Taken

Ryder glanced at his Lagerfeld suit. He hadn’t thought about changing his clothes to take the late-afternoon meeting. “In a manner of speaking.”

“So tell me,” she said, sitting down behind the old metal desk covered with paperwork. She took a bottle of Bailey’s from a different drawer then poured the Irish cream into the coffee and handed him a cup. Ryder took it then watched as she sipped hers. “How do you think I’ll be able to help you where others haven’t been able to? Because I get the feeling that you’re not here for a personal matter you don’t want others to know about. Am I right?”

“Spot on.”

“Who’ve you been to?”

He told her.

“Ah. The Big Three.” She raised her brows. “And they haven’t been able to get what you want?”

“No. While this is a white-collar crime, a blue-collar criminal committed it.”

“And your reasoning is that it takes a blue-collar gal to find a blue-collar criminal.”

Her words weren’t so much as a question as they were a statement. “Yes,” Ryder answered simply.

Kylie grinned. “Then it looks like you’ve come to the right place….”

BETWEEN Seline’s legs vibrated one of the most powerful machines built by man, and something she’d been craving ever since sneaking out of Ryder Blackwell’s bed the week before. The custom black Ducati 999R Xerox motorcycle with a Testastretta 143-hp engine gave her a sense of freedom not even a car could afford her. And as she ran it down the empty roads in rural southwest Wisconsin, the roar drowning out all other sounds, the air whipping around her black leather-clad body, she felt like a hellcat demon on a mission.

That is, if she ignored that there was no real mission, to rid the brand of Ryder’s touch from her skin.

It had been nine days since she’d pulled one of the biggest cons of her career. Yet a sense of a job incomplete tailed her like a state trooper with his siren blaring. Returning home usually calmed her, allowed her distance from her last job in order to concentrate on what needed to be done to ensure her security and to focus on the next con. But not this time. This time, her mind ceaselessly returned to Blackwell & Blackwell. Or more specifically to the man who sat at the helm.