Chapter 1
ONE
Prineville, Georgia
Twenty years later
Gerald Montez paced his study as he listened to the track on Spotify. The song was beautiful, though Gerald didn’t give a shit about that. Beethoven, the Beatles—it was all the same to him.
But this song…oh yes. It was important to him.
Turning a Blind Eye by Eve. No last name. Just Eve. Like Madonna or Cher.
He’d read some online reviews of the track. There were lots of them. This Eve woman took up an inordinate amount of internet time and space, because no one could figure out who she was.
Her vocals are warm and smooth, perfectly balanced by the acoustic instruments—guitar and muted trumpet. She folds in the notes, one by one, at times forging a melancholy exoticism with extensive quotes from 14th century Mediterranean music and an overlay of Monk. Brilliant.
Gerald had no idea what the fuck that was about. All he knew was who sang it.
Eve. Mystery Woman.
Only not so much.
Because though the jacket blurb said mystery singer Eve had written the song, he had heard another woman humming it a year ago.
She hadn’t even known he was there. She’d been humming some tune Gerald hadn’t recognized but did realize was pretty. Humming and singing as she worked at the computer in her office. She hummed the body of the song, and the refrain was Turning a Blind Eye.
Gerald remembered the scene very clearly because that’s what he did. He noticed things and remembered things. He’d built a fucking empire because he noticed things and remembered things.
So he’d been guaranteed to remember that song. Not only that, but he’d been absolutely blown away by the fact that it had been Ellen humming and singing. Who knew?
Ellen. Uptight, strait-laced, button-down, dependable Ellen, who kept her looks under wraps and was a fabulous accountant. Bookkeeper. Oh yeah, she had a degree in accounting but basically she kept his books, so she was his book-keeper. She kept them very well. Too well.
Staid, earnest, demure Ellen had these throaty, sexy sounds coming out of her mouth. Sounds he couldn’t even begin to imagine her making. Sounds that made him look twice at her as a woman. And that’s when he discovered she’d been hiding her light under a bushel.
Most women worked on themselves like crazy. Inch-thick make-up, plastic bags of silicone pumping up their boobs, high heels, short skirts, hair out to here…half the time when Gerald woke up next to a woman he’d fucked he realized that she wasn’t a looker at all, she just knew how to apply paint.
Man, taking a second or third look at Ellen—serious, workaholic Ellen, whose clothes usually covered her neck-to-toe—he could see that she was a fucking looker—the real deal. If she bothered, she’d be turning heads. Obviously, she didn’t want to turn heads, she wanted to keep books.
When he realized that she was starting to dig into how he made his first money, he knew he’d have to fire her or kill her. Or…marry her.
That thought had shocked him.
It was her voice that did it. Gerald liked his women savvy and sexy and not too bright. He liked his sex rough. Even after realizing how beautiful Ellen really was, he hadn’t wanted to fuck her.
But that woman singing…oh yeah. She was fuckable. There was a sexiness, a swing there that just said I’m fabulous in the sack. So un-Ellen-like he’d actually checked her desktop to see if she had speakers on. But no, that fuckable chick was Ellen.
Ellen, in bed. She might actually be teachable. What she was in the sack wasn’t that important, though, because the world was full of women who loved rich men and he was very very rich.
What was important was having a presentable wife when he went to Washington to negotiate contracts. All those assholes who counted in Washington were big on ‘family values’ even though they themselves had hotties of both sexes on the side.
Yeah—demure CPA wife with a soft voice. Perfect.
So he’d started his campaign to get her into his bed, something that usually took about five minutes. Maybe half an hour, tops.
He’d been absolutely astounded when he realized it wasn’t working. She just wasn’t interested.
What the fuck?
He was rich, good-looking, powerful. He had women crawling up his pants.
Was she a lesbo? But he had two men follow her around and she didn’t have women lovers, didn’t have male lovers, didn’t have anything.
She worked, went home, watched some TV, read, went to bed early, got up early and started all over again.
Jesus, marrying her would be like marrying a nun.
Still, who cared? All he had to do was throw her a fuck now and again, it wouldn’t have to interfere with his sex life.
Have her pop a few kids. Then they wouldn’t be able to say anything at the fucking Pentagon about where they were spending their money.
He’d been starting to work it all out in his head when the bitch up and disappeared after talking at a company party with one of his men who’d been shitfaced. Arlen Miller, who’d talked too much about Afghanistan and had paid the price.
And then Ellen was in the wind. Gone for a whole fucking year in which he sweated that she was spilling her guts to the FBI.
You don’t cross Montez. That was a rule. Because if you do, Montez will hit back so hard they’ll be finding pieces of you for the next ten years.
Now he had her. Ellen—bland, pretty Ellen Palmer who didn’t even wear lipstick, for Christ’s sake—was Eve, whose voice was sex on a stick.
Eve’s identity was this big mystery everyone got off on. Who knew who she was, yada yada. No personal info on Spotify, no website, the recordings were in the name of a company that had shell after shell around it. Something Ellen would know how to do in her sleep.
People didn’t know how to think laterally.
Eve had an agent, and this agent had a name. Roddy Fisher. Lived in Seattle. Roddy Fisher was going to be very very sorry he’d ever taken on Eve as a client.
Montez clicked on the intercom and ordered his personal jet to be ready, with a flight plan filed for Seattle.
Coronado Shores
San Diego
April 2
He relived it over and over again in his nightmares.
Crissy always ended up a smashed little body and he always awoke drenched in sweat, heart pounding.
Even when he came back himself from Syria a smashed body courtesy of an Syrian RPG, he dreamed of his little sister, dead at five. Murdered by a monster.
Harry rose, naked, and went out onto the small, deep balcony that gave out onto the Pacific. Some nights he went down in the dark and took an hour-long swim.
In the beginning, when he was still halfway dead, barely able to walk and it wasn’t at all clear if he’d ever be anything more than a pathetic cripple—well, on those nights, he’d been tempted to gimp his way down to the beach and simply swim out to his limit, out past where he could never come back, and just sink beneath the waves.
It was frightening as hell that the thought was so fucking appealing.
And that was when he discovered that his brothers, who lived in the same building on Coronado Shores, took turns staying awake to make sure he didn’t do just that.
For the first months, they took away his weapons, too. He’d screamed insults at them, but both Sam and Mike were strong-willed and had rocks for heads. He’d been given his guns back when they were sure he was out of the suicide zone.
That was when he’d taken up drinking, getting quietly blitzed night after night.
They let him. It takes a lot of time and effort to drink yourself to death, and Harry simply couldn’t do it.
He hated waking up hungover, dry-mouthed, head pounding, staggering to the bathroom to vomit a thin gruel of beer and whiskey, unanchored by any food because he had no appetite at all.
He’d disgusted even himself.
Finally, he decided that if he was going to have to live—because his fucking brothers wouldn’t fucking let him die—he might as well become strong again.
So Sam and Mike had recruited Bjorn, the Norwegian Nazi, and had helped him set up a fully equipped gym in his spare room and for months he exercised at night until his muscles ached, until he’d sweated out every drop of moisture in his body, until he was so exhausted he couldn’t think.
Sleep didn’t come, but at least there were no images in his head.
But now he was back in shape. Simple weights or the treadmill couldn’t take him out of himself, so he’d found another crutch.
He went back into his living room and sank on the couch. His living room—his entire home—was like his life. High tech and empty. He had state of the art gym equipment, work station and entertainment center. The rest was emptiness. A bed and a desk and a couch.
His stereo set was top of the line Bose and he selected his new drug, put on his headset and stretched out on the couch. The first strains of a beautiful voice arrived and it was like that first shot of heroin must be for a junkie.
Ahhh…
Eve. She’d become super famous these past three months, but Harry had been hooked from the first song he’d ever heard her sing, when she was still unknown, a jazzy cover of Stand by Me.
Her voice was utter magic. After the first notes, Harry was taken right out of himself, taken away to somewhere else, a better place.
A place where men didn’t kill little girls.
Where RPGs from men who’d whip a woman to death if they could hear the sounds of her shoes on the floor didn’t blow you up.
Where you didn’t long for the peace of death.
Eve had a smoky, velvety voice, clear as a bell, perfectly attuned to each song.
She could do it all—rousing rock, smoldering jazz, tender ballads.
There was nothing she couldn’t do, so perfectly that you couldn’t ever imagine the song being sung any other way, even when you’d heard it a thousand times before by a thousand other singers.