Chapter One
Benson Security, London Office, Present Day
* * *
Rachel Ford-Talbot should never have allowed her father to hire her company. There were plenty of other security experts in London who could have worked with him just as easily. But no, she’d let sentimentality get the better of her, just because he’d had one teeny, tiny heart attack, and now she was the one suffering. If that wasn’t a lesson in why you shouldn’t help people, she didn’t know what was.
“I don’t see why I have to get involved in the investigation,” she told Callum McKay, one of her business partners.
As usual, the Scotsman was in a bad mood. One that’d started the day he was retired from the SAS after losing both legs to a bomb in Afghanistan. Even though he had state-of-the-art prosthetics now, he was still permanently grumpy—unless you were his wife or his children. For them, he tried to act human.
“Because,” he said through a jaw clenched so hard it was a wonder he could talk at all, “you’re familiar with your family’s pharmaceutical company, and you’re the one who can get us close to the family members on the board.” He folded his arms over one of his many gray Henleys and glared at her.
Like that would have any impact. Honestly. Didn’t he know her?
“You have a professional spy leading the investigation.” Rachel waved a hand in the general direction of Michael Carter, whom everyone called Harvard. She had no idea why, since he’d studied at MIT. Sometimes it was as though everyone she worked with was still in middle school. Shouldn’t nicknames be banned as soon as you hit your twenties? Wasn’t there a law making it so? “Surely a former CIA agent can take care of this investigation on his own. After all, it isn’t like he has to infiltrate Al-Qaeda; we’re talking about a pharmaceutical company in Surrey. Compared to investigating ISIS, getting to the bottom of some industrial espionage should be a walk in the park.”
On the other side of the conference table, Harvard sat back in his chair, relaxed and smiling. Those dark eyes sparkling at her in challenge. Something he’d been doing ever since joining Benson Security months earlier. It was as though he knew a secret, a sexy secret, that he was willing to share with her if she’d just take a step toward him. Which was not going to happen. She didn’t do relationships. And she definitely had no intention of entering into a casual arrangement with a colleague. No matter how much he tempted her.
“Rachel,” her father said with long suffering, “you know as well as anyone that Harvard can’t get close to the family without help.”
“Then you help him. You know the company and the family members on the board even better than I do.”
The vein throbbing at his temple brought back many childhood memories. Apparently, that particular vein hadn’t even been there before Rachel was born, and she was the only one out of her siblings to cause it to throb.
“How exactly can I help him?” His tone was clipped. “Should I tell everyone he’s my long-lost son?”
Rachel cocked her head as she considered the idea.
“Don’t even think about it,” Callum snapped. “Nobody would buy it.”
“Because Harvard’s African-American?” Rachel prodded her partner, as making him snap was too much fun to resist. “How very narrow-minded of you. Father could just as easily have had an illicit affair with a black woman as a white woman.”
“I haven’t had any affairs,” her father barked.
She gave him what she hoped was a sweet smile. “As you keep telling me, this situation isn’t real. We’re pretending, and it’s only for the duration of the investigation. If I can pretend I’m engaged to my bodyguard, surely you can pretend you have an illegitimate son.”
“And have my reputation ruined in the meantime? Do you seriously want your mother to have to deal with that kind of gossip? Stop being so difficult. We both know you wouldn’t let her suffer like that any more than I would.”
Roger Ford-Talbot pushed back his chair and started pacing the length of Benson Security’s conference room. Pacing was something else he seemed to do more often around her than her brothers.
“Rachel,” Callum rumbled, “just suck it up and do the bloody job. You’re best suited to it, and you know it. How hard can it be to pretend you’re engaged to Harvard? You hardly take your eyes off each other anyway.”
Harvard cocked an eyebrow at her in challenge. Daring her to deny Callum’s claim. Like she cared one way or another what any of them thought.
She absently tapped her red nails against her iPhone screen. “My strengths lie in business management, not in espionage. Or even in any type of fieldwork. And goodness knows I’ve been in enough field situations to know I’m not suited to it. I don’t see why we can’t just give the job you want to give me to Harvard. As director of special projects, he’d have no problem getting close to the family members employed at TayFor.”
“Because,” her father said as he paced, “the company would never appoint someone to a role like that without them going through the interview process, and that involves the whole board. There would be no way to guarantee he got the job, and even if he did get it, it would take months to put him in place within the company. Months where this thief is free to steal whatever they like from us. Whereas you’re a family member and a shareholder, so you could take up the position without delay or any argument from the board.”
Which reminded her—she was still angry about that little deception too. “When I turned thirty, I told you I didn’t want my shares in the company. I told you to get rid of them.”
“And I assumed you were making an emotional and irrational decision that you would regret later, so I kept them for you.”
Callum snorted. “Aye, the first thing anybody thinks when they meet Rachel is that she’s emotional and irrational. Listening to you talk, I wonder if we know the same person.”
Her father ran a hand through his pristinely coiffured silver hair. “Regardless of everyone’s perception of my daughter, it’s a good job I kept hold of her shares in TayFor. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any way to get your team in place to investigate the family.” His head fell forward and he shook it. “I can’t believe it’s come to this. I can’t believe that someone I trust is stealing from us.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Really? You can’t believe it? Uncle Theo’s on marriage number five, while the payments for his first four marriages are crippling him financially. Not to mention, we have no idea what connections the new wife brought into the family. I believe he picked this one up in a strip club. Cousin Rupert has a well-known gambling problem—the problem being he never wins. Aunt Clarissa has been in rehab three times. And when she relapses, she’d sell a kidney to get a fix, so it isn’t a stretch to believe she’d sell company secrets instead. And that’s only scraping the surface. Who knows what everyone else is doing behind closed doors? Although I’m sure that information will be fascinating once our tech team digs it up. You may as well face facts; we’re a family of criminals. We just do it wearing Prada.”