Island Flame

by ROBARDS, KAREN

  She slept in flannel pajama bottoms and a tank top. The bottoms were red and loose, the top white and snug. Her long, horsetail-thick chestnut hair trailed over her shoulders in two braids. Not a look meant for public consumption, and not the image she wanted to project to the security guards. At five-six, she was lean as a whippet and superbly fit. Hard-bodied. Cool, competent, tough as nails. Right now, though, to anybody who happened to be watching, she probably looked the exact opposite.

  Current appearances notwithstanding, girly and vulnerable she was not.

  Mentally flipping the bird at the invisible watcher who might or might not be behind the camera, depending on the degree of slacking that was going on, she padded back down the carpeted hallway. There was an elevator, but she preferred to take the stairs. A little exercise was what she needed to take the edge off. She didn’t sleepwalk much anymore, maybe two or three times a year, but she knew the drill: her thought processes would be cobwebby for hours if she didn’t do something to shake them out.

  By the time she made it up the semicircular marble staircase to the second floor, her head was on straight and she felt normal again. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The anger and sense of betrayal that had been with her for almost twenty-four hours now had come back, and had once again settled into her stomach like a rock.

  “Bastard,” she said out loud to her absent ex-boyfriend. She’d said it to his face before she’d left, along with a lot of other things. She didn’t know why she’d been so surprised to learn he’d been cheating on her. She knew men. She knew cops.

  What was surprising was how much it hurt to find out that Homicide Investigator Nate Horacki of the Detroit PD was no better than the rest of them.

  This time yesterday, she would have said she was in love with him.

  But now … no way. She wasn’t that big of a …

  Clink.

  Mick never would have heard the slight sound if she hadn’t been right where she was, striding along the open second-floor gallery that ran across the top of the enormous, eye-popping entry hall, nearly at the doorway of the bedroom she was using, the one she always used, that she’d come to think of as her way-luxurious home away from home. But she was there, and she did hear it. Stopping dead, she listened. To nothing at all except the hum of the heating system. Except for the faint glow of moonlight streaming through the windows, the house was dark. Not wanting to advertise her movements to anyone outside who might be interested, she hadn’t turned on a light on her way back to her bedroom. Now every sense she possessed focused on the shadow-filled spaces stretching out all around her. The house was huge, and tonight, except for her, it was empty. At least, it was supposed to be.

  Clink.

  There it was again. Mick went taut as a bowstring, every sense on the alert. The smell of pine from the Christmas garlands tied to the gallery’s wrought iron railing wafted in the air. Shimmery gold ornaments in a glass bowl on the console table to her left glinted as a shaft of moonlight played over them. Trying to remember how the house had looked before darkness had swallowed it up, she concluded that the tall, menacing shapes in the corners were the human-sized Toy Soldiers and Nutcrackers her aunt Hope, Uncle Nicco’s wife, had used as Christmas decorations, and relaxed a little even as she listened hard.

  Silence once again blanketed everything. But she knew she hadn’t imagined the sound. And it hadn’t been a random creak that she could put down to the settling of floor joists or something equally innocent, but sharper and metallic. Purposeful, was how she characterized it. Which meant she needed to check it out.

  She embraced the thought with relish. Checking it out was something to do, something to think about, something she was good at. And it was a whole hell of a lot better than lying sleepless in her bed trying not to think, which she knew was the fate that awaited her for the rest of the night.

  Uncle Nicco had hired her to house-sit while he, his wife, and their five grown children and their families spent New Year’s and the week after at their place in Palm Beach. Because of the bust-up with Nate, she had arrived a day early, just a couple of hours after the family left. The house should have been empty for this one night.

  New Year’s Eve.

  So if the house was empty except for her, what was the source of that sound?

  Moving swiftly, Mick slipped into her bedroom and retrieved her gun from the nightstand. The familiar, solid weight of the Glock 22 felt good in her hand. Her handcuffs were on the nightstand too. She grabbed them, tucked them into her pocket just in case, and thrust her feet into terry flip-flops, which had been part of the spa basket her longtime best friend, Angela Marino Knox, Nicco’s daughter, had left on her bed as a Christmas present and which she had been using for slippers after painting her toenails with the hot-pink passion fruit polish that had also been in the basket. Then she retraced her steps, quiet as a whisper, moving cautiously but quickly back along the gallery, listening.

  Clink.

  There it was again. Probably it was nothing. Still, her heart rate accelerated as she focused in on the location of the sound: first floor, toward the rear. Padding down the stairs, the marble hard and silent beneath her feet, she tried to pinpoint the location more exactly. Left, past the huge formal living and dining rooms and the music room and the library. Slinking purposefully along, moving from shadow to shadow, she gave a fleeting thought to hitting one of the panic buttons that had been placed in strategic locations for the purpose of instantly summoning the security guards. The odds were high that the sound was something entirely innocent, but backup was always a good thing. Then Mick considered the possibilities for who had pulled security guard duty on this icy New Year’s Eve, and made a face.

  She didn’t need backup, anyway.

  No longer hearing anything out of the ordinary, she proceeded with quick caution, clearing each dark room as she passed it. As Uncle Nicco was always bragging, the security system was state of the art, not the kind of thing a burglar could easily breach. Plus, given the presence of the guards, the cameras, and the fact that the estate was ringed on three sides by a twelve-foot-high fence (the fourth side was secured by the lake) and every outside door had at least two top-of-the-line double-bolts, the house was a virtual fortress. What were the chances that … ?

  Boom.

  Okay, that wasn’t nothing. It was a soft boom, a muffled, barely audible boom, but a boom nonetheless. As if something had exploded, maybe, only quietly. Mick’s eyes widened as she rounded a corner and spied the faintest of yellow glows emanating from a door about twenty feet away. A click, a boom, a glow—good God, could the house be on fire?

  The security system included state-of-the-art fire detection. If the house was on fire, by now the system should be wailing its little heart out.

  Unless something had compromised the system.

  Adrenaline pumping, Mick glided quickly and silently to the open door, then flattened herself against the wall beside it. The yellow glow was gone. The hall, the room, the house were once again silent and dark. A quick, careful peek around the door frame revealed exactly nothing: there was just enough moonlight filtering through cracks in the floor-to-ceiling drapes to help her ascertain that the room was empty. But there was a smell: a kind of acrid, smoky scent that reminded her of a detonated cherry bomb. And barely audible sounds—a shuffle, a click, a thunk. Although she liked to think she possessed a highly honed sixth sense, one wasn’t required to deduce that she was not alone. Her heart lurched. Her stomach clenched. She wet her lips.

  Then professionalism kicked in, and icy calm descended like a curtain.

  She was still peeping around the door frame formulating her next move when a man, tall and lean, dressed all in black and wearing a black ski mask with one of those miner’s lights affixed to a band around his forehead, walked out of an open door on the opposite side of the room as brazen as could be. She hadn’t previously been more than vaguely aware of that door. If she had thought about it at all, which she couldn’
t recall ever having done, she had probably assumed it led to a closet. Only no burglar—and a burglar this certainly was—would bother to blow open a closet door, and it was clear from the sulfurous smell, from the boom she’d heard, and most of all from the fact that the door appeared to be hanging drunkenly from one hinge, that it had been blown open.

  The room was Uncle Nicco’s private office, which meant the door almost had to belong to a safe. A closet-sized, walk-in safe that held God only knew what in the way of valuables. A safe she’d never even known existed.

  Which it was nevertheless her job to protect.

  The man was maybe six-two, broad-shouldered, and athletically built, with a young man’s confident gait. Open military-style jacket over a tee, pants, and boots. With—she squinted to be sure—surgical gloves that made his hands look white as a cadaver’s against all that black. Still absolutely unaware that she was anywhere in the vicinity.

  Having registered all this in the space of a split second, Mick did what she had to do: stepped into the doorway, planted her feet, and jerked her weapon up.

  “Freeze,” she barked. “Police.”

  Continue reading for an exclusive excerpt from

  FORBIDDEN LOVE

  By Karen Robards

  February 2013

  From Pocket Books

  CHAPTER

  1

  “Hell and damnation!”

  Justin Brant, sixth Earl of Weston, swore furiously as a stream of icy rainwater rolled off the already saturated brim of his slouch hat to find its way with devilish accuracy to the bare skin at the back of his neck. He clenched his teeth as the freezing water trickled down his spine. Damn the ungrateful little minx to hell, he thought angrily. When he caught up with her—as he would, and before too many more hours had passed—he was willing to wager anything one liked that he would soon cure her of her disobedient tricks once and for all!

  The many-caped driving coat he wore was not intended for riding down an Irish excuse for a road in inclement weather. It left altogether too much of him exposed to the rain and wind that had been nowhere in evidence when he had left Galway that morning. With the predictable unpredictability of all things Irish, the downpour had descended upon him without warning; within five minutes, he had been drenched to the skin. His usually gleaming Hessians, the pride of Manning, his valet, were all but unrecognizable, and he was reasonably certain that both his dove gray pantaloons and once snowy neckcloth were ruined past saving. Another black mark to chalk up against the impudent chit, Justin told himself, although he knew this last one was a trifle unfair, for he didn’t give a damn about his clothes in the normal way of things, and regularly incurred Manning’s disapproval for the disregard with which he treated his apparel. More galling by far than his bedraggled finery was the knowledge that his curricle, specially designed by himself and well-known to every sporting gentleman who fancied himself a whip, yesterday had the misfortune to encounter a damned great hole where a hole had no business to be. The upshot of this unfortunate occurrence was that his curricle had broken a wheel, and he had been forced to leave it behind in Galway for repairs, along with his horses. The only nag available for hire was one of the sorriest bits of blood and bone that he had ever clapped eyes on, and that was just his first impression! As the beast had clopped its way toward their destination, his opinion of it had grown steadily worse. He might as well have been riding a cow! The only saving grace in the whole deplorable situation, every infuriating circumstance of which could be laid squarely at the door of his step-niece and ward, Miss Megan Kinkead, was that none of his many friends and acquaintances would be caught dead riding down a dirt road in the wilds of Ireland, and so at least he was spared their sniggers at his expense.

  Justin had been riding under trying conditions for hours. As his horse squelched through the seething quagmire to which rain had reduced the road, he acknowledged that he had seldom been wetter, colder, or hungrier. He had thought to be at his destination— Maam’s Cross Court, his Irish estate, and, he was pretty certain, Megan’s refuge—before luncheon. As it was, it was coming close to the dinner hour, and he still had some five miles to go, which in his own curricle with his own horses, would have taken perhaps fifteen minutes to negotiate. On this knock-kneed plug, he very much feared that it would take him five hours.

  This bit of calculation sent Justin’s temper, not placid under the best of conditions, simmering toward the boiling point. Its object could count herself fortunate if a tongue-lashing was the worst she received when he caught up with her. Although she had turned seventeen two or three months ago, and was properly considered a young lady now, she acted like a hoyden and it was as a hoyden that he would treat her. The idea of taking the flat of his hand to her backside did something to lessen his annoyance. By God, she had challenged his authority once too often, and this time he was going to make certain personally that she took the consequences! She would find dealing with him a very different kettle of fish from wrapping Charles Stanton, his woolly-headed, soft-hearted secretary, around her little finger.

  This was the third time in eight months that she had run away from school—a very select and exclusive school into which it had cost him considerable effort to get her, thanks to her past record of being politely requested to leave one establishment after another for her pranks. But, considering her tender sex and age, and orphaned state (and his own lack of inclination to trouble himself about the matter), he had been, up to now, amazingly tolerant of her misdeeds. But this— this was the last straw. Returning from an evening at White’s, he had been greeted by Ames, his butler, with the intelligence that an urgent message had arrived while he was out: his ward, it seemed, had been kidnapped by gypsies! Properly alarmed (although already doubting), he had driven at once to Miss Chevington’s Academy for Select Young Ladies in Bath, only to discover by dint of exhaustive questioning, that the whole thing was a hoax. The minx, having taken it into her head to run off again, had somehow managed to induce a passing band of gypsies to take her with them. For which the poor fools were more to be pitied than condemned, Justin reflected, having had past experience of his ward’s seemingly uncanny ability to persuade supposedly reasonable men to do her bidding. After calming the hysterical Miss Chevington, who stated quite categorically that she wanted no more to do with Miss Kinkead, earl’s ward or no, Justin had set out in pursuit of the gypsies. He had come upon them after a day’s hard riding, only to discover that Megan had run away from them, too, after determining that life with the gypsies was not quite as she had imagined it. Justin was as alarmed as he was angry (well, almost!) to think of her jaunting about the countryside alone and unprotected, but as he followed her trail, anger gradually gained the upper hand. It was not long before he deduced that she was headed toward Ireland, and seemed blithely prepared to take up with any chance-met stranger who offered her a ride. He supposed he should be thankful that she had made no apparent effort to cover her tracks. Wherever he went, everyone from hostlers to proper farm-wives remembered the “pretty little miss, so sweet and well-spoken, and traveling on her own like,” and were able to tell him in which direction she had set off. Justin could not quite believe that she did not expect to be pursued, so he could only conclude that the thought of being followed, and eventually overtaken, with all the accompanying consequences, bothered her not at all. The thought made Justin’s jaw clench. In the past it had been Charles Stanton who was sent to repair the damage wrought by the little witch, and no doubt Megan expected Stanton to be the one who came after her, to take her back to school, as he had twice before. But this time would be different. It was time to teach her a lesson she would never forget.

  The girl had been an irritant ever since that day, twelve years before, when Richard, his feckless younger brother, had drowned along with Moira, his appalling mistake of a wife, when a packet taking them from Liverpool to Dublin had sunk. Moira, a few years older than Richard, was an Irish peasant who earned her bread singing (she said) in the pu
blic houses of Dublin until she had managed to induce the soft-hearted Richard to marry her. In less than a year, they had run through Richard’s considerable patrimony; at the time of their death, they had been living on his, Justin’s, generosity at Maam’s Cross Court, which was suitably remote from the gaming tables that, along with Moira, had been Rich-ard’s downfall. At the time of Richard’s death he had been staggered to learn that there was a child, a five-year-old girl, apparently Moira’s daughter by some previous, undisclosed marriage. At least, he assumed that there had been a previous marriage. He hated to think that the brat was a by-blow with an unknown father; it was certainly no spawn of Rich-ard’s, who had known Moira for less than two years at the time of their death. At any rate, the child was a fact, living at Maam’s Cross Court, and he was her guardian. He could, of course, have refused the charge; no one would have blamed him; in fact, many would have approved his action, for the girl was of extremely questionable birth besides being no blood kin to the Brants. However, all his life he had taken his responsibilities seriously, and this child, however unfortunately, seemed to fall into the realm of his responsibilities. So, cursing the necessity but feeling duty-bound, he had reluctantly journeyed down to Ireland to see to the little changeling for himself. He had been pleasantly surprised. She was a pretty creature, all tangled black curls and huge violet eyes, with delicate bones and fine porcelain skin that seemed to belie her ignominious birth. Her pinafore was ill-fitting and stained and torn in several places, and her face decidedly dirty, but these were minor defects, easily remedied. After looking the child over, and being faintly taken aback by the cool appraisal he received in return, he had instructed Mrs. Donovan, the housekeeper, to get her cleaned up; whereupon the impudent little minx had put out her tongue at the good lady. Justin had been much inclined to laugh as his flustered housekeeper attempted to take the child by the hand and lead her from the room. He had even found it touching when the girl had run to him for succor, clinging to his leg for dear life as Mrs. Donovan tried without success to coax her into obedience. Finally judging that this fledgling revolt had gone on long enough, he had pried her little arms from around his leg. She rewarded him by sinking a very sharp set of pearly white teeth into his thigh; to this day he bore a faint crescent-shaped scar to mark the spot.