Her Alpha Avengers [The Hot Millionaires #7] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (3 page)

“Be it ever so humble,” Gabe said, “we look upon it as home.”

She sniffed. “The murder business must pay well.”

Gabe looked at her askance. “Come again?”

“Let’s get inside,” Fin said, “and convince the lady that we haven’t knocked anyone off today.”

Sabine offered him a sarcastic smile. “You’re certainly welcome to try.”

Gabe shrugged and led the way with Mulligan bounding ahead of him, sniffing out this new territory. He paused to lift his leg against an expensive shrub in full bloom. Finally, Sabine found something to smile about, but Fin wished he hadn’t noticed. When she smiled it lit up her entire face and caused her lush mouth to momentarily lose its tight grimace of disapproval. Even with the damned sunglasses still covering her eyes, her smile was enough to make his mind go off on a detour and for his dick to sit up and take notice. Damn, he absolutely didn’t need to be thinking that way about their temporary guest.

They entered the house through the sliding glazed doors that led directly into the vaulted living area. Sabine could barely have had time to look round before the front door opened, and Otto came in with her things.

“This is Otto Prentice,” Fin said.

Otto shared a glance with Fin and Gabe before telling Sabine he was delighted to meet her. He offered her his hand, but she didn’t take it.

“What am I doing here?” she asked. “I don’t associate with criminals.”

“Criminals?” Otto shot Fin a look. “What’s she on about?”

“She found me standing over Spencer’s body, so, not unreasonably, she thinks I killed him.”

“We’d best set her straight, then.”

“Why would I believe you any more than I believed him?” she asked, jerking a thumb at Fin.

Otto said nothing but disappeared into the kitchen and returned almost immediately with fresh coffee for them all.

“Sit down, Sabine,” Fin said firmly.

“I don’t want to sit down. I just want to get away from you.”

“You’re free to leave any time you like.”

“How kind.” She stood up, still holding her satchel like a body protector. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure. Where’s my car?”

“It’s in our garage, but you can’t go back to your condo. They’ll be waiting for you.”

“I’ll find somewhere else.”

“Okay,” Fin said, “but before you go, you should hear what we have to say.”

She dealt him a defiant stare. “Why?”

“Because you’ve come all the way from England to find Pearson—”

Her incredulous gasp caused his words to stall. “How the hell did you know that?”

“The same way that I know you’ve spent the best part of two years trying to track the man down because, and this is the guessing part, he conned someone in your family.”

He sensed some of the antagonism drain out of her as she sat down and accepted coffee from Otto. “Okay, you’ve got my attention. What’s your interest in Pearson?”

“We’ve been hired to find him,” Gabe said.

“Who hired you?”

“We’ll tell you that later, once we’re sure we trust one another.”

“You haven’t given me much reason to trust any of you up until now.”

Fin smiled at her, but she refused to meet his gaze, clearly not ready to believe him. “Sabine, if I’d really killed Spencer, do you think I’d have let you live?”

“Tell her all of it, Fin.” Otto grinned. “Your legendary charm obviously isn’t going to cut it today.”

Sabine grunted but said nothing.

“Okay, here’s how it is. We work as investigators.”

She glanced round the room. “Nice office.”

“We don’t advertise our services. People come to us. People who want the best and can afford to pay for it.”

“Good job they don’t need modest.”

Otto laughed. “Yeah, we don’t do that one. Well, Fin doesn’t.”

She had removed her glasses at last, and Fin saw that her eyes were silver, flecked with agate. As suspected, they were large and intelligent and lent character to her face.
Character
? Christ, that wasn’t a whole lot better than
interesting
. She was still wary of them, that much was obvious, but they’d obviously piqued her curiosity and she was no longer in a tearing hurry to leave.

“Bottom line,” Fin continued, “is that we’ve been hired to find the guy you know as Pearson.”

“I see.”

“I doubt that you do, but stay with me. We’ve been on this for two weeks now, and Spencer was our best lead.”

“How did you get on to him?”

“Through you.”

“Me!”

“Yeah, you haven’t been too subtle, running a blog about Pearson, making it clear you’re looking for him, asking other victims to come forward. Plus, as soon as you got over here you started asking questions in all sorts of places, flashing the picture you have of Pearson everywhere you go, putting ads in the local paper.”

“It got me this far,” she said defensively.

“And damned near got you mixed up in a murder rap.” When she turned to look at him with an expression of cool disdain, Fin was tempted to shake some sense into her. She still didn’t get it. “You were supposed to be found on the beach at the crack of dawn, alone, kneeling over a dead ranger.”

“That wouldn’t have happened.”

Fin elevated a brow. “What, you wouldn’t have found him there and bent down to see if he was still alive?”

“Well, I suppose—”

“The police were on their way before his blood had congealed.”

She shivered. “There’s no need to be quite so graphic.”

“There’s every need, if it makes you see sense. The only reason it didn’t happen that way is because I was there. The killer didn’t know that. I was hidden in the dunes, waiting for you to arrive. I saw the killer strike Spencer and called out to try to distract him.”

“That’s the noise I heard,” Sabine said, lifting a hand to cover her mouth.

“Right.”

“Did you catch sight of the killer, Fin?” Otto asked.

“No, he came from behind the dunes.”

“The grass I saw waving about,” Sabine said softly.

“Right, I had to choose between chasing him and seeing if I could do anything for Spencer.” Fin scowled. “I should have gone after him because Spencer was already beyond help.”

Sabine shook her head. “Why kill Spencer and try to frame me for it? He was bashed over the head. I couldn’t have done that.”

“Yeah, you could. It’s not a woman’s preferred way of killing, but you’re taller than he was and probably heavier.” He grinned at her. “I should know.”

She tossed her head, but Fin was convinced he caught the trace of a smile slip past her guard. She smothered it before he could be sure. “Hope you didn’t put your back out,” she said sweetly, sounding as though she hoped he had.

“He couldn’t afford to use a gun, even a silenced one,” Gabe said. “They still make a noise and frighten the birds, and the killer couldn’t know who else might have been about. Dog walkers tend to turn up early in this heat.”

“All right, I’m Superwoman, accustomed to clouting weedy men over the head and letting them bleed to death. That still doesn’t explain why I’d want to.”

“If you were arrested, the police would seize your precious computer and find your connection to Spencer.” She opened her mouth, presumably to ask how he knew there
was
any correspondence to find, but Fin silenced her with a gesture. “They’d assume that he didn’t tell you what you wanted to hear, and you lost it, or that you argued and got into a tussle…something like that.”

“Put it this way,” Otto said. “If they found you with a man they knew you’d arranged to meet, and he was dead and you weren’t, they probably wouldn’t look too hard for anyone else to pin it on.”

“I suppose.” Sabine reluctantly acknowledged the point. “So someone killed Spencer to frame me.” She encompassed each of them in turn with one sweeping gaze. “Why?”

“To stop Spencer from telling you what he knew. And to stop you, full stop.” Fin briefly touched her hand, and this time she didn’t snatch it away. “You’re obviously getting too close.”

“But I don’t know anything,” she cried passionately.

“You must, otherwise they wouldn’t have searched your condo in the hope of finding it.”

“You think that was Pearson?”

“Or someone employed by him,” Otto said.

Sabine’s mouth fell open, and a kaleidoscope of conflicting emotions chased one another across her face. Surprise and fear quickly gave way to a steely determination that Fin found admirable. Most women would have run for cover long before now, given what Sabine had already witnessed that morning. But it seemed she was made of sterner stuff. Somehow Fin wasn’t surprised.

“You okay?” Fin asked.

Was she? Sabine didn’t answer him immediately. The situation was so surreal that she felt like pinching herself to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. This morning she’d thought she might finally be getting a little closer to the man who’d screwed her mother for just about every penny she owned. Two hours later, and she was arguably a prime suspect in a murder enquiry, surrounded by three muscly hunks who could be axe murderers for all she knew. And yet, they made her feel safer than she had since setting foot in this foreign country. They were either
the
most convincing criminals in the world, or they were telling her the truth.

Time to find out which it was.

“You said you found Spencer through me,” she said. “How?”

“Er, that was me, I’m afraid,” Otto said. “I hacked into your e-mail.”

She gaped at him. “You did what?”

“Sorry.” He spread his hands and sent her a sheepish smile. “You were here, making yourself conspicuous by asking questions.”

“Ever heard of asking?”

“Yes, but we needed to know what you knew so we could decide whether to trust you first.”

“You had trust issues with me?” She placed her hands on her hips and glowered at each of them. “Geez.”

Otto quirked a brow. “Would you have told us anything if we had asked you?”

“No, probably not, but—”

“Look, Sabine,” Fin said, once again taking control. An alpha male if ever she’d met one. The other two weren’t too shabby, but there was always a leader in every pack, and Fin was it—no question. “We’re on the same side here, both trying to find the creep who ripped you off.”

“Actually, he swindled my mother.” Sabine wondered why she felt so ready to confide in them. Not that there was much to confide. They seemed to have gone prying into her affairs and found most of it out for themselves. “But, of course, if you’ve checked me out online, you already know that. I’m English, as you will also know from your snooping.”

“Nope,” Gabe said, winking at her. “It was your accent that gave you away.”

“Whatever.”

She wasn’t ready to flirt with them, even if Gabe’s wink had made her insides bubble and her mind dwell upon something other than the obsession that had gripped her for the last two years. It had been a while since any man had gotten her attention and, after what had happened to her mother, that’s just the way she intended for it to stay.

“Tell us what happened to your mom,” Gabe said, not looking at her but concentrating on a pad he had open on his knee. He had a charcoal pencil in his hand and appeared to be drawing.

“My mum was comfortably off because Dad left her well provided for when he died five years ago. She had a big house in the home counties—”

“The home counties?” Fin and Otto asked together.

“The equivalent of your Hamptons,” she explained. “She was still young when Dad passed, only just sixty, and got a lot of attention from men ready to take Dad’s place.”

“For herself or her money?” Otto wondered aloud.

“Oh, she knew what most of them wanted and wasn’t deceived. But Pearson was in a different league. He fooled us both.”

She glanced at each of them in turn. Fin’s intelligent green eyes revealed sympathy and a keen interest in what she had to say. Gabe, with blond surfer-boy looks and eyes as blue as the sea, was absorbed with his drawing, or whatever it was he was doing. Otto watched her with almost unnerving stillness, dark haired and equally dark eyed. All three of them topped six foot and carried themselves with an air of confidence that told her they were a tight-knit unit that didn’t take crap from anyone. The integrity that she sensed about them, together with all that lean, hard muscle, helped her to decide they had to be the good guys.

Nothing to do with their film-star looks, then?

She’d learned to trust her instincts recently, which meant she didn’t take anyone at face value anymore. These guys were different, though. Or maybe it was having witnessed a murder that made her decide she couldn’t keep on fighting alone.

“Go on,” Fin said softly.

Sabine snapped out of her reverie, unaware until that moment that her words had stalled, and she was staring out the window, lost in reflection. “Have you ever met Pearson?” she asked.