Kick A** Heroines Box Set: The UltimatumFatal AffairAfter the DarkBulletproof SEAL (The Guardian)

by Karen Robards

  “Mr. Kazmarek.” Holding out her hand, Bianca walked forward to greet him with a smile.

  “Kaz, please.” Kazmarek took her hand, shook it, then held it a little too long and a little too tightly. Bianca was conservatively dressed in a black pantsuit and a white silk blouse, with her straight, not-quite-shoulder-skimming blond hair parted on the side and tucked behind one ear and her makeup minimal, but still he looked her over with open admiration. Five-nine and stocky, he was fifty-three, a twice-married, currently divorced self-made multimillionaire with an unabashed eye for the ladies. He was bullish in manner and appearance, with a bald, smooth-shaven head, coarse features, pale blue eyes and a brash confidence that had its own charm. That confidence was currently on full display as, once-over completed, his eyes rose to meet hers again and he smiled.

  “Kaz, of course.” Bianca hadn’t forgotten that they’d progressed to a first-name basis during their last meeting, when she’d flown to his Memphis headquarters to present Guardian Consulting’s proposal to him and his board. She just didn’t want to encourage him to think that he was going to get anything out of this contract besides her firm’s very best security consulting services.

  She was shaking hands with Kazmarek’s associates when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw that Doc was waving at her again and looking agitated. Lips compressing, she glanced around for Evie, who, she was happy to see, had risen from her desk beneath the big silver Guardian Consulting sign that took up most of the wall at the top of the room and was approaching.

  “I don’t think you’ve met my assistant, Evangeline Talmadge.” Bianca introduced them. Evie turned on that megawatt Deb-of-the-Year smile of hers and shook hands. Five-three and curvy, Evie was dressed today in a sleeveless, colorful rose-print sheath that, like all of her clothes, had cost the earth, a coordinating cardigan, pearls and, atypically, flats. She had a round, pretty face with the magnolia-pale skin that had been prized in the Deep South since time immemorial, a riot of shoulder-length coffee-brown curls, a small, upturned nose, wide mouth and big brown puppy-dog eyes. The only daughter of a real estate magnate who owned a good portion of Savannah and a lot of the rest of the South and Savannah’s leading blue-blooded socialite, she’d grown up rich and privileged—and feeling unwanted.

  Bianca had met her at Le Rosey, the boarding school in the Swiss Alps where really rich kids whose parents were too busy to be bothered with them were shipped off to be educated. Evie was at Le Rosey because her really rich parents were divorcing. Bianca was there because her father wanted an entrée to the really rich with the intention of robbing them, swindling them or, in some other iniquitous way, separating them from a portion of their wealth, although of course she hadn’t realized that at the time.

  Evie had been miserable at first, crying herself to sleep at night, letting her vulnerability show, making herself an easy target for the school bullies, who were numerous and vicious and who’d scented fear in the plump little newcomer. Bianca, who after years of Richard’s take-no-prisoners upbringing had pretty much lost her fear of anything unlikely to result in her immediate death, had handily routed the bullies and taken Evie, one of the few other Americans at the school, under her wing. The cool, guarded blonde who opened up to no one and excelled at everything—sports, academics, languages, social graces, getting boys to fall at her feet—and the warm, impulsive, indiscriminately trusting brunette who was hopeless at sports and languages and no more than mediocre at academics but was actually pretty good at attracting boys, too, became unlikely fast friends.

  Of course, Evie knew nothing about Bianca’s double life. She had no idea that Richard St. Ives was not the independently wealthy businessman that was his cover identity, or that Bianca’s life when she wasn’t at school or helping her father steal something consisted of everything from mixed martial arts training by a sensei master to physical conditioning by a pair of retired special ops to lessons in such varied specialties as the fine art of picking pockets and locks to the use of weaponry and explosives to gymnastics and boxing—and ballet. Because ballet, according to Richard, gave you grace and balance. Bianca mastered everything that was thrown at her, but she really loved ballet.

  As time passed, at Evie’s insistence, Bianca spent the majority of school holidays (if Richard didn’t need her for a job, or training, she was left to make her own plans) with Evie and her mother, Rosalie, at their Savannah mansion. When Bianca was setting up her bolt-hole, she’d chosen Savannah because it was a continuation of the life she’d known, the one she considered her real life, the one she lived as Bianca St. Ives. She’d gone to boarding school as Bianca St. Ives, she’d earned her degree in English lit from Sarah Lawrence College as Bianca St. Ives and the minimal family life she’d experienced with her father had been as Bianca St. Ives.

  She’d also chosen Savannah because no one in their right mind would look for a member of an internationally wanted gang of criminals in the Southern belle capital of the world, and because Evie had permanently settled down there. Evie had permanently settled down there because she had married William Wentworth Thornton IV, scion of a local textile dynasty, right after her and Bianca’s sophomore year of college and Evie’s star turn, at her mother’s insistence, as Savannah’s Debutante of the Year.

  Two months ago, Evie had discovered that Fourth, as her husband was known, was cheating on her. Evie had filed for divorce. In doing so, she’d gone against the wishes of her father, her mother and Fourth himself and his family, all of whom insisted she was making a mountain out of a molehill and told her in their various ways that all men stray occasionally and that as the wife she should simply look the other way. For one of the few times in her life, Evie had refused to go along with the majority.

  She took back her maiden name: Talmadge. She kicked Fourth out of their mansion in the historic district.

  She was getting a divorce and taking her life back and nothing and nobody was going to talk her out of it.

  What complicated the situation, what had her warring parents coming together in a rare moment of accord and made getting Fourth out of her life a whole lot harder than it otherwise would have been, was that she was pregnant. Five months and change now. Her baby bump was obvious and dictated both the loose sheath and the flat shoes she was wearing.

  When Evie’s crisis had dropped in her lap, Bianca was working to move past the shock of her father’s death, which no one in her world except Doc knew about because at that point she wasn’t up to concocting and living the lie that would be required to fake a funeral, explain how he had died, etc. Shaking off her own troubles, she’d offered Evie staunch support, a shoulder to cry on and a job at Guardian Consulting.

  The job, as it turned out, was the important thing, because one of the first things Fourth did was cut off Evie’s credit cards and drain her bank account. Evie’s father, who had business dealings with Fourth’s family and an old-fashioned view of single mothers, had refused to come to her financial assistance and had threatened to disinherit her unless she went back to her husband. Once started down the road of defiance, Evie grabbed on to it with both hands and told him what he could do with his money. Then she told her mother that she wouldn’t be doing as Rosalie suggested and moving back into her old bedroom in the family mansion, either, and that furthermore she could take care of herself, thank you very much.

  Having thus burned her familial bridges, Evie gritted her teeth, squared her shoulders and huddled with Bianca to take stock. She was a veteran of the volunteer/philanthropic/charitable circuit, but none of that was paid employment. Her new job with Guardian Consulting was the first paying gig she’d ever had in her life. Bianca would have kept her on regardless of how it worked out, but Evie was proving to be really good at it.

  To what Evie confided in Bianca was her own surprise, the former Deb of the Year was efficient, hardworking and a hit with clients.

  As Evie finished shaking ha
nds with Kazmarek’s associates, Doc beckoned insistently at Bianca behind the visitors’ backs. Frowning at him, also behind the visitors’ backs, Bianca said to Kazmarek, “If you’ll go on into my office, I’ll join you in just a moment. There’s something I need to check on.”

  “Sure thing,” Kazmarek said. “You take all the time you need.”

  “Can I get you gentlemen some coffee? Or tea? Or maybe something stronger?” Smiling graciously, Evie ushered the visitors toward Bianca’s office like she’d been doing it for years, instead of the six weeks she’d actually been on the job. The men voiced their preference in drinks before disappearing into Bianca’s office. After promising them that she’d see to it right away, Evie turned back to Bianca to say, low-voiced, “I made reservations at 700 Drayton for 7:00 p.m., by the way.”

  700 Drayton was one of the city’s finest restaurants and also one of the hardest reservations to secure at short notice, which this had been. Here was the type of situation where having Evie on the payroll was turning out to be truly beneficial: she was Savannah aristocracy by birth and marriage, A-list all the way, with connections that paid off in large ways and small, including obtaining impossible reservations. The plan was that, after Bianca went over the contract and extolled the myriad benefits of signing on with Guardian Consulting here at the office, she would take Kazmarek and company to dinner to seal the deal.

  “Thanks, that’s perfect.” Bianca’s response was equally low-voiced. “Is Hay back yet?”

  Hay was Haywood Long, her second in command, in charge of running the business when she was away and overseeing all but the highest level jobs when she was present. He’d been down at the docks that afternoon supervising the crew providing security for the unloading of a large quantity of electronic equipment for Dynex, Inc., another important client. Dynex had been losing an unacceptable percentage of their imports to theft, and it was Guardian Consulting’s job to find out how it was happening, who was doing it, and stop it.

  “Not yet,” Evie said as she passed Bianca on her way to the small combination kitchen/break room where she would prepare the drinks.

  “When he gets back, send him along to the restaurant, would you, please?”

  Evie looked back over her shoulder to grin at Bianca in total comprehension. “You got it.”

  That was another thing about working with Evie: they knew each other so well that Bianca didn’t have to spell things out. Hay would serve as Bianca’s “date,” which would hopefully keep Kazmarek from coming on to her to the point where Bianca had to outright refuse him, or worse. The firm badly needed his business, and thus keeping him happy was important. Bianca felt it would be much easier to do that if she didn’t have to, say, break his nose at the end of the evening for putting his hands where they didn’t belong.

  “Boss,” Doc hissed, giving her another come-here wave.

  Bianca headed toward him. She shouldn’t have brought Doc with her to Savannah, or into Bianca St. Ives’s world at all, she knew.

  Live your life in compartments: it was another one of the rules. The corollary being, of course, that the various life compartments should be kept totally separate, and the components should never be mixed. Doc had belonged to the Jennifer Ashley, Bahrain, two-hundred-million-dollar debacle compartment. He should have been left there, none the wiser about who or what Jennifer Ashley or Kenneth Rapp or any of the rest of them really were. But Bianca had discovered that it just wasn’t in her to simply abandon Doc in Bahrain, and so she’d gotten him out of the country, then out of the Middle East. By that time she’d realized that he was clueless about how to evade the manhunt that was raging for them across Europe and helpless as a child at looking out for himself in any meaningful way that didn’t involve computers.

  She’d taken a chance and ignored one of the rules that her father had spent a lifetime pounding into her. Swearing Doc to secrecy, reminding him that he had as much to lose as she did if the truth were to ever come out, she introduced him to Bianca St. Ives, brought him back to Savannah with her and, under his real identity as Miles Davis Zeigler, reformed (sort of) computer hacker, made him Guardian Consulting’s head of cyber security.

  So far it was working out. His dese and dose accent and penchant for wearing all black clothing even when it was sweltering outside meant that he would never be mistaken for a local; any dish involving grits he regarded with deep suspicion, and he stayed pretty much permanently flushed and sweaty from the never-ending heat and humidity. But he liked his new apartment overlooking Monroe Square, he’d fallen madly in love with the pralines at River Street Sweets and he’d happily adopted Bianca as family. And he added a whole new element to the services Guardian Consulting could offer clients. Plus, she discovered, it was good to have someone around who knew the truth about what she was and what had happened and could help her keep tabs on any fallout that might be echoing around the globe from Richard’s death.

  “What’s up?” Bianca asked quietly as she reached him. Doc’s desk faced the door. She walked around it as he gestured toward the state-of-the-art computer in front of him.

  “We got another Bat Signal. Look.”

  Leaning back precariously—Doc dwarfed his small ergonomic chair, which he stubbornly refused to let Bianca replace, and had a penchant for leaning back so far in it that she lived in constant fear that he was going to tip over and crash to the floor—he looked up at her with a worried frown.

  Bianca’s pulse picked up as she moved closer to check out the monitor. A Bat Signal, so called by Doc in honor of the sign that was flashed in the sky to summon Batman, was an email that came through an anonymous, highly encrypted account used to contact Richard by clients who’d been willing to pay large for his services. Since his death, he’d been approached by four such clients, all of whom had wanted him to steal something for them. He’d been offered a handsome payday in each instance, and Bianca had thought about taking the jobs on herself. But the Live your life in compartments rule had included keeping her life and her father’s lives strictly separate. When he wasn’t Richard St. Ives, he had multiple other identities, only a few of which she knew. In his other lives, he could be anyone and up to anything. She was wary about accidentally sticking her toe into what might turn out to be a pool of sharks.

  Once she’d grown up enough to grasp the dangerous nature of what they did, she’d understood his insistence that they come together rarely, usually only when he needed her for a job. They communicated irregularly, mostly via email. Phone contact initiated from her end involved her dialing an always changing number, leaving a message and waiting for him to return her call. When he called her, which wasn’t often, the calls always came through a blocked number that accepted no callbacks. His appearances at her major school events had been quick and tightly scheduled. They had no permanent home; when she visited him, which happened less and less often as she grew up, he was always staying in a different house or apartment or hotel suite in a different part of the world. That was necessary because security, he told her, was best preserved by his keeping on the move, and by maintaining strict separation of their lives except when they were actually working together.

  She understood. But sometimes, especially when she was younger, like the first Christmas she’d spent with Evie when they were twelve years old and she’d seen the big sparkly tree and the decorations in every room and Evie’s extended family had come for Christmas dinner, she’d felt a little wistful.

  The only reason she was able to access this particular email account was because at the time of his death Richard had been having Doc work his magic to better hide the account’s tracks from anyone who might be trying to follow them back to him. Bianca was fuzzy on the details, but she gathered that Doc had the account pinging through a maze of different countries, servers and IP addresses. Doc assured her that the account’s point of origin would never be found, and they, who were monitoring it, would n
ever be found, and she trusted him enough to believe him.

  It still made her sick to read the incoming emails, because the very fact that she was doing so reminded her that her father was dead. She was having trouble coming to terms with it. Richard had always seemed indestructible to her.

  It didn’t help that questions from the night he died kept gnawing at her. What had gone wrong? How had Durand found out about the heist? And who had really taken the money?

  She knew from the sources she very cautiously kept in touch with that authorities believed it had burned up in the garbage truck. She also knew that that was absolutely untrue.

  The thought that someone else had secretly made off with the stolen fortune that her father had died in pursuit of drove her around the bend.

  Ignoring the hard knot in her chest, she read the email aloud, “‘Your services are required.’”

  That was it. No greeting, no signature, just those four words. She slanted a look at Doc. “Can you tell where this is from?”

  “Close as I can tell it originated from somewhere in Hong Kong. ’Course, that’s probably a bounce address, you know what I mean?”

  She gathered he meant a fake address that resulted from the email being bounced around through various servers before it was delivered.

  “When did we get it?”

  “Like, five minutes ago. I have an alert set up so that I’m notified when anything comes into that account.”

  Bianca’s lips tightened. The urge to reply, to reach out to whoever this was in an attempt to find out who they were, what they wanted and how they knew her father, was strong.