Knights and Kink Romance Boxed Set (27 page)

After an almost ten-minute walk through the dimly
lit brick paths that winded through the resort’s heavily vegetated
outer grounds, I finally arrived at the gated entryway to the
Presidential Suite—which wasn’t a suite at all, but rather a
private villa.

A heavily
guarded
private villa. Two
uniformed security guards—both with sidearms—blocked the door. I
immediately recognized one of them as the same bulky, hulking guard
that had been on duty at both the
Beltway Times’
offices and
Rodney’s apartment building.

Rodney’s personal bodyguard
, I thought to
myself.Obviously, that huge, luscious sample of black manhood
traveled with Rodney everywhere. And with good reason. After the
wringer that Rodney and his sleazy tabloid had put me through, I
could understand why there would probably be hundreds of people in
the world who’d want to do the man harm.

I didn’t know if the hulking guard would remember
who I was, but I knew there would be no way to get past him if he
didn’t.

“Excuse me,” I stammered. “I umm, don’t know if you
remember me, but—“

The huge man cut me off with a curt nod and a grip
on his gun holster. “You wanna see Rodney Doyle,” he boomed in his
deep, Barry White-on-steroids voice. He made Ving Rhames sound like
a child’s teddy bear.

I swallowed hard. “That’s right.”

“Sorry, no can do, ma’am. Mr. Doyle don’t wanna be
disturbed.”

“But—but I
know
him!” I protested. “And he
specifically flew all the way down here just to see me.”

The two guards exchanged looks and shrugged. “Sorry,
ma’am,” the familiar one said. “We have our orders. You’ll need to
run along now, ma’am.”

“But—wait—“

Barry White On Steroids was inches away from
manhandling me across the courtyard when a disheveled-looking,
pajama-clad Rodney appeared in the doorway. “What’s the trouble,
George?” he asked the hulking guard. Then he saw me and did a
double-take. “Jasmine! What are you doing here in the middle of the
night?”

“I should ask the same of you,” I retorted. “What
gave you the right to fly down here on a moment’s notice just so
you can break into my hotel suite and steal all my phone
messages?”

Rodney looked sheepish. “So you figured out that was
me,” he sighed.

“Actually, my friend Rebecca did. She’s the one who
told me you were here. What do you think you’re doing, showing up
here on a remote Caribbean island unannounced just so you can ruin
my vacation?” Now I was really seething. The two security guards
took their cue to leave us alone and took up a new post on the far
side of the courtyard. “That really takes a lot of balls, Rodney,
considering what you pulled on me back in Washington.”

Rodney bit his lip. “I’ve tried and tried to tell
you, Jasmine.
I had nothing to do with those pictures ending up
in any of the papers.
Including
my
paper. Why won’t you
give me a chance to explain?”

Instead of answering, I shoved past him into the
villa. I wandered from room to lavishly appointed room until I
discovered a wet bar, and poured myself a strong drink of local
100-proof rum.

I heard Rodney’s footsteps just behind me. “I
thought you didn’t like hard liquor,” he said.

“I don’t,” I shot back. “But you’ve driven me to
drink.”

He took the rum bottle from my hand and poured a
shot for himself. “And you have the same effect on me,” Rodney
said. He made no effort whatsoever to hide the fact that he was
undressing me with his eyes. The bastard.

I gulped down my drink and gave Rodney the evil eye.
“You’ve been itching to explain yourself,” I snapped. “So explain
yourself already.”

He gulped his own drink, then poured another.
“Jasmine, I think you’d better sit down,” he said. “This is going
to take a while.”

****

Rodney paced the room back and forth for almost ten
minutes in silence. I was getting antsy.

“Will you please just stop pacing and start
talking?” I blurted. “It’s the middle of the night and you’re
wasting valuable sleep time.”

He finally came to a stop just in front of me and
sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t exactly know where to
begin.”

“Well, just
pick
someplace and start there,”
I snapped. “Otherwise, I’m going back to bed. This whole situation
is just plain getting ridiculous.”

Rodney ran a hand through his sandy blonde hair.
“You’re right, the whole situation
is
ridiculous. And it’s
just going to get worse. I doubt you realize just how bad it is
already.”

I rolled my eyes. “Why don’t you enlighten me,
then?” I asked, not even trying to hide the sarcasm in my
voice.

Rodney pulled a ladder-backed wooden chair away from
the wall and straddled it in front of me. “For one thing, you
friend Dexter the taxi driver isn’t who he seems.”

“I kind of figured that,” I said, remembering my
backseat bribe session with him in distaste. “And I just found out
from somebody he used to work for the FBI. Is that true?”

“Yep,” Rodney says. “But he hasn’t been with the FBI
for almost thirty years. Now, he’s—“
“An independent contractor?”

Rodney lifted one eyebrow, obviously surprised at
how much I already knew. “You could say that,” he said. “Although
calling him an ‘independent contractor’ would be putting it a bit
too nicely.”

“How would you put it, then?”

Rodney winced. “I would call Dexter a sleazebag for
hire, among other things,” he said. “He’s basically a professional
character assassin. He seeks out easy targets with big-ticket
connections—people like you, for instance—and uses them for his own
ends. The cab driver act is just a cover. Newspapers, magazines, TV
networks, political campaigns, and even foreign governments hire
him to dig up dirt on people that can be used to destroy them in
the media. His work has decided elections, ended careers, even
overthrown a couple of governments overseas. It makes what I do at
the
Beltway Times
look like child’s play.”

“That’s insane,” I said.

“Yep, it sure is,” Rodney said. He was getting
agitated. A sweat had broken out on his forehead and he was
fidgeting his hands.

“Why does he do this?” I asked. Although I had some
idea.

“Dexter’s very good at his job, and he gets paid
handsomely for it. Rumor has it he made close to a million bucks on
an exposé job he did during the last presidential election. But
nobody knows which side hired him. Personally, I think he might
have done work for both.”

“How do you know all of this?” I asked.

Rodney frowned. “Easy,” he said. “Dexter’s my
father.”

My mouth dropped open.
“What?”

“My mother died when I was a toddler. My father
raised me until I was about ten. Then we had an argument about what
Dexter—I mean,
Dad
—did for a living when one of the public
officials he helped expose as a homosexual committed suicide. Do
you realize that Dad usually gets paid a
bonus
when
something like that happens with one of his targets? He actually
works those kinds of clauses into his contracts.” He shook his head
in disgust.

My eyes flew wide. I didn’t even know how to respond
to that. Even more amazing, I’d discovered that there apparently
were levels that even sleazy tabloid publishers like Rodney
wouldn’t stoop to. As implausible as it might sound, it seemed that
Rodney Doyle—America’s answer to Rupert Murdoch—had a moral
compass.

“I didn’t like how Dad did business, and I told him
so,” Rodney went on. “He responded by packing me off to boarding
school and never speaking directly to me again. I basically grew up
an orphan. I was cared for by boarding-school matrons and Dad’s
lawyers.”

“Oh,” I said, my voice very small. “I’m so
sorry.”

Rodney sneered. “Don’t be. I’m better off without
Dad—
Dexter
, believe me.My father has spent the past thirty
years making my life miserable. Nobody holds a grudge like he does.
He’s spent all these years trying to find a way to sabotage the
Beltway Times
and derail my career, so I’d have no choice
but to come crawling back to him on hands and knees. Frankly, I’d
rather die than let that happen. So I’ve done everything in my
power to make my newspapers and media outlets a more legitimate
alternative to the kind of business Dexter does. I know that might
sound laughable to you—the notion that tabloid journalism can be at
all legitimate—but I do think I conduct my affairs with a bit more
compassion than my father does. And it infuriates him to no end
that a lot of people around the world who used to pay
him
buckets of cash to spy on people are now able to rely on papers
like the
Beltway Times
to do their dirty work for free. And
I’m also proud to say that nobody has ever
died
because of
something the Times published. I’ll admit to embarrassing the hell
out of a lot of people, but I don’t have anybody’s blood on my
hands. That’s a vast improvement over my father’s record, believe
me.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I stayed
quiet.

“I suppose you’ve gotten caught up in his latest
scheme to punish me for not wanting to join his little operation
and striking out on my own all those years ago.” He paused, choked
back what had to be tears. “I know all of this probably sounds hard
to believe,” Rodney said, taking my hand in his, which was
ice-cold. “But it’s true.”

I stared into Rodney’s deep-set eyes and saw
unimaginable pain there—the kind of pain that can only come from
years and years of estrangement and abuse from the one person who
should have loved him most. “I do believe you,” I said. “But I
still don’t understand what’s happening.”

“My aides have been following this for awhile.
Apparently my dad is working for some unnamed overseas media moguls
who would like nothing more than to see my empire crash and burn.
He’s been searching for ways to infiltrate my inner circle for a
long time. He discovered you completely by accident. But now that
he’s found someone close to me, he’s moving in for the kill.”

Close
to him? “What exactly do you mean, I’m
close
to you?”

Rodney squeezed my hand hard. “Jasmine, I’ve said it
before, and I’ll say it again. I happen to care very deeply about
you. Probably more than I’ve ever cared for any woman. I honestly
don’t know why I feel this way, but I do. So there it is.”

I jerked my hand away. “If you care about me so
much, how could you let those photos of me get published in your
paper?” I stood up and began to pace the room myself. “I
know
you knew about it ahead of time. You knew about it the
night you threw me out of your apartment.”

Rodney’s face went deep red. “You’re right. I
did
know. Unfortunately, I found out too late to do anything
about it. The papers had already printed and shipped. I sent you
away that night because I was afraid that one of Dexter’s spies
would find you at my apartment and leak
that
to the media,
too.”

I sighed. “Honestly, I don’t think that would have
made much of a difference in what anybody thought of me,” I said.
“
Or
you.”

Rodney held up his hand. “That’s not even the worst
part. I’d received several mysterious phone calls that day from a
caller with an electronically distorted voice that threatened to do
you harm. I put two and two together and deduced out that Dexter’s
people were having you followed. It’s not outside the realm of
possibility that one of the freelancers Dexter has working for him
could resort to violence to obtain the information he or she was
hired to get. I wanted you out of harm’s way until I figured out a
better way to protect you.”

Now my head was spinning. “
Dexter
picked me
up himself in his cab at your building that night,” I said. “He
told me to call him anytime I needed a ride, day or night. He
showed up five minutes after I called!”

Rodney shook his head. “That’s because he’d been
laying in wait for you,” he said. “He must have known you were
there all along. Jasmine, I think Dexter has a mole working
somewhere in my staff. I haven’t figured out who it is yet, but I
think that mole is responsible for hacking those photos you took at
the House of Flowers off your phone and slipping them into the
morning edition under the radar.”

I sank back into a chair. “Dexter was so nice to me
whenever we spoke,” I said. “He was almost like a grandfather. I
can’t believe he was just using me the entire time.”

“He was,” Rodney said. “He’s using you now,
too.”

“How do you mean?”

Rodney’s expression became gravely serious.
“Jasmine, I know that you planned a little sexcapade of sorts for
your stay down here. I know you planned to leverage some of the new
bedroom skills I helped you cultivate to try to revive your career,
too. And I know that Dexter—my
father
, mind you—helped
broadcast that fact with a number of very highly-placed officials
so you could make your services available to the broadest possible
market. And from what I understand, that market includes a sitting
Congressman and the editor-in-chief of the Washington
Post
,
among others. Am I right?”

I felt the bottom drop out of my stomach. I’d
figured that Rodney knew some of my reasons for being on St.
Lucia—but not
all
of them. He’d read me like an open book.
The man was good at his job, that was for sure. “How did you find
all of this out?”

“I have my sources,” he said. “And my sources on
that subject are rock-solid. You’re swimming in very shark-infested
waters, Jasmine. You see, my father set you up. If you’d gone
through with your plans for this week, you not only would have been
the subject of a massive exposé in the
Post
, you might have
even been looking at federal criminal charges.”