Rogue Alpha (Alpha 7)

by Carole Mortimer

And maybe she had also wanted him to kiss her? Had needed the physical closeness of being held in the arms of a man who hadn’t hurt her. She had seen the desire in his dark onyx eyes when she sat down beside him, and it had been so long since anyone, other than her parents, had held or kissed her, that she had wanted.

  To feel desired.

  To feel desire in return.

  “You said you’re being followed?”

  His question jerked Diana back from those thoughts, her chin tilting in defense as she heard the skepticism in his voice. “Yes.”

  Seth gave an inward groan. This woman was—well, she was fucking gorgeous. She also had the body of a siren. As for those eyes—a man could lose his soul gazing into those turquoise depths. She was also, he would take a guess, vulnerable as hell—maybe even delusional?—from the trauma of being kidnapped, and then her husband being shot and killed in the street only days later.

  Seth might not have seen Diana Moore since the day he returned her to her husband at the British embassy in Bogotá, but the shooting of the British junior diplomat, Jeremy Moore, had made headlines across the world.

  As far as Seth was aware, the person responsible had never been found. Which wasn’t surprising considering where the shooting had taken place. But the unresolved murder of Diana Moore’s husband, coming so quickly on the heels of her own kidnapping, couldn’t have been easy for her.

  Seth had met Jeremy Moore briefly in Bogotá. Tall, blond-haired, athletic, with the natural bland manner of a diplomat. He and Seth were total opposites, but he remembered thinking the other man would go far in his chosen profession. Except he hadn’t, because only days later, he lay dead on the streets of Bogotá.

  “What happened to your husband?”

  She flinched. “I—I’m not sure. I— We were preparing to go back to England once I was fully recovered from the kidnapping, but Jeremy—Jeremy was shot and killed before we were able to leave.”

  Seth studied her closely. Beautiful and elegant, she appeared nothing like that bedraggled woman in Bogotá. Until you gazed into her eyes. There was a wealth of pain in those shadowed turquoise depths. A result of her husband’s violent death, or something else?

  He’d done what he was hired to do eight months ago. He and his associate Quinn had located and then studied the compound where Diana Moore was being held. Worked out a plan of how he would go in alone and then out again while Quinn waited with the vehicle which would transport them all back to Bogotá.

  In. Rescue. Out. Return kidnap victim to her husband. Fly home.

  Anything that happened from that point onwards was none of Seth’s business. It wasn’t his job to hang around to pick up the pieces afterwards. To be a shoulder to cry on. He never allowed himself to become emotionally involved. Ever.

  As Diana said, there hadn’t been the time or opportunity for the two of them to talk the day he rescued her. She had been traumatized, and he had been too busy trying to keep both of them alive. Once he and Quinn delivered her back to the embassy, she was hustled away and Seth had never seen her again.

  This woman, beautiful, self-assured for the most part, was nothing like the woman he remembered rescuing in Colombia. “Has anything else happened recently? Besides this feeling you have of being followed?”

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Someone broke into my apartment a week ago.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  She gave an uncomfortable shrug. “Nothing was taken, so they weren’t interested.”

  “Was your apartment trashed?”

  “No.”

  Seth drew in a controlling breath. “So if nothing was taken and your apartment wasn’t trashed, how can you be so sure someone broke in?” Patience wasn’t exactly one of his virtues, but he really was doing his best to hear this woman out. She looked brittle enough to break down and cry right here in a public bar if he didn’t. He didn’t deal well with crying woman either.

  Come to think of it, he didn’t deal well with women at all, except in bed—

  “You sound like the police. I just know, okay?” She glared her frustration with his skepticism. “I also know what you’re thinking right now, Mr. Armstrong, and you’re wrong. I’m not delusional. I’m not having some sort of emotional breakdown, a delayed reaction to what happened in Colombia. Someone did break into my apartment a week ago, and I don’t only feel as if someone is watching and following me. They are!”

  “Did you report that to the police too?”

  She grimaced. “Yes, and received the same uninterested response.”

  Paranoia brought on by too much emotional stress would be Seth’s guess. No doubt that was the opinion of the police too when she reported a break-in where nothing was stolen or trashed, and then a couple of days later went back to them claiming she was being followed.

  Which, equally, could be exactly what the person doing these things might hope would be the line the police took?

  Damn it, now he was allowing himself to be seduced into her paranoia.

  “Is someone following you this evening?” He glanced about the crowded bar, some of the people regulars, like Seth, others merely popping in for a drink with friends on their way home from work. No one looked as if they were taking particular notice of the two of them sitting together in this corner booth at the back of the room.

  Too busy flirting with the wrong people, would be Seth’s guess. He had no doubt several of them would imbibe a little too much Christmas cheer and end up in bed with the wrong person too before the night was through, and wake up in the morning to regret it.

  Bah, humbug, Seth recognized self-derisively. He wasn’t into Christmas. Too many bad memories from when he was a kid, probably. Whatever the reason, the garish decorations in the bar and the overdecorated Christmas tree in the corner of the room did absolutely nothing for him.

  “I don’t know.” Diana Moore looked pained. “I thought they were. It felt as if they were. I don’t know,” she added emotionally, tears gathering on the darkness of her lashes.

  “Hey, it’s going to be okay.” He reached out awkwardly and squeezed her hands where they were still clenched together on her thighs.

  “No, it isn’t.” She gave a shake of her head. “I want—I need for you to come back to Paris with me and—”

  “Paris?” he echoed doubtfully.

  She nodded. “I live and work there now.”

  Paris?

  This woman wanted him to go to Paris with her?

  Chapter 2

  “Drink it.” Seth held the glass of whisky up in front of Diana Moore’s face until she reluctantly took the glass from him. “I said drink it, Diana,” he repeated firmly as she made no effort to do so but simply cradled the glass in both her hands.

  The bar had been too noisy for them to continue their conversation, and she had flatly refused to go back to the Grayson Security offices with him, leaving Seth no choice but to drive them both back to his house.

  Not that he made a habit of taking clients home with him. In fact, this was a first. But he hadn’t felt he could abandon Diana, and he hadn’t known what else to do with her when she was obviously under such emotional stress.

  Real or imagined? That was the question.

  A question Seth wanted an answer to before he decided what move he was going to make next.

  “Better.” He nodded his approval as she finally took a tentative sip of the whisky, followed by a grimace of distaste. It was his best twenty-year-old single malt too. “Now, let’s start from the beginning.” He made himself comfortable in the chair opposite hers as they sat either side of the fireplace he had put a match to when they entered his study. “What happened to you after I left Colombia?”

  Diana looked down at her hands tightly gripping the whisky glass rather than at Seth Armstrong. Because he made her feel…uncomfortable. Not in a bad way, but a total awareness of everything about him, and it seemed to b
e intensifying the longer she spent in his company.

  A feeling not helped by the fact that, once they reached his house, he’d taken off his jacket and tie, unfastened the top button of his shirt, and turned back the sleeves to beneath his elbows, revealing strong and muscular forearms.

  Maybe in an effort to put her at her ease?

  If so, it had the opposite effect.

  He looked like a dark-eyed and lazy feline as he relaxed back in his chair. Not the fat-tabby type of feline, but one that was sleek and powerful, ready to pounce at a second’s notice.

  Which he probably was.

  She shrugged out of her own jacket in the increasing warmth of the room. “I spent a couple of days in hospital, then a week or so more at the embassy, recuperating. After that I—I flew back to England with—with Jeremy’s body. We had the funeral in Wales where my parents live, because Jeremy doesn’t—didn’t, have any family of his own. I stayed on with my parents for several months, then two months ago, I applied for and then was offered a job at a museum in Paris. I’ve been there for the past month.”

  “Explain to me again why you thought your apartment in Paris had been broken into?”

  She looked pained. “I… Things had been moved. A hairbrush on my dressing table not quite in the place I left it. The papers on my desk not in the same order. One of the books on my bedside table was lying on the floor. I have a tree. For Christmas. The presents under it weren’t in the order I put them in, and a couple of them looked as if they had been opened.” She made a dismissive movement of her shoulders. “Silly little things that on their own could have meant nothing, but when put together… I assure you, I’m not imagining any of this, Mr. Armstrong.” Diana looked across at him, silently willing him to believe her.

  “Seth,” he answered distractedly.

  Having once looked across at him, Diana now found it impossible to look away again. “How did you get that scar?” Her cheeks flushed hotly as she realized she had blurted out the question that had been intriguing her since the moment she saw this man again.

  It was such a lethal-looking scar. A clean cut, probably caused by the slice of a knife or some other sharp instrument.

  “Sorry.” She grimaced as the silence stretched uncomfortably between them. “That was unforgivably rude of me. I only— Never mind.” He obviously wasn’t about to answer such a personal question.

  And why should he?

  He didn’t know her, probably didn’t want to know her either, after she came on to him in the bar and had since regaled him with what he obviously considered to be the imaginings of a hysterical woman.

  But she wasn’t about to admit defeat that easily. After all, he was still listening to her, and he had brought her back to his home with him too.

  A house totally devoid of any Christmas decorations, she had noticed as they walked through the hallways to his study. Not that it was unusual for a man living alone not to bother with a tree or decorations, but she hadn’t seen so much as a Christmas card on show either. Surely Seth received Christmas cards? A lot of people sent e-cards nowadays, but there was still a few people who—

  “Now tell me about being followed?”

  She grimaced. “I was supersensitive after the things were moved in my apartment, and then I saw the same man a couple of times, in completely unrelated places. I thought I saw him at the airport earlier today too.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand why anyone would want to follow me.”

  Seth would like to know the why of this situation too. If indeed someone had been in her apartment and was now following her.

  Which was still in question.

  What could this woman possibly have that someone else wanted so desperately they had gone to these lengths already in order to find it?

  Diana said she worked in a museum, and presumably there would be valuable, possibly priceless, items on show and stored there. Maybe her “feelings” had something to do with that?

  But that still didn’t explain why anyone would need to break into her apartment.

  As for her curiosity about his scar…

  His fingers went instinctively to that vicious slash down his cheek and throat. It had been there for so long, he rarely gave it a thought anymore, although he appreciated it probably scared the hell out of a woman like Diana Moore.

  It was a visual—very visual—sign of the differences between the two of them.

  She was elegant, very much the lady even in her distress, whereas he was the product of a tough childhood, years in the army, and several more years working for Grayson Security. His scar was an indication of the raw savagery he had faced so often in his life.

  He smiled inwardly as that word made him think of his friend and work colleague Jonas. Jonas really was a savage. Jonas Grayfeather, so obviously Native American, from the top of his six-foot-six-inches-tall head to his battered size-fourteen boots.

  A meeting between Jonas and Diana might be entertaining to watch.

  Most women found Jonas’s blue-black hair and bronzed flesh intriguing as hell.

  And that one kiss in the bar was enough to tell Seth he didn’t want Diana to be intrigued by any other man but him.

  Enough to also tell him he wanted to kiss her again.

  Did that mean he was going to help her? Go back to Paris with her? Take her to bed if the opportunity arose?

  He shifted uncomfortably as his cock began to swell with approval of that idea. “You’re a beautiful woman. Maybe the guy following you wants to get to know you better?”

  Her cheeks flushed at the compliment. “He’s swarthy and slightly bald, with a paunch.”

  “All the more reason,” Seth drawled.

  She grimaced. “I sense anger in his interest, not attraction.”

  Seth wondered self-derisively if she could sense his attraction to her, too. An attraction that definitely wasn’t fueled by anger.

  He threw the contents of his glass to the back of his throat before standing up to place it back on the silver tray next to the cut-glass crystal decanter. He might have grown up poor, but he had made up for that during the last fifteen years. The army hadn’t paid that well, but his work since for Grayson Security was lucrative, and he had also developed an instinct for playing the stock market. “Do you have a return flight to Paris?”

  “Tomorrow evening.”

  He frowned his irritation. “That doesn’t give me a lot of time.”

  “To do what?”

  “Check into the situation.”

  Her smile lacked humor. “See if I’m imagining things, you mean?”

  There was that, Seth admitted ruefully. Although the longer he spent in her company, the less convinced he became that Diana Moore was either delusional or hysterical. There was a resilience to her that told him she was normally practical and levelheaded. She would have to be all those things in order to have survived all that happened to her this past year.

  The senseless and seemingly random murder of Jeremy Moore was only one of the things Seth intended checking into before he made any decision in regard to whether or not to help this woman.

  Moore’s wife had been kidnapped and then returned to him, and then a week later the man himself had been murdered. It seemed to Seth, on the outside looking in, those were the defining factors that began the strange events in Diana’s life.

  She shrugged. “I’ve been working at the museum for such a short time, I didn’t like to ask for any more time off than a couple of days.”

  That made sense. “Do you have family in London you can spend the night with?”

  “I only have my parents.”

  “The artist Stephen Baxter and the poet Stella Baxter.” Seth only knew of the couple because Stephen Baxter had been the one to employ the help of Grayson Security in retrieving his daughter, as well as providing the million pounds demanded from the Colombian bandits for her release. Along with many other countries, it was the policy of the British government not to pay ransom money to kidnappers
or terrorists. Which was the reason Stephen Baxter had gone to Grayson Security, a company that specialized—discreetly—in the retrieval of kidnap victims. That discretion was also the reason Seth hadn’t “officially” been in Bogotá.

  He had never met Stephen Baxter or his wife Stella. Lijah had been in charge at Grayson Security at the time, and Seth had been away on another job until days before flying out to Colombia.

  Diana nodded. “I told you, they live in Wales. And I really don’t want to worry them again after—well, after what happened earlier this year.”

  Also understandable. “Friends, then?”

  “I’d rather not put any of them in danger by involving them.”

  “But you didn’t feel the same need where I’m concerned?” He eyed her knowingly.

  “No.” Diana had good reason to know this man was more than capable of taking care of himself, and anyone else who needed it. He knew it too. “I booked into a hotel earlier, left my overnight bag in my room there before coming to Grayson Security.”

  “I’m not sure staying at a hotel is a good idea.”

  Her eyes widened. “Why not?”

  He shrugged wide shoulders. “Because if you are being followed, then a hotel could be a very vulnerable place for you to be.”

  “I didn’t think of that…” She gave a shudder as the fear she had felt for so long once again threatened to become overwhelming.

  “You could stay here.”

  Diana tensed as she looked at him warily. “Here…?”

  “Why not?”

  “With you?

  He gave a hard smile. “It would seem to defeat the object if I moved out to a hotel and left you here on your own. It’s a big house,” he snapped at her continued silence. “With half a dozen bedrooms. You can take your pick as to which one you want to sleep in.”

  Including his?

  It was utterly ridiculous, given the circumstances, but Diana couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to go to bed with a man like Seth Armstrong. An experienced and totally self-confident man, at least ten years older than her, who would probably bring those qualities to bed with him. His kiss earlier had been both provocative and intimately arousing—