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“Dear George. Thirty years ago, I chose you over my home and my family. I learned too late what a mistake I’d made, but don’t worry. I’m done with you and with Dylan’s Department Store. I know this business better than you ever could, but you never saw that. To you I was just an executive assistant on a good day and a lackey on a bad one. But don’t worry, I made sure to build my own golden parachute. Sarah Molina.”
Ice water rushed through Devin’s veins and he forgot to breathe for a second, but then the pieces clicked into place. George’s executive secretary had called in sick for the first time in five years the day after Ryder joined the investigation. Sarah had access to almost everything George did. If anyone could game the system, it would be the woman who’d been the power behind the throne for thirty years. “Sarah.”
“Yes,” George grumbled. “She always did have to have the last word.”
Ryder recovered from her shock first. “We know the who, now we just have to find her.”
“I already know where she is.” George grabbed a sheet of paper decorated with an Internet travel booking site’s logo. “Sarah didn’t bother to try to cover her tracks. She’s in The Andol Republic.”
“So we’ll contact the authorities, present the evidence, and have her extradited,” Ryder said.
Devin’s left eye twitched and a jarring pain crackled through his brain. He had about an hour before the mother of all stress migraines tried its best to lay him flat.
“The Andol Republic does not have an extradition agreement with the United States,” George said.
Ryder stared at the rain lashing the windows as the dark gray clouds tumbled across the sky. “Well, we can’t go down there and kidnap her.”
“True, but my friend, the cultural minister, has agreed to bless our removing Sarah from Andol soil—after the fact.” George sat forward and propped his elbows on his desk. “For political reasons, he cannot support our efforts publicly beforehand. It seems her family is well connected down there in the bent-nose kind of way.”
The old man had lost it. The pressure of the merger combined with the store’s financial troubles had finally made him crack.
“So are you suggesting we go down there guns blazing, grab her, and bring her back?” Devin spoke slowly, as though he were chatting with someone who’d gone off their meds.
“Not exactly. The Andol Fashion Week is kicking off tomorrow.” George opened a drawer and removed two folders, which he handed to Ryder and Devin. “You’ll travel down as Dylan’s Department Store’s official representation, attend a few shows from the hottest South American designers, and then return home—with an extra undocumented passenger. Once you’re home, we’ll turn Sarah over to the authorities, and with any luck, recover the money she stole.”
Devin scoffed. “You make it sound so simple.”
“Come on now, you should know better than most… Life so rarely is.”
Chapter Four
“Whoever said that money can’t buy happiness, simply didn’t know where to go shopping.”
— Bo Derek
The Dylan Corporation hadn’t scrimped when it came to outfitting the corporate jet. There were cream-colored leather seats as soft as a baby’s butt, hand-cut crystal decanters secured behind glass cabinet doors, and a discrete attendant who, once they reached cruising altitude, pointed out the call button and disappeared into the cockpit for the remainder of the flight.
Ryder should have been basking in the luxury. Instead, she was as twitchy as a dog rescued from a puppy mill. She hated flying.
Hated. It.
The innate vulnerability of sailing through the clouds in a metal tube always put her on edge. Usually, the key to surviving a flight was a slight buzz and deep breaths, but not today. First off, Tony would kill her if she shotgunned a beer in front of a client. And, more important, every time she inhaled, the citrusy scent that had clung to a certain man’s bed sheets taunted her.
The main reason for the tension tightening her thighs sat less than four feet away at a built-in table. Devin had ditched his suit jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his baby blue dress shirt, revealing the bright green dragon that curled up his forearm as one part of an intricate full sleeve tattoo. As he typed on his laptop, his muscles undulated, giving the dragon the illusion of movement. He’d also loosened his tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar, allowing a glimpse of the abstract design covering his hard pecs.
If she hadn’t run a background check on Devin, Ryder would have sworn he’d grown up, like her, in the working class neighborhoods of Waterberg, far from the ritzy urban enclaves of Harbor City. Talk about being dead wrong. Even if she had a hundred dollars for every pasta noodle she’d eaten in her life, she wouldn’t put a dent in his trust fund.
Devin cleared his throat, never pausing his pounding on the keyboard or bothering to look her way. “You’re staring.”
Yeah, so damn hard her eyeballs were about to fall out. Blinking rapidly, she straightened in the bucket seat and picked an invisible piece of lint from her black chiffon tank top while running through a mental list of shitty ex-boyfriends to remind herself of why she needed to stop ogling her client. No matter how hot he was.
“I was wondering how a white-bread, private-school-attending, eating-Sunday-brunch-at-the-club dude like you ended up with a healthy start to a tattoo bodysuit.” There. That should put him on the defensive.
His fingers paused on the keyboard. “Ten years as a carny.” The clickity clack revved back up to full speed.
Score one for the rich kid. “Tilt-a-Whirl?”
The clacking ceased. He leaned back in his seat and arched his neck from side to side in a move natural to every jock she’d ever dated. Next, he rolled his shoulders under the perfectly-tailored shirt and leveled a heated gaze at her. Appraising and full of dark promise, the look made her clothes too tight to contain her suddenly aching boobs, and her lungs too small to hold the proper amount of oxygen.
