LUST (A STEPBROTHER ROMANCE)

What the hell was he doing? I stepped backward as he moved toward me, one step, then another, until I was flush against the cold metal wall of our makeshift prison.

“Stop. I’m warning you, Nathan!” I shouted, holding the gun up. He stepped closer, reaching out. Every part of me wanted to pull the trigger. Here he was, the man I thought I could trust, ready to show me how foolish I’d been… But I couldn’t do it. His hand wrapped the barrel of the gun and pushed it aside as he swept me up into his arms.

“Oh, God. I thought I might not see you again,” he whispered, tears streaming down his face. I didn’t even have a chance to protest as he forced his lips down onto mine. What the hell was going on? He ran his hands over my body, my gun clattering to the floor. I pushed him back as hard as I could, separating us.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, looking around the small space. Shelves lined the walls, and a phone was wired into one of them. Next to me, a small cot was pushed up against the side of the space and a laptop sat atop a little table, open to what looked like a stock market ticker.

“It’s a safe room, Sandra. Three-foot-thick walls, enough food, water, and air for a month. I had it built a few months after I moved into this place, as a precaution…”

“Why the hell am I in here?” I asked indignantly, staring into his crystalline eyes. Despite its name, this room made me feel anything but safe. I felt claustrophobic, like the walls and Nathan were all closing in around me. I felt like a cornered animal, like a victim waiting to happen.

I had never felt this way with him before. I didn’t like it.

“Because I needed a safe place to talk about this,” Nathan said, tossing a small recording device onto the table. I recognized it immediately. It was a standard issue t22 short range video and audio transmitter. We used them to listen in on people during investigations. “There’s dozens of them all over the house,” he added.

“Of course there are. You were potentially connected to one of the biggest human smuggling rings we’ve ever taken down. Do you really think the police wouldn’t have ears on you?” I shouldn’t have been so open, but I also didn’t like lying to the man who had stolen my heart. I needed to look into his eyes and know one way or another if he was guilty.

“I’m pulling these things out of here. All of them. I’ll live in this goddamned safe room if I have to. The police offered me protection for my testimony, they gave me immunity,” Nathan replied.

I almost smirked. Immunity protected you from past crimes, not the present. The captain had to be hell-bent on taking Nathan down if he was investing this much of the budget into tracking and listening in on him. Any little misstep and the asshole billionaire would be behind bars. Just thinking about the women on that container ship made my blood boil. I wanted to be the one to slap the handcuffs on this asshole…

This asshole who made me love him.

“And there’s this,” he continued, tossing a small box next to the transmitter. This box was far more chilling. Photographs spilled out onto the table, dozens of shots from every single angle. My apartment, my car, the inside of my bedroom…

And one of me from just last night, asleep in my bed.

I stared at it for a moment, fear washing over me.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, trembling in place. I had to maintain my composure. Nathan was trying to put me off balance. He was trying to make me need him. I could see right through this game—he’d put someone in my bedroom and had them take pictures of me. He had to…

“Did someone hurt you?” he asked, his eyes suddenly alight with an angry, terrified fire. “So help me God, if someone hurt you…”

“I’m okay. Nobody hurt me. I didn’t even know they were there,” I whispered, sitting down on the cot next to him. He seemed sincere, and that set warning bells off in my mind. Was he playing me for a fool? Was this whole thing an act? Did Nathaniel Hale have me photographed in my own bed? And if he didn’t, who the hell did?

I couldn’t put it past him. Knowing what I knew, what the Captain had shown me, Nathan was capable of damn near anything. If he was half as cunning as Captain Pierce had made him out to be, there was no telling what plan he might concoct to keep me from seeing the truth.

Maybe he intended to keep me out of harm’s way. Or maybe he wanted me in here where I couldn’t interfere with his plans, where I couldn’t snoop around and ruin his schemes. Even if I’d quit the force, he might have suspected that I’d still be able to put my detective training to good use. Maybe this was intended to be my prison.

“We can stop this,” I said, trying to manufacture a reason to get us out of this room. “The police, the FBI…”

“No, Sandra. Don’t you see? Someone with a badge has been watching me this whole time. Things haven’t sat right with me since the courthouse transfer.”

The transfer… My mind flashed back to the men I’d shot. It played over the chase, and the way Officer Kimball had sped off ahead.

“There were two in uniform when they came to pick me up. Everything seemed normal. The lanky guy, the one with the scar, he gets me in the car and shoots his buddy in the head, point blank. A couple of the undercover cops tried to stop him, but it was too late.”

Kimball… It had never sat right with me. I trusted Officer Kimball, and he’d gotten in the car with scar-face like nothing was wrong. If he was in on it, why did he end up taking a bullet?

My mind went back to the day I shot O’Rourke. I could see Kimball and the way he greeted the man with the scar. It was as if they knew each other… Or… Maybe he was expecting someone.

Still, that didn’t explain why Kimball had sped off ahead. If he was killed during the pickup, that meant he thought everything was normal right up until the last minute… He never would have broken from protocol… Unless…

Captain’s orders… Kimball would have trusted the Captain. If he was ordered to hurry to the pickup, he would have done it. If the Captain had assigned someone to ride along with him, he wouldn’t have questioned it.

Captain Pierce had called Kimball “compromised.” He’d branded him a traitor.

“They’ve pulled my passport, Sandra. They say it’s temporary, in case I’m needed for any further questioning. Why? The case is over. Peter Wallace is in jail. They’re railroading me,” Nathan whispered.

Now it was the captain’s voice ringing in my head as the detective inside me went to work, putting all the pieces together.

“We still have a rat, Sandra. Officer Kimball was compromised, and now he’s dead.”

That son of a bitch, I thought to myself. It all made sense. Nathan wasn’t the one who had been playing me all this time. It was Captain Pierce.

And now he was trying to turn me on Nathan. If I gave him access to one of Nathan’s computers, there was no telling what he might do.

But why? What the hell was his angle? Money? Power? Promotion? Was he working some kind of vigilante angle? If Captain Pierce had any part in this, then the blood of thirty-six women, and maybe even more, was on his hands.

There was still one small problem, though. A container was on an inbound ship, and it had Nathan’s fingerprints all over it.

“Are you okay? Talk to me,” Nathan said.

“Nathan, I’m going to need you to be honest with me,” I whispered, staring at him. My gun was sitting on the floor well out of reach, but I was already making plans to lunge for it, if necessary. There were so many possibilities surrounding this whole sordid affair that I still couldn’t rule anything out, and that included Nathan’s possible involvement.

My heart told me a different story. It begged me to rush into Nathan’s arms, to bury my face in his chest and promise to protect him, no matter what. Listening to it would have been dangerous, but at that moment, it was all that I wanted to do.

I forced myself to listen to my brain instead. That way, I was far less likely to get myself shot.

“I’ll tell you anything, Sandra,” he replied, his eyes

sparkling in the way I’d come to enjoy. Could he really be the evil man the Captain had made him out to be? I’d been a detective long enough to know when someone wasn’t being sincere, and either Nathan was the best liar I’d ever met, or he was genuinely concerned about me.

“You signed for another container. Didn’t you?”

His eyes cast to the floor quickly, not wanting to meet my own. He might as well have come right out and said it: yes, that was his doing. My body was tense, muscles ready to throw myself to the floor, toward the gun that might be my only salvation.

“I had to, Sandra. Let me explain.”

“You want to explain? The last container ended up at the bottom of the ocean. You just condemned another group of women—children—to death or sex slavery, and you want to explain?!”

My mother would have been proud. Her angry woman voice was channeling through me from beyond the grave. Maybe Nathan was right; maybe the Captain was trying to hand his ass over to the Irish, but none of that mattered if this asshole was still bringing women over. This time, he had no excuse. He knew what was in that container, but he’d signed for it anyway. This wasn’t a case of willful ignorance. He was a monster, and he needed to be stopped.

“Sandra, stop. Mr. Wallace used my company to keep his business at arm’s length. The Chinese didn’t know who they were working with. They didn’t know Mr. Wallace’s operation had ceased to be, and they had already been paid for the next shipment up front. The container showed up at my Chinese dock with three heavily armed guards to ensure it arrived safely. If I hadn’t signed for the delivery, there would be another pile of bodies.”