Behind Closed Doors

Book 1: The McClouds & Friends

by Shannon McKenna

Genres: General Fiction; Romance; Suspense

Synopsis

Surveillance expert Seth Mackey knows everything about the women that his millionaire boss toys with-and tosses aside. Raine Cameron is something different. Night after night, Seth watches her on a dozen different video screens. Raine is pure temptation, but Seth has something more important to take care of first.




Seth is convinced that his boss, Victor Lazar, is responsible for his half-brother's murder. He cannot put his secret investigation at risk, but he can't stop wanting her-craving her-and soon he knows he can't let Victor have her. For Raine may be Victor's next victim...




Raine knows she's being watched-but no one can see the secrets in her heart. She has reasons of her own to seek revenge on Victor Lazar, and she will, despite her fear-and the distracting presence of Seth Mackey. Though Raine has little experience with men, she offers her body to him, surrendering totally to his ruthless desire might well push her beyond all emotional limits-and beyond fear itself.

Release date: May 3, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 448

Sample

Nine forty-six P.M. Almost time.

The monitor glowed an eerie blue in the darkened room, but the mosaic of windows on the screen remained stubbornly dark. Seth Mackey glanced at his watch and drummed his fingers against the desktop. Her schedule never varied. She should be home any minute.

There were more important things for him to do. He had hundreds of hours of audio and video to filter, and even with Kearn’s jazzed-up digital signal processor filters, it still took time to run the analyses. He should at least be watching the beacon displays, or checking the other surveillance sites. Anything but this.

Still he stared at the screen, trying to rationalize away the buzz of hot excitement in his body. The hundreds of hours of digital video footage that he had on file for her wouldn’t do the trick. He needed her live, in real time.

Like a junkie needed his fix.

He spat out a curse at the passing thought, negating it. He didn’t need anything, not anymore. Since Jesse’s death, he’d reinvented himself. He was as cool and detached as a cyborg. His heart rate did not vary, his palms did not sweat. His goal was sharp and clear. It shone in the darkness of his interior landscape, as brilliant as a guiding star. The plan to destroy Victor Lazar and Kurt Novak was the first thing that had aroused Seth’s interest in the ten months since they had murdered his brother Jesse. It had rendered him a miracle of single-minded concentration—until three weeks ago.

The woman who was about to walk into the rooms monitored by the screen in front of him was the second thing.

The light and motion activated camera monitoring her garage flicked to life. He tried to ignore the way his heart rate spiked, and glanced at his watch. 9:51. She’d been at the office since 7 A.M. He had watched her on the cameras he had planted at the Lazar Import & Export corporate office, too, of course, but it wasn’t the same. He liked having her all to himself.

The car pulled in, the headlights went out. She sat slumped in the car for so long that the camera switched itself off and the window went dark. He cursed through his teeth and made a mental note to himself to reprogram the default from three minutes to ten as he typed in the command that activated the infrared mode. Her image reappeared, a glowing, unearthly green. She sat there for two more minutes staring blankly into the dark garage before she finally got out.

The second two cameras snapped on dutifully as she unlocked the door and headed for the kitchen. She ran herself a glass of water, took off the horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed her eyes, clutching the sink for balance. She tilted back her head to drink, exposing her slender, soft looking white throat.

She must be trying to toughen up her look with the glasses. She’d failed, in a big way. The camera he had hidden in the stove clock framed her pale face, her stubborn jaw, the shadows under her eyes.

He zoomed in on her eyes. The straight, winging brows and curling lashes were dramatically dark against her pale skin. He would have taken her for a bleached blonde if he didn’t have damn good reason to know that her blond curls were absolutely for real. She closed her eyes. The sweep of her lashes was shadowy against the delicate curve of her cheekbones. Her mascara was smudged. She looked exhausted.

Being Lazar’s new sex toy must be more strenuous than she had bargained for. He wondered how she’d gotten embroiled with him. Whether she was in too deep to ever get out. Most people who got involved with Lazar soon found they were in over their heads. By then, of course, it was too late.

There was no objective reason for him to continue to monitor her. Hacking into her personnel file had revealed that Lazar Import & Export had hired her a month ago as an executive assistant. Had it not been for the fact that she was living in Lazar’s ex-mistress’s house she might never have come to his attention at all. Lazar’s visits to that house had warranted surveillance, and they had been watching it for months.

But Lazar didn’t visit the blonde, or at least he hadn’t yet. She came straight home from the office every night, stopping only to get groceries or pick up her dry cleaning. The transponder he had planted in her car confirmed that she never varied her route. Weekly phone calls to her mother revealed only that the woman had no clue about her daughter’s latest career move, which was perfectly understandable. A young woman kept for pleasure by a filthy rich criminal might well choose to hide the knowledge from her family. She knew no one in Seattle, went nowhere, had no social life that he could discern.

Kind of like himself.

Her big, haunted eyes were silver gray, the irises ringed with indigo. He studied the magnified image, disquieted. She looked…God, sweet was the word that came to mind, even though it made him wince. He had never before felt any moral qualms about spying on people. When he was a kid reading comic books, he’d picked out his superhero mutation of choice right away. X-ray eyes won, hands down. It was the perfect mutation for a paranoid guy like him. Knowledge was power, and power was good. He’d built a lucrative career on that philosophy. Jesse used to tease him about it.

He shoved that thought away fast, before it could bite him.

He had to stay cool and detached. Cyborg man. It was a name for a comic book superhero. He’d always liked those mutant guys in the classic comic books. They were all tormented, depressed and alienated. He could relate to that.

He’d watched Montserrat, Lazar’s former mistress, with ice-cold detachment. Watching her writhe in bed with Lazar had left him unmoved, even a little repulsed. Never once had he felt guilty.

But then again, Montserrat was a professional. He could read it in her sinuous, calculated body language. She wore a mask all the time, when she was fucking Lazar, even when she was alone.

The blonde had no mask at all. She was wide open and defenseless and soft, like whipped cream, like butter, like silk.

It made him feel sleazy for watching her, an emotion so unfamiliar that it had taken him days to put a name to it. The hell of it was, the sleazier he felt, the more impossible it was to stop. He wished he could shake off the nagging sense that she needed to be rescued. He wasn’t the white knight type to begin with, and besides, he had Jesse to avenge. That was enough responsibility.

And he wished she weren’t so fucking beautiful. It was disturbing.

A shrink could probably explain his fixation: he was projecting deprived childhood fantasies onto her because she looked like a fairy-tale princess. He’d read too many comic books as a kid. He was stressed, depressed, obsessed, had an altered perception of reality, blah, blah, blah. Then that woman’s stunning body had altered reality beyond recognition. It had shocked his numbed libido violently to life.

She drifted wearily into the range of the color-cam nestled inside the carved ebony filigree of a hanging lamp in the bedroom. The lamp had been left behind by Montserrat, who had departed so abruptly that she hadn’t even taken the time to pack the personal items that she had contributed to the house’s décor. The blonde had brought nothing of her own to the house, and had shown no interest in moving the pieces already in place, which was good. The lamp color-cam commanded an excellent view of the mirror on the armoire, a detail for which he had reason to be grateful. He enlarged the image until it filled the whole screen, ignoring a slight pang of guilt. This was his favorite part, and he wasn’t missing it for anything.

She removed her jacket, clipped the skirt to the hanger. With the awe-inspiring resolution of the latest generation of Colbit color-cams, he could differentiate every gradation of the color of her perfect skin, from cream to pink to rose to crimson. More than worth the extra bandwidth the signal occupied. She hung up the suit, and the tail of her blouse hiked up to reveal prim cotton briefs stretched tightly across the swell of her rounded ass. He knew her routine like it was the opening credits of an old television show, and still he hung on every detail. Her unself-consciousness fascinated him. Most of the good-looking women he knew played constantly to an imaginary camera. They checked every reflective surface they passed to make sure they were still beautiful. This dreamy-eyed girl didn’t seem to particularly notice, or care.

She peeled off her hose, flung them into the corner, and started her clumsy, innocent nightly striptease. She fumbled with her cuffs until he wanted to scream at her to get the fuck on with it. Then she fussed and picked at the buttons at the throat of the high-collared blouse, gazing into the mirror as if she saw another world entirely.

His breath hissed in between his teeth when she finally shrugged off the blouse. Her plump breasts were sternly restrained by a white underwire bra. It was not a sexy, rich-man’s-plaything scrap of lingerie. It had plain, wide straps, was practical and unadorned—and the faint hint of cleavage it revealed was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

She sniffed delicately at the armpits of the blouse, which brought a grim smile to his face. It was hard to imagine that graceful, marble-white body actually sweating, though he bet he could drive her to it. She would break a sweat once she were spread out naked beneath his pounding body, her hips jerking eagerly up to meet his thrusts. Or astride him, those big, soft tits bouncing, filling his hands as he drove into her from below. He would make that ivory skin flush wild-rose pink, until tangled curls clung to her cheek, her throat. He would make her soaking wet. Every hot, sweet, slippery inch of her.

He rearranged his throbbing private parts inside his jeans and dragged his hand over his hot face with a groan. He had no business getting anything more than a purely casual, incidental hard-on for one of Lazar’s toys. It was deadly stupid, and it had to stop.

Except that now it was time for the hair. God, he loved that part.

She tossed pin after pin into the china tray on the dresser, and uncoiled the thick blond braid from the bun at the nape of her neck. She unraveled the strands, shaking them loose until they rippled past the small of her back, tapering down to gleaming wisps that brushed tenderly against the round curve of her ass. His breath sighed out in a low, audible groan as she reached behind herself and unhooked the bra. His hands tingled as he stared at her plump, luscious breasts, crowned with pale pink nipples. He imagined them taut, flushed and hard against his fingers, the palms of his hands, his feverish face, his hungry, suckling mouth.

His heart began to pound as she peeled off the panties, rolling her shoulders, her neck, arching her back, enjoying the sensual freedom of being naked and alone. Unmasked. Whipped cream and butter and silk.

The downy puff of springy blond curls at her crotch didn’t quite hide the shadowy cleft between her shapely thighs. He wanted to press his face against those ringlets, inhale her warm, woman scent, and then taste her, parting the tender pink folds of her cunt, licking and suckling until she collapsed in pleasure. Video and audio were not enough. He needed more data. Textures, smells, tastes. He was starving for it.

And then, the gesture that always undid him. She bent from the waist and flung her hair over her head, arching her back and running her fingers through the wavy mass. The placement of the camera and the mirror guaranteed him a spectacular view of her soft, rounded thighs, the creamy globes of her ass, the enticing divide between them.

The sight was enough to wake the dead.

Jesse. The stab of pain blindsided him.

He turned away from the monitor and forced himself to breathe over the burning ache. Don’t cave in, he reminded himself. He couldn’t let grief dull his edge. On the contrary, he would use it to sharpen his resolve. To turn him into a single-minded, utterly dedicated instrument of ruin. He averted his eyes, punishing himself by missing the rest of the stretch show. He’d gotten very skilled at shoving away painful thoughts and memories before they could dig in their fangs, but the blonde blew his focus all to hell. He forced himself to run over his reason for existence: to watch that treacherous bastard Lazar until he made contact with Novak. And then, open season. Payback time.

By the time he permitted himself to look back at the screen, the blonde had clothed herself in a baggy fleece sweat suit, and was logging onto her computer. He scooted over to another bank of computers and monitors, activating the hidden antenna he had planted to pick up her computer’s EM frequency noise. He ran it through the DPS hardware that deciphered and reconstructed what was on her screen, and monitored her message. It was to a Juan Carlos in Barcelona. She sent messages in half a dozen different languages, but this one was in Spanish, which he understood from growing up in the ghettos of L.A. It was innocuous enough: how are you, I’m working really hard, how’s Marcela and Franco’s baby, did the job interview in Madrid go well, et cetera. She sounded lonely. He wondered who Juan Carlos was to her. Maybe an ex-lover. She seemed to write to him a lot.

He was toying with the idea of doing a background check on the guy when a cool draft whispered across his neck. He snatched the SIG Sauer P228 that lay on the desk and spun around.

It was Connor McCloud, co-conspirator and all-around pain in the ass, who had been Jesse’s best buddy and partner in the undercover FBI task force that Jesse had dubbed “the Cave.” No wonder the alarm hadn’t tripped. He’d bypassed it, the sneaky son-of-a-bitch. The guy moved like a ghost, despite his limp and his cane.

Seth lay the gun down, breath escaping slowly from his lungs. “Don’t sneak up on me, McCloud. It could get you killed.”

Connor’s sharp green eyes swept the room, taking in every detail. “Hey, man. Stay casual. I brought you some coffee, but I’m thinking now that maybe you shouldn’t drink it.”

Seth saw the dingy room through Connor’s eyes for a moment, the clutter of beer bottles and take-out containers scattered across dusty snarls of cables and electronic equipment. The apartment was getting more squalid by the day, and it wasn’t smelling too good, either.

But what the fuck did he care? It was just a parking spot. He grabbed the coffee, popped the lid and took a gulp.

“You’re welcome,” Connor murmured wryly. “Next time I’ll bring chamomile tea. And a Xanax.”

“Are you sure nobody followed you here?” Seth demanded.

Connor sat down and peered into the monitor, not deigning to reply to that. “Well, if it isn’t Barbie’s dream house,” he commented. “How much you want to bet she’s a natural blonde?”

“Mind your own goddamn business,” Seth snapped.

Connor’s lean face settled in grim lines. “Nobody at the Cave knows about you, Mackey. Nobody will. And your business is my business.”

Seth could think of no response to that statement that was not offensive. He kept his mouth shut and waited, hoping that the other man would get uncomfortable or bored enough to leave.

No such luck. Seconds ticked by. They turned into minutes. Connor McCloud gazed at him and waited patiently.

Seth sighed and gave in. “Was there something that you wanted?” he asked grudgingly.

Connor lifted an eyebrow. “Been a while since you contacted me. Just wondering what you’re up to. Besides jerking off while you watch Lazar’s new concubine, that is.”

“Keep the smart-ass remarks to yourself, McCloud.” Seth stabbed the print button and waited for the printer to spit out the Juan Carlos e-mail. He reached for the file, but Connor snatched it off the desk.

“Let me have a look. Lorraine Cameron, American citizen, degree from Cornell, summa cum laude, woo woo, smart cookie. Fluent in six languages, yada yada, appears to have lied about her professional experience on her job application. Hmm. Maybe Lazar didn’t care once she showed him her tits. How are her tits, by the way?”

“Fuck off,” Seth snarled.

“Lighten up,” Connor replied. “You know, when this babe first showed up, I thought maybe it was good for you to have something to think about besides Jesse. But it’s out of hand. You’re obsessed.”

“Spare me the pop psych bullshit, please.”

“You’re a bomb set to blow. Not that I care, but I don’t want you to take me and my brothers with you.” Connor shoved back his shaggy dark blond hair and rubbed his forehead, looking weary. “You’re wound too tight, Mackey. I’ve seen it happen. A guy gets that look you’ve got on your face, then he fucks up, then he dies badly.”

Seth schooled his face back to an indifferent mask. “Don’t worry,” he said, through set teeth. “I swear I’ll keep it together until we flush Novak out of his hole. After that, whatever. Lock me in a padded cell if you want. I will no longer give a shit.”

Connor looked pained. “That’s a very, very bad attitude, Mackey.”

“I’ve had a bad attitude since the day I was born.” Seth wrenched the blonde’s file out of Connor’s hand and shoved the Juan Carlos e-mail into it. “Don’t take it personally. And don’t step on my toes.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” Connor said. “You need me, and you know it. I have the contacts you need to make this work.”

Seth glared into Connor’s cold, narrowed eyes. He wanted to deny it, but it was true. Seth had the tech know-how and the money to launch their private campaign against Lazar and Novak, but Connor’s years in various law enforcement agencies had garnered him a formidable local network of informants. Problem was, Connor and he were both bossy, arrogant and accustomed to command; both by nature and by profession. It made for an uneasy partnership.

“Speaking of contacts, I was down at the Cave today,” Connor said. “I played up my limp. Made like I don’t know what to do with myself on disability leave. Nobody has the heart to tell me I’m underfoot except for Riggs. He told me to go get my ass to a tropical beach, drink some mai tais. Watch the bunfloss bikinis walk by. Get laid, if I can.”

“Did you tell him to fuck off?”

“Nah,” Connor said mildly. “I’m not as casual as you are about burning my bridges. Not until I get this thing sorted out.”

Riggs. Seth sorted through his memories of Jesse’s memorial service. He’d lurked in the back with a miniature video camera hidden in his coat, filming the faces of Jesse’s colleagues and speculating upon which one was the bastard that had sold his brother out. He remembered a thickset, balding man who had read some vapid thing that would have made Jesse puke laughing. “Was Riggs the potbelly and glasses who made the stupid-ass speech at Jesse’s service?”

“I was in a coma at the time, but the stupid-ass speech has got to be Riggs,” Connor replied, pulling a bag of tobacco out of his pocket. “You got any more of those warehouse raids planned?” He fished for his rolling papers, his casual tone belied by the hopeful gleam in his eyes.

Seth snorted. “You McCloud boys really get off on that, huh?”

“It’s a blast,” Connor admitted. “Better than sex, messing with Victor Lazar’s head. Maybe I missed my calling. A life of crime has its charms. God, what a rush.”

Seth shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint you, but that phase of the operation is over.”

Connor’s eyes narrowed. “Lazar’s taken the bait?”

“Yes.” Seth did not elaborate.

Connor waited. Seconds ticked by. “And?” His voice was steely.

“I’m going to Lazar’s corporate headquarters tomorrow morning,” Seth admitted. “He’s invited me to explain to him why Mackey Security Systems Design is the solution to all his problems. The cover story to his staff is that I’m here to design a radio frequency GPS inventory tracking system, so tomorrow’s meeting is just theater. Then the day after tomorrow, Lazar and I are meeting privately out at the warehouses to discuss the details of a full-out TSCM sweep.”

“Ah.” Connor’s eyes narrowed. “TSCM. Don’t tell me, let me guess. That stands for…technical surveillance…”

“Technical surveillance countermeasures,” Seth finished impatiently. “Debugging.”

Connor pulled out a pinch of tobacco, his face expressionless. “Wow. One hell of a stroke of luck, that he called you, hmm?”

“Not luck,” Seth said. “It’s called planning. Lots of people in the field owe me favors. I made sure he would hear about me and my firm when he started looking around to solve his security leak problem.”

“I see.” Connor stared down at the snarl of tobacco nestled in the fold of the rolling paper. “And just when would you have gotten around to mentioning this development to me?” His voice was soft and cold.

“As soon as you needed to know,” Seth countered smoothly. “You aren’t planning on smoking that in here, of course.”

Connor finished the cigarette with a deft twist of his fingers, and scowled at it. “It’s raining outside.”

“Tough,” Seth said.

Connor sighed, and stuck the cigarette into the pocket of his coat. “You blame me for Jesse’s death, don’t you?”

The brutal facts behind Jesse’s death lay between them, heavy and cold. Someone at the Cave had tipped off Lazar to the investigation and blown Jesse’s cover. Seth meant to find that person and rip him limb from limb. But that person was not Connor, who had been Jesse’s best friend as well as his partner. Connor had almost died in that disastrous fuck-up. He would carry the scars for the rest of his life.

“I don’t blame you,” Seth said, feeling suddenly weary. “I don’t want to make the mistake Jesse made.”

“Which was?”

Seth shook his head. “Letting too many people know his business. Ever since he was a little kid. I never could break him of it.”

Connor was silent for a long moment, his face somber. “You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

Seth shrugged. “I trusted Jesse,” he said simply.

They watched the blonde wander into her kitchen and stare blankly at her freezer for a minute, as if she’d utterly forgotten what she had planned to do. She shook herself out of her daze, took out a frozen dinner and stuck it into the oven.

“We’ll find the mole, Seth,” Connor said finally.

Seth swung around in his chair. “He’s mine.”

Connor’s eyes were as full of ghosts as Seth’s own. “Take a number and get in line, man,” he said softly. “You’re not the only one who cared about Jesse.”

Seth broke eye contact. He had plans for that traitor and for Novak and Lazar as well, plans that had nothing to do with due process of law. Which was why he didn’t concern himself overmuch with the legality of his investigation, or rather, the total lack thereof. Once he got his hands on Novak, he needed no help from anyone in bringing him to justice. Same with Lazar. But that was nobody’s business but his.

A grin dawned on Connor’s face. “Check it out. The concubine’s doing her exercise routine. Whoa. The guy has good taste in babes. This one’s even hotter than Montserrat.”

Seth looked back at the screen with elaborate nonchalance.

She was sitting on the carpet, legs spread impossibly wide, slim back straight. She flung her hair back and bent from the waist until her chest touched the ground, as graceful and flexible as a dancer.

“I don’t think she’s fucking him,” he said suddenly.

Connor gave him a dubious look. “How do you figure?”

He shrugged, regretting the impulsive comment. With Connor’s keen, thoughtful gaze fixed on him, it sounded stupid and improbable. “She never goes anywhere. She sleeps here every night. Goes straight to the office and home and back again. And he’s never visited her here.”

Connor shrugged. “He’s a busy guy. Maybe he bangs her in his office on his desk.”

“He hasn’t,” Seth countered. “I’ve covered his office. I’ve processed that tape. She’s never been inside his personal office.”

“Oh, really?” Connor’s eyes gleamed with quiet amusement. “That interested, are we?”

“I’m interested in everything that has to do with Lazar.” He bit the words out, cold and clear.

“Praiseworthy of you,” Connor remarked. “One thing’s for sure, though. If he booted Montserrat for her, she must be damn good with her mouth. Give me a call if she blows him. I’ll log on for that episode.”

Seth grabbed the mouse and clicked the window shut. The blonde disappeared, replaced by a little icon in the shape of a pair of glasses.

Connor shook his head in disgust. He fished the cigarette out of his pocket, lit it and took a deep, defiant drag. “Fine,” he said coldly. “She’s all yours, Mackey. Looks like your fantasy life is pretty much all you’ve got, so I’ll leave you to it.”

“You do that.” Seth spun around as soon as the door slammed shut and called the image back.

She was curving her spine with catlike grace, hair tumbling voluptuously over her face. Then she reversed the process in a rippling movement until her back was arched, ass raised. Curve, arch. Curve, arch, in a slow, pulsing rhythm that made him dizzy and feverish.

God, he was glad that Lazar hadn’t visited her. Watching that rapacious bastard grunting and sweating on top of his dreamy, soft-eyed blonde would not be pleasant. In fact, it would ruin his whole day.

He cursed into the screen, helpless to look away. Watching her made him feel alive again and he’d gotten strung out on the feeling, in spite of the fact that it threw off his precarious balance, leaving him wide open to spasms of pain he thought he’d learned to control. In spite of the fact that he betrayed Jesse every moment he spent staring at her.

Less than three weeks ago, his first waking thought every day had been on how to destroy Lazar and Novak. The risk hadn’t bothered him. He just felt like an empty husk anyhow. Nothing inside him but an endless, burning thirst for revenge. With Hank gone five years now, and Jesse gone, too, there was no one left to mourn him. Or need him. It wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, if they took him out with them in a blaze of glory, chapter closed, big sigh of relief from all concerned.

But since the blonde showed up, he had realized that there actually were a couple more things he wouldn’t mind doing before leaving this earthly plane. Like find out if she really was any good with that full, sexy mouth of hers, for instance.

The fantasy took him by storm: her naked on her knees in front of him, his hands buried in her hair, guiding her as his swollen cock slid in and out of her lush, pink, bee-stung lips. God, that would be sweet.

Now she was doing a back bend, her body taut like an arched bow and quivering with effort, her hair coiled under her head in a luminous pool. Her sweatshirt had slid up, snagging on her breasts and exposing the soft curve of her belly. It looked velvety and vulnerable, softened by barely perceptible white-blond fuzz. He wanted to nuzzle it, rub his cheek against that smooth, fragrant warmth, memorize the scent of her lotion and soap. And tomorrow he was going to Lazar’s corporate office. Tomorrow he would find out exactly what she smelled like.

The blast of excitement that accompanied that thought ratcheted him up another notch toward total sexual overload. He slammed his hand down against the desk. Pain jolted up his arm. The keyboard jumped. Empty beer bottles toppled and thudded onto the dirty gray carpet that covered the floor.

Calm down, he told himself. Concentrate. Tomorrow was all about luring Lazar deeper into the web that he had spent so many long, patient months spinning for him. Tonight was all about preparing for tomorrow. And right now, he was going to click that tantalizing blonde out of existence and get to work processing the latest data retrieved from the gulper mikes. It was going to take most of the night to filter all of it, and it was time he got started. Right now. This minute.

He tried, but his finger wouldn’t push the button on the mouse.

The series of exercises was long and slow, but he never got bored.

Images from this morning’s dream shimmered in Raine’s mind as she maneuvered through early morning traffic. The dream images seemed far more vivid and substantial than the drab, lonely half-life she was living here in Seattle. She was good at analyzing dreams—God knows she’d had plenty of practice—but ponder as she might, she couldn’t come up with a plausible meaning for this one.

She was tiny, swimming in a glass aquarium. Light rippled across the fake colored rocks that covered the floor. She swam slowly through little sprays of coral, over a miniature plastic castle and a sunken pirate ship. She was naked, and terribly conscious of her nakedness. She tried to wrap her long hair around herself, but it just kept floating back up around her face in a pale, swirling cloud. A black pirate flag waved languidly in the water. The skull and crossbones insignia on it was the last image she brought to waking consciousness as the alarm dragged her awake at 5:30 A.M. Just as the blaring horn of a Ford Explorer behind her jolted her into awareness that the light was green. She had to stay in the waking world and concentrate on the rain-slicked street in front of her.

She’d been having this dream often, as long as she had been staying in the house that Lazar Import & Export had assigned to her. Staying, as opposed to living, because she couldn’t get comfortable there, despite the fact that it was a beautiful place, already furnished and far too luxurious for a lowly executive assistant. It made her nervous. She had enough problems without feeling ill at ease in her own living space. She meant to look for an apartment of her own as soon as she had a second to breathe, and to hell with the extra expense.

Dreaming of herself as naked, trapped and helpless was not confidence-inspiring. She wished that she could dream of herself as something bold and fearless for a change. A pirate queen, brandishing a cutlass and yelling out her battle cry. But she shouldn’t complain. The aquarium dream was a hell of a lot less stressful than the bleeding tombstone dream. It didn’t leave her gasping for air, hollow-eyed with terror, aching with grief for her lost father.

Still, the skull and crossbones bothered her. There was always an image of death in her recurrent dreams. Lucky girl, she thought, with grim amusement. Way to start the day off right, with a dripping dagger, a nest of snakes, or a mushroom cloud. That daily squirt of screaming adrenaline into the bloodstream was better than coffee.

Her stomach fluttered as she pulled into the underground garage of the building that housed the corporate offices. Jeremy, the flirtatious parking attendant, gave her a wink and a wave, and she barely managed a wan smile in return. She’d gotten her job at Lazar Import & Export under false pretenses, and every day the price she paid for that deceit got higher. She’d researched the huge, diversified company exhaustively, tailoring her résumé to fit them, fabricating an employment history that she thought would appeal to them. She’d soothed her qualms by telling herself that she was justified, that it was for a noble cause. Still, Raine had never been good at lying. It made her stomach hurt. Breakfast would help, but there was no time, not even to grab a pastry.

God knows, Lazar Import & Export would be a stressful place to work even if she weren’t lying through her teeth every day. It was the most vicious, spiteful, back-biting workplace she’d ever experienced. There wasn’t a chance in hell of making friends with her co-workers. She stared critically at her reflection in the cloudy mirrored walls of the elevator. She’d lost weight. Her skirt was riding too low over her hips. But who had time to eat in Lazar’s lair? She was lucky if she could find a moment to pee during the course of the day.

The elevator stopped and pinged on the ground floor as she was freshening her lipstick. The door slid open, a man stepped in, and the door rolled shut behind him. The elevator seemed suddenly very small. She shoved her lipstick into her purse, a light, tickling awareness rippling across the surface of her skin, like a breeze rustling long grass.

She was careful not to look at him directly, mindful of elevator etiquette, but she gathered considerable information out of the corner of her eye. Tall, maybe a little over six feet. Lean. Darkly tanned skin, she noticed, sneaking a furtive glance at the big hands that emerged from the cuffs of his suit—his very elegant, very costly suit. Probably Armani, she concluded, peeking at the cut of his sleeves. A summer hanging out in Barcelona with that shameless clotheshorse Juan Carlos had taught her a lot about the subtle nuances of men’s fashion.

He was looking at her. She felt the weight and heat of his gaze against the side of her face. She would have to look straight at him to confirm it. For once, her curiosity was stronger than her fear.

Maybe it was the skull and crossbones in her dream that suggested the image, but the thought blazed through her mind the moment she raised her eyes to his.

He had the face of a pirate.

He wasn’t classically handsome. His features were too harsh and craggy, his nose bumpy and crooked. Midnight black hair was cropped short. It stuck straight up, like a velvety black scrub brush. His broad cheekbones jutted out, with deep hollows beneath them. His eyebrows were thick, black slashes and his mouth was both grim and sensual. But it was his eyes that shocked her. They were black, heavy-lidded and exotic. They stared at her with searing intensity.

The eyes of a marauding buccaneer.

His gaze slid down over her body as if he saw through her prim gray suit, through her blouse, her underthings, right down to the shivering flesh beneath. His appraisal was bold and arrogant, as if he had every right to stare. The way a pirate captain might look at his helpless captive…before he dragged her down to his cabin for sport.

Raine tore her eyes away. Her overactive imagination promptly went crazy with the pirate metaphor, erasing the Armani and dressing him in pirate’s garb; flowing blouse, tight knee breeches that showcased his…his assets, a cutlass thrust into a crimson sash, a golden hoop in his ear. It was ridiculous, but she felt flushed, panicky. She had to get out of this elevator before the mirrors steamed up.

To her immense relief, the door pinged and opened on the 26th floor. She lunged to exit, stumbling into the man who was waiting to enter and murmured an incoherent apology as she ran for the stairs. Walking up would make her late, but she had to regain her composure.

Oh God, how pathetic, and how typical. A hot, sexy guy gave her the eye in an elevator, and she fell to pieces like a terrified virgin. She’d blown her once in a lifetime chance to be ravished by a pirate. No wonder her love life was a non-issue. She sabotaged it before it even got going. Every damn time.

The working day began inauspiciously. Harriet, the office manager, swept by as she was hanging up her coat, her thin face pinched with disapproval. “I expected you earlier,” she snapped.

Raine glanced down at her watch. It was 7:32. “But I—it’s only—”

“You know perfectly well that the updated OFAC compliance report has to be finished and Fedexed by noon! And we still haven’t gotten an answer from the Banque Intercontinentale Arabe about those blocked funds for the wine shipment. It’s already 4:30 in the afternoon in Paris, and our distributors are drumming their fingers. Somebody has to negotiate that order for Brazilian espresso beans, and you’re the only one in the office right now with halfway decent Portugese. To say nothing of the fact that the new pages of the website still aren’t ready. I would appreciate it if you would take responsibility for your work, Raine. I cannot keep track of everything.”

Raine muttered something apologetic, teeth clenched, and sat down, punching in the code that took her phone off voice mail.

“And another thing. Mr. Lazar wants you to serve the coffee, tea and pastries at the breakfast meeting,” Harriet went on.

A jolt of terror made Raine leap to her feet. “Me?”

Harriet’s lips pursed. “I was not looking forward to telling him you were late.”

Raine’s stomach fluttered with dread. “But he’s never—but Stefania always—”

“He wants you,” Harriet cut in. “What he wants, he gets. The coffee is already brewing, no thanks to you, and the caterers have just delivered the food. It’s in the kitchen. The china and silver are already laid out in the conference room.”

Stefania poked her face into Raine’s cubicle. “Make sure to get the geisha girl choreography just right,” she advised. “With Lazar, it’s got to be aesthetically perfect. One spilled drop of coffee, and you’re toast.” She studied Raine with a critical eye. “And freshen up your makeup. Your left eye is smudged. Here, take my lip liner.”

Raine stared down at the lip liner pencil, speechless with dismay. This was the first time Victor Lazar had publicly acknowledged her existence. She’d seen him, of course; he was impossible to miss. He swept through the office like a storm wind, scattering people in front of him and dragging them in his wake. He was as dynamic and intimidating as she remembered from her childhood, though not as tall.

The first time he’d seen her, his piercing gray eyes had flicked over her with complete disregard, leaving her weak-kneed with relief. He evidently saw no connection between his newest executive assistant and his tiny, eleven-year-old niece with the white-blond braids that he hadn’t seen in seventeen years. Thank God.

His sudden interest in her now seemed sinister.

“Go, quick, Raine! The meeting was scheduled for seven forty-five!”

Harriet’s razor-sharp tone galvanized her. She scurried to the kitchen, heart thudding. This was no big deal, she told herself as she unwrapped the food. She was serving coffee, croissants, bagels, mini-muffins and fruit. She would smile, look pretty and gracefully withdraw, leaving Lazar and his clients to their business. This was not rocket science. It was not brain surgery.

Oh no, piped up the sarcastic little voice in her head. It was just her father’s murderer, up close and personal. No biggie.

She poured herself a cup of the strong, vicious brew that was always available in the staff kitchen and gulped it down so fast it scalded her mouth and throat. She had to get a backbone surgically implanted, if she really meant to go through with this. She should be pleased that Victor had noticed her. She had to get close to him if she wanted to investigate her father’s death. That was why she had taken this nightmarish job, that was why she was living this surreal life. The tombstone dream had left her no other option.

For years she’d tried to unravel that hellish dream. She’d come up with dozens of logical explanations: she missed her father, had unconscious anger about his death, needed a scapegoat, et cetera. She’d studied dream psychology, gotten psychotherapy, tried creative visualization, hypnosis, yoga, every stress-reducing technique she could think of, but the dream persisted. It burned in her mind, weighing her down, derailing every effort she made to get her life on track.

A year ago she started having it every night. That was when the real desperation began. She grew dizzy, wild-eyed, terrified to go to sleep. She tried deadening herself with sleeping pills, but couldn’t bear the headaches the next day. She was at her wit’s end, watching her life grind to a halt—until 3 A.M. on her twenty-seventh birthday. She’d started upright in bed, chest heaving, and stared with wet, burning eyes into the pitch darkness, still feeling the cruel strength of Victor’s arm clamped around her shoulders. By the time dawn lightened the windows of her room from black to charcoal gray, she had finally surrendered. The dream demanded something of her, and she could no longer say no to it. It would break her in the end if she kept trying.

She had no proof, of course. The record of events was clear and conclusive. Her father had died in a sailboat accident. Victor had been out of the country on business, then Raine’s mother maintained that she and Raine had been in Italy at the time, refusing to discuss the matter . . .