, and he had shown no stress whatsoever at having nearly killed a man.

  While Max continued to read, she moved around the space, absorbing images and feelings emanating from the collection of gadgets and gear. Max’s father had clearly been a hard man. Angry. Which made Max’s innate decency even more remarkable. No matter what violent skills his father had taught him, she could feel Max’s heart, and it felt nothing like the vibe in this room.

  Assuming her psychic abilities weren’t either lying to her or deserting her and leaving her with nothing more than blind faith in superstitions.

  Max had made his opinion of that choice abundantly clear. Was he right? Was she losing herself in meaningless and wildly unreliable impressions, feelings and guesses?

  When she’d been young and naive, she’d never stopped to question her gift. She’d bombed around confidently, telling law enforcement officials where to find dead bodies as if it were the easiest thing in the world to do. But now she knew how strange and unscientific an art it was. Now, with the wisdom of adulthood, she doubted it.

  Eventually, Max tore a piece of paper out of an old notebook of his father’s and jotted down several words in Cyrillic lettering that looked like names.

  “Is one of those my father?” she asked hesitantly.

  “Maybe.”

  He might be trying to fake casual unconcern, but his entire being was vibrating like a tightly stretched wire. He’d found something.

  “Are you ready to get out of here, then?” The closeness of the space and the accumulated hatefulness of Max’s father that filled it were starting to feel oppressive.

  He spoke reluctantly. “There’s one more thing we need to talk about without an audience eavesdropping on us.”

  She turned to face him, alarm chattering down her spine. “Do tell.”

  “I asked my buddy on the New Orleans police force to look into your aunt’s death for me. See if he could find any evidence that she might have died from something other than natural causes.”

  “I remember you mentioning it.”

  “As you may also remember, she donated her body to science upon her death. Her remains were sent to Tulane University for study.”

  “And?”

  Max exhaled heavily. “And her body was stolen from Tulane’s cadaver lab before an autopsy could be performed upon it.”

  “What?” she exclaimed. “When?”

  “Day before yesterday. Soon after my buddy started making inquiries about her death. Bastien thinks that his questions sent up a red flag and provoked the theft of her remains.”

  She sensed that Max had yet to drop the bomb that had made him reluctant to launch into this conversation. “And?” she prompted.

  “We need to find her body. And figure why someone didn’t want it examined.”

  “How do you propose to find her body?” But as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she knew the answer. She spun away from Max and then turned back to face him, accusing. “You want me to find her body.”

  His jaw muscles rippled. “Can you do it?”

  “How. Dare. You.”

  * * *

  Max was confused. He had not expected Lissa to react with such anger to his request. He’d genuinely thought she’d be pleased that he would give her and her weird abilities the benefit of the doubt. But instead, she’d reacted as though he’d asked her to drown kittens and puppies.

  “Help me out here, Lissa. Why are you upset that I’m showing some faith in your psychic abilities?” he asked.

  “I’m not a trained monkey performing for your entertainment,�
� she ground out.

  “I never thought so—”

  “You people are all the same. You poo-poo my abilities until your precious facts and science fail you. And then you run to me and beg me to pull a magic rabbit out of my hat. And as soon as I do, you go right back to calling me crazy and stupid for daring to suggest that the supernatural exists.”

  She whirled around in a circle as if looking for an escape, then stopped, facing him once more. “I didn’t ask for this...gift.” She spit out the word as if it was a curse in her mouth.

  “I don’t want to be like this. I hate talking to dead people. I’m horrified by the sights I see, the terrible feelings I’m forced to experience, the awful memories I have to relive.”

  He hadn’t thought about it in those terms before. An alarming thought occurred to him. “How old were you when you started having visions and hearing dead people?”

  “Three or so. I started to understand what was going on by the time I was about seven. I worked my first case for the FBI when I was nine.”

  He swore under his breath. “You were a baby. And you had to see all that stuff.” He’d been several years older than that when his father made him start hunting, but at least he’d been killing game animals and not seeing dead humans. And he knew how traumatized he’d been by it all in spite of having his father explain why it was important to know how to kill. Lissa’d had nothing. No one to understand her gift and help her see it as a gift, not a curse.

  “I’m so sorry—” he started.

  “Save it. I don’t want your sympathy. Get me out of here,” she demanded. He detected a note of panic underneath her angry words. It reflexively made him look around for a threat. Of course. His father’s stuff. Was she picking up psychic vibes from his old man? If so, he could entirely understand her desire to get the hell out of there.

  He pocketed the sheet of paper with the names on it and led her out of the mazelike storage facility. They got in the truck, and he pointed it toward New Orleans. Lissa simmered beside him, and instinct warned him to leave that pot alone until she’d calmed down more.

  They’d made it back to the outskirts of the city when Lissa burst out, “I had it almost stopped. But then you had to come along and tear the lid off my damned power.”