Her Enemy Protector (Tempt Me 2)

Lucas jerked to a stop. All the little details about the short man came into focus. The faded scar above his shirt collar. His super-short blond hair. The chunk missing from the shell of his right ear where a stray bullet during the Elskov coup ten years ago had missed ending the man who would threaten her safety again to avenge his father.

Gregers Henriksen was on Fare Island.

An icy fury directed only at himself pricked every nerve until Lucas was so overloaded, he couldn’t feel a damn thing, and this was what let him clearly think for the first time since Ruby had walked past him into Moad Manor. Using the arrival of the wedding guests, a mix of the rich and reckless along with the criminal and shady, to camouflage the arms exchange was the perfect plan. One Lucas should have seen coming. Now there was no way to cancel the wedding, not if he was going to stop that exchange before Henriksen took off with the rest of the guests Sunday morning. Looking over at Ruby, he saw the same stark realization in her eyes.

“It’s okay,” she whispered. “It comes first.”

Before he could form words, Ingrid pivoted and spotted them.

“If it isn’t the happy couple,” she exclaimed. “Ruby and Luc, come meet Annabelle DiStario, she is Mr. Henriksen’s guest and the only woman I’ve ever met who can do such a beautiful fascinator justice. Don’t you agree, Ruby?”

“Most definitely.” Her voice shook the slightest bit, but her gaze and welcoming smile held steady as she reached out to shake the woman’s hand.

“Have you met Luc Svendsen before, Gregers?” Rolf leaned in closer to the man. “He’s a friend of ours who carries secrets for the same reasons the other people carry cash.”

Rolf chuckled at his own joke. Ignoring his host, Henriksen narrowed his eyes and gave Lucas the kind of hard look that made every hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. Less than fifteen people in the world knew Luc Svendsen, dealer of information people would rather keep quiet, was Lucas Bendtsen, head of the Silver Knights. The chance of that secret getting out was minute, but who better than him to know that those were the exact kind of secrets that always managed to get out. In the blink of an eye, though, the questioning look disappeared.

“You do look familiar, but I’m having trouble connecting the name with the face.” Henriksen shook Lucas’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive me. I’m horrible with names.”

“It’s good to meet you.” Not wiping his palm on his p

ants took more self-restraint than he was used to exerting, but control was his best weapon right now.

More of the guests wandered over to extend their well-wishes. The conversation went on around him, and he was sure to make the appropriate responses and facial expressions, but he wasn’t really listening. Henriksen had disappeared into the crowd, but Lucas couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was somewhere watching him, biding his time. Rolf had already moved the exchange once. Lucas couldn’t take the chance that he’d do it again, not when Henriksen and the guns were on the island.

The guns.

It jolted through him. His team wasn’t here, but if he, Clausen, and Jasper could confirm their location, the Silver Knights could confiscate them and take Henriksen into custody. The fact that Rolf wouldn’t be sentenced to a life inside an Elskovian prison for his part in the plot burned a hole in Lucas’s gut, but the order had come down from the queen herself not to touch him. Before any of that, though, he needed to ensure he wasn’t sending his agents on another wild goose chase. He had to make sure the guns were here, somewhere on the island.

Ruby intertwined her fingers with his and squeezed. “Don’t be fooled by his silence, Ms. DiStario, I’m sure Luc has an interesting take on the latest wool crisis.” She looked up at him, tension evident in her strained expression. “Don’t you, dear?”

Of course I don’t. Who the hell cares about wool when there is an entire armory of guns secreted away somewhere?

And he knew just the person to help him figure out where.

Turning on the charm, he lifted Ruby’s hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her knuckles. “I hate to do this with all the guests arriving, Ingrid, but I have to sneak away with my bride to be for a little bit before you steal her away from me for all the last minute wedding preparations.”

“How romantic,” DiStario said with a sigh.

Ingrid’s face softened, and the underlying sadness that always seemed just under the surface and the spark of iron she’d shown the other night rose to the forefront for half a second before her usual half-hazy expression fell back into place. “You do that. I’ll try and hold off the horde for as long as possible.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

Ruby gave her mother a quick kiss on the cheek before they took off together, hurrying through the kitchen and out the side door onto the deserted staff patio. After a quick look around without spotting anyone, he took another few steps out into the garden and pulled her behind a tall trio of shrubs.

“He changed the exchange,” Ruby said, her voice low.

“Looks that way, but I need confirmation before I pull an entire team away from Luxembourg.” Really, it was pretty fucking ingenious. Even if the Silver Knights had known the delivery would have happened this way, there was no way they could have stopped and searched each of the vessels arriving at Fare Island without causing a huge international incident. “If it were me, I’d use the arrival of all the wedding guests like camouflage, but I wouldn’t want to keep a yacht docked with the others, too many prying criminal eyes, and I’d want to be able to have it guarded without drawing attention of the guests or anyone who might be monitoring by satellite.”

The satellite imagery of the island showed several narrow inlets, but none looked to be large enough for a yacht to tuck into.

“Skjult Bay. It’s small but deep. You could moor a yacht without any problems. There’s an abandoned lighthouse there that I used to hide in as a kid. You could use that to minimize the chance of anyone noticing the security sitting around.”

“That’s it.” The maps showed it as the largest cove. It was at the north end of the island, but without being able to go as the crow flies, it would take him twice as long to get there via the winding narrow roads circling the island. “Tell me the Sparrow showed you a shortcut during one of your weird bonding hikes.”

She grinned, her gray eyes sparkling with excitement. “There’s not a single millimeter of this island I don’t know. Come on. We don’t have time to waste.”

His gut twisted at the idea of putting her in a worse position than she was already in by having to delay getting off the island. “You’re not coming with me. It’s not safe. Just tell me how to get there.”