Saved by a Dangerous Man (8 page)

How did he make an innocuous question sound so threatening?
“Um, yeah. Tampa’s a nice place.”

Henry made a sound halfway between a grunt and a snort.
 

My phone rang. And it was my mother. Henry watched me closely; I had no choice but to answer.

“Audrey?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

“Hi, Mom.” I felt my face getting red hot, and I thought I might cry. I had no idea how I was going to juggle this, and just hearing her voice made me regret half the things I’d done in the last two days. I took a deep breath and plowed right in. “Nothing’s wrong. My flight just got in, and…”

Someone loomed over me, blocking the light. I looked up and nearly dropped the phone. Corbin’s blue-green eyes were obscured behind dark contacts, he wore thick, Buddy Holly glasses, a blonde wig, a sagging cardigan so hideous that despite my despair, I itched for a lighter so I could burn it, loose plaid pants, and black sneakers with honest-to-goodness Velcro instead of laces. He stood strangely, too, like he was uncomfortable with himself. The clothing and his posture obscured his muscular frame fairly well.

“Hey, cuz. Sorry I’m late. I forgot to write down the flight number.” He scratched at the back of his head. “Had to check all the terminals.” His über-manly voice had become reedy, wheezy, and his every word was undermined by hesitancy that practically begged for him to be interrupted.
 

“He’s here, Mom,” I said, and hung up. I pushed the mute button on my phone as I stowed it and hoped—irrationally—that my mom would shrug off the weird exchange.
 

My legs were wobbly, but I forced myself to stand; even in disguise, Corbin was still far too recognizable for my comfort, and the more distance between us and Henry, the better.

Henry stood and extended a hand. “Henry Heigh.”

“Joe Daydson,” Corbin said.

He knew my mom’s maiden name. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

Corbin shook hands like he didn’t know how to do it, eyes trained on the floor. The insecure guy act was strangely convincing, and I wondered if he’d ever been this awkward, perhaps as a teenager.

“Can we give Henry a ride home?” I asked, confident that Corbin would invent the perfect excuse.

Corbin pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Sure!”

My face fell.

“If my back seat weren’t full of junk,” he continued. He looked Henry up and down. “You’re not so big,” he concluded. “And Audrey is a slip of a girl. Maybe you could both fit in the front. As long as the seatbelt reaches around you. Don’t want to break the law. Not with all these bounty hunters in the family.”

I didn’t dare shoot him a dirty look, but if Corbin knew me at all, he sensed that I wanted him to shut up while he was ahead.
 

“That’s fine,” Henry said icily. He turned to me. “Give me a call tomorrow. We have things to talk about. Big things.”

“Really?” I squeaked.

“Have a good night.” He shook Corbin’s hand again, then picked up his stuff and walked away.

“Let me get your bag,” Corbin said in that strange affected voice. “It’s a nice one. Such quality and style.”
 

I rolled my eyes. Of course he would say that. It used to be his.

“This way.” He set off with a strange limp, subtle but convincing. I looked behind me and caught Henry lingering near the exit, his expression dark. I waved goodbye.
 

After what seemed like an eternity, he returned my wave. Then he walked outside.

Corbin essentially led me to the next terminal. I followed his lead and didn’t say anything.

Only when we were in his vehicle (yet another black SUV with tinted windows) did he pull off the glasses. He deftly removed the contact lenses and stowed them in a container while we waited for a light. He shed the wig, plaid pants and hideous cardigan. Underneath, he wore a tight black sweater and jeans. He swapped the shoes for boots.
 

“From a grub to a butterfly,” I said.
 

Corbin grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Any problems?”

“Other than Henry trying to get me to leave with him, no. He was pretty pissed about not catching Lagos…” I trailed off with a laugh. Corbin Lagos was sitting right next to me. All my concerns on the flight to Tampa seemed like silly worrying now that we were together.

I really was very lucky. Corbin could have made a big deal about me going to Florida with Henry. He’d respected my wishes when I decided to go rather than act like a meathead on steroids, getting all crazy territorial and telling me what I could and couldn’t do.

Which helped me trust him… and trust our relationship.
 

That I’d ignored his request and he’d been there to help me when things got bad only made him that much more awesome. And he wasn’t going to give me a lecture, either.
 

“I told you not to go,” Corbin said.

Oh well. “Lecture-free zone!” I eyed him and considered admitting that the trip had been ill-advised. Because at the moment, I regretted going. “But it was helpful to you, right?”

“And I told you not to worry about downloading the program onto his phone.” His voice had regained the sexy, late-night radio deejay quality that made my girly bits gush. “But yes,” he said. “Quite helpful.”

That perked me up. “Good information?”

“Yup.” He got onto the highway, and I relaxed fully. I knew that Henry was surely still in line for the taxis, but it wasn’t easy to shed the mantle of paranoia, especially with Corbin’s disguise discarded.

“Are you going to tell me?” I prodded.

He shot me a regretful look. “I can’t.”

“Understood.” No point in pushing him. If he didn’t want to talk, I’d never pry a word out of him. “When I was in Florida I kept thinking how much more fun it would have been with you there.”

He glanced over at me and smiled. “Yeah? We’ll have to go on vacation when this blows over.” Bluish light played over his face in a rhythmic loop as we rolled along the highway.
 

Mmm.
“Is that a promise?”

“You have my word,” he said solemnly, and delicious shivers ran down my spine. I was slowly becoming addicted to everything about Corbin Lagos.
 

I was so busy studying him, thinking about the parts of his body that I couldn’t see, that I didn’t pay attention to the route until I saw a sign for the highway interchange. “Missed the turn.”

“I didn’t miss it.”

“Where are we going?”

Corbin cleared his throat. “It’s not safe for you to be home.”
 

“That really doesn’t answer my question.”
 

“I’m taking you somewhere safe.”

Frustrating! “Why isn’t it safe?”

He frowned and shook his head. “Should all be over in a couple of days.”

“A couple of days!”

“A week, tops.”

“Corbin—”
 

“The data we were able to pull from Heigh’s phone revealed two things. First, this is larger than we realized. It’s not just a few low-level FBI agents who talk too much in exchange for favors. There’s an organized network taking bribes for information they shouldn’t even have access to. It needs to be cleaned up.”

“That’s your job?”

“No. But FBI problems are my problems if I don’t know who I can trust. My organization is working blind. It’s like sticking your hand into a bag of snakes and not knowing if you’re about to grab a rattler or a king snake.” He paused. “Second, one of Henry Heigh’s associates suggested, very logically, that Heigh has a leak of his own. Heigh pooh-poohed the idea, but he’s not stupid, and he was suspicious by the end of the conversation. You’re the only outsider who knew he’d be in Florida and why. He’s putting things together.”

“Like what? He complained that going after you was hard because he would always get conflicting information.”

“Maybe. But this time there was no conflicting information.”

“I’m not quite following.”

“What’s important to focus on is that Heigh will suspect you if he doesn’t already.”

I exhaled, frustrated. “There’s no proof, no reason to suspect me. Why would I be trying to help you?”

“He may think you’re trying to scoop him.”

“What a jerk.” I pursed my lips. “Because I’m so incompetent—”
 

“I didn’t show up in Florida. I wanted to, but it was out of my hands.”

“Whoa. What do you mean you ‘wanted to’?”
 

“Exactly what I said. I wanted to show up, put Heigh on a false track so that I could take care of my business there. Because I didn’t, the next few months are going to be… tiresome.” His mouth snapped shut. “Henry owes money to people. One of his contacts was guaranteed a cut of my bounty. Now they’re fighting. Henry’s claiming that he got bad intel, and he’s also looking for someone else to blame. If I had been there, that wouldn’t be happening.”

“He wants to blame… me?”

“He’s suspicious, but I think you figured that out. So I’m taking you to the safest place I know. We’ll make sure that Henry removes you from his list of suspects, but it won’t happen overnight.”

“My apartment is safe. And what’s he going to do, anyway?”

I could almost hear Corbin roll his eyes. “He’s not a nice man, Audrey. As soon as things are cleared up, you can go back to your life.”

“You mean you’re locking me in a dungeon.”
 

“Do I seem like the kind of guy who would… No, strike that.” He got off the highway. “Are we going to the mat over this?”

I considered. While my apartment was on the sucky end of the scale, and always cold, I didn’t like being forced to change my habits because of Henry.

“Four days,” Corbin promised, sensing that I might be amenable.
 

“Two.”

“Three.”

We were downtown, near the former garment district, not terribly far from where Corbin had helped me apprehend Hoboken Syre. This area was well along the path to gentrification, the warehouses now luxury loft apartments with exposed brick and ductwork and high ceilings that surely made them expensive to heat.
 

I sighed softly. Things had gotten so complicated. “Are you staying with me until you leave?”

“Tonight, yes. Of course.”

“Ok, then. Three days.” Because if I had him for the night, it was only two days. I thought about the stack of files on my desk. Despite the vacation, I had planned to get started on them the next morning. “What about work?”

Corbin’s mouth thinned into a hard line. “I don’t want you doing anything where you could have an ‘accident.’ We’ll take care of it. You get your assignments. My people will pick up the slack as much as possible.”
 

“You’re going to use your people to do my job? Maybe I should be aiming for eight days, not two.”

A grin brightened his face. He pulled up to a gated garage, lowered his window and pressed his thumb onto the pad. Then he entered a code. The gate slowly rolled up. Corbin drove forward one car length. The gate closed behind us, then he repeated the thumb-and-code dance.

“What is this place?”

“Someplace I was never supposed to bring you,” he said. “Any other questions?”

“Yeah. What’s a king snake? Wears a crown? Beheads its wives?”

“Or it’s just a nonvenomous counter to a rattlesnake.”

Although the garage was nearly empty, Corbin drove down a level before parking. The occupied spaces housed vehicles every bit as inconspicuous as Corbin’s enormous, tinted SUV. Line them up on the street and people would assume the president was in town. I got out and stretched. When I looked up, I counted four cameras.

“You really need to get some surveillance down here,” I said.

Corbin followed my gaze. “That camera is fake. Someone couldn’t sneak in here unless they passed two levels of security already and then parked in the correct sector. They would have to know that each person with access has numerous passwords. The correct password will allow access. Others will allow access but trigger an alert. The cameras you see are to give the illusion of paranoid surveillance without letting any potential troublemaker know all our tricks. And of course there are other cameras that you can’t see.”

“Creepy.”

“I prefer thorough.”

“Aren’t you supposed to say ‘we’? We, the company, the organization that’s too awesome to be a three-letter agency,” I said in my best movie trailer voice.

Corbin grinned and touched a hand to my lower back, guiding me toward a set of elevators.
 

The doors slid open and we stepped on. “And if you push the wrong elevator button, will it gas us?”

“That’s a good idea,” Corbin said. He didn’t sound like he was kidding. “See, this is why I want to hire you.”

“Set the gas to stun.”

“Cute.”
 

“I prefer sexy, tempting, brilliant.”
 

“Cute. Like a kitten with big green eyes.” He looked at me like he wanted to push me up against the side of the elevator and prove exactly how “cute” made him feel.

“Think you mean
sex
kitten.” Not my best comeback, but it had been a long few days, and I wasn’t at the top of my game.

We walked down a long hallway that managed to be both industrial and somewhat homey. I couldn’t put my finger on it until Corbin stopped before one of the wide doors.

“This place looks like it used to be a hotel.”

“It did, but it’s been completely renovated. Welcome home.”

Lights flickered on as we entered. To my right was a large kitchen, smooth surfaces instead of useless appliances like stoves and refrigerators. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the sink, I might have mistaken it for an unfurnished bedroom. I would probably need an engineering degree to heat a kettle of water.
 

The entire front of the kitchen was a cutaway wall, giving a partial view of the combined living room and dining room. Normally, combined rooms made me think cheap and cramped. This was the opposite of that. Spacious yet comfortable. The blue and cream color palette was warmed by the recessed bookcase that lined one wall, the plush sofa and chairs, and the mottled texture of the painted walls. If the apartment had been a quarter the size, I would have called it cozy.