Undercover Groom

“Pam,” he muttered. “Pam Hawkins.” He hesitated, choosing his words with obvious care. “Look, Chloe, my business with Pam is...complicated.”

“Funny, it didn’t sound complicated.”

His gray eyes narrowed, and he shot her a look so swift and sharp and un-Maselike that Chloe blinked.

“What exactly did you hear?”

“Not much,” she admitted on a long, gusting sigh. “Only enough to make me thoroughly ashamed of the fact that I’ve used you.”

“I accepted your proposal with my eyes open. You didn’t use me.”

“Yes, I did, and I’m sorry, Mase. Honestly. I know you assured me that our so-called engagement wouldn’t impinge on your private life, but I shouldn’t have presumed—I should have realized—I guess I just didn’t think things through,” she finished miserably.

The elevator door pinged open. Grabbing at the escape it offered, Chloe stepped inside and jabbed the Down button. Mase’s hand shot out, catching the door as it started to close.

“We need to talk about this.”

“We will. Call me, okay? We’ll work out the details of our big breakup.” The words left a bitter taste in her mouth. Good grief, what did it take for her to learn her lesson? First she’d let the handsome, debonair Andre con her. Now she’d conned herself into thinking... into hoping...

“No,” she said, recanting her offer to talk. “We don’t have to work out anything. I shouldn’t have risked our friendship by wrapping it in deceit. No more lies, Mase. No more pretense. As of this moment, you’re a free man. Officially, finally and irrevocably.”

His response was a short, pithy curse, something Chloe wasn’t at all used to hearing from him. She blinked in surprise as he stepped inside the elevator, caging her against the back wall.

“I’m not letting you walk away until we talk this through.”

A spurt of temper sliced through her hurt. Her eyes flashed a warning. “Back off, mister.”

“Dammit, Chloe...”

“I can’t talk about it now. I don’t want to talk about it now.”

For a moment she thought he might force the issue. Suddenly, ridiculously, she felt a frisson of alarm. Not fear, exactly. She couldn’t fear Mase if she tried. Yet this man looked almost like a stranger. To her infinite relief, he stepped back.

“All right. We’ll talk tonight. After the party at your uncle’s house.”

Finally the door whirred shut. Chloe slumped against the paneled wall, her eyes shut, with Mase’s image blazed on her eyelids. Tall. Dark-haired. Broad-shouldered. Square-jawed. Smiling down at Pamela Hawkins, who liked it hard and fast and rough.

A shiver of revulsion rippled through Chloe, followed immediately by one of pure, undiluted envy. Mase Chandler certainly hadn’t tried anything hard and fast and rough with her. Face it. He hadn’t tried anything at all. It shattered her to discover that steady, solid Mase possessed a dark side to his character she hadn’t even suspected. It shattered her even more to realize that she still wanted him. Desperately.

The elevator zipped downward. With every flashing floor number, Chloe berated herself. How could she be such a fool? When would she learn that she couldn’t trust her judgment where men were concerned?

Jaw tight, Mase watched the elevator indicator flash floor after floor. His instincts told him to go after Chloe, to work through this mess before she did something stupid, like announce to her father or brothers or the rest of the Fortune clan that they’d called off their supposedly fake engagement.

Chloe didn’t know it, but their engagement had been real from the moment Mase had accepted her ridiculous proposal. For him, anyway Oh, he’d played by her rules. Kept his hands off her, despite the hunger that had grown in him with every passing day. A hunger that sent him to bed at night hard and aching and determined to finesse his skittish fiancée to the altar.

Now she’d bolted.

He should go after her. Mase knew he should. But the image of her angry, confused face held him back. She said she needed time. Okay. He’d give her time. Until tonight. Then they’d end this charade the way he’d planned to end it all along. With Chloe in his arms and in his bed.

In the meantime, Pam was waiting for him. Blowing out a long breath, Mase raked a hand through his hair. How the hell was he going to explain his convoluted relationship with Pam to Chloe? He couldn’t even explain it to himself.

One-time lover? Sometime partner? Friend?

Who was he kidding? The ties that bound them went deeper than that. He and Pam had shared too many hours of danger, too many nights of boredom to qualify as mere friends. He’d have to think of something to tell Chloe, something that didn’t violate the absolute security he had sworn to maintain. He couldn’t explain about his secret life, the life he’d decided to give up. He couldn’t take the same risks, disappear for the same extended periods, as a married man that he did while single. It wouldn’t be fair to her... or their marriage.

His mouth twisted. What had she just said? That it was stupid to wrap their friendship in lies and deceit? He wondered what she’d say if she knew they were his stock-in-trade. Or had been until he’d decided to marry her and end his forays into the seamy underworld known as clandestine operations. With a last, frustrated glance at the elevator indicator, Mase spun around and headed back to his office.

Pam had made herself comfortable in the high-backed executive chair behind his desk, her long legs crossed and a rueful smile in her brown eyes.

“Sorry if I made things awkward for you with your fiancée, Mase. Did you soothe her ruffled feathers?”

“I will,” he replied with more assurance than he felt at that particular moment. Forcing his thoughts from Chloe to the woman regarding him with cool amusement, he cut back to the reason for her unexpected visit.

“Tell me again why you think Dexter Greene is looking for me?”

Raising a well-manicured hand, Pam ticked off the bare facts she’d related when she’d first arrived less than a half hour ago.

“One, you brought in his son. Two, said son was found dead in his prison cell last month. Three, we sent an operative to the funeral and four, our agent hung around long enough to believe that Dexter Greene’s vow of vengeance is more than the ranting of a grief-crazed parent. The father’s dangerous, Mase. We knew that when we went in to extract his son.”

Frowning, Mase jingled the coins in his pocket. Fractured images of a long, deadly chase flickered through his mind. He could almost hear the pop of gunfire. Taste the coppery residue of fear as he’d slogged through miles of sucking swamp with the gun-running, hate-mongering murderer slung unconscious across his back and Pam panting at his side.

It didn’t matter that Greene’s son was a conscienceless bastard. Or that he’d not only supplied stolen weapons to the hate-mongers who’d opened fire on a church full of Asian immigrants, but had planned and participated in the massacre himself. As fanatical about America for Americans as the others in his tight little enclave, the elder Greene no doubt approved of his son’s actions.

How the hell had Dexter Greene connected the scruffy, bearded thug who’d snatched his son with the CEO of Chandler Industries?

When he put the question to Pam, she shrugged. “We don’t know how he made the initial connection. We do know that someone logged on to the computer in the library in Greene’s hometown and initiated inquiries about Mason Chandler. We answered the queries with the standard cover information, of course, and sent an operative in to nose around. When he got there, Greene had dropped off the face of the earth.”

“Come on, Pam! Our specialty is hostage recovery and hostile extractions. We’re experts at tracking down the slime no other agency can find. How did our man let Greene slip through his fingers?”

She shrugged again. “I was in the Middle East until two days ago. The Chief called me in when you told him you were out of the business.”

“So he sent you to Minneapolis to change my mind.”

“Have I?”

“No. I’m getting married in November, remember?”

She cocked a brow. “Are you sure?”

“Pretty sure,” Mase replied with a wry smile. “I’ll have to do some fast talking in the next few hours to make it happen, though.”

“talking?” The brunette shook her head in mock despair. “That wasn’t your style when we worked together. What has this woman done to you?”

Mase wasn’t ready to admit that Chloe Fortune had tied him up in knots so tight he’d never unravel them.

“Look, I won’t go back into the field, but I’ll do what I can to help you with Greene. Did you bring the after-action reports from our original mission?”

“Of course.”