Risky Engagement

Yet.

The terse message Ace had texted a little while ago indicated they’d come up empty at their end. OMEGA could access a host of databases, public, private and otherwise. Wolf knew damn well they’d run Nina Grant through every one. Yet none of the agency’s wizards had been able to turn up a connection between Grant and Sebastian Cordell. As far as they could tell, she was clean.

Until this moment, everything in Wolf concurred with that assessment. He’d lived on the razor’s edge so long he’d learned to trust his instincts where people were concerned. The short time he’d spent with her had him ninety-nine-percent convinced Nina Grant was the busy exec on vacation she claimed to be. The finger she’d poked in his chest moments ago had just about clinched the matter in his mind.

He had only a second to decide whether to go with his gut-level assessment. A mere heartbeat, while she looked at him, wide-eyed and stuttering, to come up with an answer to Cordell’s invitation.

“Yes,” Wolf hissed. “Tell him yes!”

He could see the doubt in her face, the distrust. Her knuckles were white on the receiver, her body taut with indecision. He was sure she would refuse his urgent request when she cleared her throat.

“Lunch sounds delightful, Mr. Cordell.” Her eyes remained locked on Wolf’s. “Twelve-thirty it is. No, no need to send someone to pick me up. I’ll drive myself. What? Oh. Right. I guess I do need your phone number in case I get lost or stranded again. Let me get a pen.”

Wolf had Cordell’s numbers. All of them. But he kept silent while she hunted down a pencil and jotted a string of digits on a paper napkin.

“I’ve got it. Thanks. I’ll … I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He was in! Or she was. Wolf contained his fierce elation as she hung up the receiver and stared at it blankly for a few seconds.

“I can’t believe I just did that.” Her eyes lifted to his. “Why did I just do that?”

“I can’t speak to the why,” he said slowly, “but I’ll tell you this. A whole bunch of folks will be real happy that you did.”

“At the risk of repeating myself … why?”

He sifted the details in his mind, sorting out what he could and couldn’t tell her, and decided on the varying shades of the truth.

“I told you I freelance on occasion.”

“Right.” Her forehead crinkling, she repeated the line he’d given her. “At which time you specialize in eliminating hazards and removing debris.”

“One of those hazards is Sebastian Cordell.”

“Aha!”

Despite the seriousness of the situation, a grin tugged at the corners of Wolf’s mouth. “Aha"? Who said “aha” these days, outside of a slapstick comedy? Dr. Nina Grant, apparently.

She looked indignant again, like a tabby cat who’d been about to pounce and got its whiskers pulled instead.

“So that story about being into marine construction was just that?” she huffed. “A story?”

“No, that part’s true. I do this as a sideline.”

“Some sideline!” Frowning, she chewed on her lower lip for a few moments. “So why do you consider Sebastian Cordell a hazard?”

“We suspect he courted and seduced the senior senator from Maine.”

“Janice DeWitt?” she gasped. “The senator who died in a car accident a few weeks ago?”

“There’s some question,” Wolf said carefully, “whether it was an accident or a suicide.” Or something else.

So far the FBI and Secret Service had managed to suppress the evidence indicating that a member of the U.S. Congress had deliberately driven her vehicle through a guardrail and over a rocky cliff. Likewise the gut-wrenching e-mail she’d sent the President Pro Tem of the Senate, confessing that a disk encrypted with highly classified information might have been compromised by the man she’d taken as a lover.

“We also suspect,” Wolf continued soberly, “Cordell may have used the senator to gain access to extremely sensitive top secret information.”

Nina took a step back, and her shock that a popular, charismatic senator had indulged in an extramarital affair and possibly committed suicide took an instant and very personal turn. The information Kevin had downloaded from her personal computer certainly wasn’t top secret, but it had been crucial to her business. She would have shared it with him if he’d asked. Not all of it, of course, just the nonproprietary data that might have been useful to his financial planning and investment operation. That he’d dug into her private files without her knowledge or consent had stunned her. That he’d leveraged the data he’d extracted to benefit one of her competitors had royally pissed her off.

“Bastard,” she muttered.

“Yeah, he is.”

Pulled back to the present, she blinked. “I was referring to the jerk who pulled almost the same thing on me.”

Blackstone cocked his head. “How so?”

It embarrassed her to admit how blind she’d been. She had to force herself to recap the sorry details.

“My fiancé stole proprietary information and sold it to a competitor. Correction, make that exfiancé.”

She wasn’t looking for sympathy. Good thing, because the man seated on the bar stool a few feet from her didn’t display so much as a trace of it. Instead, a gleam of satisfaction leapt into his blue eyes.

“Then you understand why we’re so anxious to nail Sebastian Cordell.”

“I understand it,” Nina replied cautiously, “but I don’t see how my having lunch with him will help.”

“We’ve been trying to get someone inside the compound. Unfortunately, Cordell’s goon squad take their duties very seriously.”

“I noticed.”

“But Cordell just issued you an engraved invitation. We can fit you with a hidden camera, have you—”

“Whoa! Hold on there, Blackstone.”

With the shoulder holsters strapped onto the goons he’d just mentioned all too vivid in her mind, Nina scrambled off her stool and backed away.

“I’m not into playing spy games.”

“This isn’t a game,” he fired back.

“Yes, well, whatever it is, I’ll leave it to the pros like you.”

Blackstone vacated his stool and followed her into the living area. Like the rest of the casita, the room was elegantly furnished. A three-section sofa in muted colors formed a conversation pit, with a monster slab of white-veined black marble in the middle to serve as a coffee table. Facing the sofas was an entertainment center containing a sixty-inch flat screen TV, a DVD player, an assortment of recent movies and an iPod dock.

Nina’s iPod and earbuds were still in her straw tote, so the only sound in the room, as she faced Blackstone was the restless murmur of the sea below the balcony, just off the living area.

“We need your cooperation, Dr. Grant. Cordell plans to auction the information he stole to the highest bidder. If it falls into the wrong hands—an unfriendly government or a terrorist organization, for instance—it could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security.”

“Oh, sure. Lay the safety and security of the United States on my shoulders, why don’t you?”