An Inconvenient Affair

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“Can you just walk away from this?”

“It’s just physical reaction,” Hillary insisted.

Troy stepped in front of her. “Hillary, damn it … You confuse the hell out of me. I’m worried about you, and hell yes, I want to make love to you. But I also want time with you.”

“Honestly?”

“Spend a week with me. Get me out of your system so you can return to your regular life without regrets.”

“What makes you think you’re in my system?”

“Really? Are you going to look me in the eye and tell me you don’t feel the attraction, too? Remember, I was there when we kissed.”

“Okay, I’ll admit there’s … chemistry.”

“Explosive chemistry …”

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the launch of my new series, THE ALPHA BROTHERHOOD. Some characters whisper to me as I write. Others boldly shout as I type. However, computer mogul/ Interpol agent Troy Donavan devilishly winked.

I adore edgy characters, and exploring the sketchy pasts of The Alpha Brotherhood offers a vast landscape for telling my next Mills & Boon® Desire™ books. These men have a Robin Hood sense of justice that leads them each to a no-holds-barred life … and love.

And so THE ALPHA BROTHERHOOD begins with An Inconvenient Affair. From Chicago to Costa Rica, I hope you enjoy Troy and Hillary’s passionate adventures!

Cheers,

Catherine Mann

USA TODAY bestselling author CATHERINE MANN lives on a sunny Florida beach with her flyboy husband and their four children. With more than forty books in print in over twenty countries, she has also celebrated wins for both a RITA® Award and a Booksellers’ Best Award. Catherine enjoys chatting with readers online—thanks to the wonders of the internet, which allows her to network with her laptop by the water! Contact Catherine through her website, www.catherinemann.com, on Facebook as Catherine Mann (author), on Twitter as CatherineMann1, or reach her by snail mail at PO Box 6065, Navarre, FL 32566, USA.

An Inconvenient Affair

Catherine Mann

To my stellar editor, Stacy Boyd! Thank you for the

wonderful brainstorming session that gave birth to

THE ALPHA BROTHERHOOD.

It’s a joy working with you.

Prologue

North Carolina Military Prep

17 years ago

They’d shaved his head and sent him to a reform school.

Could life suck any worse? Probably. Since he was only fifteen, he had years under the system’s thumb to find out.

Hanging around in the doorway to the barracks, Troy Donavan scanned the room for his rack. The dozen bunk beds were half-full of guys with heads shaved as buzz-short as his—another victory for dear old dad, getting rid of his son’s long hair. God forbid anyone embarrass the almighty Dr. Donavan. Although, catching the illustrious doc’s son breaking into the Department of Defense’s computer system did take public embarrassment to a whole new level.

Now he’d been shuttled off to this “jail,” politely disguised as a military boarding preparatory program in the hills of North Carolina, as per his plea agreement with the judge back home in Virginia. A judge his father had bought off. Troy clenched his hand around his duffel as he resisted the urge to put his fist through a window just to get some air.

Damn it, he was proud of what he’d done. He didn’t want it swept under the rug, and he didn’t want to be hidden like some bad secret. If the decision had been left up to him, he would have gone to juvie, or prison even. But for his mom, he’d taken the deal. He would finish high school in this uptight place, but if he kept his grades up and his nose clean until he turned twenty-one, he could have his life back.

He just had to survive living here without his head exploding.

Bunk by bunk, he walked to the last row where he found Donavan, T. E. printed on a label attached to the foot of the bed. He slung his duffel bag of boring crap onto the empty bottom bed.

A foot in a spit-shined shoe swung off the top bunk, lazing. “So you’re the Robin Hood Hacker.” A sarcastic voice drifted down. “Welcome to hell.”

Great. “Thanks, and don’t call me that.”

He hated the whole Robin Hood Hacker headline that had blazed through the news when the story first broke. It made what he did sound like a kid’s fairy tale. Which was probably more of his dad’s influence, downplaying how his teenage son had exposed corrupt crap that the government had been covering up.

“Don’t call you that … or what?” asked the smart-ass on the top bunk with a tag that read: Hughes, C. T. “You’ll steal my identity and wreck my credit, computer boy?”

Troy rocked back on his heels to check the top bunk and make sure he didn’t have the spawn of Satan sleeping above him. If so, the devil wore glasses and read the Wall Street Journal.

“Apparently you don’t know who I am.” With a snap of the page, Hughes ducked back behind his paper. “Loser.”

Loser?

Screw that. Troy was a freakin’ genius, straight As, already aced the ACT and SAT. Not that his parents seemed to notice or give a damn. His older brother was the real loser—smoking weed, failing out of his second college, knocking up cheerleaders. But their old man considered those forgivable offenses. Problems one’s money could easily sweep under the rug.

Getting caught using illegal means to expose corrupt DOD contractors and a couple of congressmen was a little tougher to hide. Therefore, Troy had committed the unforgivable crime—making mommy and daddy look bad in front of their friends. Which had been his intent at the start, a lame attempt to get his parents’ attention. But once he’d realized what he’d stumbled into—the graft, the bribes, the corruption—the puzzle solver inside him hadn’t been able to stop until he’d uncovered it all.

No matter how you looked at it, he hadn’t been some Robin Hood do-gooder, damn it.

He yanked open his duffel bag full of uniforms and underwear, trying to keep his eyes off the small mirror on his locker. His shaved head might reflect the light and blind him. And since rumor had it half the guys here had also struck deals, he needed to watch his back and recon until he figured out what each of them had done to land here.

If only he had his computer. He wasn’t so good at face-to-face reads. The court-appointed shrink that evaluated him for trial said he had trouble connecting with people and lost himself in the cyberworld as a replacement. The Freud wannabe had been right.

And now he was stuck in a freaking barracks full of people. Definitely his idea of hell.

He hadn’t even been able to access a computer to research the criminal losers stuck here with him. Thanks to the judge, he was limited to supervised use of the internet for schoolwork only—in spite of the fact he could handle the academics with his eyes closed.

Boring.

He dropped down to sit beside his bag. There had to be a way out of this place. The swinging foot slowed and a hand slid down.

Mr. Wall Street Journal held a portable video game.

It wasn’t a computer, but thank God it was electronic. Something to calm the part of him that was totally freaking over being unplugged. Troy didn’t even have to think twice. He palmed the game and kicked back in his bunk. Mr. Wall Street Hughes stayed quiet, no gloating. The guy might actually be legit. No agenda.

For now, Troy had found a way through the monotony. Not just because of the video game. But because there was someone else not all wrapped up tight in the rules.

Maybe his fellow juvie refugees might turn out to be not so bad after all. And if he was wrong—his thumbs flew across the keyboard, blasting through to the next level—at least he had a distraction from his first day in hell.

One

Present Day

Hillary Wright seriously needed a distraction during her flight from D.C. to Chicago. But not if it meant sitting behind a newlywed couple intent on joining the Mile High Club.

Her cheeks puffed with a big blast of recycled air as she dropped into her window seat and made fast work of hooking up the headset. She would have preferred to watch a movie or even sitcom reruns, but that would mean keeping her eyes open with the risk of seeing the duo in front of her making out under a blanket. She just wanted to get to Chicago, where she could finally put the worst mistake of her life behind her.

Hillary switched from the best of Kenny G before it put her to sleep, clicking through the stations until she settled on a Broadway channel piping in “The Sound of Music.” Passengers pushed down the aisle, a family with a baby and a toddler, then a handful of businessmen and women, all moving past her to the cheap seats where she usually sat. But not today. Today, her first-class seat had been purchased for her by the CIA. And how crazy was that? Until this month, her knowledge of the CIA only came from television shows. Now she had to help them in order to clear her name and stay out of jail.

A moan drifted from the brand-new Mrs. Somebody in front of her.

Oh God, Hillary sagged back into her seat, covering her eyes with her arm. She was so nervous she couldn’t even enjoy her first visit to Chicago. She’d dreamed about getting out of her small Vermont hometown. Her job as an event planner in D.C. had seemed like a godsend at first. She met the exciting people she would have only read about in the news otherwise—politicians, movie stars, even royalty.

She’d been starstruck by her wealthy boyfriend’s lifestyle. Stupidly so. Until she allowed herself to be blinded to Barry’s real intentions in managing philanthropic donations, his lack of a moral compass.

Now she had to dig herself out from under the mess she’d made of her life by trusting the wrong guy, by believing his do-gooder act of tricking rich associates into donating large sums of money to bogus charities, then funneling the money overseas into a Swiss bank account. She’d proven herself to be every bit the gullible, smalltown girl she’d wanted to leave behind.

As of today, her blinders were off.

A flash of skin and pink bra showed between the seats.

She squeezed her eyes shut and lost herself in the do-re-mi refrain even as people bumped past. Focus. Will away the nerves. Get through the weekend.

She would identify her scumbag ex-boyfriend’s crooked banking acquaintance at the Chicago shindig. Give her official statement to Interpol so they could stop the international money-laundering scheme. Then she could have her life back and save her job.

Once she was back in her boss’s good graces, she would again be throwing the kinds of parties she’d wanted to oversee when she’d first become an event planner. Her career would skyrocket with her parties featured in the social section of all major newspapers. Her loser ex would read about her in tabloid magazines in prison and realize how she’d moved on, baby. Maybe she would even appear in some of those photos looking so damn hot Barry would suffer in his celibate cell.

The jackass.

She pinched the bridge of her nose against the welling of tears.

A tap on her shoulder forced her out of her silly self-pity. She tugged off an earbud and looked over at a … suit. A dark blue suit, with a Hugo Boss tie and a vintage tie clip.

“Excuse me, ma’am. You’re in my seat.”

A low voice, nice, and not cranky-sounding like some travelers could be. His face was shadowed, the sunlight streaking through the small window behind him. She could just make out his dark brown hair, which was long enough to brush his ears and the top of his collar. From the Patek Philippe watch to his edgy Caraceni suit—all name brands she wouldn’t have heard of, much less recognized, before her work with high-end D.C. clients.

And she was in his seat.

Wincing, she pretended to look at her ticket even though she already knew what it read. God, she hated the aisle and she’d prayed she would luck out and have an empty next to her. “I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“You know what?” He rested a hand on the back of the empty seat. “If you prefer the window, that’s cool by me. I’ll sit here instead.”

“I don’t want to take advantage.” Take advantage? The cheesy double entendre made her wince. A moan from the lovebirds a row ahead only made it worse.

“No worries.” He stowed his briefcase in the overhead before sidling in to sit down.

Then he turned to her, the light above bringing him fully into focus— And holy cows on her hometown Vermont farm, he was hot. Angular. But with long lashes that kept drawing her gaze back to his green eyes. He was probably in his early thirties, gauging from the creases when he smiled with the open kind of grin that made him more approachable.

She tilted her head to the side, studying him more closely. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t quite place him…. She shook off the feeling. She’d met so many people at the parties she’d planned in D.C. They could have crossed paths at any number of places. Although, she must have seen him from a distance, because if they’d met up close, she definitely wouldn’t have forgotten him.

His seat belt clicked as the plane began taxiing. “You don’t like flying.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You want the window seat, but have the shade closed. You’ve already plugged into the radio. And you’ve got the armrest in a death grip.”

Handsome and observant. Hmm …

Better to claim fear of flying than to go into the whole embarrassing mess she’d made of her life. “Busted. You caught me.” She nodded toward the row in front of her just as one of the seats reclined providing too clear a view of a man’s hand sliding into the woman’s waistband. “And the lovebirds up there aren’t making things any more comfortable.”

His smile faded into a scowl. “I’ll call for the flight attendant.”

He reached for the button overhead. She touched his wrist. Static snapped. At least she hoped it was just static and not a spark of attraction.

Clearing her throat, she folded her arms over her chest, tucking her hands away. “No need. The flight attendant’s in the middle of her in-flight brief—” she lowered her voice “—and giving us the death glare for talking.”

He leaned toward her conspiratorially. “Or I can kick the back of their seat until they realize they’re not invisible—and that they’re being damned inconsiderate.”

Except now that he was so close, she didn’t notice them. Her gaze locked on the glinting green eyes staring at her with undisguised, unrepentant interest.

A salve to her ego. And an excellent distraction. “I guess we can live and let live.”

“We can.”

“Although, honestly, it doesn’t seem fair the flight attendant isn’t giving the evil eye to the handsy twosome.”

“Maybe they’re celebrating their anniversary.”

She snorted.

“Cynic?”

“And you’re trying to tell me you’re a true believer in flowery romance?” She took in his expensive suit, his dimpled smile and his easy charm. “No offense, truly, but you seem more like a player to me.”

A second after the words left her mouth, she worried she might have been rude.

He just laughed softly and flattened a hand to his chest.

“You think the worst of me. I’m hurt to the core,” he said with overplayed drama.

Her snort turned into a laugh. Shaking her head, she kept on laughing, tension uncurling inside. Her laughter faded as she felt the weight of his gaze on her.

He pointed to the window. “We’re airborne now. You can open the shade and relax.”

Relax? His words confused her for a second and then she remembered her excuse for nerves. And then remembered the real reason for her nerves. Her ex-boyfriend. Barry the Bastard Bum. Who she was hoping to help put in prison once she identified his accomplice in Chicago—if she didn’t get offed by the bad guy first.

She thumbed her silver seat belt buckle. “Thank you for the help …”

“Troy.” He extended his hand. “My name is Troy, from Virginia.”

“I’m Hillary, from D.C.” Prepping herself for the static this time, she wrapped her fingers around his, shaking once. And, yep. Snap. Snap. Heat tingled up her arm in spite of all those good intentions to keep all guys at bay. But then what was wrong with simply being attracted to another person?

Her ex had taken so much from her, and yes, turned a farm-fresh girl like her into a cynic, making her doubt everyone around her. Until she now questioned the motives of a guy who just wanted to indulge in a little harmless flirtation on a plane.

Damn it, there was nothing bad about chatting with this guy during the flight. He had helped her through her nerves about identifying Barry’s accomplice at the fundraiser this weekend. A very slippery accomplice who had a way of avoiding cameras. Very few people had ever seen him. She’d only seen him twice, once by showing up at Barry’s condo unannounced and another time at Barry’s office. Would the man remember her? Her nerves doubled.

She desperately needed to take full advantage of the distraction this man beside her offered. Talking to Troy beat the hell out of getting sloshed off the drink cart, especially since she didn’t even drink.

“So, Troy, what’s taking you to Chicago?”

Troy had recognized Hillary Wright the minute he’d stepped on the plane. She looked just like her Interpol file photo, right down to the freckles on her nose and the natural sun streaks through her red hair.

The photo hadn’t, however, shown anything below the neck—a regrettable oversight because she was … hot. Leggy with curves and an unadorned innocence that normally wasn’t his type. But then when had he ever given a crap about walking the expected path?

That’s why he’d shown up here, on her flight, rather than following the plan laid out by the CIA operatives, who were working in conjunction with the American branch of Interpol. To see what she was like in an unguarded moment.

Lucky for him that window seat was empty so he’d been able to wrangle his way in beside her. It had been too easy, and she was totally unsuspecting. She might as well have “fresh off the farm” tattooed across her freckled nose.

A sexy uptipped nose he wouldn’t mind kissing as he worked his way around to her ear. He’d expected pretty from her picture, but he hadn’t been prepared for the un-definable energy that radiated off her. It was as damn near tangible as her innocence.

This plane on the way to Chicago was the last place she should be. More so, that viper’s nest gala this weekend was absolutely the last place she should be.

Damn, damn, damn the “powers that be” for making her a part of some crazy power play. He could have accomplished the identification in Chicago without her, but they’d insisted on having her backup confirmation. It was obvious to him now that she was too naive to brush elbows with the sharks at that gala—a bunch of crooks using a fundraiser to cover up their international money laundering.

“Troy? Hello?” Hillary waved her hand in front of his face, her nails chewed to the quick. “What takes you to Chicago?”

“Business trip.” Truth. “I’m in computers.” More truth. Enough for now. She would see him again soon enough after they landed and when she learned who he really was … Well, she would likely change, close up or suck up. People judged him based on either his past or his money. “What takes you to Chicago?” he asked, even though he already knew.

“A fundraiser gala. I’m an event planner and, uhm, my boss is sending me to check out a chef at this weekend retreat.”

She was a really crummy liar. Even if he didn’t already know her real reason for going to Chicago, he would have sensed something was off in her story.

“A chef … In Chicago … And you work in D.C. You work for lobbyists?”

“I specialize in fundraisers for charities, not campaigns. I didn’t plan the one in Chicago. I’m just, uh, scoping out competition. It’s a pretty big deal, kicking off Friday night, running all the way to Sunday afternoon with parties and—” She paused self-consciously. “I’m babbling. You don’t need the agenda.”

“You specialize in polishing the halos of the rich and famous.” He smiled on the outside.

Her lips pursed tightly. “Think what you want. I don’t need your approval.”

A sentiment he applauded. So why was he yanking her chain? Because she looked so damn pretty with righteous indignation sparking from her eyes.

That kind of “in your face” mentality was rare. But it also could land a person in trouble.

He knew too well. It had taken all his self-control to buckle down and meet the judge’s requirements when he’d been sentenced at fifteen. Although, he’d found more than he expected at the military school. He’d found friends and a new code to live by. He’d learned how to play by the rules. He’d slowly gotten back computer access and started a video games company that had him rolling in more money than his pedigreed, doctor old man had ever brought home—three times over.

But the access had come with a price. His every move had been monitored by the FBI. They seemed to sense that the taste of megapower he’d felt delving into the DOD would be addictive. Irresistibly so. At twenty-one, he’d been approached with an enticing offer. If he ever wanted a chance at that high again, he would need to loan his “skills” to the American branch of Interpol on occasion.

He’d chafed at the idea at twenty-one. By thirty-two, he’d come to begrudgingly accept that he had to play by a few of their rules, and he’d even found a rush in being a sort of “on call” guy to assist in major international sting operations. He was committed to the job, as he’d proven every time they’d tapped him for a new assignment.

Over time, they also began utilizing him for more than computer help. His wealth gave him access to high-power circles. When Interpol needed a contact on the inside quickly, they used him—and other freelance agents like him. For the most part, he still provided behind-the-scenes computer advice. He was only called upon for something out in the open like this about once a year, so as not to overuse his cover.

Some of that caution would have been nice now, rather than recklessly including Hillary Wright in this joint operation being run by the CIA and Interpol. She wouldn’t be able to carry off the charade this weekend. She couldn’t blend in.

He’d known it the second he read her profile, even if they’d missed it. God only knew why they called him a genius and then refused to listen to him. So he’d arranged to meet her on this flight to confirm his suspicions. He was never wrong. He would stick by her side all weekend and make sure she didn’t blow the whole operation.

Granted, that wouldn’t be a hardship, sticking near her for the weekend.

For the first time in years he wasn’t bored. Something about this woman intrigued him, and there weren’t many puzzles in life for him. So he would stay right here for the rest of the flight and play this through. When she found out his full name—his public, infamous identity—she would pull away. She would likely never know his real reason for being part of this sting, and someone like Hillary Wright wouldn’t go for a guy with the reputation of Troy Donavan, especially so soon after getting her fingers burned in the relationship department.