it did, Dom decided. At least it didn’t sound as if the granddaughter was likely to wilt like a hothouse flower at her first sight of him. Or complain endlessly about his choices and methods, or because he hadn’t brought her champagne and caviar or her own private masseuse.
Not that he’d ever intended not to rescue her if given the opportunity. Even if Mrs. Sommers had revealed that her darling Delilah had all the charm of a polecat on steroids, he’d planned all along to go to San Timoteo to relieve El Presidente of his unwilling guest.
But he wasn’t a fool. For all his no-sweat approach to life, he believed in doing things right. And in the security business, that meant careful planning and meticulous preparation, which meant obtaining all the information you could.
Still, it was probably past time to end the suspense and let Queen Abigail know he was willing to save her bacon, so to speak. “All right. I’ll do it.”
“Excellent!” Mrs. Sommers abruptly appeared years younger, for the first time revealing the genuine concern hidden beneath her crusty exterior. “How soon can you leave?”
“Sometime in the next forty-eight hours. Let me look this over—” he tapped the envelope “—make some calls and I’ll get back to you later today with any other questions that crop up and a more definitive timetable.”
“Excellent,” she repeated. Grasping her purse, she started to stand.
Already formulating a list of things he needed to do, he pushed to his feet. Once again, Dom and his new client shook hands and then Gabe offered his arm to escort her from the room. The two were almost to the door when Dom reached in and drew out the sheaf of papers. Paper-clipped to the top was a five-by-seven color photo. He glanced at it.
A shock like the blast from a stun gun jolted through him.
“This is your granddaughter? Lilah Cantrell?” Damned if his voice didn’t come out in a croak.
Mrs. Sommers turned, still graceful despite her years. “Delilah, yes. Her father was the product of my union with my second husband, James.”
He fought to keep his expression neutral. It took only a second for him to realize why he hadn’t made the connection: when he’d known Lilah, her grandmother’s name hadn’t been either Sommers or Cantrell, and the family mansion had been referred to as—he racked his brain, and suddenly he had it—the Trayburne estate.
But even so…He felt Gabriel’s sudden scrutiny like a touch. Yet Gabe being Gabe, his brother didn’t let on. “Come along, Abigail,” the other man said smoothly. “Margaret has the paperwork you need to sign at the front desk.”
The second they’d cleared the threshold, Dom turned his attention back to the glossy studio image clutched in his hand. A fine-boned blonde with china-blue eyes, a tantalizing mouth and an expression both reserved and challenging looked back at him.
Well, hell. Delilah Sommers was actually Lilah Cantrell. And despite her grandmother’s claims to the contrary, Lilah was every inch a self-centered society princess.
That he knew from personal experience.
Because Lilah Cantrell was the first—and only—woman he’d ever fallen hard for. The one woman he’d never been able to predict. The only woman ever to have shown him the door before he’d been sure he was ready to go.
And definitely the last woman on earth he’d deliberately seek out.
He uttered the first half of Gabe’s earlier curse.
“Something wrong?”
He jerked his head up, startled to find his older brother standing in the doorway watching him.
He immediately blanked his face. “No.”
And there wasn’t, he told himself firmly, shoving the picture back into the envelope. So what if he’d just agreed—no, insisted—on not just seeking Lilah out, but being allowed the privilege of saving her shapely little prima donna butt? He was a pro and he intended to act like it.
After all, the past was just that—the past. And he and Li had been barely more than kids at the time of their clichéd summer fling. What’s more, he’d known from the start they had no future. If in the intervening years he’d occasionally thought about her with a pang of regret, it was only because the sex had been incredible. Hell, more than incredible. Maybe the best of his life—
“You sure you’re all right?”
Gabe’s question yanked him back to reality. He thought about it for all of half a second and then felt a genuine smile form on his lips. “Yeah, I am. Why wouldn’t I be? I get to leave this Popsicle weather, go where I can work on my tan and foil some bad guys in the bargain. Plus we get paid for it.
“Trust me, bro. I can handle it.”
Three
“So you do this for a living?” Lilah’s eyebrows, shades darker than her pale hair, rose eloquently. “You—your brothers—are mercenaries?”
Apparently he hadn’t explained things as well as he’d thought. Just as this particular rescue mission wasn’t turning out to be the cakewalk he’d predicted.
That didn’t mean he had to stand here and let her get things wrong. “No,” Dom said flatly. “Mercenary implies no standards, no ethics, no values, no rules—and we stand for all those things. We don’t break U.S. law, we don’t work for anybody who isn’t one hundred per cent legit. Trust me. We can afford to be choosy.”
He refrained from adding that, in his opinion, he and his brothers had a lot in common with the guy whose nickname they shared, the one with the red cape and big S on his chest. Like him, they believed in justice and cared enough to risk their lives for it.
What’s more, unlike the majority of the populace, they’d all honorably served their country; every one of them was former military Special Operations and had put in their time on numerous tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan and even darker corners of the world.
To her credit, Lilah appeared to get the message. She worried her bottom lip for an instant, then seemed to catch herself. Squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to meet his gaze head-on. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything…negative. Or—or to suggest I’m not glad you’re here. I am. It’s just…it’s unexpected.”
He couldn’t argue with that. “Don’t worry about it.”
God knew, he didn’t intend to. After all, it looked as if things were finally going his way. And that was good, since for a while, he had half-seriously started to think of this job as the Extraction from Hell.
First, his flight into San Timoteo had been diverted. Then, when he’d finally gotten wheels down, he’d found his local contact had vanished. Which was why it had taken him a frustrating thirty-odd hours to discover that: (A) Lilah wasn’t where she was supposed to be; (B) that once he had located her—here, at what the locals called Las Rocas, an isolated, heavily guarded compound sixty-five rugged, sparsely inhabited miles from Santa Marita, the nation’s capital and only large city—his best bet of getting her out was to get himself thrown in; and (C) the best way to do that involved volunteering to get his ass kicked.
Complicating
