VINCENT (Dragon Security Book 2)

by Glenna Sinclair

  “Maybe I won’t need the full twenty minutes,” I whispered against her mouth.

  She pulled back just enough so that she could see my face. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” she said. “Never been with someone I chose myself, never lingered afterward, never felt truly wanted.”

  “That’s a shame.” I pushed her hair away from her face and pressed my forehead to hers. “Every woman should be cherished.”

  She kissed me, her lips lingering against mine. But then her fingers moved to my chest, to trace the name permanently affixed there.

  “Who was she?”

  I know I tensed a little. She sat up, her hand moving from Sydney’s name to the side of my face.

  “We all have darkness in our pasts. I assume she’s yours, the reason why you distance yourself from people.”

  “Do I do that?”

  “Yeah, you do. You barely said two words to me when we first met.”

  “I thought I was getting better about that.”

  I took hold of her ass again, tugging her tight against my hips, burying my partially erect cock deeper inside of her. She closed her eyes and sighed, rotating her head on her neck like she could hardly stand the pleasure. I pressed my face between her breasts, taking a deep breath of the sweet scent of her skin.

  “You feel so good,” she whispered.

  “There’s no words for how good you feel.”

  She focused on me again, her hand moving with such affection over my face that I almost wanted to push her away, to disappear behind the walls Sydney always said I loved to build around myself.

  “Did you love her?”

  I groaned. “Why does it matter?”

  “I want to know about you. You know all there is to know about me.”

  She was right, but I hadn’t talked about Syd to anyone in a long time. Girls had asked—it seemed like a requirement, that discussion about tattoos every time you’re with someone new—but I always found a way to reflect their curiosity. Only Cole, outside of the people who were there when it happened, knew the truth. But even he didn’t know everything.

  “If it’s an intrusion—”

  “No, Quinn. I just…it’s not something I like talking about.”

  “Okay.”

  But I could see the hurt in her eyes. I could feel her drawing away even though her body didn’t move. I pressed my face against her chest again, taking a deep breath. Then I lifted her; I needed her not to be so intimately tangled with my body during this discussion. I set her on the cushion beside me so that we were still close, but not so close that it felt more intimate than our nudity made it.

  “We met in high school,” I said after a minute. “She went to a private school up the road from my public school and we had some mutual friends. We used to have these parties every weekend at the beach, and she came to one.”

  I hesitated, the memory of that first meeting bursting through my mind. Seeing her standing by the bonfire, wearing jeans and a sweater to a beach party on a September evening—she stood out among the bikinis and shorts. But she stood out for more than just that. She was probably the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.

  “I was a sophomore—just beginning my sophomore year—but I thought I was so grown up. I walked up to her, all full of charm, and she laughed at everything I had to say. But then we found ourselves alone, walking along the shore, and she managed to get me to be a little more serious. And that was that. We were together every weekend after that.”

  “A high school romance.”

  “Yeah. It started out that way, but we were together a long time. All through high school and into college. Just under six years.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  I nodded, remembering the way Sydney looked when she came walking through security that last time at the airport. She looked so sophisticated, a woman of the world, while I was standing there in the coveralls I wore to work in my father’s mechanic’s shop, grease under my fingernails. But she was so happy to see me, running across the corridor to jump into my arms. That was a feeling like no other, the feeling that I was the only person in the world who mattered to her.

  “We talked about getting married. She had our lives all planned out. She was going to become a lawyer, then we would get married, have three kids—two girls and a boy. Then we’d grow old together, the whole sitting-on-the-porch-in-our-rocking-chairs fairy tale.”

  “Then what happened?”

  I sat forward a little, running my hands over my head as that night unrolled through my mind, a memory that would never let me rest, that always visited me in my sleep.

  “There was another of those parties. It was the beginning of summer, and everyone was home from college or whatever they were doing during the winter. There was too much booze—a keg and bottles of whiskey and bourbon making the rounds. Sydney drank more than I’d ever seen her do before. When I told her it was time to cut it out, that we should go home, she got angry with me. We argued, and she told me that she’d cheated on me, that there’d been this guy and she was lonely…” I twisted my head to look at Quinn. “Her parents think that’s why things happened like they did.”

  “What happened?”

  “She took my keys and got behind the wheel. I tried to stop her, but she refused to get out of the car. So I got into the passenger seat to try to talk her down, to convince her to pull over. She started to cry, telling me it didn’t mean anything, that she regretted it the moment it was over. I tried to tell her that I didn’t care, that she came home to me and that was all that mattered. But then we’re driving down this road with all these curves and she’s going a little too fast. She’s about to miss this one curve, not pulling the wheel over far enough. I reached over, instinctively, and grabbed the wheel, trying to correct the truck’s trajectory. But I pulled too hard, or she turned the wheel at the same time…I don’t know how it happened, but we plowed into a tree.”

  Quinn was quiet, her knees pulled up to her chest to hide her nudity. She touched my arm, but recoiled when I stiffened.

  “She didn’t have her seatbelt on. She slammed into the windshield. Massive brain damage. She was in a coma for a week, but then her parents had her taken off life support. They wouldn’t allow me near her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I shrugged. “The cops ruled it an accident, but her father was good friends with the prosecutors, and they brought charges. The judge gave me a choice: prison or the military. Her parents were incensed. It was an unusual option for a judge to offer to a defendant as old as I was, but it was all to the judge’s discretion. Sydney’s mother told me that she hoped I was killed in combat. It was the only thing that got her out of bed in the mornings.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “They blackballed my father’s garage and made it impossible for him to make a living. He had to close it and move the family to Los Angeles to work in his brother’s bodega. My younger sister got in trouble almost as soon as they arrived, spent time in juvie. My older sister taught school at the local elementary school. So many parents complained, they had to let her go. She ended up moving to Los Angeles, too, forced to make a new start. My friends all disappeared. I wanted to go to jail. I wanted to serve my time, but my parents had already been humiliated enough. So it was the military.”

  I sighed, running my hands over my skull again. “They blame me. They say that I was jealous, that she wanted to break up with me, so I turned the wheel intentionally in an attempt to kill us both. But I had my seatbelt on. I only broke a few ribs and had a slight concussion from hitting my head on the dashboard. They say it was because I was drunk. But my blood alcohol level was two times less than Syd’s.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “But wasn’t it?”

  Quinn moved closer to me, raising up on her knees and rubbing at my shoulders.

  “You tried to stop her. You tried to keep her from running off the other side of the road. That’s why they call these thing
s an accident. Blaming you is like blaming me for what my stepfather did to me.”

  “There is no comparison,” I said, twisting to pull her against my chest. She came, willingly, curling up in my lap.

  “You’re a good man, Vincent. One second of your life shouldn’t define it.”

  I pressed my face against her throat, her words reverberating through my head. I wasn’t sure she was right, but I wasn’t sure she was wrong. All I knew was that I’d carried this burden for so long, I didn’t know who I was without it. But I was willing to learn.

  I kissed her, roughly, wanting to possess every inch of her all at once. She responded, wrapping herself around me, kissing me back in a way that no one—not even Sydney—had ever done.

  The past was the past. I was ready to move on.

  Chapter 11

  Megan

  Dante leaned forward in his chair, his hands clasped in front of him. It was a gesture Luke used to do, one that drove me nuts because it was a father-giving-a-lecture sort of gesture and he wasn’t my father.

  “We checked out everyone on the list you gave us. A few of them have been arrested for various things, mostly drugs. One for lewd behavior. Another for drunk driving. But none of them have ever been accused of stalking. And most of them don’t seem to show an inordinate amount of interest in our target.”

  “What about the actor Vincent told us about? The one she fired from her movie?”

  “Dicky Hump?” Dante snickered a little. “He’s been in rehab since that day. And he’ll probably be in rehab when we find the guy doing this.”

  “Vincent told me that she had some trouble with the people who held her contract back in Austin. Anything there?”

  Dante glanced at Hayden where he was leaning against the door, his ankles crossed.

  “There’s no love there. But our target’s a smart girl. She got them to sign some paper that keeps them from revealing her true identity for fifty years. If anyone could prove that they were behind something like this, they would have to sign over every asset they ever thought of owning to her. Neither one of them is that stupid.”

  “What about support staff? Production people she worked with in Austin?”

  “It’s a tight-knit community. Everyone I talked to was pretty shocked that anyone put two and two together and got Quinn Smith. They know how careful she was about her identity—refusing to show her face on camera, careful to always hide any identifying marks on her body, never going to any of these meet-and-greet conventions that a lot of porn stars like to attend these days. None of them can imagine how her real identity got out. And, as far as any them being our possible stalker, they all have an alibi for Friday morning. They were all working on this new movie for our target’s former bosses.”

  “Surely not everyone she ever worked with was working Friday.”

  Hayden shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a tight-knit community. They use the same people over and over again. The only possibility I can see is maybe a former actor who has a beef against Quinn. But everyone I talked to said that Quinn was a sweetheart and they never saw her argue with anyone.”

  “Another dead end.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what to tell you. The only thing I can figure is that it’s a crazed fan who somehow put it all together.”

  I nodded, forced to agree with him. I couldn’t see any other possibility.

  “Okay. We’ll get back on it in the morning. If we’re lucky, this guy will show his hand at some point and we’ll nab him that way.”

  “Police aren’t being terribly helpful,” Hayden said. “The moment they found out she was a porn star, they pretty much stopped caring.”

  “Ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  I stood up and gathered my things. “Go home, boys. Get some rest. Maybe something will occur to one of us tomorrow.”

  Hayden turned and opened the door to my office, sauntering in that way he had to Sam’s desk. She was still there, squinting at her computer through the glasses she was supposed to wear all the time, but only wore when she was working on the computer. She’d been trying to get access to a hard drive I took from my brother’s computer at his office for weeks, but she wasn’t making much progress. She thought that someone got to it first and corrupted the files so that she could not extract anything from them. But she was determined to try.

  She was a good friend.

  “Hey, grandma,” Hayden said, causing Sam to glare at him. But she took off the glasses first.

  “Go home, loser,” she grumbled.

  “Ah, don’t be like that, Sammy. You know I love you.”

  “Yeah, that’s why you make fun of me every chance you get.”

  “Not making fun. Just admiring the 80s era sweater sets.” He slipped his finger under the shoulder of her pink cardigan. “I think my mom had one like this.”

  Sam smacked his hand away. “We can’t all dress like supermodels, Hayden.”

  “But what a world that would be!”

  Dante rammed his shoulder into Hayden’s. “Let’s go get a beer, brother.”

  Hayden glanced back at me. “Join us?”

  I shook my head. “Go on. Blow off some steam, but be back here at nine, okay?”

  “No problem.”

  They walked out the door, but Hayden glanced back, his eyes moving over Sam. I don’t think she noticed. She was staring at the computer screen again, squinting because she forgot to put her glasses back on. I picked them up and handed them to her.

  “Any progress?”

  “Not really.” She sat back and looked up at me. “I’m sorry, Meg. I was really hoping to figure this out for you.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  “Has Hayden found anything new?”

  “I think he’s stopped working on it ever since I lost my temper last week. Can’t really blame him.”

  “If anyone can find anything on this, it’ll be Hayden.”

  “Maybe.”

  I squeezed her shoulder lightly before heading out myself.

  I drove home, thinking about everything that had been going on these last months. The last two years, really. First Luke, my beloved fiancé, disappeared the morning of our wedding. He left a note telling me that he’d changed his mind about his ability to commit. But the thing was, we’d been together since our junior year of high school. Ten years. We stayed together through high school, through him going to the Navy, me the Marines. Through SEAL training and then the CIA came calling for him. He disappeared for months on end, trying to make the world a better place he’d tell me. We both were. I went to Afghanistan and fought beside my fellow soldiers, ending up in a hospital in Germany during my second tour after an IED exploded under the Hummer I was traveling in. Luke wasn’t there, but he came as quickly as he could. Then I started Dragon with Peter’s support and Luke continued to fight the good fight with the CIA. Finally, six months before he disappeared, he told me he’d taken a desk job, that he was ready to settle down, to make a life with me. We planned the wedding…everything. And then he was gone, and I didn’t hear anything more from him until Amber Zavalas came walking into our lives nearly a year ago.

  Peter, my beloved older brother, was killed in a car accident three months after Luke disappeared. I thought…we all thought it was just a tragic accident. But then Amber, this little waitress working a diner in the middle of nowhere, showed up pregnant, telling a story of how Peter came to the diner several times a month, apparently investigating some stolen software. She was being followed—even kidnapped at one point. It all seemed connected to Peter, causing us to take a closer look at his accident. I no longer believed it was an accident. Someone killed Peter to shut him up. For what reason, I wasn’t sure. But I knew Luke was involved.

  After Amber was kidnapped, when it was all over and she was safe, I found a note one of her kidnappers had left in the empty house where they took her. It was for me…a note with words that only I would understand. It was Luke. He was still alive.

  But then
six months passed and nothing.

  We couldn’t prove Peter’s accident wasn’t an accident. We couldn’t figure out what his investigation revealed beyond some sort of connection to a terrorist plot in France. We couldn’t figure out who would want to kill him or why.

  But I knew deep in my heart that when we figured out what Peter was up to, I would find Luke. And that was what kept me holding on. That was what got me out of bed in the morning. I’d lost so much when I lost Luke and then Peter. I needed to believe that I would find Luke again, that we’d eventually live out our happily ever after. I had to believe it.

  I grabbed a bottle of wine out of the kitchen, went into the master bath, and ran a hot tub of bubbles. I sank under the water up to my neck, thinking about Cole and Amber. They’d been living together for nearly a year, since the baby was born. He’d just returned from taking her on a trip to Europe, a sort of engagement trip. When he told me he planned to propose, I was torn between sheer joy and a blinding jealousy. I was supposed to be the one who was happily married, the one bringing babies into the world with the same dark eyes their father had.

  Would I always see the world through the warped lens of heartbreak?

  The doorbell rang just as the bottle of wine was about to run out. I glanced at the time on my phone, frowning. It was after midnight. Who the hell rings the doorbell this late at night?

  I quickly dried off and wrapped myself up in a thick bathrobe Luke once stole for me from a luxury hotel in San Francisco. When I wrenched the door open, I was surprised to find Dante standing on my front stoop.

  “What are you doing here? How did you know where I lived?”

  “I wanted to talk to you in private, and this seemed to be the best place to do it.”

  “What about?”

  “Your brother’s accident.”

  I tilted my head slightly. “What do you know about that?”

  “I know you’ve had Hayden working on it for months. And Sam’s working on his hard drive, right?”