Driven by Fire Read online

  ALSO BY ANNE STUART

  ROMANTIC SUSPENSE

  THE FIRE SERIES

  Consumed by Fire

  THE ICE SERIES

  On Thin Ice

  Fire and Ice

  Ice Storm

  Ice Blue

  Cold As Ice

  Black Ice

  STAND-ALONE TITLES

  Into the Fire

  Still Lake

  The Widow

  Shadows at Sunset

  Shadow Lover

  Ritual Sins

  Moonrise

  Nightfall

  Seen and Not Heard

  At the Edge of the Sun

  Darkness Before Dawn

  Escape Out of Darkness

  The Demon Count’s Daughter

  The Demon Count

  Demonwood

  Cameron’s Landing

  Barrett’s Hill

  Silver Falls

  COLLABORATIONS

  Dogs & Goddesses

  The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes

  ANTHOLOGIES

  Burning Bright

  Date with a Devil

  What Lies Beneath

  Night and Day

  Valentine Babies

  My Secret Admirer

  Sisters and Secrets

  Summer Love

  New Year’s Resolution: Baby

  New Year’s Resolution: Husband

  One Night with a Rogue

  Strangers in the Night

  Highland Fling

  To Love and To Honor

  My Valentine

  Silhouette Shadows

  ROMANCE

  Wild Thing

  The Right Man

  A Dark and Stormy Night

  The Soldier and the Baby

  Cinderman

  Falling Angel

  One More Valentine

  Rafe’s Revenge

  Heat Lightning

  Chasing Trouble

  Night of the Phantom

  Lazarus Rising

  Angel’s Wings

  Rancho Diablo

  Crazy Like a Fox

  Glass Houses

  Cry for the Moon

  Partners in Crime

  Blue Sage

  Bewitching Hour

  Rocky Road

  Made in America #19

  Banish Misfortune

  Housebound

  Museum Piece

  Heart’s Ease

  Chain of Love

  The Fall of Maggie Brown

  Winter’s Edge

  Catspaw II

  Hand in Glove

  Catspaw

  Tangled Lies

  Now You See Him

  Special Gifts

  Break the Night

  Against the Wind

  NOVELLAS

  Married to It (prequel to Fire and Ice)

  Risk the Night

  HISTORICALS

  SCANDAL AT THE HOUSE OF RUSSELL

  Never Kiss a Rake

  Never Trust a Pirate

  Never Marry a Viscount

  THE HOUSE OF ROHAN

  The Wicked House of Rohan

  Shameless

  Breathless

  Reckless

  Ruthless

  STAND-ALONE TITLES

  The Devil’s Waltz

  Hidden Honor

  Lady Fortune

  Prince of Magic

  Lord of Danger

  Prince of Swords

  To Love a Dark Lord

  Shadow Dance

  A Rose at Midnight

  The Houseparty

  The Spinster and the Rake

  Lord Satan’s Bride

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Anne Kristine Stuart Ohlrogge

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Montlake Romance are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503952010

  ISBN-10: 1503952010

  Cover design by Jason Blackburn

  For Lynda Ward and Jenny Crusie—I couldn’t have done it without you.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  She never should have been there. Normally Jennifer Parker would have waited for the smoke to clear for a call for her services as a pro bono lawyer. She’d already acquired a small but stellar reputation for dealing with the poor and disenfranchised, and a cargo ship with seventy-three women and children bound for the sex trade would require her help sooner or later.

  She had the perfect excuse to show up. She would have gotten a phone call from the DA’s office, or the Red Cross, or any of a number of charitable organizations in need of her expertise, and if anyone questioned her presence, she could simply explain that she saw no reason to wait when she might be needed. The police and the FBI and their ilk were doing an excellent job clearing the ship, but these victims would be better off dealing with a sympathetic woman than a gun-toting police force.

  But that wasn’t her real reason for driving her ancient Toyota down to the docks and ferreting her way past the police barricades and news crews and gawkers.

  “Do you want to be responsible for your brother’s death?” Her father had thundered at her from the end of the phone line, the father she hadn’t spoken to in three years. “I know you have no family feeling when it comes to most of us, but this is Billy, your baby brother! What would your mother have said if she knew you let him walk into a trap and did nothing to save him?”

  “He got himself into it,” she said, fighting back the guilt. “If he’s been making money from sex trafficking, then he deserves whatever he gets.”

  “A bullet between the eyes? I may have spent a fortune paying off the New Orleans police but there are other agencies involved in this, including some mysterious foreign group called the Organization or the Committee. They won’t hesitate to blow his brains out.”

  “There’s nothing I can do that you can’t,” she said stubbornly.

  “I can’t do anything. He’s not answering his cell phone, and if I or any of my men show up at the docks, they’ll think we’re a part of this mess.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Don’t be disrespectful! I know better than to get involved in a half-assed scheme that crumbles so easily. Why else do you think I’ve prospered for so long?”

  “Because you pay off the police?” she suggested brightly.

  The silence at the other end told her she’d gone too far, but there was nothing left of her relationship with her father to
salvage. Finally he spoke.

  “Are you going to save your brother? You know someone had to have played him—he’s the best of all of us,” Fabrizio Gauthier said ruthlessly, ignoring his daughter’s lifelong efforts to break free from her family’s pernicious influence.

  He was right, though. Billy was the baby, too young to be mired in the illegal activities of the rest of the infamous Gauthiers. The boy . . . no, man . . . she knew would never have involved himself in something as filthy as sex trafficking. Fabrizio was right—someone had to have set him up.

  “I’ll go,” she said finally. “Not for your sake, but because he was Mama’s baby. There’s a chance he hasn’t been totally corrupted yet.”

  She didn’t expect a thank-you, and he didn’t offer one, breaking the connection rather than spending one more moment with his recalcitrant daughter. That suited her fine—she would be just as happy never to exchange another word with the man she thought of as a sperm donor and nothing more. She’d always felt like a changeling in her family of criminals, and once her mother died, only Billy had felt like her real kin.

  It hadn’t taken her long to reach the crowded docks of the Port of New Orleans. Women and children were being herded onto a school bus, all of them looking dirty and pale and frightened. Instinctively she started toward them, then remembered she had come to find her brother. The people milling around were so busy that no one noticed when she slipped past the barriers and onto the container ship.

  She came across the first body in the narrow stairway leading upward and she froze in horror, bile rising inside her. He’d been shot between the eyes, as her father had predicted, and his bowels had loosened with the suddenness of his death.

  Holding her breath, she stepped over him, stumbling up the stairway. She found two more bodies on the next deck, and she almost turned around. In the distance she heard noise and shouting, and she wanted to run in the opposite direction, off this horrible boat with the stink of death all around her. How innocent could Billy be, with all the hideous things that were happening here?

  She had just reached the next deck when she saw them—a group of men, some uniformed, some not. Three men were lying facedown on the deck, handcuffed, and another man lay bleeding up against a wall.

  She darted into the shadows when one man turned, some preternatural sense telling him that he was being watched. She only had a brief glimpse of him—a tall man, in dark clothes, a gun in his hand. She had no idea whether he’d seen her or not, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She didn’t hear his footsteps approach, but instinct told her he was the kind of man who wouldn’t let anything go, and she managed to back into one of the cabins, closing the door silently behind her. She turned and came face-to-face with her baby brother.

  He looked like hell. His face was smeared with smoke and blood, his mouth grim, and the look in his usually sweet brown eyes shocked her. For the first time he looked like their father, kingpin of the notorious Gauthier family of organized crime and political power, and in one hand he held what she recognized as a Glock 25, her father’s gun of choice. He was texting furiously on the cell phone in his other hand, and she almost wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it. Even death and disaster couldn’t pry Billy’s cell phone from his sticky fingers.

  He looked up and saw her, and suddenly he was her baby brother again, looking lost and troubled. “What are you doing here, Sissy?” he whispered. “You need to get out of here! I’ve screwed up, and they’re going to kill me if they find me.”

  “Father sent me,” she whispered, her voice just a breath of sound. “I’m trying to save your life! What the hell have you gotten yourself mixed up in?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said helplessly. “By the time I realized what was going on I was in too deep to back out.”

  “Oh, baby, of course you didn’t,” she said, her heart breaking. “You can turn state’s evidence—I can work something out . . .”

  “I won’t make it that far,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “I’ll be dead before I get off the boat and you know it. The Committee is out there, and they don’t bother with due process.”

  A chill rocketed through her. “Then we’ll have to get you out of here,” she said in a decisive voice.

  Billy’s laugh was without humor. “Good old Sissy, always ready to save the world. There’s nothing you can do . . .”

  She heard the hand on the doorknob, but Billy was even faster, diving behind a huge desk that took up most of the small room. Jenny tried to pull herself together in time to face the man who pushed open the door.

  She knew it would be him, of course. The tall man with a gun even bigger than Billy’s, looking at her out of cold and dangerous eyes. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded roughly, and that gun was pointed at her chest.

  She didn’t make the mistake of moving. She could feel the tension in the air, and everything narrowed down into one thing. She had to get this man and his gun away from her brother. It didn’t matter what Billy had done, he was still her baby brother, and she knew he hadn’t understood what he’d been doing. She certainly wasn’t going to watch him be gunned down in front of her eyes.

  “I’m Jennifer Parker,” she said in as calm a voice as she could muster, trying to ignore the gun. “I’m a lawyer and a victims’ rights advocate. I get called in on cases like these.”

  “Who called you?”

  Shit. Should she lie? No, he was clearly the kind of man who checked the details. “No one. I heard the news on the police band on my car radio and decided I should show up and offer my help.”

  “Alone in an empty cabin?” His voice was derisive. “So why did I get the impression that you were hiding out from someone?”

  She glanced over at the desk and suddenly realized that Billy had left his damned cell phone on it. She strolled over, trying to look casual as she picked up the phone and shoved it in her pocket. She perched on the desk, trying to look natural, and swung her leg, ignoring her brother crouched down just behind her, with that lethal gun in his hand.

  “You looked like you were going to shoot first and ask questions later,” she said, trying to appear at ease. “I’m here for the victims, not the enforcers.”

  “You’re right, I would have.” He reached out and yanked her off the desk, ungently. “There are too many damned civilians here already, but since you’re here you may as well make yourself useful. They found one more victim hiding in the sick bay. You can talk to her and tell her we mean her no harm.”

  “Is that true?”

  “If she’s innocent. She’s not the one I’m looking for. I don’t expect you saw a young man in his early twenties around here?” The question came off as casual, but Jenny wasn’t fooled. She looked at the gun in his hand, then up into his face, and for a moment she froze, staring at him.

  He was . . . mesmerizing. He was a tall man, six feet or so, with the kind of lean build that was deceptive in its strength. She didn’t for one moment underestimate just how dangerous he could be. His eyes were blue, not the bright blue of an innocent, but a steely feral blue, like a cold flame, and they should have been a warning. He wore his dark hair too long, as if he never had time to get it cut; he hadn’t bothered to shave in a couple of days, and his high cheekbones suggested some kind of exotic ancestry. With any other man she might find herself attracted to him, but not this man, not this threat to her brother. Not a man who would shoot first and ask questions later.

  “I haven’t seen anyone.” The lie was instinctive, necessary, shameful.

  “Then why were you skulking around?”

  “I’ve seen three dead men since I came aboard, and you were standing there with a very large gun in your hand,” she said, keeping her expression blank. “I hadn’t seen anything to fill me with trust.”

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  She couldn’t agree more. “You’re right. Why don’t you take me to see this woman you’ve found, and I’ll see what I can do to help her. She must be shatte
red.” She had to get him out of this room, away from Billy.

  He shrugged. “That’s not my worry. Jim Long can take you to where she’s waiting.”

  Relief washed through her. “I know Jim—I’ve worked with him before. And you are . . . ?”

  “None of your damned business,” he said succinctly, opening the door for her.

  She didn’t hesitate. He must be part of the Committee that her brother had mentioned. She needed to give Billy a chance to escape. “I didn’t see Jim out there.”

  “I’ll take you to him.”

  “Perfect,” she said, meaning it.

  The man shot her a sharp look, but she simply gave him a cool nod and walked out the door, listening as he closed it behind them. If there was any chance Billy had really known what he was doing, then she’d protected the worst kind of criminal, and she was going to have to live with that. She just had to believe in him, and in her own instincts. Anyway, it was too late now, and if she told this unnamed man the truth he would probably shoot Billy, or the other way around, and she couldn’t bear the thought of any more dead bodies. She let the man lead the way, putting everything out of her mind but the young woman who needed her help. She’d done what she could to help her brother. Whether she’d made the right choice or not remained to be seen.

  An hour later she found herself bringing Soledad to the bus for the refugees, her brother forgotten in the chaos. The exquisitely beautiful young woman was in some kind of shock, unable to produce more than a word or two, despite Jenny’s excellent Spanish, but she came along obediently enough, though Jenny could sense her distrust. Who could blame the girl? She’d been kidnapped from her home in Calliveria, locked inside a freight container with as many women and children they could fit, and then endured the grueling voyage up to New Orleans. It was lucky she wasn’t comatose.

  The little ones bounced back more easily. When she climbed into the bus behind Soledad, she heard the buzz of noise, and the sudden, relieved laughter of a young child. She turned, needing the solace of it, only to see the man who’d seemed so threatening less than an hour ago squatting down beside a particularly grubby child, talking to him in calm, liquid Spanish. She couldn’t hear his words, but she could see the child’s reaction—gleeful and mesmerized. Maybe the man just had that effect on people, she thought for a moment. And then he rose and saw her, and his face went cool and blank, like a killer’s face.