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“Pam,” he muttered. “Pam Hawkins.” He hesitated, choosing his words with obvious care. “Look, Chloe, my business with Pam is...complicated.”
“Funny, it didn’t sound complicated.”
His gray eyes narrowed, and he shot her a look so swift and sharp and un-Maselike that Chloe blinked.
“What exactly did you hear?”
“Not much,” she admitted on a long, gusting sigh. “Only enough to make me thoroughly ashamed of the fact that I’ve used you.”
“I accepted your proposal with my eyes open. You didn’t use me.”
“Yes, I did, and I’m sorry, Mase. Honestly. I know you assured me that our so-called engagement wouldn’t impinge on your private life, but I shouldn’t have presumed—I should have realized—I guess I just didn’t think things through,” she finished miserably.
The elevator door pinged open. Grabbing at the escape it offered, Chloe stepped inside and jabbed the Down button. Mase’s hand shot out, catching the door as it started to close.
“We need to talk about this.”
“We will. Call me, okay? We’ll work out the details of our big breakup.” The words left a bitter taste in her mouth. Good grief, what did it take for her to learn her lesson? First she’d let the handsome, debonair Andre con her. Now she’d conned herself into thinking... into hoping...
“No,” she said, recanting her offer to talk. “We don’t have to work out anything. I shouldn’t have risked our friendship by wrapping it in deceit. No more lies, Mase. No more pretense. As of this moment, you’re a free man. Officially, finally and irrevocably.”
His response was a short, pithy curse, something Chloe wasn’t at all used to hearing from him. She blinked in surprise as he stepped inside the elevator, caging her against the back wall.
“I’m not letting you walk away until we talk this through.”
A spurt of temper sliced through her hurt. Her eyes flashed a warning. “Back off, mister.”
“Dammit, Chloe...”
“I can’t talk about it now. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
For a moment she thought he might force the issue. Suddenly, ridiculously, she felt a frisson of alarm. Not fear, exactly. She couldn’t fear Mase if she tried. Yet this man looked almost like a stranger. To her infinite relief, he stepped back.
“All right. We’ll talk tonight. After the party at your uncle’s house.”
Finally the door whirred shut. Chloe slumped against the paneled wall, her eyes shut, with Mase’s image blazed on her eyelids. Tall. Dark-haired. Broad-shouldered. Square-jawed. Smiling down at Pamela Hawkins, who liked it hard and fast and rough.
A shiver of revulsion rippled through Chloe, followed immediately by one of pure, undiluted envy. Mase Chandler certainly hadn’t tried anything hard and fast and rough with her. Face it. He hadn’t tried anything at all. It shattered her to discover that steady, solid Mase possessed a dark side to his character she hadn’t even suspected. It shattered her even more to realize that she still wanted him. Desperately.
The elevator zipped downward. With every flashing floor number, Chloe berated herself. How could she be such a fool? When would she learn that she couldn’t trust her judgment where men were concerned?
Jaw tight, Mase watched the elevator indicator flash floor after floor. His instincts told him to go after Chloe, to work through this mess before she did something stupid, like announce to her father or brothers or the rest of the Fortune clan that they’d called off their supposedly fake engagement.
Chloe didn’t know it, but their engagement had been real from the moment Mase had accepted her ridiculous proposal. For him, anyway Oh, he’d played by her rules. Kept his hands off her, despite the hunger that had grown in him with every passing day. A hunger that sent him to bed at night hard and aching and determined to finesse his skittish fiancée to the altar.
Now she’d bolted.
He should go after her. Mase knew he should. But the image of her angry, confused face held him back. She said she needed time. Okay. He’d give her time. Until tonight. Then they’d end this charade the way he’d planned to end it all along. With Chloe in his arms and in his bed.
In the meantime, Pam was waiting for him. Blowing out a long breath, Mase raked a hand through his hair. How the hell was he going to explain his convoluted relationship with Pam to Chloe? He couldn’t even explain it to himself.
One-time lover? Sometime partner? Friend?
Who was he kidding? The ties that bound them went deeper than that. He and Pam had shared too many hours of danger, too many nights of boredom to qualify as mere friends. He’d have to think of something to tell Chloe, something that didn’t violate the absolute security he had sworn to maintain. He couldn’t explain about his secret life, the life he’d decided to give up. He couldn’t take the same risks, disappear for the same extended periods, as a married man that he did while single. It wouldn’t be fair to her... or their marriage.
His mouth twisted. What had she just said? That it was stupid to wrap their friendship in lies and deceit? He wondered what she’d say if she knew they were his stock-in-trade. Or had been until he’d decided to marry her and end his forays into the seamy underworld known as clandestine operations. With a last, frustrated glance at the elevator indicator, Mase spun around and headed back to his office.
Pam had made herself comfortable in the high-backed executive chair behind his desk, her long legs crossed and a rueful smile in her brown eyes.
“Sorry if I made things awkward for you with your fiancée, Mase. Did you soothe her ruffled feathers?”
“I will,” he replied with more assurance than he felt at that particular moment. Forcing his thoughts from Chloe to the woman regarding him with cool amusement, he cut back to the reason for her unexpected visit.
“Tell me again why you think Dexter Greene is looking for me?”
Raising a well-manicured hand, Pam ticked off the bare facts she’d related when she’d first arrived less than a half hour ago.
“One, you brought in his son. Two, said son was found dead in his prison cell last month. Three, we sent an operative to the funeral and four, our agent hung around long enough to believe that Dexter Greene’s vow of vengeance is more than the ranting of a grief-crazed parent. The father’s dangerous, Mase. We knew that when we went in to extract his son.”
Frowning, Mase jingled the coins in his pocket. Fractured images of a long, deadly chase flickered through his mind. He could almost hear the pop of gunfire. Taste the coppery residue of fear as he’d slogged through miles of sucking swamp with the gun-running, hate-mongering murderer slung unconscious across his back and Pam panting at his side.
It didn’t matter that Greene’s son was a conscienceless bastard. Or that he’d not only supplied stolen weapons to the hate-mongers who’d opened fire on a church full of Asian immigrants, but had planned and participated in the massacre himself. As fanatical about America for Americans as the others in his tight little enclave, the elder Greene no doubt approved of his son’s actions.
How the hell had Dexter Greene connected the scruffy, bearded thug who’d snatched his son with the CEO of Chandler Industries?
When he put the question to Pam, she shrugged. “We don’t know how he made the initial connection. We do know that someone logged on to the computer in the library in Greene’s hometown and initiated inquiries about Mason Chandler. We answered the queries with the standard cover information, of course, and sent an operative in to nose around. When he got there, Greene had dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Come on, Pam! Our specialty is hostage recovery and hostile extractions. We’re experts at tracking down the slime no other agency can find. How did our man let Greene slip through his fingers?”
She shrugged again. “I was in the Middle East until two days ago. The Chief called me in when you told him you were out of the business.”
“So he sent you to Minneapolis to change my mind.”
“Have I?”
“No. I’m getting married in November, remember?”
She cocked a brow. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Mase replied with a wry smile. “I’ll have to do some fast talking in the next few hours to make it happen, though.”
“talking?” The brunette shook her head in mock despair. “That wasn’t your style when we worked together. What has this woman done to you?”
Mase wasn’t ready to admit that Chloe Fortune had tied him up in knots so tight he’d never unravel them.
“Look, I won’t go back into the field, but I’ll do what I can to help you with Greene. Did you bring the after-action reports from our original mission?”
“Of course.”
“Let me go through them and see if anything shakes out about the father. I’ll get in touch with you at your hotel later.”
Much later. After he had “talked” to Chloe.
Pam rose with the fluid, feline grace that was hers alone. Slinging the shoulder strap of her calfskin bag over her shoulder, she rounded the edge of the desk and patted him on his cheek.
“I’ll be waiting.”
By the time Mase wheeled through the open gates of Stuart and Marie Fortune’s Minneapolis mansion, the bright fall afternoon had faded into purple dusk. Lights blazed from every window of the two-story stone house belonging to Chloe’s uncle. The sound of laughter and chink of glasses carried clearly on the crisp evening air.
From the number of Mercedes and Jags and luxury sports utility vehicles crowding the brick-paved drive, it appeared that the Fortunes had turned out in force tonight for Stuart Fortune’s impromptu party. The mysterious invitation, conveyed by Stuart’s personal secretary this morning, indicated only that he wanted to welcome a new member of the Fortune family to their midst. At this particular moment, Mase wasn’t interested in welcoming anyone. All he wanted was to get face-to-face with his fiancée.
Masking his impatience, he climbed the curving front steps. Moments later he was shown into a high-ceilinged, glass-enclosed palazzo. With its magnificent view of the lakes and the distant city skyline, the sunroom was a favorite gathering spot of the Fortunes. After a quick scan of the crowd, he headed for a familiar figure.
His prospective father-in-law took his hand in a hearty grip. “Hello, Mase. Where’s Chloe?”
“She was supposed to meet me here.”
“She was?” Emmet Fortune’s silvery brows slashed into a straight line. “I wonder what’s delaying her.”
Having raised Chloe and her twin and their older brother on his own, Emmet’s protective instincts . kicked into overdrive on a daily, if not hourly, basis. They were revving up to full power when Chloe’s twin strolled over to join them.
For the life of him, Mase couldn’t understand how two siblings could look so much alike and possess such different temperaments. They both stopped passersby in their tracks...Chad with his striking Nordic masculinity, Chloe with her breath-stealing, feminine version of her brother’s handsomeness. They both kept themselves in superb physical shape with regular and energetic exercise—skiing in winter, swimming and tennis in summer. There the similarities ended. Where Chloe flashed a smile that could melt the ice on Minnesota’s lakes in mid-January, Chad’s too often held a mocking edge. As it did now.
“Hello, Mase.”
“Hi, Chad.”
“Chloe asked me to give you something.”
Mase stiffened. The hard glint in Chad’s violet eyes, so like his sister’s, gave him an inkling of what was coming. Sure enough, Chad pulled his hand out of his pocket and uncurled his fingers. A gleaming, emerald-cut diamond lay in his palm.
“She said she forgot to return this to you this afternoon.”
His jaw squaring, Mase pocketed the ring. “Where is she?”
Chad didn’t try to disguise his hostility. Obviously, his sister had told him about the fiasco at Mase’s office this afternoon.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“She didn’t say. She just indicated that she needed to get away and do some serious thinking.”
Emmet broke into the conversation, his fatherly feathers in full ruff. “What the hell’s going on here, Mase? Why did you and Chloe call off the wedding?”
“I didn’t. Chloe did.”
“Why? And what does she have to think about? Dammit, where’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know, Emmet, but I’ll find her.”
Chad’s smile took on a sharper edge. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Chandler. She didn’t sound like she wanted finding.”
For the first time since he looked up and saw Chloe standing in his office door, Mase felt a flicker of real amusement. None of the Fortunes knew what he did or who he worked for during his extended “business” trips. For security reasons, none ever would.
“I’ll find her,” he stated with the quiet assurance that came with years of training, a worldwide network of contacts and too many missions to count.
He left the party a few moments later and headed straight for the downtown hotel where Pam was staying. He’d get her working Chloe’s license tag and vehicle description with the locals while he tapped into a few restricted networks. It wouldn’t take long for him to track down the red, two-seater Mercedes. When he did, Mase decided grimly, he and his fiancée were going to have that little talk.
They located the Mercedes five hours later. A state trooper had spotted it nose down in a gully some forty miles west of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The contents of a black leather shoulder bag had spilled onto the floor mat. A fully packed carryall was still in the trunk.
It took almost three weeks to locate the missing driver.
Two
Mase spent those weeks in a blur of long days and endless nights. Controlling the fear that knife-bladed through him each time he thought of the deserted stretch of road and Chloe’s crumpled car, he forced himself to work through every possible scenario.
She could have fallen asleep at the wheel and plowed into that ditch. She could have been run off the road by some sex-crazed psycho. Or by kidnappers wanting a piece of her father’s wealth. Or, as he grimly discussed with Pam, she could have been followed from his office and snatched by the man who’d sworn vengeance for the death of his son. Mase had to face the very real possibility that he’d been compromised, that Dexter Greene had somehow tracked him down and intended to use his fiancée as bait to snare him. The possibility ate like acid through his system.
He sweated blood for almost three weeks. Finally, after hundreds of false leads and dead ends, his agency’s far-flung network of contacts paid off. A Seattle-based, long-haul trucker reported picking up a hitchhiker matching Chloe’s description during a cross-country run, not far from where her Mercedes was later found. According to the trucker, his passenger had sported a good-size lump on her temple and seemed a little dazed. Concerned, he’d taken her to a clinic in Mitchell, South Dakota.
Mase was in the air and en route to Mitchell within thirty minutes of receiving the trucker’s report. Once there, he picked up Chloe’s trail almost immediately. She had arrived at the clinic just minutes after a near hysterical junior high choir director brought in fifteen moaning, vomiting glee club members. In the melee of retching students, frantic parents and harried staff, the emergency room physician examined Chloe, ordered an X ray, diagnosed a mild concussion and released her.
She paid her bill in cash the next day after pawning a sapphire ring. The engraved inscription in the ring, “To Chloe, with love from Kate,” provided the first solid proof that Mase was closing in on his missing fiancée.
Then, before the relief and elation at having picked up her trail even peaked, she disappeared again.
It took another twenty hellish hours for Mase to track her from Mitchell to the two-tick town of Crockett, in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. His last report, received just as he was climbing into a helicopter, was that a woman calling herself Chloe Smith had taken up residence with Hannah Crockett, granddaughter of the town’s founder and proprietor of the general store.
A late-afternoon sun slanted through the mountain peaks when the helicopter touched down at a prearranged landing site some six miles outside of Crockett.
“I wish you’d let me go in with you,” Pam shouted over the whap of the rotor blades.
“I’ll signal you if I need backup.”
“Dammit, Mase, we still don’t know why your fiancée decided to hole up out here, in the middle of nowhere.”
He skimmed a quick look at the mountains surrounding them on all sides. Not quite the middle of nowhere, but close.
“Until we do...” Pam yelled.
“Until we do, this is my operation. I’ll contact you if I need backup.”
Pam sank back against the seat, her mouth a thin line of disapproval. Mase tipped her a quick farewell and ducked under the whirling blades. A moment later he took the keys of the mud-splashed Chevy Blazer he’d arranged to have delivered to the isolated landing site. The driver shouted quick directions to Crockett before hunching over and dashing to the chopper.
Mase slid into the Blazer and slammed the door on the ear-rattling noise. A quick shake of his leg settled the cuff of his jeans over his scarred boot and the 9mm Glock subcompact it concealed. Smaller and lighter than a snub-nosed Special, the Glock carried a tactical high-velocity load that had helped him out of more than one tight situation.
His face grim, Mase transferred the extra clip and boxes of spare bullets to the Blazer’s dash. From the report received just hours ago, it appeared Chloe wasn’t under duress. Despite his insistence on going in alone, Mase wasn’t taking any chances.
