Driven by Fire
Authors: Anne Stuart
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romantic Suspense, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense
ALSO BY ANNE STUART
ROMANTIC SUSPENSE
T
HE
F
IRE
S
ERIES
Consumed by Fire
T
HE
I
CE
S
ERIES
On Thin Ice
Fire and Ice
Ice Storm
Ice Blue
Cold As Ice
Black Ice
S
TAND
-A
LONE
T
ITLES
Into the Fire
Still Lake
The Widow
Shadows at Sunset
Shadow Lover
Ritual Sins
Moonrise
Nightfall
Seen and Not Heard
At the Edge of the Sun
Darkness Before Dawn
Escape Out of Darkness
The Demon Count’s Daughter
The Demon Count
Demonwood
Cameron’s Landing
Barrett’s Hill
Silver Falls
C
OLLABORATIONS
Dogs & Goddesses
The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes
A
NTHOLOGIES
Burning Bright
Date with a Devil
What Lies Beneath
Night and Day
Valentine Babies
My Secret Admirer
Sisters and Secrets
Summer Love
New Year’s Resolution: Baby
New Year’s Resolution: Husband
One Night with a Rogue
Strangers in the Night
Highland Fling
To Love and To Honor
My Valentine
Silhouette Shadows
ROMANCE
Wild Thing
The Right Man
A Dark and Stormy Night
The Soldier and the Baby
Cinderman
Falling Angel
One More Valentine
Rafe’s Revenge
Heat Lightning
Chasing Trouble
Night of the Phantom
Lazarus Rising
Angel’s Wings
Rancho Diablo
Crazy Like a Fox
Glass Houses
Cry for the Moon
Partners in Crime
Blue Sage
Bewitching Hour
Rocky Road
Made in America #19
Banish Misfortune
Housebound
Museum Piece
Heart’s Ease
Chain of Love
The Fall of Maggie Brown
Winter’s Edge
Catspaw II
Hand in Glove
Catspaw
Tangled Lies
Now You See Him
Special Gifts
Break the Night
Against the Wind
N
OVELLAS
Married to It (prequel to Fire and Ice)
Risk the Night
HISTORICALS
S
CANDAL AT THE
H
OUSE OF
R
USSELL
Never Kiss a Rake
Never Trust a Pirate
Never Marry a Viscount
T
HE
H
OUSE OF
R
OHAN
The Wicked House of Rohan
Shameless
Breathless
Reckless
Ruthless
S
TAND
-A
LONE
T
ITLES
The Devil’s Waltz
Hidden Honor
Lady Fortune
Prince of Magic
Lord of Danger
Prince of Swords
To Love a Dark Lord
Shadow Dance
A Rose at Midnight
The Houseparty
The Spinster and the Rake
Lord Satan’s Bride
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 Anne Kristine Stuart Ohlrogge
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503952010
ISBN-10: 1503952010
Cover design by Jason Blackburn
For Lynda Ward and Jenny Crusie—I couldn’t have done it without you.
Contents
Chapter One
She never should have been there. Normally Jennifer Parker would have waited for the smoke to clear for a call for her services as a pro bono lawyer. She’d already acquired a small but stellar reputation for dealing with the poor and disenfranchised, and a cargo ship with seventy-three women and children bound for the sex trade would require her help sooner or later.
She had the perfect excuse to show up. She would have gotten a phone call from the DA’s office, or the Red Cross, or any of a number of charitable organizations in need of her expertise, and if anyone questioned her presence, she could simply explain that she saw no reason to wait when she might be needed. The police and the FBI and their ilk were doing an excellent job clearing the ship, but these victims would be better off dealing with a sympathetic woman than a gun-toting police force.
But that wasn’t her real reason for driving her ancient Toyota down to the docks and ferreting her way past the police barricades and news crews and gawkers.
“Do you want to be responsible for your brother’s death?” Her father had thundered at her from the end of the phone line, the father she hadn’t spoken to in three years. “I know you have no family feeling when it comes to most of us, but this is Billy, your baby brother! What would your mother have said if she knew you let him walk into a trap and did nothing to save him?”
“He got himself into it,” she said, fighting back the guilt. “If he’s been making money from sex trafficking, then he deserves whatever he gets.”
“A bullet between the eyes? I may have spent a fortune paying off the New Orleans police but there are other agencies involved in this, including some mysterious foreign group called the Organization or the Committee. They won’t hesitate to blow his brains out.”
“There’s nothing I can do that you can’t,” she said stubbornly.
“I can’t do anything. He’s not answering his cell phone, and if I or any of my men show up at the docks, they’ll think we’re a part of this mess.”
“Aren’t you?”
“Don’t be disrespectful! I know better than to get involved in a half-assed scheme that crumbles so easily. Why else do you think I’ve prospered for so long?”
“Because you pay off the police?” she suggested brightly.
The silence at the other end told her she’d gone too far, but there was nothing left of her relationship with her father to salvage. Finally he spoke.
“Are you going to save your brother? You know someone had to have played him—he’s the best of all of us,” Fabrizio Gauthier said ruthlessly, ignoring his daughter’s lifelong efforts to break free from her family’s pernicious influence.
He was right, though. Billy was the baby, too young to be mired in the illegal activities of the rest of the infamous Gauthiers. The boy . . . no, man . . . she knew would never have involved himself in something as filthy as sex trafficking. Fabrizio was right—someone had to have set him up.
“I’ll go,” she said finally. “Not for your sake, but because he was Mama’s baby. There’s a chance he hasn’t been totally corrupted yet.”
She didn’t expect a thank-you, and he didn’t offer one, breaking the connection rather than spending one more moment with his recalcitrant daughter. That suited her fine—she would be just as happy never to exchange another word with the man she thought of as a sperm donor and nothing more. She’d always felt like a changeling in her family of criminals, and once her mother died, only Billy had felt like her real kin.
It hadn’t taken her long to reach the crowded docks of the Port of New Orleans. Women and children were being herded onto a school bus, all of them looking dirty and pale and frightened. Instinctively she started toward them, then remembered she had come to find her brother. The people milling around were so busy that no one noticed when she slipped past the barriers and onto the container ship.
She came across the first body in the narrow stairway leading upward and she froze in horror, bile rising inside her. He’d been shot between the eyes, as her father had predicted, and his bowels had loosened with the suddenness of his death.
Holding her breath, she stepped over him, stumbling up the stairway. She found two more bodies on the next deck, and she almost turned around. In the distance she heard noise and shouting, and she wanted to run in the opposite direction, off this horrible boat with the stink of death all around her. How innocent could Billy be, with all the hideous things that were happening here?
She had just reached the next deck when she saw them—a group of men, some uniformed, some not. Three men were lying facedown on the deck, handcuffed, and another man lay bleeding up against a wall.
She darted into the shadows when one man turned, some preternatural sense telling him that he was being watched. She only had a brief glimpse of him—a tall man, in dark clothes, a gun in his hand. She had no idea whether he’d seen her or not, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She didn’t hear his footsteps approach, but instinct told her he was the kind of man who wouldn’t let anything go, and she managed to back into one of the cabins, closing the door silently behind her. She turned and came face-to-face with her baby brother.
He looked like hell. His face was smeared with smoke and blood, his mouth grim, and the look in his usually sweet brown eyes shocked her. For the first time he looked like their father, kingpin of the notorious Gauthier family of organized crime and political power, and in one hand he held what she recognized as a Glock 25, her father’s gun of choice. He was texting furiously on the cell phone in his other hand, and she almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Even death and disaster couldn’t pry Billy’s cell phone from his sticky fingers.
He looked up and saw her, and suddenly he was her baby brother again, looking lost and troubled. “What are you doing here, Sissy?” he whispered. “You need to get out of here! I’ve screwed up, and they’re going to kill me if they find me.”
“Father sent me,” she whispered, her voice just a breath of sound. “I’m trying to save your life! What the hell have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”
“I didn’t know,” he said helplessly. “By the time I realized what was going on I was in too deep to back out.”
“Oh, baby, of course you didn’t,” she said, her heart breaking. “You can turn state’s evidence—I can work something out . . .”
“I won’t make it that far,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “I’ll be dead before I get off the boat and you know it. The Committee is out there, and they don’t bother with due process.”
A chill rocketed through her. “Then we’ll have to get you out of here,” she said in a decisive voice.
Billy’s laugh was without humor. “Good old Sissy, always ready to save the world. There’s nothing you can do . . .”
She heard the hand on the doorknob, but Billy was even faster, diving behind a huge desk that took up most of the small room. Jenny tried to pull herself together in time to face the man who pushed open the door.
She knew it would be him, of course. The tall man with a gun even bigger than Billy’s, looking at her out of cold and dangerous eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded roughly, and that gun was pointed at her chest.
She didn’t make the mistake of moving. She could feel the tension in the air, and everything narrowed down into one thing. She had to get this man and his gun away from her brother. It didn’t matter what Billy had done, he was still her baby brother, and she knew he hadn’t understood what he’d been doing. She certainly wasn’t going to watch him be gunned down in front of her eyes.
“I’m Jennifer Parker,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster, trying to ignore the gun. “I’m a lawyer and a victims’ rights advocate. I get called in on cases like these.”
“Who called you?”
Shit. Should she lie? No, he was clearly the kind of man who checked the details. “No one. I heard the news on the police band on my car radio and decided I should show up and offer my help.”
“Alone in an empty cabin?” His voice was derisive. “So why did I get the impression that you were hiding out from someone?”
She glanced over at the desk and suddenly realized that Billy had left his damned cell phone on it. She strolled over, trying to look casual as she picked up the phone and shoved it in her pocket. She perched on the desk, trying to look natural, and swung her leg, ignoring her brother crouched down just behind her, with that lethal gun in his hand.
“You looked like you were going to shoot first and ask questions later,” she said, trying to appear at ease. “I’m here for the victims, not the enforcers.”
“You’re right, I would have.” He reached out and yanked her off the desk, ungently. “There are too many damned civilians here already, but since you’re here you may as well make yourself useful. They found one more victim hiding in the sick bay. You can talk to her and tell her we mean her no harm.”
“Is that true?”
“If she’s innocent. She’s not the one I’m looking for. I don’t expect you saw a young man in his early twenties around here?” The question came off as casual, but Jenny wasn’t fooled. She looked at the gun in his hand, then up into his face, and for a moment she froze, staring at him.
He was . . . mesmerizing. He was a tall man, six feet or so, with the kind of lean build that was deceptive in its strength. She didn’t for one moment underestimate just how dangerous he could be. His eyes were blue, not the bright blue of an innocent, but a steely feral blue, like a cold flame, and they should have been a warning. He wore his dark hair too long, as if he never had time to get it cut; he hadn’t bothered to shave in a couple of days, and his high cheekbones suggested some kind of exotic ancestry. With any other man she might find herself attracted to him, but not this man, not this threat to her brother. Not a man who would shoot first and ask questions later.
“I haven’t seen anyone.” The lie was instinctive, necessary, shameful.
“Then why were you skulking around?”
“I’ve seen three dead men since I came aboard, and you were standing there with a very large gun in your hand,” she said, keeping her expression blank. “I hadn’t seen anything to fill me with trust.”
“You shouldn’t be here.”
She couldn’t agree more. “You’re right. Why don’t you take me to see this woman you’ve found, and I’ll see what I can do to help her. She must be shattered.” She had to get him out of this room, away from Billy.
He shrugged. “That’s not my worry. Jim Long can take you to where she’s waiting.”
Relief washed through her. “I know Jim—I’ve worked with him before. And you are . . . ?”
“None of your damned business,” he said succinctly, opening the door for her.
She didn’t hesitate. He must be part of the Committee that her brother had mentioned. She needed to give Billy a chance to escape. “I didn’t see Jim out there.”
“I’ll take you to him.”
“Perfect,” she said, meaning it.
The man shot her a sharp look, but she simply gave him a cool nod and walked out the door, listening as he closed it behind them. If there was any chance Billy had really known what he was doing, then she’d protected the worst kind of criminal, and she was going to have to live with that. She just had to believe in him, and in her own instincts. Anyway, it was too late now, and if she told this unnamed man the truth he would probably shoot Billy, or the other way around, and she couldn’t bear the thought of any more dead bodies. She let the man lead the way, putting everything out of her mind but the young woman who needed her help. She’d done what she could to help her brother. Whether she’d made the right choice or not remained to be seen.
An hour later she found herself bringing Soledad to the bus for the refugees, her brother forgotten in the chaos. The exquisitely beautiful young woman was in some kind of shock, unable to produce more than a word or two, despite Jenny’s excellent Spanish, but she came along obediently enough, though Jenny could sense her distrust. Who could blame the girl? She’d been kidnapped from her home in Calliveria, locked inside a freight container with as many women and children they could fit, and then endured the grueling voyage up to New Orleans. It was lucky she wasn’t comatose.
The little ones bounced back more easily. When she climbed into the bus behind Soledad, she heard the buzz of noise, and the sudden, relieved laughter of a young child. She turned, needing the solace of it, only to see the man who’d seemed so threatening less than an hour ago squatting down beside a particularly grubby child, talking to him in calm, liquid Spanish. She couldn’t hear his words, but she could see the child’s reaction—gleeful and mesmerized. Maybe the man just had that effect on people, she thought for a moment. And then he rose and saw her, and his face went cool and blank, like a killer’s face.
She knew what a killer’s face looked like, thanks to her father. She knew this man had been responsible for some, if not all, of the dead men on board.
Danger, Will Robinson!
flashed in her mind.
“You can go home now,” he said to her.
She couldn’t resist. “Oh, may I?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “How kind of you to dismiss me.”
“If it were up to me you’d be answering a lot more questions, Ms. Parker,” he said. “But my friends on the police force tell me you’re untouchable. How much do you pay for that privilege?”
She bit back her instinctive reply. In fact, their hands-off approach with her came more from the work she did and the help she gave rather than her father’s generous payoffs, but the guilt that had been pushed to the back of her mind surged forward again, and he looked at her sharply, as if reading her mind.
“Nothing at all, John Doe,” she snapped. “The good I do outweighs any possible infringement on policy.”
He cocked his head to one side. “They might believe it. I don’t. And the name’s Ryder. Matthew Ryder. You’re going to be hearing it again.” It was a clear threat—the farthest thing from flirtation she could imagine—but she simply smiled at him.
“I’m looking forward to it.” And she realized with slightly horrified amazement that she actually was.