The man shot her a sharp look, but she simply gave him a cool nod and walked out the door, listening as he closed it behind them. If there was any chance Billy had really known what he was doing, then she’d protected the worst kind of criminal, and she was going to have to live with that. She just had to believe in him, and in her own instincts. Anyway, it was too late now, and if she told this unnamed man the truth he would probably shoot Billy, or the other way around, and she couldn’t bear the thought of any more dead bodies. She let the man lead the way, putting everything out of her mind but the young woman who needed her help. She’d done what she could to help her brother. Whether she’d made the right choice or not remained to be seen.
An hour later she found herself bringing Soledad to the bus for the refugees, her brother forgotten in the chaos. The exquisitely beautiful young woman was in some kind of shock, unable to produce more than a word or two, despite Jenny’s excellent Spanish, but she came along obediently enough, though Jenny could sense her distrust. Who could blame the girl? She’d been kidnapped from her home in Calliveria, locked inside a freight container with as many women and children they could fit, and then endured the grueling voyage up to New Orleans. It was lucky she wasn’t comatose.
The little ones bounced back more easily. When she climbed into the bus behind Soledad, she heard the buzz of noise, and the sudden, relieved laughter of a young child. She turned, needing the solace of it, only to see the man who’d seemed so threatening less than an hour ago squatting down beside a particularly grubby child, talking to him in calm, liquid Spanish. She couldn’t hear his words, but she could see the child’s reaction—gleeful and mesmerized. Maybe the man just had that effect on people, she thought for a moment. And then he rose and saw her, and his face went cool and blank, like a killer’s face.
She knew what a killer’s face looked like, thanks to her father. She knew this man had been responsible for some, if not all, of the dead men on board. Danger, Will Robinson! flashed in her mind.
“You can go home now,” he said to her.
She couldn’t resist. “Oh, may I?” she said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “How kind of you to dismiss me.”
“If it were up to me you’d be answering a lot more questions, Ms. Parker,” he said. “But my friends on the police force tell me you’re untouchable. How much do you pay for that privilege?”
She bit back her instinctive reply. In fact, their hands-off approach with her came more from the work she did and the help she gave rather than her father’s generous payoffs, but the guilt that had been pushed to the back of her mind surged forward again, and he looked at her sharply, as if reading her mind.
“Nothing at all, John Doe,” she snapped. “The good I do outweighs any possible infringement on policy.”
He cocked his head to one side. “They might believe it. I don’t. And the name’s Ryder. Matthew Ryder. You’re going to be hearing it again.” It was a clear threat—the farthest thing from flirtation she could imagine—but she simply smiled at him.
“I’m looking forward to it.” And she realized with slightly horrified amazement that she actually was.
Chapter Two
“What the fuck?” Six weeks later Matthew Ryder was sitting in the inner office of the American Committee for the Preservation of Democracy, nursing a glass of scotch that he shouldn’t have been drinking before noon, when the sound of the front doorbell of the old mansion in the Garden District shot through his head like a spike. Of course he had a hangover, so even the wind in the live oak trees surrounding the house would feel like the universe crashing down around him, but he’d been counting on a peaceful day all to himself. Granted, it was just past eleven, but it was a Sunday, and the Crescent City seemed to have two things on its mind on Sundays—football and drinking. He was holding up his end on the drinking part, but he didn’t give a crap about football. In fact, he didn’t give a crap about anything but being left alone, and yet standing outside the broad double doors of the recently refurbished mansion was Ms. Jennifer Gauthier Parker, Esquire, one of the last people he wanted to see on a very long list of people he wanted to avoid.
Ms. Parker was, of course, a member of the ancient Gauthier family, one of the oldest in New Orleans, wielding more power than any other comparable family, and in the Big Easy, power was even more corrupting than in Washington, DC. The Gauthiers were as dirty as they came, except, presumably, for the saintly Ms. Parker, who had left the family business for the virtuous life of a pro bono immigration lawyer.
He stared at the high-definition screen that was a far cry from most surveillance systems, into the impatient, ridiculously pure face of his current nemesis. Parker looked to be in her late twenties, with a head of reddish brown curls, a stubborn mouth, opaque eyes, and the kind of rounded figure he particularly liked. Too bad she was such a major pain in the ass. She had one of her stray waifs beside her, a small, slight female figure with a bowed head of thick black hair. He didn’t give a shit about her either. He just wanted to drink in peace.
Speaking of pain in the ass, Ms. Jennifer Parker was still ringing his doorbell, and he rose, kicking the wastebasket across the room. It was empty, of course—any paper that they used, and they used damned little, was shredded and burned—but the clanging noise expressed his bad temper perfectly. It also rocketed through his head, and he wanted to groan. Too bad he had no reason to sock Parker in the nose—though if he did she’d probably shriek and make his splitting head even worse.
The hair of the dog was supposed to cure his hangover—all it did was make him feel like dog hair. And Ms. Parker, Esq. wasn’t going anywhere no matter how determined he was to ignore her. Might as well face the music and get it over with.
He almost wished he were drunk, but he’d barely had time to settle down with his too-early drink when Ms. Goddamn Parker began ringing the doorbell. He slammed the door behind him, winced, slid the concealing wall across the space, and made his way down the wide, curving staircase at a leisurely pace.
She’d be getting really pissed off by now, and the thought made him slightly more cheerful. He’d never been big on martyrs and do-gooders, and Parker was just a bit too saintly for his tastes, despite the fact that she was absolutely delicious, with her mop of curly hair, her warm brown eyes, and that very fine body she disguised with too-proper clothing. Which was fine with him—she hated him even more than he disliked her. She wouldn’t be any happier showing up on his doorstep on a Sunday afternoon than he was.
At least he could cherish that thought.
Jenny was standing outside the huge old house in the Garden District of New Orleans, the bright winter sun beating down on her and her companion, and she would have given ten years of her life to be anywhere else. “Don’t worry, Soledad,” she told the slender young woman beside her. “I’m sure Mr. Ryder is here—he just takes his time when it isn’t normal business hours.” The thought was depressing—she couldn’t count on another reprieve, and she had to face him sooner or later.
“But I do not understand,” Soledad said in her softly accented voice, her gorgeous brown eyes downcast. “Why are we coming to see him?”
“Because his organization is responsible for stopping the criminals who kidnapped you and so many others and brought you to this country,” she said firmly, leaning on the doorbell. “It’s their job to clean up the mess, and we need his help. I wish we didn’t—the man is a distrustful pain in the ass, but beggars can’t be choosers.”
“I would have thought . . .” she hesitated, her English momentarily failing her, “just stopping those terrible men was enough. Really, Miss Parker, you do not need to do this. I can find work on my own—I do not need any help.”
“You’d be an illegal alien,” Jenny said. “And the Committee knows how to pull strings to get you your green card.”
“What is this . . . Committee?”
Jenny shrugged, shoving a hand through her unruly hair. “No one really knows, and I’m not about to ask. I just know they were responsible for your release from that container ship, and they’re so secretive they must have a huge amount of power. That was one thing I learned from my family,” she added wryly. “The more mysterious the organization, the more influential it is. Besides, they took care of the paperwork for the other women and children—if you hadn’t been sick, you would already have your papers as well.” Jenny suspected that if Soledad hadn’t gotten sick, she would have taken off before the papers arrived, but that was neither here nor there. She couldn’t blame the girl for being distrustful, especially after all she and her fellow captives had been through at the hands of the traffickers. At the hands, innocent though they’d been, of her brother. Had she been in the same position, she wouldn’t have trusted anyone either. “It was a good thing the police searched the ship thoroughly and found you in the sick bay. Otherwise you might have gotten towed out to impound and no one would have found you.”
Soledad gave her that sweet smile that had captivated everyone at the small, street-corner office that held Jenny’s practice. “Yes, I am very lucky,” she said in a tranquil voice. “We will have to hope that this Mr. . . . Strider will be as wonderfully helpful as everyone else has been.”
“Ryder,” Jenny corrected. “I’ve met him before, and he’s not likely to be wonderfully anything except an asshole. But he’s going to make sure you can either stay here or go back home, whichever you prefer . . .”
“Stay here,” Soledad said quickly. “It is too dangerous for me to go back to Calliveria.”