A View to a Thrill (Masters and Mercenaries Book 7) (2 page)

“Chelsea!”

She turned and saw her sister. Charlotte’s hair whipped behind her as she ran to catch up. She had sneakers in her hand, her feet still wet from splashing through the waves.

“Hi. Were you with your boyfriend?” She used a little singsong voice, absolutely sure to make her sister crazy.

Charlotte’s nose wrinkled up. “Ewww, gross. Bobby is not my boyfriend.”

“He looks like your boyfriend.”

“Does not.”

“Does, too.” Charlotte spent entirely too much time with the pimply faced kid. And his feet smelled.

“He’s just a friend. Trust me. When I get married someday I’m going to marry a man who treats me like a princess.”

Chelsea smiled. This was one of their favorite games. Someday. Someday Charlotte would be a lawyer or doctor or actress, depending on the day. Chelsea knew what she wanted to be. A teacher. She wanted to be just like her mom and teach little kids all about how to read. She wasn’t sure she needed to get married. Her mom didn’t need a man.

Still, sometimes she thought it would be nice. Sometimes she thought Momma was lonely. She caught her every now and then reading a book of poetry and crying.

It’s just because it’s so lovely, dear. The poems remind me how much I love you.

Someday she was going to read those poems.

But now it was just fun to tease her sister. “I don’t think Bobby is a prince.”

They started walking toward the little cottage on the beach that had been their home for as long as Chelsea could remember.

“Someday, I’m going to marry a handsome man who is polite to everyone around him.” She turned around, her arms out as she made a full circle before starting to walk again. “And everyone will love him. He’ll be the sweetest guy in the world.”

Charlotte would find that man. Her sister was the sweetest girl in the world, and she deserved the best guy possible. A man who would love her and treat her gently.

If she ever got married, Chelsea wanted someone smart and kind and who would never, ever hurt her.

“Whose car is that?” Charlotte stopped, her hand going up over her eyes, shielding them from the sun.

Chelsea looked up and there was a big black SUV parked next to their clunky station wagon. A man stood at the front, his face turned toward their little cottage. She caught the glint of metal at his waist, but she wasn’t sure what the sun was catching. His belt maybe.

Charlotte reached for her hand. “I don’t know. He looks scary. Maybe we should go to the Johnsons.”

Chelsea slipped out of her sister’s grasp because there was a roll in her gut. Something was wrong. Her mother only had female friends and none of their husbands drove ominous black SUVs. She started to run, the sand dragging her down, but she knew she had to get to her mother.

“Chelsea,” Charlotte said beside her. “Chelsea, Momma told me to hide if we ever thought strange men were after us.”

Men with accents. Her mother had told her the same thing, but these men didn’t seem to be after her and her sister. They were in the house with Momma. Chelsea had to know. She couldn’t run and hide when her mother was there. She didn’t think, simply acted, running toward the house she’d known her whole life, the place where she’d been safe.

She was almost up the hill when the door opened and a man stepped outside, casually wiping something off his hands. He was a big man, maybe the largest Chelsea had ever seen. He had hair like Charlotte’s, blonde threaded with streaks of red, but unlike her sister, he wasn’t smiling. There was a grimness that made Chelsea stop in her tracks.

Charlotte stopped beside her.

“Is that blood?” her sister whispered.

Chelsea couldn’t take her eyes off the handkerchief in the man’s hand. Bright-red blood marred the white fabric. Blood.

Why was he bleeding? He didn’t look hurt. He was standing tall, his shoulders perfectly straight. He looked out over the beach as though searching for something. He spoke then, and Chelsea shivered at the sound.

“Найти ее.”

Charlotte pulled on her hand and this time Chelsea didn’t fight, but when they turned they found the way blocked.

And the sun. The massive man in front of them blocked out the sun, casting a long shadow over Chelsea and her sister. Charlotte’s hand squeezed hers so tight that Chelsea’s eyes filled with tears for two reasons. There was pain, but the only reason her sister would ever cause her that pain was out of fear.

Something bad was going to happen. Something very bad.

“Charlotte?” a deep voice asked.

Charlotte turned, pulling Chelsea with her. “Where’s my mom?”

The big man with the accent shrugged negligently. “She’s suffered an accident. I’m afraid she’s gone, but I’m your father and I’m here to take you home.”

Gone? Gone where? Her mother never left for long. She went to work, but someone always watched them and it wouldn’t be a scary man with blood on his hands. Where had her mother gone?

She wouldn’t leave them. Momma wouldn’t leave.

Unless…

Chelsea saw the world through blurry eyes as the truth hit her. Gone. It was a word that adults used. She’d learned that adults had lots of words that meant more than one thing. Gone was adult speak for the truth.

Dead. Gone was dead. It was a stupid word because gone meant leaving for something, but dead was just dead. Dead was a useless word and her mom wasn’t useless. Her mom couldn’t be dead.

Charlotte started to struggle beside her as the big man picked her up. Their hands came undone, and Chelsea had the horrible fear that Charlotte would be gone and she wasn’t sure in what way.

Charlotte kicked and screamed out Chelsea’s name. She pleaded with the man taking her as Chelsea stood, her feet planted to the ground because she wasn’t sure what else to do.

She closed her eyes. When a dream got bad, she had to remind herself that it was only a nightmare and that she could wake herself up. She was going to wake up. Tears squeezed from her eyes, dripping down her cheeks like warm rain.

Let me wake up. Wake up. Wake up.

When she woke up, Momma would be there making breakfast and Charlotte would say she didn’t like Bobby even though Chelsea was sure she did. The screaming would stop when she woke up. The crying would stop.

“Bring the other girl. She could prove useful,” a dark voice said.

A hand wrapped around her arm, and Chelsea opened her eyes. A man with a huge scar running down his face frowned down at her as she heard a car door slam.

“I’m sorry, little one. If it were up to me I would reunite you with your mother quickly. It looks like fate has other plans. Come along.” He started to walk, seeming not to mind when she stumbled.

Her feet hit the concrete, skin tearing in little streaks of pain and blood. She tried to keep up, tried to make her legs move faster, but it was useless.

She was shoved into the car. Immediately her sister was there, arms going around Chelsea.

She huddled in the car with Charlotte as it took off. She looked back, the little cottage fading into the distance, and wondered if she would ever see it again.

She closed her eyes and prayed to wake up.

Chapter One

“Someone’s trying to kill me.”

Simon Weston tried to let the words settle on his brain, closing the door as Chelsea walked through. Chelsea Dennis, otherwise known as Denisovitch, the daughter of former Russian mobster Vladimir Denisovitch and niece to the recently deceased head of the Denisovitch Syndicate. Recently deceased because Simon’s boss, Ian Taggart, had taken care of the fucker. Simon often wished he’d been the one to stick a blade in the bastard’s heart.

He turned and couldn’t help but stare. Chelsea wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever met and yet she stopped him in his tracks. He’d escorted some of the world’s great beauties on red carpets and to royal events, but it was a little criminal mastermind who got his cock hard just by walking in a room. She wasn’t exactly plain, either. With chestnut-brown hair and a petite figure, she was actually quite pretty until one noticed her hips and ass. Those catapulted her into goddess territory. Anything she lacked in the tit department was more than made up for with that healthy ass and curvy hips a man could hang on to while he fucked deep inside.

If he could stop wanting her, he would, but he hadn’t managed that trick yet. From the moment he’d seen her all those months ago, he’d been utterly fascinated. She was a mystery to him. Closed off, with more barricades around her than he could count, she still pulled him in the minute she walked in a room. And every time he got close to her, she smacked him with a
No Trespassing
sign right upside his head.

Unfortunately, he was a man who liked a challenge and he was definitely a man who never, ever learned his lesson. She was in his home without her sister to hide behind. She seemed to need him for something. The very idea made his dick hard. His stupid bloody cock was nothing but a puppy ready to play around her.

He closed the door behind her. “What exactly do you mean?”

He had to ask. Sometimes when she talked she spoke in an odd geek speak he didn’t always understand. She could mean something entirely different, something innocuous.

God, he hoped this was a joke.

She turned, though her eyes went to anywhere but him. She looked around, seemingly curious about her surroundings. Given her wariness around him, it wasn’t surprising she’d never been in his condo. He’d been in hers the day they’d met. He’d dragged her out of it. It might not have been the most auspicious of beginnings. “I mean that I got a little bomb sent to my apartment.”

“What?” He managed not to shout.

She finally caught his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. I defused the sucker. I just thought maybe I should find someplace safer to sleep tonight. Whoever it is, he knows where I live. What’s your Internet like? Please tell me you have wireless.”

She was awfully calm for a woman who had just escaped being blown up. His heart, on the other hand, was thundering in his chest, his blood pressure ticking up ominously. “You need to repeat that for me and this time I would like the story in much greater detail.”

She turned those big green eyes on him, her bottom lip disappearing behind her teeth. It was a nervous habit. She was full of them. He’d catalogued every single one, from the way her good leg bounced when she was anxious to how often she braided and unbraided her hair when she was bored. “Simon, I know this seems weird, but I don’t have anywhere else to go. I can’t go to Charlotte’s. Ian would be up my ass in no time, and I don’t have anything to tell him yet. It would make Charlotte freak out, and I don’t need her to get any more overly protective. I can’t go to the others. They all have kids or they’re trying to have kids, except Jesse, who freaks me out a little.”

So he was her absolute rock-bottom last choice besides Jesse Murdoch, who sometimes became a raging lunatic ball of murder. That wasn’t so surprising. She turned away from him every chance she could. He hated the fact that every time she did it, it felt like a kick in his gut. “So you came here because you can’t go to Ian and I’m sure you want to avoid the police. Otherwise it would have been smarter to call them when you got a bloody bomb sent to your condo.”

“Oh, I didn’t have time to call,” she explained. “It was on a thirty-second timer. The minute I opened it, the timer began. Luckily it was a fairly simple setup. Still, I got pretty nervous when that sucker hit five seconds.”

She was going to give him a heart attack. “Where is the bomb?”

“I left it behind. I kind of just picked up my bug-out bag and came here.” She hefted the backpack off her shoulder and set it on the floor. It made her breasts move against her T-shirt. They were small, graceful and delicate. They would likely be very sensitive. He lay in bed at night and wondered if he could make her come just by sucking on her nipples.

He forced his brain off her tits. The fact that she even had a bug-out bag should scare the shit out of him. “Where’s your car?”

If someone had followed her, he needed to know about it. She likely hadn’t had time to check for locator devices.

Her eyes slid away from his. “I didn’t bring it with me. I hopped on a train and then I walked.”

She didn’t walk many places. Her leg gave her hell and she’d never done the work to strengthen it. A nasty suspicion took root in his gut. “Why?”

Her eyes slid away. “It seemed like the right thing to do.”

A lie. He couldn’t afford to put up with that. She was in trouble, and if she’d come to him then she was likely in serious trouble. He had no illusions that she would attempt to take control, and if he allowed her to, she would treat him like an employee. He had no intention of being her lackey. If she wanted his protection, she would accept that he was in charge. Of bloody everything.

He moved into her space, watching her every movement. He wondered if this wasn’t why he was so fascinated with her. He’d never watched a woman, taken such utter care in knowing how she reacted, the way he did with Chelsea. He’d spent hours simply studying her face, the expressions, the little lines she got when she was angry or sad. She tried to pretend nothing ever got to her, to pretend she wasn’t hurt or upset, but Simon knew what to look for and she was scared. It was there in the little tremble in her fingers.