Risky Engagement

“We suspect he courted and seduced the senior senator from Maine.”

“Janice DeWitt?” she gasped. “The senator who died in a car accident a few weeks ago?”

“There’s some question,” Wolf said carefully, “whether it was an accident or a suicide.” Or something else.

So far the FBI and Secret Service had managed to suppress the evidence indicating that a member of the U.S. Congress had deliberately driven her vehicle through a guardrail and over a rocky cliff. Likewise the gut-wrenching e-mail she’d sent the President Pro Tem of the Senate, confessing that a disk encrypted with highly classified information might have been compromised by the man she’d taken as a lover.

“We also suspect,” Wolf continued soberly, “Cordell may have used the senator to gain access to extremely sensitive top secret information.”

Nina took a step back, and her shock that a popular, charismatic senator had indulged in an extramarital affair and possibly committed suicide took an instant and very personal turn. The information Kevin had downloaded from her personal computer certainly wasn’t top secret, but it had been crucial to her business. She would have shared it with him if he’d asked. Not all of it, of course, just the nonproprietary data that might have been useful to his financial planning and investment operation. That he’d dug into her private files without her knowledge or consent had stunned her. That he’d leveraged the data he’d extracted to benefit one of her competitors had royally pissed her off.

“Bastard,” she muttered.

“Yeah, he is.”

Pulled back to the present, she blinked. “I was referring to the jerk who pulled almost the same thing on me.”

Blackstone cocked his head. “How so?”

It embarrassed her to admit how blind she’d been. She had to force herself to recap the sorry details.

“My fiancé stole proprietary information and sold it to a competitor. Correction, make that exfiancé.”

She wasn’t looking for sympathy. Good thing, because the man seated on the bar stool a few feet from her didn’t display so much as a trace of it. Instead, a gleam of satisfaction leapt into his blue eyes.

“Then you understand why we’re so anxious to nail Sebastian Cordell.”

“I understand it,” Nina replied cautiously, “but I don’t see how my having lunch with him will help.”

“We’ve been trying to get someone inside the compound. Unfortunately, Cordell’s goon squad take their duties very seriously.”

“I noticed.”

“But Cordell just issued you an engraved invitation. We can fit you with a hidden camera, have you—”

“Whoa! Hold on there, Blackstone.”

With the shoulder holsters strapped onto the goons he’d just mentioned all too vivid in her mind, Nina scrambled off her stool and backed away.

“I’m not into playing spy games.”

“This isn’t a game,” he fired back.

“Yes, well, whatever it is, I’ll leave it to the pros like you.”

Blackstone vacated his stool and followed her into the living area. Like the rest of the casita, the room was elegantly furnished. A three-section sofa in muted colors formed a conversation pit, with a monster slab of white-veined black marble in the middle to serve as a coffee table. Facing the sofas was an entertainment center containing a sixty-inch flat screen TV, a DVD player, an assortment of recent movies and an iPod dock.

Nina’s iPod and earbuds were still in her straw tote, so the only sound in the room, as she faced Blackstone was the restless murmur of the sea below the balcony, just off the living area.

“We need your cooperation, Dr. Grant. Cordell plans to auction the information he stole to the highest bidder. If it falls into the wrong hands—an unfriendly government or a terrorist organization, for instance—it could seriously jeopardize U.S. national security.”

“Oh, sure. Lay the safety and security of the United States on my shoulders, why don’t you?”

Nervously, Nina swiped her palms down the side seams of her linen sundress. She’d always considered herself a good citizen. She paid her taxes on time, donated to a number of charities, gave blood regularly and volunteered at a homeless shelter one weekend a month.

She did not, however, in any way, shape or form, see herself as a modern day Mata Hari. The prospect of entering Sebastian Cordell’s heavily guarded compound with a camera hidden somewhere on her person made her break out in a cold sweat.

“Look, Blackstone, I’d like to help. I really would. This just isn’t my area of expertise.”

“We have from now until tomorrow noon. I’ll make sure you know what you’re doing before you go in.”

Her palms froze in midswipe. “From now until tomorrow noon?” she echoed. “What are you planning to do? Camp out here tonight?”

“If that’s what it will take to make you comfortable with the operation.”

If anything, the prospect of spending the next twelve-plus hours in close quarters with Rafe Blackstone made her twice as nervous.

“It won’t work,” she told him firmly. “I’m the world’s worst liar. Even a little social fib makes my face turn red, and I can’t look people in the eye.”

“Must be tough to conduct business negotiations,” he drawled.

“Not particularly,” she snapped, her chin coming up. “I conduct negotiations fairly and honestly.”

The icy reply knifed through the air like a blade. Blackstone dipped his head in acknowledgment of the hit and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his wrinkled khakis. The movement swung open the flaps of his jungle print shirt and gave Nina an unobstructed view of black cotton stretched across a muscled chest, but she was too miffed to appreciate the view.

“About those negotiations,” he said, with a considering look. “Didn’t you tell me earlier that your company supplies medical trend data to a host of private and governmental research centers?”

“Yes. So?”

“So I’m guessing government contracts must account for a sizable chunk of your business.”

Nina drew in a swift breath. Government contracts accounted for more than a chunk. They constituted almost half of her business base.

“You’d better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking, Blackstone!”

“If you’re thinking those contracts can be cancelled with one phone call, I guess I am.”

He didn’t so much as blink. The bald-faced effrontery of it, the sheer gall, made Nina gasp.

“I don’t believe this! You’re actually trying to blackmail me into helping you?”

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