ONE
San Diego
June 28
Well,well. Look at that.
Sam Reston leaned his shoulder against the wall of the hallway of his office building and simply drank in his fill.
There she was.
His own personal wet dream, standing there in the hallway between his office and hers, desperately scrabbling through a huge, expensive-looking purse.
Everything about her was expensive, classy. Top of the line. Real high maintenance, too. The kind of woman he stepped right around without a second thought because he didn’t have the time or the inclination, but shit, with her he’d make an exception.
Any man would.
Nicole Pearce. The most beautiful woman in the world. Certainly the most beautiful womanhe’dever seen, hands down.
He remembered every second of the moment he’d first laid eyes on her. Two weeks, three days and thirty minutes ago. But who was counting?
He’d been under cover, infiltrating a gang of smugglers and thieves working the docks. His client, a big shipping company, had found it impossible to get a handle on the losses incurred during transhipment at the docks, which last year had totaled almost $10 million.
The police had gotten nowhere and the company suspected that someone somewhere was being bought off. Sam hoped it wasn’t in the police department. His brother Mike was a SWAT officer with the San Diego PD and incredibly proud of it.
Someone had definitely dropped the ball, though. So the ship owner had decided to go private.
Smart move.
For a hell of a lot of money, Sam had gone under cover, working the night shift as a stevedore, spreading word around that he wasn’t averse to some under-the-table money. He’d been contacted, and had quickly made his way up the hierarchy of the Bucinski gang, finally rising to the point where they had included him on two major hauls. He’d been wired to the teeth and had photos and videos nailing gang members, their scumbag boss, and three corrupt Port Authority employees.
The fuckheads had not just been stealing cargo, they were involved in sex trafficking, too, bringing in kidnapped young girls hidden in the holds of legitimate ships, the owners of the ships entirely unaware of their human cargo.
The whole gang was going down. The shitheads deserved the needle but wouldn’t get it. Each of them would, however, spend the next twenty to thirty being some gangbanger’s newest girlfriend, which might even be better.
So Sam had looked like a scumbag the day he first saw her.Beinga scumbag was his current job.
When Sam Reston did something, he did it well.
Going under cover wasn’t like in the movies. You ate, dressed, acted and even smelled the part. While under cover, he rarely washed or shaved, and wore the same clothes for days at a time. He knew he smelled ripe and looked dangerous. Well, hell. Hewasdangerous—he was murderous with rage at the thought of fuckheads willing to rape little girls spending even one day out of jail.
He’d been up thirty-six hours straight and was just coming into the office after another all-nighter to shower, change and grab a few z’s on his very comfortable office couch when he’d seen her.
Actually, he smelled her before he saw her. The elevator pinged, the doors opened and some floral…thing that traveled into men’s heads through the nasal passageways and fucked with their brains reached out and walloped him.
He saw her a second later and froze. Simply froze. Later, when he’d untangled his head from his ass, he’d been amazed. He’d been a SEAL until his eardrum blew, and he’d been a damned good one.
SEAL training beats surprise right out of a man. You have to have good, solid nerves just to think of trying out for BUD/S. If you were the easily surprised type, you were weeded out fast.
Nothing took him by surprise, ever.
Except Nicole Pearce.
Sam had known that the tiny studio office across the hall had been rented out. The building’s manager had told him. To a translation agency—though Sam had no fucking idea what that could be—run by one Nicole Pearce.
He hadn’t thought more about it.
That particular morning he was more exhausted, filthy and pissed off than usual. He smelled, too, of sweat and beer. He was in a shitty mood, ready to cut the job short simply to get the top guys into the slammer fast. But he knew better. With the evidence he was getting, the entire operation would go down and that was worth a few extra days or weeks living with slime.
