The Takeover

by Teyla Branton

  Anger radiated from Keene at Ritter’s order. “Easy,” I murmured.

  Keene frowned, his frustration quickly vanishing as his mental shield strengthened. Now his barrier was tight, but his lapse worried me. I hadn’t spotted an Emporium sensing Unbounded nearby, but that didn’t mean much because anyone with the sensing ability could mask their life forces completely.

  As if feeling our gazes, the middle Hunter paused at the door and turned in our direction, scanning the room. I caught a glimpse of light red hair peeking from under the cowboy hat before I casually allowed my gaze to slide past them, pretending I was simply enjoying the crowd and the commotion. At the same time, I reached out mentally to the man. His shield was poorly erected, filled with gaps as though he didn’t quite believe anyone could delve into his private thoughts, and despite the space between us, it crushed easily beneath my onslaught. There was no sign of suspicion. He’d stopped only because his Unbounded bodyguard had paused.

  My thoughts shifted to the bodyguard, who was searching the crowd. He was several decades younger than his employer, a handsome blond who looked smart in his tux. Not your typical uneducated Hunter. He has to be an Emporium agent, I thought. Yet his shield was as poorly constructed as his boss’s, and I swept it aside to find that he was simply searching for a fifth member of their party—a young lady, if I had it right—to make sure she was safe. Even as I found the answer, a red-haired girl detached herself from a young man and made her way over to the woman in the purple dress.

  The others turned to enter the next room, but the bodyguard’s attention drifted to the reception room exit, pausing on the Unbounded in the black tux. A signal to a cohort? I started to check the bodyguard’s thoughts, only to find him now staring at me. My heartbeat increased, the pumping loud in my ears. If he recognized me or Keene from his Emporium briefings, he might choose to point me out to the Hunter, which would endanger our mission. Before I could decide what his gaze meant, he smiled and I received a strong impression of eagerness and curiosity. Nothing more. With a nod in my direction, he turned on his heel and followed his companions.

  Keene gave a little chuckle. “Look who has an admirer. Do you think you could lure him into a dark room for me?”

  “No!” The bark in my ear came from Ritter and caused me to wince.

  That made Keene’s grin stretch wider. He put his hand up to the side of my face, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, and said, “Emporium agent or no, I don’t blame that bodyguard one little bit. For the record, I’d go into any dark room with you.” His hand left me as he stepped forward with the suddenly moving line. “Hey, we’re almost there.”

  “Stop it with the feedback,” Cort crackled in my ear. “Remember, you have to keep the earring and the ring apart or all we hear is static.”

  Keene gave me a wink. I glanced back at the bodyguard, who passed through the double doors, disappearing from sight, his thoughts fading. My range still wasn’t as far as I’d like, though it had improved drastically since Mexico. If I pushed, I could follow him a bit longer, but I needed my full attention for the task at hand.

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t recognize me,” I said. “But the way he was staring could have been a signal of some sort to the guy near the door.”

  Keene’s eyes went past me. “Uh, speaking of the guy at the door, where’d he go?”

  Sure enough, the Unbounded in the black suit was missing. Keene turned his body slowly, casually searching the room.

  Ahead of us, the woman with the pointed nose uttered a soft exclamation and lifted a hand to wave at someone behind the backdrop. I stepped forward to see who she was looking at, and finally a balding Vice President Mann came into view. He was smiling widely for the camera, his arm around one of the guests like a best friend. His wife stood on his other side, her gaze leaving the woman who’d waved and going back to the camera just in time for the bright flash. Tonight, apparently, the pictures were a two-for-one deal: the Vice President and Mrs. Mann.

  Next to me Keene’s body radiated readiness, but I shook my head. Whoever the vice president might serve, the man himself wasn’t Unbounded. Neither was Mrs. Mann with her pale, regal face, wide-set eyes, and chestnut hair. Both of their life forces also gleamed brightly, without any sort of barriers, so it was likely they’d never heard of mental shields. Of course, that didn’t mean the vice president was innocent of all connection with the Emporium. I pushed my thoughts toward the couple.

  He was thinking about his speech and wondering why his son had been acting so strangely the past year—and if there was any way to fix whatever had gone wrong between them. She was wondering what the daughter of the woman in front of me was up to these days, and if she still had a habit of chasing older men for their money. While the vice president exuded strength, weariness leaked from Mrs. Mann like water from cupped hands. She wasn’t going to last the whole night, not without the help of drugs. Maybe her doctor was here somewhere behind the half dozen Secret Service agents.

  “Keene?” I asked, wanting to know if he’d spotted the Unbounded in the black tux.

  “No sign of him.”

  I nodded, trusting Keene to keep watch while I did my job. I tried to delve deeper into the vice president’s mind, but the cacophony of voices and thoughts around me made it difficult to distinguish his thoughts from the others that pushed in around me. “I need to get closer.”

  “The line should move soon,” Keene said.

  I joined him for a moment in scanning the room but refocused on the vice president as a small group of friends finished their individual pictures and left together, leaving a large gap in the line. We stepped forward.

  I pushed harder, and a throbbing began at the base of my skull, something I hadn’t felt in weeks. It only meant my brain was tiring from all the scanning, but I was nowhere near ready to give up. I began absorbing from the air, regaining my strength. A posh hotel right before dinner was a great place for absorbing, all those molecules with expensive, organic nutrients floating about begging to be taken in through my pores. In seconds, the throbbing eased.

  Focusing more tightly, I watched the vice president shake hands with another couple and smile for the camera. More worry seeped from him. Something wasn’t right. The fact that he worried so much about his adult son, who was supposedly holding his own in politics, seemed to underscore our intel.

  “Erin!”

  Keene’s voice, but the warning came too late. Hard fingers bit painfully into the flesh of my shoulder.

  END OF SAMPLE. To purchase a copy of Lethal Engagement (An Unbounded Novella), please visit your ebookstore. Or continue to the next page to read a bonus preview of Tell Me No Lies by the author under the name Rachel Branton. To learn more about the author and her books, you can visit the About the Author page.

  Bonus Preview

  Chapter One

  I blinked to hold back the tears, stunned by what I was hearing. No! I don’t believe it. But I did.

  Hurt followed the disbelief, growing to an agony that urged me to physically lash out at Sadie, my best friend and bearer of the terrible news, but I was frozen in place, as though my heart had stopped pumping blood to my suddenly useless limbs.

  Besides, it wasn’t Sadie’s fault.

  Oh, Julian. How could you?

  Sadie put a hand on my shoulder, but the sympathy in her eyes did little to comfort me. “I’m sorry, Tessa. I really am. I didn’t want to tell you, but . . .” She sighed and continued in a whisper, “I would want to know if it were me.”

  Her words released me from my mute state. “I need to be alone.”

  “Of course. I understand. Call me if you need me.” Sadie stepped close and hugged me while I stood without moving. I barely noticed her departure.

  My eyes wandered the room of my childhood, only recently familiar again since I’d come home to Flagstaff to prepare for the wedding. Mother had insisted on dinners and celebrations, and because Julian and I planned to live in Flagstaff, where he
would work in his family business, it only made sense for me to leave the job at my father’s factory in Phoenix several weeks early. I missed the job and my friends the minute I’d left, but Julian and I were ready to take the plunge into matrimony—or so I’d thought.

  The door to my walk-in closet was open, and I could see the wedding dress I was to have worn in just over forty-eight hours. Bile rose in my throat, and a tear skidded down my cheek. I brushed it impatiently away. I wouldn’t cry for a man who had betrayed me.

  Since tonight we were having the rehearsal dinner, last night had been Julian’s bachelor party. Sadie’s brother had been at the party and had told her all about Julian disappearing early with a woman whose hands had been altogether too familiar with a man who was about to be married.

  I slumped on my bed, covered with the homemade quilt my grandmother had made, my eyes still locked on the white satin dress. Drenched in lace and small pearls, it had a sweetheart neckline and a gorgeous chapel train. The dress cost seventeen hundred dollars and had taken three weeks of daily shopping to find. My mother had been with me every one of those days, which had been a torture in itself.

  I bit my lip until I tasted blood.

  I’d met Julian Willis when I’d come home to visit for the Christmas holiday, though if the truth be told, my visit had more to do with my horse, Serenity, than seeing my parents. At my mother’s insistence, I’d tagged along on their invitation to attend a party thrown by the Willises. I hadn’t minded going, once I met Julian. If his blond good looks and toned physique hadn’t won me over, his attentiveness and charm would have. After countless trips to Phoenix on his part and numerous weekends home on mine, the inevitable had happened: we’d fallen in love. He asked me to marry him, and I said yes.

  Two weeks later, my father and Julian’s had negotiated a business arrangement to take effect after the wedding. The Willis family owned a huge frozen food conglomerate, and my father produced a line of breakfast cereals, where I managed the swing shift. With the help of the Willises, our business would expand to new markets my father had never before reached. I wasn’t sure what the Willises were getting out of the deal since our business was stable but not growing. Maybe they would simply have in-laws who were up to their standard of living.

  Not that we’d ever been poor in my lifetime—thanks to my grandpa who’d worked himself into an early grave to create that first bowl of sugar-coated cereal. I still missed him terribly.

  What am I going to do?

  The awful thing was that a part of me wasn’t all that surprised. Julian was attractive, thoughtful, and a big flirt—a hit with ladies of every age. Half of the marriageable women in Flagstaff had chased him at one time or another, and before we’d met he’d had a bit of a reputation—one he’d assured me was complete fabrication.

  I won’t marry a liar and a cheat. Every woman deserved better than that. I wondered if I’d purposely been blind or if he’d been good at hiding things. Perhaps his betrayal had been a momentary lapse, but if so, what did that say about our future? If I couldn’t trust him now, how could I trust him for the next sixty or more years?

  Maybe it’s all a mistake. I latched onto the idea. Yet in the next minute I had to discard it. Sadie had been my best friend since kindergarten, and I’d trust her with my life. There was no way she would have spoken unless she was certain it was true. More likely she hadn’t told me everything she knew, not wanting to hurt me further.

  A knock on the door startled me from my thoughts. “Who is it?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Come in.”

  Elaine Crawford didn’t so much as enter a room as sweep into it. She was the epitome of grace and elegance. Even at eight o’clock on a Thursday morning, her hair was styled in an elaborate twist that was both attractive and left her beautiful neck bare.

  “My, Sadie was in such a hurry this morning. I’ve never seen her run off so quickly. Did you two have a disagreement?”

  I shook my head, unwilling to trust my voice.

  My mother’s eyes didn’t leave my face. “What happened? We can’t be losing your maid of honor at this late date.” She smiled to show she was teasing, but there was a warning under the words.

  “Sadie and I are fine.”

  “Wonderful.” She walked to the closet and peered inside. “You’re going to look like a princess in this dress. Even without you in it, I could stare at it all day. Julian won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”

  I gave her a weak smile. I did love the dress—a good thing, since it had taken so much time to find one we both agreed on. My mother wasn’t a woman to give up on any goal, and her goal had been to find a dress that not only would I agree to wear but that would make people sigh with admiration for years to come.

  She rambled on, going over a last-minute menu change and reminding me we needed to pick up my father’s tuxedo. “I hope Lily’s man comes dressed appropriately,” she said, almost as an afterthought.

  “Mario’s wearing a suit. Lily said he looks great.”

  “I wish you hadn’t insisted on their coming.”

  “Lily’s my sister. Of course she’ll be at my wedding.”

  “You weren’t at hers.”

  I didn’t say anything. Lily had done what she felt she had to, and I’d been happy for her.

  “He will never amount to anything,” my mother added.

  “And you think Julian will?” I couldn’t hold it back any longer, though I knew my mother was the worst person to confide in. She’d never been the kind of mother to bake cookies, to take her kids to the park, or sit and discuss school and boyfriends. As teenagers, Lily and I had agreed that she was like Mary Lennox’s mother in the Secret Garden—too occupied with her own life and goals to really care about her daughters. “Well, you’re wrong. I just found out he cheated on me. Maybe more than once.”

  My mother didn’t gasp. She didn’t hug me and ask me how I knew. She showed no sympathy for me or anger toward my fiancé. She simply stared.

  “I can’t marry him,” I said.

  That brought her to life. “Of course you’ll marry him. It’s you he loves, no matter what you’ve heard.”

  Something in her demeanor tipped me off. “Wait. What do you know about this?”

  “I know that Julian is good for you. He’ll take care of you. His family’s business is doing well, and our contract with them will do wonders for our company as well. Your company someday.”

  “You knew? All this time, you knew?”

  It was one thing for my mother to disown a daughter because she’d married a man she didn’t approve of, but I couldn’t believe she’d want me to commit my life to a man who cheated before he was even married.

  “How long has it been going on?” I asked. “Does everyone in town know?” I could imagine it now, people wagging their tongues and in the end sympathizing with Julian because he was oh-so-handsome and exciting, as if that excused everything.

  Not in my book.

  “The truth is,” my mother said, “marriage is little more than a business arrangement. Eventually you will realize that, and then you will understand this is a problem you can overcome. Besides, Julian will see the error of his ways. He’ll always come back to you.”

  I hadn’t even known he’d left me. I shifted on the bed, searching for something to make her see reason. “Would you have married Dad if he’d been cheating?”

  “I would and I did.”

  I gaped at her. I knew my parents’ marriage wasn’t perfect. Growing up, Lily and I had often clung to each other at night as they’d argued loudly in their bedroom. I’d been glad to escape to college, though it had hurt me to leave Lily behind. But she was far more resilient and determined than I ever was, never wavering from her dreams of leaving and building her own life. It was she who’d fallen in love and eloped in the middle of the night two years ago when she was only eighteen. She’d waited until I came home for the Fourth of July and awakened me during the night. I’d never
forget how happy she looked. “I love him so much!” She’d told me. “He’s like the air that I breathe. He’s a hard worker, and I know we’ll make it. You don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

  They had made it, at first, while both were working, though they were in school full time. They’d even bought a big, old, run-down house to fix up. Then the scholarship money ran out, and now Lily was expecting and so sick she had to quit her job. Worse, she’d filled every vacant space in her house with teenage girls who had nowhere else to go except the street or back to the unloving homes from which Lily had rescued them. In a few years, Mario would finish school and be able to support them, but for now they survived on love, what little money I could spare, and the funds I begged for them from my parents.

  Now thinking of how Lily’s face lit up every time she talked about Mario, or whenever he entered the room, and how careful he was of her, made me strong. I wanted that for myself.

  “I can’t go through with the wedding,” I told my mother. “I’m sorry.”

  “At least talk to Julian. He’ll make it right. I know it.”

  I knew it, too, and that was exactly why I didn’t want to talk to him. When I was with Julian, he was all too persuasive. He should have been a televangelist, because he could convince anyone of just about anything. Since he’d been over sales in his father’s company, he bragged that the business had doubled in profits.

  My mother drew herself to her full height. “Think of the caterer. All our friends coming from out of town. I swear if you do this, you’ll be making the biggest mistake of your life.”

  “The mistake would be marrying a man who doesn’t love me!” Tears were coming, despite my effort to stop them.

  “He does love you. Every bit as much as you love him. Please, Tessa, you must talk to Julian.”

  Would it be too much to ask to have her on my side for once?