The Price of Grace (Black Ops Confidential 2)

The drive leading to the parking lot was flanked by two hippie sculptures. He leapt over the first—a timepiece that looked like something right out of Alice in Wonderland. He jogged down the driveway, a stretch of asphalt squeezed between a warehouse and her club.

Gun out, he pulled up beside the club and scanned. No one around. There was a small crop of trees that lined the far edge of the parking lot. It’s where he’d placed his camera. No one there either.

Someone darted out from behind a car. Gracie? He watched her enter a small copse of trees that lined the far edge of the parking lot.

That’s where he’d placed his camera. He scanned again before heading out to give her a hand.

Nearly at the edge of the parking lot, she stepped out with her gun raised and pointed at him.

“Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. It’s me. Dusty.”

Her eyebrows inched up when she recognized him, but she didn’t say a word. As if they were back in Mexico, she crooked her head, indicating she’d go left. He went right. After triple-checking the surrounding area, they met back by her car.

Dusty holstered his gun. “You okay?”

“Of course.”

Lowering her gun, she held up a finger, as in give me a minute. He gave her the minute, but had no doubt she’d use that time to come up with an excuse for what had just happened.

Readjusting her disheveled shirt, covering the strap of a crimson bra but not the raspberry scrape on her arm, she bent to retrieve what turned out to be her purse and phone from under the car.

The phone and her weapon—Glock 22—went into her big bag. She opened the car door, tossed the purse inside, shut the door with an angry slam. Finally, she refocused her attention on him. “Why are you here?”

Was she serious? Not even an excuse, just a counter-attack? “Because I heard gunshots, and you’re jumping out of the woods with a gun in your hand.”

“Some nut tried to rob me,” she said, as if that were nothing to be alarmed about. Which sent off every alarm in his body. “I had a gun. He ran. And don’t try to distract me. I meant why are you in town?”

“Rob you?” Uh. Huh. “With a suppressed weapon? And I’m dumb as a box of rocks.”

She smiled. The kind of smile that made men drop to their knees or lose their minds.

He lost his mind.

Must have, because he was here for Mukta, the woman who adopted girls and made them into soldiers for her own war. He wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than proof of that.

So it was definitely the smile that caused the outburst: “Sure, Gracie, someone tried to rob you. With an expensive silenced weapon. Using an EMP jammer sophisticated enough not to set off your security. In a town so overconfident of the peace, not a soul opened a window to look out here. It surely wasn’t more than that. It surely doesn’t have a lick to do with your family and whatever shit y’all are into.”

She studied him long and hard. Or maybe what he’d said. Her eyebrows crashed together. “Why are you checking up on me? Showing up in the nick of time? Asking about jammers?”

Shit. “Why don’t you explain to me why someone wants to kill you?”

He stared at her. She stared back. She’d sent the letter, hadn’t she? She was reaching out for something, wasn’t she?

She drew nearer to him, so close his heart started its engines and revved, waiting for the green in her eyes to signal go.

Head inclined, her eyes flashed innocence, invitation, and challenge beneath long lashes. “Do you want to kiss me?”

“What?” He stepped back. The opposite of what he wanted to do. He wanted to wrap her in his arms, kiss her senseless, reassure his pounding heart she was safe—but not like this, not as a test, not as a game, and not when she was trying to distract him. Too bad his johnson hadn’t gotten the message.

She huffed at the distance he’d created. “Guess not. Or maybe you’re undercover and actually feel bad about lying, pretending to be former FBI.”

She quirked her mouth, ran her tongue along her upper lip with exaggerated slowness. Oh hell, she was practically calling out his cover. He stepped forward, grabbed her by the waist, pulled her body flush against his hard-on. Her eyebrows rose in surprise. She wiggled just a little.

His head dropped before he knew what was happening. His lips slid restlessly over hers. She opened wide for him. Soft. Wet. Sleek. Her glorious tongue stroked his, sent his heart thumping in his chest.

She deepened the kiss, put her hands around his waist, grabbed the belt loops on the back of his jeans and used them as leverage to grind herself against him.

The rough friction caused his dick to strain in his pants. He seriously needed to stop, to… Oh, good Lord. What is she doing with her tongue?

She broke the kiss.

Head spinning. Breath hot. He kissed along her cheek to her ear and whispered a plea and a moan. “Darlin’, tell me this ends with us upstairs.”

She laughed, squeezed his ass. “Sure. I’m going to boink your brains out and then give away all the family secrets while you lie satiated beside me.”

Boink?

She swatted his ass, stepped away. “Moron.”

Wait. What?

His head cleared. Slowly.

Oh. Shit. He’d walked right into that. He’d seen the trap, watched her lay it out in front of him, pretty as a picture, told himself not to go near it, then jumped the fuck inside. She was right. He was a moron. He grunted. Put his hands in his pockets to hide his still-raging boner.

Gracie grinned. He fought his own smile. Which wasn’t right, because he was pretty pissed off. “Okay, Gracie. Suppose I’ll see you soon.”

He turned and strolled off, unhooking his phone to make sure the feed to the camera was back on. It was. So the jammer the sniper had used wasn’t destructive. He’d have to devise a way of keeping track of her that was less vulnerable to interference.

He watched her run a hand through her hair, lean against her car, and after a moment that went on long enough to boost his confidence, turn from watching his ass and get into her vehicle.

Chapter 11

Wearing workaday jeans with a button-down over her C

lub When? T-shirt—a giant gold question mark over a clock—Gracie knelt at the periphery of the dance floor. She took another piece of red, white, and blue foam padding from the storage box and fastened it onto the gilt rail bordering the dance floor.

Around her, the sound of workers using drills and hammers to remove old decorations and put up new decorations invaded the normally quiet morning. Club When? changed themes, based on a time period or specific event in history, every eight weeks. The new theme was the Fourth of July.

Flags and fighter jets hung from the copper ceiling panels, along with strobe lights that would add to the Fourth of July fireworks light show. As she worked, her wary eyes swept the laborers, glad for the concealed carry at her side.

How much did she know about the men working on the club changes? Sure, she’d hired the contractor, Doug, and his crew many times over the years. But these weren’t all the same people who’d worked for him when she’d done her initial background check. Were they?

She wiped at her brow with the back of her hand. Sheesh. It had only taken an assassin and being threatened by an ex-lover to wake her up from the delusion that she was safe here.

She shifted as one of the workers came over to her with the framed Independence Day poster, an alien ship beaming an aggressive red light onto the Empire State Building. “Where you want it?”

Ignoring the hair that had escaped her ponytail and fallen across her eye, she quickly assessed any threat the man posed. He was tall, with a lanky build, but he held himself like someone who had some kind of training. Maybe former military.

This guy was one of the two men working here today whom she hadn’t done a background check on. Her heart doing that tentative dance, that ready-in-a-whisper acceleration, she put her arm flat across her stomach so she could draw her gun more quickly. Paranoid? Sure. But she could live with that.

She nodded toward the picture of Prince in all his glory—between two art deco stained-glass windows near the bar. “Replace that one.”