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She was almost there. Her hands were reaching for the latch when she was suddenly grabbed from behind and jerked around. She bounced against the cement wall. The only thing that protected her head was the hard male hand that covered it. The only thing that dimmed the shoc
k of the impact was his lips suddenly covering hers.
The fingers of his free hand gripped her jaw, keeping her from biting the tongue that swept across hers. Not that she would have bitten. Not that she could have bitten. She was shocked, held amazed, lost in a riot of sensations that she had felt only once in her life, and only with one other man. A dead man.
“Try that again.” He jerked back from her, releasing her. “You can play dirty all you want to, baby, but remember, I’ve got your number, and I know damned well how to use it.”
She flashed him a daring smile. “I expect to hear from you soon then.”
Sliding the door handle down, she slipped out the crack she made in the double doors and escaped into the night. The car was waiting, the keys in the ignition. Within seconds she was pulling sedately down the alley and checking her rearview mirror.
He was watching her. Standing there beneath the moonlight, illuminated in an eerie glow cast by the nightly orb and the lights that struggled to ease the dimness in the alley.
And for a second, just the briefest second, it wasn’t the arms broker/unknown agent John Vincent she saw. For just a breath of time, it was Trent. For a single heartbeat she saw him, felt him.
“Trent.” She whispered his name as he turned and stepped back into the warehouse, dispelling the fantasy forever.
Trent was gone. He was dead. She couldn’t ever let herself forget that.
Or was he?
Her eyes narrowed as she pulled the vehicle into Atlanta’s traffic. She had her suspicions where her cousin David Abijah was concerned, because God’s truth, Micah Sloane could be no one but the Israeli cousin that she had believed was gone forever. She knew his voice, his movements, and the man who had interrogated her earlier could be no one else.
Micah Sloane was no more a former Navy SEAL than she was. He was a man without a true past. A man who moved like her cousin, a man who carried himself like the only family she could have called her own.
Bailey knew voices, she knew faces, she knew characteristics and movements. It was her strength as an agent. And she knew her cousin David, just as she had known her lover Trent. And now two men, one supposedly a dangerous criminal, both with the same characteristics, the same “feel,” and they were working together?
She didn’t believe in coincidence and she sure as hell didn’t believe in an overactive imagination. She wasn’t overly imaginative. She was fact-based. She knew herself. She knew the people she loved.
She was betrayed. It was a betrayal that struck into her soul and left her shaking in anger. A betrayal she wondered if she could ever forgive. John Vincent couldn’t be Trent Daylen, but she knew for a fact that Micah Sloane and David Abijah were the same.
It was a betrayal she drove away from, just as her cousin had walked away from her. Just as Trent had been taken away from her.
As the night wore on and the car ate up the miles to DC, Bailey knew where she was going from here. She had spent too many years fighting other people’s battles. It was time she fought her own.
CHAPTER 1
One years Later
IT WAS A WORLD BAILEY HADN’T expected to ever enter again. She had left home fifteen years before, vowing she would never return. After her parents’ deaths seven years ago, there had never been a reason to return.
She stood beneath expensive crystal chandeliers, outfitted in a brilliant emerald designer dress and high heels, with emeralds and diamonds at her throat and ears. Diamond pins held her hair in place and a single emerald ring graced her hand as she lifted a champagne flute to her lips to sip.
Not cheap champagne here. This was some of the best she had sipped in her life. Perhaps better than her own coming-out ball when she had turned sixteen and her father had definitely splurged on that.
She stared around the ballroom, let the orchestra’s music drift around her and pretended it was just another assignment. That she was still with the CIA, that the op she was on was blessed by its director, and that backup would be waiting if the shit hit the fan.
She knew better. In this world there was no backup. There was just Bailey Serborne, the Serborne heiress. The prodigal daughter without a family to welcome her back into the fold. Only the enemies surrounded her here.
“Bailey, how good to see you again.” She lifted her cheek and allowed yet another vapid smile to cross her lips as a kiss was brushed against her cheek.
Janice Waterstone. She was in her sixties and still looked forty. Plastic surgery and cosmetics could accomplish miracles.
Janice was one in a long line of welcoming elite in attendance at the Serborne mansion, which Bailey had reopened a year ago.
She’d returned home, supposedly with her tail tucked between her legs, her pride smarting from her dismissal from the agency. And the dismissal was nothing more than the truth; she could still hear her director screaming at her in his office. Milburn Rushmore’s face had been neon red, flushed and perspiring, he’d been so pissed at her.
“It’s good to see you again, Janice.” The smile was as patently false as the other woman’s.
