Solid Gold
(Unseen Enemy #8)
By Marysol James
© 2016 by Marysol James. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, including information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission from the author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: theuntitledbook.com
Cover photo: © Fxquadro/Fotolia
Dedication
For A.
Because new beginnings can be strong, honest, and beautiful.
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
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
The Devil's Scars
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
About the author
By the same author
Chapter One
John ‘Griff’ Griffin made himself a third cup of instant coffee, and headed back to his desk to go over the case paperwork one more time. His meeting with his boss and the new client was in less than twenty minutes, and he was determined to be ready for it.
He sat, sipped, shuffled the mountain of papers. Griff knew that he knew this back-and-forth – he’d spent the weekend poring over it, after all – but if there was one thing that he’d learned in his time in the navy, it was that you were never too prepared. That thinking had saved his life, and more than once.
Absently, he rubbed at the long, thick scar that ran the length of the left side of his neck. It was ugly and it was bright purple, but he was covered in enough scars to not be self-conscious about it. In fact, he cherished and valued it in a way, cherished and valued it as much as he did his dog tags from his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like them, he treated that rough, raised flesh as a reminder of just what happened when preparation was half-assed, and when one’s guard was dropped. Sometimes you got damn lucky and nothing happened… and sometimes you got stabbed in the neck by some creep psycho.
Not that Griff had been the one to drop his guard or the ball. Nor had it been his partner here at Solid Security, Selena Perez. No, the blame was squarely on the shoulders of the bar bouncers who’d wandered away from the VIP parking area for illicit smoke breaks, and to flirt with hot women. And the stalker who’d been cheerfully terrorizing Griff and Selena’s client for months had just slipped right on into position in a parked car and waited.
Griff had been lucky to survive the stabbing, and it was all down to Selena. Despite being hurt herself, she’d taken down the stalker, then staunched the flow of blood from Griff’s neck. Without her guts and calm, he’d have bled out right then and there, on the filthy ground.
Yeah. Being prepared was the way to go… in everything.
“Hey, Griff.”
He glanced up, his green eyes squinting a bit in the bright morning sun streaming through the Solid Security office windows. The woman standing there was short – much shorter than he was – but he wasn’t fooled by her small stature. Not at all.
Roxanna Hale was an ass-kicking demon of a receptionist, and since Griff had had to recover from his injury and get psychological clearance before being allowed back into the world as an operative, he’d been at her mercy for the past few months. She’d knocked his ass from one end of the office to the other, and had begun each day by handing him a never-ending ‘to do’ list: photocopying, filling in stacks of paperwork, filing, taking notes at client meetings then typing them up after, responding to client queries, handling the team’s bodyguard and security schedules.
All in all, Griff was deliriously glad to be heading back out into the field. Hell, he’d wrestle down an entire parking lot of knife-wielding stalkers if it meant never having to handle anything HR- or administrative-related ever again. Ever.
“Hi!” he said, jumping to his feet. “How you doin’, Roxanna?”
“Good,” she said, then tilted her dark head at him. “Dallas just told me that you’re out of the office again, huh?”
“Yep. Working with a client directly.”
“I heard. Congrats.”
“Thanks,” Griff said, then decided to tease her a bit. It was the equivalent of poking a sleeping dragon and he knew it, but what the hell. “You gonna miss me, hon?”
“Ha!” Roxanna huffed, all fiery and bang on cue. “As if!”
He grinned at her. “C’mon, Roxie. You can admit it now… you’ve loved having me around here every day. It was like having your own personal serf, huh?”
She narrowed her dark-blue eyes at him. “First, John Griffin, don’t call me Roxie. Second, you’ve been a passable assistant – though I’ve given up any hope of you ever being able to make a decent cup of coffee.”
“I know,” he said agreeably. “So maybe now’s a good time to tell you that I did that on purpose.”
That gave her pause. “You did what on purpose?”
“Screwed up the coffee.”
“And just why would you do that?” she demanded.
He shrugged, his massive shoulder muscles rippling through the crisp dress shirt material. “‘Cause I hate that goddamn coffee machine, so I acted as incompetent as possible so you’d never let me anywhere near it. That way, I can stick to my beloved instant shit that I just add boiling water to, and you can handle the steam and foam and fiddly little capsules.”
Roxanna stared at him, impressed despite herself. “Well played, Griff.”
“Thanks, Roxie,” he said cheerfully. “So… as a peace offering, how about this: I’ll make the coffee when the new client comes in. Deal?”
She gazed at him some more, then she smiled. Griff stared down at her, a bit stunned at the shining glory of that smile.
Roxanna smiled at him rarely, and she never smiled at him like this. Griff was amazed at how it changed her face, totally and beautifully – she suddenly looked about six years younger than her thirty-one years, and good God, were her eyes ever gorgeous when they were all lit up and sparkling like that. That smile actually kicked Griff in the chest, and hard, because it was strangely soft, and sweet, and vulnerable… and he’d never have associated Roxanna with any of those words.
It made him wonder, just for a brief, insane second, if he’d had her wrong this whole time. If maybe the woman had a gooey centre hidden under all the sharp cool and remote reserve.
She wasn’t like this around Selena, he knew. With other women in the office, Roxanna was funny, bright, open. Griff had seen her joke and smile with a woman, and then just snap it all off as quick as flicking a light switch when a man came over. She was never straight-up rude and she was never unprofessional… but she definitely wasn’t friendly. So for these few seconds, he just enjoyed this smile, knowing that it was a gift that she was going to snatch back soon.
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br /> Sure enough, she caught herself. The smile disappeared lightning-fast, and she glared at him crossly. He sighed a bit at that all-too-familiar expression, and braced himself for her return to standard form. She didn’t make him wait long, and she didn’t disappoint.
“Yeah,” she said brusquely. “You make the damn coffee, Griff, and I’ll get back to work. Congrats again on your return to the field.”
Before he could answer, she spun on her heel and stalked across the large, open-plan space, back to her desk by the front door. Griff watched her go, puzzling – yet again – about the woman’s story. Nobody at Solid Security knew anything about her, not one single personal thing.
It’d be easy enough to find out, of course, since digging up information on people was what they were all about, but Griff’s boss, Dallas Foreman, was militant to the point of lunacy about employee privacy. It was a fireable and ass-kickable transgression, according to Dallas, and he’d upheld that policy more than once when somebody had gotten just a bit too curious about a colleague, for whatever reason.
Sighing and forcing his thoughts away from the infuriating puzzle that was Roxanna Hale, Griff turned his attention to the client notes one last time. He stared hard at Wilbur and Claire Worthington’s wedding picture, wondering how these two smiling people could have ended up defrauding investors and businesses of almost forty billion dollars, at last estimate. Not quite as big as the Bernie Madoff thing – which stood at almost sixty-five billion, making it the largest fraud in U.S. economic history – but pretty goddamn close.
Griff sighed again, then looked up as his boss approached his desk with his usual intent stride. Griff stood, nodded.
“Morning, Dallas,” he said.
“Griff.” Dallas’ normally-mellow Texan drawl had an edge this morning, and Griff went up yet another notch in his alertness. “Is she here yet?”
“No. You want me to call her? Make sure she hasn’t changed her mind?”
Dallas waved a huge hand. “No need, man. The woman ain’t changing her mind for nothing, I can promise you. She’ll be here, and with a vengeance. She wants the Worthingtons to land in jail cells, and for the keys to get thrown into shark-infested waters.”
Griff cracked a grin. “I’ll do what I can to make all that happen.”
“I know you will.” Dallas’ hard blue gaze sharpened now, and Griff glanced over his shoulder. An astonishingly-tall woman with long brown hair was standing there talking to Roxanna, and Griff looked back at Dallas. “That’s Leeza Burns?”
“Yep.” Dallas started over to greet their client, and Griff straightened his tie. “Show time, man.”
Show time, indeed.
**
“Ms. Burns.” Dallas tilted his head at her, his voice and eyes both warm. “You brought the pictures?”
“I did.” Leeza Burns set her cell phone on the conference room table with shaking hands. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t send them to you before now, Mr. Foreman. I just couldn’t… I don’t know. I wanted to show them to you in person, I guess.”
“I totally understand your thinking, and please call me Dallas.” He gave her his trademark charming grin, and then indicated at Griff. “And Mr. John Griffin here prefers to be called ‘Griff’.”
“Dallas and Griff,” she repeated. “Leeza.”
“Leeza,” Griff said. “What pictures are we talking about? Are these new ones? Ones that ain’t in the file?”
Leeza fidgeted a bit with her blouse button. “I – I took some cell pictures of Claire Worthington.”
Griff’s eyebrows shot up. “You mean here in Denver, right?”
“Yes.” She exhaled, hard. “Dallas says that you’ve read the reports, so you know that I saw her on the street. Just walking around Denver, like she was a normal person out for a coffee.”
“Yes, I know,” Griff said quietly. “I can’t imagine what a shock that must have been for you.”
She flashed him a look of surprise mingled with gratitude. “It really was a shock. It was like… like a face from my nightmares had just come to life and strolled on past me in a crowd of teenagers and moms pushing strollers. It was – surreal. She’s supposed to be far away in New York, in some swanky penthouse apartment, not here, wandering into my life as I go to the gym. You know?”
Dallas and Griff both nodded.
“Even though I’d spent months staring at her face on the news, I was thrown at first because of her hair and glasses,” Leeza continued. “They make her look totally different, so she was all the way past me and already walking into the store before I clicked. When the penny dropped, I just stopped dead in the middle of an intersection, then spun around and ran after her. Followed her around the store like a goddamn stalker, hiding behind racks of clothes and shelves, trying to see her without being seen. It was – it was utterly humiliating, in a weird way. One more humiliation inflicted by the Worthingtons, really, and not the worst… just the most recent of many.”
Griff nodded again; he knew that a woman as tall as Leeza Burns would have quite a job hiding herself without looking ridiculous, and he felt for her. In some ways, she was almost as enraged about having to slink and skulk around a clothing store as she was about the loss of her father’s pension and life savings – though her father’s suicide was and always would be the real source of her rage at Wilbur and Claire Worthington.
“Anyway.” She shook herself a bit, and her dark eyes narrowed, refocused. “She was busy looking at t-shirts, so it was easy enough to snap a few pictures without her noticing.”
“Did you talk to her?” Dallas asked. He’d asked Leeza this more than once, and she’d always avoided directly answering. Today was about getting the whole damn story, though, so he was ready to push if he had to. “Make any contact at all? Even eye contact?”
“No.” Leeza shook her head. “I thought about it, believe me, but in the end I… I backed out.”
“Why?” Dallas said gently. “Why not confront her, maybe shout at her? Even bump into her accidentally, just to force her to acknowledge that you exist, even if she had no clue who you were?”
Leeza dropped her eyes. The men waited, knowing that whatever was going through her head was hard to say aloud. Finally she sighed, blurted out the truth:
“Because she looked happy.”
Dallas and Griff exchanged confused glances. Waited some more.
“I mean…” Leeza’s voice trailed off, and they actually saw her struggling to articulate her jumbled thoughts. “She looked so completely content and delighted with her life. She looked younger than she looked on the news, and she looked so much more – more beautiful.”
“OK,” Griff said slowly, carefully. “And so why did this make you decide to not talk to her?”
“Because I wouldn’t have talked to her.” Leeza’s voice was pure venom now, and both men started at the sudden and dramatic change in their client. “If I’d met her eyes, if I’d seen that joy up close and personal, I’d have punched that fucking bitch smack in her smug, gloating little face.”
Griff and Dallas blinked in shock. As always, Dallas recovered first, and moved in to soothe and settle things.
“OK,” Dallas said, keeping his voice low. “So you kept your wits about you enough to know to not approach her, right?”
“Yes.” Leeza sucked in a breath. “I just – I knew that I’d be the one up on assault charges, and I was suddenly scared to death about what I was thinking and feeling. I mean, I’ve never hit anyone in the whole of my life, but when I saw her deciding between the red t-shirt or the white one, and then she decided to just go on and buy both, I wanted to punch her until she was on the floor in pieces. That brought me up short, I suppose, and I just ran out of there like a crazy woman. Went home and shook for awhile, then I called you.” She looked at Dallas. “After helping my Dad, I haven’t got much left in terms of savings, but I have some… and I want to use them to get the whole story about Claire Worthington. The real story, not the one that her hu
sband and his lawyers have thrown around in the press.”
“And why do you think that it ain’t the real story?” Griff asked. This was the question that he’d been puzzling over ever since he’d started reading the file, and it was a big one. Whatever the answer, it was enough for this woman to be here in this office, ready to drain her bank account in order to finally make it happen. This answer was everything to her, and Griff was damn well going to hear it here and now. “Why don’t you believe that they’re really divorced and totally out of each other’s lives? Why do you think it’s all a sham? Why do you think that she’s got full access to the money they stole, or to at least part of it?”
“Because, like I said before,” Leeza said evenly, the anger back in her voice now. “She was happy.”
Griff cocked his blond head at her. “Still not following you.”
“I am,” Dallas said quietly. “I totally am.”
“Alright,” Griff said, all amiable charm. “So maybe break it down for the slow guy in the room?”
Leeza managed a tiny smile at that, and Griff grinned back.
“C’mon, seriously,” he said. “Explain it to me and use small words, OK?”
She huffed a small laugh. “OK, Griff. Two syllables max… that good?”
“Perfect.” He drank a bit of his beloved instant coffee, leaned his bulk back in the chair. “Hit me with it, Leeza. I really do want to understand this. I know it’s important to you, and that makes it crucial to me.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.” She was silent, then sighed. “Well… put yourself in her place for a minute. You’re married to one of the richest men in the country, a man whose face is plastered across the covers of Forbes, Money, The Economist and Barron’s, and they all write these breathless, fawning articles about the man’s God-like money smarts. Every single picture of you together has you staring at him with pure adoration.”
Leeza paused, took a breath, dove back in.
“As a result of your wonderful hubby’s insane investment successes, you have this amazing, perfect life of luxury. You don’t work, you have very little education and no aspirations that way, you have no kids. You have nothing to do except play hostess at some cushy charity lunches, and attend hot yoga classes, and spend your husband’s money on clothes and shoes.”
Solid Gold (Unseen Enemy Book 8) Page 1
