Secret Agent, Secret Father. Donna Young

was no doubt about the close friendship between the two.

      Ignoring the weapon, she gripped him between her thighs. Slowly, she scooted him back through the doorway. Using the strength of her legs and arms, she tugged and pulled in short bursts of energy. The struggle took more than twenty minutes. Twenty minutes in which she pleaded, prayed, begged and swore. But she managed it.

      Once inside, she scooted back toward the fireplace and lowered his shoulders gently to the floor. Quickly, she closed the door, grabbed a pillow and placed it under his head.

      For months, she’d worried about him, raged at him—yearned, grieved, loved him—silently through the long, dark nights.

      But not once had she been terrified for him.

      Until now.

      His face was pale, stark against his deep brown hair, now darker with rain, sticky with blood. His features cut in razor-thin angles. Sharper, leaner since the last time she’d seen him. A four-inch gash split the hairline above the middle of his forehead. Blood and bruises covered most of his features.

      She knelt beside him, saw him shiver. Cursing herself, she threw a few more logs on the fire.

      But it was his shoulder that worried her the most. Blood was everywhere. His face, neck and arm were coated with it. From his head, or shoulder, or both. She couldn’t be sure which.

      Her pulse thickened with fear, making her hands heavy, her fingers tremble. She shook them, trying to settle them and her nerves, then removed his suit jacket. A shoulder holster crowded under his arm. Something she hadn’t noticed when dragging him in. Quickly, she unbelted the holster and tossed it aside. Within minutes, she had him stripped to his underwear and covered him to the waist with her comforter.

      The bullet had torn a hole through his right shoulder, leaving an exit wound on the back side.

      Fear and confusion warred within, but right now she had time for neither. Instead, she crossed to the linen cupboard and pulled out a clean, white hand towel.

      After running the cloth under warm water, she returned to his side with it and her biggest pan filled with hotter water. She tucked the blanket around him, knowing she couldn’t do anything other than clean the wound until her father got there.

      With gentle fingers, she brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, then systematically dabbed the blood away from the gash.

      “I’ll give you one thing, Lomax,” she whispered. She rinsed the towel out in the water, watched it turn pink, before she switched her attention to his shoulder. “You sure as hell know how to make an entrance.”

       Chapter Three

      “He’s coming, Mr. Kragen.”

      Oliver Kragen sat on a park bench as dawn broke over the Chesapeake Bay. His enforcer, Frank Sweeney, stood no more then ten feet away, his bulky frame eclipsing the sun behind him. Dressed in an Armani suit, the man appeared more like a pro football player ready to renegotiate his contract than the mercenary he was.

      And that’s exactly why Oliver had hired him.

      “I’ll give you odds the bastard screwed up.”

      Oliver didn’t acknowledge Sweeney’s comment. Instead, he waited until the click of shoe soles sounded behind him. Rather than turn in greeting, Oliver tossed the remainder of his Danish to a nearby pigeon. After all, Boyd Webber wasn’t a peer, he was an employee.

      “She’s dead.”

      Oliver glanced at Sweeney, a silent order to leave. Once the big man stepped away, Kragen spoke up, but his focus remained on the pigeons at their feet. “How?” The question was low, pleasant.

      Boyd wasn’t fooled. But he didn’t care, either. The exmarine had more than two dozen kills under his belt and had survived more horrors than the bloodiest special effects ever created. Nothing on this earth made him afraid of dying. Least of all a weasel like Kragen. “The Garrett woman had a gun. They both did. It forced my hand.”

      “They forced your hand because they were armed? They’re government operatives. What did you expect, Webber?” Kragen’s voice hardened. “If I remember right, I told you it was imperative that the Garrett woman was to be brought to me. Alive.”

      “It was a mistake. They killed one of my men, wounded another. The third man targeted Lomax, but somehow the woman took a stray bullet in the chest.”

      “And this third man?”

      “I killed him.”

      “To save me the trouble? Or him the pain?”

      “I was…angry.” More than angry. Infuriated. Enough to lose his cool and shoot until the woman was dead. Enough to murder another man—one of his own—who had witnessed his transgression. “My man should have been more careful,” he lied.

      In Webber’s opinion, Helene Garrett deserved no better than to die in a gutter. She had betrayed Senator D’Agostini. Slept with him, used him, stolen from him. End of her, end of story. Or it should have been. But the files were still missing.

      “Did you clean up your mess?” Kragen’s eyes shifted to his coffee cup. He took a sip, burned his tongue and swore.

      “I thought it better to leave things.” Resentment slithered down Webber’s back, coiled deep within his belly. He studied Kragen’s profile with derision. Kragen was the poster-boy politician. The meticulous, trimmed blond hair that enhanced the high slant of the cheekbones, the aristocratic forehead. A nose so straight that Webber would bet his last dime that Kragen had it cosmetically carved. All packaged in a five-figure topcoat and custom suit. All done to hide the trailer-park genes that ran through Poster Boy’s veins.

      “You killed your man without consulting me first.” Oliver glanced up then. Twin metallic-gray eyes pinned, then dismissed the mercenary in one flicker.

      “I consulted with the senator beforehand,” Webber responded.

      Oliver noted the verbal jab, but chose to ignore it for the moment. “Did you search the bar? Her apartment?”

      “She’d moved out of her apartment days ago and left nothing behind. And we had no time to search the bar. Lomax was the priority.”

      “The woman had the files and the code,” Oliver insisted. “I want the bar searched. And I want Lomax found.”

      “Shouldn’t take long. We winged Lomax before he slipped away. We found his car wrapped around a light pole.”

      “Did you follow the blood?”

      “Witnesses told the police he took off down the street but the rain washed away any bloody trail.”

      “And the police? What do they say?” Oliver prompted, his annoyance buried under a tone of civility. More than the Neanderthal deserved, in Oliver’s opinion.

      To say that Webber was ugly would have been polite. He had the face of a boxer, flat and scarred from too many alley fights, and a bulbous nose from too much booze. Like Sweeney, he wore a tailored suit, had no neck and too much muscle. Unlike Sweeney, he sported a butch cut so close it left the color of his hair in question.

      “The police are questioning the bar manager. An ex-con by the name of Pusher Davis.”

      “If the man is an ex-con, they’ll suspect him first,” Oliver observed. “Tail him, just to be sure. I don’t want any loose ends.”

      “There won’t be. The police won’t get anywhere. Helene Garrett will become just another statistic in a long line of unsolved homicides,” Boyd explained.

      For the moment, Oliver ignored the arrogance underlying Webber’s words. “They have Lomax’s blood on the scene.”

      Webber snorted. “Won’t