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“But opposites attract. Everyone knows that.”
“No, they don’t. That’s a myth perpetuated by people who screwed up and married somebody totally wrong for them and now they’re looking for a way to explain the dumb choice they made.”
“Okay, so this one didn’t work out. But there’s still that other guy Jeff works with. The one who—”
Alyssa held up her hand. “No. No more blind dates. Just let me make my own choices from now on, okay?”
“So the men you pick will be better?”
“Yes!”
“Like Mr. Wonderful in Seattle? The man who had an affair with you for a week, lied to you about who he was, then disappeared without a trace?”
Alyssa cringed. Whenever she thought about that time in Seattle, she tried very hard to edit out the way it had ended. The week they’d spent together had been incredible, and not just because of the sex. He said he’d never been to Seattle before, so she’d shown him the sights, taking him to museums and parks and restaurants and enjoying his company more with every moment that had passed. She’d shared more intimate details about her life with him than with any man she’d ever known. She’d told him about her family, her job, her volunteer work, and he’d listened with rapt attention, as if she were the most fascinating woman he’d ever met. She knew she couldn’t have been. Not even close. She didn’t consider herself to be an unattractive woman, but fascinating she wasn’t.
Still, in spite of her rational, reasonable nature that told her how crazy it was, she’d begun to imagine what forever with him might be like. Then she’d awoken one morning to find him gone, with only a cursory note left behind. It’s been fun, but I have to go. Derek.
She’d told herself to let it drop, to forget him, to pretend the week had never happened, because it clearly hadn’t meant as much to him as it had to her. But she couldn’t stop herself from trying to find him. And that was when she’d made the most painful discovery of all: every word out of his mouth had been a lie.
Derek Stafford didn’t exist. Not in Kansas City, anyway. He’d never worked for Primus Engineering, because it didn’t exist, either. He hadn’t attended the University of Kansas and Oak Park High School had never heard of him. And slowly she’d realized that while she’d told him everything about herself, he’d offered her almost nothing in return aside from a few basic facts, all of which had turned out to be lies.
She’d felt like a fool. How could she have fallen so hard for a man who hadn’t cared about her in the least? Of course, she was acting like an even bigger fool now for wasting time thinking about him at all.
Kim was right. Anything beat a man who was there one day, gone the next, with no goodbye, not even a halfhearted attempt at the old “It’s not you, it’s me” excuse. Just a note on his pillow and a trail of lies to remember him by.
“He was probably married, you know,” Kim said.
“I know.”
“Or just a world-class jerk.”
“I know.”
“Or both.”
Alyssa sighed. “I know.”
“You need to stay away from guys like him. Go for ones who’ll offer you some kind of future.”
“Who are also self-important snobs?”
“Okay, then, tell me. If Tom was a dud, what are you looking for in a man?”
She didn’t know, exactly. It was so hard to describe the man she saw in her head sometimes that it would sound stupid to say it out loud. She wanted a man who was interesting. A man who was exciting, who knew how to excite her.
Her mystery man in Seattle.
He lied to you and left you, and you’re still obsessing? What’s the matter with you?
Kim sighed. “Look. All I’m trying to say is that you may be looking for something that’s just not reality. If you’re still waiting for that dashing man to ride up on his white horse and sweep you off your feet, you’re going to be alone for the rest of your life.”
Intellectually, Alyssa knew her sister was right. Still, something inside her said it was better to be alone than with a man who demanded everything and gave nothing.
“After all,” Kim went on, “you’re pushing thirty. You need to be thinking about settling down.”
“I’ve got a good job. I don’t need a man to take care of me.”
“You’ve got a job that requires you to work twelve hours a day and pays you for eight. Lawrence Teague is a gazillionaire, but does he pay you what you’re worth? If you didn’t get an apartment out of the deal, it’d be slave wages.”
“I make enough. And I like my job.”
“Right. Running in circles for a bunch of rich people. Sounds like a real blast to me.”
Kim just didn’t get it. Yes, the people who lived at the Waterford were wealthy. After all, it was arguably the most prestigious apartment building in the city of Dallas, one of seven identical buildings owned by Starlight Properties in major metro areas across the country. It climbed twenty-three stories into the North Dallas skyline, offering housekeeping services, a state-of-the-art security system, an on-site spa and hair salon, as well as a health club. As Tenant Relations Manager, it was a challenging task for Alyssa to keep everyone in the building happy and life running smoothly, but she thrived on it.
“Speaking of Mr. Teague,” Alyssa said, “he’s flying from Houston to Dallas early tomorrow morning. I’m picking him up at the airport.”
“Good. That’d be a great time to ask him for a raise.”
Alyssa ignored her sister’s remark, thinking instead about her most important task whenever Mr. Teague came to town: making sure he got star treatment. That meant picking him up in a limousine, putting fresh flowers in his suite, having his clothes cleaned and pressed if necessary, making reservations wherever he chose to dine. He might own the building, but she was the hostess there to welcome him to his home away from home.
Alyssa’s cell phone rang and she pulled it out and put it to her ear. As soon as she heard the panicked voice speaking broken English interspersed with Spanish expletives, she knew her problem-solving abilities were about to be put to the test.
After determining the gist of the problem, Alyssa hung up and turned to Kim. “One of the housekeepers accidentally broke a vase in the penthouse apartment.”
“Oops. Better hope it’s something cheap.”
“Up there, nothing’s cheap.” Alyssa shoved the cell phone back into her purse. “Gotta go.”
“I’m sorry your date sucked,” Kim said. “I’ll try to do better next time.”
“Kim? Didn’t I tell you there isn’t going to be a next time?”
Kim just flashed one of her “that’s what you think” smiles. Alyssa wanted to scream with frustration. But instead of fighting it, she merely said goodbye and double-timed it up the street to the Waterford. Right now the problem in Gerald Owens’s penthouse was more pressing than her problem with her sister’s matchmaking.
Okay. A broken vase. That was only a minor crisis, one she could deal with long before Mr. Teague arrived tomorrow morning. By the time he got here, he’d see nothing but a smoothly operated building and four hundred happy tenants.
AS DEREK STONE strode through the parking garage of the Waterford, he felt that familiar rush of adrenaline that pulled every nerve taut and heightened all his senses. Even though the intelligence he’d received about this situation was reliable and the job had been scripted right down to the last footstep, that trace of uncertainty kept his head up and his body on full alert.
He passed one late-model luxury vehicle after another, testimonies to the wealth of the people who lived in this building. If Gerald Owens occupied the penthouse, his business of gathering blackmail information on U.S. government officials had to be pretty lucrative. Maybe even as lucrative as Derek’s business, which today just happened to involve retrieving blackmail information before it could cause a government incident.
Derek adjusted his earpiece to make sure the communication was loud and clear between him and the surveillance van parked across the street, and then he pulled his backpack more securely over his shoulder. When he reached the door that led to the private elevator lobby, he glanced over his shoulder and saw no one else in the vicinity.
“I’m at the door,” he said softly.
Through his earpiece, Derek heard the soft clacking of Kevin’s fingers on his computer keyboard. A moment later the door lock clicked open. Derek entered the lobby and headed for the private elevator that led directly to the penthouse suite.
“I’m in,” he said.
Derek listened to a few more seconds of Kevin’s keyboard clacking and then the lock clicked behind him.
Perfect.
Derek loved tightly integrated high-tech security systems like this one, because it made his job so much easier. Once they were breached, all it took was a few keystrokes to open doors all over the place. Not that the average hacker could penetrate a sophisticated system like the one at the Waterford, but the men on Derek’s team left average in the dust.
“Okay,” Derek said. “I’m at the elevator.”
“I’ve bypassed the circuit that reads the key card,” Kevin said in his ear. “Just punch in the code. It’s sixty-eight, fifty-four. That’s six, eight, five, four.”
Derek entered the numbers and the elevator doors opened.
“You’re a genius, Kevin.”
“Uh-huh. Can we talk about that raise now?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
As the elevator ascended, Kevin said, “The doors will open into the apartment itself. You can head to the safe right away.”
Two days ago, Derek’s contact in Washington had approached him about Congressman Galloway’s problem. In spite of the tight time frame and the possibility of a dozen things going wrong, Derek took the job. His team, as always, had risen to the challenge. They’d begun analyzing the intelligence, planning a breach of the building’s security system, and surveilling Gerald Owens.
Fortunately for Owens, Derek’s contact in Washington didn’t want him arrested or charged. He merely wanted the blackmail material Owens had gathered on Congressman Galloway to be retrieved and destroyed. Owens was only the hired help, anyway. Derek’s contact didn’t know who had ordered the man to gather the blackmail material, and he didn’t care. Making arrests in this case would only bring out into the open what needed to stay firmly under the rug—namely, that Galloway had a fondness for dressing in women’s clothing. If Derek didn’t retrieve the DVD that showed the congressman’s fetish in action, one of two things was going to happen on Monday morning. Either Galloway would vote against the trade bill coming to the House floor, a bill that would greatly restrict the import of certain Chinese goods to America, or Galloway would release the DVD to the press, revealing that Galloway was one of those men who knew Victoria’s secret. Once his redneck, gun-toting constituency from east Texas got wind of that, Galloway’s chances of reelection were nil.
As the elevator neared the top floor of the building, Derek pulled a ski mask from his pocket and put it on. If something went wrong inside the apartment, the last thing he wanted was for somebody to give his description to the police, which could lead to an artist’s rendering of his face being splashed all over the evening news. His team worked independently from contract to contract, sanctioned by the federal government but with no traceable ties to it. Translation: if something goes wrong, you’re on your own.
Derek mentally reviewed the floor plan of the apartment. A study of the architectural drawings of the building had told him where the safe was and the most direct route to it. He couldn’t say for sure that the blackmail material would be there—nothing was one-hundred-percent certain—but the intelligence reports had all pointed to this man, this building and this safe. A pair of Derek’s men were tailing Owens right now, ensuring that he stayed on the golf course long enough for Derek to break in. The housekeeping staff maintained a rigid schedule, which meant that the maid had already come and gone, and with Kevin in the van opening doors and keeping watch, this job was going to go off without a hitch.
And, most importantly, his team’s perfect record would stay intact.
2
AS ALYSSA TOSSED the last piece of broken vase into a trash bag, she reluctantly upgraded the crisis from minor to major. The magnitude of the mess and the size of the empty pedestal beside it told her that the vase had been at least four feet tall. And judging from the quality of the rest of the art in Owens’s apartment, it had undoubtedly been worth thousands of dollars.
The moment she’d arrived back at the building, she’d taken the lobby elevator to the penthouse floor to find the housekeeper in tears in the master bedroom. The woman told Alyssa that she usually cleaned the penthouse in the morning, but she’d had a doctor’s appointment, which meant she’d been late getting to work. Then, because she was running behind, she’d been in a hurry when she was sweeping the hardwood floor and accidentally bumped the pedestal, sending the vase crashing to the floor.
Alyssa assured the poor woman that of course it had been an accident and of course they had insurance to cover such things, but the housekeeper had been so freaked out that Alyssa had sent her to work on another floor. Then she’d taken off her jacket, tossed it onto the bed and cleaned up the mess herself.
In her mind she was already formulating a plan. She’d phone Owens’s decorator for the name of the gallery that had sold him the piece to see if they had a similar one. With luck, she could have it in place before Owens returned from his golf game—a weekly appointment he kept without fail—and discovered the empty pedestal. A similar piece of art couldn’t replace the one-of-a-kind vase that had been broken, but at least it would let Owens know that she’d made an effort to rectify the mistake in the most expedient and effective way possible. Since he’d only lived in the building a short time, she was especially motivated to solve the problem to his complete satisfaction.
Then, as she was twist-tying the trash bag, she heard a soft whirring noise. The rear elevator?
She froze. It couldn’t be. Mr. Owens wasn’t due back for two hours. The man never cut short his golf game. Never.
Sensing that something wasn’t right, Alyssa stood motionless, the strangest chill skating across the back of her neck. She peeked out of the bedroom into the living room. A man came into view and her heart jolted hard. It wasn’t Gerald Owens.
It was a man in a ski mask.
Suppressing a gasp, Alyssa backed away. A burglar? How had he bypassed the security system?
Her jacket was lying on the bed across the room, her phone in the pocket. All she had to do was dial 9-1-1. She started in that direction, only to hear footsteps and realize he was coming toward the bedroom.
With no time to grab her phone, she shifted her gaze wildly around the room, looking for a place to hide. She hurried to the closet and slipped inside, closing the door silently behind her. The closet light was on. But just as she reached up to turn it off, she heard his footsteps and pulled her hand away from the switch. If he saw the light go off, he’d know someone was in the closet.
With every step he took, her heart rate escalated. She clasped her hands together to stop them from trembling, sure he could hear the slightest move she made.
Then she heard nothing. She felt a shot of relief, only to realize that the absence of footsteps indicated that he’d reached the bedroom rug.
Which meant he was right outside the closet door.
DEREK KNELT on the rug in the master bedroom, flipping the corner back to reveal the floor safe. Again, the state-of-the-art technology offered in this building was working against Owens. With the software Derek had access to, the electronic keypad lock was a whole lot easier to crack than a combination lock.
Derek took off his jacket and stuffed it into his backpack, then pulled out his small laptop computer and flipped it on. Using a wireless connection, in a matter of seconds he set up an interface with the lock at its programming port. He hit a few keys, then sat back to wait as the computer ran the possible combination sequences.
“It’s only a five-digit combination,” he said to Kevin. “We’ll be out of here in no time.”
“Good. That means I might be able to go fishing this afternoon after all. I hear they’re really biting up at Lake Dallas.”
Unlike Kevin, Derek was glad this job had come up at the last minute. If it hadn’t, he’d have been at a wedding rehearsal right now, of all things. Talk about dodging a bullet. What would have been the point of him being there, anyway? How tough could it be to stand up with Gus at the front of that church and hand him the ring at the right time?
Derek didn’t like weddings. They seemed like a whole lot of time and expense to accomplish something that had the same end result as going to a justice of the peace, assuming a man were crazy enough to get tied down in the first place. Unfortunately once Gus had met Sally, Derek hadn’t stood a chance of keeping him. Gus had quit the team a year ago, started a security business and then asked Sally to marry him.
Derek couldn’t imagine that kind of life. He thrived on the excitement of crisscrossing the country to solve problems that had to stay under the radar of standard law enforcement. He loved the autonomy he had to get the job done any way he saw fit. He had so many aliases for his undercover operations that sometimes he had a hard time remembering his real name. Because of his profession, he’d never even considered tying himself down to a lengthy relationship, much less a marriage. Likewise, was it really fair to expect a woman to tolerate his here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle?
Suddenly the words flashed on the screen: combination found.
“I’m in,” Derek told Kevin. “How’s it looking downstairs?”
“Coast is clear.”
Derek returned his laptop to the backpack, punched in the code on the keypad, then opened the safe door. He pulled a penlight from his pocket and flicked it on. A sweep of the interior of the safe revealed a small stack of folders. His intelligence said that Owens had yet to deliver the DVD of Galloway to his client, and when Derek opened the top folder, he saw just how dead-on that information was. In the left-hand pocket of the folder, he found a DVD that was labeled clearly with Galloway’s name. Owens was a meticulous record-keeper. Derek smiled to himself. Anally retentive criminals made his job so much easier.
“Got it,” he told Kevin.
He was about to close the folder and tack it into his backpack when his attention turned to the right pocket of the folder, which contained photos, lists and other information about the blackmail operation. As Derek flipped through the pages, he came to a stunning realization.
He might have solved one problem, but he’d just found five more.
“Holy crap,” he said.
“What?” Kevin said.
“It looks as if Galloway isn’t the only congressman Owens is blackmailing.”
There were photos of several more congressmen, as well as detailed plans for blackmailing each of them. One other congressman shared Galloway’s predisposition toward women’s clothing. Two had been caught cheating on their wives. Two more were victims of setups that only made it look as if they’d been cheating. But real or staged, it didn’t matter. Either one could send a man’s reputation right down the toilet.
“How many are we talking?” Kevin asked.
“Five others besides Galloway.”
