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The pretty blonde he’d been tracking for weeks stood right in front of him.
“I’m Nick. Nick Callahan,” he said. He offered his hand.
She took it, and it was warm to the touch. Had she been sunning herself? Sweet hell. This assignment was going to kill him.
“I’m Kim Cassidy,” she said. “I have the apartment next door. Welcome to Magnolia Falls. Will you be staying long?”
“I’m not sure yet. Depends on how long my business takes, and then… Well, they owe me some time off. Seems like a nice, quiet place.” He shrugged.
“It is a nice place, and friendly,” she said.
Friendly? Was she going to be friendly? And what did this girl-next-door beauty think friendly entailed? Please, please, don’t let this assignment take awhile, he thought. If she got friendly, he just might not be able to take it.
TERESA HILL
lives in South Carolina with her husband, son and daughter. A former journalist for a South Carolina newspaper, she fondly remembers that her decision to write and explore the frontiers of romance came at about the same time she discovered that she’d never be able to join the crew of the Starship Enterprise.
Happy and proud to be a stay-home mum, she is thrilled to be living her lifelong dream of writing romances.
Teresa Hill
www.millsandboon.co.uk
For the real Khleo, who lay under my feet,
hoping I’d rub his belly with my toes,
while I wrote most of this book.
My daughter insists everyone know he’s a male
cat, spells his name Khleo and is a sweet, gentle
soul, without a violent or vindictive bone
in his giant, furry body.
And for his brother, Inky,
who we call our $900 kitty, after his stay
at the Emergency Vet’s last Christmas.
Chapter One
Kim Cassidy grinned like crazy as she made her way off the plane at the Atlanta airport and into the arms of an exasperated-looking blond giant of a man who happened to be her brother.
Jackson Cassidy was gorgeous, solid as they came and most definitely mad.
“Are you trying to make me old before my time?” Jax demanded, crushing her to him for a long moment.
“No, I am not trying,” she said, hugging him in return before easing back to smile at him. “And you? Been flashing your badge around again?”
“What if I have?” he said, completely unrepentant, as he waved off the contingent of airport security waiting three paces behind him. “I’ve got it from here, guys. She’s not going to get away from me.”
Kim laughed.
“Come along quietly, miss, and I won’t get out the handcuffs,” he said, hustling her away from the gate.
Kim’s fellow passengers, many of whom she’d chatted with on the plane from Heathrow, looked aghast. Airport security understandably looked annoyed. She’d been met at the gate like this more than once, having an unfortunate tendency to run into trouble when traveling. Not that it had been all trouble this time.
“Honestly, baby girl, pirates?” he said, taking her tote bag from her and throwing it over his shoulder.
She giggled, couldn’t help it.
“Pirates?” he repeated, louder this time and sounding even more irate.
“Just a couple,” she said.
“That’s not what I heard.”
And, knowing him, he’d heard all about it by now. He probably knew more about the incident than she did, even though she’d been there and he’d been thousands of miles away.
It was truly annoying at times, sweet at others.
“It was not my fault,” she insisted. “I was minding my own business, doing nothing more dangerous than sunning myself on the pool deck of the ship. That’s it. Just lying there sipping my froufrou drink with one of those cute little umbrellas sticking out of it, when…”
Her cruise ship was attacked by pirates!
It was nearly impossible to believe.
She won a trip on a luxury cruise ship and what happened?
Attacked by modern-day pirates?
Who knew?
Leave it to her to find—on vacation—a disaster of the sort she’d thought had been extinct for hundreds of years.
“I mean…come on?” she tried. “Did you know there were still pirates floating around looking for ships to hijack? I didn’t know. How was I supposed to know?”
Looking no less worried or annoyed, Jax flipped open his cell phone and hit Speed Dial. As they continued to walk, he put the phone to his ear and said, “Got her. All in one piece, too….Yeah, we’ll be there in an hour and a half if I use my sirens.”
“There’s no need for sirens,” she insisted, trying to take the phone from him, but he just frowned down at her, flipped it shut and put it away, which meant he intended to interrogate her all by himself on the ride home without anyone getting in the way.
“Hey, I could still pull out the handcuffs,” he said.
“Do it and you won’t get a word from me about my trip or the guy I met there,” she threatened.
That got his attention. “There’s a guy?”
She nodded, her grin back full force as she looked up at him.
“Jax…” she sighed, knowing her voice had taken on a silly, dreamy quality and simply unable to help it. “I think… No, I’m sure. I’m absolutely sure that I’m in love!”
He looked completely taken aback for a moment, stopped dead in his tracks, the line of airline passengers behind them coming to a grumbling halt, some cursing softly as they made their way around her and him, all in a hurry to get somewhere.
“Okay, just…tell me he’s not one of the pirates?” he asked with a look that said he couldn’t handle that right now.
“No!”
“’Cause that could definitely give me gray hairs. That would be cause for handcuffs and sirens and maybe a jail cell—and you know I could arrange it—until you came to your senses.”
“He is not a pirate! He’s the guy who saved me from the pirates.” She beamed just thinking about it.
“Oh,” her brother said, finally giving in to the grumbling of the crowd now flowing around them and starting to walk again. “A cop?”
“No.”
“Rent-a-cop?” His disdainful label of anyone who worked security but wasn’t a real cop.
“No,” Kim said.
“Soldier?” he tried.
“No. Nothing like that. He was just there and… He was wonderful. He made sure I was completely safe and he even helped fight off the attack. It was amazing, really. You’re going to love him.”
“So that means I get to meet him, right? Preferably sooner than later?”
“Of course. He’s meeting me here in a few days, as soon as he gets back home—”
“Which is where?”
“California—”
“California? I don’t like him,” her brother insisted.
“You haven’t even met him. You can’t dislike him just because he’s from California.”
“Sure I can.”
They made it into the wide hallway connecting the main terminal to Baggage Claim, which was packed as usual, and headed toward the down escalator. Kim leaned back against her brother as they rode down.
“Jax? Come on. Don’t be like that.” She’d known from the start that he’d hate the idea of anyone taking her as far away from the family as California. Not that she wasn’t a bit apprehensive about that part herself.
Her family meant a lot to her, her brother and his wife, two older sisters and their husbands, one absolutely adorable two-year-old niece, a baby nephew, the teenager her oldest sister and husband had adopted and two more teens they were foster-parenting at the moment.
Their family life was rich, full and happy, more so than she’d ever thought it could be after losing their beloved mother to cancer four years ago and losing their father, also a cop, when Kim was just two years old.
How could she ever walk away from them?
“That’s it. I don’t like him. You’ll just have to fall for a local guy,” her brother said, looking more worried than he had been about the ridiculous pirates who’d tried to board her ship and rob them.
“Serves you right,” she claimed. “All those years of you making it so difficult for me to date locally… You should have known there’d be consequences one day.”
Jax frowned at that. He was overprotective to a fault at times, but he thought, when he wasn’t really annoying her, she could understand why. It couldn’t have been easy, taking over as surrogate father to three little girls when he’d been all of eleven years old when their father died.
Still, Kim was twenty-four years old now, something he couldn’t quite grasp in moments like this. It was time for him to back off.
“Just don’t be a jerk to him when he shows up, all right?” Kim asked as they found the luggage carousel for her flight, still empty at the moment, and stood there to wait.
“I won’t be a jerk—”
“And don’t try to scare him.”
“If he’s tough enough to save you from pirates, he should for damned sure be able to handle one older brother with a gun,” Jax said.
“No threatening him. And no dragging him off into the woods and beating him up, like you did with Joe.” Her middle sister, Kathie’s, husband. They’d had a rocky start, especially with her brother.
“I never beat him up in the woods,” Jax insisted.
“Just threatened him there?”
“Yeah. I just threatened him there.”
“And beat him up at the bank,” Kim quipped.
Jax gave her an exasperated look. “We’ve all moved on from there. You should, too.”
“I just don’t want anything to go wrong when he shows up.”
Because she was fairly certain that he was it.
The one.
The guy she’d been waiting her whole life to find.
It had been a little crazy with him on the ship after the attack. The whole thing had been a classic whirlwind romance, granted, but still…
Beside her, her brother gave a heavy sigh.
Kim linked her arm with his. “You’re going to tell me I can’t possibly fall in love in a week?”
“No, I was going to let Kate do that.”
Older sister. Impossibly practical until she fell in love inside of six weeks herself. Would Kate think it was impossible to do in a week? Kim wasn’t sure.
“Hey, you didn’t even tell me his name,” her brother said.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re not even going to tell us his name?”
“Why? So you can run him through the FBI’s computer?”
Her brother shrugged, like there was nothing unreasonable about him doing that to everyone she dated.
“Then no, I’m not going to tell you his name,” she said, just to annoy him even more.
“Looks sweet as can be, doesn’t she?” a tinny voice quipped through what looked like an ordinary, blue-tooth headset that agent Nick Cavanaugh wore, as he followed the woman through the Atlanta airport.
“Find out yet how the guy got through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick said, speaking into the mike of the headset.
It was a really nice break, everyone using those little wireless receivers to talk into their cell phones these days. No more needing to hide a mike and an earpiece discreetly on his body. He just had to look like a guy who was always on the phone.
Technology was absolutely grand.
“Come on, Nick. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed how fine that woman looks. Eye candy of the sweetest variety. I mean, yum,” Harry said, his voice piped directly into Nick’s ear. “You’re not dead yet, are you?”
“Not yet,” Nick admitted, although his right shoulder was killing him from a nasty little mishap on the ship.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t even notice how she looks. Somebody said you were surveilling her in a bikini for hours on the ship. Man, I don’t know if my heart could have taken it.”
“What can I say? That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” Nick said.
Because he could supposedly handle the sight of sweet little things like her in a bikini and still keep his mind on his job.
“So…how’d the guy with her get through security to meet her at the gate?” Nick asked again.
“Claimed he was a cop.”
“She’s got a local cop waiting to pick her up as she gets off the plane?” What had the woman done before she’d left town to go on her expensive vacation?
“Yeah, but you didn’t see the greeting the cop got as she got off the plane. He did not show up to arrest her.”
“Oh,” Nick said.
“Yeah. Give us a minute. We’re checking right now to see if he’s really a cop or not.”
“Okay,” Nick said and kept walking.
“So maybe she’s not as sweet and innocent as she looks, huh?” Harry said. “She’s got the guy on the cruise who was just a little vacation fling and her regular guy waiting for her at home?”
“Don’t know, Harry.”
It was certainly not what they hoped to find when they’d decided at the last minute to tail her as she’d left the ship.
She and the blond guy with a badge stopped dead in the middle of the busy corridor filled with travelers and their luggage, the move so abrupt that Nick had no choice but to keep walking. He’d go pick up a newspaper at the store fifteen feet down and to the right, wait for them to move on and then…
He slipped right past them and…
Ahhh.
It was a sound a man might make when he’d accidentally touched a hot stove. Like he’d been burned.
That’s how it felt. Burning.
He’d gotten a little too close.
And with her, it mattered.
He’d actually touched her, brushed past her right shoulder as she’d turned her hair at just the right moment. A wave of pretty, blond curls had teased their way past his nose, just out of reach but leaving him with a giant whiff of her.
And she smelled really good.
He’d found that out on the ship, too.
The woman smelled great, looked… Well, it was scary what that woman could do to a little, yellow bikini. It was downright unfair. Criminal, even.
He had indeed been forced to watch her for hours sunning herself in a bikini. She’d rubbed lotion on herself and he’d watched. Drank a silly, fruity drink, licking her lips when she was done, and he’d watched. Rolled over onto a perfectly toned tummy and then reached behind her back to untie the strings of her top, baring a completely naked back, while he watched and another agent had been whispering in his ear, speculating about how much Nick and the rest of the crew would pay him to dump a cup of ice water on her back and make her jump up, leaving the top behind.
Nick had watched it all.
There’d been a secluded deck on the ship reserved for nude sunbathing. He would be forever grateful she hadn’t gone there and taken any more of her little suit off.
But now he’d gotten close enough to smell her hair, actually brush past her shoulder, and every other thought—except what torment she’d already caused him—had simply vanished from his head.
“Hey, what did she say?” Harry asked.
Nick had no earthly idea.
Damn.
“I think it was something about being in love,” Harry said.
Nick frowned. Love was not an emotion he wanted involved in any of his cases. Lust was trouble enough, especially when it was him lusting after a pretty woman in a bikini, but love… Love was bad. It was awful. People who thought they were in love did completely unpredictable, illogical, often incredibly stupid things. They got mad. They got hurt. They set out for revenge, ruining their lives and often the lives of people around them, all in the name of that foolish thing called love.
God save him from another woman in love.
“Did you get that on tape?” Nick asked. “Can you play it back?”
“Yeah, hang on. It’ll be up in a second or two. We’ll up the volume on the playback for you. Here it comes.”
There was a lot of background noise, but he knew her voice by now, just as well as he knew how she smelled.
He might try to fool the other guys working with him on this case, but he wasn’t going to try to fool himself. It was hard not to remember the woman’s sweet, slow, genuine-sounding Southern drawl. He’d fallen into an exhausted, all-too-brief sleep the last two nights with the sound of her voice and the things she’d said running through his head.
The way she laughed.
The pretty smile she so often flashed.
The twinkle in her pretty blue eyes.
And yes, the way she’d looked in that little, yellow string bikini.
Contrary to popular belief, he was not inhuman, just disciplined and focused most of the time, better than most at hiding any feelings he might be unfortunate enough to have and suspicious as hell of almost anyone he met, especially a pretty woman who might or might not be innocent of whatever crime he happened to be investigating.
Okay, there it was, the tape of the conversation she’d had not thirty seconds ago, playing in his head, the way her voice had been doing for the last forty-eight hours already.
“I think…” she said. “No…” The tape cut in and out. “Sure…” Come on. Let ’em hear it. “I’m in love.”
“Oh, great,” Nick said.
“Yeah, baby,” Harry said. “What do you think? From the way our guy was hanging all over her the last few days, it’s gotta be him, right?”
“Hell, I don’t know. You know how women are, Harry.”
Nick had to hope one Eric Weyzinski didn’t feel the same way. That he wouldn’t have a little fling with someone like her on a ship and just walk away from her when it was over. He had to hope Weyzinski was either coming here, or she was going to him, so Nick could follow her and find Weyzinski again. Because they’d screwed up as the ship’s passengers left, lost Weyzinski and they still hadn’t figured out whether he was their bad guy or not.
That was Nick’s job.
Catching the bad guys.
Catch ’em and move on.
That was his motto, his life, and it suited him just fine.
One crook after the next.
Bring ’em on.
“Okay,” Harry said through his earpiece. “The guy with her did flash a badge to get through security. From a police force in a little town north of the city called Magnolia Falls, which is where our pretty blonde claims to live. We’ll check with the cops there and get back to you to tell you for sure if he is who he claims he is. And from the information I’ve got now, looks like he and our blonde have the same last name. Cassidy. His name is Jackson Cassidy.”
“Tell me she’s not his wife,” Nick said.
Because the thing people thought was love, coupled with a marriage license and a wedding ring, mixed in with jealousy and another man who happened to be a crook… That was sure to be a disaster in the making.
“If the cop’s her husband, she wouldn’t come home from vacation alone and announce to him that she’s in love with someone else,” Harry reminded him.
“Oh, she just might.” He’d seen more than one unhappy wife throw something like that in her husband’s face.
“Hey, buddy, remember that little problem of yours we’ve talked about before? The woman thing?”
“I don’t have a problem with women,” he claimed. “I just have women who happen to cause me problems quite often.”
Her being merely the latest in a long string of problem-causing women.
“But I don’t have a problem with women,” Nick insisted.
“All right, buddy. Whatever you say. What’s your pretty blonde doing now?”
“Well, the cop looks unhappy about her little announcement, but not pissed off. So I’d say he’s not her husband.”
One thing to be grateful for.
“Okay,” Harry said. “Didn’t think so.”
“Hang on. We’re moving again,” Nick said, putting down the newspaper he’d picked up moments ago and falling into step behind them, blending into the crowd as best he could.
They made it to the escalator and he managed to get a spot right behind her by rudely cutting in front of an older couple and a woman with a baby, jostling his sore shoulder as he went.
Oh well.
A guy had to do what a guy had to do.
So what if the shoulder still hurt when all he’d done was taken a fall and rolled through it? So what if he didn’t roll as well as he used to and he grew more cynical by the moment?
He could still do the job better than most.
And he was not old.
Thirty-eight was not old for an agent.
Thirty-eight meant he was simply more experienced and therefore smarter than most.
Knew all about women and love.
And this was nothing but another job.
With the kind of discipline his job demanded, he put his focus firmly back on his case. They had a band of modern-day pirates based off the northern coast of Africa preying on passing vessels. Private boats at first, the crooks stealing to fund whatever other things they might be doing. Then they’d moved on to bigger and better things. Luxury yachts and, now, cruise ships.
How the hell did they expect to actually board a cruise ship?
Nick didn’t know, but if they ever did, the potential consequences were enormous.
Hostage-taking? Massive ransom demands? Terrorism?
Nick didn’t even want to think of what they might do if they weren’t stopped soon.
His agency had gotten a tip that the luxury liner The Paradigm was the group’s next target, and he’d been on board since the ship docked in Rome eight days ago.
There’d been more than a thousand passengers, plus a crew of over six hundred on its maiden voyage. The pretty, young blonde he was following had been one of them. The guy she’d been hanging out with might have been in league with the pirates—on board in advance to help them take control of the ship—or he might not have been. Nick didn’t know yet. They hadn’t focused on Weyzinski until very late in the game. There’d simply been too many possible suspects to check them all quickly. By the time they’d grown suspicious of Weyzinski, the cruise had been nearly over. Then Weyzinski had managed to give another agent the slip as he’d left the ship.
Which meant one of the few leads they still had to Weyzinski was the pretty blonde, supposedly one Kimberly Ann Cassidy of a little town called Magnolia Falls, Georgia.
They’d been scrambling just to follow her, to get Nick on her plane for the States and get agents in place waiting for her in the Atlanta airport when she arrived. They didn’t even know yet if Kim Cassidy was her real name. They didn’t know if she was working with Weyzinski or just an innocent victim.
Nick had to find out.
He followed her and the cop through the baggage-claim area until they stopped at an empty carousel. He hoped he’d at least have time to grab his checked bag before she found hers and took off.
“My car’s waiting at the curb?” Nick asked, knowing Harry would have tried to arrange things that way.
“It’s there. Bright red Lexus convertible. Sorry about the color, but the car will flat-out fly if you need it to. Try not to hurt it, okay?”
Nick sighed. “That was not my fault, Harry.”
A car chase on a freeway near L.A. six months ago had ended badly and he was still catching hell for it. Nick’s right knee had plowed into the dashboard. It still bothered him at times, usually when it rained.
“I don’t suppose you can get someone to hold her bag in the back for a while?”
“We’re working on it. Sorry, buddy. I didn’t get here until fifteen minutes before her plane touched down. But I’m getting a sheet on the cop right now. Okay… Looks like he is her brother.”
“Okay. So she wasn’t two-timing him with the guy on the ship.”
One point in her favor.