A Weaver Christmas Gift. Allison Leigh

      She had never been one of them. Their relationship, their sexship, hadn’t been planned. It had been more like a head-on collision neither one of them had predicted.

      “It won’t be the same.” His lips crooked. “Nobody gives good...bickering...like you.”

      She pressed her lips together, not wanting to be amused, particularly now, and headed downstairs to the back door. He never parked in front on the street, where his truck might be noticed. She yanked open the door. It was almost midnight and outside, everything was quiet and still. “I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure—”

      “It’s been more than that,” he drawled as he stepped past her. “Since passion isn’t factored in this plan of yours, you’ll probably want to remember what it feels like when you’re working your way through your matrimonial prospects. But if you find yourself in need of a reminder, you know where to find me.”

      “Working at Cee-Vid,” she said smoothly. “Because nothing’s more important than keeping those video games coming.” Then, before she changed her mind, she pushed the door closed behind him.

      If she’d wanted confirmation that Casey would never be interested in redefining their friends-with-benefits relationship, she’d certainly gotten it.

      She just wished that it didn’t hurt quite so much.

       Chapter Two

      Inside his office at Cee-Vid, Casey entered a code on his computer that revealed a security panel in one wall. Cee-Vid had been producing some of the most popular video games in the world for the past few decades. But behind the front, the company did a heck of a lot more as a location of Hollins-Winword, an equally successful organization that hardly anyone in the world knew existed. International security. Black ops. Hollins-Winword did it all and they did it well. And right now, they had an asset on the ground in Nepal named Bax Kennedy who had missed his last two check-ins. Casey’s mind should have been strictly on that fact. But it wasn’t.

      It was on Jane Cohen.

      He stepped up to the security panel that looked like a small wall mirror and stared into the iris scanner.

      She wanted to get pregnant. Have a baby.

      The scan completed and a numeric panel lit behind the false mirror’s surface.

      Why hadn’t he seen it coming? She was a woman. Past thirty. There were enough females among the Clay clan for him to know perfectly well that her desire for a family wasn’t unnatural. Hell, his entire extended family believed in having kids.

      It was what the Clays did.

      Except for him.

      He tapped in another code on the smooth surface and heard the nearly soundless, hollow release that came from somewhere inside the wall. A moment later, part of the wall moved, revealing itself as the door it actually was, and he stepped through into the cavernous communications center they called Control.

      “Status?”

      Seth Banyon leaned back in his chair and stretched, looking relaxed even though his eyes never stopped roving the bank of screens covering the wall in front of him. “Same.”

      Casey felt the automatic door closing behind him and he moved across the large blue-lit room to stand behind his associate. Like Casey, Seth collected a paycheck that showed that he worked for Cee-Vid. But also like Casey, his real employer was hidden deep and well beneath that. “This was a simple assignment,” he said. “All Bax had to do was escort the emir’s niece back to college.”

      “Without drawing attention to the fact that she wasn’t where she was supposed to be in the first place. Money,” Banyon muttered. “More trouble than it’s worth, if you ask me.”

      The emir had plenty of it. His affection for his only sister’s three children was well-known. When whispers of a possible kidnapping attempt had reached him, he’d reached out to Hollins-Winword to discreetly resolve matters.

      Casey had two sisters and from them, four nephews and a niece. They were still children but whatever their ages, he knew there wasn’t much he wouldn’t do to help keep them safe.

      He stepped around Banyon and tapped a few keys on one of the keyboards that surrounded the room. The uppermost screen on the wall in front of them shifted from a satellite image to a photograph of the emir’s niece and nephews. “This isn’t about money. It’s about a power struggle between the emir and his despot of a second cousin. And a whole lot of oil behind them. Where are the other two?”

      “Safe behind the walls of their London estate in the loving arms of their mama.”

      “At least that’s something. We’ve only got Samira to worry about. Wish to hell she would have stayed in London instead of going out on this mission trip of hers.”

      A series of electronic chimes sounded and a moment later, another interior door slid open and the man in charge stepped inside.

      To most of the world—including the regular employees of Cee-Vid, who didn’t know anything else was going on beneath the surface—Tristan Clay was merely the brilliant mind behind Cee-Vid.

      To a select few, he was close to the top of the food chain inside Hollins-Winword. And to Casey, Tristan Clay was not only his boss but his uncle.

      The older man’s piercing blue gaze went straight to the bank of screens. “Where’re we at?”

      Protocols were always followed whenever an asset or an operative went off plan. It was easier for Casey to work through them than it was for him to think about Janie’s “plan,” and he nudged Banyon out of the seat and took his position at the controls. “Last contact was thirty-six hours ago.” His fingers started flying over the console, satellites high above the world snapped to attention, and Casey did the only thing in the world he figured he was meant to do.

      He kept Hollins-Winword’s own safe.

      * * *

      “You do realize that if women could just snap their fingers and find the perfect man, the entire chocolate industry might crumble to dust?” Hayley Templeton’s slender fingers hovered indecisively over the opened box of Godiva delectables sitting on top of the gleaming wood bar at Colbys.

      Jane wasn’t indecisive at all. She plucked a heart-shaped piece from the box and bit it in half, sighing a little over the explosion of bliss on her taste buds. “I know I can’t just snap my fingers,” she countered. If her digits possessed such magic, she’d have waved them over Casey and he wouldn’t have bothered offering up his friends and associates to put their heads in her matrimonial noose.

      He would have given his neck to her willingly.

      Instead, he’d bolted.

      Just as she’d known he would.

      The chocolate suddenly lost its appeal, but she ate the second half of the heart anyway before rinsing her hands at the bar sink and pulling the latest rack of glasses fresh from the dishwasher built into the cabinets below the bar. “Other women manage to find spouses here in Weaver. So why can’t I?”

      Hayley finally selected a chocolate and replaced the lid on the gold box. “Get that away from me before I eat the rest.”

      “They are your chocolates,” Jane reminded her. Her friend had brought them with her when she’d stopped by the bar and grill that afternoon.

      “And I expect you to save me. I haven’t been running with Sam Dawson four times a week only to have a box of chocolates, given to me by a grateful patient, going straight to my hips.” Hayley groaned. “Sam’s a slave driver. You’d think she’d have a little sympathy for her friends.”

      Sam Dawson was a deputy with the sheriff’s department. “She gave me a parking ticket the other day. Sam doesn’t have any sympathy for anyone.”