Navy SEALs Complete Series: 3 Books + 3 Novellas (Tempting Navy SEALs) (88 page)

Oh yeah, she was the niece to Jason Maclane all right. And one of the most clever damned contract agents Homeland Security had on its payroll.

The Chameleon, that was her code name. And why was that her code name? Because she was as changeable in her appearance as she was in her moods. Because her job wasn’t to confront a damned thing, it was to watch and listen and flit around the elite little parties that catered to the rich and notorious, and the dirty little deal makers. To shift and change according to her location, to become seductive or dangerous, to fit in with the diseased, disgusting parasites of the world.

And he should remember that one, he told himself as he followed Deke into the elevator. Kira knew the rules of the game. She didn’t need him to protect her.

I
AN’S MOOD THE NEXT MORNING
was less than cheerful. He always awoke quickly, but opened his eyes slowly. He felt his surroundings out, let his senses hone in to detect any shifts or dangers before he allowed himself to move from the bed.

This morning, he awoke in a mood designed to piss even himself off. His skin felt stretched, irritation tightened his guts, and damn if he didn’t still have the hard-on from hell throbbing between his thighs.

He took care of the hard-on in the shower, masturbating as he closed his eyes and imagined Kira, on her knees, her lips surrounding him, her tongue licking and stroking as she sucked him to her throat and made his teeth clench with the need to hold back.

Not that his hand came anywhere close to the imagined feel of her mouth, but the thought succeeded in spilling his semen to the shower floor and taking the bitter edge off his lust.

Hell, he could have gone to Astra’s room and awakened her last night. He could have fucked her all night long, and rather than giving him grief, she would have smiled and licked her lips in anticipation.

She was one of many women that Diego seemed to delight in filling the villa with. He liked pretty women, and he
liked having them near. Women who liked rough sex. Hell, they went beyond a little rough sex. They were women who enjoyed the pain Diego could mete out.

Ian grimaced at the thought of that. He had seen one of the maids, Eleanor’s, back beaded with blood from the stroke of Diego’s whip, and still she had begged for more. Not more sex. Not more fucking or a deeper penetration, because Diego rarely fucked one of his toys. No, it was the pain that got both of them off. Diego got off giving it, and Eleanor could climax from it. Ecstasy would wash over her face and her body would tremble with it.

It was enough to make a jaded man wonder what the hell had gone wrong with the world. For all his cynicism and experience, he still couldn’t understand that one. But it wasn’t Astra he wanted, it was Kira.

Stalking into the breakfast room nearly an hour later, he found Diego at the breakfast table. Just what he needed that morning, a healthy dose of dear old pop.

“Ah, good morning, Ian.” A smile creased Diego’s swarthy face as he laid his forearms on the table and regarded him with something resembling pride. “I trust you slept well?”

Could his morning get any worse?

“Morning, pop.” It was the most disrespectful title Ian could come up with. It was the one thing that had earned him his stepfather’s ire when he used it.

John Richards wasn’t a man to stand on ceremony, but he did demand respect, and he earned it. Ian could call him John or Dad, his choice, John had informed him. But call him pop again and he would show Ian a pop he wouldn’t forget. Ian almost smiled at the memory.

Diego frowned. He didn’t like the title any more than John Richards had.

“ ‘Father’ would be a much better greeting,” Diego informed him, not for the first time.

“Too stiff.” Ian moved to the sideboard, piled his plate high with fluffy scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, and toast. For all
his faults, Diego had an excellent cook, and she seemed to have grown fond of Ian. “ ‘Father’ sounds like something from the fifties,” he continued, passing over the fruit and various sweets the cook had laid out as he turned and moved to the glass-topped breakfast table.

Sunlight spilled through the open doors and tall windows that surrounded the room as Ian took his seat and let the little dark-haired maid pour his coffee.

“Thanks, Liss.” He smiled as she moved back.

“You are welcome, Mr. Fuentes.” Her lilting English was a little shy, but Ian had learned early just where this little cat’s loyalties lay. And they weren’t with him.

“Set the coffee on the table, Liss,” he directed her. “And then you can leave.”

She looked to Diego. The obvious cut was irritating.

“Liss, he didn’t give you the order, I did,” he told her softly, meeting her dark eyes with the promise of retaliation in his own gaze if she didn’t do as ordered.

“Of course, Mr. Fuentes.” She set the silver pot in the center of the table, between him and Diego, and then headed for the wide double doors, the short skirt of her uniform swishing.

“Close the doors behind you,” he ordered, before nodding to Mendez to follow her out. The other man would stand guard at the doors. Deke and another bodyguard stood guard at the patio and the fourth had positioned himself at the door leading to the kitchen.

Only Deke knew his true purpose there, but the other three were slowly proving their loyalty to Ian rather than the cartel.

“I do not like how you require that I serve myself,” Diego snapped as he reach for the coffeepot and refilled his cup. “I have the servants for a reason.”

“And I’m always amazed that they survive it.” Ian grunted at the thought of the perversions the maids shared with Diego. “But I see no reason to have to kill one of them because they overheard the wrong thing.”

“You should not discuss business with breakfast,” Diego instructed him. “It is bad for the digestion.”

“Right now, business is bad for health, period.” Ian sipped at his coffee as he stared back at Diego. “I’m canceling our relationship with the Radacchio consortium. My men were hijacked on the way to the delivery point and I lost two of them. We nearly lost the shipment.”

The report of the lost coca shipment hadn’t been as bad as learning that the two men he had lost were handpicked agents he had put in place. That pissed him off.

“Sorrell?” Diego narrowed his eyes thoughtfully as he watched Ian.

Sorrell was the reason Ian was there. The elusive terrorist, as yet unidentified, had managed to slip through every net that several countries and more than a dozen law enforcement agencies had attempted to use to catch him.

“That’s what I suspect.” Ian shrugged as he dug into his breakfast. “Valence Radacchio claims otherwise, but the strike was well prepared and centered where security should have been the tightest. They dropped the ball, and rather than getting embroiled in a blood feud with them, I’d rather sever ties instead.”

“Valence has worked with me for many years,” Diego mused. “He has always moved our product through Colombia and onto the ships. If we sever this relationship, we will be forced to forge a new one.”

Ian shook his head. “We move our own product. Why use a middleman when we have the necessary manpower and the network to do it efficiently? It saves time, money, and risks.”

The product, of course, was drugs. Radacchio collected the bales of cocaine from the processing warehouses and transported it across the mountains to waiting ships. From there, he delivered it to various points to another drop-off where others then collected it, broke it down, and shipped it to other points.

Until Sorrell had begun hitting the processing warehouses.
The first thing Ian had done when he took over the Fuentes business was to relocate the warehouses and have his men deliver the goods to Radacchio instead.

“Is Valence aligned with Sorrell, do you think? Or has the bastard merely managed to obtain information about our supply lines?”

Ian shook his head. “I don’t know and I don’t care. But Radacchio knew the location of the former warehouses. We changed our locations and began delivering to them rather than having them pick up the bales from us and the hijackings stopped. Now this strike? I’m inclined to once again cut them out of the loop. We’ll see what happens then.”

“He will not be pleased over this,” Diego warned him. “We pay him well for his consortium’s work.”

“Then he can find another client, one with a bit less paranoia than it seems I possess.” Ian’s smile was tight. “I don’t have time for a drug war, Diego. We’ll do it my way first.”

Diego’s black eyes gleamed with excitement.

“The wars spice up life, Ian.” Diego grinned with all apparent anticipation. “They keep you on your toes.”

“I’d been a ballet dancer if I wanted to dance on my toes, pop,” he said.

Diego sighed in regret. “Radacchio will demand a meeting to discuss this.”

“Then tell him he can talk to me. And that’s another thing; either I run this shit or I don’t. Stay out of it. Don’t try to negotiate with Radacchio like you did the Misserns last month. I won’t be happy.”

The announcement had an angry frown creasing Diego’s face. “What do you mean by this?” he burst out. “Stay out of what business? Fuentes business? I remind you, I am the Fuentes. It is my business.”

Ian lifted his head and stared back at Diego silently.

Diego flinched as Ian stared back at him unblinkingly.

“I do not like this,” he muttered. “I am not so old that I cannot be a part of my own business any longer.”

“You have your job.”

“Bah. My job. It is no job to oversee the farms and production of the coca. A child could do this.”

“We have a deal,” Ian reminded him, his voice hard. “Don’t fuck me over on it, old man, or I’ll be gone even faster than I made it here.”

It wasn’t an idle threat. If he couldn’t control the cartel, then Ian didn’t have a hope in hell of drawing Sorrell in. He knew it, and Diego knew it. To safeguard the business from being forcibly taken by the terrorist, Diego needed Ian. Ian needed control.

“You are hard, Ian.” Diego sighed. “Harder than even I believed. More so than my investigations into you revealed.”

“I’m a product of my childhood, pop,” he bit out. “Remember?”

Diego grimaced. His black eyes were, for the barest moment, bleak with sorrow. It was a sorrow Ian refused to acknowledge, even to himself. He didn’t care about Diego’s past regrets, his hopes or his dreams, no matter the illusion Ian allowed him that he did. All he cared about was catching Sorrell and delivering him and Diego Fuentes into the hands of justice. Or, their heads on a platter. The latter if he could get away with it.

“If I could go back, I would give my life to have spared you that pain,” Diego said softly, with apparent sincerity.

“There’s no going back.” Ian shrugged. “Just think, it made me hard enough to straighten your little world out, pop. We haven’t had a successful hijacking or a missed load since I arrived.”

“For a man who does not enjoy war, you shed enough blood,” Diego griped. “And refuse to allow me in on the fun. I was pleased though. The agents of the U.S. that you uncovered last month will steal no more information from us, yes?”

The men he had killed had been perverted monsters posing as American agents. They had worked for the DEA,
drawn their pay, and given just enough information to make them viable. Until they tried to kill Ian in the name of that bastard Sorrell.

Killing agents was something Ian preferred not to do, but when a man had the barrel of a gun aiming in his direction, he did what he had to.

“I have to head back to town this morning.” Ian glanced at his watch and grimaced. “I’m meeting one of our lawyers at the casino. One of our Miami clubs seems to be losing a tidy little profit. I want to know why.”

“Why did you not have him come here?” Diego stared back at him in angry confusion. “You do not go running like a hound to the underlings, Ian. They come to you.”

“Good idea, pop.” He sneered. “Let’s just throw a party for all of them so they can scope out our security and hit the house in the dead of night. Why the hell do you think so many of your friends end up dying in their beds from an enemy bullet?”

Diego’s expression flickered with anger. “I am aware of the risks to this life. I have lived many years and survived many attempts against mine. We are Fuentes. We do not hide and we do not scrape to those beneath us by observing their rules. They come to us.”

“And Sorrell has managed to turn some of your most loyal associates his way simply because of your arrogance,” Ian snapped. “Let’s not make this harder than it already is. I’ll be back in a few hours. Until then, try to stay out of trouble.”

Diego hated nothing more than being talked to as though he were a child, and though Ian tempered it, there was nothing he delighted in more. He was afforded very few pleasures in this little game he was playing and he took them where he could.

“Should I consider myself under house arrest while we are at it?” Diego burst out angrily as Ian made to leave the room. “You will not tell me who I may or may not invite into my house.”

Ian shrugged. “Invite them all for all I care. I don’t sleep deep enough for anyone to slip into my room unawares. You do, though. I’d remember that.”

He opened the doors and stepped into the foyer before Diego could say more.

“Mendez, have Deke and the others join us outside,” he ordered the waiting bodyguard. “We have a lawyer to meet.”

Ian strode through the marbled foyer to the front door, almost grinning as the houseman rushed to open the wide doors ahead of him.

He stepped onto the sunlit portico, gazing at the ferns, palms, and swaying greenery that surrounded the large circular driveway and sheltered the paved road that led from the gated entrance. The entire property was enclosed by a ten-foot stone wall that Ian had had wired for security. Guards were posted around the property, and the additional training Ian had insisted on had paid off several times when attempts were made to slip into the estate.

He was vulnerable and he knew it. Shoring up his defenses and inspiring loyalty throughout the Fuentes networks was imperative now. He needed men who were loyal to the heir of the cartel rather than the cartel leader himself. Soon, Ian would know every dirty little player, every scumbag assassin and petty drug dealer Diego possessed.