Midnight Vengeance

by Lisa Marie Rice

  Midnight Vengeance

  By Lisa Marie Rice

  Morton “Jacko” Jackman isn’t afraid of anything. He’s a former Navy SEAL sniper, and he’s been in more firefights than most people have had hot meals. Lauren Dare scares the crap out of him.

  Gorgeous, talented and refined, she’s the type of woman who could never be interested in a roughneck like him. So he’s loved her fiercely in secret, taken her art classes, and kept a watchful but comfortable distance. Until now.

  Lauren had finally found a home in Portland, far from her real identity, far from the memories of her mother’s death, and outside the reaches of the drugged-out psycho who’s already tried to kill her twice. One tiny misstep—a single photograph—has shattered it all. She has no choice but to run again, but this time she’ll give herself a proper farewell: one night with Jacko.

  Their highly charged emotional encounter changes everything. In Jacko’s arms there cannot be fear, there can only be pleasure. Anyone wishing her harm will have to pass through him, and Jacko is a hard man to kill.

  67,000 words

  Dear Reader,

  August here in North America is one of last-minute frenzy for many of us: fit in as many more days at the beach as possible while it’s still blazing hot, get one final vacation in before school starts, and read as many excellent books as you can before next month’s books arrive. Okay, maybe that last one could be said of every month (at least for me) but with beach time and vacation time does come more reading time, so I find I often get to read more in August than any other month.

  This month, kick off your beach reading with a little contemporary crack romantic suspense from Lisa Marie Rice. I’ve been a fan of her writing for years, and I’ve read everything she’s written, so I was thrilled when she agreed to come write for me at Carina Press, and revive her popular Midnight series in Midnight Vengeance. Longtime fans of Lisa Marie Rice will see a return to her well-known, compulsively readable, alpha-tastic story and characters. Readers new to Lisa Marie Rice can dive in to Midnight Vengeance and discover just what I mean by contemporary crack, compulsively readable and So. Darn. Good!

  Fans of contemporary crack-type reads will find themselves drawn to Heather Long’s Some Like It Deadly, a book everyone on the team found themselves talking about just how much they liked it. As attorney and best friend to a grand duke, Richard Prentiss has dealt with everything from the paparazzi to business moguls, but when he takes an interest in Kate Braddock, his new “personal assistant,” it’s up to her to keep it professional—unbeknownst to him, it’s her job to step in front of the bullet with his name on it.

  New York Times bestselling author Shannon Stacey is back with her final (for now) novel in the Kowalski series. Meet Max: a little bit odd, a little bit obsessive, a whole lot sweet and sexy. He’s ready to find his perfect match, someone he can share his days and nights with. Meet Tori: a little bit flirty, a little bit sassy, a whole lot happy being single. She’s ready for some temporary fun, to help Max get in dating fighting form. What she’s not ready for is to find herself longing to be the person Max spends his time with. After having a front row seat to her parents’ bitter divorce—and bitter after-divorce—she’s determined not to go down that road herself. And Max is determined to be the one to change her mind. Don’t miss Falling for Max—you’ll fall in love with him too.

  If you’re in the mood for more contemporary romance, I urge you to pick up Stacy Gail’s One Hot Second. Stacy has mastered the art of creating a contemporary romance that’s both deeply emotional and offers laugh out loud moments. And for those contemporary readers who love the Upstairs, Downstairs feel of Downton Abbey, you’ll love Tamara Morgan’s contemporary romance When I Fall. After a leaked photo forces rich, privileged media trainwreck Becca Clare to lie low for a few weeks, she puts her trust into the hands of the last man in the world who’s qualified to safeguard it—Jake Montgomery, a profligate playboy whose one ambition in life is to have no ambitions at all.

  Kate Willoughby follows up her dynamite debut contemporary romance release, On the Surface, with Across the Line. Left winger for the NHL San Diego Barracudas, Calder Griffin is hellbent on proving he can be a top six player like his hotshot older brother, but when he meets Becca, he discovers that, like hockey, love demands a lot of hard work and pain, but in the end, it’s worth the fight.

  Fans of paranormal romance will be drawn to Dangerous Calling by A.J. Larrieu. Powerful telekinetic Cass Weatherfield has learned to control her dangerous abilities, but when she faces a terrifying new enemy, she’s forced to embrace the dark side of her powers, with devastating results.

  And for those looking for a little more erotic with their paranormal, Nico Rosso’s Ménage with the Muse should be right up your alley. Two very different demon rockers, Wolfgang the wild drummer and Ethan the solitary guitarist, find their fated Muse at a music festival, and it’s the same woman, Mia, a musician who’s been hurt so many times she’s slow to trust anyone, let alone two satyrs who have drawn her into their world.

  If you love your science fiction with an edge of mystery, The Freezer by Timothy S. Johnston is a chilling whodunit at a claustrophobic and secluded station; a classic murder mystery scenario transformed into electrifying techno-thriller... It’s a case where the only thing that can prevent the investigator from dying a cold and cruel death is the love of the most remarkable woman he’s ever met.

  Also in the science fiction category, irrepressible heroine Cherry St. Croix is back and returning to fog-choked London to settle her debts once and for all—and to rescue the Menagerie’s wicked ringmaster, whether he wants it or not, in Karina Cooper’s steampunk Engraved

  As always, don’t forget to visit the awesome collection of romance, mystery, science fiction and fantasy in our backlist including titles from Ava March, Shannon Stacey, and Vivian Arend.

  Coming in September, 2014: Mystery week! I can’t wait for you to get your hands on our “lifestyle Elvis” mystery! Also, the riveting conclusion to Lynda Aicher’s Wicked Play series, romances from Christi Barth, Alison Packard and more!

  Here’s wishing you a wonderful month of books you love, remember and recommend.

  Happy reading!

  ~Angela James

  Editorial Director, Carina Press

  Dedication

  As the song goes, this is dedicated to the ones I love: Alfredo and David

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to my agent, Christine Witthohn, and my editor, Angela James. Fantastic professionals, both.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Portland, Oregon

  January 15

  “Inside/Out” Exhibit of Suzanne Huntington’s interior designs

  “Girlfriend on your six.”

  A hard elbow jabbed into Morton “Jacko” Jackman’s hard side. It would have knocked a lesser man down. Former senior chief Douglas Kowalski wasn’t known for his gentleness or delicate touch. But then neither was Jacko. He was a former Navy SEAL too, just like Senior. But both of them were out of the service and working in the same company, Alpha Security International, so Jacko could knock Senior on his ass and not be court-martialed.

  Except, well, Senior was a good guy.

  Senior’s elbow couldn’t knock Jacko down, but his knees nearly buckled a
t the thought of the woman behind him.

  “Not my girlfriend,” he mumbled, hoping the tan he’d gotten over his dark skin this past week teaching Mexican federales in Baja the fine art of fucking with the enemy hid his red face.

  Senior shifted his eyes sideways, a hint of a smile on his big ugly mug. “No?” He shook his head and jabbed him again. “So why the chubby every time you lay eyes on her?”

  Fuck. Busted. Jacko pulled his tuxedo jacket lower. He’d learned to control his dick at fourteen. What was he—back in high school? Why couldn’t he be in jeans, like he was most times he saw her? Tight stiff ones that kept the hard-on down because it didn’t have anywhere to go.

  Except you don’t wear jeans to a fancy art exhibit. Particularly not when your boss’s wife’s works were on show.

  “Bravo red, moving fast,” the chief murmured. Anyone farther than a foot from them wouldn’t have heard a word and wouldn’t have understood anyway. The orientation clock. “Bravo red” meant she was moving behind him to his right. Man.

  Lauren Dare.

  Oh. God.

  Jacko thought he could smell her but that was crazy. Still, why not imagine he could smell her, because she drove him crazy in every other way? Though smelling Lauren in a room full of hundreds of people, every single one—man, woman and other—wearing perfume or cologne, with caterers walking around with hot food on platters and glasses of wine everywhere...well, that stretched even Jacko’s sense of his own craziness.

  He wasn’t known for this. He wasn’t what Suzanne Huntington, the big boss’s wife and the star of the show, would call a fanciful man. He was known for being hardheaded and hard-hearted and hard-bodied. He was a roughneck from Texas who’d be in jail if he hadn’t signed up for the Navy. They’d pounded self-discipline and a sniper’s focus plus a dozen lethal martial arts into him. He could handle any type of weaponry, explosives, hand-to-hand combat.

  Not one ounce of his very extensive and very expensive training gave him a clue about how to handle Lauren Dare.

  There she was! Alone and lost-looking against the wall across the room to his right. For such a beautiful woman, she was doing her best not to attract attention, though for Jacko that didn’t work. Couldn’t. It was like the roof opened up and the sun shot a beam straight down onto her like a spotlight. Jacko was surprised people weren’t gasping and turning to watch her.

  She was doing everything possible to keep a low profile. She didn’t even want her name on the program, though all of the works on the wall were hers. Suzanne insisted she take the credit for them, but Lauren had insisted right back. Very few people knew this entire show was all hers. He had no idea why she didn’t want credit. Most people were happy to receive it for things they didn’t do; few refused it. But who knew why women wanted anything, anyway? Lauren didn’t want anyone to know, and for him, that was that.

  Lauren was moving through the crowd like a ghost, nodding and smiling and never stopping to talk to anyone. Jacko couldn’t understand how the men managed to avoid staring at her, but then he’d always known deep down that most men were assholes. You’d have to be an asshole and blind to boot not to realize that Lauren was the most beautiful woman in a room full of them.

  Two of the beauties were married to his employers, John Huntington and Senior.

  Lauren moved gracefully, not speaking a word to anyone, accompanied by notes from heaven. It took Jacko a full minute to realize that angels weren’t sending down a sound track for Lauren Dare to move to. It was Allegra Kowalski, up on a dais, playing her harp. The notes morphed into a recognizable tune he’d heard Senior’s wife play a million times.

  Senior’s wife was a talented musician—a harpist and singer. Jacko remembered the first time he’d met her, sent to be a bodyguard while Senior hunted down the fuckhead who’d attacked Allegra and blinded her. She’d had to have tricky experimental surgery to get her sight back, which had added years to Senior’s life. Jacko would have done his duty, even lain down his life, for a snaggletoothed banshee girlfriend of Senior but as it happened, Allegra Kowalski was beautiful and sweet and had played her harp for Jacko for a couple of hours while he sat in a chair facing the door, .22 on his lap, finger along the trigger guard.

  Allegra’s music had fucked heavily with his head and changed him forever.

  But Lauren was the one who messed with him the most. Those long, white delicate hands of hers created things he couldn’t even begin to imagine existed and yet became stone hard reality for him the instant he saw them.

  He’d seen her drawings and paintings first. Suzanne, the wife of his other boss, John Huntington, aka Midnight Man, designed places where you walked in and felt like you were in some kind of stylish fairyland. Suzanne had sent him to pick Lauren up in her workshop to talk about creating images of Suzanne’s designs. Jacko had walked into a big airy room and had frozen because he was surrounded by the most beautiful things he’d ever seen in his life. He’d simply stood stock still and gaped, mouth open like some raw recruit watching SEALs in training.

  And then Lauren had walked into the room and even her gorgeous watercolors and drawings vanished from his head like smoke.

  Suzanne and Allegra were beautiful women. They were known for being beautiful, though they never used those coy tricks most good-looking women did. But Lauren—it was like she was another species. A cloud of shiny dark hair surrounding a heart-shaped face with silver-gray eyes on top of a body to make men weep. It had been a hot late summer day and she’d worn a sundress that showed delicate pale shoulders, slender arms and a tiny waist, and when she spoke Jacko didn’t hear a word she said.

  His head was buzzing too loud.

  She tried twice. He got that much. He saw her full mouth open and close and all he could think about was that mouth on his while his entire body buzzed and he got the first of many, many hard-ons that sprouted whenever he was around her.

  At the third try, he tried hard to focus and managed to grasp that she was asking him a question. Morton, right? He simply stared at her. Suzanne said she’d send someone called Morton? And at the end there was this little inflection, making it a question. And fuck him if he didn’t forget his own name was Morton.

  He was an asshole and blown away by her, but in his defense was the fact that only the Navy ever called him Morton, and that was only on official occasions or when he was being chewed out. He’d been Jacko forever.

  It was only when he saw the first glimmerings of fear in her eyes and she took a quick instinctive step back that he pulled his head out of his ass. And felt ashamed. Having a 240-pound thug who lifted weights daily and had spent the last fifteen years training to kill people stare at you was probably not a good thing. Particularly if you were a beautiful woman with a slender build, alone in a space with the thug.

  So he’d used every single ounce of self-discipline the navy and particularly SEAL training had beaten into him and nodded and said—Yes, Morton’s my name—most folks call me Jacko. Suzanne Huntington sent me to pick you up.

  She’d just stood there, staring at him. Well, he could do something about her unease. He’d tapped his cell and called Suzanne. When she answered he simply handed the phone to Lauren and watched as some color came back into her face.

  And when he complimented her on some of the artworks she actually blushed.

  And Jacko was lost.

  He drove her to Suzanne’s office in Pearl, which was also the headquarters of Alpha Security International, where Jacko worked. He thought driving under eighty miles per hour was for dead men but he kept it at a steady forty and would have driven at twenty miles an hour if he could, just to stay in the vehicle with her. He waited for her as she and Suzanne talked, then drove her back. At thirty miles per hour. When he dropped her off at her house, he drove around the block and stopped the car and waited for his hands to stop shaking.

  When he found out that Lauren taught drawing at a community center, he enrolled immediately and got another huge whack to his system. He w
as good at it. Damned good.

  The past four months of his life had been work, thinking of Lauren, attending her classes, sitting in his empty apartment drawing maps and drawing Lauren. There hadn’t been room for much of anything else. No cycling out to the boonies and letting his Kawasaki Vulcan Voyager motorcycle rip. Megadeth, his favorite band, came through Portland, one night only, and he didn’t go. It was a Tuesday and Lauren taught on Tuesday evenings. So no Megadeth.

  No fucking, either.

  That was a shocker. He didn’t even realize he’d stopped fucking chicks until three weeks after meeting Lauren. It hadn’t even occurred to him. When it did, he made a point of going out that evening to his usual hole, The Spike, and picking someone up because Jacko Jackman didn’t do abstinence. Nope.

  A couple of chicks he’d hooked up with before stopped by and made interested noises and to his enormous surprise, his dick said no. Fuck no.

  As a matter of fact it felt like his balls tried to crawl up into his body.

  He never tried that again and so he might as well have been a tattooed and pierced monk these past four months for all the tail he got.

  And the reason was right in this room.

  Jacko tracked Lauren as she made the rounds, speaking briefly with a few people when they spoke to her, then moving on. In the room full of trendy women dressed in bright peacock colors tottering on stiletto heels, she was low key in a midnight-blue dress with ballerina slippers. Jacko couldn’t even see the other women while she was in the room.

  They all seemed overblown and shrill. Sharp laughing voices crackling. Lauren’s voice was never sharp. It was soft, with an underlying tone like music, only not.

  She was sweeping the room with her eyes and Jacko felt a change in the air when she saw him. Her face went from slightly sad to joyous in one second, and his heart nearly exploded out of his chest when she veered course immediately, making a beeline for him. He could feel himself stiffening in every sense.

  “Incoming,” Senior muttered. “You’re on your own here, son. I’m going to my own woman.”