Scandalous (2 page)

Cristal waited an appropriate amount of time, during which she nursed her drink, before leaving the bar.

She let her mind wander as she sipped her whiskey, thinking about the fact that when women suspected their husbands of cheating, it was usually in the general sense. In those situations, you could send in a bait girl, and nine times out of ten, the men would snatch up the bait like mice taking cheese from a trap.

But when men suspected their wives of cheating, it was always with a specific person. They had a name. With women, infidelity definitely seemed more personal. You couldn’t use bait men to uncover a woman’s indiscretions.

She smiled a little to herself, inside. Well, she thought, you could...but it wouldn't look the same. With guys, we can send a sexy bait girl into a bar one night and have our answer in a few minutes. A few hours, tops.

With women, we'd have to get the bait guy a job at the woman's work, and then the bait guy would have to spend six months listening to her cry at lunch and assuring her that, no, she wasn't the crazy one, and that if he was lucky enough to be with a woman like her, and yadda yadda yadda. Then maybe...MAYBE...she'd take the bait.

Cristal sighed to herself. Men were such simple creatures.

And thankfully, Kellan seemed to be among the most simple of them. He seemed to have taken the bait tonight, and taken it eagerly.

From the recon they had done, Cristal knew that if, in fact, Kellan did want her to be his next plaything, then she would be followed home and presumably have a background check run on her. After that, there would be a meeting at a random hotel. Sadly, that was all the intel they had.

They had been watching the congressman both virtually and physically for three months now and they knew that he would go to a dive bar talk briefly to a woman (always married), then have a member of his security team follow her.

The next day, a background check would be run on her. Within a week, she would show up at a random hotel where the Congressman happened to be staying. They had confirmation of the women going to the same floor as the Congressman, but after that, they had nothing.

The women left a few hours later. They had watched this pattern with three separate women. The first had only gone to meet him that one time. The other two had met him at least three times.

As she got into her car, she pulled onto Sepulveda Blvd and started to drive south. She noticed almost immediately that a black Lincoln was following her a few cars back. Hmmm. When she made a left on Victory, he followed closely. Hmmmm, again. She smirked. Let's see if he follows me all the way down to Lankershim.

“Game on,” she said aloud, knowing that Raiza, her best friend and Red Hot's tech goddess, was hearing her loud and clear through a small listening device that was strategically placed in her diamond stud earrings.

--- ~ ---

She drove up to the small house that they had recently rented (although if you ran a check, it would show that she and her “husband” had lived there for two years) and saw that, as planned, his truck was not in the driveway. He was due to return home within a few minutes.

She had known that this assignment would entail her and Dominic, her “husband”, cohabitating as husband and wife for several weeks. She had thought she was prepared for it. She would treat it just as she would any other undercover assignment, she told herself. That meant no emotions, no feelings.

That was one of the main reasons she was so good at her job. She never got
personal. No feelings were involved. Ever. Feelings were a liability that she could not afford.

Unfortunately, when it came to Dominic, she felt things, both emotionally and physically. That was no good! So, she stayed away from him…mostly.

Dominic Charles was head of security and protection for Red Hot. He had about eight to ten guys in his division at any given time, and they all had a military or a law enforcement background. All the men that worked in his division were good, competent, and efficient. But Dominic was the best. He had protective instincts, uncanny insights and physical reflexes unlike any Cristal had ever witnessed in a single human being. He was often referred to as the Terminator, like he was part machine.

So when Red, the owner of Red Hot Private
Investigations and her mentor for the last eight years, had explained that he wanted Dominic and Cristal to take the lead on this case, she should have been relieved – excited even. In the PI game, you're only as good as your team, and Dominic was the best.

Still, when the
tiny
little detail of the cohabitation was revealed, Cristal’s first instinct was to say no. For the first time in her eight years of working for Red, she wanted to turn down an assignment.

She was not going to live with Dominic. Dominic was exhausting, infuriating, and just plain annoying. She could only handle Dominic in very short increments. He pushed her buttons in a way that no one else on the planet did, or even could. He got under her skin, and no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t seem to keep him at arm’s length the way she could with other people. That was what pissed her off more than anything else – not so much the way he
was (although that was annoying), but the way that she couldn't seem to control her own reaction to him!

Dominic prided himself on the fact that he could get a rise out of her – he gloated about it, as a matter of fact. They could not be around each other for more than ten minutes without arguing. Well...except for one itty bitty, teeny weeny exception.

She grimaced.

Yep. There was one night when they had spent almost ten hours together, and they certainly hadn't been arguing. She shook her head. No need to revisit the past – and that night was
firmly
planted in the past.

It had been an aberration. A moment of weakness. A complete and total lapse of sanity!

It also happened to be the hottest night of her life...but that was not the point. The
point
was it would never happen again. Ever.

And, honestly, if Red hadn’t been talking for nearly a year about retiring and selling Red Hot, then Cristal definitely would have walked away from this case. She didn’t want to spend even one day – much less up to a month – playing house with Dominic. She didn't want that at all. But if there was one thing that Cristal wanted more than keeping a safe distanc
e from Dominic, it was to buy Red Hot when Red decided to retire.

She knew that backing out of a case at this stage in the game would cause him to question whether or not she could handle the business that he had spent over twenty years growing into an elite private investigation and security firm, and she was not about to let that happen.

This case was a means to an end. When she owned Red Hot, she would make sure that she and Dominic never had to be out in the field together again.

As she walked into the small two bedroom home they had rented in North Hollywood, Cristal decided that wine and a bath
would be first up on the agenda for the evening. Coming in a close second was avoiding Dominic at all costs.

Slipping off her heels, she padded across the linoleum floor and opened the fridge to pull out a bottle of Moscato she had left chilling this morning. Just as she was pushing the corkscrew into the cork, she heard the front door open.

--- ~ ---

“Honey, I’m home,” Dominic called out playfully, and saw Cristal’s shoulders tense as she popped the cork off of her girlie wine. He knew announcing his presence in that manner would only aggravate Cristal, but he had decided when he took this assignment that he would be having a little fun with it. OK, yes, maybe a
lot
of fun. May as well start strong right out of the gate.

Cristal didn’t respond to his opening volley, so Dominic decided to push his luck just a little, “Wow, you didn’t have to wear that dress for me, Sweetie. I don’t need anything to remind me of the best night of your life.”

She turned and, although she was clearly attempting to hide her reaction to the statement he had just made, he could see the flush rising in her cheeks. He smiled. If looks could kill, Dominic figured he would be headed to the coroner's office in a body bag right about now.

“I think you must be projecting,” she said lightly, “Because although I am sure it was the best night of
your
life, sadly, for me it ranked just below an evening spent on the couch in sweats watching re-runs of Friends.”

She tried to walk past him through the doorway and into the hall that set directly behind where he was standing. Lucky for him
, at six foot three he could easily fill up a doorway. He crossed his arms in a stance that implied he wasn’t going to move just yet.

“Oh, really?” he smirked, “So when the credits are rolling on an episode of Friends, you cry out in ecstasy and beg for more?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Cristal’s said, her stony face suddenly void of any emotion.

“Hey, I was just trying to gauge your enthusiasm for Friends re-runs,” Dominic smiled.

“Get out of my way, Dominic,” Cristal demanded through clenched teeth.

This only made Dominic smile wider. Damn
, she was sexy.

“Now, honey, really. Is that any way to talk to your husband after a long day?”

He didn’t move.

She stared him down. Well, technically, she stared him up, owing to the fact that he had a good seven or eight inches on her, but they were definitely having a stare down.

He had to give her credit, Cristal had never been intimidated by him. She had never once tip toed around him because of his size. She had certainly never kept an opinion to herself, afraid of what he might say or think.

Most people treated him with kid gloves, never wanting to go toe to toe with him in any arena, physical or mental. They knew, even if only instinctively, that the odds were against them – that he could outwit and/or outmaneuver them easily.

But from the first day he had met Cristal, she had never once backed down from a battle with him or anyone. She may have been slight in build, but she was mighty in spirit! She was a fighter, you could see that much in the fire that burned in her eyes.

She reminded him of Scrappy Doo, a character from his favorite cartoon show as a kid. So much so, in fact, that he had asked her, after only knowing her for about an hour, if she had ever watched Scooby Doo. When she had given him a puzzled look, he had explained that she was like a real life, female Scrappy Doo.

Hey, he meant it as a compliment! She...didn’t exactly take it as one. Consequently, they had started off on the wrong foot from the start.

Dominic had known many women in his thirty-two years on the earth. He had been with beautiful, intelligent, sophisticated, street-smart, funny, and – most importantly – sexy
women. But he had never met even one that came close to touching Cristal Hart. There wasn't another woman on the planet who was even in the same league with her. She made Angelina Jolie seem boring.

Cristal was smart, funny, loyal, ambitious, savvy and determined as hell. She could read people in under a second’s time, she was like a walking lie detector. She knew how to stand out in a crowd if she needed to, and she also knew how to blend into the background, which – given her appearance – was not an easy task.

To describe her as incredibly sexy was an understatement. With golden brown hair that fell half way down her back, large green bedroom eyes, full and supple lips that begged for attention...God, she had men eating out of her hand!

Add to that the fact that she had legs that should be illegal and curves that rivaled pin-up models...Dominic shook his head to clear it. Damn, she put him off-balance! Still, he couldn't derail his train of thought. Once he started thinking about her beauty, it was tough to start thinking about anything else.

Then there was her skin. God, that glowing skin. Her half-Latino, half-Irish heritage gave her a year round honey-kissed tone that made Dominic want to lick every inch of her.

And he had. Oh, good God, he certainly had. He had worshiped every single place on her body. From the bottom of her toes to the tip of her head, he had explored it all. It had been the single most erotically charged experience of his life, and, since that fateful night two years ago, he had not gone even one day without replaying it in his mind. Sometimes lately, it had felt like the whole thing was just a fantasy he had conjured up.

He tweaked her about it from time to time, and not just because it was fun to see her get all flustered. No, he sometimes felt that he was also looking for validation that their steamy encounter had, in fact, been more than just a dream, and her responses validated the reality of it. They convinced him that the passion-filled night had not existed only in a paradise he had created in his mind.

Just thinking about it now was making Dominic grow harder by the second.

Cristal, however, did not seem to be suffering from the same trouble with focus that he was, as she was still staring him down. He knew from experience that she could go for hours and not move a single muscle. He didn’t want to waste hours like that. He wanted to use this time that they were confined and forced to live as husband and wife for good, not for evil.