At sixteen, Charlie bartered for her own freedom. Striking out on her own in a world that loved nothing more than to chew young women up and spit them out, she’d been resourceful. She’d had to be. But at barely eighteen, she’d used her resourcefulness and fondness for computers to skim money off a few well-endowed bank accounts—strictly for food, shelter, and other necessities. But she’d picked the wrong account—or more accurately, the right one.
Sean Michael Stone.
He was never supposed to question the minuscule amounts she skimmed every other month, much less be able to track her, but he did—and gave her an ultimatum: Use her smarts for good, go to school, and then work for him; or get comfy in a county lockup.
She’d chosen the first option and hadn’t looked back since—at least until now.
Standing in front of the house that had been her jail from the ages of eight to sixteen conjured feelings and memories Charlie hadn’t thought about in a damn long time. According to Vince’s employee file, he’d been to war zones in both the desert and the jungle, places all over the globe where he’d fought for his life and the lives of others. Charlie might not have toted around an AK-47 and covered her face in black camo paint, but this house had been her war zone all the same.
Arturo didn’t do anything half-assed. “Ornate.” “Ostentatious.” “Outrageous.” Those three words described his taste pretty accurately. His house, a mixture of Miami color and Greek grandiosity, welcomed visitors with a marble staircase that led up to a rotund, pillared porch and double-wide glass doors.
At the top of the stairs, Charlie glanced back at their rental truck, a good twenty feet away. They hadn’t rung the bell. It wasn’t too late to change her mind. She could still turn around, build another identity, join a nunnery…and let her uncle deconstruct yet another dream, the first being a lifetime of experiences with her mum.
Vince’s hand settled on the small of her back, its warmth turning into a supportive wall. Charlie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “You got this, English.”
“Yeah, I know I do,” she lied. “I’m just worried about you. This isn’t any regular Meet the Parents.”
“I can handle it.”
A sudden silence hung in the air between them. Charlie couldn’t meet his gaze. She gripped the purse in her hands a little tighter. Vince’s fingers locked onto her chin and directed her gaze to him.
Disdain. Annoyance. Hell, even that horny look that occasionally clouded his eyes was easier to deal with than the concern staring back at her.
“You got this. We got his. We go in, make nice, then leave and continue on with our day. That’s it.” He made it sound so damn simple.
“I need in his office,” Charlie reminded him.
It had been their first argument of the morning. Charlie wanted to use the opportunity of being in Arturo’s territory to their advantage while Vince wanted simply to use it as a foundation for future encounters. Immediate versus eventually. Fast versus slow. Charlie versus Vince.
“We talked about this,” Vince murmured. “It’s too risky. He’s not going to have any kind of useful intel lying around for anyone to come across. It’s better to hold off and wait until we’re in a better position.”
“The women being taken from the clubs don’t have time to wait,” Charlie hissed. “Each day we sit around drinking mimosas gives these arseholes another chance to ruin someone’s life. If I have an opportunity to get away from the table, I’m taking it. Either back me up, or I’m walking in there with an announcement that I’ve called off our winter wedding.”
A low rumble slid out from his throat.
Patting his cheek, she stepped back and rang the bell. “Keep growling at me, and I’m going to fit you in a muzzle.”
Nothing inside the house had changed in twelve years. Expensive artwork hung on the walls, and sculptures lined both sides of the corridor. Branson, her uncle’s butler, led the way through the foyer and toward the back patio, where Anthony waited outside the sliding glass doors.
“Glad you showed.” Anthony gave them a small nod, holding open the door.
“I’m not one for wearing cement shoes, so…”
Vince tensed, only relaxing when Anthony burst out into laughter. “Haven’t lost the sense of humor, I see.”
“Not a bloody bit. As a matter of fact, I’m trying to teach it to Vince.”
Anthony chuckled harder, but he was alone in the joke. Firming his arm around her waist, Vince bent closer to her ear. “I think you’re the one who needs the muzzle.”
Charlie ran her hand up his chest and grinned. “Try it and see what happens, love.”
Anthony was still chuckling as he walked them onto the patio.
Arturo Franconi, the once robust, most-feared crime boss south of the Mason-Dixon Line, looked like a different man than the one she’d left. He looked like half a man. He’d easily lost seventy-five pounds off his hulking frame, the lines bracketing his mouth deeper and more numerous, …and his pallor yellowed.
DHS’s sources had confirmed end-stage liver disease, but they didn’t say how far advanced it had become. Shock at her uncle’s physical changes almost made Charlie overlook the man standing at his side.
Brock glared unapologetically at her and Vince until her uncle stood, keeping one hand secured on the tabletop.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Arturo said, dismissing Charlie’s former friend. “It looks as though my long-lost niece has finally come home.”
“I really think we need to nail this down now…sir,” Brock stated firmly.
Arturo’s eyes snapped back to the younger man. Dark and menacing—that was the uncle whom Charlie not-so-fondly remembered. “As long as there is life left in my body, I’m still the one who makes the decisions—and I believe I’ve given you an order. I told you what needs to be done. Now I expect you to get it done. Is there going to be a problem?”
“No…sir.” Brock gritted his teeth.
“Then do it. And I don’t want to hear any fucking excuses.” With a flick of his hand, Arturo dismissed him again.
Brock stalked past her. “You still don’t fucking listen,” he muttered beneath his breath. Vince shifted his weight closer to her, obviously hearing the less-than-welcoming words.
“Come.” Arturo gestured to the empty chairs. As Charlie and Vince sat, she sensed her uncle’s gaze on her. “You’ve turned into a very beautiful woman, my dear. Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised. Both your mother, Mia, and my dear departed Leslie looked the part of earth-bound angels.”
Hearing him mention her mum and aunt turned Charlie’s vision red. Her body tensed, and Vince, sensing the change, reached over and gave her leg a firm squeeze.
“And you”—Arturo turned toward Vince—“you’re the man who believes he’s good enough for my niece, a Franconi.”
“I’m a Hughes,” Charlie corrected, her jaw aching.
Arturo turned his cold, dark eyes on her. “You were a Franconi from the moment you stepped through my front door, all pig-tailed and wide-eyed.”
“You mean red-eyed and shell-shocked. After all, my mum had just been murdered.”
Arturo frowned at the reminder, but Charlie didn’t care.
“I suppose I should apologize, Vincent. I’m sure Charlotte has explained to you that we haven’t exactly been keeping up with the times. As a matter of fact, I think it’s been…what? Ten years since she shed her family as though we were the common cold? I mean, changing her name…to Charlie Sparks?” He shook his head, tsk-ing.
“It’s been twelve—as you very well know,” Charlie muttered. “And my name is more Charlie Sparks than it ever was Charlotte Franconi.”
“It’s a wonder why you’ve even graced me with your presence if you find everything Franconi-linked so distasteful, my dear niece.”
“If Anthony had made it a choice, I wouldn’t be…Uncle.”
Arturo leaned back in his chair. “Did she ever tell you how she became a part of my life, Vincent? It was both a shining moment and a dark cloud—she lost her mother, and I lost my wife—all in the course of minutes.”
Charlie stared at her uncle. He wouldn’t.
He took a sip of his champagne. “Eight years old is such a horrid time to lose someone so close to you. But as one does in times of great sorrow, you latch onto the family who remain. At least, that’s what I did. I gave my daughter and my niece my whole heart, and do you know what put the next crack in it? The girl I thought of as a second daughter, one I’d raised as my own, thinking I could be so heinous as to be behind the death of my own wife.”
“If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here,” Charlie forced her voice to work.
Finally, Arturo turned his attention toward her. “You no longer think I’m responsible for their deaths?”
“I no longer think you ordered them,” she clarified. “I didn’t say anything about not being responsible. They’re gone because of who you are, what you do, and the friends you keep.”
Arturo looked thoughtful for a moment before letting out a drawn-out sigh. His posture relaxed, shoulders releasing some of their stiffness. “That’s one of the many reasons why I’m turning over a new leaf.”
Charlie snorted. “Right.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I’d sooner believe in the Easter Bunny. You’re not the kind of man to go through life without having power over others. No way would you give that up,” she pointed out.
“You’re right. But it seems like fate has other plans for me.” He gestured to his rail-thin body. “As you could guess, I’m not in the best of health. And since I can’t take power with me to the grave, and both you and your cousin have no desire to take part in the family business as it works now, there’s no reason not to use my final days putting things on the straight-and-narrow. Contrary to what you may believe, Charlotte, I do love my family, and the last thing I want is to pass something to you and Tina which may bring danger into your lives.”
Too bad he hadn’t thought that way twenty years ago, before someone tampered with the car her mother and aunt had been driving.
Before she left Miami, Charlie had gotten close to finding true answers as to who had called for the hit. It hadn’t been Arturo, but someone had—someone with something to gain, either by flexing their power or creating a reason for retaliation. Charlie hadn’t wanted any part of the life that had taken her mother from her way too soon—and still didn’t.
The click-clack of heels on stone reached Charlie’s ears as Tina, her cousin, turned the corner, looking no less gorgeous than the last time Charlie had laid eyes on her. Her skin-tight red dress, no doubt tailor made, hugged her curvy body, and her black wavy hair and flawless olive complexion leaned heavily on her Italian genes.
“So you really are here.” Tina’s dark eyes gave Charlie a critical once-over. “I thought Daddy lost his mind when he said you came back to town. I assumed you ended up buried in a garbage dump somewhere.”
“Now, now, Tina,” Arturo admonished. “That’s no way to greet your cousin.”
Tina dropped a kiss onto her father’s cheek and did a double take as she turned her gaze on Vince. She propped her sunglasses on top of her head, letting her eyes feast on him from the waist up. “Well, hello there, gorgeous.”
Charlie contemplated amputating her cousin’s hand as she walked behind them, sliding her palm over Vince’s shoulder as she passed. He got points for pulling away pretty quickly and received even more for draping an arm on the back of Charlie’s chair.
Chuckling, Tina took the seat across from her father. “I can’t possibly stay long or eat much. There are a few fires I need to put out.”
“Anything you need help with?” Arturo asked.
“I’ve got it handled, Daddy. Just a little housecleaning that needs to be done.” Tina leaned toward Vince, giving him a nice view of her cleavage—something that hadn’t been there years back. “I own and run my own successful business. I hear you run one as well.”
“Along with a few of my service buddies,” Vince replied.
“I love ambitious men.” Tina turned a false smile in Charlie’s direction. “And what are you doing, Charlotte? Working as a drop-in volunteer at one of those salon schools? Not at a very good one, judging by the hair. Hopefully they give you some kind of hazard pay.”
Charlie clenched her teeth and prayed for patience. “I’m a bartender…in Vince’s bar.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that.” Placing a hand on the center of her chest, Tina feigned empathy. “I suppose it was a very rude awakening to find out you weren’t half as smart as you thought you were, huh? What was it that you said when you left? That you wanted to make a positive difference in the world? I didn’t know you could change the world with martinis. Maybe you’ll show me how you do it while you’re in town.”
Charlie would love to show her all right…show her her fist and a dark closet.
As if reading her mind, Vince pried her fist open, finger by finger, and interlocked their hands to keep her from doing it again.
“Down girl,” he murmured under his breath before gracing Tina with a hard glare. “Your cousin’s an extremely talented woman. At anything she sets her mind to do. And the best thing about it—which is sometimes the most frustrating—is she demands to get it on her own terms. Handouts aren’t her thing. It’s one of the many reason why I care for her as much as I do.”
Something in Vince’s words sounded almost believable. Like he’d meant them. Or maybe it was the mimosas starting to course through her body. Thirty minutes and three orange juice concoctions later, Charlie needed to do something more useful than verbally sparring with everyone within a six-foot distance—except Vince. And didn’t that shock the hell out of her because he was normally the first one she tried goading into an argument.
“I need to use the loo.” Leaning over to brush a kiss on Vince’s cheek, Charlie whispered, “Keep them busy.”
“Charlie,” he warned softly.
“Be back in a jiffy.”
He looked like he wanted to throttle her, but she couldn’t worry about his displeasure. The entire point of this meeting was to get information, not go on a trip down memory lane or be verbally accosted by the cousin from hell.
It took all of five seconds to note that nothing had changed about Arturo’s security, including the dummy cameras. All ancient by prehistoric standards, they were visible to the naked eye, not hooked up to a live power source. Every night she’d had on the town as a teenager had been because of those things.
Charlie turned into the left corridor leading to Arturo’s office and kept to the perimeter. Just outside the door, the same squeaky floorboard that had been present years ago squeaked under her shoe, indicating that not only had he avoided updating his security, but shunned house repairs too. She carefully stepped over it and slid into the office, undetected.
Natural wood bookcases lined the white, weathered walls of Arturo’s office, making the space functional, but with the old-world Italian flair her uncle coveted. Sitting at the desk, she turned on the laptop. While she waited for the decrepit machine to boot up, her gaze snagged on an old photo.
She’d seen it before—one of her aunt, her mom, Tina, and an eight-year-old Charlie. All smiling. All happy. Two days after that picture had been taken, Charlie’s two-week family reunion had ended up becoming a permanent stay.
Big world. One little girl.
Not exactly the stuff of which dreams were made.
“Throw yourself a pity party later, Char,” Charlie admonished herself, jiggling the mouse as if it would speed up the hunk-of-junk computer. Without her around to keep things updated, Arturo’s tech was in serious need of upgrades…and a new password.
The second the screen flashed to life, she grabbed a flash drive from between her cleavage and inserted it into the USB port. Time to go fishing.
Anyone who didn’t know how Arturo’s mind worked could have searched the hordes of files for days and not have a thing to show for it. But having cracked his system when she was thirteen, she easily found what they needed on his businesses—both the public ones and those he only financially backed—and started copying.
Charlie got into a routine of clicking and dragging, not wasting the time to read the open docs. There’d be time to sort through it all later. Outside the office door, the loose floorboard groaned under someone’s weight.
She shut down the system moments before Vince slid into the room.
“What the hell are you doing?” He silently closed the door behind him before drilling her with the intensity of his disapproval.
“I told you that the best way to get into his files was to go directly into his files.” Charlie pocketed the drive back between her breasts, noticing Vince’s gaze tracking the movement. “He’s not going to know I was here.”
“Not the point. We agreed this was about making the first contact.”
She came out from behind the desk and drilled a finger into the center of his hard chest. “No, you said we were going to take our sweet ol’ time. I told you waiting wasn’t an option. If opportunities don’t pop up on their own, then we need to make them.”
“And if someone caught you in the process?”
“Arturo’s allergic to technology. Sneaking out of this house was always easy as pie, and I’m a significant degree smarter than my sixteen-year-old self. No one was going to catch me.”
The same floorboard that had alerted her to Vince’s presence alerted them to another. Charlie didn’t blink. One tug on Vince’s shirt and her mouth was on his, tasting the hint of coffee and mint on his tongue. He didn’t miss a beat, walking them backward until her bum hit the edge of the desk. Arturo’s desk rattled.
Vince’s mouth feasted on hers. The man could perform a search-and-rescue of her tonsils any damn day he’d like. Palming his rock-hard arse, Charlie tugged him even tighter. He took the invite to get closer and slid his fingers beneath the hem of her dress and up her thigh. A not-so-little—and very real—moan slipped from her throat as the door clicked open.
Tina’s disgusted grunt barely inched them apart. “Ugh. Really? Now I’m going to have to get the cleaners in here to sanitize every square inch of this room.”
Breathless from the intense kiss, Charlie reluctantly pulled her mouth from Vince’s. Her gaze dropped to his swollen lips and before she dove back in for another round, she was reminded they weren’t alone by Tina’s not-so-subtle throat clearing.
Charlie flashed her cousin a naughty smirk, but didn’t move from Vince’s embrace. “Sorry. You know how it goes. When you find the man of your dreams it’s practically impossible to keep your hands off each other. Or maybe you don’t know. I never did ask, Ti, is there someone special in your life?”
“Yes. My father,” Tina snapped. “If you both could please put yourselves back together, Daddy’s making plans.”
Charlie wiped a speck of lipstick off Vince’s mouth, and he gently bit the pad of her thumb. Her eyes shot up to his, immediately registering their still-sweltering fire. Maybe they had gotten a bit carried away.
“What do you mean ‘plans’?” Charlie turned, facing off with her cousin.
Tina’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Daddy wants to sponsor a girls’ day at the spa while he gets to know your boy toy here. Personally, I say we don’t and say we did. Or better yet, I’ll go and say that it turned out you’re allergic to grooming. I’m sure I’ll have no problem selling that as an excuse.”
Charlie clenched her teeth. “Fine. You tell me when and where, and I’ll be there.”
Tina’s eyes narrowed. “You realize I said ‘spa,’ right? Not a tattoo shop? I won’t let you embarrass me by asking Gustov to put more of that…whatever the hell it is…in your hair.”
“Time and place, Tina. I’ll even drive.”
With a disgusted growl, Tina turned away and click-clacked out of the office.
Vince shook his head. “I don’t know who’s going to have it worse—me for getting grilled by your uncle, or you for having to put up with that.”
“Me. Definitely me.” Charlie sighed, turning around, and fixed his shirt, which she’d somehow managed to partially unbutton. She paused in re-dressing him and rubbed the back of her fingers over his stubble-laden jaw. “Do you want to switch? You could probably use a thorough exfoliating scrub…maybe a little man-scaping?”
“Fuck no.” He snorted, glancing at the door where Tina had disappeared. “And be nice—maybe see if she knows anything about anything.”
“Fine, but I’m taking the truck.”
Vince’s mouth opened to argue, and it made her laugh. “Seriously, Navy. I have to go to a spa—for hours—with the devil’s spawn. I will be bloody damned if I’m left without an escape route.”