Blush

by Cherry Adair

  Jesus fuck. Did she have any idea how damned close she’d come to being a statistic? Cruz’s fury rose. Crap. He never lost his temper. Never let shit get under his skin. And now . . . Fuck. “Your security people raced in and—”

  She shrugged. “Not much they could do. I had small cuts all over me. They administered first aid, patched me up, then waited for the police and paramedics to show up. It was only after they arrived that I discovered I’d been grazed by the bullet.

  “I was too shocked to faint, and too pissed off to puke, but not too anything to stop shaking. I have to tell you, I wasn’t feeling anything close to brave at that point. It took me days to stop looking over my shoulder. And loud noises still make me jump. But I damn well won’t live in fear.”

  He’d noticed. “What did the cops discover in the other building where the shooter was?” Nothing, he bet. A sniper had made that shot. It could be any one of a dozen contractors, and none of them would leave even a shoe scuff to indicate their presence. Not like himself, who’d already left his fingerprints and DNA all over the fucking house.

  “It was from a neighboring fortieth floor, under construction for new occupants, in the building directly across the street. From the distance and the almost pinpoint accuracy, they know it was a professional sniper. That said they weren’t surprised that not a single clue was found over there.”

  Professional. No clues. No surprise.

  Mia downed the rest of her wine, then cradled the glass against her chest. “The bullet recovered from my office was an HSM230 from a .338 Lapua Magnum sniper rifle. I did some research. That’s a weapon used by police and military snipers. Not something anyone could buy off the street. Whoever shot at me meant business.”

  Cruz knew that the HSM230 cartridge was designed to arrive at a thousand meters with enough energy to penetrate five layers of military body armor and still make the kill. A plate glass window and a pretty head of hair in a French twist would be as easy to crack as a hot knife cutting through butter.

  The effect would be just like what had happened to his mother. Nothing left to make an identification. Cruz’s finger tightened on the stem of his glass. The effective range was over one mile in the right shooting conditions. Cruz had made a kill shot with the same rifle in excess of 2,000 meters. But realistically 1,500 meters was within the range of a trained sniper. Shooting between two buildings, a street’s width apart, was child’s play, no matter what the conditions.

  “They could’ve just been a bad shot and aiming for someone else in the building. . . .” Like hell. Anyone in the business would know they hadn’t, and he felt a rise of ire. If they’d hired him out of the gate, the job would be done, no questions asked, because he wouldn’t have used a goddamn sniper rifle. She’d have had a fall, a car accident, a fall in the shower. A sniper was just sloppy and asking for an investigation.

  Lemon and Muncie? Good, but not as good as he was. Not by half. And the attempt had been botched. The two men weren’t Rhodes scholars, but their marksmanship had always been impressive.

  Which made him question the integrity of his client, especially if he wasn’t their first choice. Had they started cheap and worked their way up the ladder to the top and to Cruz Barcelona?

  “It was after ten at night. Other than the cleaning crews, I was the only one still in the building.”

  He reached over, took her glass, and picked up the wine bottle. “Who knew you’d be working late?” he asked, pouring.

  “Everyone. Thanks.” She took back the filled glass, then pulled her bare legs up under her. “I’m habitually always the last one there, unless I have a function to attend, in which case I usually end up back at the office before I go home. Or I just sleep downtown. I have a pied-à-terre on the next floor up.”

  “Jesus, Mia. Didn’t your security people instruct you to mix up your routines? Being consistent and predictable is an assassin’s dream.”

  She frowned, her finger rubbing over the rim of her wineglass. “Well, it’s freaking inconvenient to try to mix things up all the time.” She sounded testy. “I’m a from-point-A-to-point-C kind of girl, with no time-consuming detours.”

  “That stupid habit almost got you killed. What else?”

  “What else?” she said, finally sounding annoyed, and set her empty glass on the table beside her. “Wasn’t being shot at enough?”

  “More than,” he said dryly. “Were there other attempts? Before or after that?”

  Chapter Eleven

  Three weeks before the shooting incident, my limo driver had an accident,” Mia told him, sounding remarkably cool for a woman who had a hit man after her. Or several hit men. Cruz was getting more and more pissed the more he heard. What the fuck was going on? He had to do some investigation of his own. See how deep, how far-reaching, the threat was.

  Well, for fucksake. This job was supposed to be easy. Quick. Right now he should be in his sunny oceanfront studio in Brazil. Painting, eating moqueca de camarão, and drinking Skol beer. But something about this whole situation wasn’t right, and now he was in too deep to let it go.

  “Something manipulated in the engine, they said.” Mia held out her glass for more wine. Cruz poured, and she leaned back in her chair, cradling the glass between her breasts. Lucky glass.

  “My assistant went to the event in my place while I was incapacitated with the flu. By some kind of miracle, neither Kevin nor Stephanie was badly hurt, thank God. But the car was totaled.”

  “Nothing suspicious there. Accidents happen.” In this case, Cruz could certainly have engineered such an accident.

  “Yes, they do. And we wouldn’t have thought anything about it if the executive elevator hadn’t dropped several floors three days later. Immediately followed that night with everyone at my table at a charity event getting serious food poisoning. It was so bad, nine people ended up in the ICU at the hospital. I was barely recovering from the flu and wasn’t hungry, so I just moved my food around and sipped water all night, otherwise I would’ve been there with them.”

  “You were damn fortunate.” Fucking with food was Clive Benzie’s MO. He was good, damn good. A master at his art form, in fact. He would’ve calculated her weight and metabolism to a tee. Benzie didn’t make mistakes. He made sure a dozen or so other diners with the same meal were affected, but the person he wanted dead always ended up dead. Unless his target was too damned sick to eat.

  Tampering with anything mechanical—car, elevator, train, or plane—was Joel Shram’s specialty. Anyone could’ve dicked with the car, but Cruz’s gut told him the car and elevator were Shram.

  Cruz was starting to see a pattern here he didn’t like.

  Was it possible that whoever had hired him had three people on the job simultaneously? Did they want Amelia/Mia dead so badly that they’d hired, at great cost, three professional hit men?

  Talk about overkill . . . and irony, since she was still very much alive.

  “How did you end up in Bayou Cheniere?”

  “My head of security, and my VP of marketing, advised me to disappear while they figure out the who and why.”

  “Did they also tell you how to disappear?”

  She moved the almost empty glass onto the armrest of her chair. If he didn’t know her so well, Cruz would’ve thought she was completely relaxed. But he did know her, and he was shocked to realize how well he knew her tells.

  “Miles did,” she said, absently swirling the last inch of wine in her glass, her index finger tapping the glass, a nervous habit he’d observed before.

  “Miles?”

  “Miles Basson. Head of security. He explained the steps to me in detail. He walked me through changing my ID and my appearance, and how to drop out of sight.” She drained her glass. “But I’m not a fool, Cruz. As much as I trust him, I wasn’t going to be led anywhere. I left San Francisco and found people in various places who made me false identities. They went from mediocre to damn good. And I kept moving until I figured I’d diffused my scent. The
n I did a U-turn and bought this house from a broker via the Internet. Nobody knows where I am, and nobody will until it’s safe for me to go back home.”

  Too damned bad. I know where the fuck you are.

  “Has it occurred to you that the two people you trust the most could be the ones trying to kill you?”

  She gave him a pained look. “Miles worked as my father’s personal security for thirty-five years. He’s on point and one hundred percent trustworthy. I’ve known Todd, my cousin, from the day he was born. I trust both men with my life.”

  “Literally. Because these two men are the only people who know you’re in hiding, right?”

  Rubbing the glass over her cheek absently, she nodded. “But don’t know where. And everyone else has been told I’m taking a long-overdue vacation.” She smiled slightly. “My stepmother thinks I’m getting plastic surgery.”

  “On what, for God’s sake? Your tits are amazing, your ass is prime, and you’re too damn young to need any face work.”

  The press thought she was having plastic surgery, too. Hadn’t they looked at the thousands of photographs they’d taken of her? And had this stepmother leaked that factoid?

  “Anyone else in this close inner circle? This stepmother? Does she have any axes to grind with you?”

  Mia shrugged. “It’s hard to tell with Candice. Her face doesn’t move, so it’s hard to read any nuances.” She smiled. “She’s two years younger than I am. We’re not BFFs, but we’re not enemies either. She’s quite extraordinarily beautiful, so she’s certainly not jealous. And my father left her extremely well-off, so I doubt she has an issue with money. She was kind of pissed at me a few years back, but that wasn’t about me per se. Our advertising agency didn’t want to use her as the face of Blush. They chose Amanda Dupris, a sexy twenty-year-old redhead with amazing skin. Candice was not happy, and let everyone know it. But that was two years ago. I doubt anyone would carry a grudge that long, or intensely enough, to hire a hit man.”

  “Depends on how badly she wanted it. How about someone in your office? Your assistant?” She shook her head. “Board of directors?”

  “No. But I’m sure they’re speculating. I’ve been orchestrating a leveraged buyout behind the scenes for several months, and the paperwork is almost ready to sign.”

  Bingo. It would’ve been good to have this vital piece of information before he’d accepted the job. “Who’s handling the buyout?”

  “Davis and Kent.”

  One of the biggest investment firms in the country. “Top-notch players. Does anyone at Blush know about this?”

  “Only Todd is in my confidence about the LBO.”

  “It doesn’t take much cross-referencing to figure out that this cousin is the only one of two people to know you’ve gone into hiding, and he’s the only one of the two people also in on the LBO.” She was shaking her head. “Are you sure you’re willing to trust him with your life?”

  “Yes. One hundred percent. But, that said, not even Todd knows where I am right now. No one does.” She gave him a small smile that did weird shit to his heart. Cruz ignored the sensation. “Except you.”

  Fuck. “Someone doesn’t want you to own the company outright. What’s the family dynamic here?”

  Absently she stroked her thigh. Self-soothing. Cruz wanted to do it for her. Mesmerized, his gaze followed the path of her fingers on her smooth, pale skin. “Great-grandfathers Duncan Wellington and Christopher Wentworth started Blush together almost a hundred years ago. A member of each family has been on the board for all those years with equal shares. It’s made for interesting family dynamics.”

  Her palm cupped her knee, then slid to her calf. Cruz’s attention snagged on the path of her fingers, and the glide of her small hand on her own silky skin made his dick pulse.

  “In the late eighties, my mother, Sonya Wellington, married Richard Wentworth in a wedding extravaganza to rival royalty. People still speak about the spectacle—or, as I later saw it, a brilliant business merger. Sonya was my father’s second wife, and he was in his mid-sixties when she got pregnant with me.

  “Before Sonya’s death from an aneurysm, he met a young model working in Blush’s advertising division. She became his”—she made quote marks in the air— “personal assistant.” Candice Jensen was two years younger than I was. He married her and made her his number three—so she’s now Candice Wentworth—two days after my mother died. Eighteen months later he inconveniently died of a massive stroke, leaving his new wife a place on the board and a nice block of Blush stock. Damn rude!” Mia said mildly. “Rude and mildly frustrating. Candice can’t/won’t make a decision without the other board members lighting a fire under her Jimmy Choos. Which in a week won’t make any difference, because I’m negotiating a leveraged buyout of all the shareholders so I have complete control of the company back in my own Blush Super Satin hands.”

  “Why do you want that kind of control?” So that no one asks questions about the factory and everything going on a world away, in China?

  Mia went back to running her hand up and down her calf. “I don’t want to go through hoops every time I want to put money into my foundations. The stockholders want accounting, the board has opinions. I have plenty of money. I want to put it where it’ll do some good. With no shareholders, I can do whatever the hell I want with my money. As long as I pay my employees fairly, it’ll be nobody’s business but my own. Everyone involved—board, shareholders, investors—will get an enormous payday when I do the buyout.”

  He wanted to shake her. “Surely you’re not that naive. Not everyone is satisfied with great wealth. Some people want the power and prestige that goes with owning a chunk of a multinational, incredibly successful company. Someone is willing to kill you to stop the buyout.”

  “But nobody— Hell. Not true. Todd told me a few days ago that he thinks bits and pieces of information have already been leaked. . . .”

  “He has telephone contact with you?”

  “It’s a burner phone.”

  “Even a burner phone’s location can be traced with the right equipment bought from a goddamned chain electronics store. Who’s your biggest shareholder?”

  “Me. By far. On my father’s death, his shares went to me, Todd, and his first and third wives. But even before that, I’ve always been the majority shareholder. My mother, grandfather on my maternal side, and my paternal grandfather all left me their shares.”

  “Enemies?”

  “Business competitors? Sure. Personally? I hate to think so, but obviously someone hates me enough to want to get rid of me.”

  “Permanently.”

  “Yeah,” she said dryly. “I already got that part.”

  “When are you signing the papers?”

  “Friday.”

  His deadline. All of it made sense now. Todd was the number one suspect. And frankly, knowing it was her cousin who wanted to bump her off so he could have all the toys to himself pissed Cruz off. Put together with the double, it didn’t take much to figure out he was being played. He hated being played.

  “Three days from now?”

  “Right.”

  “Then I’d better make sure you’re safe.”

  “God, Cruz. I don’t want to put you in any danger.”

  Oh, the irony. “No one knows where you are, right?” But if he knew, someone else would eventually track her down. She’d disappeared, but anyone with enough brains, resources, and incentive—several million dollars’ worth of incentive—would find her.

  Cruz almost laughed. Who said fucking didn’t addle a man’s brains?

  He’d just gone from hit man to bodyguard.

  • • •

  Cruz seemed to be taking her revelations in his stride. Mia wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. She tried to gauge his thoughts, but as usual his expression was shuttered and still.

  The doorbell rang, making her jump. “That’s the first time anyone’s rung the bell.” She gave him an inquiring look. �
��Are you expecting anyone?”

  “No. And certainly not at nine at night. Don’t worry, I doubt a hit man would ring the doorbell. I’ll go see who it is.”

  Mia uncurled her legs and got to her feet. “I’ll go with you. Hang on.” She dropped to her knees beside the bed, brought out the Beretta and a box of cartridges, then got to her feet. “James Bond’s gun.” She placed one bullet at a time into the top opening of the magazine, pushing and simultaneously sliding the bullet back against the magazine wall until all fifteen rounds were loaded in the magazine. “I figured, why not?”

  Cruz watched her engage the safety switch without comment, then noted, “Bond’s gun was a Walther PPK.”

  She slid the magazine into the well and heard the click indicating it was locked into the weapon. “After he had the Beretta—”

  Someone leaned on the doorbell. It was old, and sounded like a car horn. Very annoying. Mia made a mental note to replace it as she grasped the serrated area of the slide, then pulled it to the rear and released it, chambering the round. The safety was still on, but the weapon was ready to fire. “Okay, okay, we’re coming!”

  Cruz held out his hand at the top of the stairs and yelled over the doorbell, “Give me that thing.”

  Mia hesitated. She’d had years of target practice experience. “Do you know how to use it?”

  “Military, remember?” He wiggled his fingers. “I’ve shot one a time or two.”

  Mia handed it over, then ran down the stairs. At the bottom she told him, “Do not shoot off any of your own body parts. In fact, try not to shoot at anything. It’s probably a neighbor wanting a cup of sugar.”

  The front door was completely boarded up, so visitors had to use the back door on the bayou side to enter the house. A new front door was on the house to-do list. She waited for a break in the raucous ringing, then shouted, “Who is it?”