Chapter One
Six Weeks later, New Orleans
DECLAN LEANED against the stair railing. “C’mon on baby let’s get you upstairs and out of this dress.”
The blonde woman giggled and broke from his embrace. “Chase me.”
Declan braced himself against the railing, after a night of drinking he was in no shape to pursue her. He was Declan Shaw, he didn’t chase pussy. He just snapped his fingers and it appeared in his bed hot and ready. She caught his eye and blew him under the table, she earned a night to remember.
“Third door on the right. I’ll even give you a head start.”
The blonde giggled again and headed upstairs. She whipped her blue dress over her head and tossed it at him.
“If you catch me, I’ll let you do anything you want to me.”
That was a given. Declan caught the dress, the silky material warm in his hand. He smiled. This never got old, a warm willing woman. He took a step as he watched her naked ass climb the staircase in the mansion. The world spun and he realized he was toasted, but he was going to get his dick wet, hopefully get a few hours of sleep and enjoy the rest of his weekend before he had to go back to work being a rock star.
Okay he had a plan.
A shoe flew past his head and he ducked almost losing his balance. Was she trying to decapitate him?
“Kitty!”
He saw his latest playmate sitting on the top step holding Magnolia, Charlotte’s cat in her lap. There was a joke in there about pussy holding pussy, he even took a second to figure it out, but he was too drunk to form it correctly.
“You have a cat. How cute is that?”
“What the hell?” Magnolia should be in Travis and Charlotte’s room with a bag full of food and an assortment of cat toys.
Did Travis and Charlotte come home early? The happy couple were supposed to be in Vermont at Charlotte’s gay best friend slash ex fiancé and his new boyfriend’s B and B having a sex fest. Thinking that convoluted thought almost made him lose his boner.
“She’s Travis’ girlfriend’s cat. And she shouldn’t be loose.” He reached the woman and took the cat out of her arms and almost crawled to Travis’s room. He found the door open and the room was a mess. Charlotte must have been excited to go to Vermont, she never let Travis be a slob anymore.
He put the cat down, pushed her in the room and closed the door. He leaned against the door jamb and glanced across the hall to Shane’s room and noticed the door was open. Same with Malcolm’s and Gavin’s. He didn’t check Vaughn’s room because he didn’t care.
Down the hall he noticed his door was open too. That was strange. Now he was drunk, confused, and creeped out. No one was supposed to be here. They took the weekend off because the family Yorke was having a big blow out and everyone decided a weekend away would do them good. Shane was in Iowa at the family farm. Malcolm and Gavin went to Florida, Gavin to surf and Malcolm to check out this ska band he was thinking of producing. Vaughn had picked up a couple live gigs in Texas.
Declan was going to visit his mom and Brody in L.A. but his mom had the flu and her doctor didn’t want to stress her out even further.
“I’m getting cold.” She walked past him.
So was he. He wanted to get lost in between some silky thighs tonight.
“I’ll warm you up.” He watched her enter his room.
“How romantic.”
“What?” He pushed off from the wall and went into his bedroom and stopped short. Red rose petals were strewn on the hardwood floor. Candles were lit on every empty space. This scene was set for seduction.
“This puts me in the mood. How did you know?” He took in every detail of the scene. Even the snowy white comforter had been pulled down. The only thing missing was a bottle of champagne and chocolates.
“I didn’t do this.”
“I don’t understand.”
Then he spotted a big red envelope on his pillow. He walked over and pulled it off the pillow and slid his finger under the flap. He pulled the card out and something fell to the bed. He picked it up and recognized a bullet. He began to shake. He took a breath regaining his composure. He opened the card. He read the letters, but they didn’t form in his head. Then he read them again. I’m aiming for your heart. Shit he thought he had a stalker.
JANE PETERSON KNEW she was dreaming. She watched her mother being murdered again. In her logical mind she wanted to tear her eyes away, but she couldn’t. Her grandfather hit her mother again. He screamed telling her to beg Allah for forgiveness. Jane peed on herself again. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t cry out. She couldn’t stop it. Her heart raced.
“Jane.”
Her eyes flew open and she sat up in the dingy hotel room bed.
“What?” She rubbed her eyes and focused on Gita Limbu, standing in the connecting door between the hotel rooms.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m good.” Gita’s small body took up hardly any space in the door. Her short stature and caramel colored doll-like face and cheery English accent belied her deadly nature.
What she could do with a blade on flesh made Jane weep with envy. Her grandfather and father were Gurkha soldiers from Nepal. Grandpa Limbu fought for the British back in the day. So did her dad, now he trained British Special Forces. Gita continued the family business, retired from the military, now she freelanced. When Jane needed to launch her own version of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Gita was on the first plane out of London.
“We hear from the Brits?”
Gita smiled. “Twenty.”
Jane slid off the bed. She picked her up Beretta off the night stand and slid it in her into the waistband of her cargo pants.
“How much is that in American?”
“Twenty seven million, five hundred, two thousand, three hundred fifty three dollars and seventy nine cents.”
Jack-mother-fucking-pot. “Did you do the math in your head?” Kick in ten from the angry soon to be ex-wife, twenty from the Feds divided by five and it wasn’t buy your own private island money, but it was college money for her sibling’s kids and her I-can-retire-sooner-than-I-thought fund.
Gita held up her cell phone. “I have an app.”
“Sweet.” Jane took a hair tie out of her pocket and put her dark hair in a ponytail. “Irina,” she called.
The red haired Russian stuck her head into the door. “Da?”
“We hear from the Russians?”
Irina scowled. “Fuck Putin. They put me on hold.”
The sexy Russian was a small arms expert and one of the best honey traps in the business. If she wanted you seduced and talking the deal was done. “You sure this isn’t personal?”
Irina scowled. “I want the respect.”
Jane didn’t have time to deal with this shit. Either they wanted a ticket to the party or they didn’t. “I didn’t want to deal with them anyway.”
“You know why I like you Jane?”
Jane figured until Irina and the fifth member of their quintet got together, Irina wanted to sleep with her. Although flattered, Jane didn’t play for the girl team. “My rack?”
“That is number two.” Irina pointed a finger at her. “You have standards.”
She could roll with that. “I like doing the Lord’s work.”
Gita and Irina gawked at her like she just sprouted another head. “What is that in English?”
Jane walked over the man duct taped to the chair and pulled off his hood. His eyes were still glazed over from the sedative they’d been pumping into him to keep him quiet. Malik Amin. One of Bin Laden’s inner circle still breathing. Until twenty hours ago he was number two on the big bad list still free. “There are people who are so vile, so evil they are beyond redemption in this earthly realm and when you put them down it’s God’s work.”
“Amen sister.”
Jane turned to see Paige Ernest standing in the door way. The sweet faced honey blonde was in her thirties and still got carded at bars. She could hack any computer and handle a sniper rifle like nobody’s business. They’d been besties since their West Point days. “What’s the word?”
“The French told me to fuck myself.”
“Fuck the French.” Irina said.
Jane agreed. Cheap bastards probably didn’t want to pay. Her cell phone pinged and she checked her text. It was from the fifth member of the party Makeda Hadar, Irina’s lover and a former Israeli soldier. They’d met when Jane had done a joint mission with the Israeli army outside of Baghdad. Keda was great at covert ops and if you needed to blow some shit up she could do it with a rock and ball point pen.
Jane read the one word on the screen. Done. That meant that she had landed in Sydney with Sanaa Amin and her children. “Keda and the package have arrived. Let’s get this over with. I need a bath and scotch.”
She turned to Malik Amin and noticed fear in his eyes. Bastard knew this wasn’t going to end well for him. She smiled. “They’re going to break you and you’re going to tell them everything.” She said in perfect Arabic. “Do you know why I know this?” She patted his cheek. “Because you’re not one of the faithful. You like to pretend you are, but we know the truth. You don’t feel like a man unless you have a woman under your thumb. It’s ironic that it was women who fucked you over. Your wives, who can’t stand you, me and my girls, and I’m going to make sure that it’s a woman pulling your strings. When you’re sitting in a dirty cell with a probe up your ass I hope you think about your mistakes. You should have never married Sanaa, she might have been raised Muslim, but she’s American and you know what that does to a girl. You should have never tried to sell her twelve year old daughter to a pervert.”
A tear rolled down his cheek. His day of reckoning had finally arrived. How many people his bombs killed no one would ever know. Since Bin Laden’s death he’d been on the run. He was supposed to be in Cuba until he could slip into Bolivia, but he made the mistake of trying to marry off one of his daughters to the wrong man. Sanaa had called Cindy Verdon, who ran a woman’s rights organization, and Cindy called Jane. The rest was history. Jane got a big payday, Cindy got a nice donation, Sanaa and her sister wives got their freedom and Malik’s money, the US got a big bad they’d been hunting for years, and Malik got what was coming to him.
As they loaded up their prisoner, her cell pinged again. She got a text from her old major Mick Fernandez. After he retired, he opened up his own security firm. Jane did work for him occasionally, usually a high paying gig that wasn’t too bloody. She basically prevented some big wig from taking a bullet while wearing a dress or go after some high value felon.
He had job a for her. She was going to turn him down, when his next text said she would be sorry if she did. He said he had a blast from the past. That intrigued her and she hated to turn down money. She had her eye on a sweet house in the Garden District that needed a lot of TLC. She sighed.
“Down time is for sissies.”
She told him to pick her up at the Belle Chasse Naval Air Station in four hours. She knew the entire team would have to be debriefed by the Feds and the Brits and that could take a while.
JANE HUGGED her friends thanked them for the help and then walked over to Mick’s black Escalade parked under a Spanish moss draped live oak. She opened up the door and his smile turned to a frown.
“What the fuck is that smell?”
“Hello to you too.”
Mick was a handsome man. Dark haired and dark eyed with a dazzling Latin lover smile that drove the boys crazy. He taught Jane to be a soldier and he was a good friend. “You aren’t getting in my ride smelling like that.”
Jane put her hand on her hip. She knew she didn’t smell girl pretty, but after the last two days she needed sleep more than a shower, besides she had to go pick up her gear at the hotel where she intended to shower. “I’m not getting any fresher.”
“Where the hell you been?”
“Cuba and then the bottom of a shrimp boat.”
He reached behind the driver’s seat and threw a towel on the leather seat. “Do I want to know why you were in Cuba?”
Uptight neat freak bastard. “I brought Malik Amin back for some American hospitality.”
His eyes widened. “That had to be a major payday, you couldn’t invite a friend?”
She felt a moment of guilt. If she’d have shown up with Mick and his boys, Sanaa Amin would have locked the front door and called it quits. “It was, but the lady who hired us only wanted women or you know I would have invited you.”
“Why?”
Over the last few years she’d called on Mick and his guys when she needed muscle and he’d hired her when he needed the feminine touch. “She’s his wife and still Muslim enough to not feel comfortable dealing with men.”
He seemed to ponder that. “I forgive you because I snagged a major A list client.”
She laughed. “Did Channing Tatum hire you?”
Mick shook his head. “I can beat that.”
This was interesting. “Who’s the client?”
“Declan Shaw.”
Holy crap. “Scorned Declan Shaw?”
Mick started the car and pulled onto the main road. “Is there another?”
She wished there was because where Declan Shaw went, Malcolm Elliot wasn’t far behind and she hated knowing that, because that meant she cared, which felt like a betrayal to her family. “Not really.”
“Declan Shaw has a stalker.”
That wasn’t surprising. A man that handsome and charismatic should have a legion of them. An actor she’d had as a client once told her that a stalker was proof he’d made it. He’d laughed about it until she tried to burn down his house with him in it. Did she want this job? “Probably the father of some poor girl he humped and dumped.”
“It’s a woman.”
Was she ready for this? To come face to face with Malcolm Elliot. “Is he there?”
“He is. The band is working on the next album.”
Jane wasn’t sure how to feel. Anger, curiosity, envy. There was nothing she could do about it. She prided herself on her ability to let go of the things she couldn’t control. “Oh.”
“I just get an oh.” He turned on the road heading to New Orleans. “Don’t you want to meet him?”
She stared out the window. Did she want to meet her half-brother? Did she want to run the of risk of Malcolm finding out who she was? If she met Malcolm, she might meet Fox Elliot and she’d be tempted to beat the crap out of Fox for abandoning her mother. There was always this corner of her brain that blamed Fox Elliot for her mother’s death, because if he’d put a ring on her even temporarily she might be alive. “I don’t know.”
Mick grinned. “I don’t know is Jane for yes.”
Damn he knew her to well. “I’m curious.”
“Good, the job pays a hundred grand.”
He knew she couldn’t resist cash. “What do I have to do?”
“Don’t let Declan Shaw get dead and be sexy in a dress. You can handle that.”
She’d done worse, she could deal with her half-brother. Did she want to? For the last ten years, she’d been curious about her biological family, she’d read articles, or catch some tidbit on the internet, but she’d never wanted to meet them. Half-brother number two, Grant, was in and out of rehab until he landed in jail for trying to mule enough coke to drop an elephant. Number one, Tate, was a porn director. Malcolm, the youngest of the Elliot brood, turned out okay, he just looked funny. As for Fox, she didn’t even want to think about her sperm donor. She’d landed on her feet and had a family that loved her, and that she loved more than anything. Finding her blood relations would seem like she’d missed something. She hadn’t, but still… “I can deal with my daddy baby.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“You pay for the clothes, because skanky groupie wear is not my taste level. And if Declan Shaw is an asshole, I get an extra fifty large for not taking him out myself.”
“Just don’t do it on my watch.”
Now what fun would that be?