The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

by Karen Leabo

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romance; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Karen Leabo spins a sexy, thrilling story of an FBI agent playing a dangerous game—and falling head over heels in love with his beautiful target.
 
Special agent Clint Nichols has had suspected gangster Jimmy Gabriole in his sights for a while. Then Jimmy makes it personal and kidnaps Clint’s ex-wife. Never one to back down, Clint takes action. His plan is straightforward: hijack Jimmy’s sailboat, snatch the man’s sister, and negotiate an exchange. But the moment Clint lays eyes on Marissa Gabriole, he can think of nothing else but getting tangled between the sheets with the stunning beauty.
 
Marissa knew that spending the weekend on her brother’s yacht was a bad idea. First Marissa discovers that she’s prone to seasickness. Then she’s taken hostage by a man who claims that Jimmy is in cahoots with the mob. Marissa should be terrified, but something about the tender, uncompromising agent steadies her nerves. As Clint fights to keep his mission (and himself) alive, Marissa learns that nothing is what it seems—and realizes that her abductor is slowly but surely capturing her heart.

Release date: April 15, 2014

Publisher: Loveswept

Print pages: 240

Sample

ONE
 
Clint Nichols sliced noiselessly through dark, murky water on a black night. The only way an uninvited guest could get into Houston’s ultraexclusive Seville Yacht Club was through the water. Wearing a wet suit, his face blackened with greasepaint, he knew he was almost invisible. Still, he swam mostly underwater, surfacing as infrequently as possible.
 
Almost there, he thought, his lungs burning. His training at Quantico hadn’t prepared him for anything like this. But he was in good shape—better than most of his younger colleagues. He worked like a demon to stay that way, especially since he’d hit forty.
 
The young Turks might think of him as a dinosaur, but he’d bet not one of them could make it through the grueling physical demands of this task. Too bad the only way he’d ever be able to brag about it was from a jail cell. The Bureau didn’t exactly condone kidnapping and hijacking.
 
Clint carefully counted the boat slips. Most of them were occupied by empty sailboats and cabin cruisers. The wealthy owners paid tens of thousands for the crafts themselves, and thousands more to berth them at the prestigious Seville dock, then actually took them out only once or twice a year.
 
The whole thing was a pretentious waste of money in Clint’s book. Then again, he’d never made enough money to think about owning anything fancier than his sixteen-foot catamaran, berthed in his garage. How could he understand what motivated rich men, men like Jimmy Gabriole?
 
At least Gabriole occasionally used his boat. He often arrived without his entourage, believing he was inviolable at the high-security yacht club. This particular weekend he’d brought his sister, Marissa, with him, providing Clint with the perfect opportunity. An eye for an eye.
 
A little sister for an ex-wife.
 
Jimmy had raised Marissa from the time she was ten and Jimmy was twenty, when their parents had been killed in a car bombing. Rumor had it that he valued her far more than any of his several wives over the years.
 
Slip 64. And there was Fortune’s Smile, Gabriole’s forty-two-foot cabin cruiser, not an ostentatious vessel by any means. Clint supposed that Gabriole didn’t want to draw unwanted attention from the IRS. His official income was enough to allow him to live comfortably, but he wasn’t a millionaire. Not unless you counted all the cash that came in under the table.
 
Fortune’s Smile. Gabriole didn’t know how ironic the name of his boat was. Fortune was about to frown on the Mafioso. Big time. He’d find out what it felt like to have someone he loved disappear into thin air.
 
Clint found a vantage point behind a slime-covered pier and watched. The water was still a bit chilly on this late April night, and a soft rain was starting to fall, but Clint felt no discomfort. He was on a mission, and he had plenty of time. He wouldn’t move until the optimum moment.
 
Clint had agonized for days about what to do. Rachelle, his sweet, wild little Rachelle, had been missing for almost a week, last seen at the Foxhunt, where she worked as a dancer. Police questioning had extracted no useful information. Clint’s boss, Neil McCormick, had warned him to let it go. Rachelle was a minor player, and pursuing her fate might jeopardize an eight-month organized-crime investigation. Let the police handle it, he’d been told.
 
But Clint couldn’t sit on his hands, not when it came to Rachelle. She’d briefly been his wife, and though their marriage had ended a long time ago, they still shared a bond. He looked out for her, bailed her out of scrapes now and then. And she provided him with useful bits of information. Her entire involvement with Gabriole and the Foxhunt had been Clint’s idea. She’d risked her life for him. He could not abandon her now.
 
Clint pumped his legs beneath the water, trying to keep his circulation going. He didn’t know when, or if, Marissa Gabriole would be left alone on the boat. But he would wait. He was good at waiting.
 
 
“You’re sure you don’t want to come?” Jimmy asked his sister for the third time as he fastened a slim gold watch around his wrist. “I was supposed to show you a good time this weekend, and we haven’t even left the dock.”
 
“It’s okay, Jimmy, really,” Marissa Gabriole said, hoping she didn’t look as green as she felt. She was actually relieved the lousy weather had prevented them from venturing out on Trinity Bay with Fortune’s Smile. She loved her brother, and she’d been promising for a long time that she would spend a weekend on his sailboat with him and his wife, Sophia. Now that tax season was over, she’d run out of excuses, so this was the weekend. But sailing had never appealed to her. In fact, she’d discovered, much to her dismay, that she was prone to seasickness.
 
Since the weather had made sailing impossible this evening, Jimmy wanted to go out on the town.
 
“But it’s lobster, Marissa,” Sophia said. “How can you turn down a lobster dinner?” She pronounced the shellfish as “lobsta.” Sophia was young and cute and unsophisticated, Jimmy’s third wife. Still, Marissa couldn’t help liking her. She was as ingenuous as a puppy.
 
“I just want to curl up in my bunk with a book,” Marissa said. And some antacid. She’d downed a gallon of the pink stuff since her arrival at the Seville Yacht Club that afternoon. “Y’all go out and have fun. Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.”
 
“Okay, sissy,” Jimmy said with a shrug. He’d never claimed to understand his sister’s low-key ways. “We’ll be back around midnight, maybe a little later.”
 
Marissa breathed a sigh of relief as the hatch closed behind Jimmy and Sophia. She grabbed the edge of the fold-down galley table as the boat listed to one side, then the other, announcing the couple’s disembarkment. Closing her eyes, she waited for the rocking to stop before she tried to walk.
 
What she really needed was some down time. This spring had been the busiest tax season ever for her growing accounting business. For weeks she’d been working twelve-hour days, seven days a week. Then, when the end had been in sight, Jimmy had shown up at her doorstep with a chicken-scrawled ledger book and a box of receipts, begging her to do a Schedule C for his restaurant, the Foxhunt. His regular bookkeeper had quit in a huff.
 
She’d done it because she had a hard time saying no to her older brother, who’d always done so much for her. But she’d barely finished the paperwork in time for Jimmy to make the April fifteenth tax deadline.
 
Thank God that insanity was over. Now all she wanted was to kick back, relax, be bored.
 
Marissa wiggled out of her sticky clothes. The sailboat didn’t afford much privacy, so it was a relief to have the place to herself for a few hours. In deference to the muggy night, she wandered around in a beige silk camisole and paisley boxer shorts.
 
Some graham crackers and a glass of milk served as her dinner. After tidying up the tiny galley, then washing her face and brushing her teeth in a bathroom too small to turn around in, Marissa headed for her cozy—some might say cramped—quarters in the V-berth. She stretched out on clammy sheets and cracked open a mystery she’d been dying to read.
 
With a sigh, she decided that this wasn’t paradise, but it wasn’t half bad, either. No phone, no computer, no aggravations. Just the gentle sound of waves lapping against the hull, the murmur of a gentle rain, the occasional sleepy call of a water bird, and—
 
What was that noise? The boat abruptly leaned to one side, the way it did when someone boarded. Did Jimmy and Sophia forget something? It wasn’t even ten o’clock. Maybe the weather had dissuaded them. It was supposed to be stormy later on.
 
She didn’t hear any familiar voices. Tense with fear, Marissa put the book aside and felt around at the side of the mattress for her gun. Ever since she’d passed her test to carry a concealed weapon, she never went anywhere without her old Colt revolver.
 
It’s a lady’s gun, she remembered her father saying when he’d presented the weapon to her mother. Marissa had been seven or eight at the time. Small, fits easily in the purse, but accurate. Not like some of them peashooters your bridge club friends carry.
 
Her mother, who had never favored impractical furs or jewelry, had been pleased with the gift.
 
Now the gun belonged to Marissa. It was considered old-fashioned today, but she didn’t care. She knew how to use it, and it would do the job if she ever had to pull the trigger, which she fervently hoped would never happen. She quickly loaded all six chambers from the box of ammunition in her overnight case.
 
The hatch at the opposite end of the boat rattled. Had Jimmy locked it behind him? Probably. Jimmy took matters of security very seriously.
 
A loud creaking noise shattered the quiet. Oh, Lord, someone was breaking in! Marissa rolled onto her stomach, closed the privacy curtain that separated the V-berth from the rest of the boat, then trained her eye and the muzzle of her gun through a crack. If she could keep her presence a secret, she would. Maybe her uninvited guest would quickly canvass the main living area of the boat for valuables, then leave.
 
She could hope, anyway.