by Cindy Dees
Table of Contents
Blurb
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
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
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By Cindy Dees
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Copyright
Showdown
By Cindy Dees
A Stud Games Novel
In crime, like in love, there can be no half measures….
Fashion model Zane Stryker needs money—badly. At almost thirty, his glory days are behind him, and he needs capital to start over. When his luggage is switched with a bag containing contraband he’s forced to deliver, it’s either the worst thing that’s ever happened to him… or the best.
Enter Sebastian Gigoni, formerly of the British Special Forces, who has to decide just where Zane’s loyalty lies and why. Sizzling attraction erupts between them, but that doesn’t mean they can trust each other. They double down in a race for their lives—and their love—but are their purposes at odds? As they struggle to reconcile their goals, their consciences, and the needs of their hearts, one thing is clear—they must go all in or give up altogether.
Previously published by Dreamspinner Press as All In by Ava Drake, July 2017.
Chapter One
“C’MON, C’MON, c’mon. Spit out my bag.” Zane Stryker glared at the luggage carousel as if he could will his suitcase into existence—the suitcase carrying all his hopes and dreams. His last shot at catching the eye of a major fashion house.
He was tired, grimy, sore from sleeping bent in all the wrong ways in a middle seat in coach on a nine-hour flight from Milan to New York. He wanted his luggage, a hot shower, a meal, and about twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. In that order. Starting now.
The shiny metal flaps of the luggage conveyor belt ground to an uncaring halt, empty but for a single bedraggled black duffel bag that bore no resemblance to his navy blue hard-sided suitcase.
He’d poured every last dollar he had into the wardrobe in that suitcase. The clothes were hip and chic—retro design, fashion forward—sure to impress the shit out of the condescending twelve-year-olds the major fashion houses would assign to hiring runway models for the upcoming season. He needed those clothes, dammit.
Zane spied a troll in an airline uniform clumping toward the abandoned duffel bag. He moved forward to intercept the guy. “Excuse me. My bag either isn’t here, or you’ve managed to make it invisible.”
“Talk to the people in the baggage claim office,” the troll droned. “Past baggage carousel number eight.”
Right. The panic becoming real, he hurried over to the glass-windowed office and the line of pissed-off people bitching randomly at one another about how bad air travel sucked. He bit back an urge to suggest that if they hated flying so much, they could have crossed the Atlantic to New York in a ship like people used to. May they all get scurvy and their teeth fall out.
The flat leather portfolio that held his best photos was tucked safely under his arm, at any rate. Hell, he would rather lose his passport than lose those.
After the woman in front of him tried unsuccessfully for Ten. Fucking. Minutes. to get the airline to replace a guitar case that had obviously been decrepit well before it boarded the flight to JFK, it was finally his turn.
He handed his bag tag to a clerk, who looked harassed enough that Zane actually felt a frisson of sympathy for her. She typed into her computer. Frowned.
Nonononono. No frowns where his suitcase was concerned. He needed expansive smiles of relief and reassuring words of having found his bag to flow from her ruby lips. C’mon, sweetheart. Gimme some love, here.
She typed again. Frowned again.
Shit.
“Would you come with me, sir?” she asked.
“You found my bag?” he asked hopefully.
“Please come with me.”
The woman led him down a hallway into the utilitarian, grease-scented guts of the airport and gestured for him to go into a room crammed with what looked like lost and unclaimed luggage.
Cripes. He hadn’t packed anything illegal in his bag, had he? A drug-sniffing dog hadn’t hit on his suitcase, had it? It had been years since he’d snorted cocaine, and he didn’t even take pulls on joints when someone passed him weed anymore. Frantically, he reviewed his possessions. No guns, knives, explosives, aerosols, batteries, or anti-American propaganda. What, then?
Ominously, the luggage clerk of the ruby lips didn’t go in with him. He stepped into the storage room, which was crowded with suitcases of every size and shape, standing on the floor in messy rows and shoved onto stacks of tall metal shelves. Two men stood in the room, staring suspiciously at him.
One wore a rumpled khaki airline employee’s uniform and had the dull expression of a man with a low-double-digit IQ. The other one, though….
Brioni twill, two-button suit in classic charcoal gray. Size 44, tailored in at the waist. A cool five grand for the jacket alone. Trousers, 34 long, also custom-tailored. Another grand. Custom-made Italian leather oxfords. Three grand-ish, more or less, depending on the maker. The tie, a bold red pattern on silk, had to be Roberto Cavalli. But Zane didn’t recognize the pattern, and he’d worked the photo shoot for this season’s collection. Custom-designed, then. No telling how much that had cost.
He lifted his gaze to the man’s face, and swear to God, his heart skipped a beat. Those eyes.
There were blue eyes, and then there were blue eyes. These were Kodachrome cobalt, so brilliant they would leap off the pages of a magazine. And the face to go with them was arresting.
Square jaw, strong nose, chiseled cheekbones. Brows in need of a little shaping. Skin tanned, in need of a moisturizing facial, but otherwise great. Two, maybe three days’ growth of dark whiskers to go with brunet hair so thick and touchable it hurt to look at. He wasn’t a pretty man the way high-fashion models were beautiful, but he was so damned compelling, Zane couldn’t even think about looking away.
“Are you Mr. Stryker?” Blue Eyes asked.
Fuck me now. That voice. Deep. Rich and raspy. Confident as hell. Commanding. Zane’s knees turned to jelly and his gut turned to water. “I am Zane Stryker. And you are?”
“Sebastian Gigoni.”
“You got called gigolo a lot as a kid, didn’t you?” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them. Jesus. It was probably a really stupid idea to flirt with a hot-as-shit fed, or whatever kind of law enforcement official he was.
A disgusted look flashed through those bluer-than-blue eyes.
Good job, Zane. Piss off the guy who can toss your ass in jail and throw away the key. Hell, the guy was probably straighter than a highway across a desert. In a bid to keep his ass out of jail, he said with what he hoped didn’t come across as forced cheerfulness, “So, I lost my bag. The lady at the counter said it would be in here. How do I go about claiming it? Here’s my tag.” He held out the narrow strip of waxed paper with its printed barcode.
The airline dude—middle-aged, medium build, with thinning hair, and in every way unremarkable—said, “Can you describe your bag?”
“Large. Navy blue. Four wheels. Hard sides. It has a black leather Valentino luggage strap around it. Oh,
and there’s a glue stain on the top. I don’t know what they use to put on destination stickers in Hong Kong, but I haven’t been able to get that stuff off the bag.”
Sebastian nodded to the baggage guy, who said, “Come with me.”
What the hell? He followed the airline employee to the back of the room and into a small, stuffy office with a glass window looking out on the holding room they’d just left. A plain table stood in the middle, and beside it stood his suitcase.
Thank God. The life savings he’d invested in the clothes in that bag, each piece strategically chosen to hide the signs of his age, came close to ten grand. A matter of weeks away from turning thirty, he desperately needed to work the runways for one last season. And this time he was going to save every damned penny he could and not walk away from this business broke and broken.
“What’s inside?” Baggage Dude asked.
“Clothes. Two Italian suits that are going to need steaming, four dress shirts, a half-dozen hand-painted T-shirts. Some polo shirts. A pair of Saint Laurent couture slim-fit jeans.” They cost three grand new, but he’d lucked into a pair at a thrift shop in Milan whose owner didn’t realize what he had. Zane had picked them up for the equivalent of about forty dollars. Score. “Underwear. Socks. Razor. Blow dryer—I can give you a complete inventory if you need it.”
“No. That’s enough,” Luggage Lout replied.
Brioni Suit, who’d followed them into the room, crowding it with his large frame and larger presence, said, “Would you mind opening the bag to show us the contents?”
“No problem.”
The airline employee lifted the suitcase onto the table, and Zane unbuckled the strap, unlatched the top, and threw it open—
“What the fuck?” he exclaimed.
Where were his clothes?
He stared down at the mostly empty suitcase. In place of his things—of all his things—lay one dark, carefully folded suit with a slim brown leather briefcase strapped down on top of it.
“Is that suit yours?” Sebastian asked.
“Never seen it before in my life. That briefcase isn’t mine either. This can’t be my bag.”
Airline Guy flipped the lid down and compared Zane’s luggage claim tag to the one on the bag. “It’s yours. Numbers and bar codes match. Your name’s on the tag for this bag. It even has the glue stain you described.”
“Well, yeah. It’s my suitcase. But all my stuff is gone. I’ve been robbed.” A stream of mental cursing, born of desperation, erupted in his brain.
“So you’re saying these are not your possessions?” Sebastian asked.
“That’s what I said,” he answered impatiently. His mind was already racing ahead to how in the hell he was going to get clothes to go on auditions for runway work. The go-sees were already starting and would be done for the season in less than two weeks. He couldn’t even get a job and a first paycheck in time to buy a decent suit. Thank God he’d carried his portfolio onto the plane by hand, but this was an unmitigated disaster!
“…leave us alone for a moment, please,” Sebastian was saying to the baggage handler.
Zane’s attention snapped back to the beautiful stranger as the door clicked shut, closeting the two of them alone in the tiny room with his suitcase between them on the table. Any other day, any other situation but this, and he would definitely be throwing out hints to Tall, Dark, and Dangerous that he was single, ready to mingle, and kinky enough to try pretty much anything the man had in mind.
Instead, he let the panic he was feeling creep into his eyes and prayed this man realized how sincere it was.
“Mr. Stryker, I have reason to believe the contents of your suitcase contain illegal contraband. In the absence of you producing a compelling story for how that briefcase and its contents came into your possession, Customs agents are going to come in here in a few minutes, go through the motions of questioning you, and arrest you. You’re headed for federal prison to serve hard time for a significant chunk of the rest of your life.”
Zane’s mind went blank. Utterly, blue-screen-of-doom blank.
“Do you understand me?” Sebastian asked.
Prison? Him? It would be a death sentence. But he hadn’t done anything wrong!
“Do you understand?”
“Yes. Wait, no.” Finding his voice at last, he burst out, “No, I don’t understand at all! That’s my suitcase, but the stuff inside it isn’t mine. I’ve never seen it before! I swear. You have to believe me—”
Sebastian cut him off, speaking low and urgent. “Look. I do believe you.”
“Who are you?” Zane blurted.
Without answering Zane’s question, Sebastian continued, “I’m here to help you. But I need you to help me first. I’ve got to get you, your bag, and its contents out of here. I had to pull a lot of strings to get your luggage through border control and put in here without you having to walk it through Customs.”
“Whoa. You’re not some sort of drug dealer, are you? Did you make me some sort of unwitting mule for your shit? I don’t appreciate being used like that, and I’m not letting you ruin my life—”
“It’s not drugs,” Gigoni interrupted sharply.
“Is the contraband yours?” he demanded.
“No!” Another sharp denial that sounded authentic.
“Lawyer?” he tried.
“God, no. Think of me as a fixer.”
“A what? I don’t understand—”
“I know you don’t. I’ll explain everything later. Until then, I need you to trust me long enough to get you and your suitcase out of here. Can you do that?”
“Do I have any choice?”
He shrugged under the perfectly tailored shoulder of the Brioni suit. “Sure. I can hand you over to Customs and you can go to jail… for a long time.”
“But I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“That’s your suitcase. You admitted in front of witnesses that it was yours. And inside it is something that will put you in jail for decades. You’re royally screwed, my friend.”
“What’s in the briefcase?”
“Later. Yes or no. Will you help me help you?”
Chapter Two
SEBASTIAN STUDIED the freaked-out man before him. He’d seen some beautiful human beings in his day, but this guy was in a class of his own. His hair was light brown streaked with honey gold, and his eyes were pale green and intense as hell. The guy’s facial structure was a sculptor’s wet dream.
Zane Stryker was around five foot ten, lean to the point of being spare, and everything about him—the way he moved his hands, the way he carried himself, even the way he turned his head—was elegant. It was no stretch at all to see the guy as a male model or movie star.
Envy stabbed Sebastian in the gut, shocking him into stillness. This Stryker guy oozed class and breeding from every pore. He was everything Sebastian had aspired to be as a poor kid growing up on the tough streets of East London and couldn’t have been further from. God knew he’d thrown a fortune at polishing the pig’s ear that he was, but he would never achieve the easy, breezy sophistication of Zane Stryker, no matter how many billions he earned nor how many of those billions he threw at adorning himself in wealth.
Right now, however, he had no time for pondering class divisions. He had to get Stryker and that suitcase out of here before they both fell into the hands of the US government. While Uncle Sam would be delighted to seize the contents of the briefcase, the feds wouldn’t have any idea what they really had in their possession.
Now was not the moment to stop everything to explain to the feds what they had. Right now it was more time critical that this op run its course than it was to bring the federal government up to speed and run the gauntlet of bureaucracy and paperwork necessary to sanction an official operation on American soil.
Local authorities would have no idea that the contraband represented bait to catch a shadowy criminal organization his former employer and good friend had been chasing for years. An organization th
at desperately needed to be stopped. Hell, he’d come out of retirement from the security business to help out.
Compliments of an inside informant who’d risked his life to smuggle out a massive cache of information and bank account numbers, Interpol had just made a huge bust. They’d seized most of the group’s cash assets and shut down its Asian operations, nabbing most of its smuggling and drug production assets in the process. The crime ring had taken a major hit both in cash and personnel. But lions were the most dangerous of all when they were wounded. And this lion was bleeding profusely at the moment.
The contents of this suitcase represented the tip of the spear that was going to deliver the killing blow.
He spoke urgently. “Listen, Zane. The baggage guy is going to be back in a minute with airport security cops. We may need to move fast, so keep up with me if I take off. Got it?”
“Umm, yeah, I guess so—”
He hated running roughshod over the guy like this, giving him no time and no information with which to make a decision. But they were out of time. Stryker had to go with him now, or everything he and his colleagues had worked so hard for would be lost.
“Grab the bag,” he ordered. “I’ll check the hallway.”
Sebastian peered around the doorframe into the long hall outside the baggage holding room while Zane closed the bag and rolled it to the door. Sebastian murmured over his shoulder, “We’re clear. Let’s go.”
He moved fast, his legs churning up the linoleum. Zane kept up easily, except of course his stride looked like it came straight off a fashion runway, an aggressive, stalking prowl made to draw attention. If they could just get into a public space with lots of people, maybe they could blend into a crowd. Or at worst, lots of camera phones would be there to record any potential confrontation with anyone who might try to question them as they walked that suitcase out of the baggage holding area.
Of course, the worst-case scenario wasn’t the police, or even the bag and its contents being seized by the feds. He was actually more worried that whoever had used Zane’s bag to smuggle something into New York would try to reclaim it right here at the airport.
