Undercover Holiday Fiancée

by Maggie K. Black

  There were no messages from Trent on her phone. She crossed the parking lot and walked around the front of the building. Trent’s truck was gone.

  She nearly screamed at the sky. So, Trent really had left, then. He’d dropped Coach Henri, switched covers and disappeared from her life without explaining what was happening or telling her why. She didn’t even know why she was surprised.

  A car honked at her twice as it drove out of the lot. Johnny was hanging out of a silver sports car. “Hey, Detective, I’m sorry for what happened earlier at the diner. George was being a fool. I saw Coach Henri pull out of here like his feet were on fire. Everything okay in paradise? Can I give you a ride anywhere?”

  She nearly laughed in his face. From where she stood that flirtatious and cocky young man had caused more than enough trouble. “I’m good, thanks. Tell me, did you really kiss Poppy?”

  “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell!” Johnny slid back into the driver’s seat.

  Like he was a gentleman.

  He lit a cigarette and puffed it out the window as he peeled out of the lot.

  Now there was someone she’d have suspected of dealing drugs in a heartbeat, if she could figure out how Third Line fit into it. Trent was certain one of the four third-line players had hidden the payara in the locker room, and she didn’t believe for a moment any of them would lie to police to protect Johnny, especially not considering how Hodge had pounded on him and apparently none of the players had tried to stop him. Had Trent been wrong about the timeline? Was Poppy really Trilly?

  The taxi she had called took twenty minutes to arrive. Then it was an eighty-dollar fare back to her house. She spent it looking out the window and staring at the darkness rushing past. She never should’ve let herself kiss Trent. She never even should have let herself hold his hand. She never should’ve let Trent slide himself back into her life and infiltrate her heart.

  Hers was the only vehicle in her driveway when she got home and her small hatchback was buried under a foot of snow. Her footsteps crunched on the cold, snowy ground. She undid both sets of locks on her front door and eased it open.

  A tall form with broad shoulders sat silhouetted in her living room.

  She yanked her service weapon and pointed it at him. “Hands up! Don’t move!”

  “Clo, it’s me.” Trent switched on the lamp. Her gaze fell on the short, buzzed hair and smooth, clean-cut face. Gone was the softness of the beard and the gentle curl of his hair. Now shadows sharpened the lines of his jaw and traced along his cut shoulders and bulging biceps. A black T-shirt covered his chest. He leaned forward like an alpha animal. Torn jeans covered in motor oil stains gave way to the outline of a handgun near his ankle, just above a pair of steel-toed work boots. “Look, I’m sorry, but you have to trust me—”

  “No, I don’t.” The gun held firm in her grasp. “I don’t even know who you are anymore.”

  TEN

  “Come on, Chloe. You can’t possibly mean that,” Trent said. Could she? He watched as Chloe holstered her weapon. Then she smacked on the switch to the main lights. Light flooded her living room.

  “You broke into my house,” she said.

  “You left a spare key for the crime scene investigators.” He stood. “I just picked it up from them, let myself in and locked the door behind me. They didn’t find much but they’ll have what they found analyzed in a few days—”

  She cut him off. “Which hardly matters now that you clearly know who my attacker was.”

  Okay, she was angry. He’d expected as much. He bit his tongue and kept from pointing out that any evidence that Royd had broken into her home would still be helpful in getting a confession and conviction.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew him?”

  “Because all I had was a suspicion.” His jaw set. “There’s more than one bald and bulked-up man out there with a spiderweb tattoo. Royd’s full name is Roy Denver. He’s low-level Wolfspider fodder that Uncle throws at problems sometimes to see if he’ll come back alive.”

  Trent wasn’t even sure what he was doing in her living room. He had to drive two hours to Huntsville, find Uncle and get him to believe his side of the story before Royd managed to get word to them of what had happened.

  As Chloe had slapped the handcuffs on Royd, he’d run back to his rented apartment, shaved off every last trace of Coach Henri and transformed into the version of himself he most hated looking at in the mirror. He’d been motoring down the highway, twenty minutes passed her house with Bobcaygeon in the rearview mirror, when he’d suddenly found himself turning his truck right back around and heading to Chloe’s. Couldn’t say for sure why. He just knew there was something inside him that kept kicking his brain like an old boot, telling him he needed to at least try to give her an explanation for his sudden shift in gears.

  “I don’t know what Royd’s doing here,” he added, “but I need to find out. Yesterday we had one gang involved in this payara mess. Now we have two—”

  “So, you just took off?” Flames blazed in the green depths of her eyes.

  “I came back!” he said.

  “You blew your cover!”

  “Because I had to.” His arms crossed in front of his broad chest. “Royd and I have known each other for a long time. The moment I tried to help you he would’ve recognized me. But part of my arrangement with Uncle is that my family and girlfriend—if I ever had one—is off-limits. Either way, I was made. My cover was going to be blown. I couldn’t just keep pretending to be a mild-mannered hockey coach.

  “Yes, Royd was arrested and that will complicate my situation with the Wolfspiders. Royd’ll probably get bail, and he’ll most definitely get a phone call. Who knows how long it will be before he tells someone he saw me in Bobcaygeon and they figure out I was posing as a hockey coach. Or, for all I know, he might’ve even had someone else on the inside. I didn’t come to town to coach hockey. I came here to stop the spread of payara. Sure, when this mission started my job was to get close to the third-line players. But the second I knew the Wolfspiders were involved, and that one of them would recognize me, then the mission changed. Don’t you get that? I texted Eli, told him I had a personal emergency and needed him to take over the team, and also emailed my resignation to Trillium. It’s done. All of it—Coach Henri, Trillium hockey, Third Line and the coach’s cute fiancée—is over.”

  “Because that’s how this works,” she said. “You just snap your fingers and everything changes. Too bad for anyone who might care about Coach Henri or miss him.”

  “I’m an undercover cop. You know this. It’s my job. It’s never personal.”

  “Royd says you broke his sister Savannah’s heart,” Chloe said.

  He winced. Yeah, he wasn’t exactly proud of that. “Savannah has a crush on the person I pretend to be for my Wolfspider cover. Not on who I actually am. I promise I never intended to lead her on.”

  “He knew your real name, Trent. Not a cover name.”

  “Because, as we’ve covered, the best cover stories have a kernel of truth,” he said.

  Fact was, he’d been fourteen and still an uncontrollable ball of rage and pain about the death of his sister, when the students he occasionally hung with behind the gymnasium had introduced him to Uncle. Uncle had taken a liking to him and started giving him odd jobs to do, like picking up packages, looking out for cops and destroying things. Until, at seventeen, Trent had been arrested and scared straight by an understanding cop and gotten his life back on the straight and narrow. He’d never imagined his work as an undercover cop would mean using the shell of his teen life to concoct a new cover, based on a version of himself that he’d never really forgiven himself for.

  “The Trent they know is a fixer,” he added. “I randomly show up, after being away for months or even years, and use Uncle for information. He’s a source and a g
ossip. He tells me what other gangs are doing because he knows I’ll take care of it.”

  Chloe’s eyebrows shot up.

  “By getting them arrested! Sheesh, don’t look at me like that! Uncle is a vital informant to our police operations and has absolutely no idea. Thanks to the information I’ve weaseled out of him, the RCMP have taken out human smuggling, child abuse rings, weapons trafficking and all sorts of other horrendous crimes that give cops nightmares. Even you’ve used information my cover has gotten from Uncle. When we first met, I was giving you intel I’d gotten from him about a Gulo operation.”

  But what he really wanted was to take Uncle down. Yes, Uncle was too clever about keeping his own hands clean, and Trent understood why his superiors believed an arrest shouldn’t happen until they were confident the charges would stick. Not to mention that once Uncle believed Trent was no longer usable, he might come after Trent’s family. But when Uncle finally slipped up, Trent wanted to arrest him personally.

  “That’s what’s in jeopardy right now,” he went on. “I don’t know what Royd and the Wolfspiders have to do with payara, but it’s a lead I can’t afford to ignore. Uncle doesn’t exactly trust me, and he won’t be happy that I let you arrest Royd. I don’t know what Uncle is going to think when he finds out that you and I have been telling everyone around town that we’re engaged. Maybe he’ll laugh it off like Royd did. But maybe he won’t.”

  Or maybe, the Wolfspiders had an informant inside Bobcaygeon who’d seen them lock lips at the diner. “Either way, my roughing up a Wolfspider to save a cop looks really bad. In fact, it could destroy my Wolfspider cover for good. Not to mention it basically announces that I’m an obstacle in Uncle’s way of getting his hands on payara. But I can probably manage to convince Uncle to tell me everything he knows about both the dealer and drug lab if I can spin it right.”

  Which he couldn’t do as long as he stood around arguing in her living room. At least Chloe seemed to be listening now.

  “Either I get the intel I need from Uncle tonight to find the payara dealer,” he said, “or he discovers I’ve been playing him for years and he puts targets on both my back and yours. Those are the stakes. So, I’ve got to make tracks to get to Uncle first and spin him some story about how I’ve been romancing a pretty but foolish lady cop who doesn’t realize I’m using her to get my hands on the drugs. No offense.”

  “None taken.” A smirk turned at the corner of her lips that he didn’t think he liked the look of. Then she turned and walked into the bedroom. The door slammed and locked behind her. “Give me thirty seconds. I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not!” He called through the door, “This is still my case, and there’s absolutely no way that you’re walking into a Wolfspider den with me.”

  “I’m going.” It sounded like she was tossing the contents of her drawers and wardrobe on the floor. “My home stopped being safe when Royd broke in. Uncle could’ve sent someone else by now. Besides, someone needs to have your back.”

  “My back is just fine!” He paced to one side of the room and back again.

  Help me, Lord, what am I doing here? Why did I even turn the truck around and come back? Why can’t I walk away from this fight?

  “The case might’ve changed, but we’re partners.” She pulled the door open so suddenly he tumbled to the floor, landing hard on one knee at her feet. He looked up and blinked.

  Thick, knee-high combat boots encased her legs, over a pair of leather motorcycle pants. She wore a black tunic dress over top, which fell all the way to her knees, with a studded leather bag that was half purse and half gun holster around her waist. A black leather motorcycle jacket completed the biker look but was almost swallowed up with the wild tumbling mass of thick red hair, now with unexpected shocks of pale blond extensions. Electric-blue eyes, framed with thick, artful dark lines met his.

  “Stand up,” she said. “And let’s go. We can argue as we drive.” Her lips were painted the same flaming red as her hair.

  He stood slowly, opened his mouth and had to swallow twice before any words came out. “Who are you and what have you done with Chloe?”

  “You think I’ve never walked into a room full of criminals who’d kill me as soon as they look at me?” She tossed her hair and it fell around her shoulders like a cape of flames. “Who do you think the Special Victims Unit sends in after those girls trapped in the kinds of nightmarish places you get intel from Uncle about? Detectives like me. I’m the one who walks through that door. I’ve been the one inside, providing surveillance, providing cover for the girls and giving the Emergency Response Unit the signal to burst in.”

  “The plan is to convince Uncle that I’ve been using you—”

  “The plan is idiotic and going to get you killed.” She cut him off. “Then, after they kill you, they’ll send someone to kill me. You think Uncle is really going to believe that you’re so smart and irresistible that you charmed a fierce and dedicated detective into spilling classified information without her knowledge. You really think you can sell that?”

  Well, not to anyone who’d actually met her. But still.

  “I don’t have any other choice,” he said.

  “Yes, you do.” Her hands snapped to her hips. “You keep trying to convince me that you’re some expert on corrupt cops. We go in together, you introduce me as a bad apple and we tell them I only arrested Royd because there was a bunch of people coming my way and I needed to maintain my cover.”

  His eyes opened wider. “You expect me to walk into the middle of the Wolfspiders, right up to Uncle, with you on my arm, and tell him that the detective who Royd tried to rough up was just posing as my girlfriend because she’s corrupt and wants a piece of my payara money?”

  “Not quite.” Her eyes fixed on his face through the blue contacts and he realized he’d know they were hers anywhere, no matter what color they were. “I’m going to walk in there and do what I don’t believe you can. I’m going to convince Uncle that I sold out my badge, my honor and everything I believed in for you. We’re going to tell them I’m your fiancée, and then I’m going to convince a roomful of killers that I’ve fallen head over heels for you, Trent. I’ll make Uncle believe that he has nothing to fear from me and that he can still trust you. Because if I don’t, you’ll die.”

  ELEVEN

  The Pit 11 Grill was a low, nondescript, squat structure that sat on a strip of highway outside Huntsville, Ontario. It was only about a twenty-minute drive from the warm family farmhouse where he’d grown up and would be going for Christmas dinner. But it felt like an entire world away. Yellow light seemed to drip in puddles from the sparse lampposts. The electric sign flickered blue through the thickly pelting snow. The parking lot was packed with battered Wolfspider vehicles.

  Trent pulled to a stop at the far end of the lot. Then he felt his hand reach for Chloe’s and squeeze it while he prayed. “God, help us in there. Keep us safe. Keep us smart. Keep us honest and honorable. Help us do what needs to be done, with as few people getting hurt in the process as possible.”

  “Amen,” Chloe said.

  He looked up through the windshield at the place that had harbored so many of his worst memories. He hated the Pit 11 Grill. He hated what he’d heard in there, what he’d seen in there and everything the dingy restaurant represented. A person like Chloe didn’t belong in a place like that. Yes, as a cop she’d walked bravely into even uglier places for the sake of justice and mercy. But the dirt of what Pit 11 stood for was like a stain on his heart. She deserved better than to be led by a man like him into a place like that.

  “Any last words?” she asked.

  He winced. He wished she hadn’t put it like that. He looked down at her slender gloved hand enclosed in his and felt the lump of the engagement ring beneath the leather. He wanted to tell her that the story of his life had some ugly chapters h
e hoped she’d never read and that his heart had some dark places he hoped she never saw. He wanted to tell her that as grateful as he was that he’d turned his life around, he wished there was a way to scour every corner of his past so that he’d never even needed that forgiveness God had offered him. “If you sense your life is in danger, I want you to get yourself out of there, okay? Don’t hesitate. Don’t look back. Got it?”

  “Got it.” She pulled her hand from his. “But for the record, if anyone pulls a gun on you and threatens to kill you, I’m shooting them first. Even if it’s Uncle.”

  He chuckled. “Deal. You can shoot only if he tries to kill me. But only then.”

  As they walked toward the building, he could feel his shoulders roll back, his chest puff out and his gait slow to a cocky saunter. They reached the door and he felt Chloe’s left arm drop possessively around his shoulders, as confident and smooth as if it belonged there. His arm slid around her waist. Her lips brushed his cheek and an odd warmth filled his core as he realized that for the very first time, when he stepped through those doors, he wouldn’t feel utterly alone.

  They stepped over the threshold into a dark space filled with wobbly round tables and even wobblier patrons. The air stunk of alcohol spilled long ago. Faces he recognized and strangers whose types he knew all too well cut him furtive glances. His eyes narrowed and locked on the white-bearded, barrel-chested man nursing something in an unmarked bottle at the counter.

  Uncle glanced up.

  Trent counted at least two enforcers flanking him—a tall one to his left and a shorter but heavily armed one to his right. Trent kept his eyes locked on his target and strode toward him with the swagger of a man who knew every crack in the counter and the kinds of deals that had been made over them.

  He made it six steps from the place where Uncle sat before the taller enforcer leaped in front of him and lobbed a sucker punch at Trent’s jaw, knocking him clear out from under Chloe’s arm. Trent took the blow and staggered back. Then he reared forward, grabbed the enforcer by the throat and shoved him hard against the counter. Trent glanced at Uncle. “What kind of welcome is this for an old friend?”