Dirty Little Lies Read online

  “Where do you think you’re taking me?” she whispered, her nose skimming the rough texture of his chin.

  “A cielo encantadora.”

  She laughed. Frankie had called her many things over the years, but “witch” had always been one of his favorites.

  “To heaven, huh?” She traced his slim beard, enjoying the textures beneath her fingertip—the smooth heat of his skin, the prickly pinch of his razor-thin beard that effectively covered the scar she knew lingered beneath his bottom lip. “You look more like el diablo than any angel I’ve ever known, señor. But then, that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

  He tilted his cheek into her palm, then turned to kiss the sweet spot on the inside of her wrist, squarely on the tattoo he had watched her get over ten years ago.

  “Venga con mi, mi amor. Tengamos una noche divertida.”

  Come with him and have a wild night? She could think of worse offers. Like listening to Ian Blake schmooze with plastic politicians. Or watching over a bunch of rich women who didn’t have the sense not to flaunt jewelry that could finance a few small third-world nations. Still, if she’d learned one thing from Brynn, it was that the job had to come first.

  “I’m supposed to be working,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. Darkness enshrouded them, but she could hear the music just beyond the wall.

  With an insistent touch, Frankie turned her chin toward him. His mouth curved into a half-frown, half-pout as he took her hand in his and led her up the stairs. “¿En que trabajas?”

  Only half reluctantly, she followed, amused at Frankie’s game, asking her what she did for a living when he’d been the one to get her this gig in the first place. But tonight, he was leading her astray and likely enjoying every minute. She figured he’d be damned happy if she got fired. Again. Without Brynn to run to her rescue this time.

  “I usually spend my time looking for bad guys,” she answered.

  Her comment inspired a smile that cracked beneath the edges of his mask. “Tu a encontrado.”

  Yeah, she’d found a bad guy, all right. One of the baddest around—and damn if that didn’t thrill her to the bone.

  At the top of the staircase, Frankie led her into the darkness of a shadowed niche. To her left, Marisela could hear the sounds from the ballroom drifting upward. He’d led her into the dome above the dancers, where a balcony, hidden by velvet curtains, kept them from view. From here, they could watch the activity below unseen.

  If they were interested.

  Which Marisela was not.

  Frankie tugged her in close so that her body, covered in silk so delicate she’d eschewed traditional undergarments in favor of a skimpy thong, instantly molded to his hard, unyielding muscles. She leaned close and inhaled the scent on his neck. The fragrance was musky and male. The aroma curled around them, drawing her so close, his breath brushed her neck only seconds before his lips followed the same erotic path.

  He whispered in Spanish, but the words didn’t matter. Her mind was a swirl of color and sensation and she could focus only on the press of his hands over her hips, the scratch of his moustache across her neck, the heat of his lips on her shoulder. Against her ribs, the familiar jab of his sidearm heightened the polarity of safety and danger she felt in his arms. She speared her fingers into his hair, breaking the string that secured his ponytail. Suddenly, she realized that the hair she’d always known to be thick and wavy flowed through her fingers like threads of silk, fine and polished.

  Doubt slammed into her. She opened her mouth to question his identity when he captured her lips with his own. The kiss was classic Frankie—possessive, urgent, and oh-so-thorough.

  She yanked off his mask. With a push against his hard chest, she forced him back so that his cocky smile emerged in the shadowy light.

  “You didn’t know it was me, did you?”

  She wanted to slap that smirk right off him. “I knew it was you the whole time!”

  “Sure you did, vidita. I’m thinking a couple of months without me in your bed made you so hot, you’d do any guy with dark skin and an accent to make up for what you’ve been missing.”

  Keeping her rage in check, Marisela stepped farther into the alcove above the ballroom. The salsa music had given way to a disco tune. “Turn the Beat Around.” They’d escaped just in time.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Getting you excited,” he answered, reaching forward and flicking her tight, aroused nipple.

  She’d backed up against the velvet curtain, biting the inside of her mouth to keep from pushing this challenge too far.

  “You’re some piece of work,” Marisela claimed, borrowing one of Brynn’s favorite phrases. “You think just because I’m back you can take up where you left off, with your hands in my pants?”

  “Worked last time.”

  “You don’t know what I’ve been up to the last few months,” she claimed haughtily. “Maybe I’ve moved on.”

  “Don’t make a fool of yourself, Marisela. I know everything you’ve been doing the last few months, right down to the vibrator you bought at that little sex shop in Tijuana with the horchata lollipops shaped like dicks in the window. I could give you a play-by-play of what happened next. Want me to?” He eased closer, and unless she planned on performing a backward flip out of the curtained archway onto the dancing crowd below, she couldn’t retreat any farther.

  Not that she wanted to. It seemed silly to protest when the feel of his hand inching up her inner thigh ignited a fire that hadn’t been stoked in entirely too long. His eyes narrowed when he found her thong, and with a hard snap, he invited a rush of blood and sensation to the intimate lips of her concha.

  She let her head fall back, inviting Frankie’s lips to taste the sensitive skin of her throat. He complied, and the mixture of the soft, moist heat of his mouth with the stiff, cool friction from his beard nearly drove her plummeting over the edge. Her eyes fluttered open just in time to realize that she was leaning so far back, she was halfway outside the curtain, exposed to the crowd below.

  With a startled laugh, she glanced down, hoping no one—particularly Ian Blake—had witnessed her indiscretion. Confident they hadn’t been spotted, Marisela turned back toward Frankie—just in time to see the flash of a gun barrel—a gun trained on the crowd below.

  Two

  WITH A SHOVE, Marisela sent Frankie flying out of her way, his Glock now gripped tight in her hands. She aimed and pulled the trigger—a split second before the rifle across from her fired. Or maybe a split second after. She wasn’t sure. But the curtain flared and from the other side, she heard a startled curse.

  A cacophony of screams erupted from below and the music stopped mid-note. Marisela looked down. A man lay on the ground, blood pooling behind his head on the polished dance floor, his eyes staring blankly upward.

  She tossed Frankie his gun and retrieved her own from beneath the folds of her skirt. Pointing to the curtain she’d fired at, Marisela then jerked her thumb to the left while she started down the circular hallway to the right, gun leveled ahead of her.

  Behind her, she heard authoritative shouts spiraling upward, likely inside the narrow, hidden stairs she and Frankie had taken earlier. Great. What if some rent-a-cop confused her with the assassin, shot first and asked for ID later?

  She met up with Frankie, both of them having completed their half-circle of the balcony. The opening to the main staircase mawed in front of them, brightly lit and covered in plush carpet. The ultimate escape route.

  “I found this,” he said, flashing the spent cartridge in front of her.

  “Security’s coming up behind us,” Marisela said.

  Frankie grabbed her arm and tugged her toward the wall. “If security in this place was any good, the congressman wouldn’t be dead.”

  “You know him?”

  Frankie shook his head. “Heard him introduced earlier. His wife is wearing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of ice around her neck.”

 
; When the cops appeared, Marisela and Frankie held their weapons above their heads and identified themselves as Titan operatives. While two uniformed officers from the state police checked out their names by walkie-talkie, the rest of the contingent headed downstairs via the open stairway.

  “They had the main entrance guarded,” Marisela said to Frankie, her mind racing. How could an assassin get in to this party armed and then escape nearly unnoticed? Thanks to Frankie’s sensual diversion, she hadn’t had a good look at the mansion’s layout, but she had noticed high ceilings, wide-open foyers, and few odd-angled curves. Seemed an ideal place to protect. Big, but with mostly unhampered views inside the main areas. Of course, the place was probably loaded with secret passageways and hidden halls. Look at the staircase concealed behind the bandstand. How many other hidden nooks and crannies did Houghton House possess?

  “The dome was the perfect hiding place for a shooter. Security sucked,” Frankie assessed, inducing the ire of the cop still holding a gun on him.

  Thanks to Frankie’s outspoken remark, checking out their story took twice as long, but when the police decided that finding the shooter was more important than harassing two private investigators, they took quick statements, recorded their contact information, and then told them to get lost. One officer immediately dashed down the stairs. The other remained behind, protecting the area Marisela pointed out as the shooter’s perch.

  Marisela pulled Frankie around the opposite side of the circular balcony, where the cop wouldn’t hear them.

  “Why didn’t you give him the casing?”

  Frankie grinned and shrugged. “Cooperating with badges ain’t my deal no more.”

  Marisela smirked. For years while in prison, Frankie had survived twenty-three-hour days behind bars by working as an informant during the one hour he was in the yard. He’d never ratted out his home-boys, but specialized in putting a crimp in the foreign-run drug trade. And while his service had shaved a few years off his sentence, he tended to look back on his time as a mole with disdain, probably because his dirty deal with the DEA had led him straight to Titan and Ian Blake.

  “Let’s find the shooter ourselves,” Frankie offered.

  “Our gig is just to watch the jewels,” Marisela pointed out.

  Frankie tossed the casing into the air like a coin he intended to flip. “No harm in us taking a look around. Maybe if we catch the shooter, Blake’ll give us a raise.”

  Marisela rolled her eyes. “Bored a little?”

  Frankie’s grin was pure sin. “Not now that you’re back, vidita. Where do we start?”

  Marisela took a quick look around. “Where does the main staircase lead?” she asked, pointing to where the officers had disappeared.

  “Down to the main entry hall. Two doors lead into that hall. Both had two guards at each site. The cop at the foot of the stairs was just backup. No way the shooter got in through there.”

  Marisela nodded. “Then there’s another secret entrance up here. Like the one we took. Could the shooter have used—”

  “No,” he interrupted. “The secret staircase wasn’t on any of the blueprints. I found it by accident earlier when I was checking things out. I’d been using it all night to get a bird’s-eye view”

  “Couldn’t someone have seen you use it?”

  He looked offended. “The cops were sweeping the balcony every fifteen minutes. I was timing myself around them. No way anyone got past me.”

  Marisela walked along the balcony, running her hands along the wall panels that encircled the inner part of the dome. On her second pass, she started to count. Belinda would be so proud of her. Her math-whiz little sister was forever preaching to Marisela about the virtues of using numbers to solve all her problems. Unfortunately, most of the time, Marisela needed a calculator to figure out a twenty-percent tip. But something about being surrounded by curves in the circular balcony sparked an idea. She counted the panels between the main stairwell and the secret staircase she and Frankie used to ascend to their private rendezvous.

  The numbers didn’t add up. On the left side, where they stood, there were too many panels.

  “Damn, where’s Belinda when I need her?” she said in a whispered hiss.

  “¿Tu hermanita?” Frankie asked, clearly surprised. Marisela didn’t talk about Belinda much. Mostly never.

  “There are twenty-three panels between the main staircase and the one we used. And forty-six…”

  As she spoke, the problem’s solution popped into her brain. So simple. She counted twenty-three panels from the main stairwell in the opposite direction of the secret staircase and stopped. She stretched up and smoothed her fingers into the grooves around the wood. She pressed on the left side. Then on the right. A spring released the panel, revealing another private staircase.

  “Madre de Dios,” Frankie said.

  Marisela shushed him, but inside did a mental salsa step. “Come on.”

  She could feel Frankie venturing away from her, exploring the darkness beyond the panel, which she closed so the cops wouldn’t follow. After a few seconds, their eyes and ears adjusted. Light glimmered from below. In the faint distance, they could hear footsteps moving downward.

  Frankie grabbed her hand. “This way.”

  Marisela followed, wondering how the hell she was supposed to walk quietly down creaky wooden steps in stiletto heels, but did her best to balance on the balls of her feet. She gathered the bulk of her skirt over her arm, preferring not to rip the damned thing to shreds chasing an assassin she hadn’t even been hired to find. But she couldn’t deny the rush of adrenaline pumping through her veins. This was the stuff that had led her to Titan in the first place. The thrills. The excitement. The risk.

  At the bottom of the stairs, a partly opened panel led into a short, narrow service hall. Not too far in the distance, pots and pans clattered, steam and grease sizzled, and raucous conversations in rapid-fire Spanish rent the air. Marisela moved quietly toward the door and listened.

  What did she have in that bag? How much did she give you to stay quiet?

  Whoever had just sneaked through the kitchen had the tongues of the staff wagging.

  “Frankie,” Marisela whispered. “She went through here.”

  “She?”

  “According to the kitchen staff, yeah.”

  “Let’s follow her,” he said, his eyes twinkling.

  Marisela barred her arm across the door. “I’ll follow her through here. You double back and get outside. Cut her off.”

  Frankie narrowed his eyes and she blew out a frustrated breath. He didn’t want to miss all the fun. Well, hell. Neither did she.

  He turned back toward the stairwell. “Watch your step and where you wag that thing,” he said, gesturing to her gun.

  As if she needed Frankie Vega to give her advice on weapons. Marisela reholstered her LadySmith and slipped through the door into the small kitchen. Chatter came to an abrupt halt and serving spoons dropped in a clatter against the steam tables. Marisela pasted on her best smile and started talking in Spanish.

  “I’m looking for my friend,” she explained, thinking as quickly as she could. “She came through here, carrying a bag.”

  Six men and women with dark skin and frightened eyes all exchanged furtive glances. They’d clearly been instructed not to talk.

  “Por favor, I have something she needs. She could be…hurt,” Marisela said, eyeing the door behind her, implying people were after her—and the woman the kitchen staff was oddly protecting.

  The confused and clearly torn group remained silent, forcing Marisela to count to ten in order to hold her anger in check. She continued to implore them with her eyes and a pathetic smile, repeating in her mind, Patience, Marisela. Wait for it. They’ll trust you. Give them just a few more…

  “Sí, sí,” a man dressed in a white chef’s uniform finally answered, grinning broadly, if not guiltily. “Through there.”

  Marisela smiled and took off, hoping like hell they hadn’t
led her on a wild-goose chase.

  * * *

  The Houghton House grounds were well lit, glowing with more land, statuary, topiary, and reflective pools than one mansion just minutes from the center of bustling Boston had a right to. In the distance, Marisela could hear the scream of ambulances and twice she saw police dashing through the line of limousines parked along the stone drive far to the west of her, forcing open doors and searching for the shooter.

  She and Frankie should back off, she supposed. She hadn’t been hired to protect the congressman. But she’d been so close to the shooter when the hit went down. Maybe she would have noticed the threat sooner if she hadn’t been more concerned with her own sexual pleasure than with keeping her eyes and ears open.

  Movement to the east of the main house caught her eye. Shadowed movement. If the shooter was hiding in the cars or along the drive, then the cops and security guards would find her. But no one that she could see was moving in this direction, likely because the manpower hadn’t yet been deployed. Wouldn’t hurt for her to explore a little.

  She entered a garden with tall hedges on either side. Only after she was a few steps in did she realize the bushes were shaped into a maze. She stepped back out. She wasn’t screwing around with that shit. Making her way around the outer perimeter, she caught sight of a shadowy figure slipping under the portico.

  Just up the brick stairs, inside the tall, beveled-glass doors, the invitees to the masquerade soiree were milling around, sucking down cocktails as fast as the waiters could serve them and talking in hushed, horrified tones.

  The closest door was slightly ajar.

  A nice touch.

  Make them think she went back inside. Engage the next few hours in interviewing each and every attendee while the real assassin makes her escape.

  Muy engañosa.

  But the shooter wasn’t the only sneaky female in the house. Marisela bounded up the steps, slammed the door, then hid behind a large urn.

  Only a few heartbeats later, Marisela heard fabric rustling on the grass. A second later, a tall, statuesque form folded out of the darkness, looked left, then right, and then dashed toward the sculpted bushes. Marisela took a deep breath and launched herself over the porch railing.