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No One But You
Carly Bishop
Lovers Undercover: Dangerous opponents, explosive lovers–these men are a criminal's worst nightmare and a woman's fiercest protector.When undercover cop Matt Guiliani arrived at the Bar Naught ranch in the dead of night to sting a vigilante leader, he got the biggest surprise of his career: His prey was already dead…and Matt was staring down the double-barreled shotgun of the beautiful and frightened Fiona Halsey.With a sinfully sexy body and sass to spare, Fiona was no innocent. But how she was connected with the murder or the secret organization, Matt wasn't sure. He only knew that Fiona was the one woman to scale the walls of his impenetrable defenses.Yet to let down his guard in this assignment, with Fiona, would be costly. Because this time it would mean his heart…if not his life.
His body reminded her she was a woman…
The battering he’d taken earlier, evading the sheriff, only made him that much more dark and dangerously appealing. Her pulse throbbed.
Matt was in her space, breathing the same scarce air. The more he looked at her, the more powerful he became and the deeper in his thrall she fell.
“I’ll be back in the morning,” he said. “You’ll need to go along with whatever I say or do. Clear?” When she didn’t answer, he continued, “You don’t want to cross me, Fiona. The sheriff will be back in the morning and they’ll be saying you’re the one who murdered Kyle Everly.”
She swallowed hard. “I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t have to believe me, Fiona. Just wait and see.” He stepped closer to her, and in the frigid night air she could feel the warmth emanating off his body, smell the scent of hay and horseflesh on him. He touched her cheek. “I want you to know this,” he said, his voice low. “I want you to know you can tell me anything.”
He just didn’t know. That was the one thing she couldn’t do.
Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,
All the evidence is in! And it would be a crime if you didn’t “Get Caught Reading” this May. So follow the clues to your favorite bookstore to pick up some great tips.
This month Harlequin Intrigue has the distinguished privilege of launching a brand-new Harlequin continuity series with three of our top authors. TRUEBLOOD, TEXAS is a story of family and fortitude set in the great Lone Star state. We are pleased to give you your first look into this compelling drama with Someone’s Baby by Dani Sinclair. Look for books from B.J. Daniels and Joanna Wayne to follow in the months ahead. You won’t want to miss even a single detail!
Your favorite feline detective is back in Familiar Lullaby by Caroline Burnes. This time, Familiar’s ladylove Clotilde gets in on the action when a baby is left on a high-society doorstep. Join a feisty reporter and a sexy detective as they search for the solution and find true love in this FEAR FAMILIAR mystery.
Our TOP SECRET BABIES promotion concludes this month with Conception Cover-Up by Karen Lawton Barrett. See how far a father will go to protect his unborn child and the woman he loves. Finally, Carly Bishop takes you out West for a showdown under a blaze of bullets in No One But You, the last installment in her LOVERS UNDER COVER trilogy.
So treat yourself to all four. You won’t be disappointed.
Sincerely,
Denise O’Sullivan
Associate Senior Editor
Harlequin Intrigue
No One But You
Carly Bishop
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Carly Bishop’s novels are praised for their “sensuality, riveting emotional appeal and first-class suspense.” She was a RITA Award finalist in 1996 for her Harlequin Intrigue novel Reckless Lover, and she’s won numerous awards and critical acclaim throughout her ten-year writing career. Carly lives in Colorado and regularly uses the great Rocky Mountains as the backdrop in her stories.
Books by Carly Bishop
HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE
170—FUGITIVE HEART
232—FALLING STARS
314—HOT BLOODED
319—BREATHLESS
323—HEART THROB
357—RECKLESS LOVER
370—THE SOULMATE
394—SHADOW LOVER
440—ANGEL WITH AN ATTITUDE
454—WATCH OVER ME
497—MCQUAID’S JUSTICE
538—NO BABY BUT MINE* (#litres_trial_promo)
564—NO BRIDE BUT HIS* (#litres_trial_promo)
616—NO ONE BUT YOU* (#litres_trial_promo)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
Fiona Halsey—She spent her time gentling wild mustangs on the ranch her parents once owned. Would she tame Matt’s heart, or set him up?
Matt Guiliani—The last bachelor undercover agent in operation against an insidious vigilante organization, Matt was all business…or so he’d thought.
Dex Hanifen—The sheriff had ties to local thugs, and he really had it in for Fiona.
Dennis Geary—The ranch manager went AWOL early on.
Kyle Everly—Owner of the Bar Naught, he was set to conduct a high-level meeting when someone shot him in the back.
Elliott Braden—The Interpol agent wanted a clean sweep of all the conspirators.
Pascal Lariviere—The playboy in Fiona’s past was a very careful man.
Garrett Weisz and J. D. Thorne—Top undercover agents, they worried that Matt was in deadly, unforeseen danger.
In memory of Boyd D. Adsit
I miss you dearly
Contents
Chapter One (#u5d6f0557-3304-540b-a04d-42465da1495a)
Chapter Two (#u143690fa-19c7-5b37-bdd2-349b2163a3a8)
Chapter Three (#u0b037681-f4de-52a3-ade3-ddb0f2ed0bd0)
Chapter Four (#u18f02f70-5f9d-5ee5-b7e0-0f4e5ac4f1a5)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
At six minutes past eleven, Matt Guiliani rode into view of the main house on the Bar Naught Ranch. The deep irony of his own timing didn’t escape him. Nothing much ever did.
The window of opportunity had reached its own eleventh hour. The time to move on Kyle Everly was now.
Matt reined the sorrel to a halt and dismounted, dropping silently to the freezing earth. He could smell winter coming in the frigid night air. He could almost smell his own anticipation. He’d been preparing for nearly seven months to go after Everly. The wealthy Wyoming rancher, never dirtying his own hands, made the shadowy vigilante organization known as the TruthSayers look like a bunch of local yokels trying to get up a lynch mob.
Under cover of the moonless night Matt tethered his mount to a patch of scrub oak at the edge of national forest land. He crouched low and pulled a pair of high-tech night-vision binoculars, no larger than a deck of cards, from the breast pocket of his heavy flannel shirt.
He dropped to one knee and began to familiarize himself with every detail of the landscape below—the yard, the hedges, the barn, the residence. And he allowed the thrill of the chase to seep into his awareness…Everly had so narrowly escaped their notice.
Matt had arrived here tonight on an undercover assignment for the U.S. Attorney in Seattle. The Department of Justice wanted the TruthSayers dismantled, once and for all. This business of vigilante extremists doling out their own brand of justice had to be stopped. No one would have made the connections between Everly and the TruthSayers but for one arrogant mistake.
Scrutinizing the main ranch house once more for good measure, Matt turned his focus upon the barn. Inside the upscale, heat-controlled, state-of-the-art facility Everly kept his horses: six polo ponies, three Thoroughbred studs, a couple of working mounts—and the ruined show-quality Arabian that belonged to Fiona Halsey. Soldier Boy, she called him.
All the stable doors were divided in two. Only one had the top half open. From satellite reconnaissance photos, Matt knew that stall housed the viciously claustrophobic stallion. Word had it that everyone in town had warned Fiona the horse should be put down before he killed someone.
She had grown up on the Bar Naught. The land had been passed down through her family for five generations, but her parents had lost it all eighteen months ago. She resided now in a small apartment at the west end of the barn.
If there was a wild card in the deck Matt was about to shuffle, it was this woman. A long-stemmed beauty too perverse or sentimental, or both, to do what had to be done with a horse that had survived the fiery hell of a rollover in one of Everly’s trailers.
As far as the neighbors were concerned, poor Fiona kept to herself, broke feral mustangs on a government contract program to adopt out the horses, oversaw the breeding of Everly’s Thoroughbred studs, and spent her evenings alone sitting with Soldier Boy. The local princess, descended from the landless younger son of a nineteenth-century British earl, brought brutally and unfairly low.
But Fiona Halsey had a dubious past with a French playboy who had too many ties to a group of international thugs Interpol had dubbed The Fraternity. These men brokered illegal weapons, assassins, guns-for-hire and mercenaries. They fostered and gave away arms and services to vigilante groups like the TruthSayers.
Kyle Everly was one of them, almost certainly in command, and here was Fiona Halsey, living on the Bar Naught by his leave.
Coincidence? No one knew for sure.
Satisfied with his survey, Matt snapped shut the binoculars, tucked them away, shouldered his duffel bag and began to pick his way down the mountainside.
As he drew nearer and approached from a westerly angle, Matt saw flickering candlelight within the curtained windows of the ranch manager, Dennis Geary. The ramrod could be counted upon to be entertaining a lady friend in his bunkhouse quarters. Probably one of the clerks from the local convenience store.
The main house was lit up in a couple of rooms. Matt knew Everly himself was away for a regular Friday night poker game that always lasted into the wee hours of Saturday morning. Everly was said to lose a lot, currying favor of the locals.
Which left only Fiona’s whereabouts to account for. Her four-wheel-drive vehicle was parked beneath a pair of old cottonwood trees just outside her apartment. It took Matt thirty seconds to satisfy himself that she was inside.
He had his doubts about her as well. Devil or angel? Player or patsy? Everly’s dupe or a woman who simply loved the Bar Naught and would live on it as an employee if that was her only option?
Not knowing left Matt edgy. He didn’t like it, but there it was. Everly was his target. If Fiona Halsey got in his way, Matt would have his answer.
He crouched low and circled around to the back of the main house. Vaulting easily over the pristine white picket fence at the perimeter of the lawn, he crossed to the back door of the ranch house. There on the porch he knelt to open his duffel bag. He took out a small flashlight and shone a narrow beam on the doors and windows, then disabled the security system.
He opened the back door of the residence, slipped inside and hung his bag by its strap over the inside doorknob. But as he turned around to get a sense of the place, he had an almost visceral feeling of a plan about to go very wrong.
Matt let the feeling spread through him. He stood there in the kitchen listening for the smallest sound, the barest hint that he was not alone. Hearing nothing to alarm him, he began a stealthy room-to-room search of the house, in the end satisfied that he was alone. Still, the feeling of something badly amiss persisted, like a distant siren that went on and on without fading away.
A sudden memory rose up in his mind, of another night he had experienced just such a chilling, powerful presentiment—the night the TruthSayers had snatched his best friend’s young son, Christo.
Matt dragged in a deep draught of air and blew it out slowly, letting his breath carry off the adrenaline rush and the tension the memory evoked in his body. At least no child’s life was at stake this night.
He took a couple of powder-free latex gloves from the back pocket of his jeans, pulled them on and began going through the house, taking it apart, studying the interior and furnishings in earnest. He wanted to become as familiar with Everly’s possessions as if they belonged to him. As if he were Kyle Everly.
Tension lingered inside him. He sat down at Everly’s computer at twelve-thirteen and set to work against the subtle ticking of an antique grandfather clock.
He spent half an hour at the computer, finding detailed maps. He suspected these would match up perfectly with the shipments of illegal arms Interpol had meticulously tracked. In spreadsheet format he found timetables he knew would match thefts and bombings and murders carried out all over creation.
All of these files could be explained away by a defense attorney, but the information gave Matt the leverage he needed to blackmail his way into Everly’s affairs. Tomorrow he would be back, a dangerously renegade cop, formerly of the Anti-TruthSayers squad, ready now to go on the take. Matt Guiliani would become Everly’s new best friend and partner in crime.
He printed key files, then a household inventory as well. One never knew when it would come in handy to know the exact worth of the Renoir on the bedroom wall or the bronze sculpture in the living room. An eagle in flight, clutching its prey in fearsome claws, it was a perfect metaphor for Kyle Everly, the predator who owned the bronze.
The psycho profilers described Everly as a narcissist sociopath, a blond, blue-eyed pretty boy that no one had ever given nearly enough credit for having a brain.
A mistaken prejudice, Matt thought now, that physical beauty such as Everly’s inevitably went unmatched by intellect. Everly sat out here in the middle of big Wyoming thinking himself safe. Thinking he slipped with ease under the radar of law enforcement. He expected to get by with whatever pleased his twisted fancy because he always had.
