by Julie James
To say that the afternoon had not gone as planned would be an understatement.
Grant crept through his apartment with the lights off, checking the view from every window. From his third-story perch, he looked down onto the street below for anything remotely suspicious—strange cars parked out front, a dog walker who just “happened” to be out at that time of night, a homeless person conveniently passed out in the alley behind his building.
He saw nothing.
For the second time in the two weeks since Mandy Robards had tried to blackmail him, he was furious. And now paranoid, too. Not a good combination.
Cameron Lynde wasn’t supposed to have come home from work so early. She also wasn’t supposed to have brought a friend home with her—not that he’d had any trouble getting him out of the picture.
He could’ve handled the police officers in the car out front. He had not, however, been ready for a standoff with Jack Pallas. The rage he’d seen in the federal agent’s eyes as he burst through the glass door was not something he’d expected. Nor had he been expecting the woman—who’d been relatively well-behaved up until that point—to try grabbing the gun out of his hand.
He’d been lucky, he knew, to have escaped when everything had gone so far awry from his plans. Thankfully, however, he didn’t need to count on luck in the future.
Satisfied that his apartment wasn’t under surveillance, Grant headed back to his bedroom and undressed. As he’d done a hundred times already that evening, he ran through the events of the attack and after, looking for the areas where he was most vulnerable.
No one had seen his face. Nor had anyone heard his voice, since he hadn’t so much as coughed during the entire attack. No prints left behind, thanks to the gloves. His getaway had been clean enough—he’d had to outrun those two worthless cops, one of whom had seen leaner days and the other of whom looked barely old enough to drive a squad car. Chicago’s finest. He’d lost them in an alley three blocks from the woman’s house and then high-tailed it a half mile in the opposite direction to the parking lot where he’d stashed his car. He’d swooped up the backpack he had left in a garbage bin along the way. By the time he got to the parking lot he’d shed the mask, the gloves, and the jacket, and was simply a man wearing black nylon pants and a long sleeve T-shirt while carrying his gym bag after a late-afternoon workout. Once he’d gotten back to his car and driven off, he’d pulled into another alley a couple miles away and changed into the suit he’d left in the car. The backpack, with the remainder of the black clothes and with the addition of a couple heavy bricks, was now sitting on the bottom of the Chicago River.
Grant walked naked into his bathroom and turned on the water to the shower. He studied himself in the mirror as steam filled the air.
There was one weakness.
He had no alibi. He wasn’t supposed to have needed one.
Sure, as soon as he’d dumped the backpack in the river he’d driven straight to his evening appointment—he’d met an old friend who worked at the Tribune at a bar in River West. Word had gotten out that a high-priced call girl had been murdered in one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and the unconfirmed rumor was that Senator Hodges’s name had shown up on her client list. The friend, who owed Grant several favors for all the times he’d given him early access to many of the senator’s political dealings, called to give him a heads-up and had asked to meet for drinks. Grant had been curious to know whether the senator’s name was being tossed around as a potential suspect, and how much his friend knew about the FBI’s investigation. As it turned out, his friend knew very little, and Grant got the feeling he was the one being pumped for information.
After drinks, he had returned to the senator’s offices and attended a series of meetings with the higher-level staff members and two of Hodges’s attorneys. The senator originally had planned to be back in D.C. by the following week, but given the FBI’s warning that he not leave the state, alternate plans needed to be discussed. First and foremost on everyone’s mind was how to explain the changes to the senator’s schedule without tipping the press off about his connection to Mandy Robards’s murder.
Secretly, Grant got a kick out of these conversations. The hushed tones, the tension-filled rooms, the worried glances over what the press and—gasp—even the killer might possibly know about the senator’s involvement with Mandy. They had absolutely no idea that the man they were talking about was sitting right at that table.
And he knew everything.
After the meetings finally ended, Grant had driven home, taking a few detours along the way to make sure nobody was following him. All in all, his day would seem like any other to anyone who might ask—except for that one missing hour. He’d have to come up with something to fill the void, just to be ready.
Grant thought back to the moment inside Cameron Lynde’s house when she’d first seen him on the stairs—the way she’d taken a step back and whispered, What do you want?
He wanted to stop looking over his fucking shoulder when he walked into his apartment, that’s what he wanted.
She said she didn’t know who he was. Although he liked to think people tended to tell the truth when feeling the cold steel of a gun barrel pressed against their heads, he wasn’t sure he trusted her. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.
For her sake, he hoped she was telling the truth. Mandy’s murder had been near perfect, almost artfully so. The best FBI agent in the city had been assigned the case, and still they had nothing on him. And they wouldn’t ever have anything on him as long as Cameron Lynde didn’t step out of line.
Of course, he’d taken precautions to know if she did.
They were so stupid. Pallas, the cops, all of them. It was right under their noses, and they didn’t even realize it.
If he’d known it was this much fun getting away with murder, he’d have done it years ago.
Twenty
SHE AND JACK would be living together.
The practical realities of the situation struck Cameron during the car ride to Jack’s South Loop apartment. He had asked Wilkins to drop them off so he could pick up his car and “a few things.” As they pulled away from the FBI building, he leaned over the seat and asked if she had any questions about how the protective custody was going to work.
She nonchalantly answered that there were none she could think of off the top of her head.
This was not true.
She had lots of questions. For starters, where exactly did Jack plan to sleep? Could she still go to work during the day? Did he expect her to cook meals while he stayed at her house? (Certainly the surest way to kill them both.) Would they do normal, everyday things together, like watch television at night? (Which reminded her—she really needed to delete those episodes of The Bachelor from her TiVo playlist.) And where, exactly, did he plan to sleep? (This particular question consumed such a vastly greater percentage of her musings, it bore repeating.) Was he allowed to leave her alone at all, like when he took a shower? Or, purely from a safety perspective, would it be better for her to join him in such undertakings . . .
“This will only take a few minutes,” Jack said as they rode the elevator to his fourth-floor loft. He looked her over. “Are you okay? You looked like you zoned out for a moment there.”
“I’m still processing everything that happened today,” Cameron said, hoping she didn’t spontaneously combust right there in the elevator at the thought of him naked in her shower.
When they arrived at the fourth floor, Jack led her to the apartment at the end of the hallway. He unlocked and opened the door, inviting her inside.
She didn’t know what she expected Casa Pallas to look like, perhaps something stark and Spartan with minimal furnishings and lots of gray, but that was not what she found when she walked through the doorway. The walls were exposed brick and the ceiling was vaulted. In keeping with the loft style, the main level had an open floor plan, with the living room running into the modern kitchen and what appeared to be a powde
r room and a small office down the hall to her right. There was a second floor; a floating staircase led to a small balcony. Beyond that were open double doors made of frosted glass through which she could see the master bedroom.
To say the least, the place was warmer and far more welcoming than she had expected. But that wasn’t what surprised her most. What really caught her attention were all the books.
An entire wall of Jack’s living room was filled with books—hundreds of them—organized neatly on dark mahogany shelves. More books rested on the lower shelf of his coffee table.
“Wow,” Cameron said, making her way over to the shelves. “You have some collection here.” It looked like a mixture of everything, fiction and nonfiction, hardcover and paperback. “You must be quite a reader.”
Jack shrugged. “It fills my spare time.”
Cameron would have loved to own such a collection of books—one of her plans for her house was to convert part of the third floor into a library. Not that she got a chance to read as much as she would’ve liked; a lot of her free time was sucked up by Collin and Amy. Which made her wonder whether Jack had a Collin or Amy in his life. Or anyone, for that matter. He seemed awfully . . . solitary.
He pointed upstairs. “I’m going to grab my things. Do you want anything to drink?”
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
As soon as he went upstairs, Cameron checked out the living room more thoroughly, looking for anything that would give her some insight into the mystery that was Jack Pallas. He had an impressive flat-screen television on the wall opposite the sable couch—of course he had a big TV; he may have been a mystery but he was still a guy—and from what she could tell from the books underneath the coffee table, he had an interest in black-and-white photography.
A couple of picture frames on the end table next to the couch caught her eye. Curious, Cameron headed over. One of the photos had been taken several years ago—Jack and three other guys at their graduation from West Point, all formally dressed in their uniforms of gray coats, gloves, white pants, and caps.
Cameron picked up the frame. In the photo, Jack wore a cocky, wide grin and had his arms slung over the shoulders of the guys next to him. It was his smile that struck her—so brash and open. Seemingly so different from the man she knew now.
She turned to the next picture frame. It held a black-and-white photograph of a woman in her late twenties who laughed as she pushed a little boy on a swing. The woman had dark eyes and straight, chin-length hair pulled back with a headband. She bore a striking resemblance to Jack.
“My sister and nephew,” came his voice from behind her.
Cameron started and turned around. He stood before her with a duffel bag on the floor near his feet. No clue how long he’d been there.
She tried not to reveal how curious she was as she set the picture frame back down. “Do you see your sister and nephew a lot?”
“Not that much when I was in Nebraska. But hopefully more now.” He swung the large duffel bag over his shoulder with one hand. “Ready?”
Cameron couldn’t help herself as her eyes drifted over him, remembering the night at Manor House. The strong shoulders and arms that had braced her against the door, the lean hips and muscled thighs that had pressed heatedly against hers, the firm chest and stomach that she’d just begun to explore with her hands. And the intense look of desire in his eyes.
Now he’d be sleeping in the bedroom next to her.
Perhaps she’d be better off taking her chances with the murderer.
WHEN THEY GOT back to Cameron’s house, Jack’s first order of business was to make sure that the doors had been repaired per his orders—first the front lock, and then the French doors off the master bedroom balcony. As he’d instructed, the agency had sent over a maintenance crew to board the door and clean up the glass.
Cameron eyed their handiwork skeptically. “It definitely adds that certain ‘vandalized’ quality I was going for with my renovation.”
“It’s safe. We can worry about style later,” Jack said.
The second thing he did was conduct a thorough check of the premises, with Cameron by his side until he was sure they were clear. This was no quick feat, given the size of the house.
“Did you used to be married?” he asked as he opened the closet in one of the guest bedrooms.
“No,” she said, seeming surprised by the question.
Rules out the rich ex-husband idea, Jack thought.
Another mystery he would soon get to the bottom of.
Third on his list was to get settled in. He took the room closest to Cameron’s—which luckily, unlike the other guest bedrooms, actually had furniture—and unpacked his bag. He shrugged out of his blazer and hung it in the closet. He put his spare gun on the nightstand, then opened one of the drawers of the dresser in the corner.
He discovered a man’s sweatshirt inside.
Jack slammed the drawer shut and chose another.
He moved next onto the fourth item on the evening’s agenda: taking care of Cameron.
She was doing a pretty good job with the tough criminal prosecutor routine, pretending to be fine with everything that had happened that afternoon. But he had seen the exhaustion that had set into her eyes in the car ride to her house, had heard the nervousness that belied the sarcasm in her voice as she’d commented on the boarded-up French doors, and had noticed the way she’d momentarily hesitated when she’d followed him up the stairs that led to the second floor, undoubtedly thinking back to the masked intruder’s earlier attack.
He guessed she hadn’t eaten in hours. That seemed as good a place as any to start. Pausing at her bedroom door to make sure everything sounded okay, Jack headed downstairs into the kitchen. He found her junk drawer and a well-worn menu from a Chinese restaurant a couple blocks away and figured that was a safe bet. He had no idea what she’d want to eat, so he ordered a bunch of things—screw it, he’d charge it to the Bureau. Besides, this way they’d have leftovers. From the looks of her refrigerator and freezer, she was an even worse cook than he was. Thank God for delivery, because a six-foot-two-inch man couldn’t last more than an hour on those skimpy frozen meals. He’d been stranded in a jungle in Colombia for five nights with four other guys on his Special Forces team and still had seen larger rations than those things.
Next, he checked out the liquor cabinet in her dining room. From the looks of it, she liked wine and she liked it red, so he went with the safe bet and chose a cabernet. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, he knew she would need some help falling asleep that night. While listening to the sound of water running upstairs, he made his way around the kitchen and poured her a glass of wine. The doorbell rang a few minutes later, and, after a brief moment of confusion when Jack frisked the delivery guy, asked him for his I.D., and called the restaurant to confirm his status, they were set to go.
Jack set the bags of food on the counter, grabbed the wineglass, and headed upstairs. Cameron had left her bedroom door partially open, as he’d asked her to. He knocked.
“Come in,” she said in quiet voice.
Jack pushed the door the rest of the way open. He found her standing in front of her closet and walked over. “I thought you might want a glass of wine to help you . . .” He trailed off as she turned around, stunned by what he saw.
There were tears in her eyes.
Of course, he realized. The closet where the killer had been hiding, waiting for her.
He set the wineglass on the floor and went to her. “Cameron . . . everything’s okay now. You know that, right?”
She blinked, and a tear ran down her cheek.
It killed him.
Jack wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close. He whispered in her ear. “He’s not getting near you again, baby, I promise. No one’s laying a finger on you ever again.”
She turned her cheek against his chest and peeked inside the closet. He could’ve sworn he heard a sniffle.
“It’s such a beautiful
dress,” she finally said.
Jack took a look. A long, silky, deep-pink dress hung front-out in the closet. No clue why she was crying over it, but he figured it was best to simply nod and be supportive under the circumstances. Maybe the killer had wrinkled it or something.
“It’s a very nice dress,” he agreed.
Cameron pointed at a pair of silver high-heeled shoes on the closet floor. She’d positioned them directly underneath the dress, as if an invisible woman was wearing them. “And the shoes . . .” She peered up at him, all weepy-eyed. “They would’ve gone so perfectly with it, don’t you think?”
Yeah . . . maybe he should just skip past dinner and put her straight to bed instead. Somebody was clearly a bit out of sorts.
He cleared his throat. Frankly, this was the kind of thing Wilkins was better at. “And now. . . you don’t want to wear the shoes again because . . . the killer might have touched them?” Hell, he was a guy, what did he know? Maybe shoes were as sacrosanct as purses and bachelorette parties.
Cameron pulled back and gave him the strangest look. “What? Oh, come on, give me a little credit, Jack. It’s a bridesmaid’s dress. I’m upset because I was supposed to wear it to my friend Amy’s wedding. It’s this weekend, in Michigan. With all the chaos today, I completely forgot about it.” She sighed. “You’re going to tell me I can’t go, aren’t you?”
Jack thought this over. “Where in Michigan?”
“At a hotel in Traverse City. Amy used to vacation there with her family when she was a kid. She’s planned this wedding for years—it means a lot to her.” Cameron forced a smile. “Looks like Collin’s going to have to step in as maid of honor after all. He’s going to be so pissed.”
Jack saw right through the smile. It was impossible not to notice how close she was with her friends.
Traverse City was a good couple hundred miles from their Detroit office, but he could probably get Davis to call in a few favors. Everybody owed Davis favors.
