The telephone rang while Jace Blackstone was killing somebody.
Killing a woman, to be exact. But she was a woman who really, really needed to die. He ignored the phone.
His adversary smiled, cruel and slow, the darkness inside visible at last behind the gorgeous façade, then dropped into a crouch. The filleting knife she held sliced patterns in the hot, stale air of the abandoned warehouse as she taunted him. “All out of bullets, then? Pity. Strong man. Big man. You won’t be so big when I’ve cut some pieces off you. And you won’t be strong at all after an hour or so. You’re going to be screaming. You’re going to beg me to let you die.” She waved the knife again, the conjurer distracting you with one hand while the other one picked your pocket.
There was nothing as hypnotic as a weapon in the hand of your enemy. A weapon that was a heartbeat away from slicing your guts out.
He didn’t tense. He relaxed, coiled his energy into himself like a spring, and…
The phone rang again.
He jumped and swore aloud. In the corner, Tobias raised his handsome head. Jace’s beautiful adversary, though, just looked at him, those I’m-yours-if-you’re-man-enough eyes mocking him the same way they had when he’d first caught sight of her in the opulent lobby of the Four Seasons, and purred, “Poor baby.”
Jace picked up the phone and said, “Bugger off. I’m killing people.”
Tobias’s skinny tail thumped twice. He always knew when it was Rafe.
Rafe’s dark Aussie drawl took up more than its fair share of airspace even when he was wasting his star power on his big brother. “How long have you been sitting on your arse?”
“An hour.”
“As a liar, you’re bloody useless. Close to the end? Ready to emerge into the real world again?”
“Nearly there. Final action scene.” Jace considered telling Rafe that the real world was the last place he wanted to be, but he didn’t.
Weakness. You didn’t go around confessing to it, even if you weren’t a six-foot-five near-superhero ex-Delta Force operative with a mind like a computer who could disable four attackers at once. On a bad day. Tied to a chair.
No. Even if you were just a reasonably tall, moderately fit Aussie bloke who used to do real things and now made up stories for a living, you didn’t admit weakness. Even to your brother.
“Brilliant,” Rafe said. “Walk while you talk, though. A few press-ups, maybe. If you don’t get moving, you’re going to get fat.”
“When you’re chopping wood for heat like I am,” Jace said, “you can give me stick about not moving enough. I don’t have an assistant to fetch my latte, and I worked out this morning. Ran as well. Ask Tobias.” The Ridgeback raised his head again, his gaze alert. Jace could swear he saw too much. “My heart’s all good,” he told Rafe and Tobias, “if that’s what you’re worried about, so you can shut your gob. I’m doing a knife fight, though. It’s not coming out right. If you’ll walk through it with me, I may forgive you for ringing me in the middle of it. I’m killing somebody here, mate.”
“Right.” Rafe was all business now. Turning up in the nick of time, as always. Rafe had been born to save. “Who am I?”
“A woman. Smoking hot.”
“It’s a big ask,” Rafe said, “but I’m very good.”
“Girl, more like,” Jace clarified. “Beautiful enough to stop a man’s heart, and an ice-cold assassin, as it turns out. Russian mafia. Matt’s been sleeping with you. You think he won’t be able to bring himself to kill you. You think you’re better than he is. You’re overconfident.”
He put the phone on speaker, and then it was back and forth across the hickory floor of the cabin, describing his actions to Rafe, his brother offering up his own suggestions, his own counter-moves. When it came to action, Jace’s hands could only type what his body told him, and for that? He needed to move.
He was ducking, feinting, as Tobias prowled the boundaries of the log cabin like a wraith. Jace—Matt Sawyer, that is—grabbed his adversary’s slim wrist in a hard hand. Even as he did it, she tossed the knife to her left hand and lunged for the kill.
No softness in her now. Her teeth were bared, and there was nothing but menace in that face. Nothing but hatred.
He was reading her intention, dropping to his knees, thrusting his head forward instead of back, moving into the fight instead of away from it, shaking up her assumptions and throwing her off-balance. He knew the blade was whistling through the air, ready to take off his scalp, even as he drove the crown of his head into the beautiful body that had been trembling under his a few hours earlier. He heard the whoosh of her breath leaving her lungs, felt the weakness, and he was tumbling her, flipping, ducking behind a wooden beam as she recovered. As she went for the kill.
And then the mistake. The frozen quarter-second when she stared at the quivering blade impaled in the heavy wood. The moment when she didn’t react fast enough.
Sawyer hadn’t spent that moment staring, though. It was what he’d told her. She might be good. He was better. He had an elbow crashing into her face and his hand on the knife, was wrenching it from its prison. She lunged for him, her nose spouting blood, her teeth sinking into his left hand all the way to the bone, her legs kicking viciously, and he struck.
A knife to the heart. The way he’d felt when he’d finally understood exactly why the enemy had seemed one step ahead of him all this time. When he’d realized he’d been betrayed by the woman he loved.
Yeah, it had hurt. But a real knife to the heart hurt more. He knew that. He’d watched it happen before. He was watching it now.
She fell to the floor, graceless, in a heap of tangled legs and arms, those thick-lashed golden-brown eyes staring up at him as her failing heart pumped one last time. And then she died.
“Good,” Jace said to Rafe, breathing hard with effort and adrenaline as Tobias came forward at last and thrust his muzzle into his hand now that he wasn’t Sawyer anymore. Now that he’d switched gears. “Cheers, mate.”
“Don’t hang up,” Rafe said. “I wanted to—”
It was two hours later when Jace realized what his brother had said. He only remembered, in fact, when the phone rang again. He picked it up and said, “Sorry.”
No answer.
“Rafe?” he asked. “Mate?”
Still nothing, then a sharply indrawn breath, a low, halting voice. “It’s you.”
“Pardon?” He held the phone out and checked the screen. Not an area code he recognized, and not a voice he did, either. He put the phone to his ear again and said, “Wrong number.” As he was about to hang up, he heard the voice ask, “Did you get it?”
That was odd. Annoying as well. He didn’t bother to say anything more, just hung up and turned back to his laptop screen. Somehow, it had become afternoon. He could tell by the angle of the sunlight streaming through the window at his shoulder. The first Tuesday in May, barely spring in the Montana Rockies, the chill of the mountain night ready to fall around you like a blanket of snow.
He picked up his coffee cup, and the liquid within it was cold. Huh. He had been working longer than he’d thought. He could’ve sworn he’d just refilled that.
The urgency had abated, that burning need to get the words down before he lost them, and he became aware of the tension between his shoulder blades. He stood up, interlaced his fingers, stretched his arms overhead before swinging them in giant circles, then headed out the door of the cabin with Tobias padding behind him.
Rafe was right. Jace had run the mountain with the dog that morning and had worked out after that, but other than the choreography for the knife fight, he’d barely moved since. He was hungry, he was thirsty, he was stiff, and he wanted a beer. But he had one hell of a story, with only the epilogue to go. He smelled money, but more than that? He smelled satisfaction.
Might as well empty the mailbox while he was out here. He ran a hand over his beard, then pushed back his hair and tried to remember when he’d checked the mail last. He couldn’t, so he jogged lightly to the intersection with the main road, inhaling the sharp, clean smell of evergreens, then pulled open the door of the galvanized iron mailbox with an effort.
It had been longer than he’d thought since he’d been down here, apparently. It took some time to prise the contents loose, they were wedged in there so tightly. Rubbish, mostly. Why did people still mail things? Who looked at advertising? He walked up to the house again, sorting along the way. Catalog, catalog, grocery store circular, flyer from the hardware store, oil-change coupon. On and on. And one hand-addressed legal-sized envelope.
Retirement-planning seminar, probably, and they were trying to make it look like personal mail so you’d open it. He was only thirty-six, but that didn’t seem to stop anybody. Even though they didn’t know who he was, as far as he could tell, other than that weird bloke up on the mountain. He ventured only a few times a week into the fleshpots of Sinful, Montana—the town where he’d bought this cabin on a desperate whim during that low point nearly six months back. Had made the down payment, in fact, with the money from returning the ring.
He kept his distance. From Sinful. From people in general. Dogs, now—dogs might not be fantastic conversationalists, but at least they were honest. What you saw was what you got. He went to the grocery store, the gym, the hardware store, and his favorite café, with an occasional foray into the library when the cabin’s walls closed around him. He’d never sampled the glories of the his-and-hers spa treatment room as he’d originally planned, let alone the master suite at the Sinful Inn. He’d never set foot inside Montana Gems, and as for the lingerie store where you could buy your lady something fragile enough to rip straight off her? He’d crossed the street to avoid that one.
But he hadn’t run away. He’d been too stubborn for that. He’d stayed here and finished his book, and then he’d written another one. Which meant he’d won. He kicked open the door of the cabin again, tossed the rubbish into the burn box, then hesitated over that white envelope.
“May as well,” he muttered, then ripped it open, unfolded two stapled, printed sheets, and sighed. Some wannabe author sending him a story, wanting him to “help me get started.” He was about to toss the whole thing into the burn box with the rest of the junk when something caught his eye.
His name. His real name. Not Jason Black. Jace Blackstone. They were the first two words in the manuscript. And wait, he thought, his gaze flicking back to the ripped envelope. This hadn’t been forwarded by his agent. It had been addressed here. To him. What the hell?
He sank down into the rocking chair that sat in front of the enormous green wood stove, pulled the manuscript all the way out of the envelope, and began to read.
Jace Blackstone opened his eyes. At least he thought he did.
Blackness. A void.
Something was wrong with his brain. Some fuzziness. He started to sit up, and he couldn’t.
Wait. He couldn’t move.
Choppy breath coming short. Panic beginning to twist in his gut. Arms. His arms were splayed overhead, fastened by the wrists with something hard. Not cloth. Something that cut at his skin when he tried to pull free.
Ankles, too. No play in them at all. He was spread-eagled on something soft… a mattress. Blindfolded and secured with… with zip ties, maybe. Hard, cutting plastic.
The fuzziness cleared some, enough to remember sipping his drink as he sat backwards on a bar stool, one booted foot on the rail, surveying the room. And the moment when he’d seen the blonde, her hair falling over one eye, her dress and her mouth as red as sin, as hot as hell, and everything from her deep cleavage to her swaying hips speaking the language of lust.
The language of lust? No. Too much. And this woman sounded like Jessica Rabbit. Jace kept reading anyway.
She’d walked straight over to him, not bothering to drop her eyes. Not hiding what she wanted. Then she’d tossed that mane of blonde hair back, looked sidelong at him, and purred, “Buy a girl a drink?”
He remembered that, and he remembered buying himself another one, too. Remembered taking a sip, the whisky burning a path down his throat as hot as her gaze on him. But that was all. And now he was here, in the dark, tied like a sacrifice.
Helpless.
“Hello?” he called out, then hated the weakness. He wanted to ask, “Who’s there? Where am I?” But he didn’t.
When the soft slap came, he flinched. And his heart, which had already been racing, turned it up another notch. Because the blow wasn’t from a hand. It was something else. Something flexible, but with a sting. Then the nearly tickling touch as it was drawn down his body, and he was tensing more.
He wanted to ask, “Who are you? What do you want?” He wanted to say, “Let me go.” But he was damned if he’d give her—him—the satisfaction. The blonde? Somebody else? Was this about sex? Money?
The next blow fell.
It was about pain.
Jace could hear his own ragged breathing, clearly audible in the quiet cabin. He turned the page. The next one—the last one—was blank.
Movement beside him. A faint sound. A hum.
“Huh!” The exclamation was out before he could stop himself, and his body jerked, sending the rocking chair into motion and startling a sharp bark out of Tobias. The Ridgeback was standing by Jace’s chair, whining softly, the source of the movement and the noise.
Jace shook his head to clear it, then jumped up, leaned down for the handle of the wood stove, shoved the manuscript inside, struck a match, and lit the whole mess up. He caught sight of the envelope—no return address—grabbed it, too, and tossed it on top before slamming the door shut.
Wait, he thought as he watched the glass window glow yellow as the flame flickered and died. What would Matt Sawyer, super soldier, have done in this situation? Something much more clever, of course. Sawyer would have preserved the evidence, obviously, because something else was clicking into place in Jace’s brain now. That phone call.
“It’s you,” the husky voice had said. “Did you get it?” Male or female, Jace hadn’t been able to tell. Phone numbers could be traced, though. Envelopes with no return address, even if he’d noticed the postmark, which he hadn’t? Not so much.
He hadn’t been so stupid after all, then. It was a one-time thing, or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t, there would be more evidence, and next time, he’d save it. Anyway, it wasn’t news that fans could send you some crazy stuff. Invitations to their birthday parties six states over, offers to come to your home and “take care” of you while your wife was away. And if you were a six-foot-three Aussie thriller writer with some female readership, a few muscles, and blue eyes—invitations into their lives and their beds.
But not on the phone.
Not using your real name.
Not in your home.
Time to get prepared.