Romantic Times

by Christina Skye

  A naked man, given one quick glimpse through the shadowed doorway. He was stretched out in her bathtub, completely at home.

  Maddie heard the sound of water and a low male voice, talking on a phone. Silently, she moved back out to the hall. She looked at her room card and the number she had scribbled down.

  Room 301.

  The gold letters gleamed on her door.

  Her room alright.

  What was she supposed to do now? Call security? Scream?

  Sighing, she stepped inside and pocketed her card.

  It was a beautiful suite in the Excelsior Hotel with floor to ceiling glass windows that overlooked the strip. If she stood just right, she could see the spectacular fountain and music shows like clockwork at the Bellagio.

  The suite was way above her pay grade. But then Maddie wasn't paying. Otherwise, she’d be camped out at the cheapest local branch of the YWCA.

  But this was a job, and Maddie’s employer happened to be a secret unit of the US government. And for her kind of skills they paid very well indeed.

  Water slapped quietly from the end of the hall.

  She was still trying to decide whether she should go inside and confront the man or simply call security, when she heard the man’s voice rise. The words were rougher now. He was speaking Russian.

  No, not Russian, she decided. It sounded like a dialect from Ukraine, near the Black Sea. She collected odd information like that. Languages happened to be a passion of hers.

  She tilted her head and listened to the man sing. Scraps of melody teased her memory.

  She had it now. It was a particular song that was sung by the crime syndicates around Odessa. The words had something to do with how to treat a woman to keep her quiet.

  The pig.

  The creepy, arrogant pig.

  Maddie scowled.

  He really thought he could crash her room and sing creepy, woman-hating songs? Wait until the hotel management heard about it.

  Water splashed hard. She heard a door open. A man's voice boomed out and feet scuffed over carpet. By instinct, Maddie slipped into the nearby closet. She didn’t want a scene just yet. Through the louvers at the bottom of the door she watched a pair of bare feet move past. Water splashed on the carpet and then a big hotel towel dropped to the floor.

  Holy grapeshot.

  She shrank back, listening as he placed a call and spoke quickly. It was more of the Black Sea dialect. She couldn't follow any of it.

  Maddie realized that she was supposed to meet her boss downstairs in exactly twelve minutes. They had been assigned to run security for a high-profile wedding at the hotel, a favor called in by a senator who was an old friend of her boss.

  The old boy’s network. Frankly, the whole idea made Maddie sick. If she had a problem, she didn’t have anyone to call for a “Get out of Jail Free” card. Not one. Life was tough, but did you hear her complaining?

  She sniffed, angry at the way this whole trip had gone south from the moment she’d left DC.

  Down the hall she heard the man stop and turn slowly.

  Okay, big mistake sniffing. She hadn’t realized he was so close.

  She waited silently, her shoulders stiff with tension while long seconds trailed past.

  The feet turned and moved on down the hall.

  When she was sure he was gone, Maddie drew a slow breath and punched a brief text to her boss.

  May be late. Someone here in my room. You send anyone up?

  She had switched the phone to silent mode and waited impatiently for a reply.

  Not me.

  Will check with front desk.

  Better be careful.

  Big help he was. Damned right, she'd be careful.

  A door closed. Maddie could tell it was the bedroom at the end of the hall. She opened the closet slowly, checking the distance to the front door. She could make it without being discovered.

  Time to move.

  Except she couldn’t leave her laptop, not the gleaming silver model with all its sweet new technology crammed under the cover.

  An arm locked over her shoulders. Hard fingers closed over her throat.

  Maddie kicked out wildly, feeling a tough, damp male body behind her.

  Before she could spit out a scream, darkness gripped her, pulling her down in a cold, sickening rush.

  Chapter Two

  Gabriel Ross stared down at the figure stretched out unconscious on his couch. The woman was so small. So damned fragile, despite the spiky purple hair and the single Celtic cross earring.

  He hadn’t meant to put her out. Hell, he hadn’t even known she was in the suite. He’d acted by pure instinct. And all his chokeholds were meant for thugs who weighed about 200 pounds more than this woman did.

  But there was no reason for her to be in his room. He could have put it down to a simple mistake by the hotel computers, but Gabriel made it a firm rule never to trust in simple mistakes.

  Because generally they hid something really bad.

  So he came back to question one. Why in the hell was she here?

  He circled the couch and grabbed his phone, scowling. “Yeah, it’s Ross. Better get up here. She's coming around any second.”

  He jerked on his clothes, all the time keeping an eye on the couch.

  This was supposed to be a simple two-day security operation. Spoiled senator’s daughter marries the slick young son of a Silicon Valley software billionaire, while an adoring press crowds close. But it was starting to look as if the operation had a leak on the inside, somewhere in the hotel administration. Someone wanted to create confusion, throw up smokescreens and buy time for an unknown entity to crash the wedding.

  There had already been blackmail threats from the Russian mob. Or the Miami Haitian mob or the Jamaican mob. Right now the source was unknown. And Gabriel hated wasting precious time here when he should be out cornering leads.

  On the couch the girl stirred. Her hand slid over her throat. She gave a low, harsh cough. A second later she shot to her feet.

  Her eyes held a snarl. “Get away from me, you creep.”

  But now she was holding out a small piece of metal, Gabriel saw. It looked like a cigarette lighter, but he was pretty sure it was something else entirely.

  “Just so you know, this isn’t Mace. It’s far worse.” She waved the little silver square. “If you don't get back, you're going to be blind for life.”

  Gabriel almost believed her. She seemed tough for someone so young. How old was she anyway? Seventeen? Eighteen tops?

  He shrugged away the thought. All that mattered was why she was in his room.

  He raised one hand in a slow gesture meant to soothe. “Calm down. I can explain this.” Like hell, he could. “I didn't mean to put you under. You caught me by surprise, that's all. Why don’t you put down the lighter so we can talk.”

  “I told you, it’s not a lighter. And there’s no point in talking. So get into the closet. Do it now.”

  “Maybe you could calm down.”

  “Maybe you could kiss my ashes.” The woman glared, circling behind him. “I’ll calm down when I see you inside that closet with the door locked. Now get your hands up in the air.”

  Gabriel hid a smile as he turned around. She had a lot of guts, he'd say that. She couldn’t possibly know how highly he was trained. He could have her flat on the ground, wrists and legs bound in less than three seconds without making any noise. It was what he did.

  And he was damned good at his job.

  “Sure.” He shrugged, smiling as if embarrassed. Mr. Nice Guy. “Fine. I’ll go. Whatever you say.”

  He walked to the closet and stepped inside. It still held her scent. Cinnamon. Bubble gum.

  What a ridiculous mess.

  At the back of the closet, he turned, hands still raised. “Can I make a phone call to the front desk?”

  “I’ll make the calls here, amigo.”

  “You still think that I want to hurt you?” He shook his head and moved slowly t
oward her. “That’s nuts. I don’t even know you.”

  “Stay back.” She snapped at the air with the not-lighter.

  Gabriel wasn’t really worried. Even if the woman did figure how to engage the heavy latch on the lower edge of the closet door, he’d be free in seconds. The wooden frame was remarkably flimsy. He had assessed that as soon as he entered the room, as part of his initial security check.

  What did bother him was her attitude. She was clearly upset. She considered she had every right to be in the room. Since she didn’t appear to be drunk or under the influence of drugs, there was no reason for her to mistake the room number.

  So why was she here?

  Not your problem.

  He would leave it to the on-site liaison to deal with. His local contact should be here any minute. There were hotel room blueprints to run, guest background checks to complete, and personnel records to assess. And they only had twenty-four hours until the big fiasco wedding took place.

  Gabriel didn’t get the whole wedding thing. He certainly wouldn’t have a noisy, orchestrated pageant like this and he wouldn’t choose a high profile place like the Excelsior. Not that he’d ever found the right woman. Probably he never would. He simply wasn’t built for loyalty and long-term commitment.

  Except to the secret brotherhood who employed him.

  Given the 24/7 relentless demands of his job, it was just as well that he didn’t have a commitment gene, Gabriel thought grimly.

  He heard something slide under the slats at the bottom of the door. Metal clanged outside. A silver pipe twisted around the edge of the door.

  Maybe the woman wasn’t so slow after all. It might take him three minutes rather than thirty seconds to break out.

  Footsteps moved past the doorway. He heard her angry voice trail away down the hall toward the bedroom.

  “That’s right. A man. A big nasty man. He’s here in my room.”

  Nasty? Him?

  Maybe she had a point, Gabriel thought. He had put her out cold.

  “Hell, I don’t know. Six-foot something. Sandy blond hair.”

  Sandy? There was nothing wrong with his hair.

  “Muscles. Yeah, I guess he seems fairly fit.”

  Fairly?

  Gabriel leaned closer, trying to hear the muffled words from the bedroom. “Well he’s locked in the closet, so you’d better get up here. And why you’re at it, see who issued his room card. Yes, of course I’ve got my laptop. Assuming the big goon didn’t steal it while I was gone.”

  Goon?

  Gabriel reached into his pocket for his phone, punched in a code, and watched room numbers shoot up. He scanned the name list of everyone currently staying at the Excelsior Hotel.

  There she was.

  301. Madison Munro.

  No sign of his name anywhere.

  He ran another search and got the same results. Someone had shifted the room assignments.

  Frowning, he rubbed his neck. He had been running personnel checks when he had stopped to wash off the dust of seventy-two straight hours of inflight travel. He had already turned up irregularities in seventeen hotel employees, the kind of things that triggered further search. Calling out sick meant a break in pattern, and you always tracked whereabouts, large deposits of money, and connections with suspicious or hostile organizations.

  Gabriel highlighted five names. These were his target employees, all returning to the afternoon shift. Damn it, he had work to do.

  He put his shoulder to the door and shoved.

  Wood creaked. Something heavy and metal banged outside near the floor. He took a step back, leaned in and rammed the door with full force. Metal twisted and two wood slats shattered.

  He exploded through the newly made hole.

  The woman with the purple hair was ready for him.

  The silver not-Mace device was held out in front of her as she faced him from the end of the hall.

  “Put it down, Madison. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  “What makes you think that’s my name?”

  She frowned and her hands shook slightly, betraying the strength of her voice.

  “We both know the answer. You’re Madison Munro. And we can figure this out. But I’m running out of patience.” Gabriel moved toward her.

  “Stay back. I’ll use this stuff, I mean it.”

  He shook his head and kept walking.

  Behind him the room bell chimed. That had to be his local contact.

  About freaking time.

  “I’m answering that,” he said gruffly.

  “Get back in the closet. I’ll handle the door.” The woman who said she was not Madison Munro frowned as it became obvious that the closet would hold no one until the big hole was repaired. As she hesitated, Gabriel swung around and flicked open the door.

  The man outside was tall and rugged, and his mahogany features were just the way Gabriel remembered. The man even made the hotel room service uniform look good.

  “What the hell is going on in here?”

  “Why don’t you tell me,” Gabriel snapped. “We’ve got a problem. I checked the hotel room list, and her name is on it. 301. Someone switched things around.”

  Then something heavy struck him in the back of the neck. He cursed as another blow hit his left shoulder.

  Izzy Teague, ex-DEA agent and high-level government operative, shoved a metal room service table through the door and pinned the struggling woman with the spiky purple hair against the wall. “Stand down, Maddie. Gabriel is one of ours.”

  “Ours? This creep?” She glared at Gabriel. “I don’t buy it. He was singing creepy Russian mafia songs.”

  How had she known that? Gabriel hadn’t been aware of the singing himself, but after he left deep cover it always took him a few days to wind down.

  “Why didn’t you warn me he would be here in the room?”

  “Because I didn’t know. I’ll go check it out if you’d stop waving that new protection spray around.” Izzy Teague tossed a backpack on the table and opened Maddie’s laptop. “Sit down. I need you to run a personnel check on someone at the hotel.”

  “Would someone tell me what the hell is going on?” Gabriel growled. He watched the woman called Maddie manipulate the keyboard of what appeared to be the very latest government issue hardware. Her laptop was lightning fast and amped up with major encryption protocols. Gabriel had only seen one other with this kind of hardware.

  So she had to be very good at her job.

  But he didn’t like being ignored, not after working three hours on his own data search. “I have the hotel list narrowed down to five targets, Teague.”

  “Good. Show me later.” Teague leaned over Maddie as she worked, watching data stream past. “Get me a complete background on the first name on that list. Full stats and employment. Friends, family, arrests. The whole gorilla.” He glanced at his watch and frowned. “And make it fast because the first wedding guests have begun to arrive.”

  Chapter Three

  Sometimes Maddie loved her job.

  Sometimes working for the government was a real ray of sunshine in a very dark world.

  She rolled up her sleeves with a flourish. “Gimme the whole name, boss.”

  “I hate it when you call me that.”

  Maddie hid a smile. Of course she knew that. And it was why she did it.

  “McNamara. Timothy J.” Izzy Teague spelled it out and watched Maddie type. “He works in hotel beverage services.”

  “Date of birth?”

  Izzy rattled off the numbers.

  “Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got for this bad boy.” Maddie studied the scrolling text as she typed quickly. Personnel checks were no challenge at all. She could run them in her sleep.

  “Roommate employed in the hotel laundry. Both of them are out sick today. Bought a new car last month. Nice one. Lexus. Roommate’s bank account last month was $325.17. Now it’s…”

  Maddie gave a little whistle. “$492,712. I’d say that’s bingo.”
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  “I could have told you about the bank account. About the new car too,” the man behind Maddie’s chair said flatly.

  “I needed redundancy of search, Gabriel. You know how it works.” Government operative and ex-DEA agent Izzy Teague gave a quick nod at Gabriel. “You two stay at this. I’m checking out food services and the laundry. I want to see McNamara’s work locker and find out what his co-workers have to say about both men. Meanwhile, I want you running deep, Maddie. I need prior addresses. Phone numbers, friends, family. Travel and buying habits.” He glanced at his watch. “After I finish downstairs, I’m checking their apartment. I’ve got a dog waiting out in the van.”

  Dogs? Maddie loved it when they used the search dogs. It was so cool to watch the big, tough animals run down a scent. Those trained noses were awesome in action. “B and E? I could help you with that,” she said brightly.

  “Stand down, Einstein. I’ll handle the physical evidence search. I don’t need to remind you that we only have twenty-three hours until the Bridal March begins. The Senator will be on site in about six hours.”

  Maddie’s stomach rumbled.

  Izzy frowned. “No breakfast? Sorry about that. I know I promised you a few hours off. Get something to eat here in the room. Call room service.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine, boss.”

  “I’ll order something for you anyway. And remember to eat what they bring up. Don’t get lost in program code and coffee fumes. I need you in top shape.” Izzy grabbed his backpack and shared a look with the man called Gabriel. “Keep an eye on her until I get back, Gabe.”

  The door closed quietly behind him.

  Chapter Four

  For top shape, Maddie needed energy.

  Energy as in mega caffeine.

  An oil tanker full of coffee would do nicely. Since the tanker was out, she’d settle for downing it by the pot.

  But the nearest good coffee shop with a roaster was three miles away, down the strip. And that was just plain unfair.