Neal (Golden Streak Series) (8 page)

“No. I thought you were too busy for
that.” He shook his head and slid his hand along her thigh. “Stop that. Your
family is right here.”

He leaned in and nipped at her ear lobe,
and she felt as if he’d set her on fire. “I know where they are and where I’d
like for us to be as well. I want to take you home and do all the things I didn’t
get to do to you last night or this morning.”

He’d done a great many things to her
last night, some of which had required some of his ties and a large feather
he’d taken from the duster. She’d never been tied up before and had never come
so hard in her life when he’d used the feather over her clit and nipples. When
she shivered, he grinned at her and told her to eat.

“I would like to speak to you. Now, if
you wouldn’t mind.” She looked up at Ryland when he sat down next to her. Her
entire body was on fire and he wanted to speak to her? Not if he wanted it to
be something that was coherent.

Neal moved away and sat near his mom.
She figured that whatever Ryland had to say to her was private, and she
wondered if this was where he forbade her to see Neal again. She didn’t know
why that hurt so much, but it did. So before he could tell her that she had to back
off, she decided she’d do it for him.

“I didn’t want this in the first place.
I told him to stay away, but like all men, you figure you know what’s best for
us poor helpless females. Well, I don’t care what you say about us not being
together, so you can just fuck the hell off.” He looked at her oddly, then
threw back his head and laughed. She was so confused that she stood up to leave
him to his unexpected mirth.

“Sit down, Rayne, and let me tell you
the real reason I’m here. And by the way, have you met my wife? Does she strike
you as someone who would let me even for a minute treat her like she was poor
or helpless?” She sat down, and he nodded. “That was a really good one. What
did you plan to do? Storm out and have me face the wrath of everyone in this
room alone?”

She shook her head. “I thought you were
here to tell me to stay away from your family and that, I don’t know, I wasn’t
good enough for Neal. I don’t understand you people.”

“Good, because, honey, we don’t
understand you either. But as for you not being good enough for Neal? That’s
not even close to the truth. You’re everything he needs and then some.” He
laughed again. “You didn’t really think I came here to tell you to fuck off,
did you?”

“Yes.” He laughed again. “I really don’t
get you. You have all the money in the world, and yet you all came in and
helped me today when…granted, most of it was your fault anyway, but you could
have let me fail. I thought about it a lot today, and I don’t understand why
you did it. For me.”

“You’re family now, and we help each
other. And it wasn’t just for you but for Neal as well. He would have felt as
if he failed you had today not worked out, even though I’d made the decision to
help you.” He leaned back in his chair and handed her a thick file. “That’s the
contract for the lobby of our main building downtown. There are six other
buildings that we’d like for you to maintain too, and there are contracts in
there for those as well. I understand from your mom that you do that, go back
to make sure the plants are up to your standards, and replace or fix what needs
it.”

“Yes, but I don’t have the resources to
take on a job this big. I have some capital now that Sanders is going to pay me,
but not on this scale.” She started to hand him back the file when an envelope
fell out. “What’s this?”

“It’s a deposit. I’m hoping it’s substantial
enough to give you the extra capital to do the job for us.” She opened the
envelope and looked up at him. “Is it?”

“You know it is. It’s more than you know
I was going to charge you to do the initial project.” She put the check back in
the envelope and stuffed it in the file and laid it on the table beside them. “Why
are you doing this? If this has anything to do with your daughter, I don’t want
the job this way. I have standards. They aren’t as high or as lofty as the
Goldens’, but they’re all I have.”

He stared at her for several minutes, but
she didn’t squirm. She wanted to and felt the need to fidget, like she’d never
felt before. When he picked up the file and handed her the first contract, she
looked at where he was pointing.

“As you can see, this was drawn up the
day before my daughter was delivered safely by you. And the other six the
morning you delivered her and gave my wife a chance to survive when all I
wanted to do was panic. And as for wanting you to do this because of a sense of
obligation because of all this, then no, I wouldn’t stay in business very long
if I let my emotions lead me by the short hairs, as my father used to say.” She
took the pen he offered her. “I’m not willing to have a second-rate company, being
the first thing people see when they come into my lobby. And I doubt for one
second that you’d give me that. Sign the fucking contracts, Rayne, and I’ll get
down to the other part of my business with you.”

She scribbled her name over all the
places that he’d had marked with tabs. She supposed she should have read it
over or at least had an attorney do it. But the only one she knew was more than
likely the one who had written this one, and she couldn’t afford anything else.
Besides, as much as she hated to admit it even to herself, she trusted the male
cat in front of her.

“Now, I would like to become a silent
partner to your company. And this has nothing to do with the previous contract
signed by us both. We can make a great deal of money off this venture, and I,
for one, like money. Do you?” She nodded at him before she could think. “Good. Here
is what I propose for us as a beginning.”

By the time she’d left the restaurant,
she was a great deal smarter about what the Golden Towers did, and she would
have a nice bank account when she was able to get to hers in the morning. She
looked down at the checks Ryland had given her, as well as a copy of the
contracts that Alistair just happened to have on him. When Ryland, then her mom,
signed off as investor and witness, she sat back and then stood up.

“I need air. Now. I need some air.” She
left the little dining area and was out the door before anyone could stop her.
She was taking big gulps of night air when she felt Neal come out behind her.

“Did he hurt you?” She turned to laugh
when she realized that he was serious. “Ryland can be a bit pushy when he wants
something. But he’d asked me to give the two of you a few minutes. So I ask
again, did he hurt you?”

“No. He bought a small interest in my
business, hired me as an outside consultant to help with the books, and gave me
a list of places I could get cheap labor during the peak times. He also gave me
over seven hundred thousand dollars in the form of cashier’s checks for his
first installment of buying a percentage of my…Christ, who has that kind of
money?”

“We do.” He helped her to the bench when
she swayed. “Don’t move while I get you something to drink.”

When he returned, she looked up at him. “You
knew he was going to do this. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you needed to hear it from him,
as I have very little to do with it, and as far as now, we’re mates, but it’s
still your business. Drink this, it’s water.” She took a sip and handed him the
file that Alistair gave her. “Is this the contract?”

“Contracts, as in plural. He wants me to
do the other buildings that you guys own too. Also, he wants me to think about
expanding my business to run year round.” She sat back and eyed him. “I wonder
where he might have gotten that idea.”

He flushed but didn’t say anything as he
sat beside her. “So you’re a wealthy woman now. What do you want to do to
celebrate?”

A thousand and one things popped in her
head and not one of them could they do there. She stood up and leaned down to
bite his ear. He wrapped his hand into her hair and held her to him as she
licked the curve in his ear, then down along his throat to his pounding pulse. When
he stood up, he nearly dragged her to the car. Instead of going to the front
like she’d thought he would, he opened the back end and started to strip down.

“I’m going to shift. Then I’m going to
find you and then fuck you.” He tore his shirt off and tossed it in the back of
the car. “I would suggest that you take off those shoes and run. Because I’m
not going to wait too much longer before I’m naked and running after you.”

Throwing everything she had in her hands
on top of his things, she kicked off her shoes and took off as fast as she
could for the tree line. Even as her heart felt as if it were pounding out of
her chest, she felt her body’s need of this man as it rolled through her veins
like molten lava.

Chapter 8

Sheldon Pierce had one more name on his
list, and if this one didn’t pan out, he was going to have to go back to his
old job, knowing that everyone was right. There were no such things as
weretigers. He stopped at the large front gate and pushed the buzzer. When the large
man came out of his booth that Sheldon had not seen until that moment, he
thought maybe he’d just go home anyway.

“I’m looking for Bronwyn Lawrence
Golden. I was told she lived here now.” The man didn’t say anything, but for
reasons Sheldon couldn’t explain, he felt the need to give the man more than he
needed to. “I’m investigating the disappearance of a man by the name of Cunningham,
Eli Cunningham. Do you know of him?”

“You see that road behind you?” Sheldon
turned and looked at it, thinking the man was going to give him directions to
finding the woman. “You turn your vehicle around and pull out onto it. Hopefully
there might be a big fucking truck coming, but I got a feeling that I’m not
going to be so lucky. But you pull out anyway, and then you turn and never look
back this way again. Because you know want happens if you do?”

Sheldon shook his head. He was afraid of
the answer and also what the bear of a man would do to him as well. When he
leaned down to put his face less than an inch from his, Sheldon whimpered.

“What happens is I pull you from your
car through the window whether it’s open or not and beat the living shit out of
you, then toss you into the pit I have behind my station there and let you rot
with the other motherfucking pricks that come here looking for a handout.”

He started to tell the man he wasn’t there
for a handout when he hit the roof of Sheldon’s car and it bent toward his
head. He put his car in reverse so fast that he knew that the gears were grinding.
Had there been a truck coming in either direction, he would have been dead
because he never looked when he pulled out of the drive and right into the
street. He was nearly a mile away before his heart began to slow.

His phone was ringing, and he had to
pull over to answer it. He was shaking so hard that he nearly hung up on the
call twice before he got his finger to slide the tab over for him to speak into
it. He nearly wet himself when the person on the other end said her name.

“Bronwyn Lawrence is your girl.” Sheldon
asked his nephew and jack-of-all-trades helper, Bobby Smyth, what he meant.
“About ten years ago or so, she was in that same lab and I found pictures of
her. She’s a beauty too. And just over a year ago, she and some rich prick
married, and she is now Bronwyn Golden. Same girl.”

“Those pictures were shit, Bobby, like I
told you before I left. You can’t even tell if she’s a girl, much less what she
looks like.” He felt the weight of the roof of his car press down on him, and
he tried to shove it back into place. How the hell that man had done that was
beyond him. “Just…I’m coming home. This is a dead end.”

“I have this amazing little program that
can take pictures like the ones in her file and enhance them, make them
more…readable. It’s her. I’m sending you a copy of what I found and what I was
able to get from my work here. You call me back when you get them.”

Sheldon didn’t hold out any hope and
drove to the closest restaurant he could find to have dinner and to view the
email. He heard it alert him that he’d received some but didn’t pull over this
time to see it. Bobby had been sending him shit all month.

After ordering the nightly special of
meatloaf and mashed potatoes, he waited until his coleslaw and tea were brought
before he went through the process of pulling his email up. He was just having
his empty salad plate taken away when the thing finally loaded. One of these
days he was going to get a better phone but hadn’t found a reason to yet. It
might be time to replace it now. When the first picture popped up, he knew this
was the one from the paper. He had a copy of it in the file back at this hotel
along with the other nineteen Bronwyns he’d had on his list. When the second
photo was being loaded, the waitress sat his dinner plate in front of him, and
he could only stare at it.

“Something wrong there, sweetie?” He
looked up at her and then at the plate. “You did order the special, didn’t
you?”

“Yes. But this is…I’ve never had…is this
one portion?” She laughed and told him she’d be back. On his plate was the biggest
hunk of meatloaf he’d ever seen as well as about two cups of mashed potatoes. And
the green beans were just like his mom used to make, onions and tiny little
potatoes as well as what looked like ham. He was in heaven. When she put a
basket of cornbread in front of him, he actually considered asking her to marry
him. He put the first bite into his mouth and moaned. Christ, he was going to
ask her as soon as she came back.

Sheldon finished his entire meal and had
four glasses of the sweetest tea he’d ever drunk along with it. Christ, he was
so full he felt like he was going to pop a button. He was reading the menu to
see what to have for dessert when his phone rang. He nearly didn’t answer it,
not wanting his nephew to intrude on his fine dining, when he noticed people
staring. He answered it on the fourth ring.

“Well? It’s her, isn’t it?” He had to
think what he was talking about when he remembered the picture. “I knew it.”

“I been having dinner, and I’ve not
looked at it if you want to know the truth. Let me call you back in ten
minutes.” He asked for his check after hanging up on Bobby and was in his car
again when he pulled up the pictures. He nearly went back inside to ask the
waitress if what he was seeing was true. It was Bronwyn right down to the pissed
off look in her eyes.

He called Bobby back and tried to tone
down his excitement. “Give me her address and I’ll check it out in person in
the morning. If it’s her, I’ll—”

“It’s her. You and I both know it. And
you said I could come to you when you found this woman. And you’d tell me what
she is to the CIA. I helped you, and now you have to help me.” He had been
under the impression that Bobby would have had to have been a great deal more
help and a lot less annoying when he’d agreed to those terms. He told him he
would see her tomorrow, and after that he’d call him.

After going back to his hotel room and
pulling up the email on his laptop, he could see that Bobby had been right.
There was no question that this woman and the one from the older pictures were
the same woman. He moved to his bed, thinking about what he was going to say to
her. He wanted her to come back with him so he could prove to everyone that he
wasn’t nuts, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think that would ever work either.
She was as good as his.

He pulled out the address he’d gone to
yesterday. The directions that he’d found had led him to a lab that was so far
off the beaten path that he would never have found it without the navigation
device on his phone. He had knocked on the front door only to find it unmanned and
unlocked. He had walked in and had been surprised by what he’d seen.

There were so many men and women walking
around with white coats and small laptops that he wondered where the funding
was coming from. It struck him as some covert operation and it was confirmed by
one of the security officers that asked him who he had been there to see.

The man was wearing a government-issued Glock
as well as a badge that said CIA. He showed him his identification, and the man
had nodded and told him to wait while he gave him an official badge for the
facility.

“This way no one will question you again,
Mr. Pierce.” With his newly printed badge, he had walked around for hours just
taking it all in. He’d even been able to walk in some of the more restricted
areas. And that’s when he figured out where he could take Bronwyn when he had
her. And now, he just about had her where he wanted her. And he would have her
soon too.

~~~

“Hi.” Rayne nodded to the man sitting at
her desk in the shop. “Ryland asked me to come over and have a look at your
books.”

She took her raincoat to the little
lunchroom and pulled out her phone. Just before the call was connected, the man
came in the room behind her, and she felt the bite of the gun in her back. He
told her to come with him.

“No, I don’t think so.” He pressed the
gun in harder, and she let herself fall forward. As soon as he reached for her,
she supposed to keep her from falling, she used his off-balanced weight and
flipped him over her shoulder and onto his back. Before he could get up, she
wrapped her hand around his head and held him.

The voice on the phone alerted her that
she might have dialed someone, and she groaned when she realized it was Bronwyn
rather than Neal like she’d meant to call. She told the woman what had
happened.

“I’m sending Brock to deal with him. Is
he secure?” Rayne didn’t have a clue what she meant and asked her. “I mean, my
dear, are you holding him with some of that awesomely wicked power of yours or
do you have him tied to a chair?”

“Holding him. Which would you find more
secure, just out of curiosity?” Bronwyn laughed and told her that she thought
the way she had him was better. “I hope so because I can’t see if anyone else
is in here with him.”

“Good point. I think you should contact
Neal too. He’s probably felt your fear by now and will no doubt be trying to
contact you. Have you been using your link to speak to him?”

He’d shown her how to use it last night
when he’d nearly killed her with a climax. When she disconnected the call with
Bronwyn, she’d told Neal she was fine, but there had been an intruder in her
office. He told her he was on his way. She sat down on the floor, still holding
the man as she waited for someone to show up.

It was a good twenty-five minutes later
when Neal showed. Brock was only ten minutes behind him. She’d been surprised
to see both Keith and Jules show up, but they had come by on an unrelated
quest. Keith wanted to set up her computer, and Jules wanted to ask her if he could
display his pottery in her shop.

“I won’t bring in any of my larger
pieces unless you want them.” He’d grinned at her as she held the man down
until Brock took him and the gun. “I just think it might bring in some of
the…the clientele that buys my stuff.”

“Snobs you mean.” He laughed. “I guess,
if you want. But you have to make sure that you have some sort of barrier put
around it. I don’t have the insurance to cover that kind of work if some kid
decided to break it.”

He told her he had a rider on his
insurance he carried that covered it. She was just showing him how much space
he could have when Brock and Neal walked toward her. Christ, it was only Monday
and she was having a shitty week already.

“He was alone, and you’re never going to
guess who sent him.” She already knew and told Brock. He looked so crestfallen
that she had to laugh. “I did get to talk to him before you arrived. And I can
make him tell me the truth. How did you get it out of him?”

“I beat the shit out of him.” She
laughed until she realized he was serious. “I guess your way was better, but
mine was way more fun. And a great way to relieve some of that pent-up stress
I’ve been having.”

The police were called in, and she told them
what the would-be kidnapper had told her. “He works for Daniel Sanders, and the
man owes me a great deal of money that is well past due. I pressed charges
against him the other day, and this is how he repays me. He sent that man here
to tell me to back off and that he wasn’t paying me what he owed me anymore
than he was giving me back my things. I’d like to press charges against both
men if that’s possible.”

The officer taking her statement looked
at her. “Are you sure, ma’am? He’s sort of got a lot of money and he can be a
little on the…I’ve only heard that he has a temper, but I’d hate to have him
take it out on a pretty girl like you.”

She had to cough loudly to cover the
growl that came from Neal. He seemed to grow bigger the more she looked at him,
and she was pretty sure that the officer had seen it as well. Neal’s cat was
beautiful, but she was pretty sure if he came out now it wouldn’t be for fun
like it had been yesterday and the day before. She decided to deal with the cop
on her own before Neal ate him for a snack.

“Mr. Sanders owes me nearly twelve
thousand dollars, officer. Does the fact that he has more money than me make it
okay for him to send in men with guns to have me forget about it? Do you have
twelve grand that you can just toss away?” He shook his head. “Neither do I. I
want to press charges against him. Either you take my statement or I’ll have my
lawyer come down there and talk to your captain.”

The officer took her statement and told
her that he’d make sure the proper paperwork was filed. After he left, it took
her another hour to get everyone out, and then Ally showed up. She smiled and
told her to do her thing and she’d do what she did best. As long as she didn’t
bother her, she said to go for it.

Arranging the orders was a simple task. She
mingled the larger orders in with the smaller ones so she had something to keep
her energy levels about the same all day. She had learned that doing the larger
orders first left her with little energy to do the smaller ones, and doing the
little ones first sort of bored her. She put everything on her carts, still
nervous about all the inventory that she had in the storeroom and on the floor.
She set to work.