Behind Closed Doors (The Mccloud Series Book 1) Read online

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  “I’m sorry about what I said, Raine. I wish I could take it back.”

  His sincerity made her heart ache, hot and soft. Made her want to cover his face with soothing kisses as if he were a baby, to make up for the loneliness she sensed behind his rough façade. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her face against his hair.

  Her soft embrace provoked a frightening flare of heat in him. He spread open her jacket and shoved her T-shirt up against her collarbone, rough and urgent. She twisted against him in protest. “Seth, don’t.”

  Her breathless words lost their meaning as his warm hands stroked and soothed. “Just this. Just let me rub my face against your skin. I’m starving for it. So soft. I love the smell of you. Please, Raine. I need this.” His voice was a pleading rasp.

  It was easier just to let herself believe that he was giving her a choice, she thought, as he discovered the zippered front of the sports bra and growled in approval at the convenience.

  That was it. She was lost.

  SHANNON MCKENNA

  BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Preview: Blood and Fire

  Preview: One Wrong Move

  Prologue

  The dream never changed.

  Her father’s sailboat was drifting slowly away from the shore. The clouds were growing darker. Gusts of wind whipped the dark water into a white-capped froth that sloshed up over her feet. Dread lay in her belly, as heavy as a cold stone. She watched the boat drift farther and farther. Lightning flashed. Thunder.

  Then she was standing with her father in front of a tall black marble obelisk. His arm was around her shoulders, and his handsome face was pale and grim. He pointed to the obelisk. She realized that it was a tombstone.

  A jolt of fear reverberated through her. It was his tombstone.

  She leaned closer to read his name and the dates of his birth and death. The grooves in the marble seemed wet and dark. More than wet, they were dripping with dark liquid. It oozed out and snaked down the pale surface of the marble in long, tangled crimson rivulets. Blood.

  Horrified, she looked back up at her father, but he was no longer her father. He had become her Uncle Victor, his cold eyes an electric silver gray, his teeth white and oddly sharp looking. And his heavy, muscular arm was around her shoulders, tightening until she thought her lungs would burst.

  She woke up gasping for breath, a scream trapped in her aching throat, and stared wild-eyed into the dark. Trying to breathe, trying to make her hammering heart calm down.

  Wondering how long it would take for the dream to drive her mad.

  Chapter 1

  Nine forty-six P.M. Almost time.

  The monitor glowed an eerie blue in the darkened room, but the mosaic of windows on the screen remained stubbornly dark. Seth Mackey glanced at his watch and drummed his fingers against the desktop. Her schedule never varied. She should be home any minute.

  There were more important things for him to do. He had hundreds of hours of audio and video to filter, and even with Kearn’s jazzed-up digital signal processor filters, it still took time to run the analyses. He should at least be watching the beacon displays, or checking the other surveillance sites. Anything but this.

  Still he stared at the screen, trying to rationalize away the buzz of hot excitement in his body. The hundreds of hours of digital video footage that he had on file for her wouldn’t do the trick. He needed her live, in real time.

  Like a junkie needed his fix.

  He spat out a curse at the passing thought, negating it. He didn’t need anything, not anymore. Since Jesse’s death, he’d reinvented himself. He was as cool and detached as a cyborg. His heart rate did not vary, his palms did not sweat. His goal was sharp and clear. It shone in the darkness of his interior landscape, as brilliant as a guiding star. The plan to destroy Victor Lazar and Kurt Novak was the first thing that had aroused Seth’s interest in the ten months since they had murdered his brother Jesse. It had rendered him a miracle of single-minded concentration—until three weeks ago.

  The woman who was about to walk into the rooms monitored by the screen in front of him was the second thing.

  The light and motion activated camera monitoring her garage flicked to life. He tried to ignore the way his heart rate spiked, and glanced at his watch. 9:51. She’d been at the office since 7 A.M. He had watched her on the cameras he had planted at the Lazar Import & Export corporate office, too, of course, but it wasn’t the same. He liked having her all to himself.

  The car pulled in, the headlights went out. She sat slumped in the car for so long that the camera switched itself off and the window went dark. He cursed through his teeth and made a mental note to himself to reprogram the default from three minutes to ten as he typed in the command that activated the infrared mode. Her image reappeared, a glowing, unearthly green. She sat there for two more minutes staring blankly into the dark garage before she finally got out.

  The second two cameras snapped on dutifully as she unlocked the door and headed for the kitchen. She ran herself a glass of water, took off the horn-rimmed glasses and rubbed her eyes, clutching the sink for balance. She tilted back her head to drink, exposing her slender, soft looking white throat.

  She must be trying to toughen up her look with the glasses. She’d failed, in a big way. The camera he had hidden in the stove clock framed her pale face, her stubborn jaw, the shadows under her eyes.

  He zoomed in on her eyes. The straight, winging brows and curling lashes were dramatically dark against her pale skin. He would have taken her for a bleached blonde if he didn’t have damn good reason to know that her blond curls were absolutely for real. She closed her eyes. The sweep of her lashes was shadowy against the delicate curve of her cheekbones. Her mascara was smudged. She looked exhausted.

  Being Lazar’s new sex toy must be more strenuous than she had bargained for. He wondered how she’d gotten embroiled with him. Whether she was in too deep to ever get out. Most people who got involved with Lazar soon found they were in over their heads. By then, of course, it was too late.

  There was no objective reason for him to continue to monitor her. Hacking into her personnel file had revealed that Lazar Import & Export had hired her a month ago as an executive assistant. Had it not been for the fact that she was living in Lazar’s ex-mistress’s house she might never have come to his attention at all. Lazar’s visits to that house had warranted surveillance, and they had been watching it for months.

  But Lazar didn’t visit the blonde, or at least he hadn’t yet. She came straight home from the office every night, stopping only to get groceries or pick up her dry cleaning. The transponder he had planted in her car confirmed that she never varied her route. W
eekly phone calls to her mother revealed only that the woman had no clue about her daughter’s latest career move, which was perfectly understandable. A young woman kept for pleasure by a filthy rich criminal might well choose to hide the knowledge from her family. She knew no one in Seattle, went nowhere, had no social life that he could discern.

  Kind of like himself.

  Her big, haunted eyes were silver gray, the irises ringed with indigo. He studied the magnified image, disquieted. She looked…God, sweet was the word that came to mind, even though it made him wince. He had never before felt any moral qualms about spying on people. When he was a kid reading comic books, he’d picked out his superhero mutation of choice right away. X-ray eyes won, hands down. It was the perfect mutation for a paranoid guy like him. Knowledge was power, and power was good. He’d built a lucrative career on that philosophy. Jesse used to tease him about it.

  He shoved that thought away fast, before it could bite him.

  He had to stay cool and detached. Cyborg man. It was a name for a comic book superhero. He’d always liked those mutant guys in the classic comic books. They were all tormented, depressed and alienated. He could relate to that.

  He’d watched Montserrat, Lazar’s former mistress, with ice-cold detachment. Watching her writhe in bed with Lazar had left him unmoved, even a little repulsed. Never once had he felt guilty.

  But then again, Montserrat was a professional. He could read it in her sinuous, calculated body language. She wore a mask all the time, when she was fucking Lazar, even when she was alone.

  The blonde had no mask at all. She was wide open and defenseless and soft, like whipped cream, like butter, like silk.

  It made him feel sleazy for watching her, an emotion so unfamiliar that it had taken him days to put a name to it. The hell of it was, the sleazier he felt, the more impossible it was to stop. He wished he could shake off the nagging sense that she needed to be rescued. He wasn’t the white knight type to begin with, and besides, he had Jesse to avenge. That was enough responsibility.

  And he wished she weren’t so fucking beautiful. It was disturbing.

  A shrink could probably explain his fixation: he was projecting deprived childhood fantasies onto her because she looked like a fairy-tale princess. He’d read too many comic books as a kid. He was stressed, depressed, obsessed, had an altered perception of reality, blah, blah, blah. Then that woman’s stunning body had altered reality beyond recognition. It had shocked his numbed libido violently to life.

  She drifted wearily into the range of the color-cam nestled inside the carved ebony filigree of a hanging lamp in the bedroom. The lamp had been left behind by Montserrat, who had departed so abruptly that she hadn’t even taken the time to pack the personal items that she had contributed to the house’s décor. The blonde had brought nothing of her own to the house, and had shown no interest in moving the pieces already in place, which was good. The lamp color-cam commanded an excellent view of the mirror on the armoire, a detail for which he had reason to be grateful. He enlarged the image until it filled the whole screen, ignoring a slight pang of guilt. This was his favorite part, and he wasn’t missing it for anything.

  She removed her jacket, clipped the skirt to the hanger. With the awe-inspiring resolution of the latest generation of Colbit color-cams, he could differentiate every gradation of the color of her perfect skin, from cream to pink to rose to crimson. More than worth the extra bandwidth the signal occupied. She hung up the suit, and the tail of her blouse hiked up to reveal prim cotton briefs stretched tightly across the swell of her rounded ass. He knew her routine like it was the opening credits of an old television show, and still he hung on every detail. Her unself-consciousness fascinated him. Most of the good-looking women he knew played constantly to an imaginary camera. They checked every reflective surface they passed to make sure they were still beautiful. This dreamy-eyed girl didn’t seem to particularly notice, or care.

  She peeled off her hose, flung them into the corner, and started her clumsy, innocent nightly striptease. She fumbled with her cuffs until he wanted to scream at her to get the fuck on with it. Then she fussed and picked at the buttons at the throat of the high-collared blouse, gazing into the mirror as if she saw another world entirely.

  His breath hissed in between his teeth when she finally shrugged off the blouse. Her plump breasts were sternly restrained by a white underwire bra. It was not a sexy, rich-man’s-plaything scrap of lingerie. It had plain, wide straps, was practical and unadorned—and the faint hint of cleavage it revealed was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.

  She sniffed delicately at the armpits of the blouse, which brought a grim smile to his face. It was hard to imagine that graceful, marble-white body actually sweating, though he bet he could drive her to it. She would break a sweat once she were spread out naked beneath his pounding body, her hips jerking eagerly up to meet his thrusts. Or astride him, those big, soft tits bouncing, filling his hands as he drove into her from below. He would make that ivory skin flush wild-rose pink, until tangled curls clung to her cheek, her throat. He would make her soaking wet. Every hot, sweet, slippery inch of her.

  He rearranged his throbbing private parts inside his jeans and dragged his hand over his hot face with a groan. He had no business getting anything more than a purely casual, incidental hard-on for one of Lazar’s toys. It was deadly stupid, and it had to stop.

  Except that now it was time for the hair. God, he loved that part.

  She tossed pin after pin into the china tray on the dresser, and uncoiled the thick blond braid from the bun at the nape of her neck. She unraveled the strands, shaking them loose until they rippled past the small of her back, tapering down to gleaming wisps that brushed tenderly against the round curve of her ass. His breath sighed out in a low, audible groan as she reached behind herself and unhooked the bra. His hands tingled as he stared at her plump, luscious breasts, crowned with pale pink nipples. He imagined them taut, flushed and hard against his fingers, the palms of his hands, his feverish face, his hungry, suckling mouth.

  His heart began to pound as she peeled off the panties, rolling her shoulders, her neck, arching her back, enjoying the sensual freedom of being naked and alone. Unmasked. Whipped cream and butter and silk.

  The downy puff of springy blond curls at her crotch didn’t quite hide the shadowy cleft between her shapely thighs. He wanted to press his face against those ringlets, inhale her warm, woman scent, and then taste her, parting the tender pink folds of her cunt, licking and suckling until she collapsed in pleasure. Video and audio were not enough. He needed more data. Textures, smells, tastes. He was starving for it.

  And then, the gesture that always undid him. She bent from the waist and flung her hair over her head, arching her back and running her fingers through the wavy mass. The placement of the camera and the mirror guaranteed him a spectacular view of her soft, rounded thighs, the creamy globes of her ass, the enticing divide between them.

  The sight was enough to wake the dead.

  Jesse. The stab of pain blindsided him.

  He turned away from the monitor and forced himself to breathe over the burning ache. Don’t cave in, he reminded himself. He couldn’t let grief dull his edge. On the contrary, he would use it to sharpen his resolve. To turn him into a single-minded, utterly dedicated instrument of ruin. He averted his eyes, punishing himself by missing the rest of the stretch show. He’d gotten very skilled at shoving away painful thoughts and memories before they could dig in their fangs, but the blonde blew his focus all to hell. He forced himself to run over his reason for existence: to watch that treacherous bastard Lazar until he made contact with Novak. And then, open season. Payback time.

  By the time he permitted himself to look back at the screen, the blonde had clothed herself in a baggy fleece sweat suit, and was logging onto her computer. He scooted over to another bank of computers and monitors, activating the hidden antenna he had planted to pick up her computer’s EM frequency noise. He ran i
t through the DPS hardware that deciphered and reconstructed what was on her screen, and monitored her message. It was to a Juan Carlos in Barcelona. She sent messages in half a dozen different languages, but this one was in Spanish, which he understood from growing up in the ghettos of L.A. It was innocuous enough: how are you, I’m working really hard, how’s Marcela and Franco’s baby, did the job interview in Madrid go well, et cetera. She sounded lonely. He wondered who Juan Carlos was to her. Maybe an ex-lover. She seemed to write to him a lot.

  He was toying with the idea of doing a background check on the guy when a cool draft whispered across his neck. He snatched the SIG Sauer P228 that lay on the desk and spun around.

  It was Connor McCloud, co-conspirator and all-around pain in the ass, who had been Jesse’s best buddy and partner in the undercover FBI task force that Jesse had dubbed “the Cave.” No wonder the alarm hadn’t tripped. He’d bypassed it, the sneaky son-of-a-bitch. The guy moved like a ghost, despite his limp and his cane.

  Seth lay the gun down, breath escaping slowly from his lungs. “Don’t sneak up on me, McCloud. It could get you killed.”

  Connor’s sharp green eyes swept the room, taking in every detail. “Hey, man. Stay casual. I brought you some coffee, but I’m thinking now that maybe you shouldn’t drink it.”

  Seth saw the dingy room through Connor’s eyes for a moment, the clutter of beer bottles and take-out containers scattered across dusty snarls of cables and electronic equipment. The apartment was getting more squalid by the day, and it wasn’t smelling too good, either.