Rules of Re-engagement
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Silhouette Romantic Suspense
ISBN 0373275161
December 2006
A man back from the dead.
A madman on the loose.
One woman who will change everything.
He should be dead. That was what Olivia Killinger thought when her former fiancé appeared at her door sixteen years after his “death”. Now Jacques Sauvage was asking for her help to bring down a deadly syndicate — which was led by her own father. Olivia had never stopped loving Jacques, but how could she trust the man? She knew he needed her help … but did he also want to reignite the passion that had once burned between them?
Three men. One mission. Only love can save them.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
16:57 Romeo. Manhattan. Tuesday, October 7
He stood across the road from United Nations headquarters, watching, a scarred man hidden in the shadows of bare-fingered trees. A wanted man. He didn’t like the way it felt to be back on U.S. soil – illegally — but he was here because he had to be. He was the only one who could stop an inordinately powerful man from bringing the entire nation to its knees in just six days.
And he needed a woman to help him do it.
She worked inside that building. She was the key to the man’s inner sanctum, his Achilles heel. His daughter.
Jacques Savages thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and narrowed his eyes into the brooding gray mist that was cloaking the city with premature darkness and chill. Only trouble was, Olivia Killinger was also his Achilles heel. Her father had already destroyed him once because of it.
Six days — that’s all he had to find out whether she was complicit in her father’s scheme. If she was somehow oblivious to what Samuel Killinger was doing, he’d have to turn her, force her to betray her own flesh and blood, the father she clearly adored.
But if he found her guilty, he’d have no choice but to use her life as leverage against Killinger. Either way he could not afford to fail. If he did, millions upon millions of innocent people in the country’s three largest cities – New York, Chicago and Los Angeles — would start dying by midnight October 13. Just six days away.
And that would just be the beginning.
Sixteen years? How in hell did one begin to bridge a gap like that? Especially when the woman you were waiting for had once been your fiancée — and you were supposed to be dead.
He checked his watch. She should have come out by now. The row of flags — almost two hundred of them — that had clapped bravely in the fall wind had long been wrestled to the ground by security staff, their poles now naked as the scraggy boughs above his head.
Only the blue-and-white UN flag with its olive branches of peace was left snapping against the front sweeping down from the Arctic, dragging the premature chill of the Canadian prairies behind it.
The irony of that lone UN flag flying in the face of the coming storm wasn’t lost on him. Global peace wouldn’t stand a chance in hell if Samuel Killinger’s plan succeeded. War would be his tool, the weapon that would feed his massive corporate coffers. Samuel Killinger and his Cabal were about to launch the U.S. into an era of violently aggressive imperialism that would kill democracy and forever change the shape of the globe’s future.
Unless he got to Olivia in time.
He checked his watch again. The temperature was dropping. Leaves skittered across the road, clattered and churned in the wake of a cab. It was fully dark now, street lights just fuzzy halos in mist. Still she didn’t come.
He felt the first spits of rain against his face. Perhaps he’d missed her. Perhaps he hadn’t recognized her profile among the huddled shapes that had scurried from the building into the streets, bent against the cold, making for home. Or perhaps she’d used a different gate. He shifted his feet against the growing numbness in his toes.
Then suddenly she was there.
Primal recognition slammed through him. His body snapped tight, and his nostrils flared, as if he’d somehow detect her scent on the chill wind. The muscles of his face grew taut, twisting at his scar as his world tunneled in to just this moment. Just her.
The headlights of a car panned round and silhouetted her figure as she ran across the road, the wind playing with her coat like a malevolent spirit, opening it so that it fanned out behind her, exposing her skirt, pressing it firmly against the outline of long, lean legs. She moved in his direction, her boot heels clicking on the pavement as she neared. His heart beat faster.
A sharp gust whipped hair over her face. She tried to hold it back with a leather-gloved hand and he noticed she’d had it cut shorter. It looked more chic, but it was just as thick, just a lustrous. The sensation of his fingers combing through those soft waves of chestnut brown clawed through his memory, drawing a searing trail of coals in it’s wake. Jacques inhaled sharply.
Olivia Killinger could still do it to him.
One look was all it took to make him hard in places where memory had plagued him for well over a decade. But this time it was different. Now a ferocity swirled through the heat of his lust, and it fed a wild viciousness inside that scared him. Every molecule in his body screamed for him to storm into the road, grab her by the shoulders, yank her round, shake her, demand answers.
Why, Olivia? Why did you betray me?
But he couldn’t do that.
If he made one wrong step with her, if Samuel Killinger found out he was in town, the bombs would blow.
While he had to move fast, he also had to go in carefully. This operation was as delicate as it was time sensitive. And this was not supposed to be about the past, not now. This was about saving the future. This was about protecting democracy, lives. And to do it, he was going to have to walk a dangerous and delicate line.
Jacques drew in a steadying breath, and he took a step forward, the word Olivia forming in his mouth, a name that had lived indelibly in his brain for all these years, but had never left his lips. Until now. Until this mission.
But as he stepped out of the shadows toward her, his hand rising involuntarily as if to reach out and close the distance of the years between them, a black SUV veered sharply out from the curb and screeched to a stop in front of her.
She jerked to a stop. Her head whipped back, as if searching for escape.
Jacques instantly pressed back into shadow, the urge to rush forward and defend threatening to totally override his control. But he had to assess the scene. The vehicle was unmarked, extra-long wheelbase, a battery of communications antenna mounted on top. The door swung open and a man in a dark suit uncurled himself from the vehicle, stepped onto the curb, his eyes scanning the street as he moved. Secret Service.
Jacques swore softly to himself. This had just gotten a whole lot more complicated. What the hell should he have expected? The woman was dating the Vice President. The woman who was once going to be his was now sleeping with the enemy, the very man Samuel Killinger was going to put into the most powerful office in the world in just six days.
Acid filled Jacques mouth as he watched.
The agent said something to her and gestured to the open door. She shook her head and stepped back from the car. The agent put his hand on her arm, his body language turning insistent. But she stood her ground, her posture defiant.
Intrigue whispered through Jacques. Why was she resisting?
The agent leaned closer, said something else to her. She hesitated and glanced in Jacques’ direction. His heart stilled. Had she seen him? Could she sense him?
Then she turned back to the agent, and his heart dipped inexplicably. Of course she hadn’t sensed him. Who was he to think she ever even thought of him? He no longer existed to her. He lived in the shadows. The damp chill from the nearby East River nosed into his coat. He flipped up his collar, watched her climb into the SUV.
He’d known she was seeing Vice President Grayson Forbes. He’d studied the tabloid photos of their outings. He’d been obsessed by one particular image where the vice president was touching her bare arm, their heads tilted together in intimate conversation. But Jacques hadn’t quite anticipated how actually seeing the living evidence of her association would make him feel.
A cesspool of dark and conflicting emotions swirled up from somewhere deep inside him. He’d totally underestimated the depth of Olivia’s hold over him, even after all these years. He’d misjudged the rawness of his latent passion, his buried anger, his violent resentment. He’d refused to acknowledge his deep and primal need for revenge. Until this very moment.
He knew in this instant, as the door of that SUV slammed shut, that this mission was going to challenge him in the ways he hadn’t even dreamed possible.
The SUV swerved out and pulled swiftly into the traffic. Jacques stepped into the street, raised his arm, hailed a cab, the wind snapping his wool coat around his calves.
