Dani waited until she figured Marcus was out of earshot. It was tricky, he’d been a good several paces behind, but she swore he could still hear everything. She turned to Luke who was still trying to get his wallet back into his pocket. She moved in front of him, choosing to walk backwards, hands behind her back, trying her damnedest to look innocent, though she couldn’t quite hold back her smile.

“I think I was just conned,” he said, coming to a halt in front of...whoever’s house that was. Elaina had told them, she was sure, but who really cared? Let the window curtain twitch, let whatever old biddy there spread the word all over the neighborhood. Dani was alone with her man.

Luke crossed his arms, but a corner of his mouth was quirked. Dani was relieved to see that; even a half-smile was good. She placed her hand on his and got in close. He’d been tense since they’d arrived.

Maybe that was what had thrown her. He’d been Mr. Calm when Marcus landed a helicopter blind, at night, in an area the size of a shoebox. One misstep and they would all have gone up in a fireball, but leave it to Luke to be unfazed. Even escaping from a shoot-out, in a near riot with burning buildings and bodies strewn everywhere hadn’t left him so much as shaken.

But get the man around his mother and the little veins in his head start taking mambo lessons. Not that he really seemed to see his mother at all. She was surrounded by wealth, she was still a young, beautiful woman, in her mid-fifties, not old by anyone’s standards who had gone through puberty, but he had her wasting away in a “nursing” home somewhere as the years piled onto her sweet, gray head.

How did he not know about the money? Was it that new, or that old? The longer they lingered here, the more questions she had. And she wondered just how much she’d ever learned about him at all. Which hardly seemed fair when he knew enough about her family to write a Master’s thesis on them. She wanted to change that. Their relationship couldn’t be just about sex.

Not that sex didn’t have its place.

She tugged at his hands, disentangling his arms until they hung at his sides, no longer creating a barrier between him and her. One palm flat on his chest, she stepped in as close as she could, lifting her chin that she might nuzzle his neck. Dang, he was tall. His arms came around her, cradling her against him as he bent his head to meet her lips lightly, in the most fleeting of kisses. It seemed like forever since they’d touched like this, tender and romantic.

She rubbed her leg against his crotch and smiled. “Well, we’re going to have to make sure you get your five-dollars’ worth, then, won’t we?”

“Drafty old musty garage...” Luke’s hands drifted down her waist, and grabbed her butt and squeezed, lifting her to her toes so he could cover her lips with his. Her hand dug into his side and held on, her other hand braced against his back, her leg rising around him.

She could feel his arousal, the bulge in his jeans growing larger and harder as she rubbed against him. It was almost enough to rub against, but the thickness of her shorts and his pants conspired to thwart them. Still, she kept the pressure of contact until he groaned in frustration and his hand went from her butt cheek, sliding up her back before coming around to grasp the side of her breast, fingers splayed against the tender flesh. Dani gasped against his mouth, forgetting little old ladies hiding behind lace curtains, the sound of traffic, or a million other distractions. The world faded, and it was only the two of them.

His mouth dropped to her neck and he inhaled deeply, as though the scent of her skin and the smell of her hair were the most intoxicating perfumes in the world. She arched her neck like a cat, reveling in the touch on her neck, and her hand grasped his shirt, fingernails digging into the cloth. Her leg wound around one of his, knee wrapped around his buttock, and she nibbled fiercely on his earlobe.

“Fuck, I need you,” he murmured, hands now under her shirt in the back, reaching up past the strap of her bra, then under it. “I need you now.”

“We can’t have sex on the street.” She laughed breathlessly, and for one wild, crazy instant she wondered if they could.

Apparently, he thought the same thing. “Watch me.”

She grabbed his head between her hands and smothered his protests with her lips. Not that he was protesting. Her hand pulled up his shirt and found the rough, curly hairs on his chest. She grabbed a handful, alternating between stroking the fur and pulling on handfuls as her passion waxed and waned.

The press against his jeans must have been becoming unbearable, it was as bad as she’d ever seen in him, but he just kept on as though she was the only food, the only salvation, for a lost and starving man.

She felt the same. It was one thing to lose yourself in a lover, but when he was lost in you it became an entire world, a separate and distinct reality where no one else existed. Sadly, they were standing on someone’s front yard, and the reality of other existences pressed through her passion and hunger for him. Of course, it didn’t help that the old lady behind the curtain had started to knock on the window and make shooing motions with arthritic and twisted hands, the way one would try to scatter stray cats or approaching door-to-door salesmen.

“I like garages,” she managed to say as he worked his lips down her neck to the hollow of her throat.

“Cadillac,” he mumbled. “Big back seats. Lots of room and all...” He dropped his hands and grabbed her ass, bodily lifting her. She wrapped her legs around his waist and held on, kissing the base of his neck. “... and all thick, soft upholstery.”

“Mmmmmm,” she purred as he continued down the sidewalk as though she weighed nothing at all. “You’ve done this before!”

He grabbed her hair and pulled hard. She gasped and looked up into his eyes. “I left my virginity in a Cadillac,” he said, and pulled her to him again to kiss her so thoroughly that she whimpered against his mouth, to let him know she needed to come up for air.

She pressed against him, strong legs holding her in place. “Mine was on a mountainside during a thunderstorm.”

He pulled back to look at her and blink. “Okay, that’s hot!” he admitted, and assaulted her lips with renewed passion.

“You’re thinking about that right now, aren’t you?” she asked, breathless and blushing when he finally allowed her to come up for air.

“Come with me to the garage and I’ll show you what I’m thinking!” And this time it was he who laughed.

It was the first laugh she’d heard from him in a long time, and her heart lifted. Crazy, deliriously happy. Maybe she’d take him instead, she felt so giddy. Did it matter which it was at this point? The fact that he’d laughed made her feel happier than she’d been in longer than she could remember.

She leapt down from her perch and knelt right there on the sidewalk, bending forward to kiss the thickness through his pants. He mimed opening the zipper and she grabbed his hand.

“Not yet, people might talk!”

“Only if they’re impressed, so make it look good,” he said, and winked.

Be still her heart. He was a rogue, a genuine rogue. She was lost. Definitely lost. “Goodbye Mrs. Fielding!” Dani called, and waved to a random house.

“What?” Luke turned. “That’s not even...”

But Dani had a head start on him. She was already running down the street to his mother’s house. Luke ran to catch up to her and she flipped her shirt up, giving him a tantalizing view of her back as she ran. “Last one to the garage has to clean the...”

She stopped short across the street from the house. Luke thudded to a stop beside her.

She burned, a pent-up mix of frustration and anger. Was she EVER going to get five minutes alone with the love of her life? You’d think no one respected the whole engagement thing they had going, even if it wasn’t necessarily genuine. Yet.

“Shit.”

She looked at Luke to share in her frustration but Luke stood silent, his eyes wide, his face absolutely drained of all color.

He might as well have seen a ghost.

***

THERE WAS A SMALL CLUSTER of people gathered around the garage. As Luke and Dani approached the house, she could just make out the image of his mother and her father, but there was a third figure she didn’t know, a man in a suit.

He was... dapper.

It was the only word that fit him. Tailored suit, thick wavy hair, and a ready smile that looked too poised and practiced. Either he was a used car salesman or a politician. He stood in the driveway with his hands clasped in front of him. It could have been a very submissive pose, even should have been. When Marcus or one of his men stood like that, waiting for orders, it screamed “underling”.

But this man made it look like he was a benevolent god accepting the adulation of his worshipers, though adulation was the last thing that either parent was willing to give. Even from a distance, Dani could hear Luke’s mother’s voice. From here it was impossible to hear the words, but her tone was plenty emphatic.

Dani winced; she glanced uneasily at Luke, who still hadn’t moved.

Still, this man was definitely in charge. It was an air he had, a simple statement of fact. Wherever he was, became his territory; he was in charge. Where Benny had been all bluster and noise to ensure that everyone listened to him, this person had no need to establish the pecking order. It was simple and indisputable. He was in charge.

Luke had skidded to a complete stop, his hand in hers going stiff and his breathing seeming to stop.

“Luke?” Dani looked from the man to Luke and back again. “Do you know this guy?”

Luke wasn’t there and that scared her, more than anything had ever scared her in her entire life. And she’d grown up around the mafia. Luke’s eyes showed a healthy display of horror as well.

“LUKE!” Dani hissed, and yanked his arm. His head swiveled around that he might look at her, even if his eyes didn’t seem to register her presence. He could have been staring at the man, or at the open gates of hell for that matter. It was all the same. She waved a hand in front of his face until he blinked, and awareness crept back into his eyes. “Who. Is. That?”

He looked back at the cluster in the distance. Marcus had arrived to turn the trio into a quartet, and he was obviously being introduced.

“My father.” Luke croaked out the words, as though through a dry and rough throat. He tried to clear his throat and ended up coughing instead.

Dani patted his back, not sure what else to do. “I thought he was dead,” she murmured, darting glances between him and the stranger, seeing the resemblances between them now.

“Wishful thinking,” Luke muttered, and shook his head.

His father chose that moment to look past the people on the driveway, straight at him and Dani. He smiled a bright, charming smile that warmed Dani’s heart, and set her into fantasies about what Luke would look like at that age, picturing him as a gentleman rogue, the inveterate ladies’ man. It was a strange and heady thought, and not for the first time Dani wanted to make this engagement real. The idea of growing old with this man at her side was the stuff of fantasies.

I wonder...

Then the stranger turned those eyes on her.

Now it was she who couldn’t breathe. She’d seen men with that kind of look in their eyes before. She found herself reaching again for Luke’s hand, pressing a little closer, though she knew she was being ridiculous. She was standing on a Florida sidewalk in broad daylight. There was absolutely nothing to fear. Yet she had an inkling of how dangerous this man could be. There was something calculating in that gaze that said he knew absolutely everything about her. She felt naked and exposed, and wondered how many people had fallen for that surface charm that captivated from a hundred feet away.

“Well?” his father called. “Are you going to join us, or have you decided to wait there until I’ve left?”

“I’m considering it,” Luke called back, and she felt the tension in his arm, in his hand. She pressed against him a little closer, trying to remind him that she was still there. She could no longer feel her fingers, he was clutching her hand so tight.

If his mother frustrated him, his father left him absolutely enraged.

“Luke...”

Her soft whisper seemed to soothe him. He darted a glance at her, and his hand unclenched marginally. Her fingers tingled as her blood fought to circulate again.

“Well, consider it over a steak, boy—I’m hungry!” The man made a grand, sweeping gesture to a limo down the road, that pulled forward in obedience to his wishes. A man in a suit and cap jumped out to open the back door. Under his close supervision, he handed Elaina into the back, bowing as Edwin and Marcus clambered in after. When had Marcus gotten to the house? She hadn’t even been paying attention.

The driver closed the door on the passenger side of the car and opened the other side, the side facing the street where Luke and Dani waited on the sidewalk, watching.

“Come on, boy!” his father called, though the façade was cracking. His voice had a hint of growing impatience, of dissatisfaction that his wishes weren’t being seen to quickly. “I want to meet this girl of yours! Tell her embarrassing things about you a child. And as an adult. It’s the only joy old people have, embarrassing their children.”

Dani looked up at Luke, whose face was still unreadable. Wordlessly, he stepped off the curb. Thankfully, no cars were coming. Dani wasn’t sure he would have noticed if they were. Luke’s feet seemed to move on their own, or maybe he was walking in a fog, but Dani was sure he wasn’t there for a moment as he crossed the street and entered the car as ordered.

Dani was helped into the car last, the driver offering his hand to her as she folded into the vehicle. He smelled like shaving cream and air freshener. It wasn’t bad, but it was very strong.

The door closed again. The interior was every bit as spacious as Dani had expected it would be. Elaina sat in the corner and seemed to avoid her son’s eyes, for once silenced by this chain of events. Dani found she missed Elaina’s chatter... No, she missed Elaina being Elaina, and found herself disliking their suave and genial host all the more. She wasn’t alone in her dislike. Her own father tried not glare at the newcomer, and Marcus... Dani knew that look. Marcus was sizing up possible opponents. Whether that assessment was aimed at the father or his driver, it was impossible to say. Knowing him, he meant it for both. It had been easy, these past few days, to forget the fact that Marcus had put a bullet between Katie’s eyes without a moment’s hesitation. Now Dani was reminded that he was hired muscle, a confirmed killer with very little compunction when it came to killing on Edwin’s orders.

And Edwin was jealous.

Dani shot a glance at her father, wondering just how far he would take his petty jealousies and whether she would need to intervene. Her own training had left her more than capable of assessing the risks, as much as Marcus, even if she maybe didn’t have the years of experience that her father’s bodyguard had. But she had youth on her side, and she trusted that the situation couldn’t get too far out of control. Besides, she had Luke, right? And he was a highly-trained federal agent. If it came down to it, it would be them two against... well, whatever individual decided to press his agenda. Two against one, then. Good odds.

Except Luke was gone, lost in his own agenda. His expression ranged from comic to tragic, and Dani didn’t know which way to jump.

Yeah. Two against one.

She was screwed.

She sighed and reached for Luke’s hand, pressing his palm to let him know she was there. No matter what, she would not leave him again. He’d been abandoned before. She’d take on the world all by herself if that’s what it took to save him.

Not knowing what else to do in the meantime Dani found herself focusing on Elaina, who huddled across from her, trying to disappear into the upholstery. She seemed to be ashamed. Embarrassed? Mortified? Something. There was a feeling of resentment mixed in, too. The play of emotions across her face was unguarded, open, raising more questions than they answered.

Dani glanced again at Luke. Man, did they need to talk.

The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Luke’s father. He caught Dani’s eye and extended a hand to her. His handshake was strong. Firm. “Since no one is bothering to be civil,” he said, “allow me to introduce myself. I am William McConnell, at your service.”

Dani glanced down at his hand in hers. He wore a ring, gold, with a brilliant ruby set in the top. His watch was an expensive Swiss import that Benny had been drooling over but never got for himself. It had been too pricey for even him.

This, then, was the source of the artwork. This was the source of Elaina’s money. And since Luke had been FBI, that meant that his father had passed Luke’s background check. All this money was legit. As much as any large sum of money could be said to be obtained legitimately.

“And what is it you do, Mr. McConnell?” she asked as sweetly as she was able as she drew her hand back to cover the other still firmly in Luke’s grasp.

“Currently, I am a... special liaison,” he said with that charming smile. “Meaning I have a cushy government job that pays well and that no one truly understands... especially me.”

“Dad’s an ambassador,” Luke said suddenly, color returning to his face.

“Not for some time, my boy!” William contradicted jovially. “I haven’t done that for years now. I’ve gone on to other prospects.”

“Why now?”

Dani smiled. Her special agent was, in fact, pulling himself back together. It’s about time.

William cocked his head. “I thought I could offer my son a hand,” he enthused, beaming magnanimously, “and meet my new daughter.” His smile was now for Dani’s benefit alone. It was creepy, like staring down a crocodile. “And her family, of course!” He turned to Edwin and bestowed a smile there, too, despite the odd look her father was giving him.

“How much?” Luke asked.

“Luke!” Elaina’s head came up sharply, her eyebrows meeting her hairline, the picture of mortification.

“No, no... it’s quite all right.” William leaned over and patted her arm. Edwin positively bristled. “My boy has a right to be suspicious. As it happens,” he said, turning to Luke, his smile gone, “I do have an ulterior motive, one I am sure that you won’t mind in the least.”

“Oh?” Luke’s eyes were narrowing dangerously. “And what might that be?”

“That USB stick,” William said, his smile benign, like he’d asked for something simple. Like a drink of water. “I want it.”