Page 13 of Dangerous Secrets

Twelve year old Moldovan girls kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, used brutally on an industrial basis and dead by twenty. Mountains of AK-47s put into the hands of Sierra Leonian child soldiers barely big enough to carry them. Cut heroin guaranteed to kill the poor sick fucks shooting up on the streets of a hundred cities. And Fentanyl. Jesus. By the ton.

Nick was going to take him down. Oh, yes. It was what he did. What he lived for. He’d dedicated his life to taking down the bad guys and Vassily Worontzoff was as bad as they come.

Pity the road leading to the destruction of Worontzoff ran right through this beautiful woman sitting across the table, smiling at him.

“So.” He put his fork down and leaned forward slightly. He could feel the heat of the candle flame against his face. “What do pretty girls do in Parker’s Ridge? What are the local attractions?”

Charity shook her head. It was physically impossible, but it felt as if her scent covered him when she moved, as if it were a fine, pearly powder.

Head. Out. Of. Ass.Now!

“Parker’s Ridge isn’t Manhattan, Nick,” she said, with a gentle smile. “The pleasures here are more provincial than you are perhaps used to. Still, we do have some attractions. And there’s always Vassily Worontzoff’s musical soireès. He manages to attract world-class musicians to our little corner of the world.”

Not by a flicker of his eyelashes did Nick betray any emotion. He furrowed his brow, clueless businessman trying to place a name he knew he should know, but didn’t. “Worontzoff,” he said, frowning. “Isn’t he that Russian . . . Russian what? Musician? Dancer?”

“Writer.” Charity laughed. “Russian writer. A very great writer, the author ofDry Your Tears in Moscow, one of the great masterpieces of 20thcentury literature. Each year he is nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature. And he would undoubtedly have won if he had continued writing, but he never did. He was one of the last of the dissidents sent to a Soviet prison camp. After he was released, he never wrote another word.”

Her face and voice had turned serious. She looked down at the tablecloth, tracing a pattern with a pink-tipped fingernail. She looked up at him, gem-like eyes gleaming with emotion.

“And he won’t talk about it, either. He’s a wonderful man and we’ve become friends since he’s moved here. As a matter of fact, he’s having a musical soirée this Thursday evening.”

Oh, God. Nick felt his heart nearly stop. Friends. What the hell did that mean? Was shefuckinghim? It was bad enough that she’d spend next Thursday in Scumbag Central, without him having the image of Charity spending time under Worontzoff, those slender legs wrapped around the fuckhead’s hips . . .

This was bad shit. He didn’t even want to think about it. This was worse than Consuelo’s chest of toys, way worse.

Nick looked at her carefully. She met his eyes, her gaze calm and serene. He relaxed. If she’d been Worontzoff’s lover, she’d have shown some sign. A little blush, evading his gaze, a slight smile. Something. But there was nothing.

So, she wasn’t fucking the bastard. Good.

Not that he cared.

Much.

Jesus. Oh, shit.

The short hairs on the back of Nick’s neck stood up. He’d just been handed an opening—an honest to God opening wide enough to drive a Humvee through—to insinuate himself into Worontzoff’s house, as Charity’s guest. It was a goddamn huge window of opportunity, it was why he was here and not in the smelly surveillance van and the first thing that flashed through his mind wasn’thow do I wangle an invitation into Worontzoff’s housebut—is Charity fucking the guy?

He’d been completely sidetracked from the mission. Pow, it had been punched right out of his head. Being sidetracked went against every single ounce of training he’d ever had, not to mention being an excellent way to get killed.

Undercover work is like proctology. You poke and prod around assholes, looking for something bad, and then you zap the bad things you find. His line of work required utter concentration, day and night.

If Nicholas Ames made a big mistake, he lost money. Nick Ireland paid for his mistakes in blood.

Time to get back on track, fast.

“I haven’t read anything by him, sorry, though I have heard of the book. How long has this guy—what’s his name? Worontzoff?”

Charity nodded.

“How long has this guy Worontzoff lived here in Parker’s Ridge? It seems a strange place for a Russian exile to settle down in.”

“Well, maybe not so strange. I’m told upstate Vermont is much like the area around Moscow, only our beech trees have larger leaves. And Vassily isn’t a Russian exile. He got out of prison camp more or less in the same period the Soviet Union fell. In Moscow, he was greeted like a king when he was released. I readDry Your Tears in Moscowwhen I was twelve.”

Nick cocked his head. “Wow. Twelve. Pretty adult reading for a girl not yet into her teens.”

She shrugged, more of that fairy dust coming his way. “I was a very precocious twelve. And . . . that summer I had . . . a lot of time to read.”

Damn straight. Charity Prewitt had spent the summer of 2006 in the hospital. Her father had thrown her out of a third story hotel bedroom window in a desperate attempt to save her life during a hotel fire. The two Prewitts, man and wife, perished, and Charity suffered a T12 fracture. She had 3 operations and spent that summer and most of the winter in a full body cast.

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