Ripped: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  One. She rushed him.

  A blink in time, and she’d kicked apart his feet, shoving him off-balance and forcing his hands on the dresser top, and angled the deadly edge of the knife blade to Faraday’s vulnerable throat.

  To his credit, the cold bastard didn’t so much as blink. “Where did you get a knife?”

  “Knives like me. They’re drawn to me.” Her grin was positively feral as she pressed the edge of the blade to his jugular. “Like woodland creatures to Disney princesses.”

  “Woodland creatures.” He arched an eyebrow. “Not an analogy with which I’m familiar.” His throat worked in a swallow, but she knew it wasn’t nervousness. Merely a test of the knife’s sharpness. “I’ll ask again—where did you get a knife, Ms. McCallister?”

  She heaved a disappointed sigh. “I picked Cameron’s pocket on the stairs. Pip told me he always carries a Leatherman tool, and he’s right-handed—so, right pocket. It was an easy lift.”

  “You’re dangerous.”

  “That is precisely the lesson I wished you to learn.” She patted his cheek. “What a good student you are, Toby. Now that I have your attention...” Her hand circled his throat, his skin warm against her palm as two fingertips located the pressure point she needed. She applied pressure, watched his pupils dilate until the beautiful—beautiful?—stormy gray of his irises was a slivered ring. “You know who my father was.”

  “Reggie McCallister.” His chest lifted in a steady breath, and contact was made. Heat. Shivering, fluttering, inexplicable, intolerable heat.

  She clenched her jaw. “The press had a better name for him.” Drawing blood would be so easy, the inner blade sharp, but Faraday’s next words were sharper yet.

  “The Scottish Slasher.”

  God, she hated that name. Angry heat splashed her cheeks, burned the tips of her ears, and the pad of her thumb stroked over the dulled outer edge of the knife. “There is much in my life I’m unwilling or unable to discuss—the details of my work, obviously—and I’m sure you’re clever enough to deduce that my father is on that no-fly list of topics. But it’s important you understand why we’re here.”

  “Why we’re here with a knife to my neck, or why we’re here in this medieval throwback of a room?”

  Humor caught her unawares and she laughed. “It’s complete rubbish, isn’t it? The room?” His lips twitched, but she didn’t want to laugh with him. Laughing with him defeated the entire purpose of threatening to skewer him with Cameron’s Leatherman. Sobering, Chandler stared up at the face of a man who compelled her—ah, fuck, he really did compel her, didn’t he—to the point of implosion. “We’re at Val Manor because Lady Valsar is trying to stop her son from marrying my sister, and if she finds out about Reggie, she won’t restrain herself from merely cancelling the event. Pip’s told me about Victoria Nolte, exactly how vindictive she can be under particular circumstances.” She eased off his pressure point, a calculated risk.

  Faraday didn’t move. “The circumstances here being her son’s welfare, I take it.”

  “Her heir’s welfare. Cameron is nineteenth in line to the royal crown. She won’t risk a single rust mark on his shiny name, and marrying the daughter of an infamous serial killer goes beyond a light tarnishing.” Her fingers still wrapped around his throat, and Chandler had the distinct thought that she should let go of him. Now... Okay, now. Slowly, her hand fell away, but the knife remained. “My sister is not a stain, Toby. My sister is brilliant and beautiful and funny and kind and generous and not a fucking stain.”

  Before she could draw a full breath, he had their positions flipped, his sudden grip on her wrist forcing her knife hand to the dresser, her other arm twisted behind her back. His hip pressed into her belly, angled such that she couldn’t move her legs defensively.

  She was pinned.

  It was like a bomb going off. The strength in his hold and hard lines of his body morphed implosion into explosion, fire chasing over her skin, sensitizing her to the soft fibers of her sweater, the tight weave of her slim-cut trousers. She dropped the knife without thought as her lips parted on a gasp. Six feet of masculine heat had no business turning her stupid, and for a few precious minutes, she was the biggest idiot in the world.

  Faraday’s gaze searched her face, and she prayed he saw nothing. Nothing nothing nothing but then he was speaking, and she forgot to mask her expression. “I understand.”

  “You...what?” His fingertips bore calluses. Unexpected, that.

  “I understand why we’re here. I understand the need to protect one’s sister. I understand it all, Ms. McCallister, and I’ll help you keep Lady Valsar from outing Pippa, I promise. But use a weapon on me again and my understanding will dwindle, considerably. Do you understand?”

  Her head spun. She resented that he caused her head to spin and, jaw clenched, she willed her body to cool, her heartbeat to slow. Her eyes to deaden. “We’re agreed, then. We keep Pip safe.”

  “We keep her safe.”

  Chapter Five

  Returning Chandler’s phone to her had been a mistake. Not because Tobias feared her contacting someone, either at MI6 or in Moscow, but because of the tiny translucent dot with adhesive backing he’d stuck to the phone’s casing near the microphone and speaker output. One of Adam’s better creations, come to life courtesy of Gillian’s engineering skills, it allowed Tobias to monitor Chandler’s whereabouts via the patented Faraday tracker application. He could observe her movements every second of every day, so long as she carried her phone with her.

  Good news: Chandler had not relinquished her phone once since he’d handed it over.

  Bad news: Since handing it over, Tobias had started checking the tracker app every five minutes.

  Last night after an informal welcoming supper, simply to force his eyes from Chandler’s blinking purple dot, Tobias had wandered along the majestic veranda spanning the south side of the manor house, finding a pocket of shadow on the far edge against an intricate stone railing. He’d left Chandler in the dining room with the “family”—Cameron and Pippa, Lady Valsar and her daughter Irene, and the four groomsmen and two bridesmaids who had arrived shortly after Chandler and him.

  Warm light had spilled onto the veranda through the glass-paned doors standing sentry between the outside of the estate and the inside, but Tobias avoided it, preferring to lean on the railing out of direct sight from any housebound onlookers. He didn’t require the privacy, but he preferred it, especially when he was making a call.

  Lifting the phone to his ear, he’d listened to one ring, then two.

  Two was all it took. “‘Sup, bro?”

  “Adam.” Tobias’s twenty-six-year-old brother was the director of Faraday Industries’ internet security division. To the public, that particular branch of the family business tested data integrity and security firewalls for United States government clients. Privately, however, Adam Faraday used his genius to hack any and every potential threat, peripheral or not, to the company and its people. Faraday people.

  Tobias took threats to his people very seriously. As of yesterday, Pippa Landry was one of his people. “Am I interrupting anything pressing?”

  “You know me, Tobias. Just kickin’ it in my cave,” Adam had said, a grin in his carefree voice as he referred to his office space in the subterranean level of the main Faraday compound warehouse. “How’s Londontown?”

  “Far, far away,” Tobias muttered, glancing at his surroundings. Chandler had hit the nail on the head; this place was straight out of a Victorian gothic. “I’m sleeping on a couch all week.”

  “They don’t have beds at that fancy castle?”

  “There are beds. I just can’t in good conscience sleep in one.” A night on the creaky overstuffed settee facing his suite’s bed would have him waking each morning bad tempered and with a crick in his neck. One of the bene
fits to having money was never roughing it with anything less than eight-hundred-count organic cotton sheets, or so he’d believed. “Ms. McCallister and I are sharing a room to preserve our cover.”

  “As boyfriend and girlfriend, right?” Adam’s glee was unmistakable, as only a sibling’s could be. “How is that going?”

  Not well. Or perhaps very well? No one seemed to doubt they were a couple. “She’s cooperating, with no indication of forthcoming betrayal.” When she had first demanded attending this wedding in trade for taking him to Moscow, he hadn’t compreheneded why she’d asked for so little. A wedding wasn’t worth her life. But now that he understood the threat Pippa faced from Lady Valsar, and how Chandler had positioned herself as the sentry at the gate between their notorious father’s past and Pippa’s pristine future, he saw her unquestioning loyalty to her sister and admired it. Trusted it, and therefore trusted her. “I have a couple of concerns I want you to look into for me. How much do we know about Pippa Landry’s fiancé?”

  “Nolte?” The subtle tapping of fingertips flying across a keyboard. “Cameron Nolte, age thirty, will inherit the title of Viscount Valsar eventually. Eton then Cambridge, earned passable grades in his degree track of economics but was never gonna do much on his own. He joined his father’s investment firm, which is in...” More typing. “Uh, I was about to say London, but a more correct statement would be in the hole, heading straight for bankruptcy court.”

  Tobias scanned the external facade of the manor house. “They’re broke.”

  “Totally,” Adam agreed. “It started when Nolte’s dad had a stroke about four years ago and retired early from the firm. A peek at the auditing history here...dude.”

  Tobias sighed. He loved his little brother, really he did, but Adam had the most plebian vocabulary at times. “Dude what?”

  “Our spy’s sister, Pippa. She’s marrying this guy in how many days?”

  “Five. The wedding’s Saturday morning.”

  A pause. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s such a great idea, bro.”

  “You don’t think what is a great idea—Pippa marrying Nolte?” Apprehension pricked his conscience before calm descended once again. He couldn’t do his job if he was flustered, so calm must always be his baseline. “At this point, I’m fairly certain there’s nothing to be done about that.”

  “It’s not just that he’s broke.” Adam exhaled audibly. “It’s that over the past twelve months, every employee at the investment firm has been let go. Not fired, just...let go, probably with some sort of severance package and NDA to keep them quiet, because otherwise this would’ve made business news.”

  Frowning, Tobias leaned his hip against the rail, legs crossing at the ankle. “How does a bankrupt firm pay an enticing-enough severance package to keep multiple individuals quiet?” Living in the age of social media meant nothing stayed silent for long, not without major financial influence.

  “They don’t. But it looks like a shell company acquired the lease and interceded with Nolte’s attempt to liquidate the firm’s assets. It’ll take me some time to figure out who controls the shell, but the bottom line is, someone holds the dude’s purse strings and he desperately doesn’t want anyone else to know.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “CCTV footage shows Nolte coming and going at the firm five days a week, wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, even though no one’s been working there for months now. He’s—”

  “Keeping up appearances.” That didn’t bode well, for Cameron or for Pippa. “Dig deeper?”

  “You got it. What was the other thing you wanted me to look into?”

  Laughter sounded from the opposite end of the veranda, and Tobias fell back deeper into the shadows as nightfall settled in around him. He couldn’t afford to be overheard, not after his promise to Chandler to protect Pippa. “Victoria Nolte may have hired an investigator to find dirt on Pippa Landry.”

  “Victoria...the mom? Hold on, let me—Yeah. I’ve got credit card charges here to two different PIs, several times over. Probably starting back when the engagement was announced.” Adam continued to work his magic. “One of the regular payments stopped in February, and—Huh.”

  Another curl of tension, immediately stifled. “What?”

  “There was a return on that final payment, the day before our spy landed in Chicago.”

  “Chandler got to the investigator.”

  “No question. McCallister is one scary chick.”

  Except she didn’t scare Tobias. He possessed a healthy respect for her abilities, and her intelligence was nothing to scoff at, but actual fear? He could see how she might inspire it in others, with the violence he sometimes noticed lurking in her brown eyes, her expertise with weaponry of any kind, the unflappability of her spirit. Picturing her standing in front of him in her Underground cell, staring up at him without a trace of fear in her when any normal prisoner would have been pleading for her freedom, Tobias accepted his brother’s description but preferred his own: powerful. She was a powerful woman. “What about the second PI?”

  “Most recent automatic payment was received yesterday. Man’s name is Colm Pinney, lives in Camden, has an arrest record but no convictions.” Adam paused. “And he just bought a train ticket at London Euston, destination Wolverhampton.”

  Less than ideal. “Arriving when?”

  “First thing Tuesday morning.”

  “Good.” The laughter flitted closer, but Tobias’s back was already to a potted shrub. He needed to end this call, now. “Contact Keir,” he said, dropping his voice to a whisper as he mentioned his cousin. “Send him Colm Pinney’s picture and have him intercept at Wolverhampton tomorrow.”

  “And then?”

  A loaded question. Myriad options were available to them—haul Pinney back to London, interrogation and forcible imprisonment until the wedding was over or... “Book Keir a hotel room near the estate and hold Pinney there. I’ll talk to him myself. We need everything Pinney plans to hand over to Victoria Nolte. Let me know when it’s done.”

  “On it. Hey, about the Noltes...you know our connection with them, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” That goddamn book had been nothing but a public-relations pain in his ass since it was published a few months ago. “Lady Valsar definitely reacted when we were introduced.” No other way of explaining the old woman’s near-stricken expression earlier that day—she’d taken their shared family history to heart, in decidedly the wrong way, and that meant Tobias was the enemy whether he wanted to be or not. “This is an inconvenient coincidence.”

  “Gonna be a problem, you think?”

  “No clue. I suppose we’ll find out this week, won’t we?” Unable to wait another moment, Tobias had ended the call and left his hiding spot—though to call it thus was undignified—and nodded to the tipsy bridesmaids who’d wandered too close before returning to the house.

  And yes, he’d checked the app as he went. Damn it.

  He was still checking that app this afternoon as he walked from the parking lot behind the Dauphin Inn & Pub in central Wolverhampton toward an upstairs room containing the second sleazy private investigator Lady Valsar had hired to dig into Pippa Landry’s past. Chandler’s purple dot blinked at him from what looked like the west garden of the manor, harmless and nonthreatening.

  So why the hell couldn’t he stop looking at her—it? Why the hell couldn’t he stop looking at it. “Sick,” he muttered, irritated at his own helpless behavior, and slipped the phone into his pocket as he knocked on the door to room 202.

  A second later it was opened by a brawny man in his late twenties. Full-sleeve tattoos marked Keir Quinn from wrist to neck, with more ink hiding beneath his gray camp shirt and, Tobias knew, trailing down his torso to his knees. His cousin might look like a criminal, but Keir actually held a graduate-level degree in civil engineering
and worked for a large construction and development firm based out of Belfast. His speciality? The controlled explosion of build-site munitions. That he moonlighted as a bombs expert for Faraday Industries was something Tobias and his siblings took great care to keep off the books, for the sake of Keir’s legitimate career.

  Tobias took in Keir’s scruffy, hard-planed face, sharp green gaze and overlong ginger hair pulled back in a messy knot. “Someone ought to buy you a razor.”

  “Someone ought to steal yours,” Keir responded gruffly, his Irish lilt undeniable. After a hard handshake with one big, callused paw, he stepped back to allow Tobias inside the hotel room.

  Immediately, Tobias’s gaze was drawn to Colm Pinney. The PI sat bound in the room’s only chair, swearing and sweating, his round face pale as he watched Tobias approach. Nervousness lurked in the middle-aged man’s bleary eyes.

  Excellent. Pinney was right to be nervous. Tobias was feeling a little edgy this morning, as it was. He’d been spot-on with his prediction of how sleeping on the settee would affect him; he was cranky and sore, and he’d woken with an unfamiliar scent in his nostrils. A scent he had liked, feminine and sweet. And Chandler’s.

  His hand hovered over the pocket containing his phone.

  “I know yer face,” Pinney said thoughtfully.

  “I’m sure you do.” Tobias nodded to Keir lurking in the corner of the room, lounging against a wall with his tatted arms folded over a broad chest. “Do you know his face?”

  Pinney glanced at Keir with even more wariness than he had Tobias. Unsurprising: Tobias’s cousin was the type to inspire a deep sense of physical threat in the average citizen. “Nah, don’t know him.” The investigator brought his attention back to Tobias. “Should I?”

  “Oh, you should. You really should.” After tugging deliberately at his cuffs, Tobias squared off against the bound Pinney. Looking at this lowlife, knowing whose pasts he’d been paid to dig into, made Tobias’s fists clench in unchecked aggression. “Because if you don’t provide me with the answers I want—”