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David flashed her one of his mind-melting smiles as he nodded. “No worries there.”
Her eyes went wide. David Moretti had a twin. Two of him. Like one wasn’t overwhelming enough.
“So this brother of yours, he’s the rough-and- tough type?” Gina asked. “If he’s going with Sam, he’d better be able to provide protection.”
“He is a professional bodyguard,” Brant cut in. “He’s somewhat of a wild card from what I understand.”
David didn’t respond. His eyes were becoming somber, although the ever-present smile never faltered on his face.
“Sounds like a good alternative,” Anita said with caution. “I think it would be smart for Sam not to go alone.”
She didn’t mean it disparagingly, as if Sam wasn’t capable. Anita was simply the mothering type. She couldn’t help being concerned about others’ safety. It no longer bothered Sam. God knew, she had a serious deficiency when it came to being mothered. Still, she didn’t want to look as if she were scared of the mission, especially not in front of the others. She wasn’t ready to let them see any of the chinks in her armor. You showed weakness and the world steamrolled right on over you. It was a lesson she had learned well on the street.
“It’s a beach party. I’ll get a tan, check out the house, draw some blueprints, eavesdrop if I can. What can go wrong?” She shrugged as if her scalp weren’t tingling from nerves. “I can do it.” She didn’t feel nearly as sure as she sounded, but what was the alternative? Have the others figure out what a screwup she was, kick her off the team and send her back to the can?
“You can if you need to,” Brant said, apparently buying her bravado. “But it looks like we are getting a chance to put in a second man. It’s a freebie, a bonus. He could watch your back. You could go further, get more information.”
“I shouldn’t have introduced David by his real name.” Sam shook her head. She’d been kicking herself for that ever since. But who could think standing next to David Moretti?
“That was probably a good move actually,” Brant said. “Cavanaugh will have him investigated prior to the party. He wouldn’t let a complete stranger inside his compound. If he caught us in a lie, it would jeopardize the whole operation.”
A moment of silence passed, then Carly turned to David. “You think your brother could handle this?”
“He could, but he won’t. It’s not what he does. He escorts businessmen in politically unstable areas. He navigates the hot spots, retrieves kidnap victims, that kind of thing.” He hesitated.
“And?” Brant was asking. “This is not about preferences.” He paused for a moment. “I just received the latest report an hour ago, didn’t want to mention it until I had a chance for another look and a more careful analysis, but there is so much bustle in terrorist circles, the lines are glowing. Monies are moving, human resources are being re-shuffled. We’ve never seen this much activity.” He paused again. “Not even before 9/11.”
“Something major is about to go down,” Nick picked up where Brant had left off. “Since Tsernyakov rules the illegal-weapons market, chances are he’s in on it. If we can get to him, we might be able to stop whatever is about to happen.”
And Cavanaugh was their only link to Tsernyakov. Cavanaugh, who had just invited her to spend a week at his house. Everything rode on her. Odd doubts surfaced, one after the other. What if she wasn’t equal to the task?
At the beginning, she had taken the deal without much thought because it got her out of prison, and to show them all that she wasn’t scared of anything. But as she’d gotten to know the others over the past months, it was becoming more and more important not to let them down. She wanted to get Tsernyakov, for the team, and for herself, too, to prove that she could do something right for once.
“So, David, how about Reese?” Brant asked. “Without telling him everything, of course. Strictly on a need-to-know basis.”
“I’ll attempt to persuade him. However, the last time I requested a favor from him it turned out rather unfavorably. He was guarding one of my clients prior to court testimony and she allegedly shot him in the back. I don’t believe I can convince him to discard whatever he’s working on to come and bail me out again.”
“What’s a bullet in the back between brothers?” Gina joked.
David shook his head. “His exact words were, Never again. You don’t even have to ask.”
THERE WAS a wide-eyed wildness under her polite veneer. He wouldn’t have minded being the one who tamed her and broke her in. All four women at Savall, Ltd. were stunning—a superb combination with their lack of moral sensibility that was guaranteed by their records, ex-cons the lot of them. Their business was growing by leaps and bounds.
Samantha had something special about her that made her stand out from the others, however, and it wouldn’t let him rest, had grabbed him from the beginning. She had such an abundance of nervous energy humming through her. She was forever in motion.
Cavanaugh sat behind his desk and pictured harnessing Samantha Hanley’s energies for his own purposes. He didn’t care about the guy she’d been with. If anything, he added to the challenge. Rivals didn’t scare him, inside or outside of business.
Moretti was her lover at the moment, he was pretty sure. He’d picked up on some odd vibes between the two. They had that look of the guilty, especially Samantha, of people caught at something they shouldn’t have been doing.
He was an attorney. A crooked one if he was close to the women. Cavanaugh would bet a kilo of the best cheese he had flown in from Paris that morning that Moretti was in on the money laundering.
Everyone could always use another shady lawyer. Moretti could come in handy yet. He didn’t need to know if Samantha made a few detours to the party host’s bed.
And she would, Cavanaugh was pretty sure of that. Women always gravitated to the most powerful man in any group. It was part of their genetic conditioning, part of the primal program that ran in their DNA. A splendid bit of biology he regularly took advantage of.
“Last van just left,” Roberto said as he came through the door. Without knocking.
Cavanaugh shrugged off the moment of annoyance. The man was all brawn but little social sensibility. Any attempt to teach him the finer points of polite behavior and manners were a waste of energy. “Good. Make sure the place is cleaned up. We have visitors coming.”
“Sure, boss.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s it.”
“I’m ready for my lunch to be sent up,” he said and the man disappeared the next second—miracle of miracles, closing the door behind him.
He signed into one of his many bank accounts he kept under assumed names and filled out the online form to wire money to one of the many front businesses that, in a convoluted way, belonged to Tsernyakov. That one could be dangerous if he didn’t get his full cut of the business and on time. People in his organization who didn’t perform to expectations tended to disappear.
A few clicks on the keyboard concluded that business.
Cavanaugh leaned back in his chair, his lips pressed together. Having to give away his money always left a bad taste in his mouth. He shrugged it off and went back to thinking about Samantha Hanley in his bed, a much more pleasant topic.
SAM STOOD by her dresser and listened to the noises in the living room. Reese Moretti was making up the couch for himself. She’d never had a man in her apartment before. Up until a few weeks ago, she’d never had an apartment.
She took a deep breath and walked out with the pillow and blanket she was holding. Better do it before she lost her nerve.
“Here.” She held out the bedding and gestured toward the couch. “Sorry, it’s the best I can do.”
All the women on the team got one-bedroom apartments. It hadn’t seemed necessary to spring for more. They spent most of their time at the office or snooping around at the various business functions the island’s elite hosted, trying to figure out who else might be doing business with Tsernyakov. The man had money coming to the island through a maze of channels. They couldn’t just sit back now that they had Cavanaugh. With a guy like Tsernyakov, one needed many backup plans.
“The powder room is all yours,” she said, not mentioning the obvious, that to shower he would need to use her bathroom. She’d spent an hour that morning cleaning it.
She hadn’t grown up in an orderly environment and at times had trouble remembering to put things away. She was improving, though. And she had paid special attention for Reese Moretti’s sake.
The idea was for the two of them to spend as much time together as possible, since, in twenty-four hours, they would have to sell Cavanaugh on the idea that they were romantically linked. That made her more nervous than the rest of the mission put together. They needed to get to know each other and become comfortable with the situation in a hurry.
“Thanks.” He glanced up, looking just like David, and yet different in so many ways. He tested the couch, wearing the same grim expression as he had since his arrival a couple of hours ago—one of the many differences between the twins. David didn’t do grim.
The azure-blue Naugahyde monster that came with the apartment was hard as a chunk of sidewalk. “Sorry,” she said again.
“Don’t sweat it. I just spent a month sleeping in the bush in Africa.”
She couldn’t picture David, always dressed in some sleek silk suit, say anything like that. “Under a bush?” She’d spent plenty of nights on the street; she could sympathize.
But he shook his head with a semiamused look. “In the bush. It’s an expression. Just means out in the wild, wherever you find a convenient piece of ground when night falls.”
Reese dropped the bedding at the end of the couch. His movements weren’t as elegant as David’s. He was more soldierlike, watchful and alert, his dark gray eyes penetrating. There was effortless strength to everything he did, his posture, his gaze; it even came through in his voice. He was clearly used to giving orders, had grilled her for a good hour after the briefing he had received from Nick Tarasov and Brant Law.
After spending most of the evening with him, skirting him warily in the small apartment, she hadn’t gotten a handle on him yet.
He sat and kicked off his safari boots, then leaned back on the couch, rubbed a hand over his face as he looked around once again, his mouth set in a tight line of disapproval.
David Moretti’s smooth and easygoing ways made her frazzled, but it took Reese’s brusque manner to get her really nervous. David had that benign, gentlemanly air about him. Reese didn’t.
“You can have the bedroom if you want.” The words came out of her mouth without thought or intention.
“Sofa’s fine.”
“Is something wrong?” Now, why would she ask that? She should have just walked away. Her nerves made her mouth run.
He watched her carefully for a long moment before he responded. “I spent the last four months in Uganda between two rebel factions, risking my team for a man who turned out to have been dead the whole time. We came back with seven gunshot injuries between the four of us.”
Clearly, he didn’t want to be here. She wondered how Brant and Nick had managed to talk him into it. From the look on his face, he wasn’t going to be a lot of fun to be around.
A single week, that was all. She could handle that standing on one foot. She’d been forced to put up with worse company in the past. The years she had spent at Brighton Federal Correctional Institute came to mind.
“Okay, I’ll leave you to get some rest.” She backed toward her bedroom.
“We don’t have much time. We’d better get to work,” he said, and when she looked at him blankly, added, “We are supposed to get to know each other.”
What did he call the hour-long interrogation he’d put her through earlier in the kitchen? Or was he going to finally reveal more about himself? She drew a deep breath and walked back, sat gingerly in the armchair opposite him.
“Nick Tarasov tells me you’re good with a gun,” he said with some undisguised doubt in his voice. “He seemed confident that you could handle yourself in a hand-to-hand tussle, too, in your own weight group.” He looked her over as if he was measuring her ounce by ounce and ended up with an expression that said she wasn’t quite up to snuff.
She resisted the urge to pull herself taller. “I went through the training” was all she said.
He raised a dark eyebrow. “So you think you can handle whatever comes your way?”
“I’m not stupid.”
The eyebrow went back down. There might have been a shadow of approval that crossed his face before he put forward his next question. “How long have we supposedly known each other?”
“Three months.” That was how long she’d been out. Where had the time gone?
“How much nudity are you comfortable with?” His gaze was sharp on her face, unflinching.
The question brought her up short. What did that have to do with anything? And yet, after a second, she had to admit that the question was relevant. Cavanaugh thought Reese—pretending to be David—was her lover. She swallowed, her already frazzled nerves buzzing as if she were undergoing electroshock therapy. “Very little.”
When you spent your teenage years on the streets, you strove to cover as much as possible, look as un-appealing as possible, as scary as possible. It had been part of her defense mechanism. She’d hidden behind the darkest of Goth looks, complete with chains and studded chokers, and complemented it all with a tongue and gaze as sharp as razors.
Prison had taken away most of her props. Anita had been working on her to make her see the lack of necessity for the rest. She wasn’t quite there yet, but even Sam had to admit that she had mellowed. She was no longer frightened of everything, so in turn she no longer wanted to frighten anyone who so much as looked at her.
The concept of nudity, however, especially in the same context with Reese, scared her. She searched for a cutting remark to disguise that fact.
“We are going to a beach party,” he said dryly before she could come up with one.
She had an image of topless cover models frolicking in the surf. Knowing Cavanaugh, it wasn’t impossible.
“How far are you willing to go for this mission of yours?” Reese laid down the challenge.
Putting it that way got her back up. “I’ll do what I have to.”
“Good.” He nodded and extended his arm toward her. “Then come and sit on my lap.”
It was the wrong thing to say. She was on her feet the next second. “Touch me and lose the hand.” The warning tore from her throat, hoarse and hard as a fist.
He tilted his head and waited a beat. “For the next three days, we are supposed to pretend that we are madly in lust. How do you think we’ll pull that off when you look like you’re ready to jump out of your skin even with three feet between us?”
She drew some air and let a couple of seconds tick by, straightened her back. Okay, so she’d overreacted. He wasn’t about to jump her. And he was right, once they got to Cavanaugh’s mansion, it would look suspicious if they never touched.
She had to make herself get over it.
She fisted then relaxed her hands, trying to swallow the memories in vain. She knew her face was getting whiter with every inch she moved toward him. Her muscles tensed. She stopped in front of him and fought to shrug off the temporary paralysis that clutched her.
Stop it.
This was stupid. He was Reese Moretti, the man who was going to keep her safe. He wasn’t Buck. He wasn’t like Buck at all.
Pretend, she told herself. Pretend it doesn’t freak you out so bad that you can barely breathe.
She looked into his face and could no longer find the disdain he’d shown since his arrival. He was watching her with a darkening expression.
“Who was it?” he asked quietly, through clenched teeth.
She could have pretended not to understand what he was asking, but she didn’t have the energy. All the starch had gone out of her, leaving her feeling weak.
“My stepfather,” she said, and couldn’t stop the images in her head.
Buck Cossner drank. When her mother wasn’t home, he drank a lot. And when he was drunk, he got mad. When he got mad, he hit her. Then he would feel bad and want to console her, no matter how hard she tried to tell him she was okay, no matter that she never cried. She’d been more afraid of his consoling than the beating. It’d always started with, I’m sorry, honey. Come sit on my lap.
Chapter Two
Reese stood, and she cringed, even though there was nothing threatening in his movements. If anything, he seemed an island of calm and strength. Even the bad-tempered look that she’d thought permanent was replaced by a softer expression.
“Take it easy.”
A part of her was staring at the transformation, at how handsome he was without the drawn-together brows and his mouth set in a flat, displeased line, how even the gray of his eyes changed. But the rest of her couldn’t help backing away a step. In a moment of conflicting emotions, instinct honed by years of bad experiences trumped everything. Goose bumps she couldn’t control rose on the bare skin of her arms.
A muscle jumped in his cheek. “Is that why you ran away from home?” Then, when she didn’t respond, he said, “I read your file.”
She nodded and they stood there like that, a foot or so between them. He wouldn’t take his eyes off her.
And God, that felt good. Because when you lived on the streets and became one of the “undesirables” of society, the first thing everyone did was avert their eyes. Nobody wanted to see the filth or desperation, nobody wanted to risk a pang of guilt, that they should feel uncomfortable. She had spent years without ever being acknowledged by anyone except those who sought to use or abuse her. She’d been a “problem,” and all people wanted was for problems to go away.
But there was no pity in Reese Moretti’s gaze, nor anything remotely judgmental.
She took a breath, feeling her lungs open up. “What are we supposed to do?”
