Chapter 1
Little Red Riding Hood
It had beena mistake having totally wild sex with Nick Donovan during our first assignment together.
Including the hundred or so times we ended up in bed—or up against a wall, on the kitchen table, on the floor, in my office—when we weren’t working on Operation Cinderella.
The breath I sucked in burned my throat as I tried to control myself while I watched Donovan. His jeans tightened against his muscular ass as he bent over the shoulder of Agent Chandra Kerrison to look closer at the widescreen monitor in front of her.
Donovan had become like a drug to me. An addiction. I couldn’t get enough of him.
I pushed my hair out of my face in frustration. Lexi Steele had never allowed distractions like Nick Donovan. I had to get a grip.
I’d been telling myself that for a good six months now, since June, a couple of weeks after we finished our first op together. Here it was, the end of November, and I still couldn’t get enough of Donovan.
“Damn it,” I said under my breath. This infatuation had to stop. It was like being a freaking teenager.
Another thought crossed my mind as I watched Donovan, a thought that was always there and wouldn’t let go of me. The big man held so many secrets tight to his chest and had never let me in far enough to know what any of them were. I had spilled my guts about what had happened when I was in Army Special Forces, and how I’d been forced into being an assassin. Why was Donovan keeping a big part of his past from me?
I shook off the thoughts. This wasn’t the time for lust or secrets. It was time to get back to work. I turned my attention to the current op and headed toward David Takamoto.
Takamoto stood at the opposite side of the banks of monitors and screens of our Team Center, TC. A blue glow encompassed the whole of the Command Center, the glow given off from walls of screens in the CC where various teams tracked activity on their assignments.
Agents had put up holiday decorations here and there, some for sheer amusement, like a small Santa who dropped his pants every time someone walked by.
There were also decorations on agents’ desks reflecting their own holiday beliefs. A silver-and-blue-depiction of a Jewish menorah with its white candles. A picture of a Kwanzaa kinara with its colorful candles—three red, one black, and three green.
Some wiseass had put up a Mexican donkey pinata in a corner of the CC—a picture of Special Agent in Charge Morris Carter on its ass. Our SAC would be entirely oblivious considering he spent his time in his first-floor office playing computer card games as he waited out the last year until his retirement.
Of course, our Assistant Special Agent in Charge might not find it amusing. Our ASAC, Karen Oxford, was tough, fair, and had no obvious sense of humor. Then again, the picture was still up, and the donkey had been there since two weeks before Thanksgiving. Maybe she had a sense of humor after all.
A soft buzz and hum filled the CC as agents spoke into headphones and kept track of their assignments on the enormous high-tech screens. I smelled pine from a small Christmas tree that overpowered the familiar scent of climate-controlled air as I passed the tree.
“Steele.” Takamoto caught sight of me, and I tilted my head to meet his brown eyes when I reached him. “I was just about to find you and give you the news. It’s about Wolf.”
A petite five-four, I had to look up at most of the guys at the Recovery Enforcement Division. Seemed that Oxford liked to hire male agents six feet and over. Or maybe it was a coincidence.
Ha.
Most of the guys on RED task forces made me feel like I was in the land of the giants—just like my four older brothers did. Even my twelve-year-old brother towered over me. Little shit. Make that big shit.
“I’d give anything for news on Hagstedt.” I put my palms on my hips as I met Takamoto’s gaze. “Tell me you have something on that bastard.”
Takamoto was excellent at schooling his expressions, and right now I wanted to shake him for looking so calm. He slipped his hands into the pockets of his slacks, causing his shirt to pull against his athletic runner’s physique. He pressed his shirts and slacks so stiffly I don’t think a wrinkle would dare sneak in. I managed not to look down at my T-shirt and Levi’s that I’d snatched out of the laundry basket this morning and felt the material almost crawl with wrinkles.
“Operation Big Bad Wolf looks like it could be hot in Manhattan just like we expected.” Takamoto glanced in the direction the group of agents on his intel team. “Rublev just reported in after she sent us the coded message. She said the Elite Gentleman’s Club is definitely Hagstedt’s. She overheard a conversation that verifies what info Johnny gave us. And if we can crack that coded message she intercepted earlier, that may give us all we need to get in there and get to Hagstedt.”
I wanted to grip my fist and jerk my elbow back in a yes! motion. We’d known the key men were involved in kidnapping and prostituting young women in their club, but we hadn’t known for sure if that operation was part of Hagstedt’s enormous human trafficking ring. “Thank God. We’ve been working that club for how long once Rublev was in?”
Takamoto shook his head. “At least two months.”
“About friggin’ time.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “I can’t believe it’s been over six months since we brought down his man Cabot in Cinderella.”
Operation Cinderella had been a huge coup for the Human Trafficking and Sex Crimes Unit, which was part of the Recovery Enforcement Division. RED was a clandestine offshoot of the NSA, and we had clearance to do any damned thing we wanted to.
Yeah, Cinderella had been a success, but Wolf had not been going so well. Over six months of fruitless searching over the summer for Anders Hagstedt grated at me more and more every single day. The so-called mastermind of countless human trafficking rings in China, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States needed to be brought down. Now. We doubted Hagstedt was his real last name, but we’d still run all the leads we could on anyone with that surname with no luck.
Takamoto inclined his head in the direction of the “dungeon,” as we liked to call our geek squad’s domain. “Now if the geeks can decipher the coded message, we might get some more detailed info. It’s been six hours and the geeks are still working on it.”
“The new agent, Kerrison, thinks she can crack it,” I said. “She’s only had it fifteen or twenty minutes, though.” My chin-length hair brushed my cheeks as I looked over my shoulder and saw her talking with Donovan just a few feet away.
I swiveled my gaze back to Takamoto. “I think we’re real close to putting Little Red into play.” Before Takamoto could respond, I sensed Donovan behind me and caught his musky, spicy scent. My body immediately responded to his presence with an aching desire that made me want to growl in frustration.
Oxford had paired Donovan and me up as Team Supervisors during Cinderella, and she’d decided to keep us working together instead of giving Donovan his own team. Karen Oxford was one incredibly savvy, observant woman, but I don’t think she knew about my sexual relationship with Donovan, or she would have separated us. Or canned one of our asses. Hell, probably both of us.
Donovan’s blue eyes didn’t show any emotion that might tell me how he felt about the two of us. No, his gaze was entirely professional. Good. That’s how it should be. I hoped I looked just as professional.
Donovan glanced from me to Takamoto and back. “Kerrison deciphered the communication.”
It took some effort, but I managed to keep my jaw from dropping. “She decoded the message in twenty minutes?”
“Fifteen.” Donovan’s expression bordered on grim as he continued. “Hagstedt’s operation isn’t relegated to one or even a few clubs. It looks like he’s doing exactly what we’ve been able to gather from intel,” Donovan continued. “He imports girls from Switzerland, China, and Russia, and forces them into prostitution in clubs in all of New York City’s boroughs. The club we’ve been watching on East Sixtieth Street is more or less the headquarters for his New York op.”
Rick Smithe gave a low whistle behind me, and I cut my gaze to my left to see that he and George Perry had joined Takamoto. “What do you know? We finally got something,” Smithe said.
Women being lured into the wrong hands with promises of jobs in America, then being prostituted once they arrived was nothing new—other teams on our task force were working on various ops related to all types of human trafficking, including that.
But to finally find a ring firmly tied to Hagstedt was like raking in the dough from a billion-dollar lottery. No—giving the slimeball a bullet in the brain would be the winning ticket. This was more like watching each Powerball number start to fall into place.
A shiver of excitement tickled my skin from anticipation of getting my teeth into the Wolf op that was finally going somewhere. Hagstedt was a big fish. Probably the biggest mastermind of human trafficking in the world from the intel we’d gathered.
I gave Donovan word on the latest Takamoto had just relayed. Adrenaline started rushing through me from the excitement of an oncoming hunt. “What do you have that Kerrison came up with?”
Donovan was holding two pieces of paper, and he raised his hand. For a moment I couldn’t take my eyes off his thick wrist and the black hair on his forearm, and I could almost feel myself tracing my fingertips over the back of his hand. I swallowed and met his gaze. Damn.
He handed me the pages. I skimmed the gibberish on the first piece. “The code’s so complicated that Taylor and his geek squad couldn’t make sense of it in six hours, but Kerrison did it in fifteen minutes?” I repeated more to myself than any of the men standing around me.
Oxford had told me that Kerrison had one of the highest IQs in the world and had also sailed through Quantico’s intense physical tests—supposedly she could kick major ass. A Harvard graduate at twenty with an IQ as high as Stephen Hawking or Marilyn vos Savant, Kerrison made an incredible addition to my and Donovan’s team. On top of that she was model-beautiful, which could work to her advantage in some undercover ops.
My skin prickled as I read the decoded message on the second page. “Hagstedt is supposed to arrive in Manhattan within the next couple of weeks,” I said.
I glanced from the paper to Takamoto, Perry, and Smithe as I continued. “It actually names the Elite Gentleman’s Club and names the asshole who oversees Hagstedt’s entire New York City human trafficking ring. His name is something we’ve never been able to get. He doesn’t talk with anyone but a couple of his men and the madame, from what Rublev has managed to see. And they call him Mr. G.”
“Holy shit.” Smithe’s grin was almost dangerous. “We’re going to put that bastard’s ass in a grinder.”
Perry tilted his head to look at the paper as he rubbed the back of his neck. “What kind of name is Beeff Giger?” Perry touched the sides of his dark GQ haircut. “Sounds almost cliche, like Rocko or Shorty.”
A metrosexual. Perry was always primping. He was supposed to have been my submissive in the last op—I’d ended up being the submissive, but to Nick Donovan, who’d been my “Master” in a private BDSM circle. Not something I wanted to repeat. I’d been whipped enough in my former life as an assassin, and even though things had gotten pretty erotic with Donovan, I’d skip floggings any day. Especially with bamboo. That hurts like a sonofabitch.
Takamoto shrugged in response to Perry’s question. “Beeff, is actually a Swiss variant, like Giger, his last name.” Takamoto pronounced the names perfectly as he looked over my shoulder at the page, too.
“We think our inside cooperative, Jenika Rublev, has been doing her job in finding ways to make the handlers suspect that the club’s madame is catching on to their real operation—that it’s not a strip club with willing prostitutes.” Donovan glanced at the three men beside me. “These boys are probably starting to feel a little uncomfortable with the madame.”
“We need to pull her out or she’ll end up permanently visiting the fishes in the Hudson,” Takamoto said.
I nodded. “We’ll be able to roll Little Red into gear in no time. But we’ve got to hurry.” I glanced at the huge atomic clock on one wall with its glowing blue numbers. Almost two in the afternoon. I looked back at the guys. “Smithe, grab Weiss, Fairbanks, and Jensen and meet me and Donovan in Conference Room Four. Three sharp. Takamoto and Perry, I want you there, too.”
“Can’t wait to see what you’re cooking up in that ruthless head of yours, Steele,” Perry said with a grin.
Same here. “Three,” I repeated before I turned to head up the steps to the catwalk that led to the Team Supervisor offices.
Damn, a hot lead. But we had to hurry and get “in” before Hagstedt arrived. We needed to make our case solid to tear down his entire house of cards.
Donovan fell into step beside me, and as always he made a point of shortening his normally long strides so that I wouldn’t have to jog to keep up with him. As my partner he’d be going in on any op we put together, and the thought sent something indefinable curling in my belly. Or at least something I didn’t want to define.
My new athletic shoes squeaked on the metal stairs that led out of the Command Center. I glanced up at Donovan as we stepped on the black-and-white-tiled catwalk at the same time. He was looking at me with such intense scrutiny that hair pricked at my nape.
“Hold a second,” Donovan said. We came to a stop in front of the glass-walled offices of four other Team Supervisors. Donovan was already walking back to Kerrison, who now stood at the top of the stairs we’d just taken from the CC to the catwalk.
I didn’t follow him. I figured he’d relay whatever message the junior agent had.
I couldn’t resist admiring Donovan’s biceps, which bulged as he braced his hand on one of the rails that ran along the catwalk as he spoke with Kerrison. The powerful muscles of his shoulders flexed beneath his black T-shirt when he moved, and his short, dark hair needed to be ruffled.
I trailed my gaze down his athletic physique—all six feet, four inches of him—to the Levi’s that were snug against his tight ass and muscular legs. When I moved my gaze up again, I studied his almost harsh but incredibly sexy profile. I couldn’t see his vivid blue eyes, but the stubble on his strong jaw made me itch to caress his cheeks, to see my fair Irish skin against his darker flesh.
Donovan headed back toward me while Kerrison returned downstairs to the hub of our RED unit. I went into my office, Donovan right behind. He closed the door.
My gaze fell on the red heavy-duty Everlast punching bag that I kept in my office. I could sure use it now to work off the sexual tension.
I plopped onto the padded leather seat behind my desk. Besides the punching bag, my large-screen monitor, and my desk, my office was almost bare. The exception being a framed photograph of my entire family taken two years ago. All five brothers, my sister, Mama, Daddy, and me.
“If we hurry and make our move,” I said as I swiveled slightly in my chair, “I think we can put Operation Little Red Riding Hood into action.”
Donovan folded his arms across his broad chest and hitched one shoulder against the frame of the door he’d just closed behind him. The floor-to-ceiling windows were currently covered by my office’s sleek black vertical blinds. “Agreed.”
Enthusiasm for our plan took over. I rested my forearms on my modern, sleek black desktop and leaned forward. “Smithe’s team just needs to put the finishing touches on the fictitious history for me.” I almost rolled my eyes at the thought of Smithe, who was always up to something.
With a very unladylike snort, I continued. “Of course, Smithe embellished the rap sheet, but it is good. Still comes down to me having run a successful cathouse for nine years here in Boston. Smithe even managed to create fake articles in the Boston Globe and several other rags about me being busted for my girls having sex with clientele willing to cough up the money.”
“How long since the bust?” Donovan looked so sexy the way he leaned up against the door.
“A year,” I said. “Long enough to be sure no one would pay any attention to me now. I’ve had plenty of money to last me, blah, blah, but now I need the income to continue my comfortable lifestyle.”
Donovan nodded. “Exactly what we wanted.”
I rocked back in my chair. “Nothing on the rap sheet would put me on the radar with any government agencies. This Beeff Giger bastard will see my solid history of handling girls. I’ll have moved to Brooklyn to get away from the heat in Boston and stay low for a while.”
“I don’t think we’ll have a problem getting you in once the current madame is out.” Donovan looked thoughtful. “I assume Smithe has my background set up so that it shouldn’t be too big of an issue getting on as one of the handlers.”
“You’ll have to rough yourself up a bit, Donovan.” I appraised him and tried not to smile. “You don’t look like a hard-core prostitute handler.”
“And you don’t look like a hard-core madame,” he said, his tone dry but almost amused.
“All it will take is a little wardrobe change and just the right made-up look.” Georgina, my best friend and fellow RED agent, was brilliant at helping me with that kind of thing. Plus, she currently wasn’t on an undercover op. “Yeah, makeup and adding about four inches to my height.” Thank God for stilettos.
The corner of his mouth quirked in one of his rare smiles.
Donovan sat down on the other side of my desk and we got to work.
I queued up the op on my large computer screen. I turned it slightly so that Donovan could see it from where he now sat.
“Twenty-four hours after the meeting,” I said, “our team better be fully prepared and standing at the gates to board the plane to JFK to put Operation Little Red Riding Hood in motion.” I cocked my head. “Once we get our claws into enough meat to get Hagstedt, we shift to Operation Big Bad Wolf.”
Donovan studied me with his damned incredible blue eyes but no discernible expression on his harsh but handsome features. I knew he hated it when I took control and didn’t ask his opinion. But even after working so many months together, I couldn’t help my natural inclination to make decisions on my own.
“We’ll change things up a bit and bring Kerrison in on Little Red to replace Jensen,” Donovan said in a way that sounded like he considered his statement a done deal. “She’s new, but from everything I’ve seen she’s got what it takes, and the fieldwork will be good experience for her.”
I didn’t let my surprise that he’d recommended the new agent show, and that he wanted her on the inside with me. “That’s not a good idea, Donovan. Kerrison’s untrained and not ready for this kind of undercover op.”
Donovan gestured to my glass wall that would give a perfect view of the CC if the blinds were open. I pictured Kerrison sitting in front of her monitor, her long sunset-red hair pushed over her shoulders.
“She’ll be perfect for decoding any messages that might come your way when we get you two on the inside,” Donovan was saying. “Plus, we can really use Jensen in surveillance.”
Of course, he was right. If Kerrison could decode anything as fast as she’d taken care of today’s intercepted communication, she’d be an incredible asset on the inside. Marti Jensen was top-notch, but she could be used on the surveillance and raid team just as easily.
Still, I found myself pushing it. “I know I wouldn’t have a problem with Jensen avoiding the kind of attention the bastards might try on her. If anyone got rough with her, she knows how to take care of them.”
“Kerrison can do the job.” Donovan met my stare with a solid look. “Martinez can prep her on using the same bracelet Jensen would have worn, and he can size a ring for Kerrison. It won’t take him long to brief her on the narcotics contained in the jewelry that will keep any sonofabitch away from her if she’s forced to use them.”
“During Cinderella, you told Oxford you didn’t want to put me in the kind of danger I ended up in. As if a woman can’t hold her own.” I cocked my head as I studied him. “And now you’re ready to let a junior female agent throw herself into a pack of wolves?”
Irritation flashed across Donovan’s features. “You know I think all of RED’s agents, female or male, are equally capable.” He was quiet for a moment as his eyes held mine and his tone softened. “But Cinderella—from the beginning I had a bad feeling about that op.”
“Yeah, yeah.” I held my palm to my T-shirt, over the Chinese symbol meaning “dragon” tattooed around my belly button.
That op had gone bad. Real bad.
“We came up lucky with what Rublev got through to us.” I figured I’d change the subject super-fast since thinking about what was beneath that dragon tat wasn’t something I liked. “What she’s doing isn’t pretty. And it’s dangerous for her to be taking chances like she did to get that intel.”
Jenika Rublev had been a willing prostitute in a cathouse in Nevada, but I still didn’t like the fact that she was having sex with men—and sometimes women—to feed us intel from the inside. Even though I’d been the one to go to her and offer her the assignment and the cash.
“Rublev made the choice, Steele. She jumped at the hundred grand to put aside for her twins’ college education,” Donovan said. “Not to mention part of it will help her get out of that Nevada shithole. Once this op is over, RED will make sure the job they land for her in the private sector will be damned good paying, too.”
I sighed. “She was a lucky find.”
When Donovan came up with the idea of searching for a Russian prostitute to work as a cooperative, I hadn’t been crazy about it. But I’d still contacted some of RED’s branch offices until I hit pay dirt in Nevada. I should have started there instead of LA and New York City since prostitution was legal in some parts of Nevada. One of the Las Vegas agents recommended Rublev. Wasn’t sure exactly how the agent was familiar with the prostitute, but from the way he talked about her, I had my suspicions.
“Rublev can take care of herself.” Nick leaned back in his seat. “She’s been doing that since she emigrated from Russia.”
“I suppose.” I rested one forearm on the desk and glanced at the monitor, which had the beautiful prostitute’s dossier next to Kerrison’s. “She did say that the madame at her Nevada cathouse made sure her working girls knew how to de-ball any man who tried to get rough.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, Donovan winced at the de-ball comment. Men.
Rublev had turned to prostitution when she came to America and couldn’t find a job in the sinking economy. She brought in good money in the cathouse, so she had stayed with it for the past two years to care for her twins and to be able to set some money aside.
Fortunately for this op, Rublev looked barely seventeen even though she was twenty-two. These bastards liked their girls young. We’d shipped her to Russia with her own fictitious background—using our Moscow contacts—hopefully to be chosen as one of a group of girls to be taken to a New York “modeling agency.”
It had been close, but Rublev had made the modeling agency’s cut. She’d been sent with a group of nineteen other girls to a so-called gentleman’s club. We just hadn’t known which one until two months ago when she’d gotten word to us that she was at the Elite Gentleman’s Club in Manhattan.
Pay dirt.
“Instead of going with everyone tomorrow, Saturday, you’ll head out at nine pm on Sunday,” Donovan was saying, drawing my attention fully to him. My skin prickled like a porcupine starting to bristle. He was giving me an order?
“You need to be with your family for Sunday supper,” he continued. “Zane said Ryan is in port. It might be a while before you see all of them again.”
Heat crept from my body to my neck and to my face. There I was, barreling through life as usual and Donovan had been the one to remind me of the most important day of the week for my parents as well as the rest of us. With Ryan on leave from the Marines, all five of my brothers would be here as well as my sister.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
We spent the next forty-five minutes laying out plans for our backup team, surveillance, and every detail down to making sure our fictitious personal rap sheets were perfect.
We added a rap sheet for Kerrison that included being busted with me for her part in running the club. She’d managed the finances for that part of the business, which included taking cash from the customers paying for sex.
When it was time to head to the conference room, both Donovan and I stood, and I walked toward him. He wrapped me in his strong embrace and gave me one of his amazing kisses before we left my office.