Taken

She glanced toward the clock on the nightstand, finding a pillow covering it. Seline dragged it off and the clock fell with it. She picked it up from the floor.

Five forty-five. Damn.

She could count the times she’d had such great sex on two fingers. With Joey Caprioti when she was nineteen and just coming to know her own sexuality. And now.

She smiled stupidly. Yes, Ryder Blackwell was definitely no slouch in bed. She’d known men who were roaring lions in the boardroom but lazy cats in the bedroom. Not Ryder. He was as ambitious between the sheets as he was outside them. Sheets being optional.

In fact, they hadn’t hit the bed until sometime after 3:00 a.m. And only then because they’d risked serious injury in the kitchen when he’d hoisted her onto the counter and knocked over a stand of butcher knives.

The shower shut off.

Seline bounced up from the bed, collected her clothes, then headed at a run for the door.

No matter how good, no sex was worth the risk of a long prison sentence.

4

WHEN RYDER had emerged from his shower to find Carol gone, he’d been amused. He’d hoped the sound of the water would wake her and entice her to slip under the multi-jet spray with him.

Instead she’d left.

When she hadn’t shown up to work by ten, he suspected she’d gone back to her place and fallen asleep. He thought maybe she’d be in later.

Then around eleven, John Coleman had requested an emergency meeting.

By 4:00 p.m. Ryder was furiously aware of everything one Carol Lambert had done. Only it hadn’t been Carol Lambert but the sexy woman he’d slept with last night. Because Carol Lambert was a thirty-eight-year-old brunette who still lived in Washington State and hadn’t transferred to New York and his company, but rather was taking extended time off to have her first child.

“How much are we looking at?” he asked Coleman.

“Three quarters of a mil.”

Ryder sat back in his chair as if hit in the chest with a punching bag.

“This woman was good. She brokered a deal between Blackwell and a sham company that as of this morning no longer exists.”

“Get the money back.”

“Easier said than done. The instant the money hit the sham company’s account it was then automatically transferred out to various other accounts, and I’m guessing even more accounts from there. The minute the money left our bank it essentially became untraceable.” Coleman shook his head as he considered the printouts he held. “This woman was a pro. She knew exactly what she was doing.” He looked up. “Johnstone says this was a set-up from the get go. She borrowed the Lambert woman’s résumé, burrowed deep into the company, then meticulously set us up.”

Ryder rubbed his face, as much to wake himself up from the nightmare he was in the middle of as to rid himself of the erotic images that kept sliding through his mind from last night.

Coleman didn’t know he’d spent the night sleeping with the enemy. Sleeping—hah! They hadn’t slept at all. He’d had Carol, the con artist, every which way it was possible to have a woman. Hell, he’d had more sex with her in one night than he’d had in the entire year.

And he’d been stupid enough to believe he’d be getting more of it.

And still wanted it despite what she’d done.

“Johnstone’s got nearly every detective firm in Manhattan working the case now.”

“So he’s confident she’ll be caught.”

Coleman grimaced. “Look, Ry, I’ve never been one to mislead you. The truth is, given the professional nature of the crime, with every moment that passes the trail gets colder.”

“You mean there’s a chance we won’t catch up with her?”

“More than a chance. A probability.”

Coleman’s cell phone rang, and he answered. A minute later, he rang off.

“The apartment she rented came furnished and was in Carol Lambert’s name. And it was wiped clean. Not a print anywhere. But they think they got a couple of hair samples.”

“Security cameras?”

“The staff is going over Blackwell’s videos now. But routine dictates that they erase tapes after a twenty-four-hour period so all we’ll have is the footage from yesterday.”

Ryder looked at his watch. The woman had left his place just before six. Nine hours ago. Which meant she could be pretty much anywhere in the world by now. Probably collecting the cash she’d stolen from his company.

“I want to see the footage as soon as it comes in.”

“I don’t expect to get much,” Coleman said. “She always walked as if staring at something on her shoe. I thought it was because she was self-conscious, but now we know the real reason.”

Ryder also knew the real reason she’d originally rebuffed his advances yesterday after finding out he’d been the one she’d raced with. No doubt number one in the con artist’s handbook was “Fly under the radar.”

“Ryder?”

He blinked at Coleman.

“Are you okay?”

No. He was far from okay. Because he was all too aware that if he hadn’t taken the woman back to his place last night, he wouldn’t be obsessed with the situation right now. He’d have left everything in Coleman’s capable hands and gone on with his day full of meetings overseeing expansion plans, financial realignments and mergers. While the amount of money wasn’t anything to sneeze at by any means, it wasn’t enough to warrant the type of attention he was giving to it. The company lost that amount in a day if truck drivers went on strike in the Midwest.

Despite all that, he’d cancelled everything, mentally incapable of doing anything but concentrating on this one thing. This was personal.

“I want to talk to Johnstone,” he said, naming the head of security.

“I can do that. Don’t you have a meeting regarding Stanton?”

Ryder got up from his chair and put his suit jacket on. “I cancelled it.”

“But we’re in the final stages of closing the deal. Everything’s set to go into motion the instant the takeover papers are signed. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

No, it was a decidedly bad idea. The not-altogether-friendly leveraged buyout of his second-largest competitor would give him a marketing edge in the nation’s distribution system, one of the many areas in which Blackwell & Blackwell owned businesses. But Ryder couldn’t help himself. He was going to find this woman who’d impersonated Carol Lambert, the woman in the rented Audi, and he was going to find her now.

BY THE END of the week, Ryder had been forced to accept that his finding her wasn’t going to be easily checked off his agenda.

It was a Sunday and along with Blackwell & Blackwell’s own security team, he was paying three detective firms double their going rate to find her.

Only it was beginning to look like no amount of money was going to be able to uncover the true identity of the woman who’d screwed him… twice.