Road to Temptation

by Terra Little

  “Explain it to me anyway,” he said, wanting, needing, to know more.

  “The first thing you should know is that Elise and I aren’t running a crime syndicate. The majority of our business really does come from the usual stuff—cheating spouses, missing children, will and probate issues, and on and on. I mean, don’t get me wrong, our clients do tend to be highbrow, so we’ve encountered our share of scandals along the way. But nothing about the services we provide to ninety-five percent of them is or ever has been illegal. Taking on your sister’s case was a mistake—one that I made on my own. She was an exception to our rules that I wish I’d never made.” She sat across from him at the island and draped her own napkin across her lap. They picked up their spoons at the same time and eyed each other suspiciously as they sampled. “How’s the gumbo?” Olivia asked after swallowing.

  “Superb. You don’t seem like the type who knows her way around a kitchen.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and reached for his wineglass.

  Olivia’s eyebrows shot up, her mouth dropped open. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, you aren’t really that much of an ass, are you?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Actually, now that you mention it, no, I wouldn’t.”

  They stared at each other.

  She held his gaze while she drank from her wineglass, and he had the distinct feeling that she was reading him, assessing his character and possibly finding him lacking somehow. She was smiling, not at him but at something that she’d been thinking just then, when she set her glass down with a soft click and cleared her throat. “You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

  He thought about lying to her. Then he thought about Elise and couldn’t lie to himself. “Yes. Are you going to answer my question?”

  “Eventually, but we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves. Did I ever tell you about what Elise was like in high school?”

  “You know damn well that you didn’t.” He chewed a chunk of perfectly seasoned crab meat and swallowed slowly. “But I’m all ears now, though.”

  “Elise was painfully shy,” Olivia told him as she sipped from her second glass of wine. She’d gotten better at socializing by the time they reached high school, but her mind was always on other things, like helping women at the shelter where she had volunteered for what seemed like forever.

  “That place was her second home,” Olivia joked. “It’s why she became a police officer in the first place—to help lost souls find their way and blah, blah, blah. But the experience wasn’t quite the fairy tale that she hoped it would be. She couldn’t stomach the violence and the more she dealt with the victims of violence, the more disillusioned she became. She felt like the justice system was failing abuse victims. So when she was recruited by the marshals, she was more than ready to make the move, if nothing else than to get away from that part of it for a while. She liked it and she was good at it, so...” Olivia paused to take a deep breath and release it slowly. “After she’d been with the Marshals Service for a few years, someone there approached her about coming aboard with the network. They had been watching her for a while. That’s when we started.”

  “The network. What is this network?”

  “Just a group of people who help battered women,” she said. “Would you like more gumbo?”

  “I couldn’t eat another bite.”

  “A slice of caramel cheesecake, then?”

  He cocked a brow. “Did you make that, too?”

  She cocked a brow right back. “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re tying to distract me and it’s not going to work. I still want to hear about the network.”

  “You know, you really are overthinking this whole thing,” Olivia told him as she left the island in search of cheesecake. “The answer to each of the questions you asked earlier is no. We are not and have never been into human trafficking of any kind. The women we help are at the end of their ropes, some of them with injuries so severe that they’ve barely survived them. Women whose abusive husbands or significant others won’t be stopped, seemingly by anything, not by signed divorce decrees or desperate moves in the middle of the night, by the laws on the books or by the police who show up to enforce them.” She replaced his empty bowl with a dessert plate topped with a slice of cheesecake. “It goes without saying that each and every incident of domestic violence is serious, but sometimes there are those incidents that require thinking outside the box. Those are the kinds of cases that we take on.”

  “For example,” Broderick prodded.

  “For example, just last month, we erased a woman whose hair had been completely burned off when her ex-husband doused her with gasoline and set her on fire. Before that, she moved around to five different states in the three years since their divorce, trying to outrun him, but he found her every time. Setting her on fire was the last straw. Eventually he would’ve killed her but knowing that wasn’t what brought her to us. Do you know what did, Mr. Cannon?”

  “No, what?”

  “She’d just been diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer and given a year or two, at most, to live. She wanted to spend whatever time she had left as a free woman. How could we deny her her last wish?”

  Neither of them spoke while he ate and she sipped. When he was finished, he wiped his mouth with the linen napkin one last time and came out with the thing that was bothering him the most. “It’s not that I don’t understand what you’re telling me, because I do. But how can you justify committing the crimes that you and Elise are committing by making people disappear? At the very least, we’re talking forgery, identity theft, insurance fraud... The list could on and on, if the full scope of what you’ve done ever comes out.”

  “What about you, Mr. Cannon? How can you justify the crimes that you commit in the course of your work?”

  “Excuse me?” He stood and carried his dessert plate and fork over to the double sink, set them down carefully.

  “You were off somewhere in Argentina just recently, right? How many people did you shoot to kill while you were over there? Better yet, how many did you have to kill in order to accomplish your mission?”

  He looked away, sighing heavily. “It’s not the same thing.”

  “But it’s still a crime, isn’t it? And of course it’s the same thing. It’s against the law to shoot people just because you want something from them, but I don’t see you turning yourself in. You play fast and loose with the law every day yourself. What makes you so much better than us?”

  “You have no idea what I do.”

  “Oh, I think I have a pretty good idea. At least enough of an idea to know that not quite all of the means that you employ to accomplish your ends can be justified in a court of law. If you were an ordinary Joe Schmoe, instead of a government-sanctioned mercenary, they’d have built a special prison just for you and others like you a long time ago. If you think I’m going to stand here and be lectured by you, you’re mistaken. And you’re a hypocrite. I don’t take direction from hypocrites.”

  “So, what, you think I should just walk out of here and pretend like I don’t know what you do?”

  “You didn’t bring the police or the FBI here with you. Why is that?”

  He crossed his arms and glowered at her. “Because I wanted answers first.”

  “And I just gave them to you. Helping your sister was my mistake. Elise had nothing to do with it and she didn’t know anything about it until she got back from the trip to Columbia, Missouri, with you. And, as you can probably surmise from her absence right now, she didn’t take the news very well. So I’m asking you right now, flat out, what are your intentions with her?”

  Broderick answered Olivia’s question with one of his own. “You weren’t surprised to see me. How did you know I’d come?”

  “The minute that Elise suddenly packed up and
rode off into the sunset, I knew what she’d done. I figured it wouldn’t be long before you showed up with the police in tow.”

  “Why didn’t you run, too?”

  “Because I haven’t done anything wrong and, even if I had, I’m not afraid of you. Do you think that my sister and I haven’t already prepared ourselves for a situation just like this?”

  “Where did she go?”

  “Why should I tell you? What are you going to do, have her arrested and extradited back here to face charges?”

  “You do know that I could find her with or without your help, don’t you?”

  The look she gave him was both smug and petty at the same time. “Could you, Mr. Cannon? Could you, really? I don’t know where she is. She wouldn’t tell me and I was trying to give her a few more days to herself before I broke down and had Eli track her down.” Her expression turned wary when he took out his cell and pressed a button. She snatched it from him and ended the call that he’d been in the process of making.

  “Olivia, I swear to God—”

  Holding his cell phone out of his reach with one hand, Olivia held up her other hand defensively. “No, wait, listen to me,” she said, quickly sidestepping him before he could lunge at her and then skipping several feet away from him. They danced around in a wide circle. “Elise isn’t like the women you’re used to dealing with. I’m sure you’ve already figured that out by now, but, still.”

  “My phone, Olivia,” Broderick growled, reaching for it and almost succeeding in grabbing it from her before she clutched it to her chest and turned her back to him. He wasn’t about to breach her personal space, and she knew it. He backed off and took a breath for patience.

  “Not yet. Not until you take a few minutes and think about what you’re going to do when you find her. If you’re planning to hurt my sister in any way, Mr. Cannon, then, I’m telling you right now—just leave her the hell alone.”

  Broderick cocked a brow. “Or else what?”

  “Or else,” Olivia said as she slowly turned to face him, “you’ll regret it.”

  “Is that a threat, Miss Carrington?”

  “Not at all. It’s actually more like a promise. So what’s it going to be, Mr. Cannon? Are you in or are you out?”

  * * *

  Finding Elise took Broderick all of five minutes. It was only a matter of scrolling through his cell’s recent call history, singling out her personal cell number and attaching a tracking worm to her cell’s signal. After that, everywhere she went, she unwittingly took him along with her. Not that she was necessarily hiding, he thought as finished his walk-through of the tiny beach house that she was calling home these days and went to stand at the sliding glass door in the living room. She’d left a minute or two earlier, looking like a million bucks in a white tank top that caressed her breasts like a lover’s touch and a brightly colored ankle-length wrap skirt that fluttered in the breeze as she walked. With his mouth watering at the sight of her long, shapely legs peeking out of the split in the front of her skirt and the unmistakable imprint of her erect nipples through her tank top, he soaked in the look of contentment on her face one last time before picking the flimsy lock on the door and inviting himself into her space. She’d paid the rental fees through the rest of the month in advance, which meant that she was at least planning to hide out there for another couple of weeks, but whether or not that actually happened, he decided, was entirely up to him.

  In the week since he’d last spoken with Olivia, he had visited his sister in Dayton. She had matured and seemingly changed for the better, and he was happy for her. For the both of them, because, after all these years, it was nice to have what was left of his family present and accounted for in his life. She had no interest in returning to her old life and there had still been the matter of Borya Maysak’s stolen money to deal with, but the road they were on now seemed like a good one. Because of their history, shaking off his wariness was proving to be harder than he imagined it would be, but they were making progress every day.

  He found the money in an offshore account that Dortch had opened without Brandy’s knowledge. The amount was a drop in the bucket to Maysak but Broderick flew to Russia to personally return it anyway. Smoothing the man’s ruffled feathers was difficult, as he’d expected it to be, but after several vodka shots and lewd jokes, they had eventually reached an understanding that had simultaneously put Brandy Cannon Dortch’s name at the very bottom of Maysak’s hit list and Broderick squarely in the man’s debt. Terms had been agreed to and another vodka toast made, after which he had returned to the States with another mark on his soul and a remarkably clear conscience.

  Making Brandy’s perjury and contempt of court charges go away was simple enough, as well, since both charges were misdemeanors and the case that she’d been implicated in had already been settled out of court. He’d called in a few favors and had the charges quickly and quietly resolved, for which she’d been profusely grateful. It was exactly the closure she needed to finally put her past behind her for good.

  Elise, on the other hand, was still a loose end in the entire debacle, and as soon as she returned from wherever the hell she’d sashayed off to, they were going to settle things between them, whether she wanted to or not. He’d given her a week to herself and kept his distance. But he was here now and all bets were off.

  The first thing he planned to do was wring her neck for disappearing the way she had and worrying the hell out of him. As soon as he had arrived on the island a few hours ago, he’d taken one look at her hiding place and his imagination had taken off running for the hills. From the outside, the two-bedroom cottage was shabby-looking and alarmingly close to the ocean’s edge. It was also badly in need of a power washing and a security system that could at least keep out a five-year-old. Located on a short stretch of private beach on Florida’s Marco Island, it was the absolute last place that he’d have ever expected to find her in hiding, which, no doubt, was part of the allure for someone like Elise. Discovering that its interior was nicely updated, the exact opposite of its exterior, was a relief, if only a small one.

  Which brought him around to the second thing that he was planning to do to her when she finally returned.

  Screw.

  Her.

  Brains.

  Out.

  He had missed the hell out of her.

  Grabbing a bottled water from the refrigerator in the tiny kitchen, Broderick took a seat in a corner of the living-room sofa and settled in to wait for his woman.

  Chapter 16

  Elise sensed Broderick’s presence the moment she walked into the house and slid the door closed at her back. She could smell his intoxicating alpha-male scent in the air. Inhaling him, she closed her eyes for the second that it took to settle her nerves, and then she turned her head and opened them to see his face across the room. Her body reacted instantly, readying itself for an erotic assault, even as her brain kicked into overdrive with possibilities that weren’t the least bit sexy. The worst of which being...

  “Are you here to arrest me?” she asked, setting the canvas shopping bag she carried on a side table and straightening with her arms folded underneath her breasts, a baleful look on her face.

  “For someone who’s so worried about being arrested, you certainly didn’t run very far or hide yourself very well.”

  “I didn’t run,” she corrected, wishing that her voice wasn’t so shaky. She swallowed the lump in her throat, drinking in the sight of him greedily. “I just...left.”

  “Coward.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Look, if this is about your sister—”

  “You know damn well that this isn’t about my sister,” Broderick thundered, rolling to his feet and coming toward her. “This is about you and me. You should’ve told me.”

  Elise jumped at the lash in his voice but she held her ground. �
��Maybe so, but don’t act like you don’t understand why I couldn’t. What was I supposed to say? How was I supposed to explain myself to you?”

  “How about with the truth?” He didn’t stop coming until their faces were just inches apart, and she could smell the faint scent of peppermint on his breath.

  The urge to jump into his arms was strong but she managed to resist. Barely. There was nothing sexier to her than a well-dressed man, and Broderick definitely fit the bill in his flawlessly tailored Brooks Brothers suit. His paisley necktie was expertly knotted and lying against his dress shirt so perfectly that her fingers itched to get tangled up in the silk fabric. And, good Lord, he smelled so damn good that she almost swooned. “The truth is complicated,” she said, watching his Adam’s apple bob in his throat and telling herself to get a grip. “There are people out there who think that what I do is wrong and you could be one of them.”

  “What you do is wrong.”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “You won’t get an argument from me, because I happen to agree with you,” she said as she massaged the wrinkles out of her forehead with stiff fingers. “Technically, you’re right. It is illegal.” She searched his eyes. “But did you know that, just last year alone, the percentage of women who were killed by their domestic partners dropped from forty-three percent to thirty-one percent? That’s a very significant decrease and I’m positive that I had something to do with it. So if you came here, expecting me to say I’m sorry or that I’m ashamed of myself, then you wasted a trip.”

  “I didn’t ask you to apologize.”

  “Good, because I won’t.”

  They stared at each other.

  “I’m just wondering if you realize that there are probably legal ways to do what you’re doing.”

  “Probably being the key word,” Elise rebutted, grabbing her shopping bag and walking off with it. “Please tell me that you didn’t come all the way down here just to give me a lecture on the relationship between morals and legalities,” she said over her shoulder as she turned a corner into the kitchen. “Because, as much as I hate to be the one to break it to you, the fact is, sometimes there is no relationship.”