Pawn. Carla Cassidy

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СКАЧАТЬ no matter what it might be she couldn’t think what any of it would have to do with her.

      “If you’ll just follow me,” Samuel said and led her past the desks and toward an inner office where blinds were pulled down and the door was closed.

      A terrible dread filled her as she approached the office.

      For the last year she’d rebuilt her life, a life that had been shattered beneath deception and lies. She’d moved from her godfather’s luxurious mansion on the beach in Miami to a small apartment in Phoenix. She’d made a nice life for herself here and she wasn’t about to let the FBI ruin things for her.

      Whatever they were selling, she wasn’t buying.

      Samuel opened the door and motioned for her to precede him. She stepped in to find a man seated behind a large desk.

      He was an odd-looking man with an unusually wide forehead and a small nose. His buzz-cut hair looked unnaturally black and his eyes were that pale blue color that never managed to look warm. He stood, his gaze sweeping over her with intense assessment.

      Every sense that Lynn possessed went on high alert. She knew instinctively that this was not a man to screw with. An aura of power clung to him, nothing subtle about it.

      “That will be all, Agent Cahill,” he said.

      Cahill dropped Lynn’s car keys on the desk, then nodded, left the room and closed the door behind him.

      “Ms. White, I’m Special Agent Richard Blake. Please, have a seat.” He gestured to the chair in front of the desk. When she was seated, he eased back down behind the desk and eyed her with open speculation.

      Once again an overwhelming sense of disquiet fluttered through Lynn. Who was this man and what did he want from her? Although she had a million questions, she refused to give voice to a single one. She’d wait until he was ready to tell her what the hell this was all about.

      She didn’t have long to wait. He leaned forward in his chair, those pale eyes of his holding her gaze intently and radiating with keen intelligence. “Ms. White. We need your help.”

      “Why not just give me a call and arrange an appointment instead of having me dragged here off the street by some of Arizona’s finest?” She didn’t try to hide her irritation.

      One of his dark eyebrows drew upward and a disbelieving smile curved his thin lips. “And had I called you to arrange an appointment, you would have come?”

      “Probably not,” she answered truthfully. The less polite answer was not in a million years. “Look, I don’t want to waste any of your time or mine. I can tell you right now that whatever you want from me, I’m not interested.”

      “But you haven’t heard what I have to say.”

      “It doesn’t matter what you have to say,” she replied. “I did my time with the FBI last year when I helped gather evidence against my godfather. It’s not my fault he escaped arrest, and he’s dead now anyway. I have no interest in disrupting my life to work with the FBI again.”

      “This is bigger than the capture of one criminal.”

      “It doesn’t matter how big it is, I’m simply not interested.” She stood.

      She’d been curious when the cops had pulled her over and they had acted out of character. She wasn’t curious any longer. She was just tired and wanted to go home.

      “I paid my dues, Mr. Blake. A year ago I did what I could to help the FBI. Now I deserve to be left alone.” She didn’t want to hear what he had to say, what he might want from her. She was terrified of getting sucked into a drama she didn’t need or want in her life. It was better to walk away knowing nothing.

      “Sometimes we don’t get what we deserve,” he countered.

      Lynn had enough. “Am I under arrest?”

      “Of course not.”

      “Then give me my car keys. I’m out of here.”

      There was a split second when she thought he wasn’t going to comply. She saw something dark and angry flash in the depths of his cold blue eyes, but after a moment of hesitation he held out her keys.

      She snatched them from his hand, overwhelmed with the need to get out of here, to escape this man, this place. “Thanks, and I hope we never meet again.”

      She couldn’t get out of the office fast enough. She looked neither right nor left as she walked back down the hallway toward the exit.

      As she left the building the night air embraced her, but she was unsure if the heat was from the outside temperature or the edge of anger that stirred inside her.

      She strode to where her car had been parked and didn’t feel quite safe until she was behind the wheel with the doors locked. She couldn’t quite believe how easily he’d let her go.

      It took her only minutes to orient herself as to where they had taken her and get back on the highway that would take her home. Home to her apartment on the south side of Phoenix.

      The small apartment was a far cry from the mansion where she’d been raised in the lap of luxury. Her Uncle Jonas had kept her isolated from friends but had made sure she had the best of everything that money could buy. She’d also been raised to believe she was the heir of wealthy parents who had died in a tragic boating accident.

      Lies. All lies. She clenched her fingers around the steering wheel as she thought of the lies that had filled her life.

      When the FBI had gone after Jonas and frozen his accounts, Lynn had discovered she had no trust fund. She had nothing. She hadn’t cared, because she thought she had Nick. As always, thoughts of FBI Special Agent Nick Barnes brought with them a deep regret, an ache of love lost.

      Nick Barnes had worked for her uncle. Of course, neither her uncle nor she had known that he was an undercover FBI agent determined to bring Jonas down. In the course of his investigation he and Lynn had fallen in love, but the timing for that love had been all wrong.

      Lynn had just discovered the beginnings of the truth of her birth and the surprising existence of two sisters. One, Faith, lived in Louisiana where she worked in the evidence department for the New Orleans police. The other, Dawn, traveled the world on all kinds of hair-raising missions as some sort of mercenary soldier, fighting for justice. Lynn, left Miami and Nick behind to come to Phoenix to find out more about herself and the special school, Athena Academy, that their biological mother had attended. She’d known then that she couldn’t go forward in her relationship with Nick until she had the answers she so desperately needed.

      As she drove she began to relax. Driving had always been the way she unwound when she’d been younger. The only difference was when she’d been living with Jonas she’d driven a new model red convertible with all the bells and whistles.

      She now drove a five-year-old sports car with a dented front fender, but she’d paid for it with money she’d earned and nobody and nothing could take it away from her.

      She breathed a sweet sigh of relief as she parked in front of her apartment building. She’d half expected to be followed home, but had seen no suspicious cars behind her.

      Familiar СКАЧАТЬ