Seducing the Mercenary

Chapter 3

A dark whisper of warning breathed through Laroque as her violet eyes held his steadily. “I saw you,” he said, watching her carefully. “In the street this morning.”

A nebulous look swam through her eyes. “I know.”

Something rich and dark slid through his stomach. She’d felt the same connection, he could read it in her eyes, hear it in her voice. Every last strand of primal DNA in his body fought to override rational thought at this moment.

He loved the way her hair fell in a dark tangle almost to her waist, the way freckles ever so faintly dusted the pale skin over her nose. And he was particularly attracted to the sharp intelligence that sparked in her unusual eyes. This woman presented challenge.

And nothing fired Laroque like a challenge.

It fueled a voracious appetite in him—for victory, dominance. It made him want to play the game.

There was no doubt in his mind that he’d take her physically, should she dare offer.

But he didn’t trust her.

He’d be damned if he didn’t want to, though. The notion of sharing his personal story with her was strangely compelling.

He’d never told anyone his life story before. He’d borne his scars solo since the age of thirteen, pretending the opinions of others never bothered him.

But they did.

Deep down, if he really was truthful, Laroque wanted people to understand that while he’d learned the art of guerrilla warfare and the techniques of torture and death from his father, while he’d been forced to follow, and depend on, and fight with Peter Laroque for his very survival, he was not at all like him.

Yes, he’d become a mercenary, because it was what he knew, and he’d become very good at it. But he had his boundaries. His game was always an ethical one. And what he wanted for Ubasi—for the entire region—was good. Bold, yes. Overambitious, perhaps. But it was for the benefit of the majority who lived in increasingly abysmal conditions in contrast to the rapidly growing oil wealth of a few corrupt leaders.

The romantic part of Laroque actually wanted to believe that this woman had been dropped into his life like an angel.

But he wasn’t a fool, and he did not believe in coincidences. He also had trouble believing her science crew would just abandon her like this.

He needed to check her out. Thoroughly.

In the meanwhile, he needed to be sure she was safe. His castle was the best place for her tonight.

“You’ll agree to the interview, then?” Her voice was midnight velvet, soft and powerful at the same time. It was the kind of voice that made a man aware of his sex. And that made her potentially dangerous.

“You’re welcome to stay the night,” he said bluntly.

Surprise showed in her eyes. “Is that all?”

“That’s all. I’ll have my men show you to the guest quarters. They’ll escort you to the airport before noon.”

He stepped back and summoned his guards.

Langley, Virginia. CIA headquarters

CIA director Blake Weston pored over the reports on his desk. The death of his men in Ubasi ate at him like acid.

He rubbed his face, inhaling deeply.

He had what appeared to be an extremely serious intelligence breach on his hands. His agents in West Africa had been deep, deep cover. The exposure of their identities indicated an information leak, and it could only have come from the inside. At least this is how it would be viewed in Washington. He pinched the bridge of his nose.

Blake was new to this top job, and the White House was watching carefully to see how he handled his first major crisis. His agency had to be seen to be acting swiftly, decisively and ruthlessly to root out any possible mole. Blake was also aware that his career depended not only on his actions at this critical juncture, but on the political perception of his actions.

Which is why the Laroque-Ubasi situation had been instantly outsourced to the FDS, an objective organization, while the CIA could be seen to be dealing with its own internal security issues. Blake had no doubt the FDS would effectively eliminate Jean-Charles Laroque and pave the way to stability in the Gulf of Guinea.

But that didn’t solve the disclosure of his men’s identities. That was the problem that burned him. That was what would come back to haunt him.

He shoved his chair back, stood, unscrewed his bottle of pills, popped two into his mouth. This clandestine cooperation with the Pentagon only confounded things. He’d been put hands-on in charge of the new joint task force, and any failure would reflect directly on him. He chewed his medication slowly, thinking. This business was full of mirrors and shadows and smoke—one never really knew who or what one was dealing with. Or what the agenda was. He could use this to his advantage.

But getting off this particular tiger was going to be tricky. Maybe impossible. It could even cost him his life. If Blake was to have any chance of actually riding this one out, Laroque had to take the fall for the agents’ deaths.

If Laroque died with Washington believing the tyrant had somehow discovered the CIA agents’ identities on his own, the mystery—all the niggling questions—would die with him. Then Blake’s problem would simply disappear.

There was just one little hitch—the profiler. The FDS had insisted on this approach. Blake had been dead set against it. He didn’t need some academic from New York declaring the tyrant fit for capture, he needed him dead.

He glanced at the calendar on his desk.

The FDS profiler had less than one week to make her move. It had damned well better be the right one.

03:17 Zulu. Saturday, November 9. Ubasi Palace

Emily lay on the king-size bed staring at the impossibly high ceiling. The door had been bolted from the outside. When she’d protested, the guards had said it was for her own safety. The balcony was too high to climb down. She’d checked.

She was imprisoned like a damn princess in a castle tower.

Her bags had been delivered to the room, but her computer, phone, camera and knife were all still missing. Emily had little doubt Laroque was going through her things with a fine-tooth comb, checking out her story—her identity.

She told herself she shouldn’t worry. It was state-of-the-art military issue, and everything was encrypted. The FDS techs were among the best in the world. They’d have been careful not to leave digital clues. Laroque wouldn’t find a thing.

So why didn’t she feel more secure?

She figured the only reason she was still here in his castle boudoir was so that he could thoroughly check her cover story. Perhaps he hadn’t believed a single word she’d said. She wondered if she’d even see him again.

Emily tossed irritably on the Egyptian cotton sheets as the wind moaned up in the parapets and rattled at the French doors on her little stone balcony.

The more she thought about it, the more she really liked the idea of a book. Laroque exhibited classic Alpha Dog pathology, yet he’d only recently become a dictator, which meant she had an opportunity to witness a monster-in-the-making. Scoring a one-on-one interview with Le Diable would not only secure her FDS mission, it could earn her academic prestige down the road.

It would give her something to take back to New York.

Emily desperately needed some sort of professional—and personal—validation after being so thoroughly humiliated by her ex and her peers. Anger surged through her at the memory. She sat up abruptly in the bed, forced out pent-up breath with a puff of her cheeks.

She did not want to go back to New York a failure.

The fiasco she’d left at home had forced her to question everything about herself, every choice she’d ever made in life—from her career to the men she dated. And she really didn’t want to face those questions. Not now. Not yet. Maybe never, if she could help it.

She wanted excitement, adrenaline, something big to focus on right now, other than herself.

This wasn’t running, she told herself. Sometimes you just needed distance.

She slid off the bed, snagged the water jug on the dresser and poured herself a glass. She took a swig but the liquid balled in her throat.

Her eyes began to burn and hurt tightened her chest.

She’d trusted her ex.

Hell, she’d even thought she loved him. But it had just been a game—a bet he’d taken with his colleagues that he could not only bed the brainy ice queen, but make her fall for him.

She plunked the glass down, shoved her hair back from her face and cursed viciously.

She had fallen for him. His name was Dr. Anthony Dresden. He was much older, an esteemed university professor who did consulting at her clinic. Not only had he made a mockery of her, but he’d lured her across a line she should never have dared cross—that line between personal and professional. A vital line in a field like hers.

What made it worse was the fact she’d once confided to Anthony that she was concerned about her consistent attraction to dominant and physically powerful males—men like her dad. She’d told Anthony she was beginning to think she subconsciously found ways to sabotage her relationships with men like this as soon as they showed signs of getting serious. That’s why her relationships never lasted more than eighteen months. She invariably grew afraid that if she committed wholly to the alpha guy in her life she’d be trapped. That he’d undermine her independence and ultimately quash her. Like her dad had quashed her mother.

To death.

Emily was deeply afraid of not being in control, always. Because in her heart, Emily was terrified that she was really just like her mom. Weak.

Dr. Anthony Dresden, a man she’d once respected on so many levels, had used her secret fears against her.

He’d taken a substantial monetary bet one very drunken night over dinner with a group of his—and her—male colleagues. He’d wagered he could seduce the brainy ice queen—that’s what they called her—and make her fall for him. He’d bet he could date her longer than any of her previous relationships. He’d told his friends that it was more than sex for Emily, you had to get her at her own game, a mind game.

It was pure betrayal.

When their relationship had gone over that eighteen-month hurdle, Emily’s heart had begun to feel light, as if a huge weight had been lifted from her. She thought she might be truly in love, that Anthony was the one.

Tears slid hotly and angrily down Emily’s face.

He hadn’t collected on the bet.

When she’d found out about it via the grapevine, she’d been devastated. Anthony told her he’d called the bet off because he’d come to care deeply for her. He said it had been a lark, something he should never have allowed to happen. He’d pleaded with her for the relationship to continue. That’s what made it worse—the fact that he said he really did love her.

All he’d done was reinforce her deep-rooted pathological fears. Because in a powerfully intellectual and physically subtle way, Anthony was an alpha himself. She’d fallen for his calculated seduction, and he’d used her own mind against her. And everyone who mattered in her career knew about it.

Emily threw herself back onto the pillow and closed her eyes tight. No, she could not go home.

Not yet.

Not until she’d proved something to herself.

05:45 Zulu. Saturday, November 9. Ubasi Palace

A soft peach bled into the ink sky. Monkeys stirred in the branches below, and the sound of birds rose in a soft chatter. Laroque stood on his balcony, hands flat on the balustrade, surveying the dark jungle canopy.

The storm had blown through, and he was enjoying the rich scent of fecund earth. In a few hours the forest would be an oppressive place, steaming under the sun’s fire. He liked these predawn hours best.

He hadn’t slept, but he was used to not sleeping. He’d learned since a boy how to push, and keep pushing, to rest only when the battle had been won. He wouldn’t be alive otherwise.

“Sir?”

He spun round to face Mathieu Ebongani, the technician who’d been busy with Emma’s equipment.

“Mathieu, did you find anything?”

The tech stepped onto the balcony. “Her ID checks out.”

“What about her equipment?”

“It’s beyond my scope, I’m afraid. Her satellite phone and computer are fitted with highly sophisticated GPS and encryption technology,” he said. “We’re going to need Ndinga if you want to try to decode it.”

“Is the technology consistent with a science mission of this nature?”

The tech’s mouth twisted. “It looks more state-of-the-military to me.” He paused. “It’s her laptop that worries me. It appears to be communicating at a low-level-signal strength with another off-site station, even when turned off.”

“GPS?”

“No, this is something different.” He hesitated. “I haven’t seen anything like this before. We’d learn more by opening the hard drive up in a forensic environment, but again, we’ll need Ndinga and his team for that.”

Laroque’s pulse quickened. “What about her computer files?”

“Encrypted, but she does have a photo in there that I could access.”

“Photo?”

“From the Parisian Press archives. The caption says it’s you at age thirteen being taken from the hospital by your father.”

A band of muscle tightened sharply across Laroque’s chest.

His mind was yanked instantly back to a day he’d rather forget. His mother had been famous. She was always in the tabloids, and by default, so was he, the young boy hanging on to the skirts of the glamorous African model, or so it had looked to the world. It was logical Dr. Emma Sanford would have dug one or two of those out, especially if she wanted to work on a book. Yet it made him feel strange. Vulnerable. Especially that specific image.

Did she know it represented the turning point of his life?

“Anything in her e-mail?” he asked, his words unnecessarily clipped.

“Only correspondence with Geographic International headquarters.”

“Thank you. Keep her equipment for Ndinga’s return,” Laroque said, dismissing his tech.

He turned to watch the peach sky deepen to burnt orange, then blood-red as the fiery ball of sun crashed over the Purple Mountains in a wild symphony of color. He breathed in deep. He loved the African sky. It was bold. Confrontational. Always changing.

It defined him.

He hadn’t been born here, yet this place pulsed rich through his blood. His mother was an Ubasi native, his father a third-generation South African of Dutch heritage. Laroque himself had been born and schooled in Paris, but from the age of thirteen this continent had been his heart and soul.

People from other parts of the world didn’t understand the differences, the laws of this vast and elemental land. They couldn’t. The things that happened here just weren’t in the lexicon of the West.

It made him mad…and, strangely, glad. He was as conflicted about this place as it was conflicted itself.

But he did know that if Ubasi and the rest of the Niger Delta was to survive, thrive even, he needed to bridge that vast gap between Western ideology and African. The rebel oil alliance was the starting point, the foundation of something big, a local OPEC and an army with some real negotiating power for the people of the Delta.

He wondered just what part in this unfolding melodrama Emma Sanford was to play, if any. There was a chance she was telling him the truth, but things weren’t adding up well enough to make Laroque comfortable.

Her computer equipment had only raised more questions.

If she was broadcasting he wanted to know to whom—and why. He needed to hang on to her gear long enough for Mano Ndinga, his top IT genius, to return and look into it.

Laroque checked his watch.

Mano and his team were busy installing a network at the Nigerian base of one of Laroque’s allied rebel militias. They’d be back in roughly four days. Laroque couldn’t hold Dr. Emma Sanford prisoner until then. It would cause an international outcry.

He could just ship her out of the country. However, if she was some kind of informant, she might be a vital link to whatever was going on behind the scenes in Ubasi. He’d be a fool not to milk that angle—it was the only lead he had. And if worse came to worst, she might end up a valuable negotiating tool.

She’d have to stay on her own volition.

He’d have to make it her choice.

He drew the morning air deep into his lungs again, and breathed out slowly. If the lady was playing a game of deception, she was good. But he’d show her that he was better.

And keeping one’s enemies close—very close—was never a bad idea.

8:07 Zulu. Saturday, November 9. Ubasi Palace

A loud rapping on the door ripped Emily from sleep. She jolted upright, squinting as she tried to focus. Bright bars of sunlight streamed through shutters, throwing slatted patterns on the walls. Her head felt fuzzy, her mouth dry.

The banging continued, louder.

She stumbled out of bed and headed toward the door, belting the silk robe she’d found behind the bathroom door tightly around her waist as she went. She pulled on the brass handle, and it gave—the door had been unlocked from the outside. She drew it open cautiously, shoving her tangle of hair back from her face as she did.

Muscled pecs under a snug-fitting crisp T-shirt greeted her at eye level. She stared numbly, her brain trying to kick back into gear. She lifted her eyes slowly and met his clear, penetrating gaze. Her stomach somersaulted, and she grounded herself by reaching for the door handle, his eyes instantly tracking her movement. Did this guy not miss a damned thing?

“Good morning,” Laroque said in his exotic African-French accent, a smile reaching right into his luminous green eyes, making them sparkle with unspeakable mischief.

The effect rocketed through Emily like dynamite. And damned if her cheeks didn’t flush. She reached up to smooth down her hair.

“You slept well?”

“I…yes. Thank you.” It sounded trite. She’d been abducted and locked in a turret, for goodness’ sake. “I was tired. I was dragged here at 2:00 a.m.,” she added defensively. “What…time is it, anyway?”

He held up her passport. “Time to leave Ubasi.”

She stared at her passport in his hand, her ticket to freedom.

She reached up to take it from him, but as she tugged at the passport, he held tighter, his fingers connecting with hers, the sensation electric. Emily’s breath caught and her eyes whipped to his face.

“I have a proposition,” he said. “Take the passport, and leave Ubasi before noon. Or—” He paused, watching her way too intently for comfort. “I keep the passport, and you stay and interview me. Your choice. My terms.”

Her heart was now racing so fast she could barely breathe. “Your…terms?” Her voice came out thick.

“Stay in my palace, under my constant guard. If we do venture beyond the fortress, you do not leave my side. Understand? Not for one instant. No exceptions. It’s for your own protection, of course.”

Emily appeared to be incapable of disconnecting from his touch, of letting go of her passport, her ticket to freedom. Her mind reeled. She should leave, for her own good. Perhaps she wasn’t yet mentally ready to handle this man and the strange seductive power he had over her.

Then she recalled the mission, why she needed to succeed. She thought of New York, of her ex, of the utter humiliation and pain that awaited her.

She’d be Laroque’s voluntary captive. She’d have exclusive access to Le Diable in his inner sanctum, an extremely rare opportunity to watch one of her Alpha Dog subjects at work. She’d have access to information that could help the FDS.

This was an opportunity that might never present itself again.

This was what she wanted—wasn’t it?

A dark, sensual excitement tangled with rising adrenaline as conflict raged through Emily. He was making it her decision. He was making her a partner in her own captivity. It was a power play.

Laroque could destroy her if she stayed. He would kill her if he found out who she was working for.

This is life and death, Emily. This is the real thing. Wake up, here, think straight.

Logic screamed at her to leave, screamed that she was basing decisions on flawed reasoning, on personal issues, not professional ones. Logic told her that at some level she was dangerously attracted to this subject, and it reminded her of all the trouble she’d ever gotten herself into when she’d tangled emotionally with A-types. And those men in her past didn’t even begin to hold a candle to the kind of power and sexual charisma Laroque possessed.

Neither were they killers.

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