All Of Me

Genres: Contemporary Romance; Police & Law Enforcement Romance; Romantic Suspense

Synopsis

From Book 1

When interpreter Lian Albright takes a job with the FBI, she has no idea how complicated her mission will become. She has come back to the U.S. to find out the truth about Jonas Cole. She never imagined she would find herself falling for him. Whether innocent or guilty of the crimes she suspects him of, when he finds out she took the job with the FBI to get closer to him, there isn't a future for them.

Supervisory Special Agent Jonas Cole is on a mission to find an international gun runner and bring him to justice. Lian has been brought in to help him do just that. He didn't expect to find himself attracted to the lovely interpreter. But he finds himself fascinated by her and wants nothing more than to get closer. Despite her reluctance to become involved with him and the secrets he can see in her eyes, Jonas can't stay away from her.

When betrayal and secrets tear Lian and Jonas apart, duty forces them to complete their mission. Will they be able to get past the hurt and find their way back to each other?

Note from author: “This is the first book in the All Of Me duology, a little over 70,000 words. Please note this is an open-door romance. I hope you enjoy.” – Lizzy Castle.

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Publisher: In The Air Publishing

Content advisory: Open door romance.

Sample

From Book 1

Chapter One

Lian Albright used her bright red mitten to wipe the frost that was forming on the inside of the window of her small coupe before burrowing deeper into her black wool coat.  “So what do you think?”

“I think he’s hot.”  Mindy yawned but kept her eyes on the man down the road heading into his apartment building.

Lian couldn’t help but smile at her counterpart’s comment.  They’d been watching Jonas Cole for the past week.  Most of Mindy’s comments were about Jonas’s appearance, rather than why they were following him.  Lian had to admit he was indeed hot, though she would use the adjectives rugged and handsome to describe him.  And sexy.  Very sexy.  She had his profile and several surveillance photos.  He was six feet even.  His hair was so dark it looked black.  That feature, she knew, he got from his mother.  The height would be his father.  He was an interesting mix of his parents.  He had chiseled cheekbones and a square jaw, though under his five o’clock shadow it was hard to see it in the fading daylight.  That was his father.  His nose and mouth were also from his father.  But his eyes, with just their hint of an almond shape, and the deep, deep brown color, were from his mother.

Lian just hoped that when he was finally confronted, he would have the temperament of his mother.

Mindy made a note on her tablet.  “I have to say, for a guy who looks like that, it’s really sad that his social life is as pathetic as yours is.  It’s just not natural.”

“For him or me?”  Lian took a snap with her surveillance camera.  Mindy had it right.  So far, he had done nothing more exciting than go to work and make a stop at the grocery store.  They hadn’t seen him with anyone that raised red flags.  He commuted alone, he ate lunch alone, on the rare occasions he left his office during the day, and he went home alone.

“Him.  I’ve given up hope for you.”  Mindy tugged her bright blue coat tighter around her neck.  Her bright blonde curls framed her pixie-like face.

Lian had heard this lecture before, so she didn’t ask again.  Mindy was only twenty-six, but she’d done some hard living in those years.  Last year, Mindy had decided she needed to get married and start a family, so she was constantly on the lookout for a suitable candidate.  It seemed Mindy had her eye on the man they were watching, which, as far as Lian was concerned, was a bad idea.  As for Lian, dating was low on her priority list.

Lian zoomed in with the camera she held and took another photo.  She certainly wouldn’t mind breaking her pattern if the man looked like Jonas.  She supposed that made her a bit shallow, but she had found herself immediately attracted to his image the first time she’d pulled up a picture of him on the internet.  In person, he was even better looking.  She had casually walked past him on the sidewalk the day before while he was heading towards his office building, trying to get a better look at him.  On the off chance he remembered her passing him, she had a valid excuse for being near the building.

Startled out of her reverie, Lian set her camera aside.  For a moment she thought Jonas’s eyes had met hers across the distance from where she was parked down the road from his apartment building.  But he went inside without a backward glance.  Lian let out the breath she held.  Tailing an FBI agent could be dangerous work.  She didn’t want to imagine his reaction if he caught them.

Lian pulled the red cap that matched her mittens further down on her head.  It was freezing, and the car was only a few degrees warmer than the air outside.  Her nose was probably pink, and her face was going numb.  She imagined her cheeks and lips were also the same bright pink shade as her nose.  Shivering, she flicked her long French braid behind her back and settled back against the seat.  It was easier to keep her waist-length platinum-blonde hair, several shades lighter than Mindy’s, in a braid when she worked.

Mindy’s quivering voice reflected how cold she was in the quiet of the car.  “I think we can call it a night.  If he sticks to his pattern, he’s going to stay inside until he leaves for work tomorrow.  I say we head back to the hotel.  I need a hot bath to soak the chill from my bones.”

Lian started the car, hoping the heat would kick in quickly.  They had been sitting outside his apartment for the last two hours.  The pair had been tailing him for the past week, but earlier today she had managed to lose him.  He’d taken his car to lunch, but at some point, she had lost him in the busy afternoon traffic, and he had not returned to work.  Lian wished she knew where he’d gone.  Had he met with someone?  Was he involved with his brother, Bo?  Was his brother in the U.S.?  She found herself desperately hoping the answer to her questions was no.

When they arrived back at their hotel, Mindy went straight to her room.  By the time Lian had gone across the street to grab dinner and got back to her room, she had no doubt Mindy was already in the tub and had been for the past twenty minutes.  Shrugging off her coat, Lian sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her laptop from where she had stashed it in the dresser drawer.  She pulled up the file she was keeping on Jonas Cole.

He was forty-one, nine years older than she was.  He was the adopted son of Abby and Henry Cole.  His birth certificate said he had been born in Chicago, though Lian knew that wasn’t the case.  And he had not been born Jonas Cole.  He had been born Jiao Lee in a private hospital in Hong Kong.  He had been given a different name by the state of Illinois when he’d gone into foster care when no documentation on who he was could be found, or how he’d come to the U.S.  The young boy could tell the caseworker his first name, but not his last, nor where he’d come from.  But the boy spoke English and didn’t look Chinese, so the caseworker decided that Jiao became Jonas and gave him a proper American surname to make it all legal.  When he had been adopted, he had legally changed his name to Cole instead of the impersonal name chosen by the overworked caseworker.

Her file on him also told her that he had grown up in a government-run home, one for children who had been deemed unadoptable.  He had run away from that home at age ten.  He had been missing for the next four years, deemed just another statistic.  But he had eventually resurfaced at fourteen and had been adopted two years later.  It had taken the Cole family that long to get the state’s permission to adopt him.  It had not been an easy task, given young Jonas’s social services record had recorded several illegal activities he had been involved in as a child as young as six, hence the reason he hadn’t been adopted.  Prospective families hadn’t wanted to adopt the home’s troublemaker.  The older kids had used him to steal, lie, and do whatever else they could think of.  Lian wished she could say otherwise, but it was not outside her knowledge that children of any age could be used and manipulated, especially when they were desperately seeking acceptance and someone to care for and about them.

Lian kicked off her shoes and climbed under the covers.  She pulled her laptop closer.  It was time to get closer to him.  Time to see if she could uncover his secrets.  Everyone had them, some innocent and some sinister.  Everything in her screamed that he was innocent.  But she’d been wrong before.  And just because he was a lead FBI agent with the counterintelligence division didn’t mean he hadn’t turned against his country, or that his job there wasn’t an elaborate ruse to get him access to some of the government’s most powerful secrets.

It had only taken a small favor to get her assigned to his team.  She was being hired on as a contract linguist.  She would be on the FBI payroll, but not a member of the FBI.  She’d done similar assignments over the years for the FBI, and one memorable assignment with the CIA.  Mostly she worked for American businesses that had relations with businesses in China.  Before that, she’d been an interpreter for hospitals in her youth.

A few years back, she had tried to get a more permanent position with the FBI.  Americans who could fluently speak Mandarin and who knew the culture and local dialects were not easy to find, though competition for actual language analyst positions was tough in the FBI, where jobs were not easy to secure.  She’d applied but had not been offered the job.  Contractor positions were more easily obtained, as this one had been.  Getting on Jonas Cole’s team had been a bit trickier.

Her phone beeped, and she grabbed it off the nightstand.  Her phone was as secure as it could be, but she still felt uncomfortable.  She responded to the cryptic message with one of her own.  She was operating without government sanction, and she felt like she was doing a trapeze act without a net.  But she had made a promise, and she intended to keep it.

 

*  *  *

 

Jonas Cole watched impatiently as the recruits settled in.  Though he had mostly settled into his new job as a supervisory special agent of a counterintelligence unit, he still got itchy feet when he had to deal with newbies.  On top of that, he was used to seeing a bit more action.  Counterintelligence was mostly done with computers these days.  He had some skill in that area, but he was by no means a hacker.  The twenty-two-year-old kid sitting at the station across from him, with pimples still decorating his skin, likely had more skills than he did.

His superiors wanted him in this role because of the many years he spent in the field and the instincts he’d honed over the years.  Whether listening to a conversation through an amplifier across the street from his quarry or listening to him from thousands of miles away, the results were the same.  His former boss called him a human lie detector.  And with the injury he’d sustained two years ago, his superiors had pulled him out of the field and promoted him.  Not that Jonas could blame them.  But at only thirty-nine, Jonas had not been ready for a desk job.  But at forty-one, that was where he now found himself, and he still hadn’t completely adjusted.

The people assigned to his new project were an interesting lot.  His superiors hadn’t deemed his current quarry as significantly dangerous or important enough to get a full team working on the case.  Jonas had a feeling about their quarry, so his boss had allowed him to gather a small but inexperienced team.  His superiors had learned to trust his instincts, but budgets were tight and resources were hard to get.

The kid was a student; one was a lower-level agent hoping to get promoted and gain experience in counterintelligence, and one was simply a contractor on a short-term assignment.  He potentially had a Chinese arms dealer supplying weapons to gangs and other assorted riffraff.  The man had started with supplying gangs but was now upping the ante.  Jonas was worried he was supplying munitions to potential terrorists, but he didn’t have much proof; the man was not yet a great interest to the FBI, so he hadn’t gotten seasoned agents assigned to the case.  He also had hours of audio that needed to be interpreted, and miles of financial documents in Chinese to run through the computer system to decode if Jonas was to find out where he was operating.

He pulled the files of the team members up on his tablet as they patiently waited for him to get started.  He pulled up the kid first.  He was twenty-two, maybe a hundred thirty pounds, six foot two, and so skinny he looked like a good breeze would blow him over.  His sandy blond hair was ruthlessly combed back, probably in an attempt to tame the curls that were popping up all over his head.  He wore a tan blazer, a white button-up shirt, and navy slacks.  Jonas thought of it as the uniform of students.  He’d seen a few of them in his day.

Jonas took a step in front of the kid.  “Donaldson, Andrew.  Says here you’re an accounting and finance student.  Just one month shy of graduating with your master’s.  Passed all of the tests with high scores.  Very impressive for a man your age.”

“Thank you, sir.  I was honored to have been chosen for the Honors Internship Program.  I’m looking forward to helping in any way I can.”

Jonas nodded and went to the next.  He didn’t know the agent personally, but the man had come recommended.  He wore the uniform of an FBI agent.  The black slacks, black jacket, and plain blue shirt wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.  His dark brown hair was cut short.  He was just shy of six feet, probably a hundred seventy pounds, fit and muscular.

Jonas took a step so he stood directly before the man.  “Special Agent Rhodes, Matthew.  Says you came from our Forensic Accounting division.  Why counterintelligence?”

Agent Rhodes got to his feet.  “I passed all the necessary exams and want to move into counterintelligence.  I think my skills can be applied to this job, sir.”

Jonas nodded at the vague answer.  The man was sweating bullets and looked so nervous Jonas didn’t have the heart to press him.  He then took a step over to look at the striking blonde watching him with a smile on her face.  Her bright blue eyes held his.

This one wasn’t so easy to assess.  She wore a wool skirt that skimmed her knees, black tights in deference to the cold outside, knee-high brown leather boots, and a sweater that accentuated her small waist and high breasts.  She had her almost waist-length hair pulled back in an elaborate braid.  She wore minimal makeup but knew how to enhance her natural beauty.  Her file said she was five foot six, but the boots would add some height, as he was sure was her intention.  She weighed around one-twenty and appeared to be fit.

Eyes on hers, he spoke.  “Albright, Lian.  Contract linguist.  And what brings you to this assignment?”

“I speak fluent Mandarin and Cantonese, and I need money.”  Lian kept her tone bored, as she wanted to project the guise of just another linguist looking for work.

What she didn’t want was for him to get too curious about her and start digging into her past.  Her file with the FBI was slim.  She had the necessary requirements to work as a contractor, and as far as the FBI was concerned, that’s all there was to her.  The time she spent with the CIA was classified and not mentioned in her FBI file.  And the time she’d spent in China this past year was also classified.  Her counterfeit records showed her working at a university in Maryland during that time, but for a man in counterintelligence, it wouldn’t be hard to rip that cover story to shreds.

Jonas studied her face.  Her accent, which spoke of her years spent in China, was incongruent in the face of a woman of obvious European descent.  The face itself was not stunning.  Her mouth was a little too big, as were her eyes.  But the sparkle in her eyes and her low, sexy voice were enough to get his attention.  Her almost white hair was braided down her back in an intricate weave.  Her features were distinctive, as was that hair.  Something about her was nagging at him.  He thought he had seen her somewhere before, but her file said she was new to the Virginia area, and he didn’t recognize her name.

“That’s honest enough.  All three of you have been assigned to help track down a man simply known as Kang.  He’s anywhere between thirty and forty years old.  He used to operate out of Hong Kong but has made his way to the U.S.  His last known address was a mansion in Beverly Hills.  He likes to make money, and he likes to spend it.  We’re hoping to track him through his finances.  Ms. Albright, you’re assigned to sift through the statements and use the system to translate the most important ones first.  Your next task will be to listen to some recordings and interpret those.”

“What about us, sir?”  Agent Rhodes interrupted.

Jonas gritted his teeth.  “We have some of his records from American and Swiss bank accounts, along with some of his Chinese account records translated for you to start with.  You’ll get the rest after Ms. Albright processes them.”

“Yes, sir.”  Rhodes fell silent once again.

Lian watched as the other two team members turned in their chairs and got to work on the files in front of them.  The assignment was easy enough, for which she was grateful.  It would be hard to deliver good work on a difficult assignment while keeping her eyes and ears on Jonas.

“Is there a problem, Ms. Albright?”  Jonas took a seat at the station next to her.

“No.  I like to get a feel first.  Would you mind answering some questions?”  Lian gave Jonas her most professional smile.

“Depends.  You have clearance, but some things are beyond your clearance level.”  Jonas scooted closer in his chair and tapped a few keys to bring up her screens.

“Just tell me no if I get past my level.  What is your interest in this guy?  I would think running guns to gangs would be more at the local level in Los Angeles.”

“It might if he weren’t smuggling those weapons in from Hong Kong.  And if he weren’t selling those guns all over the country.  I have reason to suspect that he has ties to some notorious triads.”

Lian nodded.  “Organized?”

“Highly.”

Lian nodded again.  There were generally two types of triads.  Some were loosely organized, mostly operating as small groups but without much power.  The other type was highly organized.  They controlled most of the crime in local markets and often had police protection, though not legally.

“Our guy Kang likes to think of himself as part of a secret society, like in the early days of the Chinese triads in the eighteenth century.  Rumors are that he spent a fortune when he arrived in the U.S. decorating his home with ancient Chinese art and antiquities.  I have a feeling he ticked off the wrong people and fled Hong Kong, leaving his possessions behind.  He’s found himself quite a lucrative business here in the West.”  Jonas tapped a few keys and pulled up some files.

Lian grabbed the mouse and enlarged some of the files.  “So you have a low-level ex-triad member living the American dream.”

“That about sums it up.  Local authorities haven’t been able to pin anything on him.  There were also a couple of homicides I’m sure he had a hand in.  I’m hoping some of the recordings might reveal either his involvement or those who were.  The homicides crossed state lines, but I haven’t played the federal jurisdiction card yet.  The two local police captains have been keeping me apprised of their progress.”

“Which I’m guessing isn’t much.”  Lian pulled up the file with a picture of Kang.  It was grainy, and unfortunately, it wasn’t good enough for accurate identification.  All it gave was an impression of hair color, which was dark brown given his Chinese heritage, and an idea of how tall.  She took a closer look and saw a ring on the man’s hand.  The close-up of the ring was fuzzy but identifiable.

“I haven’t had a chance yet to identify the symbol on his ring.  That’s another thing I need you for.”  Jonas saw where her attention had drifted.

“It implies he is an enforcer for the triad he is a part of.  Puts him one step above your general triad members, but not so far up he’s in line to be the next dragon head.”

“Dragon head?”  Jonas looked closer at the ring.

“Leader.  I take it you don’t speak or read Chinese.”

“No.  The cases I worked on in the major crime unit were domestic.  The work I’ve done so far in counterintelligence has also been domestic.  Kang’s name kept popping up on a case I was working on.”

Lian opened a browser and did a rudimentary search.  “This is the symbol on his ring.  It’s simply Chinese for ‘red pole’ or, in English, enforcer.  Our guy is very literal and probably likes people to know he is not to be reckoned with.  He would have been one of many, but he was probably the most ambitious of the group.”

Jonas was impressed.  “Is this your first assignment with the FBI?”

Figuring the truth was her best bet, since she was sure he’d read and memorized her file, she shook her head.  “No.  I’ve worked a few cases with the FBI over the years.  It pays well, and I get to do my duty as an American.”

“But you weren’t born here.”  Jonas had read the files on all three.  Lian had been born in China.  Beijing to be specific.

“You read my file, so you know I was born in Beijing.  My parents were missionaries.  It was only sheer luck that had my parents in Beijing when I was born.  They were on the verge of being deported and were working on renewing their paperwork to stay in China.  They were also meeting with friends.  I came early, or I would have been born in the village where I spent most of my childhood.”

Jonas scooted back to his desk.  He had an unprecedented urge to touch.  Normally when he worked, he was all business.  Something about Ms. Lian Albright had his fingers itching.  He got back to business.  “Any more questions?”

“No.  Knowing his level in the triad might help.  He’s most likely working with someone his level back in Hong Kong, or with someone higher up trying to get even higher.  I think you’ll learn a lot once Andrew and Agent Rhodes start tracing his money.”

“Focus on that then.  And when you get cross-eyed running the software program to translate them, the recordings are already in a file on your desktop.”  Jonas rose and walked to the center of the room.

The trio turned and looked at him.  Donaldson looked excited. Agent Rhodes was poorly concealing his.  And Lian Albright looked at him with big blue eyes that held secrets.