by Desiree Holt
“I have three deadbolts on all the exterior doors and safety locks on the windows,” she said slowly. “Last year, I had a security system installed, but maybe it needs to be upgraded. And I do have an unlisted number, although people seem to have a way of finding it, no matter how often I change it.” She shrugged. “After a few days the newshounds go away though. The curiosity seekers stop driving by. Even my phone calls eventually stop.”
“He’s never come to the house? Never tried to push his way in?”
She shook her head. “He used to send me letters too, but he’s stopped that. Now it’s only the calls with a bunch of threats and nasty language.”
“That doesn’t mean things can’t escalate. And from what I saw on the news this morning and outside just now, you need to be prepared in case they do.”
She tucked her hair behind her ears. “This is really the worst it’s ever been. I don’t know what’s so special about this incident but it’s lit a fire under everyone.”
Troy finished his coffee and stood up. “Let’s walk through the house so I can check windows and doors and we’ll figure out what you need.”
Lauren reached out to take the mug from him. When their fingers brushed bolts of electricity shot through her arm and into her body. Long-buried feelings of sexual awareness zinged to life, freezing her in place.
“Lauren?” Troy’s voice broke through the fog surrounding her brain. “Are you okay?”
“What? Oh yes. Sorry.”
But when she looked up at him, she saw a corresponding shocked awareness in his eyes. Whatever it was, he’d felt it too.
She nearly stumbled as she backed away from him, gathering her wits as she rinsed the mugs in the sink and put them in the dishwasher. When she turned back to face him, she felt more in control.
“Where do you want to start?”
“Front door’s a good place. We’ll do room by room down here, then head upstairs.”
As they walked through the lower floor, Troy checked doors and windows, nooks and crannies and made notes on his iPhone. When they climbed the stairs to the second floor Lauren was acutely aware of Troy behind her, almost as if he was touching her. Nerves sparked beneath the surface of her skin and her pulse throbbed everywhere. They moved slowly from room to room. Whenever their bodies touched accidentally or their hands brushed, Lauren felt that same explosive reaction.
When they came to the door of her bedroom, she stepped back to let him enter, inexplicably nervous about being in the room with him. He looked at her, one corner of his mouth twitching as if a grin was teasing at it, before he walked in and did his usual check. By the time they finished with the room, she was a nervous wreck and not sure she understood why. Still, she did her best to conceal it.
She felt a lot better when they were back in the kitchen, a room with no beds. But when she looked at him, that sense of awareness still lurked in his eyes, the brown deepened to a rich chocolate. She had to use all her wits to focus on the conversation.
“Faith and Mark are good friends,” she told him, leaning against the counter, arms crossed. “They wouldn’t have asked you to do this if they didn’t have some concerns. So what do you think I should do?”
“The first thing we need to talk about,” he began, “is getting you much better electronic protection, not just for the house but the entire property. A system with a lot more bells and whistles. Living by yourself, it’s good to have one anyway.”
Lauren shrugged. “I guess you’re right. But it’s a terrible thing to think you aren’t safe in your own home.”
He moved closer to her, his very masculine aftershave drifting across her nose. Good lord, what was wrong with her? She had a problem and thinking about sex wasn’t going to help it.
“All we’re doing is making your home as safe as possible,” he told her. “Unfortunately, experience tells me this probably isn’t the last time something like this will happen. Who knows how aggressive things might get in the future.”
She shivered at the thought but nodded. “Okay then.”
Before he could say anything else the landline rang, its sound shrill and jarring, and without thinking she lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“You’ve gone too far this time, you freak.” The voice was low and filled with venom and totally recognizable. “Someone needs to wipe you off the face of the earth before you do some real harm.”
Nerves jittery already, Lauren dropped the phone into the cradle as if it was a hot poker.
Troy took one of her hands, his touch grounding her as shivers raced through her body. “Tell me.”
She wet her lips. “It was him. The stalker.”
The muscles in Troy’s face tightened. He opened his mouth to say something when the phone rang again. “Don’t answer it,” he ordered her. “Let it ring.”
“He’ll just keep calling,” Lauren protested. “Eventually he’ll get tired of it and stop. At least for today. I’ll just take the receiver off like I did earlier.”
Sure enough, the phone rang a third time.
Troy held up a hand to her as he reached for the instrument. “Let me.”
Troy didn’t know what he expected when he lifted the phone, but it wasn’t the stream of vitriol that spewed over the connection. He didn’t even need to utter a greeting before it began.
“Don’t ever hang up on me, you mutant. You bitch. You’d better answer my calls, or I might have to step up my efforts to rid society of you. Before you actually kill someone with your mumbo jumbo.”
Troy didn’t say a word, just let the man rant for another minute or two, growing angrier by the minute. What he heard disturbed him greatly, and he had to grit his teeth to keep his control in place. He had dealt with people like this before, and the end result was never good. The man was obviously disturbed and obsessed with destroying Lauren, and it might not be too much longer before he moved from phone calls to a personal appearance. All of Troy’s experience told him this man was perched on the edge of a ledge and about to fall over into escalated violence.
Finally, he disconnected the call in mid-rant and turned back to Lauren. She was watching him, eyes wide. Her face was pale and her body taut with anxiety. He needed to be sharp here, not just to analyze the situation and develop solutions but to assure Lauren that he had things well in hand.
He was, however, having a hard time focusing. The Hallorans hadn’t warned him that Lauren Cahill had the kind of earthy beauty that punched you in the gut and stunned your body. It was all the more shocking because she was so unaware of her natural sexiness. And he totally hadn’t expected to be blindsided by the electricity that crackled between them from the first casual brush of hands. Not that he ever lacked for women. He had a healthy sexual appetite and wasn’t shy about feeding it. But no woman had ever affected him like this one. His fingers itched to sift through the silk of her thick brown hair and his mouth badly wanted to taste hers. And her body!
Holy shit!
He had to forcibly rein in his libido, reminding himself he was here on business. What now appeared to be really serious business. And he couldn’t let himself be distracted by a woman whose very presence set his blood to heating and his cock hardening to the point he could pound nails with it. Shit. He had more control than that.
Didn’t he?
He damn well better have.
“You have an answering machine, right?” he asked her. Who didn’t in this day and age?
She nodded. “In the room I use as my office.”
“Show me.”
She led him into the cozy room where bookshelves lined two walls. A large window looking over the backyard let in plenty of light and sunshine and made it a pleasant work environment. Here, she’d set up the computers and printers she used for her web design and graphics business, a large corkboard on one wall displaying printouts of projects in various stages of design.
“I fell in love with this house the minute I saw it,” she told him. “My famil
y tried their best to talk me out of it.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “Different reasons. Too big. Too much space. Too much to take care of. What was I doing with something this size?”
He couldn’t help smiling. “But you bought it anyway.”
“Of course. I had the money and I needed to get away from my mother’s constant disapproval and my father’s worry. I was too old to be living with my parents anyway.”
“When did you buy it?”
“About eight years ago. And I’ve never been sorry.”
Troy took a moment to admire the room before turning toward the desk. Lauren was scant inches away from him and again that charge of electricity crackled between them. Holy shit! This woman was in danger, and his cock insisted on doing his thinking for him. He’d never had this problem before, and he needed to get it under control now.
The answering machine was garden variety, built into the base on which the receiver sat with a limited capacity for storing messages. Messages had to be erased regularly to make space for new ones. He picked it up to examine it more closely and was still holding it when the phone rang again. He held up his hand to stop Lauren from answering and shook his head.
“Let it ring.”
“I usually do when this chaos starts again. I didn’t even mean to answer it before. But then I worry it’s someone I really need to talk to.”
“You have a cell phone, right?”
She nodded.
“Then anyone important will call you on that. If they don’t have the number already, give it to them. Let’s see who this is.”
The first words left no doubt.
“I know you’re listening, you insane bitch. Well, listen to this.”
The venom spewing out of the speaker made every muscle in Troy’s body tighten.
“You can’t get away from me,” he concluded. “I’ll find you and neutralize you before you do real damage.”
Lauren had dropped into the big wing chair in the corner, even paler than before, hands clasped tightly in her lap.
“He’s never made this many phone calls at one time,” she said almost in a whisper. “I think he’s getting worse.”
“You’d better believe it,” Troy agreed. “And that means we need to take the proper steps to ensure your safety. You can’t even be sure the media has backed off completely. They could just be biding their time before another assault. If you won’t stay with the Hallorans, or even at a hotel…” He paused, looked at her, but she shook her head. “Then we need to create a total security blanket for you.”
He pulled out his cell phone and pressed the speed-dial number for Mark.
“Who are you calling?”
“Mark and then our other partner who lives in San Antonio, Dan Romeo. This calls for a little more than a basic security system and a better answering machine.”
* * * * *
Kurt Olberman leaned back in his big leather desk chair and lit one of the fat cigars he enjoyed so much. Puffing a stream of smoke into the air, he pressed the rewind button on his remote and watched again the chaotic scene in front of Lauren Cahill’s home in San Antonio, Texas. Listened one more time to her background as a photo of her filled the screen. The idea rooting around in his brain continued to form and grow.
He had become the multi-billionaire that he was by paying attention to things that most people passed over. To the media, Lauren Cahill was a freak, a source of sensationalism, fodder for their gristmill. To the general public, she was weird and someone to be shunned. But Kurt saw in her the source of untold money if handled properly.
The first time he’d seen a story about her, he’d tucked the information away in a corner of his mind until he could investigate further. Since then he’d researched both Lauren and everything he could find on psychic healing. The more he read, the more fascinated he became. Especially with Lauren herself.
He traveled all over the world, wheeling and dealing in his mostly illegal enterprises. From drug smuggling and white slavery to selling arms to both sides of a conflict and supporting terrorist groups, there was little he didn’t have his fingers in. In the course of his activities he’d met many men with untold wealth, many of whom had a family member with some type of lingering illness. And who would without doubt pay an exorbitant price to have that person cured.
Olberman swiveled in his chair and gazed with great pleasure out the big window overlooking the grounds of his fortress. And that’s what it was—a fortress. One hundred acres of lush green lawn and thick forest, with the three-story stone Tudor house rising from the crest of a hill high in the Colorado Rockies. A stone wall ten feet high, constructed at great cost, surrounded the entire property, its top embedded with sensors should anyone have the balls to try to breach it. Not too far from the house, trees had been cut down to build a landing strip and a hangar for Kurt’s private jet and his helicopter. It allowed him the freedom to travel on his own schedule and also provided a facility for those few he invited to land their own planes.
Some might have chafed at the isolation, but for Olberman it suited his purposes perfectly. He had the magnificence and grandeur of the Rockies as a backdrop and the assurance that he was well protected from his enemies. Oh yes, he had enemies. A man didn’t do what he did without accumulating them. But no one could get to him here.
He smiled. This was his paradise, his kingdom, and even thinking about it gave him great pleasure. And an ideal place for what he had in mind. All he had to do was sweep up Lauren Cahill, install her in private quarters in the house, and make her available to those who would pay handsomely for her services. And with the hangar and landing strip the “clients” could come to him. The lovely Miss Cahill could live out her days here until such time as her powers failed. Then he would find someone else to replace her.
But first, he had to satisfy himself that she was the real deal.
Turning back to his desk he pressed a button on his intercom. Vivian Jackson, his no-nonsense assistant, answered at once.
“Yes, Mr. Olberman?”
“Please come in. I have an assignment for you.”
* * * * *
Lauren poured coffee into three mugs and handed them to the men sitting at her kitchen table. Then she sat down with her own mug between Troy and Mark. Directly across from her was a man she was meeting for the first time, the darkly good-looking Dan Romeo. Six five, olive-skinned with dark hair and darker eyes, a former Force Recon Marine, he was the nominal leader of the group, although they all had equal decision-making powers. She knew two partners were absent. In addition to Mark, former Delta Force, and Dan, the partnership included flyboy Mike D’Antoni, who’d trained with England’s crack SAS, and finally Eric “Rick” Latrobe, former Special Ops and a trained sniper.
Each brought highly specialized skills to the agency known simply as Phoenix. A good name for a group that rose from the ashes of war and one that now contracted to both private citizens and the United States government for jobs that had to be conducted “off the books”.
Dan had made her feel at ease immediately. She recalled being told his wife had precognitive abilities, the gift that allowed her to see future events before they happened. Her visions usually came to her in bits and pieces and sometimes only as clues that she had to decipher. But Mark had also mentioned that her visions had helped Phoenix wrap up an espionage case. Faith and Mark also used their telepathic communications gift when the agency needed it.
She wondered about Rick Latrobe’s wife, Kelly. They lived in Maryland, along with Mike and Kat D’Antoni, so she was unlikely to meet them. Still, she couldn’t help being curious.
Now the three men were holding a council of war in her kitchen with an efficiency that was at once both comforting and frightening. Before this, she’d always just hidden from the crowds and the stalker, closing all the drapes, working in near darkness, answering calls only from her family. Eventually everyone got tired and left her alone. She hadn’t wanted to acknowledg
e that this time everyone had stepped up their game. More reporters. Bigger mob. More vicious and more frequent vitriol from her stalker.
“Aren’t you all making just a little too much of this?” she asked finally, cradling her mug as if the warmth of the liquid could ease the chill suddenly invading her body. “Mark, you know I’ve been through this before. In a few days, the media loses interest and focuses on someone else. And my so-called stalker has never done much beyond his phone calls. Even the letters have stopped. Then he loses interest too.”
Mark leaned forward. “Lauren, you know I’m not an alarmist. If I agreed with you, then we’d set up some simple security procedures and let it go at that. But this time is different. First of all, this is the largest media mob you’ve had hounding you by far. Maybe it’s just a slow news week, but they’re out for blood.”
“Not to mention the fact,” Troy added, “I guarantee you we haven’t seen the last of the sleazy tabloids.”
“Second,” Mark went on, “we listened to the message on your answering machine. Trust me when I say we’ve been doing this long enough to know when someone’s about to go over the edge.” He narrowed his gaze. “And I am more than mildly pissed that you never came to me before about the letters and the constancy of the phone calls.”
“You have much more important business to attend to than being bothered by my little problem.” Asking for help had never been easy for her.
“Damn it.” His hand tightened into a fist. “Now I’m really pissed off. There’s nothing more important than helping my friend. Jesus, Lauren. You’re practically family.”
“The police—“
“Can do a good job. More than adequate. But they don’t have the resources Phoenix does.” He pinned her with his dark gaze. “So are we clear that this time we’re in charge?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Okay. I know you’re right.” Lauren tightened her grip on her mug. “I just hate having my life controlled by some nut who’s probably going to move on to someone else before I can blink my eyes.”