The Deception

by Kat Martin

  She left him long enough to grab her purse off the bar. When she led him outside, he didn’t resist, just followed her out the door and pulled her back into his arms. She tasted better than good and he deepened the kiss, sinking into those plump pink lips, inhaling her soft perfume.

  Kate was right there with him, taking the hot kiss deeper, pressing her full breasts into his chest, turning him rock hard and making him reckless.

  “My house or yours?” he asked. He wasn’t into one-night hookups, not usually, but this woman hit every hot button he had.

  For the first time, Kate looked uncertain. “I might want you, big boy, but I’m not dumb enough to leave with a total stranger.”

  He leaned down and kissed her. “Smart girl.” Pulling the keys to his big black Yukon out of the pocket of his jeans, he clicked the locks, flashing the lights, and gave her the keys. “So you know I’m not going to drag you off somewhere.”

  She looked down at the keys, then over at the SUV parked in the dark at the edge of the lot. In his job, it paid to be careful. Kate slid her arms around his neck and kissed him again, hot, wet and deep, and the last of her reservations seemed to fade.

  “I need this,” she softly repeated, speaking more to herself than to him. Grabbing his hand, she pulled him over to the SUV. Jase jerked open the backseat door, climbed inside and hauled Kate in behind him.

  He lifted her, settled her astride his lap, one of her knees on each side, making her short skirt ride up on her thighs. He tried not to wonder what she was wearing underneath, which, with any luck, he was about to find out.

  Sliding his hands into her long, thick, honey blond curls, Jase kissed her until both of them were breathless, until she was squirming against his hard-on and moaning.

  She shoved up his T-shirt, and he stripped it off over his head. He pulled off her tank top, unfastened the front hook on her lacy white bra and slid it off her shoulders, filled his hands with her luscious breasts.

  “Beautiful,” he said, admiring the soft globes that perfectly fit his big hands. He kissed the side of her neck, and Kate tipped her head back to give him better access. He trailed kisses over her shoulder and took a rosy nipple into his mouth. Breathing hard, Kate ran her hands over the muscles in his chest.

  “I love your body,” she said, leaning down to kiss him. “Please... Jason.”

  “I’m all yours, baby.” He was reaching between them to unzip his fly when he heard a young couple walking toward the SUV. The girl was laughing, a soft, sweet sound more like a teenager than someone old enough to be drinking.

  Kate’s whole body went tense.

  “Easy,” he said, pressing his mouth against the pulse beating in her neck, kissing his way down to her shoulder. “They’ll be gone in a minute.”

  Kate dragged in a shaky breath. A noise came from her throat that sounded something like pain.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “They’re just kids. They aren’t going to bother us.” But she was already moving off him, reaching for her bra and sliding it on, hooking the front, grabbing her tank top and pulling it over her head.

  “I’m... I’m really sorry,” she said as she slid off his lap. “I’m not like this. I don’t do this kind of thing.”

  “You’re a grown woman, Kate. You can do whatever you want.” He wanted to be mad. Nothing worse than a tease, but the pain in her eyes leashed his temper.

  She cupped his cheek, and when she looked at him, he realized there were tears in her eyes. “Something bad happened today. My sister was killed. I couldn’t... I can’t get the image of her dead body out of my head.”

  “Jesus, honey.”

  “I just... I just wanted to forget for a while.”

  Jase pulled her back into his arms and she let him, her body softening against his. She started crying and he tightened his hold. He knew a lot about death. He’d been a marine. Now he was in law enforcement. He knew a lot about grief.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It just takes time.”

  “I’m sorry.” Her hand shook as she wiped tears from her cheeks. “I made a fool out of myself tonight.”

  “I don’t think you’re a fool, Kate. And everybody does things they regret once in a while.”

  She drew away from him, opened the door and climbed out of the SUV. Jase grabbed his T-shirt and pulled it on, followed her out and she handed him back his keys. He was still hard as a brick, aching with every heartbeat. He couldn’t remember wanting a woman so badly.

  “My name’s Maddox. Jason Maddox. Give me your number and I’ll call you. We’ll start over, go out to dinner or something.”

  She just shook her head.

  “At least tell me your name.”

  She smiled sadly. “It’s just Kate. Thank you for being so nice about...tonight.”

  Nice wasn’t a word often used in connection with the Hawk.

  “Good night, Jason.”

  “You shouldn’t be driving. Let me take you home.”

  “I’ll call an Uber.” Turning away, Kate dug her phone out of her purse as she hurried off toward a hot-looking black-trimmed white Camaro sitting under a light in the parking lot. Jase watched her until an Uber car appeared out of nowhere, she climbed inside and the car drove away. Opening the door of the Yukon, he slid in behind the wheel and fired up the powerful engine.

  She wouldn’t give him her name or her number. She didn’t want to see him again. Or at least that’s what she’d said.

  He told himself to forget her. She was just a pretty blonde, and Dallas was full of pretty blondes. But there was something special about this one, and it wasn’t just her amazing cleavage.

  He had some things to finish in Dallas before he could head down to Houston to look for Harding.

  The following day he found himself returning to the Sagebrush Saloon. Kate’s flashy white Camaro was gone. Turned out Just Kate occasionally came in to dance on Friday nights with her girlfriends, occasionally came alone. No one seemed to know her full name, but according to the bartender, she never left with a guy, just danced, had a few drinks and went home.

  Jase knew he could find her. Finding people was what he did. But he wasn’t a stalker. If she’d wanted to see him, she would have given him her number.

  Still, when Friday night came around, he found himself on a bar stool at the Sagebrush Saloon.

  Unfortunately, Just Kate never showed up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After her meltdown at the bar, which still embarrassed her, Kate spent the following week hounding the Dallas Police Department.

  Chrissy’s case had been assigned to a homicide detective named Roger Benson, an older guy with thinning brown hair and a bad attitude. She’d done a little digging, found out he had previously worked in the sex crimes unit, an unabashed misogynist who acted as if he believed all women were whores and was completely the wrong person to be handling cases in that department—which was probably why he now worked in Homicide.

  She tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, figuring the crimes he had worked had changed him into the man he had become. Or maybe he had always been like that. Either way, Kate didn’t like him.

  “Your sister was using the name Tina Galen,” he told her when she appeared in his office demanding answers for the fourth day in a row. “She was a heroin addict and a known prostitute.”

  Her heart squeezed, though the police had already told her those things. “She was murdered, Detective. Her killer needs to face justice.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Ms. Gallagher. We’re doing everything we can to locate the person who killed her, but in circumstances like these, the odds of finding him aren’t good.”

  “The killer must have left evidence. Fingerprints or DNA. Something.”

  “We’re working on it. We believe Tina hooked up with a john who liked rough sex. That night, he got c
arried away, beat her worse than he meant to and killed her. If that’s the case, he may have assaulted women before.”

  “So you’ll be able to find him.”

  “Like I said, we’re working on it. You need to let us do our job, Ms. Gallagher. Coming down here every day and badgering us isn’t going to help. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got things I need to do. Your sister’s case isn’t the only one on my desk.”

  She glanced over at the stack of files on the detective’s desk and bit back a sharp retort. “Yes, I can see that.” And clearly, arguing with Benson wasn’t going to get her anywhere.

  As she left the police station, it occurred to her there was a good chance nothing she said or did was going to get the answers she was determined to get in regard to Chrissy’s death.

  She needed someone to help her. A detective who worked directly for her and strictly on her sister’s murder case.

  At twenty-nine, Kate was the owner of Gallagher and Company Consulting, an up-and-coming management consulting firm. And though there were only two other analysts in the office so far, plus a receptionist who acted as her personal assistant, she had built a solid reputation during the time she’d been working in Dallas, and the company was making money.

  She could afford to hire a private investigator.

  Arriving in the lobby of the five-story building on North Akard near McKinney where the Gallagher and Company office was located, she waved at one of the security guards, a big guy named Clay, as she passed.

  Kate’s stomach tightened. Clay didn’t have the thick dark hair and gorgeous blue eyes of the man she had nearly had sex with in the parking lot of the Sagebrush Saloon, but he was almost as tall, with the same rock-solid body. Seeing Clay, who was older and not nearly as good-looking, made her think of Jason “Hawk” Maddox, and she felt a combination of embarrassment and a ridiculous rush of heat.

  Dear God, she had never been more turned on in her life. When he’d hauled her out on the dance floor and into his big, powerful arms, it occurred to her for the first time, she might really go through with the hookup she had only imagined when she’d seen him in the bar that night.

  Maddox really knew how to dance. And he could kiss. She could have kissed him for hours.

  Thank God, she had come to her senses before it was too late. She didn’t do hookups, especially with hot, muscle-jocks in jeans and scuffed boots. She didn’t have sex with strangers.

  But after she’d left the morgue, she had gone a little crazy. Crying hadn’t done a lick of good and eventually she had managed to pull herself together, but the terrible feelings of guilt and failure would not go away.

  It didn’t matter that she and Chrissy, her parents’ surprise baby eleven years younger than Kate, had never been close, that by the time Chrissy was in high school, Kate had moved from the small Texas town of Rockdale to Dallas.

  She was working full-time for Bain Consulting as a junior member of one of their teams when Chrissy began having problems with drugs and alcohol, and behaving promiscuously with boys. Kate had gone back to Rockdale to talk to her, but it hadn’t done any good. A few months later, her sister had run away from home, and though the police had done everything in their power to find her, Kate had never seen her again.

  Not until the police had called with the terrible news of her murder and Kate had gone to the morgue.

  How she’d wound up half drunk at the Sagebrush Saloon still wasn’t completely clear. She’d just been desperate to get the image of Chrissy’s battered and bludgeoned body out of her head, and for a while in the backseat with Jason, it had actually worked.

  It was impossible to think of anything but those big hands on her breasts and the thick ridge beneath the fly of his jeans. God, she had never known that kind of want before.

  The elevator dinged its arrival on the third floor of the building, and Kate shoved the memory away.

  There was a small reception area in the front of the office. Her assistant, Laura Delgado, an attractive Latina woman in her twenties with long straight black hair clipped back at her nape, sat behind a computer, clicking away on the keyboard. Kate waved and kept walking.

  Beyond the reception area were three private offices and a conference room. None were large, but the dark blue-and-gray motif was sleek and sophisticated and gave the impression of success—imperative in the consulting business where an analyst’s job was to give advice on how to make more money.

  Kate closed her office door, took a seat behind her glass-and-chrome desk, turned on her computer and started scouring the internet. It didn’t take long to come up with a list of security firms that handled private investigation. The firms were star-rated by reviews.

  An hour later, she had narrowed her choices down to three. At the top of the list with the highest reviews was a company called Maximum Security, owned by an investigator named Chase Garrett. Kate knew who he was. Chase and his two brothers were megarich, the co-owners of Garrett Resources, a Texas-based oil and gas company.

  The middle brother, Reese, ran the business while Chase and Brandon had chosen careers in law enforcement. The Garretts were Dallas elite, and were frequently featured in local news articles. Kate jotted down the address of Maximum Security, as well as two alternate choices. Might as well start with the best and work her way down.

  Kate grabbed her purse and headed out the door.

  * * *

  It had been one helluva week, Jase thought. He’d spent the last few days in Houston, trying to locate Rosa Diaz or her brother, Paulo. Trying to hunt down Randy Harding.

  The closest he got was finding the garage where Paulo Diaz worked, Ray’s Auto Body. Apparently Paulo didn’t like Harding any better than anyone else, so Jase didn’t have to press too hard to get information.

  “The no good pendajo left town three days ago. He knocked the crap out of my sister, but she still went with him.” Paulo spit on the ground outside the metal shop door. He was a little guy, black hair and a few tattoos, probably a lot tougher than he looked. “Women. I do not understand them.”

  “Neither do I, Paulo, and we probably never will. Does Rosa know what happened to the last woman Harding lived with? She know that after she left him, Randy broke into her house, beat her and ended up strangling her to death? Does Rosa know he’s wanted on murder charges?”

  “She says he did not do it. She says Randy ended things with the woman after he met Rosa. She says he only hits her because he is jealous. It means he loves her.”

  “Yeah, right. You got any idea where they went?” When Paulo didn’t answer right away, Jase held up a hundred-dollar bill. One thing he’d learned—money talked and bullshit walked.

  “If I knew, I would tell you,” Paulo said. “You would not need to pay me.”

  “I guess I don’t have to tell you not to let your sister know I’m hunting him.”

  “I won’t tell her. Rosa is a fool when it comes to Harding.”

  “Sooner or later, I’ll find him. I just hope for Rosa’s sake, it’s sooner.”

  That was two days ago. Now he was back in Dallas, digging into Randy’s past, looking for something he might have missed. He needed to figure out where Harding was now that he’d left Houston and taken Rosa with him.

  He looked up as the glass front door opened. The Max, the guys called it, a single-story brick building on Blackburn Street, was a great place to work. The décor was masculine, kind of Western, like the Sagebrush Saloon only nicer, with a tufted dark red leather sofa and chairs in the waiting area, oak desks, and antique farming tools on the walls.

  The woman who had just walked in was sophisticated and modern from the sleek blond knot twisted at the nape of her neck, to the burgundy skirt-suit she was wearing with gold jewelry. He couldn’t see her face, but she was tall and curvy. Even the business clothes couldn’t hide her spectacular figure.

  “I’d like to see Chas
e Garrett,” she said to the receptionist. “I’m hoping he’s here.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” Mindy Stewart, a petite brunette, flashed her trademark smile.

  “I’m afraid I don’t.” That voice...like whiskey and cream and sexy as hell.

  “May I have your name?”

  “Kathryn Gallagher.”

  She turned a little and Jase came out of his seat. Just Kate hadn’t been at the Sagebrush Saloon Friday night, but she had just walked into The Max. He hadn’t pursued her. Instead, she had come to him.

  The bad news was she was looking for another man.

  Jase strode toward her. Kate spotted him, and the blood drained out of her face. For an instant he thought she was going to turn around and run back out the door.

  “Hello, Kate.”

  She swallowed so hard her throat moved up and down. He remembered pressing his mouth against the spot where her pulse beat frantically at the base of her neck.

  “Jason...” The sound of his name on her lips sent a rush of heat straight to his groin.

  “We’ll be in the conference room,” Jase said to Mindy, taking a firm hold on Kate’s arm. She resisted a moment, then let him lead her in that direction.

  He closed the conference room door behind them. “It’s good to see you, Kate.”

  She glanced around as if she were looking for a way to escape. “So you...you work here? You’re...you’re a private investigator?”

  He avoided the question. “Is that why you’re here? You want to hire a private detective?”

  “That’s right. My sister was murdered. I mentioned it...that night.”

  His mind was beginning to function again, and he remembered she had told him that her sister had died. She hadn’t said the girl was murdered.

  “I remember.” He remembered a lot of things. Everything. “Why don’t we sit down? You can start at the beginning, tell me what’s going on.”