Undercover Groom
Merline Lovelace
Fortune's Children: The Brides: Meet the Fortune brides - six special women who perpetuate a family legacy greater than mere riches!WHO WAS MASON CHANDLER?Chloe Fortune had no memory of the tall, gray-eyed hunk standing before her, claiming to be her fiance. Actually, she had no memory of anything since the car accident that had left her stranded in Crockett, South Dakota, with no ties to her past but a sapphire ring bearing her first name.Whatever the hidden truth, Chloe wanted to start her life over - with Mason by her side. But something about her handsome hero whispered of untold secrets. Would his mysterious past destroy their love?
Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry (#u6eca5ff8-adfd-5962-9bfa-741b3889bde8)Letter to Reader (#u456b7ee9-df1c-514f-9fe1-ee76e3a14884)Title Page (#u886e8771-d16f-5796-8efc-a3d094f9feed)Dedication (#u267cff3a-b72f-56c7-9d26-ca64e12ba791)Acknowledgments (#uf1631704-943a-565e-a237-e37d4a9ac36a)MERLINE LOVELACE (#u58d10f68-775e-550c-9044-430b08321720)FORTUNE’S Children (#udd8861ec-35ae-5c8f-b35c-e112d1a13ead)Chapter One (#u6e3b86f6-372e-5d05-b06e-086ff7d54e1d)Chapter Two (#u4b8afe11-d8e4-546f-83b0-c92cdb933220)Chapter Three (#u73bcd1cd-8bf3-5449-977f-2028d5442608)Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Kate Fortune’s Journal Entry
My poor, dear Chloe! I had had a feeling all was not well in paradise. Why was I the only one who wasn’t surprised when she took off before the big day?
Don’t get me wrong—I still think Mason Chandler would make my grand-niece a perfect husband. You know the expression that things happen for a reason? Perhaps Chloe’s amnesia is really a blessing in disguise. Now they have a chance for a fresh start.
There’s just one thing nagging at me. What was it exactly that caused these two lovebirds to split up?
Don’t miss the exciting conclusion of
Fortune’s Children: The Brides!
Will Chloe and Mason ever say “I do”?
Dear Reader,
Why not sit back and relax this summer with Silhouette Desire? As always, our six June Desire books feature strong heroes and spirited heroines who come together in a highly passionate, emotionally powerful and provocative read.
Anne McAllister kicks off June with a wonderful new MAN OF THE MONTH title, The Stardust Cowboy. Strong, silent Riley Stratton brings hope and love into the life of a single mother.
The fabulous miniseries FORTUNE’S CHILDREN: THE BRIDES concludes with Undercover Groom by Merline Lovelace, in which a sexy secret agent rescues an amnesiac runaway bride. And Silhouette Books has more Fortunes to come, starting this August with a new twelve-book continuity series, THE FORTUNES OF TEXAS.
Meanwhile, Alexandra Sellers continues her exotic SONS OF THE DESERT series with Beloved Sheikh, in which a to-die-for sheikh rescues an American beauty-in-jeopardy. One Small Secret by Meagan McKinney is a reunion romance with a surprise for a former summer flame. Popular Joan Elliott Pickart begins her new miniseries, THE BACHELOR BET, with Taming Tall, Dark Brandon. And there’s a pretend marriage between an Alpha male hero and blue-blooded heroine in Suzanne Simms’s The Willful Wife.
So hit the beach this summer with any of these sensuous Silhouette Desire titles...or take all six along!
Enjoy!
Joan Marlow Golan
Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire
Please address questions and book requests to:
Silhouette Reader Service
U S. 3010 Walden Ave, P.O Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269
Canadian PO. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3
Undercover Groom
Merline Lovelace
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
This is for Mary and Inga and Paula and Audrey and all
the other wonderful readers who enjoy romances as
much as I do. Thanks for your letters, your friendship
and your words of encouragement!
Special thanks and acknowledgment are given to
Merline Lovelace for her contribution to the
Fortune’s Children miniseries.
MERLINE LOVELACE
spent twenty-three exciting years as an air force officer, serving tours at the Pentagon and at bases all over the world, before she began a new career as a novelist. When she’s not tied to her keyboard, she and her own handsome hero, Al, enjoy traveling, golf and long, lively dinners with friends and family.
Look for her next book, A Man of His Word, the second in the MEN OF THE BAR H miniseries, coming from Silhouette Intimate Moments in July 1999.
Merline enjoys hearing from readers and can be reached at P.O. Box 892717, Oklahoma City, OK 73189.
FORTUNE’S Children
Meet the Fortunes—three generations of a family with a legacy of wealth, influence and power. As they gather for a host of weddings, shocking family secrets are revealed...and passionate new romances are ignited.
CHLOE FORTUNE: The young debutante thought she’d outwitted her overly protective, matchmaking relatives by getting engaged to her brother’s best friend. Only problem—she’d fallen in love with her pretend groom. And Chloe’s all set to end the masquerade, but it looks like the groom’s been keeping his own secrets!
MASON CHANDLER: This powerful CEO wants to settle down with the only woman he’s ever loved. But suddenly his double life catches up with him, threatening his one chance at happiness...
KATE FORTUNE: This family matriarch knows from female intuition and a lifetime of matchmaking that Chloe and Mason’s nuptials won’t be the last of the Fortune family weddings!
One
“Wait, Miss Fortune. I’ll announce you.”
Chloe Fortune aimed a smile over her shoulder at the trim, gray-haired executive assistant who hurried out of the copy center, her arms laden with a stack of documents.
“Never mind, Amy. I called Mr. Chandler earlier and told him I’d drop by sometime this afternoon.”
“But he’s got someone in his office. . . .”
The older woman’s protest trailed off as Chloe waved a crimson-tipped hand and sailed through the elegantly furnished reception area. Chloe had made enough visits to her fiancé’s twentieth-floor office suite to know she always had immediate access.
A dazzling view of the Minneapolis skyline drenched in late September sunshine filled the floor-to-ceiling windows on her right. Chloe didn’t allow the spectacular view to distract her; it had taken her most of the morning to work up the courage for this visit. She had to do it now, before she lost her nerve.
This time she wouldn’t wimp out.
This time she’d wait until Mason Chandler got rid of his visitor, then she’d either sweep everything off his burled mahogany desk and make wild, uninhibited love to him on its polished surface or—She gulped. Or she’d hand him back the four-carat emerald-cut solitaire he’d slipped on her ring finger last January.
Last January! She paused with her hand on the brass door latch, thinking of her unconventional engagement. She couldn’t quite believe that she and Mase had been engaged for almost nine months. Or that they’d shared only a few casual kisses in all that time.
Okay, so maybe their self-imposed restraint had been part of the ground rules she’d laid down when she proposed to Mase. After all, she was the one who’d come up with the idea of a phony engagement in the first place. At the time it had seemed like the perfect answer to her dilemma.
She’d just returned to Minneapolis after two years in Paris, bringing home with her a degree in art history, a slightly bruised heart and a seriously dented ego. The degree she’d earned from the Paris Institute of Art. The damaged heart and ego she owed to handsome tennis star, Andre Couvier, who, she’d discovered, had loved the prospect of getting his hands on a chunk of her father’s millions far more than he’d loved her. The last thing Chloe wanted when she got back to the States was to rush into another disastrous romance.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to convince her overly solicitous father that she was more interested in translating her degree into a viable marketing tool than in socializing. Emmet Fortune had exerted the kind of constant, loving pressure that only a father can, urging her to cut back on her long hours at the Fortune Corporation headquarters, to go out more, to enjoy her youth.
So-o-o-o...in desperation, Chloe had proposed to Mase.
The deal was simple. He would run cover for her with her father. In return, she’d take over the marketing campaign for Chandler Industries’ latest twin-engine jet prototype. Since the VP for Marketing had just been caught with his hand in Mase’s executive till, Chloe’s offer had been deliberate, calculated and timely. Once he’d recovered from his initial surprise, Mase had agreed to her scheme readily enough.
She’d been sure he would. She’d known Mase Chandler off and on for most of her life—first as her older brother Mac’s friend and then as an occasional escort. Unlike her fiercely overprotective father and older brother, however, Mase didn’t take her personal ambitions lightly. Nor had he ever patronized her. He understood her need to prove she was as capable as any of her Fortune cousins. So she’d worked up the marketing campaign, and he’d agreed to act as her fiancé.
Their phony engagement had worked perfectly . . . at first. The match had certainly thrilled her father, who liked and respected Mase. It also allowed Chloe to devote every ounce of energy to learning the intricacies of the marketing and advertising worlds from the ground up. And Mase made the perfect fiancé. Easy, undemanding, relaxing to be with. Whenever he wasn’t jetting off on one of his extended business trips, he and Chloe enjoyed each other’s company at dinner and the theater.
She wasn’t quite sure when or how the engagement had taken on a life of its own. She hadn’t expected the diamond Mase slid onto her finger the night they announced their engagement to his family. Nor had she planned on giving in to her father’s pressure to set a wedding date. That had sort of...happened. Before she knew it, she’d been roped into discussing gowns and menus and flowers with Mollie Shaw McGuire, the wedding planner who’d become such a close friend of the Fortune family.
Even worse, the pretend bride had somehow fallen hopelessly in love with her phony groom.
Looking back, Chloe couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened, couldn’t pick a morning when she suddenly woke up and realized that she wanted her fake engagement to end in a real wedding. She only knew that she missed Mase when he was gone. That the hand he planted in the small of her back to guide her to a table burned right through whatever she was wearing. That she ached to peel off his hand-tailored suit, unknot his tie, unbutton his shirt and plant hot, greedy kisses all over his naked chest.
All of which she fully intended to do today.
If she didn’t lose her nerve!
They couldn’t continue the deception any longer. Mollie wanted to send the wedding invitations to the printers. Her father was already talking about endowing a chair at his alma mater to ensure his grandchildren got a quality education. Chloe either had to call the engagement off...or convince Mase to toss out their original ground rules and make wild, reckless love to her.
He wanted to. For all his deliberate restraint, Chloe sensed the desire he so carefully kept in check. She’d tried to hint that she was ready—more than ready!—for him to unleash it. This time, she vowed, she’d do more than just hint.
Dragging in a deep, steadying breath, Chloe pushed down the brass latch. The heavy oak door slid open noiselessly. She’d taken only a single step when the sound of a husky contralto floated across the luxurious office suite.
“Come on, Mase. You love what we do together. Surely you’re not going to give it up just because you’re engaged?”
The intimacy in the dark-as-chocolate voice brought Chloe up short. That...and the sight of a stunning brunette nestled comfortably between her fiancé’s thighs.
Mase was leaning against the front edge of his desk. Beneath his neat black hair, his tanned face wore a smile that ripped at Chloe’s heart. His hands rested on the brunette’s waist, while hers played with his tie. The same silk tie that Chloe had envisioned slowly unknotting just seconds ago!
Her fingers balled into fists. She struggled for breath as a wave of raw emotion crashed over her and Mase replied in his rich, easy baritone, “No, I’m not giving it up because I’m engaged. I told you my reasons.”
“None of which will matter when the fireworks start,” his companion purred, tickling the underside of his jaw with the tie ends. “You’re hooked, just like I am. You crave the thrill, the excitement, of our little games.”
His smile tipped into a wry grin. “I don’t think you can call what we do a game, Pam. We’ve taken it too close to the edge too many times.”
“And that’s what makes it so wonderful. What makes us so damned good together. You don’t want to give it up, Mase. You know you don’t. Besides, I need you. No one plays it harder or faster or rougher than you do.”
Chloe choked. She didn’t want to hear any more. She certainly didn’t need to see any more. Now she understood why Mase hadn’t taken her up on her subtle hints about morphing their pretend relationship into a real one. Only a fool would want to tie himself to idiotic, naive Chloe, who had traveled all the way to Paris to lose her virginity at the ripe old age of twenty-four, when he could play hard and fast and rough with this...this person.
Misery and a fury she had no right to feel coursed through her. She must have made some movement, some sudden jerk, because the brunette flicked a quick look over Mase’s shoulder.
Her brown eyes locked on the woman frozen in the door, then filled with an expression that hovered between recognition, amusement and—damn her!—triumph. The message was immediate, unmistakable, woman to woman.
He’s mine. He put an engagement ring on your finger, lady, but we both know he’s mine.
Chloe’s nails dug into her palms. Her chin shot up at the exact moment Mase twisted around and spotted her.
Another man might have stammered or flushed with embarrassment at being caught in such intimacy by his-supposed fiancée. Not Mase. Not calm, controlled, always-in-command Mase.
“I’m sorry, Chloe. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Obviously not.”
Unruffled, he moved his visitor to one side and straightened. “Please, come in. I’d like you to meet Pam Hawkins. She’s a business associate of mine.”
He didn’t blush. Didn’t even blink. Chloe had to admire his aplomb, even as she fought the hurt and fury tearing through her. She had no right to feel this awful jealousy, she reminded herself fiercely. Mase hadn’t made her any promises. He’d helped her out when she asked him to, that’s all. He was a friend. Only a friend.
The realization made her even more miserable. To compensate, she hiked her chin up another notch.
“I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“You didn’t.” He strolled over to usher her into the office, as cool as she was flushed. “We’ve finished our business.”
His hand went to the small of her back in a touch so natural, so casually polite that Chloe’s teeth ground together. Involuntarily she jerked away from his hand.
“You’re finished?” she echoed. “Strange. From where I’m standing, it looked as though you were just getting started.”
The tinge of red that crept into his cheeks gave her some satisfaction. Not much, but some.
“I’ll talk to you another time,” she said icily. “When you’re not quite so busy.”
With a regal nod to the brunette, she spun around and retraced her steps through the anteroom.
Mase caught up to her as she jabbed at the elevator button, blinking furiously to clear her eyes of a ridiculous sting of tears.
“I’m sorry you walked in on that. It’s not what it looks like—” He broke off, his mouth twisting in disgust. “I can’t believe I just said that.”
Chloe couldn’t, either. She started to point out acidly that every man ever caught cheating on his wife or girlfriend used the same, hackneyed line, but caught herself just in time. She wasn’t Mase’s girlfriend. Not really. And she certainly wasn’t his wife.
“You don’t have to explain anything. Not anymore. Not that you ever did.” She stabbed the button again, trying for a coherency that eluded her. “Oh, hell, I’m making a mess of this. Look, I just came by to—to tell you that you’re off the hook.”
“What?”
Forcing a deep breath into her lungs, Chloe turned to face him. “It’s time to end our charade. Mollie called this morning, begging me to okay the final proof of the invitations. I put her off, but it’s not fair to stall her any longer. Or keep you dangling like this.”
“I’m willing to dangle as long as you want.”
She pasted what she sincerely hoped was a smile on her face. “Really? You weren’t dangling a few moments ago. You were practically wrapped around what was her name?”
“Pam,” he muttered. “Pam Hawkins.” He hesitated, choosing his words with obvious care. “Look, Chloe, my business with Pam is...complicated.”
“Funny, it didn’t sound complicated.”
His gray eyes narrowed, and he shot her a look so swift and sharp and un-Maselike that Chloe blinked.
“What exactly did you hear?”
“Not much,” she admitted on a long, gusting sigh. “Only enough to make me thoroughly ashamed of the fact that I’ve used you.”
“I accepted your proposal with my eyes open. You didn’t use me.”
“Yes, I did, and I’m sorry, Mase. Honestly. I know you assured me that our so-called engagement wouldn’t impinge on your private life, but I shouldn’t have presumed—I should have realized—I guess I just didn’t think things through,” she finished miserably.
The elevator door pinged open. Grabbing at the escape it offered, Chloe stepped inside and jabbed the Down button. Mase’s hand shot out, catching the door as it started to close.
“We need to talk about this.”
“We will. Call me, okay? We’ll work out the details of our big breakup.” The words left a bitter taste in her mouth. Good grief, what did it take for her to learn her lesson? First she’d let the handsome, debonair Andre con her. Now she’d conned herself into thinking... into hoping...
“No,” she said, recanting her offer to talk. “We don’t have to work out anything. I shouldn’t have risked our friendship by wrapping it in deceit. No more lies, Mase. No more pretense. As of this moment, you’re a free man. Officially, finally and irrevocably.”
His response was a short, pithy curse, something Chloe wasn’t at all used to hearing from him. She blinked in surprise as he stepped inside the elevator, caging her against the back wall.
“I’m not letting you walk away until we talk this through.”
A spurt of temper sliced through her hurt. Her eyes flashed a warning. “Back off, mister.”
“Dammit, Chloe...”
“I can’t talk about it now. I don’t want to talk about it now.”
For a moment she thought he might force the issue. Suddenly, ridiculously, she felt a frisson of alarm. Not fear, exactly. She couldn’t fear Mase if she tried. Yet this man looked almost like a stranger. To her infinite relief, he stepped back.
“All right. We’ll talk tonight. After the party at your uncle’s house.”
Finally the door whirred shut. Chloe slumped against the paneled wall, her eyes shut, with Mase’s image blazed on her eyelids. Tall. Dark-haired. Broad-shouldered. Square-jawed. Smiling down at Pamela Hawkins, who liked it hard and fast and rough.
A shiver of revulsion rippled through Chloe, followed immediately by one of pure, undiluted envy. Mase Chandler certainly hadn’t tried anything hard and fast and rough with her. Face it. He hadn’t tried anything at all. It shattered her to discover that steady, solid Mase possessed a dark side to his character she hadn’t even suspected. It shattered her even more to realize that she still wanted him. Desperately.
The elevator zipped downward. With every flashing floor number, Chloe berated herself. How could she be such a fool? When would she learn that she couldn’t trust her judgment where men were concerned?
Jaw tight, Mase watched the elevator indicator flash floor after floor. His instincts told him to go after Chloe, to work through this mess before she did something stupid, like announce to her father or brothers or the rest of the Fortune clan that they’d called off their supposedly fake engagement.
Chloe didn’t know it, but their engagement had been real from the moment Mase had accepted her ridiculous proposal. For him, anyway Oh, he’d played by her rules. Kept his hands off her, despite the hunger that had grown in him with every passing day. A hunger that sent him to bed at night hard and aching and determined to finesse his skittish fiancée to the altar.
Now she’d bolted.
He should go after her. Mase knew he should. But the image of her angry, confused face held him back. She said she needed time. Okay. He’d give her time. Until tonight. Then they’d end this charade the way he’d planned to end it all along. With Chloe in his arms and in his bed.
In the meantime, Pam was waiting for him. Blowing out a long breath, Mase raked a hand through his hair. How the hell was he going to explain his convoluted relationship with Pam to Chloe? He couldn’t even explain it to himself.
One-time lover? Sometime partner? Friend?
Who was he kidding? The ties that bound them went deeper than that. He and Pam had shared too many hours of danger, too many nights of boredom to qualify as mere friends. He’d have to think of something to tell Chloe, something that didn’t violate the absolute security he had sworn to maintain. He couldn’t explain about his secret life, the life he’d decided to give up. He couldn’t take the same risks, disappear for the same extended periods, as a married man that he did while single. It wouldn’t be fair to her... or their marriage.
His mouth twisted. What had she just said? That it was stupid to wrap their friendship in lies and deceit? He wondered what she’d say if she knew they were his stock-in-trade. Or had been until he’d decided to marry her and end his forays into the seamy underworld known as clandestine operations. With a last, frustrated glance at the elevator indicator, Mase spun around and headed back to his office.
Pam had made herself comfortable in the high-backed executive chair behind his desk, her long legs crossed and a rueful smile in her brown eyes.
“Sorry if I made things awkward for you with your fiancée, Mase. Did you soothe her ruffled feathers?”
“I will,” he replied with more assurance than he felt at that particular moment. Forcing his thoughts from Chloe to the woman regarding him with cool amusement, he cut back to the reason for her unexpected visit.
“Tell me again why you think Dexter Greene is looking for me?”
Raising a well-manicured hand, Pam ticked off the bare facts she’d related when she’d first arrived less than a half hour ago.
“One, you brought in his son. Two, said son was found dead in his prison cell last month. Three, we sent an operative to the funeral and four, our agent hung around long enough to believe that Dexter Greene’s vow of vengeance is more than the ranting of a grief-crazed parent. The father’s dangerous, Mase. We knew that when we went in to extract his son.”
Frowning, Mase jingled the coins in his pocket. Fractured images of a long, deadly chase flickered through his mind. He could almost hear the pop of gunfire. Taste the coppery residue of fear as he’d slogged through miles of sucking swamp with the gun-running, hate-mongering murderer slung unconscious across his back and Pam panting at his side.
It didn’t matter that Greene’s son was a conscienceless bastard. Or that he’d not only supplied stolen weapons to the hate-mongers who’d opened fire on a church full of Asian immigrants, but had planned and participated in the massacre himself. As fanatical about America for Americans as the others in his tight little enclave, the elder Greene no doubt approved of his son’s actions.
How the hell had Dexter Greene connected the scruffy, bearded thug who’d snatched his son with the CEO of Chandler Industries?
When he put the question to Pam, she shrugged. “We don’t know how he made the initial connection. We do know that someone logged on to the computer in the library in Greene’s hometown and initiated inquiries about Mason Chandler. We answered the queries with the standard cover information, of course, and sent an operative in to nose around. When he got there, Greene had dropped off the face of the earth.”
“Come on, Pam! Our specialty is hostage recovery and hostile extractions. We’re experts at tracking down the slime no other agency can find. How did our man let Greene slip through his fingers?”
She shrugged again. “I was in the Middle East until two days ago. The Chief called me in when you told him you were out of the business.”
“So he sent you to Minneapolis to change my mind.”
“Have I?”
“No. I’m getting married in November, remember?”
She cocked a brow. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure,” Mase replied with a wry smile. “I’ll have to do some fast talking in the next few hours to make it happen, though.”
“talking?” The brunette shook her head in mock despair. “That wasn’t your style when we worked together. What has this woman done to you?”
Mase wasn’t ready to admit that Chloe Fortune had tied him up in knots so tight he’d never unravel them.
“Look, I won’t go back into the field, but I’ll do what I can to help you with Greene. Did you bring the after-action reports from our original mission?”
“Of course.”
“Let me go through them and see if anything shakes out about the father. I’ll get in touch with you at your hotel later.”
Much later. After he had “talked” to Chloe.
Pam rose with the fluid, feline grace that was hers alone. Slinging the shoulder strap of her calfskin bag over her shoulder, she rounded the edge of the desk and patted him on his cheek.
“I’ll be waiting.”
By the time Mase wheeled through the open gates of Stuart and Marie Fortune’s Minneapolis mansion, the bright fall afternoon had faded into purple dusk. Lights blazed from every window of the two-story stone house belonging to Chloe’s uncle. The sound of laughter and chink of glasses carried clearly on the crisp evening air.
From the number of Mercedes and Jags and luxury sports utility vehicles crowding the brick-paved drive, it appeared that the Fortunes had turned out in force tonight for Stuart Fortune’s impromptu party. The mysterious invitation, conveyed by Stuart’s personal secretary this morning, indicated only that he wanted to welcome a new member of the Fortune family to their midst. At this particular moment, Mase wasn’t interested in welcoming anyone. All he wanted was to get face-to-face with his fiancée.
Masking his impatience, he climbed the curving front steps. Moments later he was shown into a high-ceilinged, glass-enclosed palazzo. With its magnificent view of the lakes and the distant city skyline, the sunroom was a favorite gathering spot of the Fortunes. After a quick scan of the crowd, he headed for a familiar figure.
His prospective father-in-law took his hand in a hearty grip. “Hello, Mase. Where’s Chloe?”
“She was supposed to meet me here.”
“She was?” Emmet Fortune’s silvery brows slashed into a straight line. “I wonder what’s delaying her.”
Having raised Chloe and her twin and their older brother on his own, Emmet’s protective instincts . kicked into overdrive on a daily, if not hourly, basis. They were revving up to full power when Chloe’s twin strolled over to join them.
For the life of him, Mase couldn’t understand how two siblings could look so much alike and possess such different temperaments. They both stopped passersby in their tracks...Chad with his striking Nordic masculinity, Chloe with her breath-stealing, feminine version of her brother’s handsomeness. They both kept themselves in superb physical shape with regular and energetic exercise—skiing in winter, swimming and tennis in summer. There the similarities ended. Where Chloe flashed a smile that could melt the ice on Minnesota’s lakes in mid-January, Chad’s too often held a mocking edge. As it did now.
“Hello, Mase.”
“Hi, Chad.”
“Chloe asked me to give you something.”
Mase stiffened. The hard glint in Chad’s violet eyes, so like his sister’s, gave him an inkling of what was coming. Sure enough, Chad pulled his hand out of his pocket and uncurled his fingers. A gleaming, emerald-cut diamond lay in his palm.
“She said she forgot to return this to you this afternoon.”
His jaw squaring, Mase pocketed the ring. “Where is she?”
Chad didn’t try to disguise his hostility. Obviously, his sister had told him about the fiasco at Mase’s office this afternoon.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“She didn’t say. She just indicated that she needed to get away and do some serious thinking.”
Emmet broke into the conversation, his fatherly feathers in full ruff. “What the hell’s going on here, Mase? Why did you and Chloe call off the wedding?”
“I didn’t. Chloe did.”
“Why? And what does she have to think about? Dammit, where’s my daughter?”
“I don’t know, Emmet, but I’ll find her.”
Chad’s smile took on a sharper edge. “I wouldn’t bet on it, Chandler. She didn’t sound like she wanted finding.”
For the first time since he looked up and saw Chloe standing in his office door, Mase felt a flicker of real amusement. None of the Fortunes knew what he did or who he worked for during his extended “business” trips. For security reasons, none ever would.
“I’ll find her,” he stated with the quiet assurance that came with years of training, a worldwide network of contacts and too many missions to count.
He left the party a few moments later and headed straight for the downtown hotel where Pam was staying. He’d get her working Chloe’s license tag and vehicle description with the locals while he tapped into a few restricted networks. It wouldn’t take long for him to track down the red, two-seater Mercedes. When he did, Mase decided grimly, he and his fiancée were going to have that little talk.
They located the Mercedes five hours later. A state trooper had spotted it nose down in a gully some forty miles west of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The contents of a black leather shoulder bag had spilled onto the floor mat. A fully packed carryall was still in the trunk.
It took almost three weeks to locate the missing driver.
Two
Mase spent those weeks in a blur of long days and endless nights. Controlling the fear that knife-bladed through him each time he thought of the deserted stretch of road and Chloe’s crumpled car, he forced himself to work through every possible scenario.
She could have fallen asleep at the wheel and plowed into that ditch. She could have been run off the road by some sex-crazed psycho. Or by kidnappers wanting a piece of her father’s wealth. Or, as he grimly discussed with Pam, she could have been followed from his office and snatched by the man who’d sworn vengeance for the death of his son. Mase had to face the very real possibility that he’d been compromised, that Dexter Greene had somehow tracked him down and intended to use his fiancée as bait to snare him. The possibility ate like acid through his system.
He sweated blood for almost three weeks. Finally, after hundreds of false leads and dead ends, his agency’s far-flung network of contacts paid off. A Seattle-based, long-haul trucker reported picking up a hitchhiker matching Chloe’s description during a cross-country run, not far from where her Mercedes was later found. According to the trucker, his passenger had sported a good-size lump on her temple and seemed a little dazed. Concerned, he’d taken her to a clinic in Mitchell, South Dakota.
Mase was in the air and en route to Mitchell within thirty minutes of receiving the trucker’s report. Once there, he picked up Chloe’s trail almost immediately. She had arrived at the clinic just minutes after a near hysterical junior high choir director brought in fifteen moaning, vomiting glee club members. In the melee of retching students, frantic parents and harried staff, the emergency room physician examined Chloe, ordered an X ray, diagnosed a mild concussion and released her.
She paid her bill in cash the next day after pawning a sapphire ring. The engraved inscription in the ring, “To Chloe, with love from Kate,” provided the first solid proof that Mase was closing in on his missing fiancée.
Then, before the relief and elation at having picked up her trail even peaked, she disappeared again.
It took another twenty hellish hours for Mase to track her from Mitchell to the two-tick town of Crockett, in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. His last report, received just as he was climbing into a helicopter, was that a woman calling herself Chloe Smith had taken up residence with Hannah Crockett, granddaughter of the town’s founder and proprietor of the general store.
A late-afternoon sun slanted through the mountain peaks when the helicopter touched down at a prearranged landing site some six miles outside of Crockett.
“I wish you’d let me go in with you,” Pam shouted over the whap of the rotor blades.
“I’ll signal you if I need backup.”
“Dammit, Mase, we still don’t know why your fiancée decided to hole up out here, in the middle of nowhere.”
He skimmed a quick look at the mountains surrounding them on all sides. Not quite the middle of nowhere, but close.
“Until we do...” Pam yelled.
“Until we do, this is my operation. I’ll contact you if I need backup.”
Pam sank back against the seat, her mouth a thin line of disapproval. Mase tipped her a quick farewell and ducked under the whirling blades. A moment later he took the keys of the mud-splashed Chevy Blazer he’d arranged to have delivered to the isolated landing site. The driver shouted quick directions to Crockett before hunching over and dashing to the chopper.
Mase slid into the Blazer and slammed the door on the ear-rattling noise. A quick shake of his leg settled the cuff of his jeans over his scarred boot and the 9mm Glock subcompact it concealed. Smaller and lighter than a snub-nosed Special, the Glock carried a tactical high-velocity load that had helped him out of more than one tight situation.
His face grim, Mase transferred the extra clip and boxes of spare bullets to the Blazer’s dash. From the report received just hours ago, it appeared Chloe wasn’t under duress. Despite his insistence on going in alone, Mase wasn’t taking any chances.
While the helo’s engines revved up to full lift power, he pulled a red ball cap from his back pocket and tugged it low on his forehead. In well-worn jeans, a sturdy plaid shirt and blue sleeveless down vest, he’d fit right in with the other hunters and anglers who drove hundreds of miles to hunt game and fish the jewellike lakes that dotted the Black Hills. He had no idea if the sportsman’s cover was necessary, any more than he knew why Chloe had chosen Crockett to hide out in. But he intended to find out.
Under the curved brim of the ball cap, Mase’s jaw locked tight. He was past feeling the cumulative effects of too little sleep, too many gallons of black coffee and the six kinds of hell he’d gone through since Chloe’s disappearance. Even now, despite confirmed reports that she was alive and safe, the mental image of her Mercedes nose down and abandoned in that ditch could still put a kink in his intestines.
He drove the narrow two-lane road, remembering that fear, tasting its bitter residue once again. Now, however, a healthy dose of anger added its own flavor to the fear. At this point, Mase was almost as furious over the torment Chloe had put him and her family through as he was relieved to have found her.
As the Blazer crested a hill dotted with tall pines and dropped down toward the half dozen weathered wooden buildings that comprised Crockett, he couldn’t decide whether to hustle her back to Minneapolis or haul her to the nearest motel and stake his claim the way he’d wanted to since the day she proposed to him. He was still debating the issue when he pulled up at the Crockett General Store and killed the Blazer’s engine.
Mase climbed out, disappointment rising sharp in his throat. They’d tagged the wrong woman. Chloe couldn’t have stayed in this place for almost three weeks! Not his Chloe, anyway.
Eyes narrowed behind his mirrored sunglasses, Mase returned the blank stare of the bleached cow skull mounted above the much-patched screen door. Those weren’t the only bones to grace the store. Entwined elk antlers twisted up and around its four wooden porch supports like prickly white ivy.
Against the weathered wood, the antlers were a startling white. In contrast, the rusting South Dakota license plates framing the two front windows provided a riot of color, as did the wooden bins and baskets filled with fall produce that fought for porch space alongside a bagged-ice locker and a bait bucket set under a hand-lettered sign advertising worms and crawlers. The whole weathered wooden structure seemed to list a few degrees to the right, giving the distinct impression that a good wind could topple it over completely.
Warily, Mase mounted the sagging front steps. The boards creaked a protest, but the bell above the door jangled a cheery welcome when he stepped inside. Tangy wood smoke from the cast iron stove in the center of the store caught at his senses along with the equally compelling aromas of fresh-brewed coffee, ripe apples and tobacco.
Mase stopped just inside the threshold, sweeping the store with a searching glance. Enough light filtered through the dust-streaked windows to illuminate the nooks and crannies of the single room, crammed with every imaginable necessity from work boots to cereal to beeswax candles. If there was an order to the jumble of products and produce filling the floor-to-ceiling shelves, he couldn’t see it.
Nor did he see anyone resembling Chloe. The tension coiling his body had just torqued up another few degrees when a woman called from a back room.
“I’ll be right there.”
Relief crashed through him. He would recognize his fiancée’s voice in his sleep. Soft and musical, with the rounded Minnesotan vowels that winters in Palm Springs and two years in Paris couldn’t erase, it was as much her signature as her silky blond hair and violet eyes.
Still, Mase had to look twice before he recognized the creature who backed bottom-first into the room a few moments later. Bent double, she fishtailed a fifty-pound sack of rock salt along the wooden floor and added it to the others propped haphazardly against the far wall. Mase watched, stunned, as she straightened with a small grunt. Raising an arm, she swiped it across a forehead streaked with sweat and dust.
The face was the same. Classic Chloe, all high cheekbones, creamy skin and full mouth. Her hair was silvery gold, glinting with warmth even scraped back in a no-nonsense ponytail instead of sweeping to her shoulders in its usual sleek fall. The clothes... Mase blinked, trying to remember the last time he’d seen his fiancée poured into thigh-hugging jeans and a thin yellow T-shirt that displayed a provocative patch of sweat between her firm breasts...or when she’d greeted him with such cool, distant politeness.
“Do you want something?”
He went still, thrown off balance for a moment as much by Chloe’s appearance as by her deliberate remoteness. His every sense alert to possible danger, he searched the store again. Why was she pretending not to know him?
The possibilities he’d forced himself to consider during his long hunt for Chloe leaped instantly to life once again. Was she trying to warn him? Had someone forced her to stay in this remote town? Was she under duress? With a speed that made her start in surprise, Mase rounded the end of the counter and edged through the door behind her.
“Hey, you can’t go in there!”
Ignoring her startled protest, he did a quick visual of the storeroom. It held cardboard cartons stacked almost to the ceiling, several unused display cases and a jumble of seasonal sporting goods, but no imminent threat that Mase could determine. An open door in the opposite side wall led to a long, dim hallway and, presumably, the attached living quarters. Frowning, he spun around to confront a decidedly irate Chloe.
She reached behind him and closed the storeroom door with a snap. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but whatever it is, I’ll find it for you. If I can,” she tacked on in a low mutter.
Slowly, Mase peeled off his sunglasses and stared down at her. If this was an act, it was a damned good one. If not... His gut twisted.
Why would she pretend not to know him? What the hell was going on? He searched her face, her eyes, trying to find a hidden message.
The woman who called herself Chloe Smith lifted her chin and matched the stranger stare for stare. In the almost three weeks she’d lived in Crockett, she’d learned to cope with the kind of looks he was laying on her. As Hannah had dryly pointed out, Chloe was the only nubile young female within fifty miles who didn’t come on the hoof. Word that she’d been hired to work the store while Hannah was laid up with multiple fractures to her left ankle had spread faster than a range fire. Every horny cowboy working the ranches around Crockett suddenly found himself needing new work boots or a supply of chewing tobacco. The vet from over at Custer came by twice as often to check the penicillin supplies Hannah kept in the cooler alongside the milk and soda. Even the transient sportsmen who flocked to the area to hunt deer and elk and to fish the mountain lakes had started joining the regulars who clustered around the potbellied stove in the mornings.
Chloe had grown used to being ogled...but that didn’t mean she liked it. Especially when the ogler raked her with a pair of iron gray eyes that glittered with an unsettling intensity.
“Did you want something?”
Instead of answering, he shot back a question of his own. “What’s going on here?”
Not liking his low growl, she backed up a step. “You tell me.”
He followed, too quick and too close for Chloe’s peace of mind. Like a hammer striking an anvil, her temple started to throb. The bruise that had marked it had long since faded, but she still suffered from occasional headaches. The accident that caused them remained only a blur in her mind. Vaguely she remembered climbing out of a car and stumbling for miles along a dark, deserted stretch of highway. She could recall the trucker who gave her a ride and the doc who X-rayed her. She couldn’t remember who she was, however. Somewhere along that empty stretch of road, she’d lost her identity, her direction and her memory. All she retained were the clothes she was wearing, the sapphire ring that had given her a first name, if not a last, and a vague sense of having run away. From what or from who, she didn’t have a clue.
Maybe... Her heart began to echo the pounding in her skull. Maybe from this man.
She eyed him warily. At first glance he didn’t look like the kind of man a woman would run from. Tall and muscular, with shoulders that strained the seams of his flannel shirt, he had the healthy tan of an outdoorsman without the weathered, sun-creased skin that characterized so many of the locals Chloe had met. His black brows slashed across a strong brow and defined a face stamped with a hardness she sensed came from within as much as from without. His clothes, she noted, marked him as a fisherman or a hunter. A transient. Here only to bag a trophy kill. She didn’t doubt he’d bring down his prey.
Was she his prey? A sudden fear rippled down Chloe’s spine. She disguised the shiver with a facade of sheer bravado.
“Back off, mister.”
Her brusque warning had just the opposite effect from the one Chloe intended. Instead of putting the stranger on notice, it seemed to spark a flame in his slate gray eyes. Deliberately he took another step forward.
“Back off,” she said again.
“Oh, no,” he said with a tight little smile. “I think that’s been my problem all along. I always back off, when what I really want to do...what I should have done...is this.”
Before Chloe could grasp his intent, he wrapped an arm around her waist and hauled her against his chest. She squawked a protest as his mouth came down on hers. Shock held her immobile for a moment or two, just long enough for him to blast through her defensive barriers and shatter her senses.
The searing kiss answered one of the questions whirling around in Chloe’s head. She didn’t know this man. Or more correctly, she’d never kissed him before. Not like this. There was no way she could have forgotten the rough thrill of his mouth on hers. No way she would have run from the heat his touch flushed in her veins. For an absurd moment she felt as though this kiss was what she had been running toward when she’d landed in Crockett.
Then the confusion and wanness that had plagued her for the past few weeks shuddered back. She pushed free of the stranger’s hold and stepped away, as furious now as she’d been frightened a moment before.
“Who are you?”
He didn’t answer for a long time. Too long for Chloe’s thin-stretched nerves. Thoroughly shaken and still seared with anger, she whirled and put the long counter between them.
Her nails dug into the wood. Her voice shook with fury. “Who are you? And what in the blue blazes gives you the right to come on to me like that?”
For a moment the taut planes of his face seemed to shift, become even harder, if that was possible. A frown slashed deep grooves between those coal black brows.
“My name’s Mase,” he said deliberately. “Mason Chandler.”
Chloe tested the name in her mind, willing a spark of recognition. Nothing came. Not even a flicker. Crushing waves of relief and disappointment rolled through her. For a moment there, she’d feared... She’d hoped...
The unmistakable snick of a trigger cocking brought her head snapping around. Across the counter from her, every muscle in the stranger’s body seemed to lock. Taut as a steel cable, he turned and stared down the twin barrels of a .12 gauge shotgun.
Three
Her heart hammering, Chloe spun around to face the leathery faced woman who stood with a shotgun cradled under one armpit and a metal crutch propped under the other.
“Hannah!”
The store proprietor didn’t take-her eyes from the man at the other end of the gun barrel.
“Got a problem here, girl?”
The laconic question shattered the tension that gripped Chloe. More concerned now with the fact that her employer had dragged herself out of bed against her doctor’s vehement orders than with her response to the stranger’s kiss, she shook her head.
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Funny way of handlin’ things, if you ask me,” the older woman twanged.
Chloe flushed, but she’d learned that Hannah Crockett’s tart tongue came part and parcel with a heart wider than the blue Dakota sky. She’d wandered into town only a few days after the general store proprietor had tumbled off a ladder and crawled into the street on her belly to get help, dragging her shattered ankle behind her. The cantankerous invalid had hired Chloe on the spot to tend the shop while she was laid up. Hannah had brushed aside such piddling trifles as references and identification. She was good at sizin’ up people, she informed Chloe testily. It didn’t matter a horse’s spit where the girl had come from, or where she was driftin’ to. The job was hers, if she could handle it. A spare bedroom came with it, and any meals she wanted to fix up. Otherwise, she could order for them both from the café in town.
Chloe had snatched at the offer, assuming that her duties would center primarily on ringing up sales in the old-fashioned brass cash register that dominated the counter. Three weeks and countless hours of stocking shelves, sweeping floors, breaking down boxes and scuttling fifty-pound sacks across the floor had taught her differently. The work was back-breaking and seemingly endless. With the store open from eight in the morning until nine at night, she earned every penny of the salary Hannah paid her in addition to her room and board. She’d also taken on the duties of nurse and companion, despite Hannah’s grumbling that she could take care of herself.
Worried by the deep white lines grooved on either side of her reluctant patient’s mouth, Chloe hurried around the counter. “We need to get you back to bed. The specialist in Rapid City said you should stay off that ankle until he takes the pins out.”
“If I listened to him and laid on my backside for six weeks, I’d sprout carbuncles the size of Idaho potatoes.” Keeping the shotgun level with the ease of one used to its heavy weight, she shifted her stance and gave the stranger another once-over. “What did you say your name was?”
“Chandler, Mason Chandler.”
“Hmmmm. You go around kissin’ up every girl you happen to come across, Chandler, or is there something special ‘bout our Chloe here?”
Mase debated how best to answer that one. He’d already blown any need for a cover by giving Chloe his name...not that his real identity seemed to matter to her. The absurd thought occurred to him that she might be putting him through the hoops for the scene in his office with an elaborate pretense of not recognizing him. He dismissed that thought as soon as it formed. To all intents, it appeared Chloe really didn’t know him.
A trickle of cold sweat formed between Mase’s shoulder blades. His medical training as an undercover operative had consisted of such useful field techniques as packing gunshot wounds, administering antisnakebite serum and treating frostbite. The little he’d read about amnesia made him hesitant about blurting out her identity. He needed expert medical advice, and fast. In the meantime, he owed Hannah an answer.
“There’s definitely something special about Chloe,” he said with perfect truth. “Any man with eyes in his head could see that. But I shouldn’t have come on to her the way I did.”
“Hmm.”
The woman’s watery blue eyes held his for another second or two, then she lowered the shotgun and uncocked the hammer with an agile flick of her thumb.
“Did that sound like an apology to you, Chloe?”
“Close enough,” she bit out, obviously unimpressed. “Come on, Hannah, let’s get you back to bed.”
“In a minute, girl, in a minute.”
The older woman angled a head haloed by short, feathery, white wisps of hair. Her flyaway hair might have given her a pixielike appearance if it hadn’t topped a face toughened by wind and sun and shrewd blue eyes.
“So what brings you to these parts, Chandler?”
“Hunting ”
“Elk season doesn’t start for another two days.”
“I thought I’d get in some fishing first.”
“You did, did you?”
Impatient now to get to a phone, Mase brought the inquisition to an end. “I came in to buy a fishing permit. I’ll come back later, after you get off that ankle.”
“I never turn away a payin’ customer, boy.”
All brisk business now, Hannah laid the shotgun on the counter and hobbled toward a slotted wooden box...or tried to. After only a single step, her crutch hit an uneven patch of floor. Her good leg buckled. She grunted in pain and started to topple backward. Mase caught her just before she hit the hard wooden floor.
With Chloe hurrying ahead to show the way, he carried a muttering, thoroughly disgusted Hannah through the cluttered storeroom and down the hall he’d glimpsed earlier. The hall gave onto a kitchen on one side and a combined living room and office that had been converted into a downstairs bedroom for the invalid. A narrow flight of stairs led, Mase guessed, to the upstairs bedrooms.
Edging sideways to avoid any contact between the bulky cast encasing Hannah’s ankle and the door frame, he deposited her gently on the blankets mounded on the sofa. By the time she’d stretched out and propped her leg on a pillow, the blood had drained from her face.
Chloe clucked in concern. “You’d better take one of your pain pills. I’ll get some water.”
“I’m not taking those damned pills,” her patient snapped. “They make me feeble-minded.”
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