Authors: Lizzie Lynn Lee
As she rushed by the nurses’ station on her way to the elevator, she overheard a couple of them whispering among themselves about a strange irregularity in Joseph Sanford’s chart.
“It was weird,” muttered one of them, dressed in pink scrubs. “The puncture marks on his neck indicate he was shot with a tranquilizer.”
“Maybe it’s some awful new way to mug people without them fighting back,” suggested another.
An older, third nurse said gravely, “Yes, yes. But the amount of tranquilizer in his bloodstream… that’s the kind of stuff used to take down a wild animal. Like a bear.”
“How is he even alive?” asked Pink Scrubs, wide-eyed.
“A miracle?”
“Something like that,” said the older nurse darkly.
Rose walked away with a head full of question. Someone had jumped on her new boss and tranquilized him.
For what purpose? He wasn’t robbed. His wallet was intact. And why had he told the doctor he didn’t remember anything? Was he lying?
Her logic told her to stay away from Joseph Sandford but her heart ordered the opposite.
She must help him.
Besides, Joe had just offered her a job. A job she desperately needed.
And there was another thing, when he held her hand, her heart wouldn’t stop thumping like crazy. It had been forever since a man made her heart beat like that.
And Rose couldn’t just let that feeling go.
Chapter Two
Joe Sandford didn’t have a moment to waste as he made his way through the labyrinth of servers in the dimly lit room. The hum of computers all around him and a hundred fans keeping them cool, muffled his steps as he moved quietly.
It had been quite a night, he had to admit. Tailing the head of IT systems at ArisCorp was easy enough--that was the kind of work any private eye could take care of. He was a predictable man, balding and in his forties, an unmarried workaholic. Finding out which strip clubs he frequented was the easiest part of this whole job.
Paying one of the dancers to get him drinks all night had been the next step. Again, pure child’s play. He had good rapport with the dancers all around Cleveland. Any successful private eye had to if they wanted any information that was worth a damn. Nobody had more secrets spilled to them than strippers, and unfortunately for most private eyes, nobody held onto those secrets as well as them, either.
Joe, however, wasn’t most private eyes. He had the intuition to know which palms to grease and the money to make sure the bribes were generous. For a job like this one, they had to be. Slipping at any step meant alerting some powerful enemies.
For him, though, the prospect of more enemies felt like just a drop in the bucket compared to what else he was up against. But now was no time for reminiscing on the past.
He’d swiped the cardkey the IT admin had in his coat pocket and left it unzipped. When the man would come to later today, he’d think he had just left it at the strip club--and that was precisely where Joe meant to leave it after the job was over.
Nobody would be the wiser.
Getting into the ArisCorp headquarters had been another issue altogether. But Joe had learned long ago the art of moving through the shadows like a vesper, and he had tricks of the trade that made him more silent than the most seasoned of operatives. Tricks that were almost totally unique to him, in fact.
He had to admit, as many budget cuts as ArisCorp had made over the years, security was not one of them by a long shot. Some of the dozen-or-so guards he’d seen posted around the perimeter were men he knew from other jobs like this, and they were notoriously ruthless and efficient. That didn’t make much of a difference when he had been slipping around them silently, but he could at least appreciate that ArisCorp knew quality when it came to security.
Joe was here on what he considered a routine job. Of course, he thought, most of the jobs these days were awfully dull, so accepting a job from the little environmentalist nonprofit Green Futures to get some dirt on an industrial giant like ArisCorp was just too good to turn down, even if the money they were offering was a pittance.
Green Futures was concerned about a sudden disturbance in one of the wildlife preserves outside Cleveland. A few of the environmental scientists on their team apparently detected several kinds of toxins in the environment—none of the usual suspects for the Cleveland area, as it happened. They learned that one of their own officers had been approached with an offer of a large sum of money to turn a blind eye to that particular part of the wildlife preserve—that any misunderstandings could be covered up by the agent’s lawyers. Fortunately for Green Futures, the officer they approached wouldn’t be bought, so they hired Joe to investigate corporate activity—specifically, toxic waste dumping.
ArisCorp was a relative newcomer to Cleveland, which in itself was almost a dead giveaway. Hell, they’d been run out of California for dumping back in the 90s. Getting hard evidence on them was the hard part. But that was what made things more fun, Joe thought with a smile.
He reached the main access terminal for the company’s systems. There were half a dozen cameras on him, but he’d already seen to it that they were hacked to feed the security screens a loop. He punched in a few access codes and slipped a thumb drive into the computer loaded with a less-than-simple program that would download the computer’s data within minutes. As the program did its magic, Joe stood back and admired his handiwork.
He did well for himself, considering his was a one-man show. At least, until now, he reminded himself with a smile.
What was he to make of this new woman he’d hired? Why on earth had he hired her anyway? The last question he knew the answer to, if he was honest with himself. He had a sense for unique individuals, and there was something special about this Rose woman.
Rose
.
He rather liked the name. He almost laughed to himself as he realized he’d hired her on a whim. But he followed his instincts, and his instincts were never wrong.
Besides, there was something in her that he found … maybe it was a little early to be having unprofessional thoughts about her full, curvy figure. He wondered how those hips would feel under him, a fistful of her hair in his hand as he bent her back and…
The screen flashed as the program finished its work on the computer, and Joe smiled, removing the device and returning the system to the state he’d found it in. Silently, he slipped the drive into his pocket and headed for the doors.
He stepped out of them, his mind focused on his escape route, and a sharp intake of breath to his right alerted him. Looking over, he saw a lone guard standing there—a young man, some rookie that had probably wandered off of his assigned route. He was looking at Joe wide-eyed, still in the half-seconds of panic before his training kicked in.
Joe was faster. “This is your unlucky day, kid,” he mused with a hint of pity in his voice. The guard reached for his gun, but a swift blow to the neck from Joe knocked the man unconscious. Glancing around, Joe picked the body up and hauled it just inside the computer room. He propped the man up against the wall, taking out a flask in his pocket and sprinkling some of the alcohol along the man’s face and shirt before tucking it into his hand. The unfortunate man’s boss would be too furious over his drinking on the job to believe his insane story, especially when the evidence was so damning.
Without another word, Joe slipped out of the building, the rest of his route unimpeded, and he made his way out of the complex and back into the streets, pulling his collar up to mask his appearance for any cameras or onlookers that might have been monitoring the area.
He walked through the streets for at least another hour, just as an added precaution. He’d been followed too many times in his life to give the benefit of the doubt to a soul out there. That, and he had to admit, for everything he didn’t care for about the city of Cleveland, it boasted a beautiful sunrise.
His walk wasn’t entirely just to see the scenery and throw off imaginary followers, though. By the time the sun was already piercing through the skyscrapers of the city, Joe was ambling up towards the strip club where he’d tracked the IT admin to last night. As he crossed through the nearly empty parking lot to his car, he let the cardkey quietly clatter to the asphalt.
***
Oh, I did tell her she’d start today, didn’t I?
Joe was pulling up to his office right around 8 AM, and he found his newest hire waiting outside the door with a confused look on her face. He smiled. That punctuality was something to be admired, at least; now to see if she had a taste for what she was being punctual for.
His sleek black sedan pulled up next to the curb beside the door, and he stepped out of the vehicle, smiling at Rose cordially despite the look on her face. He couldn’t blame her for looking more than a little taken aback. He was still wearing his outfit from the night’s work--a black coat and long-sleeved shirt with tight-fitting pants and black shoes. He only started to remove his gloves as he got out of the car.
“Busy night?” she asked finally as he stepped up to her, and she had to look up to face him. From the moment he walked up to her, he could smell her attraction to him in the air.
Quite literally.
Joe’s abilities—the way he could move, his immense strength, his keen senses—they were derived from more than just excellent training. He had good genes. Exceptional ones, in fact, and he was more than human.
And few women were able to resist the magnetic attraction it generated around him. Rose wasn’t the first woman he’d seen give him those eyes as she gazed at the way his figure showed through his snug-fitting clothes, the confident stride he had as he approached her, and most of all, the piercing, enchanting gaze he had that seemed able to hold a person immobile as he looked at them.
That
, he owed entirely to his superhuman nature. The blood of a
lion ran
in Joseph Sandford’s veins. It was part of him, and it had become dearer to him than his old, weaker humanity ever had been. He was far more than a mere man, and he knew it. He embraced it. His nature gave him an edge over others they couldn’t possibly hope to meet—much less so for the women who deeply desired him.
But would they appreciate his true nature as much as he did? Joe didn’t suspect as much. So to everyone he met, he was simply what he presented himself as—a highly talented private eye.
“I always work late nights, Rose,” he said, smiling brightly as he made his way past her to the door.
“Aren’t you exhausted?” she said, surprise in her eyes.
“Not entirely.” He smiled. “You could say I’m something of a nocturnal creature. In my line of work, you have to train yourself to shun the daylight hours. Nobody does anything interesting while the sun’s up,” he added with a wink, and he was delighted to see a little color in her cheeks. “I usually come into the office around 9, work until about 6, and make it home in time to sleep through breakfast.”
“Oh!” she said, suddenly flustered as they made their way down the hallway to the elevator. “Should I come back later, then?”
The elevator doors opened, and the two of them stepped inside. It was a cramped space, and Rose had to stand rather close to Joe. He smiled down at her as he sensed her nervousness. The poor woman must have had a lot of tension and anxiety to be so tightly-wound. She’d be amusing.
“I’m happy to see you any time of the day, Rose,” he said in his deep, silky voice.
She chewed her lip and seemed to be struggling for the words to reply with.
With a chuckle, he spared her the discomfort. “Really though, I wouldn’t expect you to be in the office for the graveyard shift like me. I’d be out in the field nearly every night, anyway. You can make this a 9 to 5 kind of arrangement, if you like—you’ll find I’m not a stickler about daytime hours, just as long as my messages get to me.”
“Your messages?” she repeated.
“Well yes,” he said. “As my administrator, you’ll be in charge of sorting through my various incoming messages and files. I’ll warn you,” he said as they reached the top floor and the doors opened. “The messages won’t mean much to you, but leave that to me. Having them organized, along with my case files, will make a world of difference for me.” He made his way across the floor to a door without a handle, and he put his thumb on a sensor nearby to open it.
Inside was what Joe regarded as a rather modest office, but Rose seemed stunned by the look of the place. Joe was by no means a minimalist. The sleek white tile flooring was pristine, and there was a single desk with a computer up against the far wall. Around the whole office space, the black walls were decorated with art, mostly bright and vibrant cubist pieces. Planters lined the space below them, all making up for the lack of windows in the front of the office. A single door led to the back, where Joe’s private office was.
“This will be your workspace,” he said, smiling. “I’ll take that expression to assume you’re pleased with it?”
“I’ve never worked anywhere private, much less as refined as this,” she admitted.