Buch lesen: «Close To The Edge»

CHAPTER ONE

Caleb

THE QUICK GLANCE at my wrist was a bad idea. I knew the moment my gaze dropped to the black-and-azure face of my watch that I’d added another half hour to this circus.

Shit.

“Oh, am I wasting your time? Do you have somewhere important to be?” the whiny voice demanded.

I sighed.

The ability to turn circumstances, good or bad, to my advantage was what had earned me my renowned status. But no one starts life thinking they were going to do what I do, be what I am.

A fixer.

I wasn’t complaining, though. I was great at my job. Sometimes I wish I wasn’t this damned good... Oh, who the hell was I kidding? Most days I loved my job. Tonight, not so much. The 2 a.m. calls were the worst. Especially when they interrupted a very promising pre-fuck blowjob.

But hey, what was a small case of blue balls when the siren song of work beckoned? As evading tactics went, it was an effective way to hold the demons at bay.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and glared at the glassy-eyed man-child straddling the banister in front of me. “Yes, actually. I do have somewhere else to be. So if you’re going to jump, get it over with so I can get on with my night.”

Christ, you’ve surpassed yourself this time, Steele.

My client’s slack-faced shock confirmed my thought. “Are you fucking serious?”

“As Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows. This is the fourth time I’ve had to deal with your...unhappiness this month alone. Normally, I would’ve washed my hands of you or dragged you to rehab. But I promised your father I’d look out for you. The only thing you’re addicted to is laziness—”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. The band kicked me out!”

“Because you set your GPS to Cabo instead of your studio in Culver City. Last month it was Vegas. The month before it was Atlantic City, right?”

“I can’t just turn up and sing! I need inspiration,” Ross Jonas sulked.

“And you think you’re going to find that by jumping off this balcony tonight?” I shrugged. “Go ahead, then. I can have you in a nice corner slab in the morgue by sunrise.”

His jaw dropped again. “Holy fuck, you’re something else.”

I closed my eyes and wished those words were coming from a different mouth, preferably the scarlet-painted female one I’d left in my bed. When I opened them again, Ross was still there. Shame.

I wasn’t twisted enough to wish my client dead but I wanted this over and done with.

He wasn’t going to jump.

We’d been through this dance enough times. He chose this suite because there was a deep pool conveniently situated six floors below. And if by some exceptionally bad luck he didn’t make it, I had four guys on the ground floor of the Beverly Hills Hotel ready with a giant inflatable to catch his sorry ass because sadly, this wasn’t my first rodeo with a pseudo-suicidal client.

I would’ve dropped him as a client a long time ago, for his selfish antics for starters, and because I never took on suicidal clients, not even ones who were faking it. I wasn’t ashamed to admit suicide was a red-hot button for me. But Ross’s father was my first client, the guy who’d given me a break in a cutthroat place like LA, then gone out of his way to recommend my services to others. And when Victor Jonas had all but begged me to look out for his son, I’d agreed unconditionally.

The worst Ross, only child of rich, overindulgent parents, would suffer tonight if he did jump, was having the wind knocked out of him.

Whereas I was destined to suffer a stronger resurgence of the nightmares I fought each night, not to mention the cold shoulder of a pouty redhead if I didn’t wrap this up fast. “Yes, I am something else. And you have ten seconds to shit or get off the pot.”

I straightened from my leaning position against the French doors and moved toward him. He glanced furtively behind him and paled. “Fuck,” he muttered.

Two feet away I stopped and crossed my arms. “Listen to me. You keep flirting with death like this and one day you’ll succeed. Do me a favor, Ross. Put a little bit of the effort you use to jerk me around into doing some actual work. You might be surprised at how good it feels to reap the results of your hard work.”

The belligerence drained from his face. “But I’m out of the band.”

“Call your guys in the morning. Beg if you need to. Humility goes a long way if you truly mean it,” I said. I had no clue whether that was true or not. Humility wasn’t exactly a strong suit of mine. “And while you’re at it, try showing up when you say you will. Deal?”

When he nodded I stepped back, staying alert as he slowly climbed down. Relieved, I followed him back into the suite he’d checked into for the purpose of pulling this shitty, dangerous stunt.

I breathed through the fury and resisted the urge to tear another strip off him. “One of my guys is going to stick around, make sure you get to Culver City nice and early in the morning. Sound good?”

I slapped him on the shoulder and headed for the door. With any luck, my date would still be warming my bed.

“Hey, Caleb.”

I turned around. “Yeah?”

“Would you...really have watched me jump?”

My face tightened. “If you wanted to, I couldn’t have stopped you.” I paused a beat. “Did you?”

He shook his head sheepishly. “No.”

My anger spiked another notch. “Pull a stunt like this again and I’ll push you myself.”

I left him standing in the middle of the living room, shoulders hunched, pondering that.

My jaw tightened as the elevator rushed me to the ground floor. Unfortunately, the memories Ross had triggered weren’t as easy to leave behind as I exited the five-star hotel.

For my mother it’d been third time lucky. Or unlucky, depending on which side of the fence you stood on. My steps faltered as the acid-sharp pain that always accompanied the memory of her death plowed through me.

Damn Ross Jonas.

With a deep breath I walked out, handed a twenty to the valet attendant holding out the keys to my Bugatti and slid behind the wheel.

Before I could pull away, my phone beeped. Tugging it out of my pocket, I found a centerfold-worthy picture gracing my screen. The accompanying message flashed seconds later.

This is what you could’ve had tonight. Call me never!

I was torn between a smile and a scowl. A smile because if I chose to call her right then, she would’ve answered. A scowl because the redhead was the first to tweak my interest in a while, and I’d hoped she would end this uninvited dry spell that had taken over my sex life. But despite my earlier anticipation, the desire to get her back in my bed was dwindling fast. I stared at the picture again and stroked my dying wood a second before I hit the Delete button, erasing her from my contacts altogether.

I gunned the engine onto the Pacific Coast Highway, pointing my car toward Downtown LA. With my bedroom plans now shot to shit, and in no mood to return to an empty bed and dreams filled with memories I didn’t cherish, work was the next best option.

Nevertheless, I cursed when my phone rang. “Dammit, doesn’t anyone sleep anymore?” I griped.

Maggie, my assistant, answered, “You don’t pay me to sleep. You specifically stated during my interview that I wasn’t allowed to sleep.”

“You don’t get to sleep. That doesn’t mean you can interrupt mine. I’m shocked I need to explain that to you.”

“Tell me you’re not heading to Fixer HQ right now and I’ll hang up.”

I didn’t bother because she had a GPS tracker on my car. Once or twice that tracker had saved my skin and extricated me from some unsavory situations.

“What do you want, Maggie?” I switched lanes, enjoying the sweet purr of the engine.

“Wow, someone’s grumpy,” she muttered under her breath, then said briskly, “We have an urgent situation.”

I tapped my finger against the wheel. “Aren’t they all?”

“This one is less sex, drugs and rock and roll, more...something else.”

I suppressed a growl. “By all means, hold the dramatics.”

My sarcasm bounced right off her thick skin. It was one of the many reasons she was invaluable. “I’m sending you the address her people sent me. You can be there in fifteen minutes.”

The joy in my ride gone, I cursed. “Her people? Did you not explain to them that I don’t deal with people? That it’s one-on-one or not at all?”

Maggie sighed. “I know how to do my job, Caleb. Trust me, please, just a little?”

I frowned. I didn’t trust blindly because I didn’t trust anyone. Maggie knew this. Why she was choosing to tap into a resource not readily available to me wasn’t improving my mood. The sizeable monthly paycheck I signed bought me her hard work and loyalty. I didn’t expect anything else, and certainly not her request for me to trust her.

My phone buzzed with the incoming address. “I’ll be in touch.” I hung up, pulled off the road long enough to check out the Mulholland Drive address before I executed a slick U-turn.

High walls and electronic gates greeted me when I reached the property. Everything about this smelled like trust-fund princess with her panties in a twist about her latest flame. Or a chihuahua kidnapping that wasn’t worth my time.

Only the assurance that Maggie excelled at her job made me roll down my window and press the intercom.

The cast-iron gate slid back, and I drove up the cobbled driveway of a large stone mansion. In typical Hollywood style, the original property had been remodeled into a grotesque status symbol, with little care for artistic design.

I hid my lip curl as I stepped out and spotted the rent-a-cops stationed on either side of the house.

The front door swung open to reveal a young, sharply dressed man on the threshold. He seemed out of place in this setting but I wasn’t here to judge. “Good evening, Mr. Steele. If you’ll come with me?” He didn’t offer his name and I didn’t ask for it. This was LA, where even D-list celebrities were paranoid about revealing their identities to the wrong person.

The inside of the mansion was as gaudy as the outside, the designer having gone to town with an explosion of golds and leafy greens splashed across every surface.

Suppressing a shudder, I went down a hallway into a large living room, growing impatient when a look around didn’t produce the her Maggie had mentioned.

“Wait here, please.”

He left. I paced, silently hoping this trip would be worth my while. I had a dossier full of needy clients but their demands were nothing I couldn’t handle in my sleep. Thoughts of sleep, or the woeful lack of it lately, ramped up the disquiet inside me.

I was busy smashing it down when the double doors opened in front of me.

At the first sight of her, my gut clenched tight and my lungs flattened with expelled air I wasn’t interested in replenishing.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the shock of her roughly chopped white-blond hair that gripped my attention or the wide, full red lips currently getting sucked between her teeth. Maybe it was the bright, oval-shaped green eyes staring directly at me. Or the lush petiteness of the body draped from head to toe in black leather and lace.

Leather and lace.

The combination was lethal enough without the silver-studded leather cuffs encircling both wrists and her slim throat.

Jesus.

She was a cross between a wannabe punk rock star and a BDSM enthusiast’s wet dream.

She stared at me, our height disparity forcing her to angle her head and expose her delicate neck to me. Edgy hunger burned through me as I tracked her alabaster-pale face, the lightest flutter of her nostrils, the velvet smoothness of her mouth. The racing pulse beneath her choker.

She inhaled and exhaled slowly. “I hear you’re a fixer.”

“You heard correctly.” I wasn’t in the phone book. Referrals were strictly by word of mouth. I sent silent thanks to whichever client had sent her my way.

She gave a brisk nod. “Before we start, we need to discuss an NDA,” she said in a sexy voice I wanted in surround sound in my head.

I was used to nondisclosure agreements. No one worth a damn did business these days without first whipping out an NDA. But whether it was the time of night or my general mood lately, I shook my head.

“Before we discuss NDAs I need the broad strokes of the job first.” Who was I kidding? This woman, whoever she was, intrigued me. I was fairly sure I was going to take the job.

Her mouth firmed. “Fair enough. I’ve picked up a stalker,” she said matter-of-factly. “It started off as cyberstalking but in the past three weeks it’s escalated to physical stalking.”

The bolt of unexpected protectiveness shot through me, unsettling me enough to make me cross my arms. “And you haven’t called the cops because...?”

“Because it could be linked with the work I’m doing.”

“What work?”

“Extremely sensitive work that I can’t discuss without you signing the NDA.” She held out the document.

My intrigue spiked. “Okay, let’s see it.”

It was seven pages long, far more detailed than the standard three-page NDA, with her name left blank. I noticed her studying me from the corner of my eye as I read it a second time. When I was done, I shifted my gaze to her, my interest mounting when she met my eye boldly. “It looks good. Pen?”

As if on cue, the door opened, and the young guy who opened the front door walked in. I watched him, then her, looking for signs of a relationship. She nodded her thanks when he produced a pen, but there was nothing else in her gaze that tweaked my senses.

I grimaced at the relief that shot through me, and signed.

She took the pen and inserted her name.

Lily Angela Gracen.

I stared at the name, searched the corners of my mind and came up empty as the guy witnessed the document.

As she walked him to the door I allowed myself a second, more intimate look.

Hell, she was stunning.

No one deserved to be stalked, online or in real life, but fuck, looking at her, I understood why she could become an object of some psycho’s obsession.

The moment the thought crossed my mind, I froze, rejecting the idea of her being in danger, even while my cock stirred to life, excited by the magnificent vision crossing the room toward me.

She moved with understated but sexy awareness, a woman who acknowledged her considerable attributes but didn’t need to flaunt them. A woman who knew the power of those curvy hips, her plump lips and generous breasts.

Despite her combat boots adding a couple of inches to her height, she barely came up to my chest. Petite, perfectly proportioned, she was the epitome of a filthy, decadent Pocket Venus.

She probably weighed no more than a hundred and ten pounds. On a good day I bench-pressed twice her weight. My mind reeled with images of how she would feel in my arms.

Easily pinned against a wall, her naked, delicious weight trapped between my greedy hands.

Easily tied down to a bed with silk ropes if that was her thing, her skin flushed pink as she straddled the fine line between preorgasmic tension and a screaming climax.

Easily subdued and tossed into the back of a van by some unhinged asshole with entitlement issues.

I yanked myself away from lurid sexual scenarios and adjusted my stance to ease the constriction in my pants as the most gorgeous creature I’d seen in a long time stopped before me.

“Who was he?” I nodded at the door.

“He came with the house rental. I asked him to stick around to witness the document.”

“Okay, now that I’ve signed your document, let’s start again. I’m Caleb Steele. Fixer.”

She stared at the hand I held out. “Lily Gracen, chief coder for Sierra Donovan Media.”

Despite what was happening to her, she had more than a little sass. And if she was a coder, she had brains, too. A lethal combination on any given day. Packaged in that body, I got the strongest suspicion I was in for an exhilarating ride.

After several moments she took my hand.

The second I felt the warm sizzle of her flesh, experienced an extra shot of testosterone through my system and watched her eyes widen in mutual acknowledgment of the rush, I accepted my reality. Signed NDA or not, the unholy fire spreading through my bloodstream had only one destination.

I was going to cross a helluva lot of lines, all of which started and ended with one fact.

I was going to fuck Lily Angela Gracen.