DRAGON SECURITY: The Complete 6 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  I could see other men in the diner admiring her, too. And then they would glance at me and drop their gazes, like they were concerned about some sort of retaliation. They thought we were together. And, for a moment, my chest puffed with pride at the idea that other men would admire and want something that belonged to me. But then I had to remind myself that Quinn didn’t belong to me.

  This was just a job.

  They came back to the booth, and Olivia jumped onto the bench beside me.

  “Do you like bacon on your burgers, Vincent?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  Olivia stuck her tongue out at her mom. “See! I told you it wasn’t anti-American to like bacon on a hamburger!”

  “It’s not traditional is what I said,” Quinn corrected her. “And I still don’t see the fascination.”

  “Salty and crispy bacon?” I tilted my head, regarding Quinn closely. “How could you not see that as the perfect complement to a perfect burger? Don’t tell me you don’t have cheese on your burgers either?”

  “She eats mayonnaise on hers,” Olivia whispered to me.

  “Now that’s truly un-American.”

  Quinn just shook her head. “Now I’m outnumbered.”

  When the food came, I leaned over and made Quinn taste my burger. She took a small bite, and Olivia cried foul.

  “That’s not enough! You have to really taste it, Mommy.”

  She took a bigger bite, her eyes glued to mine for a moment. Then she sat back and sighed as she chewed.

  “Okay…” She shook her head and pointed her finger at Olivia. “Don’t get too big of a head, but maybe you were right.”

  Olivia laughed, as I offered her a high five.

  “I knew we could do it.”

  “Yeah?” Quinn just shook her head. “Eat your dinner.”

  Chapter 7

  Quinn

  We checked into a motel out in the middle of nowhere. Vincent insisted that we wait in the car while he got the room and then while he checked it out. Once inside, Olivia suddenly realized that we didn’t have any clothes. She thought it was pretty funny when Vincent went out to the car and came back with a spare t-shirt for her to wear.

  “Look, I can completely disappear in this,” she said after her bath, sitting in the center of one of the beds and ducking her head into the shirt while she pulled her arms inside the armholes.

  “Now you’re a turtle,” Vincent told her.

  She giggled. “Then I win the race! Isn’t that how the story goes, Mommy?”

  “It does.”

  It took a little time to get her to settle down. I had to lie on the bed with her, her small body pressed up against mine. I smoothed her hair back from her face, stroking her cheek until she reached up and pushed my hand away. Then I just snuggled close to her, wondering what the hell I’d gotten her into.

  Olivia was everything to me. If anything ever happened to her, I would never forgive myself.

  Once she was settled, I became a little restless. My body just didn’t want to lie still anymore, my thigh aching and my head spinning with thoughts that were not really conducive to relaxing.

  Vincent was standing by the windows, studying the parking lot that was nearly empty.

  “Everything okay?”

  He turned, those dark eyes unreadable in the dim lights.

  “You should be sleeping.”

  “Can’t.”

  He pulled a chair out from the small table set there by the windows and gestured for me to sit. He sat close to me, leaning forward a little so that his hands were less than a breath from my knees.

  “I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened.”

  I shook my head, my eyes jumping to Olivia, snoring lightly in the center of the far bed. “It’s not your fault. I should have gotten out of this business long ago. I always imagined I’d get my GED, then a degree in business. But something always seemed to stand in the way. We needed to save up for a house. We needed to put away money for Olivia’s education. We needed to go on a trip to Europe…”

  “Life got in the way.”

  “I told myself that it was okay since I wasn’t doing any of the hardcore stuff anymore and I wasn’t putting my face out there. But I never imagined it would lead to this.”

  He stared down at his hands, moving them until the slightest movement on my part would have forced him to touch me. A part of me desperately wanted him to touch me.

  “Could someone close to you be doing this? Someone you work with?”

  I sat back a little, lifting my arms to rub away the tension that was quickly causing a headache. “I thought about that when this first started. I even came up with a tentative list of people who might have a reason to hurt me. But I had a private detective check them out and he came up empty handed.”

  “You know that’s something we’re going to have to look into.”

  “I know. I gave a list of my employees and colleagues to Miss Wagner when I went in to talk to Ms. Bradford.”

  He sat back. “Are there any videos out there with your face in them?”

  “A few. But they’re from way back in the beginning of my career, nearly nine years ago. Someone would have to really dig to find them.”

  “We’ll figure this out, Quinn,” he said after a moment’s silence. He leaned forward again, reaching to touch my knee. But, again, he stopped with his hand just inches from me. I found myself staring at that hand, at how long and thin his fingers were. The power in the muscle and sinew that was visible through his skin. He could have been a pianist, his hands were so perfect for that sort of thing.

  I don’t know what I was thinking, but I wanted to feel that hand against me. I pressed my hand to the back of his and pushed it down onto my knee, holding it there even as I could feel him spread his fingers and press his palm tight against me.

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” he asked.

  “For being so good with Olivia. She’s never really had a strong male presence in her life.”

  “She’s a good kid. I like her.”

  “She likes you, too. I just…” I stopped myself before I said something I might regret. But he heard it anyway.

  “I shouldn’t have promised to go to her concert. I’m sorry if I overstepped any boundaries.”

  “No, it’s fine. I just don’t want her disappointed.”

  He nodded, his eyes falling to his hand on my knee, my hand still resting on the top of it. I was afraid he was going to pull away and something inside of me was convinced that if he did I would completely lose it. And I really didn’t want to do that.

  I leaned forward and brushed my lips against his. It wasn’t really a kiss, more like a touch of skin on skin. But when he didn’t pull away, I tried again, pressing my lips against his until I felt his give just a little, just enough to show me he wasn’t pulling away, that he wasn’t totally repulsed by the idea of kissing me.

  I didn’t know what I was thinking. I was kissing a man I hardly knew, a man who I already knew was temporary to my life. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe the fact that I knew he wouldn’t be around for the long term made him safe. Most of the men in my life had hurt me. My father. My stepfather. The porn stars who chewed me up and spit me out at the beginning of my career. The men who controlled my career and threatened to out me when I tried to leave. There had never been a truly good man in my life. I’d never had what could be called a normal relationship. And this…it wasn’t any different, really. This man was in a position of power over me. But I employed him, so, really, didn’t I have all the power?

  And right now I just wanted to distract myself. To think about something other than the insane person who killed a cat and wrote a threatening note on my bedroom wall. What was a better way to forget the world than sex?

  I touched his jaw, ran the tops of my fingers along his jaw. He let his lips fall apart ever so slightly, opening to me in a way that invited more. And then his hand slid further up my thigh, and mine moved t
o his chest, tangling itself in the soft material of his shirt. When his tongue slipped over my bottom lip, I knew I had him. I knew he was mine.

  I climbed into his lap, my hair falling like a waterfall over his shoulders, blocking the show from anyone who might happen to walk by the partially open curtains. His hands moved over my hips, and he tugged me closer, as he slipped his hands under the bottom hem of my shirt. It was nice, the heat of his hands on my skin. And his tongue…it was doing things inside my mouth that I’d never felt before. Kissing was not a big thing in porn movies. I’d made out on film maybe twice in my career. This was a first for me. I could certainly see why it was such a popular thing to do.

  I ran my hands over his face, memorizing the angles, loving the way his bone and muscles worked together as he deepened his kiss. And then I touched his throat and slipped my fingers along the collar of his shirt. He was so warm, so full of life. Movement and flexing muscles everywhere. And when he pulled my hips forward, I almost couldn’t catch my breath when our hips rocked together and I could feel his arousal right there, just waiting for me to notice.

  He was…damn, he was hot! The way he kissed, the way he moved, the feel of his palms smoothing their way up my back…I’d never felt half the things that were happening inside my body in that moment. I didn’t want it to stop.

  He lifted me up and carried me across the room. For a minute, I thought he was taking me to his bed. But then he lay me down beside Olivia.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said, even in whisper, his voice deeper than before.

  He brushed his hand over my face, his thumb pausing against my bottom lip.

  “Goodnight, Quinn.”

  Then he was gone, slipping out the door and disappearing into the night. I lay there for a long time before my heartbeat slowed and the tightness in my lower belly finally began to relax. But I could still taste him on my lips as I drifted off to sleep, my daughter pressed up against the length of my body.

  Chapter 8

  Vincent

  I didn’t think I would sleep. I stood by the window for a while, listening to Quinn shift on the bed she was sharing with Olivia, my thoughts stuck on that moment she first kissed me. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been kissed since Syd. I wasn’t a monk all these years. There’d been that girl at Camp Pendleton who liked to sit and make out for hours, pushing my hands away from her jeans whenever they got too close. And there was that girl in Seattle when we were on leave and we drove up there to find some friend of Paulie’s. And the girl in Chicago a couple of months ago. So it wasn’t like it had been a long time or anything. But there was something different about Quinn’s touch that made my body remember things I didn’t think it would ever think of again.

  But when I finally lay down, sleep came over me in a way it hadn’t done in a very long time. I slept long and hard, no nightmares that were memories in disguise. It was the best sleep I’d had in a long time. I might have slept even longer, but I forgot to take my phone out of my pocket and the vibration woke me.

  Megan Bradford.

  I glanced at Quinn and Olivia. They were still curled up together, still sound asleep.

  I slipped out the door, the card key in my back pocket.

  “Vulture.”

  “Hey, Vincent. What room are you in?”

  “212.”

  “I’m in the parking lot. I’m coming up.”

  I disconnected and leaned over the railing, spotting her the moment she slipped out of the SUV that looked so much like the one I was driving. It was, actually, the same year and model as mine. Company issue.

  She looked tired, her shoulders overburdened, her light eyes lost in dark shadows.

  “We had to call the police. The house was a mess, and we couldn’t just ignore possible evidence,” she explained as she joined me outside the hotel room door. “They were there most of the night, dusting for fingerprints and complaining about the lack of cooperation on our part because we wouldn’t produce Ms. Smith.”

  “Did they find anything useful?”

  Megan shook her head, her dark blond hair floating around her shoulders. “Not a damn thing. But I’ve got Hayden and Dante doing the legwork for the investigators. Hopefully they’ll come up with something.”

  I glanced at the window, surprised to see Quinn’s face there. She had a crease on side of her face from Olivia’s arm and her hair was a rat’s nest. She’d never looked quite so beautiful.

  “I think it would be best if you take them to my beach house out on Galveston,” Megan said, holding out a set of keys. “There’s an address on the key tag. Just put it into the GPS. It’s pretty easy to find.”

  “For how long?”

  “Just until we can get the house cleaned up and the security system put in. Till tomorrow afternoon, probably.”

  “Okay.”

  Megan studied my face for a long second. “Everything okay? You getting along with them?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  She glanced at the window, lifting her hand. Olivia was standing there now, watching us through wide, green eyes that were so much like her mother’s.

  “Cute kid,” Megan said.

  She looked at me a second longer, then sort of waved her hand in a dismissal movement. “I’ll call you in the morning, let you know where we stand then.”

  She disappeared down the stairs, the weight on her shoulders seeming even heavier than it’d been before. Cole had told me about her fiancé leaving her at the altar. I couldn’t imagine a man doing that to a woman like her. She was strong. Independent. But she was also beautiful and kind and generous. She and Quinn had a lot in common.

  I turned, reaching into my pocket for the room key, but Quinn was already there, standing in the open doorway. She stepped—barefoot—onto the cool concrete walkway.

  “Why did Megan come all the way out here?”

  I touched her arm to draw her further out so that the door closed behind her. I didn’t want Olivia to hear what I had to say.

  “They called the police to check out the damage in the house.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  I shook my head. “Megan has a team setting up a security system in the house, but they don’t want us there while they do it”—I held up the keys Megan gave me—“so we’re going to Galveston for the weekend.”

  She didn’t look terribly happy. She moved to the rail, looking down into the parking lot.

  “We don’t have any clothes. And Olivia has school on Monday.”

  “Megan said we can go back tomorrow.”

  “And then what?” She turned to look at me, anger burning in her eyes. “I want this over.”

  “I know. It will be. Soon.”

  She didn’t respond. She just turned and waited for me to let her back into the room.

  ***

  Olivia was excited to go to Galveston. We stopped at a Walmart and picked up new clothes, a bathing suit, and toiletries for all of us. And enough food to feed an army for a week. Then we drove out to the house, all three of us speechless when we saw the beautiful glass and wood home set back in a cloister of trees just above the beach. The inside was even better than the out. The front doors opened onto a huge living room with a massive fireplace and sliding glass doors that opened onto a deck that wrapped around the entire house. The kitchen was off to the right, a gourmet kitchen with every appliance we’d ever need. On the left was a wide hallway that led to four bedrooms and a master that was big enough to fit my entire apartment inside of it.

  Olivia rushed straight out to the beach, laughing when the waves came up and tickled her toes.

  “Come put your bathing suit on first!” Quinn called down to her.

  Olivia glanced back over her shoulder. “Do I have to?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, Olivia,” I called. “If you’ll come get your swimsuit, I’ll go out with you.”

  “Okay.”

  She came running back inside and rushed into the bedroom he
r mother had chosen for her. I went to the kitchen to unpack the food, putting a package of steaks in a bowl with a quick, simple marinade for dinner. The girls came out of the bedroom, laughing at something. I watched them, unable to keep from admiring the way the simple black, one-piece suit Quinn was wearing fit her body. The woman was incredibly beautiful.

  I swung Olivia up onto my shoulders.

  “Let’s go tackle those waves, huh?”

  She giggled as I bounced her intentionally as I ran out to the beach. “Can you swim?”

  “Yep!”

  I ran into the water and tossed her into a wave. She came up a second later, laughing so hard I couldn’t believe she could catch her breath. Then I scooped her up again and tossed her deeper. She was laughing again when she came up.

  “I’ll show you how to body surf.”

  “You can surf without a board?”

  “Of course. Your body is the board.”

  She giggled, but she watched me and was doing it like a pro after just a few tries.

  We swam for quite a while, laughing and teasing each other, splashing each other despite the fact that the waves were hitting us almost constantly. It was late fall. Most of the families who called these beaches home during the summer were gone and the water was slightly cooler than I imagined it was during the summer. After an hour or two, we got out and built a sandcastle on the beach. Olivia called to her mother and begged her to join us over and again, but Quinn lay on a towel near the deck, content to read a book as she sunbathed.

  “How do you know so much about building sandcastles?” Olivia asked.

  “I grew up on the beach.”

  “Here?”

  “No. In San Diego.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “California.”

  Olivia patted a rough edge of the castle turret. “Momma promised to take me to California someday. She says it’s bright and sunny there all the time.”