New York Times bestselling author Cindy Dees introduces a brave soldier…and the woman who is his toughest challenge

Going undercover in a seedy New Orleans club to find her brother, Eve Hankova knows the dangers. But she isn’t prepared for the blazing heat arcing between her and the customer who “buys” her for his exclusive pleasure. Like wildfire, it burns hot and out of control.

Navy SEAL Ashe Konig knows no other way to protect Eve from the Russian mob she’s infiltrated at the club. But for this disillusioned loner, is it a suicide mission? As heavily armed mobsters breathe down their necks, the stubborn woman refuses to quit. Ashe doesn’t know who poses the greater danger—the ruthless killers who threaten their lives or the sweet innocent who threatens his heart.

Sexual tension hung in the air around them.

Thick and hungry.

The lights had gone out in their hotel room; a killer might be making his move against them any minute. But all he could think about was the woman beside him.

She stilled, and he stared down at the shadows wreathing her face, trying and failing to penetrate the dark to see her eyes.

She made a sound of distress.

“Are you okay?” he asked. He knew she was afraid of the dark, ever since the crash when she was young.

“No.” A pause. “I want to kiss you, but I think it would be a mistake.”

His entire being stilled, holding its breath. All of a sudden, he wanted nothing more in the world than for her to kiss him. Even if she was right that it would be a terrible mistake.

They weren’t meant to be. He sucked at relationships, and she was too damned vulnerable to protect herself from him and his baggage.

“Don’t kiss me if you’re afraid of the dark,” he said. “That’s all you’ll find inside me.”

* * *

Be sure to check out the next books in this exciting new miniseries, Code: Warrior SEALs: Meet these fierce warriors, who take on the most dangerous secret missions around the world!

* * *

Dear Reader,

It was with great pleasure that I finally got to return to New Orleans this past year for the first time since Hurricane Katrina devastated that lovely city. I was thrilled to see that the Grand Lady of the South has come back strong and that she’s as fun and fabulous as ever. And what better way to celebrate the recovery of New Orleans than to write a book set there? My only problem in writing this story was choosing where in the parish to set the book!

Fortunately, my heroine (who announced to me early on that she goes by the improbable nickname Hank) and her navy SEAL hero, Ashe, are both N’awlins natives and knew just where to go to best unfold their story. It turns out that a blend of steamy romance, dark suspense, towering love and simmering danger is pretty darned close to the perfect tale to tell when those hot summer nights come calling in the Big Easy.

So, pour yourself a mint julep, turn on the ceiling fan slow and lazy, put on a little Preservation Hall jazz, and get ready to go undercover with a SEAL in a hot story of love and danger that I’m excited to share with you!

Happy reading,

Cindy

Undercover

with a SEAL

Cindy Dees

www.millsandboon.co.uk

New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author CINDY DEES started flying airplanes while sitting in her dad’s lap at the age of three and got a pilot’s license before she got a driver’s license. At age fifteen, she dropped out of high school and left the horse farm in Michigan, where she grew up, to attend the University of Michigan. After earning a degree in Russian and East European studies, she joined the US Air Force and became the youngest female pilot in its history. She flew supersonic jets, VIP airlift and the C-5 Galaxy, the world’s largest airplane. During her military career, she traveled to forty countries on five continents, was detained by the KGB and East German secret police, got shot at, flew in the first Gulf War and amassed a lifetime’s worth of war stories.

Her hobbies include medieval reenacting, professional Middle Eastern dancing and Japanese gardening.

This RITA® Award–winning author’s first book was published in 2002 and since then she has published more than twenty-five bestselling and award-winning novels. She loves to hear from readers and can be contacted at cindydees.com.

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Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Dear Reader

Title Page

About the Author

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Extract from The Temptation of Dr. Colton by Karen Whiddon

Copyright

Chapter 1

Asher Konig looked around Bourbon Street in the heart of New Orleans as something akin to shock crept into his gut. What was this place? Granted, he hadn’t been home in years, but he felt like he’d landed on an alien planet.

The buildings were mostly the same—painted bright colors and adorned by elaborate wrought-iron balconies. The sweet smell of beignets still wrestled with the sour smell of vomit. People and music still poured out of bars into the street. But somehow, it was not the same. The vibe was all wrong.

Damn. He’d heard things had changed since Hurricane Katrina, but he hadn’t guessed how much.

It wasn’t just that so many storefronts and restaurants had new names. Or that the music forming a cacophony in the background was more generic pop now and less jazz or twangy zydeco. Or even that the throngs of people had changed. Even at a glance there were more out-of-towners, fewer locals, less authenticity. Less unapologetic seediness.

The French Quarter had been transformed into a sanitized tourist version of itself.

The whole casual, laissez les bons temps rouler culture was missing. Oh, the tourists were living their cartoon version of it, drinking and laughing and flashing bare breasts for beads. But if he looked closer, he saw hawkers urgently coaxing tourists and their wallets inside their establishments, vendors shoving schlocky souvenirs in people’s faces. It was all hustle, hustle, hustle.

Hell, maybe he was the one who’d changed. A decade on the SEAL teams did that to a guy.

Not that he had actually wanted to come home after all this time. But his boss, Commander Cole Perriman, had sent him here with orders to “Eff-ing relax and don’t come back until you do.” Translation: get your head together and stop taking stupid, suicidal risks, or else you’re off the teams.

Secretly panicked by the unspoken ultimatum, he’d agreed to take this rare vacation in the hope that it actually would help him get his head together. He’d always been all about the job. He was the job. Also, his old man had died nearly six months ago, and he had yet to put his father’s final affairs in order. It was time to get that unpleasant task out of the way.

It had been pure luck that he’d been downrange and way deep undercover, unable to get home after his father had his last and fatal heart attack. He’d been relieved not to have to face the people who would have genuinely mourned his old man’s passing. Thank God Mom went first. She would never have survived burying her husband.

It wasn’t as if Asher would have had anything decent to say to the bastard in farewell. Thanks for sucking as a parent. Thanks for never noticing anything I tried to get your attention and approval. Thanks for being incapable of love. Yup, it was just as well that he hadn’t been able to make it home.

But he was home now. Such as it was.

How in the hell was he supposed to relax? Perriman had ordered him to do it as if he actually knew how to wind down. As if he wasn’t always walking on the razor’s edge, always a warrior, always ready to act or react. Even now, wading through the noisy, raucous French Quarter on a Friday night, he scrutinized every person he passed for hostile body language, for darting or furtive looks, for unusual bulges under jackets, anything to indicate a threat.

Frankly, being among this many people was making him more tense, not less. Crowds this dense were the perfect target for a suicide bomber—

Wait. United States soil. Lawful, secure, peaceful soil. No terrorists lurking about as a rule. Jeez, he was wired tight. He shook his upper body in an attempt to release the tension across his neck and shoulders. Yeah. Like that worked. He was the goddamn job.

Frustrated, he yanked out his cell phone and texted Commander Perriman, More uptight than ever. I hope you’re happy.

He’d known Frosty Perriman for his entire SEAL career. The guy had been one of his BUD/S instructors and had handpicked him to be in a super classified unit Frosty had been in charge of putting together and training. They specialized in rescuing kidnapped American civilians. The rescues themselves hadn’t been the tricky bit. The hard part had been staying out of the damned news and keeping the existence of their group secret.

But the task force had run afoul of a congressional investigation a few months back when a journalist they’d been assigned to rescue had been killed before they could get to the guy. Never mind that their team hadn’t been given enough intel to actually find the guy, and that they had scoured the mountains in the middle of nowhere for weeks, trying to track down the journalist and his captors. In the end, it had been a colossal CIA failure, but the SEAL team had taken the heat for it and was disbanded.

Of course, it probably had more to do with the current Congress not liking the SEALs doing anything secret and off the books. Meddling politicians. They wanted to poke their fingers into everything. It wasn’t like the bastards did anything useful. They just wanted front row seats at the show. To feel like they were part of the Cool Kids’ Club. And when the navy wouldn’t let them randomly interfere, they threw a Congress-sized tantrum.

Bunch of freaking amateurs.

Someone jostled Asher from behind and he whipped around, hands at the ready to take names and break necks. The accosters turned out to be some sort of bachelor party. Plastic cups of beer sloshed, and someone slurred an apology as he bathed his own T-shirt with a generous portion of beer. Shaking his head, Asher stood down and moved on. Relaxing, dammit. He was supposed to be relaxing—not killing drunk kids. The same drunk kids he’d sworn an oath to protect and defend, along with the Constitution that gave them a sacred right to act like idiots.

Desperate to get away from the bright lights and sheer noisy wrongness of the place, he ducked down a side street toward a neighborhood that no sane tourist should have ventured into. But then, he was neither entirely sane nor a regular tourist. When the streets had turned into dark, dank alleys and the men lounging in doorways eyed him with as much hostility and suspicion as he eyed them, Asher breathed a sigh of relief. This was more his speed.

“Hey, big guy,” a raspy female voice crooned from just ahead. “Wanna free drink? First one’s on the house.”

He eyed the hard-looking woman slouching beneath a hanging sign for some joint called the Who Do Voodoo. “Strippers or just booze?” he asked.

“We got girls,” the woman drawled.

“And they’re actually female under the hood?”

The woman grinned, revealing gaps on each side of her yellowed teeth. “No impersonators here, handsome. They’re one block down on the other side of the street. C’mon in. You look like you could use a drink.”

How exactly did that look? A shot of whiskey did sound good, though. Maybe several shots. In fast succession. Enough to wipe the whole stupid idea of relaxing out of his gullet for a while.

The music was loud, pounding against his skull when he walked into what turned out to be a pole-dancing club, complete with a raised stage and topless women gyrating without much enthusiasm. Jesus, they looked like children up there on stage. Or maybe he was just getting old.

Asher spotted a table in the corner well away from the stereo speakers and slipped into a seat with his back to the wall. He scanned the room and frowned. Trouble was brewing. Two men were glaring at each other from opposite sides of the catwalk that extended out into the audience. A stripper shook her booty between the two of them, for all the world looking like she was egging them on. Being a tease was what she was paid to do, but jeez. She was provoking the guys like crazy. Drunks and half-naked women never did mix well.

Sure enough, the fight broke out, and he watched impassively as a huge bouncer dived in to break up the fray. But what Asher didn’t expect was a good chunk of the audience diving into the fight, too. When knives came out in multiple fists, he rolled his eyes.

Dammit, he didn’t want to have to be a hero tonight. He was on vacation. But it wasn’t like he could sit here and watch those jackasses carve each other up and possibly injure innocent bystanders. Not to mention that drawing weapons meant the cops would be called, and he really didn’t need to spend all damned night giving statements to the police.

He sighed and stood up. Grabbing the collar of the nearest idiot with a knife, he disarmed the guy with a twist of the man’s wrist so fast the guy didn’t know what had happened.

Asher spun to face another drunk. A hard, quick fist to the chin and the guy went down. He wasn’t unconscious, but he was stunned enough not to rejoin the fight right away. Asher stepped over him and disarmed two more men before the remaining drunks figured out a wrecking ball had swung into the fight, and they all staggered back from one another.

His shock-and-awe approach gave the bouncer time to get ahead of the knife wielders on his side of the stage and toss them out of the club, with a kick in the pants for emphasis on the way out the front door.

Shaking his head, Asher returned to his seat to watch the waitresses scurry around righting tables and hauling out broken chairs.

A slender arm appeared over his shoulder, and a glass of neat whiskey plunked down on the table in front of him. Startled, he reflexively grabbed the female wrist and gave its owner a yank. A young woman landed in his lap with a surprised oomph.

“Hey!” she protested. Eyes so blue they hurt to look at blinked up at him. Other sensations bombarded him all at once. A resilient tush pressing down rather suggestively on his man parts. A spectacular view of cleavage. Not huge breasts, but perfectly shaped. A nice handful. Slender limbs going every which way in his arms. Silky, straight blond hair wisping across a face that would be pretty—really pretty—without all that heavy makeup caked on.

But all of that paled before the bizarre sense of...connection...he felt with this woman as they stared at one another. Like they’d met before. Maybe in a past life. Not that he believed in any of that woo-woo stuff for a second.

“It’s not wise to sneak up on a guy like that,” he muttered. “Especially not after he’s just disarmed a bunch of dudes with switchblades.”

She stared up at him for a moment more and then, inexplicably, relaxed in his arms. Like she trusted him or something. As if she knew instinctively that he was one of the good guys. What the hell?

“You handled yourself well in the fight,” she murmured.

“Are you Russian, too?” he asked. Everyone else in this joint so far seemed to be. He’d apparently stumbled into the local Slavic hangout.

“Russian by heritage, born and bred in New Orleans, though,” she answered in an entirely convincing New Orleans drawl, her sapphire gaze flickering furtively toward the bar. Fear radiated off her.

His arms tightened instinctively around her sweet, now tense, body. A shocking urge came over him to carry her out of here, to take her someplace quiet and alone to...to do what? He didn’t take advantage of women. And he’d never been fond of hook-up sex. It always left him feeling cheap and more alone than ever. Was he so desperate for a human connection that the first chick to fall into his lap seemed like a gift from God? Hell, maybe Frosty had been right to force this shore leave on him, after all.

He frowned down at the girl now cowering in his arms. “Are you illegal?”

Her attention snapped back to him. Their gazes clashed but still managed to meld together as heat flared between them. Talk about instant chemistry.

She sounded a little out of breath as she mumbled, “I have to go. Let me up or else the owner will charge you for a lap dance.”

He cast about for something—anything—to keep her in his arms a little longer. “What’s your name?”

“Hank.”

He blinked, echoing, “Hank?” His arms loosened in surprise, and she leaped to her feet.

“Short for Hankova. You want another whiskey?”

“Sure...Hank. Make it a double.” Anything to get her to come back to him. To look at him again and thaw some of the ice encasing his heart.

He watched her hustle away from him toward the bar. Her legs were a mile long in black fishnet, and those seams running down the back of each leg, ending in little bows on the backs of her ankles, were the sexiest things he’d seen in a long time. He slugged the first whiskey without tasting it, let alone feeling the bite of it going down his throat.

Asher heard a commotion at the front door and tensed—no doubt one or both of the drunks from before were trying to get back in—but the bouncer handled it and kept the troublemakers out. He released the tension from his body but wouldn’t go so far as to say he actually relaxed.

His phone vibrated, signaling an incoming text, and he fished it out without ever taking his eyes off Hank. She moved around quickly and discreetly among the other patrons like she didn’t want to be seen. Not that he blamed her. Roaming hands seemed to be epidemic around this place.

His jaw tightened a little more each time some bastard grabbed her ass and gave it a squeeze. When she made her way back to the bar to place an order and got a second’s respite from the groping, he spared a glance down at his phone.

The text was from Perriman. Don’t come back until you’ve relaxed, Hollywood. That’s an order.

Hollywood. His nickname on the team and a reference to his movie-star good looks. As he recalled, Perriman had been the first of his instructors to start calling him that back when he’d been a snot-nosed kid with a chip on his shoulder, hell-bent on showing his father that he was a bigger, badder dude than the old man had ever been.

He silently cursed his boss in all of the many languages he spoke. Idly, Asher noted a patron ducking through a door at the back of the club. The passage was guarded by a beefy guy wearing a dress shirt and tie. The lap dance lounge must have been back there. Although as several more guys strolled into the back over the next few minutes and none returned to the bar, he began to suspect the patrons were going upstairs instead. Which meant this place was a front for a whorehouse.

Was Hank a working girl?

The idea didn’t even faze him, as it turned out. He had to find a way to get to know her better. Seduce her. Have a passionate affair—paid or otherwise.

Except, he was on only a couple weeks’ leave. Just passing through. For all he knew, she was looking for a long-term relationship. Permanence. Commitment. He had no right to pursue her randomly. His gut clenched in frustration at the thought of letting her slip away.

Speak of the devil. She was sauntering back toward him with a bottle of pretty decent whiskey and a shot glass balanced on her tray. She set both down in front of him and gave him a fleeting, secret little smile that only he could see.

“What do I owe you?”

She smiled again, a little bigger this time. Her whole being lit up when she smiled like that. Jeez, he couldn’t remember the last time a woman had knocked him this off balance. She murmured, “It’s on the house for helping break up the fight.”

“Wow. Generous. Who’s the owner so I can say thanks?”

Her eyes went furtive again, and she suddenly glanced toward the door beside the bar.

His senses went on high alert. “Are you safe here, Hank?” he asked.

A pregnant pause. Her doe-eyed gaze flickered to him and then skittered away again. “Yes. Of course.”

Not safe. And there went his protective instincts, firing on all cylinders. “What time do you get off work tonight? I’ll walk you home.”

Massive alarm fired off in her big, scared eyes. “No!” she blurted.

“It’s nothing like that,” he explained quickly. “I’m just offering to see you home safely. I swear I won’t come on to you or anything. But after that fight, those drunks will hang around outside looking for trouble.” It was a lie, but he really did want only to protect her from the threat scaring her inside the bar. And she obviously wouldn’t let him walk her home without an excuse.

“I can take care of myself,” she said.

He frowned, studying her face closely. Lord, she was mesmerizing. He greedily memorized every nuance of her face. Then he asked bluntly, “Do you ever work upstairs?”

Chapter 2

Hank stared down at the big, intimidating man seated before her and answered forcefully, “No!” She ought to be offended by his far too personal question, but she got the distinct impression he wasn’t asking because he wanted to buy an hour’s use of her body.

Not that she would necessarily say no to him if he offered. He was handsome with a capital H. Fashion magazine hot. He had that whole chiseled features thing going. Dark hair. Dark tan. And Lord, his light eyes looked right through her. She couldn’t tell in this light if they were gray or blue. A hint of pain clung to him, masked by his deep reserve. She never could resist a man with a dark past.

Not just his big, athletic body, but his entire being, was perfectly still as he watched everything that went on around him. She got the feeling that his all-encompassing stare could turn predatory in a second. But so far, whenever he’d turned it on her, his eyes had lit up with something reminiscent of a volcanic eruption—hot and molten.

If only she could tell him the truth. That her brother was lost somewhere inside the criminal organization that ran this place. That she was trying to infiltrate the Russian mob far enough to find him and save him from whatever he’d gotten mixed up in. Or at least to find out what had happened to him. That he was her big brother, and he’d practically raised her after the car accident.

She turned her attention back to the man lurking in the shadows. She was a total sucker for brooding, dangerous men, and he was both in spades. She couldn’t get over how well his dark hair was set off by those light gunmetal eyes of his. And the way he’d handled himself in the bar fight left no doubt how deadly he really was. He’d waded through seasoned brawlers and armed mob muscle like they were school children.

She spoke earnestly under her breath. “You seem like a decent guy. This isn’t the kind of place you should hang out in. Go have a nice life and don’t worry about me.” Find yourself a supermodel and have insanely great sex...

He poured himself a healthy shot of whiskey from the open bottle she’d put in front of him. “Not how I roll.” How then, did he roll? God, she’d love to find out firsthand. Of course, any idiot could see he was severely out of her league. Men like him just didn’t want anything to do with cheap waitresses in sleazy joints like this.

“I’m not everyone...Hank. Hankova is a feminine patronymic. What’s your actual first name?”

She frowned. He knew how patronymics worked? Practically no American had ever heard of the universal Slavic custom of taking the father’s first name, adding an ending, and making it the child’s middle name. “It’s Evgeniya. My first name, that is.”

He winced sympathetically, for which she might just have loved him a little, and then smiled ruefully. “I see now why you prefer Hank. It’s going to take a little getting used to, though.”

He planned to stick around long enough to adjust to her weird name? Whoa. Cue the stunned happy dance. She smiled shyly. “My mother called me Eve.”

“Eve. That’s nice.”

Nice? Well, crap. There went any chance of him ever seeing her as a sexy femme fatale. The kind of woman he would consider having a torrid affair with. “I always thought it made me sound like an old lady.”

“Well, then, Hank it is. But you’re still nice.”

Frantic to dispel the nice image that went hand-in-hand with “girl next door” and “my best friend’s off-limits little sister,” she took a step closer to the table. Then she leaned down, planted her palm on the table beside the whiskey bottle and gave him a generous look down her shirt.

Reaching for her toughest, most threatening tone of voice, the one she used to back off drunks who simply would not take no for an answer, she purred, “I’m a lot of things, mister, but nice isn’t one of them.”

Lifting a brow, he leaned back in his seat and pinned her with an intent look. Well, that wasn’t exactly the response she’d been hoping for at all! She’d wanted heat. Interest. Acknowledgment that she was torrid-affair material. Instead, it felt like he was stripping her bare with that laser stare of his, analyzing her psyche with computer-like precision.

She had to fight not to squirm under his probing gaze as the layers of her deception fell away. Drat and double drat. He’d seen right through her ruse.

At long last, analysis apparently complete, a wry smile curled up one corner of his mouth and he looked away from her, his gaze casually scanning the club. She sagged in relief and released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Intense guy.

He murmured mildly, “Put your claws away, kitten. I’m no threat to you.”

Hah. He had no idea. She did not need any distractions. Nor did she need some high-profile guy coming in and making waves around her—the kind of waves that would attract undue attention in her direction. Her whole plan revolved around being invisible. Innocuous. Quietly sliding so deep inside the Russian mob outfit running this place that she could unearth the truth and maybe get some closure. Figure out whether Max was alive or dead—

“Take this,” the man seated before her murmured. He passed her a business card.

Disappointment coursed through her. Really? He was giving her his phone number to get a date? One word was written on the back. Asher. And a phone number.

“Is that your first name or last?” she asked.

“First. And my mother called me Ashe.”

She couldn’t picture this hard-edged man ever having had a mother. Glancing back down at the card, she frowned. What was that area code? It wasn’t local. She turned the card over. It was for some sort of sporting goods and ammunition warehouse in Baton Rouge. “You sell tents and guns, Asher?” she asked drily.

His voice was low, sexy as he murmured, “You can call me Ashe, too.”

Cripes. Her toes curled in her high-heeled platform shoes as the masculine confidence in that low rumble vibrated through her belly.

He was speaking again. “...only thing I had to write on. That’s my cell phone number on the back. You ever get into any trouble you can’t handle, call me. Okay?”

She looked up from the scrawled number quickly. “You’re some kind of hired muscle?”

The corner of his mouth curled up again. “Something like that. Keep it, eh? No strings attached if you call the number. Just a helping hand. You’re a good kid, and you’re clearly in over your head.”

Oh, God. That was so nice of him. Something hot and sharp caught in her throat, choking her a little. She’d nearly forgotten what it was like to have a decent human being give a damn about her. An urge to take him up on his offer and confide everything to someone—anyone—nearly overcame her. Heck, the temptation just to have a simple, honest conversation was almost more than she could resist.

But then her spine stiffened. Her work here was not done. She had to maintain her cover. Her life, and possibly her brother’s, depended on it. She was in too deep to back out now. A list of names, deals, dates and crimes she’d already procured was etched in her mind. There would be no leaving this quest until she succeeded...or died.

Belatedly, she smiled cynically at Asher—Ashe—and spoke with utter sincerity. “Believe me. I’m not a kid. Not anymore.”

“Take care of yourself, Evgeniya Hankova.” He pronounced her name exactly right, palatalized vowels and all, as if he was a native speaker of Russian.

Her gaze snapped to his. Surely he wasn’t one of them! Had this been a test? Ohmigod. Had she said something to give away her real motives for being here? Frantically she reviewed their brief conversation while her face froze into a mask of a smile. She backed away from his table quickly, turned, and fled to the storeroom behind the bar to catch her breath.

Vitaly, the owner and manager of the whole establishment, poked his head into the filthy little room far too soon. “I need you out front. Candy’s done with her set, and everyone wants drinks.”

Great. Candy was one of the sexiest pole dancers in the entire club. She was also all of fifteen years old. The patrons would be horny and grabby after her performance. Steeling herself to ignore the lewd comments and inappropriately groping hands, she nodded at her boss and stepped back out into the bar.

He was gone.

She knew it without even having to glance over at the table in the corner. Ashe’s absence was a cold chill against her skin where there should have been warmth. She smiled down blankly at the mobster who’d just proposed vulgar sex with her in Russian she wasn’t supposed to understand. Take the drink order. Move on to the next table. Keep moving. Just keep moving...

God. For a minute there, she remembered what life had been like before everything went to hell. A nice, normal guy treating her with a modicum of respect and concern. Was it possible to be homesick for America while standing on American soil? Apparently, yes, because she felt tears welling up in the backs of her eyes.

Stop it. No feelings. No fear. She was a stone. She would have her answers, and then nothing else mattered.

* * *

The bar closed at 2:00 a.m., but Hank and the other waitresses were expected to stick around to clean up after that. The Voodoo was particularly trashed tonight because of the fight. The one Ashe had broken up with such ease. She yanked her thoughts away from the enigmatic American who had wandered so far from where he should have been and ended up in this little corner of hell. He was not for her. That whole normalcy thing was not for her, not anymore. She bent down to pick up the remains of a broken chair.

The good news was she was not one of the trafficked, drug-addicted girls upstairs. She was still free to walk out of here and never come back if she chose to. At least for now.

She could turn the crew in charge of this place in to the police. But a) she wasn’t entirely certain the police weren’t being paid to ignore the goings-on at the Who Do Voodoo, and b) then she would never find Max. Besides, she was convinced this place was a small fish in the overall crime ring running it.

Her goal was to work her way up to the big sharks before she called the authorities. She had names and pictures of a few of the girls that she’d snuck on her cell phone over the past few months. Those would go to the police as soon as she concluded her own investigation.

She even had pictures of a few men who came into the bar and disappeared quickly into the back any time they showed up. Vitaly was always surly when they left, and his complaints about how much money his bosses took out of the till always happened right after those silent strangers paid a visit.

The bar was finally restored to a semblance of its usual squalor, and Vitaly growled at the waitresses to go on home. She took off her apron, hung it in the storeroom and slung her purse over her shoulder. Wearily she headed outside with the other girls. They traded good-nights and went their various ways. As for her, she trudged deeper into the bowels of the Warehouse District’s worst section.

The darkness at this time of night was thick and impenetrable, shrouding her in heavy menace. Ever since the car accident, she’d been terrified of being alone in the dark. She walked fast and tried to project a badassery she was far from feeling as she hurried home. If she could call it a home. Her apartment was, at best, a dive. But it had a bed, a sofa, a tiny kitchen and a tinier bathroom. And she could afford it on her meager pay.

She’d graduated from college the previous June with a degree in art history and restoration, just before Max went AWOL. She could probably land a decent job given her family connections in the art business, and there was the cash she’d inherited when her father had died. It had covered the cost of her college with enough left over to start her own art restoration business if she wanted. Instead, she was living in a slum as part of her cover and waiting tables in a cesspool while she searched for her brother.

Her humble abode was on the second floor of a hundred-year-old building situated over an Oriental rug showroom. The rug merchant downstairs had stashed a girlfriend in the apartment until his wife caught him and forced him to ditch the mistress and rent the place out. Hank suspected the only reason she was allowed to be here was because the wife didn’t realize that Hank the Renter was a girl. A young, single, reasonably good-looking one at that. The rug merchant had made a few overtures to her to take up with him where the former tenant had left off, but she’d turned him down firmly and nailed the door shut that led from her living room downstairs to the old lecher’s office.

She turned into a puddle-strewn alley running alongside the rug store and started up the rickety wood stairs that led to her place. A sound behind her made her whip around, hand plunging into her purse to grip her can of pepper spray.

A man-sized shadow rushed toward her from the alley entrance, and she froze. What to do? How to react? Hank’s heart lurched in her throat. She had to do something, but what? The back of the alley was a dead end. Nobody would hear her scream, and even if someone did hear her, no one in this neighborhood would call the police. Oh, God. She was in huge trouble.

But as quickly as that thought rushed through her brain and panic crashed through her body, a second, taller shadow raced out of the darkness from behind the first one. The fight—if she could call it that—was quick and brutal. Shadow Number Two chopped her would-be assailant in the back of the head with a vicious backhand blow that dropped Shadow Number One like a brick.

The violent second shadow took off running straight at her. Crap. The set of the big man’s shoulders was grim. Determined. She didn’t need to see his face to know she was his next target.

She turned and raced up the stairs, half-sobbing in terror. She stumbled, grabbed the rail and hauled herself upright. Splinters from the aged and cracked wood railing stabbed her palm, but she ignored them. She was going to die if she didn’t get inside and behind a locked door now.

Footsteps closed in too damned fast from behind. Oh, God. A half dozen steps to go. The stairs shook as the shadow’s weight crashed onto them. She fled across the tiny landing. Keys. Dammit. Where were her keys?

She fumbled desperately in her purse as her attacker took the steps behind her in great leaps that devoured the long staircase all too fast.

There. Her fingers found the jumble of keys. She snatched them out of her purse and found the familiar shape of her door key. Oh, God. He was almost on her. She whirled, threw her purse at him with all her strength and turned to unlock the door.

Not fast enough.

Big, strong hands grabbed her upper arms. Yanked her around.

Pepper spray. She still had the pepper spray in her left hand. She lifted the small canister and mashed down the button.

“Oww. Bloody hell!” her attacker grunted.

He ducked away from the worst of the spray, barreled into her, and propelled both her and himself against her door. His weight knocked the breath out of her for a moment, during which he released her with one hand, just long enough to turn the doorknob. Which, of course, she’d managed to unlock right before he jumped her.

She opened her mouth to scream, but her attacker shoved her inside and slammed the door shut behind them before she could let it rip.

“Jeez, Hank. It’s me. Ashe.”

Her scream cut off just as it got started. “Ashe? What the heck?” She flipped on the light switch and stared at him in disbelief.

“Christ. Where’s a sink? I gotta rinse that pepper spray out of my eyes.” His eyes were, indeed, watering copiously, and he took a half-blind step toward her kitchenette.

“Are you going to attack me?” she asked suspiciously, backing away from him.

“Hell, no. I just took out the bastard who was about to jump you.”

Her jaw dropped. “Who was he?”

“No idea. Sink?”

“Oh. Over here.” Taking him by the arm, she guided him to her kitchen sink and turned on the spigot. It coughed then began to emit a sluggish stream of smelly New Orleans tap water.

He splashed great handfuls of it over his face again and again, rinsing away the pepper spray from around his eyes. His back muscles flexed under his taut T-shirt as he bent over the sink. Yowza. The guy was ripped. She hovered nearby, feeling helpless and guilty that she was the cause of his hissing breaths of pain and watering eyes. Eventually he stood upright. He was easily six foot two. And freaking built like an Olympic athlete.

She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand to forestall her. “Stay here.” She watched as he cautiously opened her front door. Stepped out onto the landing. Looked around. Came back inside and announced, “He’s gone.” She sagged in relief and realized abruptly that her knees felt weak.

Meanwhile, Ashe pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

She eavesdropped shamelessly as he asked, “Is Bastien LeBlanc by any chance on duty tonight...? Perfect. Could you ask him to cruise by Malouf’s Oriental Rug Shop in the Warehouse District when he gets a chance? There was a minor scuffle in the alley beside the store, and a black-and-white drive-by would help ensure that no more trouble flares up. Tell him Asher Konig will owe him one...thanks.”

“What was that all about?” she demanded. “Who’s Bastien LeBlanc?”

“NOPD patrol officer. And an old friend. He’ll cruise by and make sure your would-be assailant doesn’t stick around for seconds.”

Wow. It must be nice to have one’s very own cop on call to do favors. If only she had the same. Maybe then she would know where her brother was by now. “You should have told me who you were instead of chasing me up the stairs,” she said accusingly.

“I didn’t know if I had knocked the bastard out fully or not,” he retorted. “Unlike on television, people can pop up pretty fast after getting walloped in the head. I needed to get you behind cover and in a defensible position before I bothered with niceties.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Sorry I nailed you with my pepper spray.”

“Don’t apologize to me. You didn’t realize who I was.”

Did he have to be so nice about it? Now she felt even guiltier than before. “Let me get you a towel. You’re soaked.”

She retreated to her bathroom, grabbed the cleaner of her two towels off the rack and hurried back to the main room. Sheesh. What was wrong with her? Was she afraid he was going to bolt from her place before she got a chance to flirt with him or something?

Oh, my. As she stepped into the living room, she was just in time to see him grab the back of his T-shirt and haul the wet garment over his head.

Oh, my. Acres of bulging pecs and rippling abs came into sight as he straightened. Top-tier male models had nothing on this guy’s physique.

“Wow,” she breathed. “You’re pretty without a shirt.”

He glanced up and smiled wryly. “Thanks. And thanks for the towel.” He lifted it gently out of her nerveless fingers and began toweling off his muscular acreage...while she stood there and basically drooled at him.

“You okay...?”

Wait. What? He’d asked her something. She replayed the garbled syllables and blurted belatedly, “Yeah, sure. I’m fine.”

“Let me see your hand.”

Huh?

Before she could figure out what he was talking about, he’d moved swiftly to her side and lifted her hand in his, palm up. Oh, hey. Look. There were three angry red scratches running the length of her hand and culminating in big gouges.

“Tweezers,” he bit out.

“Medicine cabinet.”

He turned and strode swiftly into the bathroom. Oh, God. A half dozen skimpy thongs and lacy bras were draped over the shower rod, drying. Too late to stop him.

Sure enough, he was smirking a little as he emerged from her postage-stamp-sized bathroom. But then he picked up her hand and started digging around.

“Youch!” She tried to yank her hand away but might as well have had it lodged in a block of concrete for all it moved.

“Splinters,” he muttered. “Stay still.”

Obediently she stopped squirming and leaned closer to watch as he deftly extracted several splinters from her hand. He was actually really good at it. His fingers were steady and swift. Exquisitely gentle. Then suddenly, he glanced up at her and asked, “You holding up okay?”

“Uh-huh.”

“One more to go. You’re being very brave.”

This from a man who’d cracked heads twice in the same evening without breaking a sweat. The last splinter surrendered to him, and he rubbed the pad of his thumb across her palm, soothing it tenderly.

“I think the patient is going to live,” he murmured.

“Thank you. For everything.”

He looked up from her hand, and their gazes met—or rather, tangled together in a sexually charged dance of intense awareness of one another. Of hot, undeniable attraction, of hunger and need...

Yowza. The man sure knew how to, well, look at a woman.

Some sort of bright light flashed outside her window. “That would be Bastien,” Ashe said. “He’s shining his spotlight down the alley.”

“Wow. That was fast.”

“We’re good friends. Used to work together. He knows I wouldn’t bother him unless it was important.”

He took a careful step back from her and glided over beside the window like James Bond, peering furtively past the blinds at an oblique angle that spoke of cloaks and daggers. What was up with that? Her other window onto the street got the same treatment.

A text came in on his phone, and as soon as he read it, the tense set of his shoulders relaxed. “Bastien says the alley’s clear. He drove around the block a couple times, too. Your attacker has left the area.”

She was more relieved than she liked to admit. Thank God Ashe had been there to save her. And that he knew a cop who would come scope out the area so quickly and thoroughly.

Ashe moved away from the windows and settled on the lurid red velveteen sofa, part of the furnishings that came with the dive.

She had never thought of her apartment as particularly small, but he filled the space with his large frame and even larger presence. His silver-blue gaze honed in on her again, but this time it was filled with questions. Speculation. Determination to find answers. And more of that disconcerting heat.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a nasty joint like that?”

How did he manage to fill such a straightforward question with so much loaded innuendo? Her heart fluttered—actually fluttered—in response. Belatedly she mumbled, “You mean the bar?”

A frown pleated his dark brow. “You and I both know the Who Do Voodoo is a lot more than a bar.”

Caution stilled her entire being. She knew it because she’d been working there for months. But how did he know after only a few hours spent sipping booze in the corner? Who was this guy? Surely he didn’t work for Vitaly’s bosses. “Are you a cop?” she blurted.

“No.” His answer was prompt and without hesitation.

“FBI or something?”

“Nope.”

“Why do you care if I work at the Voodoo, then?” she asked. “It’s a steady paycheck.”

“It’s not worth the money. That place is trouble.”

“I’ll work where I want,” she snapped. “It’s my life.”

He leaned back, stretching an arm along the back of her sofa. Deeply tanned, it was wreathed from wrist to shoulder in corded muscle and bulging veins that spoke of ridiculous strength. And she was alone in her isolated apartment with this total stranger who could overpower her without even exerting himself. She really ought to be scared silly of him. But she couldn’t work up anything but a sense of complete trust in this man. Clearly, she’d lost her mind.

“So what’s the deal with the club?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I’d bet my next paycheck there’s a whorehouse upstairs. Given how young the dancers looked, I’m guessing it’s a sex trafficking outfit. You may be too scared to call the FBI, but I’m not.” He tilted up on one hip to fish his cell phone out of a back pocket of his jeans.

“You can’t call them!” she exclaimed.

He froze. Eased back down to the sofa slowly, phone still in pocket. “Why not?” Something dark and dangerous vibrated in his voice. It wasn’t menace exactly, but it was a reminder to tread lightly around this man.

“You’ll ruin everything!”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be more specific than that. What ‘everything’ do you mean, exactly?”

She huffed. She didn’t want to tell him anything, let alone involve him in her secret investigation. But if the FBI raided the bar and shut it down, her only lead to Max would be lost.

After weeks of frantic searching and the police seeming to ignore her, she couldn’t take the constant panic anymore and had walked into the Voodoo bar to demand answers. It was the last place her brother had been seen going into the day he disappeared. And given that it wasn’t the kind of joint he would normally have been caught dead in, logic suggested the place had something to do with his disappearance.

When she’d barged into the club, Vitaly had mistaken her for someone applying for the waitress job advertised in the window. He’d offered her the position on the spot, and in a combination of instinct and impulse, she’d taken it.

For the past two months, she’d been watching and listening and learning. But the mob bosses who employed Vitaly were extremely cautious. They rarely showed their faces, and they never did anything to hint at illegal activity—not counting the whorehouse upstairs.

She occasionally served drinks in the back lounge where the lap dances happened, but she’d never waited on the mob bosses where she could get a chance to eavesdrop on their conversation.

She had also never set foot above the ground floor of the bar and didn’t intend to, either. In all honesty, she was scared to death of getting sucked into the inescapable downward spiral that was the sex trafficking industry.

“You haven’t given me a good reason not to call the feds...yet,” Ashe said, jarring her from her thoughts. “And I happen to believe trafficking in underage girls is about the worst form of exploitation there is. I have zero sympathy for anyone engaged in it.”

“Neither do I,” she muttered.

“Well, then?”

He hadn’t moved a muscle, but a promise rolled off him to have answers out of her tonight, come hell or high water. She studied him closely. He’d shown genuine concern for her in the club and had even subjected himself to bodily harm to save her from that thug. Plus, he seemed prepared to listen to her. So heck...maybe she should take him up on his offer. Because thus far, she’d had zero success on her own finding out anything about Max.

Decision made, she released a long, slow breath that made her entire being feel as if it had deflated. It seemed as if she’d been holding that breath for months. Had she really been living under so much tension and stress? As good as it felt to trust him at least a little, she wasn’t prepared to give up all her secrets to this man she barely knew. So she chose her words carefully. “Someone I know used to hang out at the Voodoo, and then we lost touch. I’m trying to figure out what happened.”

“A girl?” he asked quickly.

Oh, God. He thought she knew one of the trafficked girls from Eastern Europe who were virtual prisoners upstairs without identification documents or knowledge of the English language or American laws. Not to mention many of the girls were drug addicts who were paid for sex with heroin or crack.

“No, no. Nothing like that. A guy. I’m hoping I’ll run across someone who knew him and may know something about why he was there and where he went.”

“Ahh.” Ashe’s expression shuttered abruptly, and he leaned forward to reach for his wet shirt.

Good grief. He thought Max was her boyfriend. Cripes. He must think she was a weirdo stalker chick working at the Voodoo to chase down some poor guy who’d fled from her and intentionally left no contact information.

She winced as she bit the inside of her lip to stop herself from correcting Ashe’s mistaken impression. It was for the best. As hot as he might be, she had no time in her life for a dalliance that might distract her from finding her big brother.

Her gut howled at her that Max was in trouble and until that internal scream was silenced, she was off the market for men.

Ashe shrugged into his damp T-shirt. “How long do you need to find your...friend...before I call the feds?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been there two months and haven’t caught a lead yet.”

“And you’re sure he’s still alive?”

Her spine stiffened in denial at the notion of Max being dead. It was what the cops thought. All this time with not a hint of him, no credit card hits, no banking transactions, no sightings...

“I know he’s alive,” she declared.

“How?” Ashe asked the question evenly enough. As if he was willing to hear her reasoning.

She sighed heavily. “I feel it in my gut, okay? I know that sounds lame, but I would know if he were dead. And I’m telling you he’s not.”

He stared at her for a second and then nodded briefly. Really? He believed her? No scoffing comments about how stupid it was to rely on a gut instinct? On how the facts said she was wrong? Wow.

He spoke gruffly. “Two weeks. I’ll help you look for your boyfriend during that time, but that’s all you get. It’ll take the law that long to gather evidence, get the warrants and set up a raid. Innocent girls are suffering every day there.”

Oh, God. She’d never thought of it in those terms. In her panic to find Max, she’d had the power to save those girls and hadn’t. She was a horrible human being! In that context, giving her two weeks was frankly damned generous.

“Don’t have the cops wait on my account,” she said grimly. “When they’re ready, they should shut the place down. I’ll tell you this, though. The Voodoo is the tip of a much bigger iceberg.”

Ashe gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean by that? What iceberg?”

Chapter 3

He leaned forward, watching every nuance of Hank’s body language intently. Now they were getting somewhere. What the hell wasn’t she telling him, though? He sensed lies in her words as sure as he was sitting here.

She answered, “Vitaly, the owner of the Voodoo, has bosses. Russian mob bosses. I haven’t seen many of them around the joint, but his place is definitely a front for them.”

“What kind of front?”

“I imagine they launder money through the place, although I haven’t seen Vitaly’s ledgers. He keeps all of those on his cell phone, and that thing never leaves his hands or his pocket.” She blew out a breath. “Believe me, I’ve tried to get a look at it. But I’ve never seen him lay his phone down once.”

“Anything else?”

She snorted. “He’s a moneymaker for his bosses. Vitaly gripes all the time about the measly cut of the Voodoo’s income that he gets. The rest is going up his chain of command.”

Ashe frowned. “The mob, be it traditional Cosa Nostra or the Russians, usually takes only a small cut of the profits as protection money.”

“Not at the Voodoo. Someone is taking the bulk of the income and giving Vitaly only a tiny piece of the pie to run the club.”

“Tell me about Vitaly.”

“His last name is Parenko. He’s tough. Smart. Mean. Organized. He actually runs a pretty tight ship.”

“Any mob ink on him?” he asked.

“He has a tattoo on his left arm, up high. It’s a globe with four compass points coming out of it. There are two flags above the globe and a submarine across it.”

Ashe’s jaw flexed. “Are the Cyrillic letters em-cheh-peh-veh on it anywhere?”

Frowning, she thought about his question. “Yes. There’s a little banner under the globe with those letters on it. And some numbers.”

“Russian Navy symbol. And he has no other Russian mob tattoos?”

“Not the traditional ones that cover the whole torso. Now and then someone spills a drink on him, and I’ve seen him change his shirt a couple of times.” She hesitated, her brow furrowing. “He’s got only one other tat. It’s on his left shoulder blade and is small. It’s a shield with a star over it and a sword going down through the star.”

“Jesus,” Ashe breathed. That was the symbol for the KGB, the Soviet Union’s equivalent of a combination FBI and CIA before it had been summarily disbanded in the mid-1990s and replaced with the FSB, the Federal Security Service of Russia. The abrupt disbanding of the KGB had stranded thousands of trained special operatives without jobs, incomes or pensions. Not surprisingly, many of them had turned their unusual skill sets to crime. In under a decade, the Russian mob had become one of the most feared criminal organizations on earth.

“How old is Vitaly?” Ashe asked.

“Midforties. But he’s in really good shape for his age.”

The guy was old enough to have been a young KGB agent in the early 1990s. “Does he ever do anything that strikes you as...paranoid?”

Hank rolled her eyes. “All the time. He does background checks on everyone who works there. Rumor is that he has all of his employees followed randomly—oh, God. What if that guy you jumped is working for him? I’ll lose my job for sure—”

He cut her off quickly. “The guy I took out was moving toward you aggressively. A simple tail wouldn’t have shown himself or moved that forcefully toward his subject.”

She nodded slowly, but doubt still clouded her gaze.

He continued his interrogation. “Any other paranoid behaviors?”

“Well, there’s the time I came into the bar in the afternoon before it was open because I forgot to pick up my paycheck the night before. Vitaly was going over the walls with some sort of electronic device. When I asked him what he was doing, he told me he was looking for bugs. But I thought he meant cockroaches.”

“Have you seen other men around the bar with mob ink?” Russian mob tattoos were a complex art form with traditional symbologies to indicate which gang a man belonged to, his mob rank and even how many kills he had. The ink tended to cover most or all of a man’s arms and torso and was hard to miss.

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“What about the men who take so much of Vitaly’s money?”

“Can’t tell. They tend to wear suits.”

Was her missing boyfriend one of them? She obviously knew what Russian mob ink looked like because she hadn’t asked for any clarification when he referred to it. If her ex was a mobster and caught wind of her stalking him like this, she’d be killed for being such a nuisance. Had that been the purpose of the guy he’d chased off in the alley?

“Look, Hank. You are in more danger than you know. You need to back off looking for this friend of yours and stop working at the Voodoo.”

“Not a chance.”

Dammit. Her reply was emphatic. She wasn’t about to be talked out of looking for her boyfriend. “Did it ever occur to you that this friend of yours doesn’t want to be found? That if he wanted you to know where he was, he would have let you know?”

Tears welled up in her eyes, and in spite of knowing that he was right, Ashe felt like a heel. God, he hated it when women cried. Especially when he made them do it. Which wasn’t often. In his line of work, he rarely had time to interact with women at all, let alone get to know one well enough to break her heart.

She swallowed hard. “It’s not like that. We weren’t dating. But I know...I know...something is wrong. Call it woman’s intuition if you like. I feel it.”

She didn’t have to convince him of the accuracy of her intuition. His life depended on listening to his all the time. More times than he could count, a gut feeling had saved his hide in the field.

Whoa. Rewind. She and this guy weren’t dating? For a moment, triumph leaped in his gut. Then who was this man she was so torn up over?

She was lying. She loved this mystery man heart and soul.

Dammit. He glanced down at her hands and noticed that she was wringing them continuously as she paced. Her slender fingers were red, she was pulling at them so hard. Oh, yeah. Head over heels for the missing dude. Disappointment rolled over him. He’d really thought for a minute there that they had some kind of connection.

“Come here, Hank. Sit down and talk to me.”

She looked up at him, stress distorting her lovely features so much that his stomach twisted in sympathy. She moved around the scarred coffee table and sank onto the other sofa cushion. He reached out and captured her hands in his, stilling their restless activity.

“Tell me about your friend.”

For a minute, he didn’t think she was going to answer. But then she let out another one of those great, relieved sighs of hers and started to talk.

“His name is Max. He’s an art and antiques broker. Acquires—well, acquired—pieces for private clients and for an auction house here in New Orleans. He got a commission to find something for someone, and soon after, he disappeared. No one’s seen or heard from him since.”

“What was he commissioned to find, and who commissioned him?”

“The auction house has no idea,” she replied. “You see, he’s an independent broker, and the commission didn’t come through the house. For the last week before he disappeared, he went into the Who Do Voodoo on a daily basis. As if he’d gotten a job there—which makes no sense at all. The day he disappeared, the name of the club was written down in his appointment book, too.”

“Who was the last person to see him?”

“I found the taxi driver who dropped him off there that night. He says he didn’t see Max meet or speak to anyone. He just went inside the club.”

“What does Max look like?” he asked.

“Six feet tall. Athletic. Brown hair. Blue eyes. I have a picture of him if you want to see it.”

“That would be great.”

She jumped up and went into the bedroom. He heard a drawer squeak open and closed, and then she was coming back toward him. Transfixed, he watched her slow, sensuous return. Her body was slender, and she moved like a dancer. She was still wearing those sexy stockings with their hot little bows, but she’d kicked off the high heels and was padding around in her stocking feet, which was almost sexier. Her feet were elegantly shaped, and her toenails were painted a sassy shade of red beneath the black fishnet. Jeez, it had been way too long since he’d had a woman if some girl’s feet were a turn-on.

“Here’s a picture of Max.”

No wonder she was stalking the guy. He exuded breezy, classy charm, and it was just a damned picture. Ashe memorized Max’s face carefully while he snapped a picture of the photo with his cell phone. He took a moment to encrypt the picture so a casual search of his phone wouldn’t show the image. If he was dealing with former KGB types, he couldn’t afford to leave any trace of his real purpose lying around to be found.

Because he was, of course, going to help this girl find her lost lover or whoever the guy was to her. She was completely unequipped to deal with mobsters, let alone mobsters of this ilk. And he was a sucker for damsels in distress.

He placed a call to his SEAL team’s ops center. It was a 24/7/365 outfit equipped to do just about anything a SEAL team could think up by way of support, from pulling in real-time intel, to tapping satellite feeds, to getting oddball-caliber ammo delivered to hellholes halfway around the globe on a moment’s notice. Illegally. And without being detected.

A familiar female voice answered the phone. Awesome. Jennie Finch was one of the best ops specialists in the outfit. “Hey, Jen. I need you to run a name. Vitaly Parenko, which is likely an alias. Former KGB type. Russian Navy submariner. Living in New Orleans now. In his midforties.”

“I thought you were supposed to be on vacation, Hollywood.”

Ashe sighed in response. God knew Jen had helped him and his guys out enough times to rate using his team nickname. He often asked for her specifically to run point in ops on his missions because she was smart as hell, had a knack for anticipating what he was going to need and had it waiting for him by the time he asked for it.

“Are you running an op I didn’t hear about?” she demanded, a shade indignantly.

“Something like that.”

“Why didn’t Perriman brief it to us here in ops?”

He grimaced. “Perriman doesn’t know about it yet. I want to get my ducks in a row before I brief him.”

“Oooh, you’re gonna be in big truh-ble when he finds out you’re working during your shore leave.”

“Don’t rat me out, okay?”

“If you’ll promise that I get to watch the fireworks when he finds out, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

“Deal,” he said.

“Okay. Vitaly Parenko doesn’t exist before the year 2005.”

She must’ve had her computer searching for data while they bantered back and forth. “What does that mean, he doesn’t exist?” he asked.

“Your guess that the name is an alias is correct. You got a picture I can work off?”

“Not yet. But I’ll get you one. Speaking of pictures, I need you to see what you can find out on another guy. Name’s Max. Lemme send you the image now.”

While he pulled the phone away from his ear to send the image to Jennie, he glanced up at Hank. “What’s Max’s last name?”

“Kuznetsov.”

He put the phone back to his ear. “Last name Kuznetsov. Went missing around—”

Hank supplied, “June tenth of this year.”

“—June tenth.” Almost three months ago. The trail had to be getting damned cold by now. He relayed the other information Hank had shared with him to Jennie and ended with, “And I need you to check out a strip joint called the Who Do Voodoo in New Orleans. Parenko nominally owns the place, but someone else is pulling out most of the cash it makes. And be quiet about it. I don’t want to tip off the Russian mob that I’m poking around.”

“Would I do it any other way?” Jennie challenged him.

“Nah. You’re the best.”

“Get me a picture of this Parenko guy if you can.”

“Roger that. Gimme till tomorrow night.”

“Okay. I’ll work on this other stuff in the meantime.”

Ashe disconnected the call to find Hank glaring at him. “Who was that? You didn’t just drag the authorities into this, did you?”

“Nah. That’s just Jennie. She researches stuff for me from time to time.”

Hank’s expression fell. Yeah, he knew the feeling. He’d felt a spark of interest for her, too, until he’d found out she was willing to risk her life to track down some ex-boyfriend she was still carrying a torch for.

It was for the best that she thought Jennie was some sort of romantic interest of his. If nothing else, it made him look a little less pathetic for having been interested in her when she was still in love with this Max guy. Too bad her heart was given elsewhere. He sensed that the two of them could’ve been good together. Really good.

He asked in resignation, “You gonna be okay tonight, or do you need me to crash on your couch?”

A combination of heat and alarm raced across her lovely, mobile features. She really was a pretty girl beneath the cheap, gaudy makeup. The kind of genuine pretty that would age with grace and grow more elegant with time. Her skin was smooth and soft and fair. It matched her light-haired, blue-eyed Nordic looks...

And she was not for him.

He rose to his feet and moved swiftly to her windows, checking the locks before he headed to the door. “Lock this after me. I’ll stand outside until I hear the dead bolt thrown home.”

She nodded, and if he wasn’t mistaken, a note of fear pinged in her gaze. She wanted him to stay but wasn’t going to ask it of him. He didn’t know whether to label her brave or just stubborn. Probably a little of both.

Knowing Bastien LeBlanc, the guy would spend the rest of the night hanging out in this neighborhood, keeping an eye on it. Hank would be plenty safe tonight. Bastien had been on the teams with Ashe for years and was a hell of a soldier, not to mention a loyal friend. Since Ashe had asked for help, Bastien would lend a hand and more.

“Be careful, Hank. You’re in way deeper than you know. Please reconsider and don’t go back to that place.”

“Thanks for your help earlier and for your concern. But I know what I’m doing.”

No. She didn’t. But it was an argument he wouldn’t win with her. He was going to have to go around her and just hope she forgave him for it.

Chapter 4

Hank stood at the bar, yawning. The combination of jumping at every sound outside and jangling nerves leftover from her intense encounter with Asher Konig had added up to a basically sleepless night for her.

The bartender was just filling her tray with beers when she felt his presence. It raced across her skin and sank into her awareness like hot sunshine before she could register dismay that he was back. What the hell was Ashe trying to do? He was going to mess up everything!

It was a busy Saturday night. Football season had started and Vitaly had installed a bunch of flat-screen TVs a few weeks back. The customers could toss back a brew, watch football, and get a lap dance from an underage girl. What more could a guy want? It also meant Vitaly would be watching the bar closely. He wouldn’t fail to notice that the patron who’d shown an interest in her last night had returned tonight. Crap, crap, crap. She had to ignore Ashe and hope he caught the hint and ignored her back.

She studiously avoided even looking at him until it dawned on her that she might be avoiding him so much that her body language would draw Vitaly’s attention, anyway. Damn. She hated trying to outthink her diabolically smart boss. What to do?

Her dilemma was interrupted as she passed close to the doorway into the lap dance lounge.

“Psst,” someone hissed.

Startled, she glanced at the door. The usual bouncer wasn’t there. He’d probably gone to the bathroom for a minute.

“Psst.”

She stepped close to the door. A girl stood there, dressed in a pair of skimpy satin boxer shorts and an even skimpier tank top that her large breasts all but spilled out of in multiple directions. The girl’s mascara was almost clown-like on ridiculously long false eyelashes, and a generous helping of mascara was running down her cheeks.

“Have you been crying?” Hank asked in alarm. “Are you all right?”

The girl patted her cheeks absently as if they had no feeling in them. “Oh. That. Huh. Can’t feel my face...” Her voice trailed off. Then she asked abruptly, “Have you seen the blue man?”

Hank frowned. “What blue man?”

“In the bowler hat. He’s all blue and his suit is melting. And his tie was purple, but it turned green...”

Wow. This girl was high as a kite on something. Hank ducked inside the lap dance lounge, backing the girl up, out of sight of the main bar. She leaned close to whisper, “Do you need me to get you out of here?”

“Out?” The girl stared blankly. “What? No. You got more juice? Need my juice.”

The girl looked plenty juiced up already. “What’s your name?” Hank asked.

“Sveta. You likey? Call me Jane. Or Grrmblahhumbugama...” Sveta dissolved into laughter. Assuming that was her name. Hank whipped out her cell phone and took a quick photo of the girl.

“Do you want to take a walk with me, Sveta? Maybe outside? To clear your head?” And call an ambulance and the cops?

“Wanna go to my room. Sleep.” And all of a sudden, the girl drooped like she was on the verge of passing out.

“Umm, okay. Let me help you.” Hank wedged her shoulder under the taller girl’s armpit as Sveta sagged.

She’d taken maybe a half dozen awkward steps beside the staggering girl, guiding her toward the back of the lap dance lounge and the emergency exit to an alley, when a sharp male voice bit out from behind them, “What are you doing down here, Sveta? You know that’s against the rules.”

Crap. Vitaly.

The girl whimpered and shrank against Hank’s side. “She was on her way out into the bar in search of a drink,” Hank explained lamely.

Vitaly moved swiftly to Sveta’s other side, pulling the girl toward the stairs that led upward into the bowels of whatever went on up there. “I’ll take her from here, Hank.”

“I can help you get her upstairs.”

“No!” She started at the harshness of Vitaly’s tone. “You are never to go up there. I don’t want you getting near any of what goes on up there. You understand?” He stared at her intently over the nearly unconscious hooker’s head.

“Uhh, sure,” Hank stammered.

“You stay away from that place.”

She frowned, confused. The guy almost sounded concerned for her. Like he was trying to protect her from upstairs, not urge her into it. He all but lifted Sveta off her shoulder, muttering under his breath in Russian to the hooker, “C’mon. Let’s get you some candy. Let’s find you a sugar daddy to love you, baby. Does that sound good? Say goodbye to the real world, baby doll...”

He and Sveta disappeared around a corner in the stairs.

“Hey? Whatchoo doing back he’uh?” another male voice demanded from behind her.

The bouncer. Back from the restroom or wherever he’d disappeared to.

“You ain’t s’posed to be in he’uh.” His Cajun accent was so thick she could barely make out the words.

“Yeah, well, a girl came out looking for some juice. Vitaly just took her back upstairs.”

The bouncer pulled a face. “Dang ho. How she git loose?”

Loose? As in the girls were locked in or restrained in some way? Horror skittered down Hank’s spine. She managed a reasonably unconcerned shrug and pushed past the bouncer into the main bar. She paused for a moment to catch her breath. God. That poor girl. She’d been stoned out of her mind.

“You okay?” yet another male voice asked from behind her.

Ashe.

Vitaly was upstairs for the moment and the bouncer back at his post. She hurried over to Ashe’s table and spoke fast and low. “I just saw one of the girls from upstairs. She was high on something psychedelic. Vitaly’s taking her back upstairs. We’ve got to shut this place down. Now.”

“Patience, Hank. Let the cops do it right.”

“But they’re on it? They’re getting everything in place?”

“Yeah.” He glanced over her shoulder and bit out, “Bring me a vodka, neat.” Under his breath, he added, “We’re on camera. We’ll talk later.”

Vitaly moved up beside her. “Everything okay here? My girl taking care of you?” He gave her backside a stinging slap that she expected was meant to serve as a warning to keep her mouth shut about what she’d just seen.

“Yes, she’s doing fine,” Ashe answered easily. He looked over at her, letting his gaze roam boldly up and down her body. Heat burst through her. Even her face grew hot. Great! How in the heck was she supposed to convince Vitaly she had no interest in Ashe if he made her freaking blush?

She headed toward the bar and was alarmed when Vitaly followed, crowding her against the wood and brass counter. He leaned in close and muttered, “Forget what you saw, Hank. You’re a good kid, understand? You don’t want any part of what goes on up there. The clients would mistake you for someone you’re not.”

Once again, he sounded genuinely concerned for her. She half turned to look him in the eye. “Thanks for looking out for me, Vitaly. I appreciate it.”

He nodded tersely and headed into his office. Son of a gun. Who’d have thunk the SOB would look out for her like that? Or was he just trying to get on her good side to prevent her from telling anyone about Sveta? Man, she sucked at all this undercover stuff. She was by nature a straightforward person, and subterfuge of any kind messed with her head. Although her family hadn’t been exactly the most forthcoming bunch to grow up around. Maybe her honesty was a twisted form of youthful rebellion.

Or maybe she was just overthinking Vitaly’s motives. Maybe he really did want to protect her. Cripes, this place was making a cynic out of her. But then, she got to see the worst humanity had to offer in this den of iniquity.

The next two weeks couldn’t pass fast enough for her. When they talked later, she would ask Ashe to move up the timetable of the FBI raid...or whatever it was he’d arranged with his girlfriend on the phone last night.

She’d been startled by the surge of jealousy that had swept through her when she’d realized that was a woman he’d been flirting with so comfortably on the phone. She’d give anything to have a man like him flirt with her like that. Maybe someday when this nightmare passed.

Assuming she survived it.

The bartender plunked a glass down in front of her and poured a sloppy shot of vodka into it. “For your boyfriend,” he announced.

She snapped back, “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“He’s watching you like he is. Guy’s warning off every dude in the room with his glare.”

Was that why no one had been groping or swatting her tonight? Except, of course, Vitaly. Crud. Ashe wasn’t helping matters by protecting her. He had to ignore her...or at least just treat her like one of the other girls. He mustn’t give any sign that she was anything special to him. Vitaly saw everything that went on around here. The man was like a spider sitting in his web.

The other waitresses whispered that Vitaly had secret cameras in the club and spied on them. Hank had even seen him sitting at his desk from time to time, studying his computer screen intently. But any time she’d had an excuse to go into his office, he’d turned off his monitor before she could glimpse whatever had been on it.

Hence her need for caution now. She ignored Ashe’s whiskey on the bar and instead delivered a tray of drinks to a table full of regulars. They were Russians, but just customers who came in for the good vodka Vitaly stocked.

“Hey, Hank,” Vitaly called from the doorway of his office. “Your boyfriend is waiting for his drink. Go serve him...and be nice to him.”

She winced. Drat. He’d seen her skip giving Ashe his drink. She’d hoped another one of the waitresses would want to flirt with the hunk in the corner and take his vodka to him in her place. No such luck.

She nodded in Vitaly’s direction without making eye contact with her boss and swerved toward Ashe’s table. He took the shot glass directly out of her hand. Their fingertips brushed, and she gasped as her pulse jumped. Lord, he had a crazy effect on her.

“Can I get you another drink?” she asked him mechanically as he handed the empty shot glass back to her.

“Do you carry Kauffman Vintage Vodka?”

She stared at him in surprise. “You know premium vodkas?”

“I like to think so.”

“I don’t know if we carry that. I’ll ask the bartender.”

“If not, I’ll take a shot of Russian Standard or the best the house has got.”

She headed for the bar and got raised eyebrows from the bartender at the request for Kauffman. He commented, “That stuff runs over two hundred bucks a bottle. Maybe Vitaly has some in his special stock. You’ll have to ask him.”

Hank poked her head into her boss’s office. “The guy from last night is asking for some vodka called Kauffman. The bartender told me to come ask you for it.”

“Kauffman, eh? Perhaps I should meet your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” she retorted in exasperation she didn’t have to fake.

“You a lesbian or something?” Vitaly asked.

She bit back a snappy reply and merely mumbled, “Nah. He’s just not my boyfriend.” Sometimes it was a struggle to keep up her charade of not being the brightest bulb in the box.

Vitaly got up from his desk and moved to a tall locked wooden cabinet in the corner. She moved a little to have a sight line into the cabinet and was stunned to see several big honking weapons standing in the case. They looked like machine guns. Holy cow—

“Here we go.” Vitaly pulled out a fat spherical bottle with a big silver cap that reminded her of a parrot’s beak. Clear liquid filled the round belly of the bottle. She shifted back to her original position and pasted a look of dull disinterest on her face as he locked the case and turned to face her.

“Bring us two of the good vodka shot glasses in a bowl of ice,” he ordered as he herded her out of the office and headed for Ashe’s table. Planning on checking out the new patron personally, was he? Sheesh, Vitaly was paranoid.

She dutifully brought the men a deep bowl with two crystal shot glasses nestled in crushed ice. She set the bowl on the table and Vitaly ordered her brusquely, “Go away. My new friend and I want private conversation.”

Every now and then, Vitaly’s flawless American accent slipped a little and took on a faint Russian tinge like it just had. But that usually happened only when he was furious or under stress. Alarmed, she glanced between the two men. Dammit, there was no way to warn Ashe that Vitaly was on high alert.

She made brief eye contact with Ashe, who merely looked vaguely irritated that she was still hanging around. Frustrated, she retreated to the bar. “What’s Kauffman, anyway?” she asked the barkeep, even though she knew full well what it was. Her brother used to drink it from time to time.

“One of the best Russian vodkas on earth. They only make it in years when the wheat crop is of especially high quality.”

She sniffed. “Sounds snooty to me.”

“It’s not the stuff regular guys order, that’s for sure. Who’s that dude Vitaly’s sitting with?”

“No idea. Just some customer.”

“Isn’t he the one who broke up the fight last night?”

Crap, crap, crap. Ashe had called attention to himself—and now to her—by coming back tonight. “I dunno. I guess so.”

“Looks like he and the boss are hitting it off.”

Great. Ashe was horning in on her investigation. She’d kill him if he messed it all up. What could Ashe and Vitaly be talking about so intently anyway?

“He hot for you or something?” The bartender’s blunt question quickly derailed her curiosity.

She rolled her eyes at the bartender. “As if I’d date any of the slimeballs who come in here.”

The guy guffawed and poured her a plain soda with a twist of lemon, the way she liked it. She sipped at the drink for a few seconds, her back pointedly turned to Ashe and Vitaly and whatever bromance the two of them were having.

She moved around the club, serving patrons and enduring their lewd comments. Just another night in downtown hell. Except that it wasn’t. She couldn’t shake her hyperawareness of Ashe sitting in the corner with her boss. Her dangerous mobster boss. Their heads were close together, and they laughed uproariously now and then like they were trading war stories.

Vitaly called for a refill of crushed ice, and when she approached the table, she was stunned to hear them conversing in Russian. Ashe was freaking fluent? Bastard. Unreasonable jealousy surged through her that he was getting further with her boss in one lousy hour than she had in months.

It wasn’t fair. She was a no-account female, and Vitaly ignored her existence for the most part. But Ashe could stroll in here and order some hoity-toity vodka, and just like that, Vitaly was hanging on his every word.

The level of vodka in the parrot-beak bottle dropped steadily over the next hour, and Vitaly demanded yet another refill on the ice. But this time, when she approached the table, her boss grabbed her rear end under her short skirt and gave it a humiliatingly familiar squeeze through her panties.

It was all she could do not to pull away from his hard fingers digging into her tender flesh. “Evgeniya the Ice Queen,” he drawled in Russian. “Needs a man to screw her lights out. I tell her the pay is much better in the lap dance lounge, but always she refuses.”

“Maybe a real man hasn’t offered to do the job right,” Ashe replied drily in the same language.

It was all she could do not to stick her tongue out at him. To date, Vitaly thought she understood only a few words of the simplest Russian, and she needed to keep it that way. She’d been able to eavesdrop on countless conversations between him and his associates because of it.

“You think you’re man enough?” Vitaly hooted. “I’ll give you a bottle of this vodka on the house if you convince her to do it. Make a lap dancer of her if you can. I’ll earn a fortune on her in the lap dance lounge if I can get her back there. Get a load of those legs. And just feel this ass...”

Ashe glanced up at her for just a moment, his eyes mirroring regret for just an instant. But it was enough for her to know he was not enjoying this any more than she was. “Come over here,” he drawled in English. “Vitaly says you have a great ass. I want to check it out.”

Was he kidding? Apparently not, for he stared at her expectantly. Silently livid at her boss, she stepped away from his invasive grip and moved to Ashe’s side, standing so close that her knees rubbed his thigh. “Go ahead, buddy. It’s not like you’ll ever get more than a handful of this action.”

Vitaly hooted with laughter. He sounded more drunk than not, but she never could tell with him. He held vodka like nobody’s business.

Ashe’s palm cupped the back of her knee, sliding up the back of her thigh with maddening slowness. With light pressure, he pushed her leg until she took a step to the side, turning so her back was to the room. What? He didn’t want the other patrons to see him checking out her posterior regions? If the man weren’t feeling her up, she might actually think his action was chivalrous. But as it was, his hand headed inexorably toward her rear end.

His fingertips traced the seam of her stockings up under her miniskirt, up to the swell of her backside, paused, and then continued higher until her entire cheek was cupped in his big, warm hand. Her glute muscles clenched involuntarily.

His hand kneaded her gently and he murmured cajolingly, “Relax, baby. I’m not gonna hurt you.”

No, but he was embarrassing her to death. It was one thing to have random drunk strangers grab her as she passed by them. But he was no stranger, and this was no random grope. It was a full-scale invasion. His fingers dipped into the tight crevasse between her cheeks, in the same place Vitaly’s had, but where her boss’s grasp had been rough and impersonal, Ashe’s fingers were beguiling. Intent on winning her acceptance. They stroked and probed gently, asking and waiting for her to relax and give him access to her most secret places. Something hot and liquid erupted low in her belly, startling the hell out of her and momentarily distracting her long enough that she did relax her tush.

Ashe’s hand dipped deep between her legs immediately, and she tensed up once more. But the damage was done. His hand cupped her lady parts with shocking intimacy, and any move she made would rub said parts against said hand. She froze, staring down at him in shock. It was one thing to go along with Vitaly’s misogyny for the sake of gaining the guy’s trust. It was another thing entirely to embarrass her in public. Although, truth be told, the worst of her embarrassment stemmed from the fact that she was a little turned on by Ashe’s hand cupping her like she already belonged to him.

“Trust me, Vitaly,” he declared in Russian. “She’s no ice queen. She’s all woman. And hot for me.”

She didn’t stop to think about it. She went with her reflex reaction and slapped Ashe’s cheek with all her might.

Vitaly surged halfway to his feet, swearing and apologizing as words tumbled out of his mouth in a garbled jumble. But it was Ashe’s reaction that shocked her. He stared up at her in stunned disbelief for a heartbeat and then threw his head back and laughed. Heartily.

“Sit, sit, Vitaly,” he chortled in Russian. “I like my women a little wild. It’s more fun that way to tame them.”

Her gaze narrowed. As if he would ever tame her. Hah!

Vitaly sank back into his chair, but he was looked genuinely angry and glared at her with a grim promise of serious retribution when Ashe left this place. So much for looking out for her best interests. Heck, for all she knew, her boss might drag her upstairs by the hair and let the clients do their worst to her. Her insides turned to jelly and her entire being quailed at the thought of what could happen to her up there. They could shoot her up with heroin until she was hooked, lock her into a room in the brothel...

Who would come looking for her? There was no one to rescue her from the hellhole Vitaly could throw her into. She would be lost. And now that Max was gone, not a living soul would care.

“...don’t let women slap me without punishment,” Ashe was saying in Russian. He leaned back in his chair, tossed back a shot of the expensive vodka and grinned at Vitaly. “How do you propose I do that, my friend?”

Vitaly scowled. “I’d beat her until she couldn’t sit for a week.”

Ashe tilted his head to one side and studied her while she defiantly glared back at him. “Nah. She’s got fair skin. She would bruise like mad. Someone would call the cops on you.”

Vitaly jerked his chin at her. “What would you do to punish her?”

A slow smile unfolded on Ashe’s face. “You want her to work in the lap dance lounge, yes?”

Aghast, she stared at him. He was not actually going to throw her to the wolves like this, was he? Ashe was supposed to be one of the good guys! Worse, she wasn’t supposed to know Russian, so she couldn’t respond in any way to this little exchange between the men.

“Yes, of course,” Vitally answered a little too eagerly. Apparently he wasn’t so drunk that he’d missed where Ashe was going with his line of reasoning, either. Dammit.

Ashe asked in English, “How about I teach her how to do a decent lap dance?”

It was Vitaly’s turn to throw back his head and laugh. “Done.”

“No way—” she began.

Vitaly surged to his feet and grabbed a fistful of her hair at the back of her neck, yanking her head violently and forcing her to endure his fetid breath in her face. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Ashe tense. “You make my friend happy, or I will take you upstairs and put you to work up there. Understood?”

She tried to nod, but even the smallest movement of her head caused her hair to pull painfully against his fist. He leaned in closer to growl, “Do what this man says or I’ll make you pay.”

Terror roared through her. It was her worst nightmare. She was going to get sucked into the abyss and never escape Vitaly’s clutches. And it was all Ashe’s fault, damn him. Why, oh, why did he have to show up here and mess up everything?

Ashe surged out of his chair, his big fist suddenly encompassing Vitaly’s at her neck. “Let the lady go.” His voice was low and cold and dripped with violence.

Vitaly shoved her at Ashe. “Be a good girl and show the nice man how very sorry you are.”

Ashe caught her as she half fell against him. He set her gently back on her feet and loomed close beside her, never releasing her arm just above the elbow. “Come along, naughty little girl.” His words might be what Vitaly wanted to hear, but his tone was soothing.

Without further ado, he led her over to the lap dance lounge’s entrance. The bouncer opened it, grinning, and Ashe ushered her into what surely was a special corner of hell.

What little lighting there was in the lounge came from red bulbs shrouded in colored scarves that hung from the ceiling and fat black candles dripping in sconces around the walls. Necklaces of bones, snakeskins, animal skulls and braids of herbs decorated the kidney-colored walls. The place reeked of incense and pot and sweat, and maybe a hint of blood. A rooster even clucked quietly in a small cage on a table off to one side of the room. More drippy candles, dried chicken feet and knives lay on the table beside the live chicken. Small curtained alcoves lined the room, and a row of chairs filled its center.

Ashe led her to an alcove with the curtain pulled back and ushered her inside. He yanked the cloth shut behind them. A low armless chair stood against the wall, and he smirked at her before turning her arm loose and plunking down on it.

She whispered furiously, “You don’t seriously expect me to do this, do you?”

He murmured back sotto voce, “I seriously expect that there are cameras in here, and that your boss will be watching. I’m not exactly thrilled about the position you’ve put me in, either. You really shouldn’t have slapped me. At least not in front of a misogynistic chauvinist like your boss.”

“What did you expect me to do?” she said with a hiss. “Let him manhandle me like that and treat me like a piece of meat he can give to whomever he wants?”

“I expected you to trust me. I’d have seen to it the bastard gets what’s coming to him and I’d have gotten you out of there without this little detour.”

She swore under her breath. He was, of course, right. It was her own impulsive nature and stupid temper that had put her in this pickle.

“I’ll fake it if you will,” he muttered.

“Right. Fake it.” But fake what? As if she had any idea how to do a lap dance. The subject had not been covered in any of her art history classes in college. Scowling, she scooted forward until her knees bumped against his shins.

He smiled. “Go for it, baby.”

“You’re going to hell for this,” she grumbled.

His grin widened, and he leaned back in the chair a little. “Ahh, but what a way to go. I dare you. Give me your best shot.”

Oh, a dare, was it? That changed things. Glaring fiercely at him, she threw her leg across his hips and plopped down on his lap. He tensed beneath her as her lady parts passed across the zipper of his jeans.

Crud. Now what? She was undoubtedly supposed to engage in some sort of bump-and-grind routine next. After all, it was called a lap dance. But that left a whole lot to the imagination by way of technical details.

Experimentally she tilted her hips forward and then back. Oh, my. That felt rather nice. She tried it again. Her nervous tension eased a little, and this time it felt even better.

“That all you got?” Ashe murmured in obvious amusement.

Concentrating intensely, she tried circling her hips to the left. Ooh, that was interesting. And better, unwilling heat flared in Ashe’s eyes. Quite a bit of heat, in fact. If she wasn’t mistaken, the region behind his zipper was getting harder. More enthusiastically, she circled back to the right.

“This may not be the right moment to mention it, but most lap dancers do it facing away from the guy. It costs extra to get a full frontal. I expect the girls don’t want to get their chests grabbed, nor do they want to be tongued or kissed.”

She sprang to her feet, outraged. “You let me writhe all over your lap the wrong way?”

“I didn’t say it was wrong. Just more suggestive than usual.”

“You are such. A. Jerk.”

His voice dropped so low she could barely hear it over the Jamaican music blaring from hidden speakers overhead. “No, baby. It’s called protecting your cover. Vitaly’s going to be watching us when we leave here. And I’d better have a hard-on and you’d better be embarrassed all to hell when we walk out of here if you want either of us to make it out of this club alive.”

Of course he was right. Darn it. “How in the heck do you know so much about this stuff, anyway?” she demanded, chagrined.

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I’m not exactly a teenaged virgin. Of course, I don’t generally have to pay for what I want from women, either.”

She glared at him a moment more, then whirled around and backed onto his lap. Her toes barely reached the floor, and she overbalanced slightly. His hands came up to clasp her hips. He didn’t do anything crude like pull her down onto his male parts, but he did steady her until she regained her balance.

Ashe shifted beneath her. Abruptly, warm breath caressed her neck. He must have taken pity on her because he murmured, “Most girls squat over the guy and keep their weight on their feet, which is why this chair is so low and has no arms. That way, the girl can pull away if the guy gets fresh with her. Then the girls twerk a little.”

“I don’t know how to twerk,” she wailed under her breath.

“It basically involves relaxing your rear end and shaking it up and down. Don’t worry about it. The view I’m getting is fine just the way it is.”

Thank God she had a skirt on. And stockings. And panties. This was embarrassing enough without her having her rear end hanging out of a skimpy thong.

“My thighs are burning.”

“Then sit down on me, silly.” He gave a little tug, and her tired legs gave out. She plopped down unceremoniously on his lap. She lurched, but he held her in place with that easy, overwhelming strength of his.

“I cannot believe you’re making me do this.” Her mouth was saying one thing, but her body was starting to say something else entirely. It wasn’t all bad having her hips nestled in his lap. His zipper bulged against parts of her she’d never...rubbed...against anyone before. The intimacy of it was staggering.

She’d had sex, of course. She was twenty-five, after all. But never like this. She’d never been the type blatantly to take control of the sex, or to be...naughty...about it. Okay, so she was a prude. There. She’d said it. Or at least thought it very loudly.

Ashe relaxed beneath her, seemingly completely at ease with having a woman squirming around on his lap. But she felt vulnerable. Terribly exposed. Even though her miniskirt flared around both of their hips, hiding most of what was going on underneath it.

“Move your hips like this,” he instructed, guiding her hips through a slow figure eight. “You can rock like before or do those circles you were doing, too.”

“This is hard,” she complained.

A low chuckle rumbled behind her. “I believe hard is the point.”

She looked over her shoulder to roll her eyes at him.

He grinned. “Just sayin’.”

“Behave.”

He shrugged. “It’s not like either of us has any choice here. If I don’t have a grin on my face or a pronounced limp, Vitaly’s going to try to hurt you. And since I’m not about to let him do that, all hell will break loose.”

“So you’re not enjoying this?” She didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed.

“Well, now, I didn’t say that,” he drawled. “I think if you put a little enthusiasm into it, maybe pretended I was your boyfriend, you might have a future in the profession.”

Imagine him as her boyfriend, huh? That wasn’t much of a stretch. The memory of his magnificent naked chest in her apartment last night popped into her head. Nope. Not a stretch at all. Let alone the steamy dreams of him that had disrupted her sleep.

She realized with a start that she was moving more sensuously against him, enjoying the feel of him growing restless beneath her. Tense. Hungry.

He was faking it, of course, which was really sweet of him. Warming up to the ruse a little more, she let her mind wander into a pleasant fantasy of the two of them together.

They would be in a beautiful old room with antique furniture, hardwood floors and white gauze curtains. The big four-poster bed would have fat pillows and white linen sheets. A fan would turn lazily overhead, stirring the sultry air. They would make love slowly. Easily. With aching tenderness that gradually turned into raging, sweaty passion...

“Okay, then,” Ashe ground out. “That should be enough to shut up your boss.”

She stilled abruptly. Ohmigosh. Her hips had been undulating all over the place. She’d been riding him like a total hussy.

“I’m sorry—” she started.

“Hush,” he muttered, cutting her off. “Vitaly will be delighted.” A pause, and then he added wryly, “Too delighted. Bastard’s gonna want to put you to work back here after that performance.” He swore quietly as he lifted her off his lap.

She turned to face him, surprised that he hadn’t stood up already. But a quick, unwilling glance at his lap revealed the source of his delay. His zipper strained to contain the raging erection behind it. He’d been genuinely turned on by her lap dance? “I didn’t suck, then?” she blurted.

A short bark of laughter slipped out of him. “You did not suck.”

He gritted his teeth and visibly reached for self-control. Sympathetically she suggested, “Think about your grandmother. Church. An ice-cold shower.”

Another laugh, this time a little pained. “I’ve got this, thanks. Just give me a second.”

She turned her back to give him a little privacy to get his body under control. It was more like a minute, but he eventually rose to his feet behind her. He leaned close, his big body radiating heat against her spine. “Don’t argue with me when I talk to Vitaly. I have a plan.”

Now what on earth did that mean?

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