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Kyle respects his brother’s memory, so it’s hands off when it comes to Nick’s widow—no matter how tempting he finds her. But she has a different plan…
As an intelligence expert, Natalie knows how to keep a cool head in stressful situations. But nothing prepared her for the sizzling attraction she feels toward Kyle. He’s a driven, powerful man, built for action. And Natalie has some very steamy action on her mind. When push comes to shove, though, duty has to come before anything else. Their very lives depend on it.
Her heart will just have to wait…
1
“Ineed two blow jobs and a screaming orgasm, please!”
Kyle Matthews glanced over at the scantily clad waitress who’d yelled the order at the overworked bartender and snorted.
Living up to the name of this not-so-fine establishment on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee—Double D’s—the gal met his gaze and gave him a naughty grin. “And what can I get for you, stud?”
“I’m good.” He raised his half-full bottle of ale in her direction. “Thanks, though.”
“No prob.” She smacked her gum, giving him a slow once-over, her earrings dangling against her bleached-blond hair. The smoky air smelled of stale alcohol and dying dreams, and some loud, obnoxious music throbbed over the club’s sound system. The waitress placed her drink order on her tray, winking at Kyle over her shoulder. “Just let me know if you need anything else. My name’s Kiki.”
He gave a short nod, then refocused on the nondescript black door near the opposite end of the bar. That door was the reason he was here.
The sign beside it said the manager’s office was back there, but from the intel he and his team had gathered about this place, there was more behind that door than employee files and pay stubs. There was, in fact, a secret storeroom for Coran Williams.
Coran Williams. Eccentric billionaire. Publishing magnate. Traitor.
After making his fortune as a defense contractor, Williams had, apparently, gotten frustrated with the limits of what diplomacy and military force could accomplish in the war against terror. A self-proclaimed patriot, he had decided thathewould be the one to secure America’s interests around the world. He would fight against the terrorists protected by alliances and backroom deals, hidden away where America’s might couldn’t legally pursue them. By his reckoning, the need for action justified his choice to…color outside the lines.
Williams invested in bribing, blackmailing, and manipulating classified information out of various government and military sources, then used the info to draw in terrorists—luring them out of their caves and bunkers and hidden compounds. And once they’d taken the bait—in the form of e-readers preloaded with classified, encoded intel—he’d use tracking software also on the devices to target their locations, and his team of mercenaries would strike.
Williams thought that his actions made him a hero. Kylethought they proved that Williams was unhinged and dangerous, knocking out terrorists with no more care or consideration than a toddler showed knocking down a tower of blocks. His strikes were badly planned—they screwed up foreign relationships, endangered peacekeeping efforts, and killed a whole hell of a lot more people than just terrorists. The most recent strike had taken out two dozen schoolchildren who had the bad luck to be too close to the bomb Williams’s men had set. And the man expected to be praisedfor what he’d done. Asshole. Kyle was glad Williams was in jail, even if he’d already sung like a canary to bargain his way out of the truly hard time he deserved.
To Kyle, Williams’s most egregious crime wasn’t his callousness but his arrogance. He’d thought that he held the strings, that he could control what happened. He hadn’t counted on one of his faithful henchmen not being faithful at all. Disgraced CIA agent Miles Arrieta had started out working with Williams, but he’d apparently decided somewhere along the way that it paid better to screw the good old US of A and side with the terrorists instead. When Williams went from funding Arrieta to pursuing him as a target, things had gotten truly ugly.
Wanting to send the message that he wasn’t to be fucked with, Arrieta had threatened one of Williams’s sources: a CIA agent who not only leaked information to Williams but also hid it, carefully encoded, in the manuscripts she penned that were loaded on all those e-readers. The woman who published under the name N.T. Smalls.
Her real name? Natalie Matthews. Kyle’s sister-in-law. And when the initial threats against her didn’t get the desired results, Arrieta took things one step further and had Natalie’s husband killed to drive the message home.
Nick Matthews. Kyle’s big brother. His hero. His best friend. Fuckingmurderedin cold blood, just to send a message. The mere thought of it was enough to make Kyle want to set something on fire.
Preferably Arrieta.
That was why he was here. Kyle and his team had chased leads all the way here to Nashville, to the innocuous-seeming storeroom where Williams was said to have stashed some of his most valuable secrets. Rumor had it there were all kinds of tech goodies inside, perhaps even the missing laptop they were looking for—its hard drive rife with all sorts of details about Miles Arrieta and his band of lying, cheating, murdering scumbags.
It was information that needed to be uncoverednow,because the intel also told them that Arrieta planned to unleash a computer virus on the world on Patriot Day, September11. The virus would take down the World Wide Web, sowing chaos and confusion and leaving the world vulnerable and exposed for whatever Arrieta had planned next.
The date was just a week away. So, if that laptop was in there, Kyle planned to walk away with its data tonight.
He took another swig of beer and glanced toward the door again. One of the busboys, a smallish kid with a black baseball hat and a neon pink Double D’s T-shirt, fumbled with a bucket of dirty dishes and a full bag of trash. Normally, Kyle wouldn’t have thought much about it, except the entrance to the kitchen was across the crowded room. What the hell was the kid doing lingering near the storeroom?
The busboy stood in the shadows, face hidden by the brim of the baseball hat. The only lighting was the glare from the crackling neon signs above. Something about the kid’s stance—rigid, tense, skittish—put Kyle on high alert.
After downing his beer, Kyle tossed a ten-dollar bill down on the bar top before sliding off his stool and moving slowly through the crowd toward that door.
Drunken patrons milled about ahead of him, blocking his way. By the time he’d pushed through the crowd, the busboy was no longer in sight—though the tub of dirty dishes sat on the corner of the bar and the bag of trash beside the door. Discarded…as if they’d been nothing more than props.
Kyle tried the door handle. It was locked. Of course. Careful to avoid nosy onlookers, Kyle pulled a small leather pouch from his jacket pocket and picked the lock. The black door cracked open, and a sliver of dim light winked out, beckoning him closer.
After a final glance around the bar, Kyle slipped inside, closing the door behind him. The noise and chaos outside dulled to a background roar as he made his way down a short hall, past the dark, deserted manager’s office on the right and toward another door near the back. A bright strip of light shone from beneath the doorframe. Scuffling sounds drifted from inside.
Well, crap.
