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Tough Justice: Countdown (Part 1 of 8)
by Carla Cassidy
Episode One
A year after FBI Agent Lara Grant put her past—in the form of a very personal manhunt—behind her, the Crisis Management Unit is called in to take lead on a shocking new assignment. A serial bomber is targeting some of the most powerful people in in the city, threatening to expose their deepest secrets.
And soon Lara will face a deadly foe—with an army of skeletons just waiting to fall out of her own closet...
Prologue
Dammit, he’d been so careful. And now this.
A trickle of sweat worked down the side of his face and he closed his eyes as fear tightened his lungs and squeezed his throat. He’d been in a simmering panic since he’d received the email.
He opened his eyes and reread the damned thing.
12:01a.m., from [email protected]:
I know what you did with all that money. I’ll keep your secret but it will cost the lives of innocent people. Or confess to the press and nobody gets hurt. The choice is yours. You have until noon tomorrow.
The lives of innocent people? What did that mean? His gut tightened as nausea overcame him.
Things like this weren’t supposed to happen to him. He’d done everything right in his life. He’d had high hopes. He had big ambitions. The New York Times was running a cover story on him next week that he hoped would launch him to a new level of success. Everything was in place and now this.
Somebody knew his secret.
He twisted his gold wedding band around and around his finger as he stared at the grandfather clock across the room. He had to make a decision fast. Time was running out.
Coming clean would destroy everything he’d worked for. Hell, it wouldn’t only destroy him, it would also destroy his wife.
How much could this anonymous person know? Did the emailer know about all the gifts, the secret hotel visits and the faux business expenses?
Just last weekend they had spent two days together at a luxury hotel upstate, ultimately paid for by taxpayer dollars.
Four minutes...he had four minutes left to make a decision. He should have contacted his brother when he’d received the email. But what could he have done to help? What could anyone do?
Three minutes. A rivulet of sweat rolled down the center of his back while his fingers poised over his computer keyboard. It was too late to call for a press conference. But it wasn’t too late for him to type something up on social media...confess to the affair and to the misuse of public funds.
If he didn’t do that innocent people would die. Jesus, what kind of a choice was this? What kind of a monster asked someone to make such a decision.
The back of his throat closed up again. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone dying. He blew out several short breaths in an effort to calm himself.
Two minutes to go. Surely it was a hoax. It had to be some sort of an outrageous bluff. How could he take this seriously? More sweat dampened him as the acrid scent of his fear wafted in the air. His fingers trembled with indecision.
One minute...oh, God, what should he do? Was this real? Would something bad really happen?
Thirty seconds. His phone dinged with a text message. Quickly he grabbed it up and stared at the text.
Ticktock.
A sharp pain shot through his chest. This couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be...could it? The grandfather clock ticked off the seconds.
Five.
Four. His fingers hovered over his keyboard.
Three.
Two. Oh God. He hesitated. It was too late to type something now.
One.
As the clock began to chime, a ding indicated another text message.
With dread he looked at it.
Boom.
Don’t miss a single exciting installment of the new FBI thriller
TOUGH JUSTICE: COUNTDOWN
by New York Times bestselling author Carla Cassidy, Tyler Anne Snell, Emmy Curtis and Janie Crouch.
On sale February 2017 wherever Harlequin ebooks are sold.
Keep reading for an excerpt from
NANNY BODYGUARD by Lisa Childs
Copyright © 2017 by Harlequin Books S.A.
Nanny Bodyguard
by Lisa Childs
Prologue
The alarm blared with such intensity the windows rattled. But the door held tight, the lock refusing to budge. Just messing with it had triggered the ultra-sensitive alarm. The sirens screeched so loudly that the noise blasted Lars Ecklund’s head, threatening to split his skull. He squinted against the strobe lights flashing in the night and grasped the stubborn doorknob, struggling to turn it.
He was too close to give up without getting inside the three-story brick, glass and wrought iron mansion. But was it a house or a prison? Was his sister in there? He needed to know, needed to get to her. Now. She had been missing too long already.
Strong hands grabbed his arms, dragging him back. He turned toward the other man. The muscular guy was intimidating as hell with an intense dark-eyed stare. Lars couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he didn’t need to. He knew.
We need to get the hell out of here...
Frustration gripped him. He wanted to refuse, wanted to stay even if the police showed up. But his friend wouldn’t leave him. A Marine never left a man behind. And he couldn’t risk Dane getting in trouble, too.
Or worse...
Gunfire flashed. With the alarm blaring, he couldn’t hear the shots, but he saw them like bursts of light in the darkness. These weren’t police officers; they wouldn’t have arrived yet.
These were security guards. Hell, they weren’t even that or they wouldn’t have fired before investigating. They were hired guns. Lars reached for his weapon to return fire.
But Dane dragged him off—to where the truck waited in the driveway. His friend shoved him inside the open passenger’s door before slamming it shut on him and rushing around to the driver’s side. As Dane shifted the truck into Reverse, Lars peered through the windshield at the dark house.
Was Emilia locked in there? Was that why he hadn’t heard from her in months?
“We need to get inside!” he yelled at his friend.
His arm across the back of the seat as he reversed the truck, Dane shook his head. “We’ll be lucky if we get out of here.”
And as he said that, the gates in the tall brick wall surrounding the estate began to close. The dark-clothed gunmen advanced on the truck, shots pinging off the metal and hitting the glass.
No. They might not get out—alive.
Chapter 1
Cooper Payne had known these guys a long time. He would trust them with his life. Hell, he had. But could he trust them with this
chance to prove himself to his older brothers? He stared across his desk, like he’d watched his brother Logan do a hundred times, at the four guys seated across from him. But this was his desk—his office—his franchise of the Payne Protection Agency.
He suppressed the surge of pride that threatened to swell his chest. He hadn’t earned a right to that pride—not yet. His office had just opened, and he had only one employee. And that employee was his sister. He needed these guys but he sensed the hesitation in them.
Hell, Lars Ecklund, who was probably his closest friend in his Marine Corps unit, wouldn’t even meet his gaze. Usually Lars was so direct, his eerily pale blue eyes stared through a person—making the Marine even more intimidating than his massive size.
Dane Sutton nudged Lars’s shoulder with his. He was a big guy, too—nearly bald his dark hair was so short, with eyes that went from topaz to black depending on his temper.
All four of them were big; that was why Cooper needed them. He wanted the biggest, toughest bodyguards Payne Protection offered to be on his team.
“I’m in,” Jordan “Manny” Mannes told him. And he extended his hand across Cooper’s desk to shake on it. He was dark haired and dark eyed—nearly the direct opposite of Lars’s blond hair and light eyes. But he was just as big.
“Me, too,” Cole Bentler said. He also shook on it. At just a couple inches over six feet, he was probably the smallest of the four guys, but his grasp was strong. He was blond like Lars but his hair was a much darker shade of it.
“You sure?” Cooper felt compelled to ask him. “River City is a long way from your family.”
Cole glanced around at the other guys in the room and shook his head. “No, it’s not.”
They were family. After everything they’d endured together, they were closer than family. No one understood them like each other.
Dane extended his hand across the desk, too. “Thanks, Cooper, for thinking of us.”
He had felt bad—like he’d left them behind when he hadn’t reenlisted when they all had. They had just returned from their last deployment whereas he’d been back over a year. He’d gotten married, had a baby and had never been happier. He wanted that happiness for his friends.
“Always,” he told Dane. He’d thought of them the entire time they’d been gone. He’d worried and prayed and hoped they would all return.
Dane nudged Lars, who finally met Cooper’s gaze. Was his friend okay? Or had he come back like Gage Huxton—another Payne Protection bodyguard—damaged from everything he’d been through?
Lars’s broad shoulders were slumped as if something was weighing on him, and there were dark circles beneath his pale eyes.
What the hell had happened on that last deployment?
“Are you up for this?” Cooper asked, concern and guilt gripping him that he hadn’t been with them—that he didn’t know what dangers they’d faced. “I know you guys haven’t been back long.” Just a couple of weeks.
Maybe he should have given them more time. But then he knew downtime was usually the last thing a Marine wanted; it gave him too much time to think. The other guys didn’t look like Lars, though. They didn’t look rested or relaxed but they also didn’t look like he did, like something was haunting him.
* * *
Nikki Payne refused to be haunted. She would not let that bitch get to her. She wouldn’t see those eyes—with the life slipping from them to leave only hatred—in her sleep. If she could sleep...
But it wasn’t like she had time to sleep anyway. She needed to help Cooper get his franchise of Payne Protection up and running. She had set up all the computers, had security systems ready to install, ads ready to be placed in every publication online and in print.
But that wasn’t what she really wanted to do; she wanted—she needed—to be out in the field. She needed to actually do protection duty, not desk duty. That was why she’d left her oldest brother Logan’s franchise—because he’d been determined to keep her chained to a desk.
But so far Cooper had, too. He claimed it was because they didn’t have any assignments yet. But she knew he’d had inquiries. His wife, Tanya, worked as a social worker, and an adoption lawyer she knew had asked her about Payne Protection. Everyone knew about their family security business. They’d had a hell of a couple of years.
So maybe it was no wonder that Nikki lay awake at night, her eyes open so that she wouldn’t see the gunfire and the explosions and the death...
She shuddered as she remembered how close she had come a few times to death herself. The car crashes, the gunfire...
But she had survived every danger. Hadn’t that proved to her brothers that she could handle the job? That she could handle anything?
She stared at Cooper’s office door. It had been closed since she’d come in, which was strange. His door hadn’t been closed since he’d opened the office six weeks ago. Well, unless Tanya stopped by to visit...
Nikki was glad he closed it then. She’d seen too much romance and love the past couple of years, too. It sickened her nearly as much as the danger and the death. She would never be so stupid as to risk her heart like her brothers and now even her mother had.
She would much rather risk her life.
If Cooper ever gave her the chance...
The knob rattled just before his door opened. She settled onto the edge of the receptionist desk, for the receptionist they had yet to hire, and turned to the door with a smile. Tanya Chesterfield was Nikki’s first sister-in-law and as Cooper’s childhood crush and friend, the woman had been a part of their lives nearly as long as Nikki could remember. She loved her like a sister. But it wasn’t the beautiful blonde who walked out the door.
It was a mammoth blond. The guy was so big he had to turn a little for his shoulders to fit through the doorway, and he had to duck slightly so he didn’t hit his head. When his eyes—an eerily pale blue—focused on Nikki, her pulse quickened. Some other guys filed out with him. They were nearly as big but she barely noticed them or her brother, who stepped out of his office behind them.
“This your secretary, Coop?” the big blond guy asked. “Can’t imagine your wife is too happy having a beauty like this working with you.”
Despite the backhanded compliment, Nikki’s blood heated with anger. “I am not a secretary,” she answered for herself. “I’m a bodyguard.”
The guy’s gaze skimmed down her petite body, and his mouth curved into a slight grin. “Okay...” he remarked, as if humoring her.
“Lars, this is my sister, Nikki.” Cooper introduced them.
The guy’s face flushed slightly. “Oh, sorry...”
Nikki knew the bro code: guys’ sisters were off-limits. Apparently her brother Nick hadn’t gotten that memo when he got his best friend’s sister pregnant. But he and Gage were good now that Annalise and Nick had gotten married, and their son—Woodrow Gage Payne—had been born.
Cooper didn’t need to worry about any of his friends getting that close to her. She had sworn off relationships; they weren’t worth the risk.
Now a fling...
Maybe then she would be able to sleep again. With the dark circles under his eyes, Lars didn’t look like he’d been getting much more rest than she was. Not that she would be interested in any of these guys even for a fling. These were macho males like her brothers who would mistake her size for weakness—like Lars apparently already had.
Cooper introduced the others. “Dane Sutton, Cole Bentler, Manny Mannes...”
She shook hands with each of them, who treated her with more respect than Lars had. But then they now knew she was Cooper’s sister.
Then Cooper announced, “These guys are part of my old unit with the Corps. And now they’re my new team.”
They were his team. But what about her? Was there a place for her on it that wasn’t behind a desk?
She didn’t like this, not at all. And she especially didn’t like Lars Ecklund because she was worried that he might be right. Maybe Cooper hadn’t hired a receptionist because he wanted her for that position.
* * *
Lars had royally pissed off the cute, little brunette. He felt her angry gaze boring a hole in his back as he walked out of the office of the Payne Protection Agency. But minutes later, as he climbed into the pickup beside Dane, he realized she wasn’t the only one he’d pissed off.
Dane had already been irritated that his truck was in a shop for repair of the bullet holes and gate scrape and that he’d had to ride with Lars.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Dane asked from the passenger seat.
“Hey, I didn’t know she was Coop’s sister,” Lars defended himself.
But he was embarrassed. Not that he’d flirted with her but that he’d come across like such a chauvinistic jackass. The way Cooper had been looking at him in the office had made him nervous. His friend had known something was up, so Lars had been struggling to act like his old self. While he hadn’t been the playboy of their unit, he had never let a pretty girl pass him without making a compliment. He hadn’t complimented Nikki, though; he’d insulted her.
“I wasn’t talking about that,” Dane said. “We were all together. Why didn’t you tell anyone else that Emilia’s missing?”
A twinge of pain struck Lars’s heart. “I can’t.”
“You know they would help you,” Dane said. “We’re all there for each other. It’s what we did. It’s what we do.”
It was who they were. Even though Lars had never had much of one—but for Emilia—he knew their unit was family. And not the kind that bickered and fought like Cole Bentler’s but the kind that would do anything for each other. “That’s why I can’t tell them.”
“Because they’ll help you?”
He nodded. Then he turned the key in the ignition to start up the truck. They should have used his vehicle the other night, but Dane had worried that the security guards might have already noticed him casing the estate and following the lawyer.
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