Seducing the Accomplice

by Jennifer Morey

  “He was hard to track,” he said as if she hadn’t asked the question. “Every time I found out where he was, he always disappeared before I caught up to him. But not this time. This time I found him.”

  “In Tirana.”

  He nodded a couple of times. “I followed him to an old warehouse. He met with two other men who gave him the money in the suitcase. I couldn’t take the chance of not catching him again, so I did what I came here to do and took the money.”

  “He was the target you talked about with Odie?”

  Again he nodded, and she knew without asking that he’d killed the man. The idea should bother her, but it didn’t. A terrorist wasn’t an ordinary man. A terrorist was someone whose warped ideologies made him evil.

  “His name was Abu Dharr al-Majid,” he said. “Anyone giving him money means it was going for an illicit purpose. Terrorism. He had to be stopped.”

  So he hadn’t really stolen the money. “I thought you said you weren’t a bounty hunter.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Do you work for the government?”

  He hesitated. “No. Dharr was a special circumstance. I’ve waited a long time to see him dead. An opportunity came up that helped me do that.”

  Special circumstance? An opportunity? Years he’d been after this man. One man. One terrorist. She was getting closer to peeling back the layers and finding the core of what drove him. “You must have really wanted to get him.”

  His face grew stony.

  “What happened? What did he do?”

  While he didn’t respond, thoughts bombarded her. He didn’t work for the government, so he’d come here unofficially. He had a personal vendetta with a terrorist. How had all that come to be? When had he crossed paths with such a man? Had he been somewhere during an attack? Or had his profession led him to this point? What had led him to work in the shadows?

  “What are you going to do with the money?” she asked as a roundabout way to get her answer and to give him time.

  “Give it to my employer.”

  “Who is your employer?”

  He raised his brow with a gently admonishing look. “This is when I tell you to stop asking questions.”

  She paused awhile, and then asked as gently as she could, “What made this terrorist significant?”

  “We had a mutual friend.” Turning away, he picked up the remote and started surfing channels again.

  It was time to start pushing. “Was it someone in your family?”

  “No more questions.”

  “You never want me to ask questions. I could ask you if you have all ten toes and you’d skirt the issue.” She was so sick of that. “You need to start telling me things. You owe me that much. None of this is my fault. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be at the hotel waiting for my passport…my real passport.”

  He stopped surfing. Leaning back against the couch, he stared ahead for a while. Her heart expanded with sympathy for him. She could feel his turmoil.

  Finally, he turned to look at her.

  “A long time ago, a friend of mine called and told me about a man who was holding a woman against her will. I owed him a favor, so when he asked if I’d go get her, I agreed.” He stopped and she watched the pain of memory wrench him.

  She leaned back against the couch with him and slid her hand onto his thigh.

  “It happened when I was still with the Army Delta Force,” he continued. “We stopped in Istanbul on the way to the location of our next assignment. That’s when I got the call. The woman who’d been abducted was his sister. When I met him to get the details, he told me the man who kidnapped her was her boyfriend. When she tried to end the relationship, he wouldn’t let her go.”

  Realization slammed into her.

  “Her boyfriend was Dharr?”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

  “You rescued her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him back then?”

  “He didn’t get in my way. I rescued the woman without incident.”

  She was missing something. “Then, why did you go after him after you rescued her?”

  “After my assignment was finished, I had a few weeks off. I went back to Istanbul and stayed with my friend. I wanted to see his sister again. I spent every day with her while I was there. When I returned home, we had a long-distance relationship for a while, and then I helped her come to the States. A year later we were married.”

  He married her.

  “Dharr didn’t know about us at first,” he said. “But somehow he learned she wasn’t in Istanbul anymore. That’s when he went to her brother and found out she was with me in the States.”

  He stopped.

  “What happened?”

  Calan leaned forward and turned off the television. “Three months after he discovered I married her, he found a way into the U.S. and killed her.”

  Sadie drew in a breath. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She really was. “That must have been terrible.”

  “That was more than seven years ago.”

  It had taken him that long to catch Dharr? “Have you been looking for him all that time?”

  “Yes, every spare moment I had. But he was good at hiding. Moving around. Like a regular Bin Laden. I was on assignment most of the time. Sometimes that put me where I needed to be to track him and other times it didn’t. I came close to killing him once when I tracked him to Yemen. I wasn’t on assignment then, but I caught him in the middle of intercepting another special forces team. They didn’t know he was there. It was a setup. I could tell the moment I saw him, hiding in a vehicle while his men swarmed a building where soldiers were waiting for rebels. The team was supposed to help the Yemen government, but someone betrayed them and told Dharr where they’d be. I tried to save them, but I was too late and I was only one man. I took down a few of Dharr’s men but not in time. Dharr got away.”

  “Why did Dharr want American soldiers dead? Was it just because they were American? Who would tell him the location of U.S. soldiers?”

  His hesitation and the way he averted his eyes revealed a lot. There was more.

  “Years after my wife died, I met a woman who worked intelligence for the CIA. She helped me uncover an arms deal a U.S. broker was arranging for Dharr. The broker arranged for a U.S. senator to bribe an executive he knew at an Albanian military export company to do business with Dharr. Kate must have been close to uncovering that because she was murdered shortly after I told her what I knew about Dharr. It gave her the lead she needed to expose the senator.”

  One that led to her death. Her heart ached for him. “He killed two women you were involved with?”

  His face became a mask of indifference.

  “Is that why the soldiers were killed? They knew about the arms dealing?”

  “Yes. One man on the team did.”

  One man had known something and all of them had been killed. A bonus package for a group of terrorists.

  Dharr had killed all those people. His wife, the soldiers and then a woman who’d tried to help him. It was overwhelming. She couldn’t imagine how difficult that must have been for him. And probably still was. “What happened with the senator? Did you know he and an arms broker were doing business with Dharr?”

  “No, I didn’t know. No one did, not in time anyway. Anyone who got too close to putting it together was killed. The senator didn’t murder anyone, but he alerted Dharr, which in my mind is the same as committing the crime right along with him.”

  Except not in his wife’s case. “Did you go to Kate because you knew she could help you?”

  “No. I met her because we knew the same people within the military. The senator was her stepfather.”

  Sadie gasped. What an awful thing. Quite a coincidence, too, but Sadie didn’t believe in coincidences. The senator was working with the terrorist Calan was after and neither he nor Kate had known. But their joining together had exposed the senator and led to Calan fin
ding Dharr. Talk about divine intervention. Or just plain rotten luck. His probing had gotten another woman killed.

  “Was the senator caught?” she asked.

  “Yes, but he killed himself before he was arrested. The arms deal fell through, and Dharr got away.”

  Until he’d found him in Albania, ending years of anguish. Or not. How could any man put something so terrible behind him?

  “I don’t blame you for wanting him dead,” she said and was amazed that she meant it. How strange, to be talking about killing someone and not finding it in the least unwarranted.

  He didn’t seem happy about it, though, as if killing Dharr hadn’t been enough. It hadn’t brought Kate back. Or his wife.

  She almost didn’t want to ask. “Were you close to Kate?”

  “We were living together.”

  Living together but not married.

  “We talked about getting married.”

  Talked about it but never made plans.

  “She wanted to, but I wasn’t over Rachel yet,” he said.

  The scars he carried from losing his wife were too deep. He’d never stopped loving her and couldn’t marry another until he could put it behind him.

  “I should have married her, though. It hurt her knowing why I hesitated,” he continued.

  She saw his pain, the pain of regret, the worst kind.

  “You loved her.”

  He nodded. “Yes. And I would have married her.”

  “I’m so sorry, Calan.” Twice he’d fallen in love and twice that love had been ripped from him. “How long ago did she die?” she asked, even though it bothered her. She was falling for a man whose heart belonged to two other women.

  “It’s been six months.”

  Sliding her hand off his thigh, Sadie struggled with disappointment. That wasn’t very long. He’d loved his wife and, later, his girlfriend, but both of them had been murdered. Taken from him in the worst possible way. By a terrorist’s hand. She couldn’t imagine how awful that must be.

  Now more than ever she understood why he couldn’t let her go, why he had to protect her at all cost. But it wasn’t necessary. She knew that now.

  “You have a good reason to be concerned for my safety, Calan, I can never argue that. But you’re overreacting because of your past.”

  “I’m not overreacting.”

  “My father is a wealthy man. He can protect me.”

  “Would he?”

  That stopped her. She looked down. The truth was, she didn’t know what her father would do. He wanted her to grow up and handle her problems on her own. He’d left her in Albania for that very reason. And he might not even believe her if she told him what had happened since she’d last spoken with him.

  She’d met a man who had killed a terrorist and taken money. The terrorist’s business associates were after him, had seen her with him, and she was now embroiled in his situation. Would her father believe her? It was so different from her other situations. Much more dangerous. Far removed from the social scenes she frequented. She didn’t think her own father would abandon her, not once she convinced him the most outlandish story she’d ever told him up to this point was true.

  “Even if he did try to protect you,” Calan said, “he won’t have enough experienced men to do the job, and the police won’t be able to do much. The feds, either, since I’d have to deny everything.”

  Because he couldn’t talk about his current profession? He’d told her personal things, but when it came to what he did for a living he wasn’t talking.

  “Who are you?” She’d asked it before and hadn’t gotten the answer she sought. She didn’t think she’d get an answer now, but she was too baffled not to say anything.

  “Just an ex-Delta soldier trying to do the right thing.”

  Just? It was more than she expected to hear. “But you aren’t with the Army anymore.”

  “No.”

  “Is the company you work for legitimate?” She didn’t want to find out he was a mercenary or some kind of extremist.

  “The company I work for doesn’t exist.”

  That was sort of like saying he wasn’t wearing underwear when he really was. But his face showed no sign of mischief. He appeared completely justified in what he said. Righteous, but not in an egotistical way.

  “I’ve already told you too much.”

  She smiled. “Thank you.”

  “Are you going to stop asking questions now?”

  She didn’t miss how he made light of something serious. “Funny, no one’s ever told me I ask too many questions.”

  “Maybe you haven’t had a reason to ask them until now.”

  But she did with him. “I’ve never been with anyone who worked for a company that doesn’t exist but allows him to go after terrorists.”

  He didn’t smile at her sarcasm.

  She plopped back against the couch. “Maybe that’s my problem. I try to please my dad by choosing friends I think he’d like.”

  He leaned back the same as her. “What would you want to do with your life if your father wasn’t wealthy?”

  That made her stop and think. “I don’t know.” She thought some more. “I suppose get a job like everyone else. Maybe open an art supply store. I like to paint, but I’ll never be good enough to have my work in a gallery.” Even saying it made her feel like she was shooting in the dark. “My parents never asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. It was just assumed that I’d follow in my dad’s footsteps.”

  “He wants you to run his company?”

  “Some day, after he retires. It’s the same thing you hear all the time. I feel like I’m playing a part in a rerun. The business tycoon expects his child to take over his empire but the child has other aspirations.” Whatever those were. “Now my father’s company will go to someone outside the family, which disappoints him immensely. It’s caused a huge rift between us. Not that we were ever close. I was always running away from his lecturing. And I don’t think he’s ever forgiven me for not going to college.”

  “Sounds like you’re trying too hard.”

  What did he mean? “I don’t think I can try hard enough to please my father, not unless I do what he wants and agree to work at his company and work my way up to running it.”

  He put his arm along the back of the couch. “You don’t pursue your art because your father doesn’t approve.”

  His strong arm behind her distracted her and she had to remember what he’d said.

  She did pursue her talent for art. She’d sold some prints at a county fair. Was he diminishing that like her father had? Her defenses reared up. “Just because my work isn’t in a fancy gallery somewhere doesn’t mean it isn’t serious enough.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I never expect to impress my father with anything I paint and he never is.”

  “Did you hear yousrself when you said you weren’t good enough to have your work in a gallery?” he asked.

  He wasn’t making fun of her work at all. He was encouraging her. Oh, she didn’t want to feel this way with him. He made it worse by brushing back a few strands of hair that had fallen alongside her face. No one had ever supported her like this.

  “Stop deliberately selecting people you think will fit the mold of what a friend should be. That’s what I mean about trying too hard. If you meet someone, let it happen. They’ll either be your friend or not.”

  Her skin was tingling even after he lowered his hand. “Yeah, and then they find out my father is rich and suddenly I’m no longer a person, I’m a bank account.”

  “Not everyone would be that way.”

  “Well, I have yet to meet them, then.”

  “You met me.”

  His blue eyes watched her and she melted into them. “Don’t you care about money?”

  “Of course I do.”

  But he didn’t want hers. This was probably where her father would caution her to be careful.

  “People have told me that before,” sh
e said, feeling her father coaching her. “That they thought I was special and it had nothing to do with my money.” Or more appropriately, her father’s money. She got up from the couch and walked to the window, opening the blinds to stare out at the darkness, dots of lights sparkling along the coastline.

  She heard him approach behind her and lean so that his mouth was beside her ear. “I prefer to make my own way in life.”

  Turning, she backed away from him. “You can’t tell me that you wouldn’t like to find a woman who had money.” Any normal person would want to land on a lot of money.

  “I wouldn’t care if she had money or not.”

  Why not? “Are you loaded or something? Do you make a lot of money?”

  “I make a decent living.”

  Working for a secret company killing terrorists? “But not a lot?”

  “What’s a lot to you?”

  She shrugged. She’d never really thought about it. “I don’t know. A million or two a year would be enough.” Did she sound as blasé as she thought she did?

  “I think the cost of a new home is a lot. The cost of a college education is a lot. Starting your own business costs a lot. It’s all about perception. For me, it isn’t important that a woman I’m interested in has a lot of money, whether I’m loaded, as you put it, or not.”

  Realizing she’d probably offended him, Sadie berated herself. “I’m sorry. I have no tact.” She was always doing that, forgetting her boundaries or the boundaries of others. She didn’t want to offend Calan. She wanted him to like her, more than she’d ever wanted anyone to like her. And that spelled disaster. The last thing she needed was to try too hard to make him like her, a man still grieving the loss of two woman he loved.

  No wonder everyone ran away from her. Well, maybe it was time for her to do the running.

  Chapter 5

  Feeling melancholy, Sadie went to the balcony door off her bedroom and walked outside, leaving the door open. Putting her hands on the rail, she smelled the sea air. It was a clear, warm night. She wished her head was clear.

  Calan had opened her eyes to so many things and in such a short time. Having an open mind about his attitude over money probably wasn’t good for her, though. He had a healthy attitude. An attitude she hadn’t seen in anyone she’d met. Not genuinely. He’d also thrown a wrench into her perception of her artwork. She loved to paint. She felt grounded when she painted. It was her secret escape. But now she wondered if her father’s disdain had kept her from pursuing a serious career. She’d set the bar too low for herself as a result. Selling at the county fair wasn’t something to totally overlook, but what if she could do better?