Sea Fire (50 page)

Current appearances notwithstanding, girly and vulnerable she was not.

Mentally flipping the bird at the invisible watcher who might or might not be behind the camera, depending on the degree of slacking that was going on, she padded back down the carpeted hallway. There was an elevator, but she preferred to take the stairs.
A little exercise was what she needed to take the edge off. She didn’t sleepwalk much anymore, maybe two or three times a year, but she knew the drill: her thought processes would be cobwebby for hours if she didn’t do something to shake them out.

By the time she made it up the semicircular marble staircase to the second floor, her head was on straight and she felt normal again. Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The anger and sense of betrayal that had been with her for almost twenty-four hours now had come back, and had once again settled into her stomach like a rock.

“Bastard,” she said out loud to her absent ex-boyfriend. She’d said it to his face before she’d left, along with a lot of other things. She didn’t know why she’d been so surprised to learn he’d been cheating on her. She knew men. She knew cops.

What was surprising was how much it hurt to find out that Homicide Investigator Nate Horacki of the Detroit PD was no better than the rest of them.

This time yesterday, she would have said she was in love with him.

But now . . . no way. She wasn’t that big of a . . .

Clink.

Mick never would have heard the slight sound if she hadn’t been right where she was, striding along the open second-floor gallery that ran across the top of the enormous, eye-popping entry hall, nearly at the doorway of the bedroom she was using, the one she always used, which she’d come to think of as her way-luxurious home away from home. But she
was
there, and she
did
hear it. Stopping dead, she listened. To nothing at all except the hum of the heating system. Except for the faint glow of moonlight streaming through the windows, the house was dark. Not wanting to advertise her movements to anyone outside who might be interested, she
hadn’t turned on a light on her way back to her bedroom. Now every sense she possessed focused on the shadow-filled spaces stretching out all around her. The house was huge, and tonight, except for her, it was empty. At least, it was supposed to be.

Clink
.

There it was again. Mick went taut as a bowstring, every sense on the alert. The smell of pine from the Christmas garlands tied to the gallery’s wrought-iron railing wafted in the air. Shimmery gold ornaments in a glass bowl on the console table to her left glinted as a shaft of moonlight played over them. Trying to remember how the house had looked before darkness had swallowed it up, she concluded that the tall, menacing shapes in the corners were the human-size toy soldiers and nutcrackers her aunt Hope, Uncle Nicco’s wife, had used as Christmas decorations. She relaxed a little even as she listened hard.

Silence once again blanketed everything. But she knew she hadn’t imagined the sound. And it hadn’t been a random creak that she could put down to the settling of floor joists or something equally innocent; it had been sharper and metallic. Purposeful, was how she characterized it. Which meant she needed to check it out.

She embraced the thought with relish. Checking it out was something to do, something to think about, something she was good at. And it was a whole hell of a lot better than lying sleepless in her bed trying not to think, which she knew was the fate that awaited her for the rest of the night.

Uncle Nicco had hired her to house-sit while he, his wife, five grown children and their families spent New Year’s
and the week after at their place in Palm Beach. Because of the bust up with Nate, she had arrived a day early, just a couple of hours after the family left. The house should have been empty for this one night.

New Year’s Eve.

So if the house was empty except for herself, what was the source of that sound?

Moving swiftly, Mick slipped into her bedroom and retrieved her gun from the nightstand. The familiar, solid weight of the Glock 22 felt good in her hand. Her handcuffs were on the nightstand, too. She grabbed them, tucked them into her pocket just in case, and thrust her feet into terry flip-flops, which had been part of the spa basket her longtime best friend, Angela Marino Knox—Nicco’s daughter—had left on her bed as a Christmas present and which she had been using for slippers after painting her toenails with the hot pink Passion Fruit polish that had also been in the basket. Then she retraced her steps, quiet as a whisper, moving cautiously but quickly back along the gallery, listening.

Clink
.

There it was again. Probably it was nothing. Still, her heart rate accelerated as she focused in on the location of the sound: first floor, toward the rear. Padding down the stairs, the marble hard and silent beneath her feet, she tried to pinpoint the location more exactly. Left, past the huge formal living and dining rooms and the music room and the library. Slinking purposefully along, moving from shadow to shadow, she gave a fleeting thought to hitting one of the panic buttons that had been placed in strategic locations for the purpose of instantly summoning the security guards. The odds were high that the sharp, metallic sound she was hearing was something entirely innocent, but backup was always a good thing. Then Mick considered who had pulled security guard duty on this icy New Year’s Eve and made a face.

She didn’t need backup, anyway.

No longer hearing anything out of the ordinary, she proceeded with quick caution, clearing each dark room as she passed it. As Uncle Nicco was always bragging, the security system was state of the art, not the kind of thing a burglar could easily breach. Plus,
given the presence of the guards, the cameras, the fact that the estate was ringed on three sides by a twelve-foot-high fence (the fourth side was secured by the lake) and every outside door had at least two top-of-the-line double bolts, the house was a virtual fortress. What were the chances that . . . ?

Boom.

Okay, that wasn’t nothing. It was a soft boom, a muffled, barely audible boom, but a boom nonetheless. As if something had exploded, maybe, only quietly. Mick’s eyes widened as she rounded a corner and spied the faintest of yellow glows emanating from a door about twenty feet away. A click, a boom, a glow—good God, could the house be on fire?

The security system included state-of-the-art fire detection. If the house was on fire, by now the system should have been wailing its little heart out.

Unless something had compromised the system.

Adrenaline pumping, Mick glided quickly and silently to the open door, then flattened herself against the wall beside it. The yellow glow was gone. The hall . . . the room . . . the house . . . were once again silent and dark. A quick, careful peek around the door frame revealed exactly nothing: there was just enough moonlight filtering through cracks in the floor-to-ceiling drapes to help her ascertain that the room was empty. But there was a smell: a kind of acrid, smoky scent that reminded her of a detonated cherry bomb. And barely audible sounds—a shuffle, a click, a thunk. Although she liked to think she possessed a highly honed sixth sense, one wasn’t required to deduce that she was not alone. Her heart lurched. Her stomach clenched. She wet her lips.

Then professionalism kicked in, and icy calm descended like a curtain.

She was still peeping around the door frame, formulating her next move, when a man, tall and lean, dressed all in black and wearing a black ski mask with one of those miner’s lights affixed to a band
around his forehead, walked out of an open door on the opposite side of the room as brazenly as could be. She hadn’t previously been more than vaguely aware of that door. If she had thought about it at all, which she couldn’t recall ever having done, she had probably assumed it led to a closet. Only no burglar—and a burglar this certainly was—would bother to blow open a closet door, and it was clear from the sulfurous smell, from the boom she’d heard, and most of all from the fact that the door appeared to be hanging drunkenly from one hinge, that it had been blown open.

The room was Uncle Nicco’s private office, which meant the door almost had to belong to a safe. A closet-size, walk-in safe that held God only knew what in the way of valuables. A safe she’d never even known existed.

Which it was nevertheless her job to protect.

The man was maybe six foot two, broad shouldered and athletically built, with a young man’s confident gait. Open military-style jacket over a tee, pants and boots. With—she squinted to be sure—surgical gloves that made his hands look as white as a cadaver’s against all that black. Still absolutely unaware that she was anywhere in the vicinity.

Having registered all this in the space of a split second, Mick did what she had to do: she stepped into the doorway, planted her feet and jerked her weapon up.

“Freeze,” she barked. “Police.”

Continue reading for an exclusive excerpt from

FORBIDDEN LOVE

By Karen Robards

February 2013
From Pocket Books

CHAPTER
1

“Hell and damnation!”

Justin Brant, sixth Earl of Weston, swore furiously as a stream of icy rainwater rolled off the already saturated brim of his slouch hat to find its way with devilish accuracy to the bare skin at the back of his neck. He clenched his teeth as the freezing water trickled down his spine. Damn the ungrateful little minx to hell, he thought angrily. When he caught up with her—as he would, and before too many more hours had passed—he was willing to wager anything one liked that he would soon cure her of her disobedient tricks once and for all!

The many-caped driving coat he wore was not intended for riding down an Irish excuse for a road in inclement weather. It left altogether too much of him exposed to the rain and wind that had been nowhere in evidence when he had left Galway that morning. With the predictable unpredictability of all things Irish, the downpour had descended upon him without warning; within five minutes, he had been drenched to the skin. His usually gleaming Hessians, the pride of Manning, his valet, were all but unrecognizable, and he was reasonably certain that both his dove gray pantaloons and once snowy neckcloth were ruined past saving. Another black mark to chalk up against the impudent chit, Justin told himself, although he knew this last one was a trifle unfair, for he didn’t give a damn about his clothes in the normal way of things, and regularly incurred Manning’s disapproval for the disregard with which he treated his apparel. More galling by far than his bedraggled finery was the knowledge that his curricle, specially designed by himself and well-known to every sporting gentleman who fancied himself a whip, yesterday had the misfortune to encounter a damned great hole where a hole had no business to be. The upshot of this unfortunate occurrence was that his curricle had broken a wheel, and he had been forced to leave it behind in Galway for repairs, along with his horses. The only nag available for hire was one of the sorriest bits of blood and bone that he had ever clapped eyes on, and that was just his first impression! As the beast had clopped its way toward their destination, his opinion of it had grown steadily worse. He might as well have been riding a cow! The only saving grace in the whole deplorable situation, every infuriating circumstance of which could be laid squarely at the door of his step-niece and ward, Miss Megan Kinkead, was that none of his many friends and acquaintances would be caught dead riding down a dirt road in the wilds of Ireland, and so at least he was spared their sniggers at his expense.

Justin had been riding under trying conditions for hours. As his horse squelched through the seething quagmire to which rain had reduced the road, he acknowledged that he had seldom been wetter, colder, or hungrier. He had thought to be at his destination— Maam’s Cross Court, his Irish estate, and, he was pretty certain, Megan’s refuge—before luncheon. As it was, it was coming close to the dinner hour, and he still had some five miles to go, which in his own curricle with his own horses, would have taken perhaps fifteen minutes to negotiate. On this knock-kneed plug, he very much feared that it would take him five hours.