Stolen Vengeance: Slye Temp book 6 (13 page)

And why the hell she was in that shitty place?

If you really cared, you’d have been around to know the answer to that.

Valene’s words had rambled around in his head all night.

To avoid thinking about that and to clear up who the fuck Charlie was, Dingo had spent his surveillance time outside her apartment hammering on his laptop to find out what he could on Charlie. Basically, the guy checked out as an antiquities and rare artifacts dealer, but that was before he pushed past online business listings anyone could get. Nothing of value and nothing too high profile. But anyone could find that much. Dingo had gone deeper on Charlie and the guy still looked upstanding until Dingo did a bit of stealth hacking to find what Josh had run across. Charlie’s background was buried in layers that would take a shovel to dig through.

There were holes here and there. Given enough time, Dingo could track Charlie electronically and find just who might be Charlie’s black market art dealer overseas.

Dingo could see why Sabrina’s hackles were up and, yes, he agreed that Charlie was suspect, but the team hadn’t come out here to stop the illegal art trade.

Plus, holding Valene responsible for Charlie’s criminal behavior was a serious stretch, since Valene would have no reason to go deeper than a normal background search on Charlie.

If you were still in Valene’s good graces, she’d have believed you when you cast suspicion on Charlie
.

He didn’t need another reminder that he’d been MIA when she needed him.

Bottom line? Charlie had nothing to do with Slye Temp’s being in LA to catch an assassin, which meant his relationship with Valene was still none of Sabrina’s business. He’d find out what Valene had agreed to do for Charlie and deal with that when he had time. Like when he wasn’t watching for a threat.

A young couple strolled past Dingo, the happy pair jogging logic loose in his mind.

Valene
could
be here if she came as someone’s date.

Shit. But he had no say so, no reason to be fighting this unreasonable spark of irritation.

All that flood of logic did nothing to stop him from heading in the direction he’d last seen those golden locks.

“Nothing suspicious so far,” Nick reported to the team from the two-story glass entrance.

Dingo paused.

Team members were expected to report
anything
suspicious, but there wasn’t anything technically suspicious about him seeing his former...what?

Girlfriend? He’d never had one.

Before meeting Valene, he’d been more of a one-night-friends kind of guy, who went for casual encounters with a woman who never expected to see him again.

Valene didn’t fit into
that
category.

He had no idea how to categorize her and he had a feeling that
not
knowing made him a dick.

Good thing Sabrina wasn’t here or she’d be in his face asking why he was so worried about a woman when he couldn’t even define what she was to him.

He forced his breathing to slow down, anything to slow the fist punching his heart over how he’d hurt Valene. And the other fist slamming his gut to complete the repeat one-two punch, because she’d up and married someone while he was gone. The guy Dingo had seen looked like he modeled on the side.

Could he blame her?

No.

There’d been no words to bind them to each other. It wasn’t that Dingo didn’t care for her, but that he was not the man to be home every night. He’d been on the run from all that since getting tossed aside at eight.

He still cared, but he’d get over it.

Every time he closed his eyes, he saw her smile and heard her laughter. Uninterrupted sleep was never going to happen again. His heart hadn’t let him forget.

But he’d taught that damaged organ to live without love the week his mother committed suicide and his stepdad dumped Dingo at an orphanage. He’d retrain his heart again just as soon as he found the damn stalker, insured Valene was safe and got the hell out of Cali-
fucking
-fornia.

He searched the fair-haired women he could see. None of them were Valene.

Because he was losing his mind. She was not here.

This city was full of hot blondes who were not Valene.

He had to stop imagining he saw her every time a sexy woman showed up.

Tanner came into view wearing a frown and heading Dingo’s way.

Nick’s deep voice reported, “Arriving guests are down to a trickle. Handing off the entrance surveillance to Josh. I’m making a pass through the crowd.” 

Dingo had installed video feeds, and one covered the entrance that Nick referenced.

Nick would move through everyone without drawing the least bit of attention, since these people bled the same blue blood he did. At least that’s what Dingo always figured about the crazy guy.

Crazy, but the loose wire you wanted on a team when your back was in a corner.

Tanner moved his hand up to his throat mic, deactivating it as he passed by Dingo and murmured, “Just saw Valene.”

She
was
here?

How had she gotten inside an event that cost as much as her car for an invitation? He’d questioned Sabrina’s claim that Valene had received suspicious funds, but he couldn’t deny something was up.

Dingo looked around. Who the hell could she be with if she was here as someone’s date?

What do you care if she’s not your ...

Fuck. He really had to figure out what she was to him. But first, he had to find out what she was doing here, which meant he had to talk to her without getting caught on one of the ten lipstick cameras he’d hidden throughout the event complex.

Chapter 14

Nick followed a woman who hadn’t come through the party entrance to Savoir Faire West.

He’d have remembered that one.

And he’d wager his favorite Ferrari that she hadn’t inserted along with the other wait staff, since Blade had forwarded every face to Josh with credentials that all matched up.

Nor did Nick think she belonged to any one of three security groups. There were so many people guarding this place and their respective celebrity bodies that they were falling over each other.

Those two men of Tinker’s on the roof had the best positions of all.

The woman Nick followed turned a corner too soon, instead of heading out to the tiered gardens where he would have expected someone on the wait staff to go with a tray full of hors d'oeuvres.

He knew that body.

Chin-length brunette hair, wire-framed glasses, pale makeup, black and white wait-staff outfit. Everything about her packaging advertised average female, all except her height.

Disguising a
lack
of height was easier than hiding the fact that a woman was statuesque.

Two more turns and he entered a hall on the east side of the building that led to a door at the end. He ran the plans for the hotel through his mind. This was the service corridor to a supply room on this end.

Nick spoke quietly for the benefit of his team. “I’m going silent for ten to fifteen max, but I’ll still have ears on while I check something out on the east side. Might be nothing.”

Blade came back. “Need backup?”

“Not for this.”

When he reached the door, he knew she was in there.

His training warned him to think twice before walking into a place that would be the perfect ambush.

Life without risk was just clocking time.

He grinned and put his hand on the knob, which turned easily. When he stepped inside it wasn’t completely dark, but security lighting forced him to wait for his eyes to adjust.

Once he could see, he moved past rows of rolling carts for the domestic engineers. A mix of smells assaulted him, but the one that tugged an old memory from him was fresh laundry.

As a child in Sicily, he’d follow old Jemma around as she delivered clean clothes and changed bed linens once the rest of the family was up and out. He’d been a late-in-life accident that nobody knew what to do with, so Jemma was the one who’d made him breakfast and read him bedtime stories.

A noise turned his attention to a dark shadow where the security lights didn’t reach.

Correction. Those security lights had been shut off.

He took the bait and walked over there.

If he was wrong about his hunch, it wouldn’t be his first knot on the head.

Or knife wound.

Or bullet wound.

He reached the leading edge of the shadow and stopped.. Waiting a beat, he leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. “Been a while.”

A figure emerged from the shadows, wearing a tuxedo that handled curves the way a high-performance car hugged switchbacks through the mountains.

She said, “Only you would walk into a bloody ambush setup and smile while doing it.”

“I had an idea I followed someone I knew, even if she isn’t willing to give me a name yet.”

She hadn’t yet shown him her true face, either, but while she might actually be a brunette, he had no doubt she was far beyond average. The latex mask she wore now was that of a woman who could be twenty-eight or thirty-five, which was easy to pull off with a figure like hers.

He’d met her a while back when she’d shared information that had given Slye teams a hand up and saved lives. She had to be trained by some country’s international spook division. If he went on her British accent alone he’d guess MI6, but that could be something she affected just for him.

Did it matter?

Not a bit.

He grinned at her. “I would say we have to stop meeting like this–”

“–but you’d be so disappointed,” she finished for him.

“Actually, I was going to say that you’d risk never getting that debt I owe you paid.”

“Debts. Plural.” She smiled and crossed her arms over her chest.

He’d seen enough of her body before to know she hid a beautiful décolletage beneath that tuxedo. “Is that why you’re here?”

“I do like working with someone who doesn’t waste my time. No, I’m not here to collect. Yet. I’m in LA because a rare scroll is being shopped and I need to get my hands on it.”

“I haven’t heard anything about a scroll,” he told her.

“I figured as much, but when I saw you here I thought maybe we were after the same thing.”

Nick listened to each word she shared with the same care someone decoded a message from the enemy. Every word counted. “Why would you think that?”

“Because the Orion Hunters are after this scroll.”

That upped his interest.

She quirked an eyebrow. “What
are
you doing here? Looks like a convention for We Be Security out there.”

He laughed. “It does.” 

She wouldn’t have missed that he skipped over her question.

He debated on sharing intel for the slow seconds she stood patiently waiting. This operative had brought way more to the table in the past without asking for anything in return. Except the debt she kept refusing to tell him how to repay.

Sabrina wouldn’t like him sharing mission details with anyone, but his willingness to take a risk with this woman had paid off heavily in the past.

Slye had nothing but Perdido for assassination targets so far.

Nick wasn’t one to tiptoe into anything. “We’re here under the cover of hunting for Perdido’s stalker, but in truth we have reason to believe three assassinations are going down in California. We just don’t have targets.”

“So you’re pretending to be Blinkin’ in
Men In Tights
?” she teased.

“Pretty much.” Nick laughed at the image of Blinkin’, a blind character put on watch for Robin Hood’s hideout. When Robin Hood stopped by to check the guard on duty, he asked Blinkin’ what he was doing.

Blinkin’ had his hand shielding his eyes even though he was wearing sunglasses and said, “Guessing.”

Yep, that summed up what Nick and his team had been doing all night. “We think the Orion Hunters are involved, but that’s only because of a tattoo on someone who killed a snitch in Atlanta.”

“Bergman? He’s dead?”

“Yes to both.”

She seemed mildly surprised. “I thought he was gone, then I heard a rumor that he’d come back to Atlanta and was slashed.”

“Bergman belonged to one of our people.”

“That’s too bad. He was useful.” 

Nick had one more crumb to toss out. “What about Satan’s Garden Club. Hear anything on them?”

She frowned and thought on her answer, then uncrossed her arms and lifted a finger to her lips. “South American group. Man named Garcia. Thought he was dead, too.”

“He is, but someone has started up a new operation and is using that moniker.”

“Bloody criminals have no originality. It’s bad taste to use another buggar’s name.”  Her eyes twinkled. “But it does keep things interesting.”

Her demeanor changed from talkative to a look that said this meeting was over. She walked forward the three steps required to close the distance between them.

His dick stood up faster than a launched heat-seeking missile. One day soon, he intended to find out the real person beneath that latex mask, and exactly what her tuxedo hid.

But he didn’t make any quick moves around this woman. She reminded him of a wild leopard who might change her spots, but was just as deadly in any camo.

Sweet Jesus, that just turned him on more.

He’d never been much for the tame ones.

She lifted a hand to his face, long fingers toying with his cheek then his lips. “How’s the chest wound?”

“Healed.” He sucked a finger in and let his tongue do his speaking for him by showing her finger what the rest of her was missing.

She must have liked what he said, because she didn’t hide the heat burning in her gaze before she withdrew her fingers. “One of these days.”

“Agreed.” He liked a woman who didn’t pretend getting naked wasn’t going to happen.

She leaned close and whispered, “I don’t know who all three targets are, but I have a hunch that one of them won’t happen for another day, maybe two. If I pick up anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks.” He let that hang in the air, testing to see if she’d give another inch.

“You can call me Chatton.”

He let her walk out first, not the least surprised when she’d vanished by the time he slowly turned and strode to the door.

Chatton, huh? Interesting. Seeing her here was good news and bad.

On the positive side, she had access to intel that he doubted even the CIA or MI6 could match.

On the negative side, every time she showed up, the game stepped up three levels and the players came locked and loaded.

Just the fact that she was at this event meant there was something else going on that she hadn’t shared, but allowing him to recognize her had been Chatton’s way of telling him to watch his back.