Guarding Grace Read online

  “I didn’t thank you for saving me.”

  “We’re not in the clear yet.”

  She nodded. “What are we going to do?”

  “That partly depends on whether you start telling me the truth.”

  A kind of desperate look came into her eyes. Before Brady could put some distance between them, she reached for him and wrapped her arms around him, pressing her face against his chest.

  “Don’t.”

  “I want to be close to you,” she said in a low voice. “Don’t push me away.”

  Then she lifted her face to him and took his mouth in a kiss that was fueled by sexual need and the terror of their near-fatal experience.

  Step back, Brady told himself. That would be the smart thing to do.

  But at the moment, he didn’t have the strength to be smart.

  He stepped back only long enough to get naked.

  REBECCA YORK

  RUTH GLICK WRITING AS REBECCA YORK

  GUARDING GRACE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Award-winning, bestselling novelist Ruth Glick, who writes as Rebecca York, is the author of more than one hundred books, including her popular 43 LIGHT STREET series for Harlequin Intrigue. Ruth says she has the best job in the world. Not only does she get paid for telling stories, she’s also the author of twelve cookbooks. Ruth and her husband, Norman, travel frequently, researching locales for her novels and searching out new dishes for her cookbooks.

  Books by Rebecca York

  HARLEQUIN INTRIGUE

  706—PHANTOM LOVER*

  717—INTIMATE STRANGERS*

  745—BOYS IN BLUE

  “Jordan”

  765—OUT OF NOWHERE*

  783—UNDERCOVER ENCOUNTER

  828—SPELLBOUND

  885—RILEY’S RETRIBUTION

  912—THE SECRET NIGHT*

  946—CHAIN REACTION

  994—ROYAL LOCKDOWN

  1017—RETURN OF THE WARRIOR*

  1072—SOLDIER CAGED*

  1089—CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

  1150—MORE THAN A MAN*

  1187—POWERHOUSE

  1215—GUARDING GRACE*

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  Brady Lockwood—Was his loyalty to his brother misplaced?

  Grace Cunningham—Why was she on the run and lying to Brady?

  John Ridgeway—What secret game was the powerful man playing?

  Lydia Ridgeway—Would she crack under the strain of her husband’s death?

  Karen Hilliard—Why did she really seduce John Ridgeway?

  Charles Hancock—Was he a power behind the scenes in the biotech field?

  Kevin Parsons—Was he really John Ridgeway’s son?

  Ian Wickers—How far would he go to protect his boss’s good name?

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Prologue

  The assassin never left murder to chance.

  Night was the best time for the mission he had taken on, which was lucky for the working stiffs who toiled at Bio Gens Labs.

  Only one car was in the parking lot, a silver Mercedes occupying the choice reserved spot beside the employees’ entrance.

  With his headlights off, he slid in beside it and cut the engine of his rental car.

  He had stowed his luggage in the trunk and started the evening with a nice prime-rib dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steak House in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, only ten miles away. Soon he would leave his calling card in this long low building and speed away. Some men would have been too nervous to eat before a big job. He found a full belly added to his feeling of satisfaction.

  This was his fourth carefully calculated hit—and the most important. Massachusetts, California and New Jersey had just been rehearsals. With the widely separate locations, nobody had connected the dots. No one knew who had struck a federal judge, a U.S. congressman and a movie producer. Nobody knew who was next. Or why.

  Gym bag in hand, he walked through the misty evening to the lab’s delivery entrance. He had clocked the schedule of the security staff who patrolled the grounds of the industrial park. Nobody would be back along this route for twenty minutes.

  The lab had a silent alarm, of course. But that didn’t mean squat. By the time the Montgomery County Police Department responded, the place would be history.

  After setting down his bag, he got out his stainless-steel lock picks. “The Navy SEALs’ choice,” according to the catalog from which he’d purchased the set.

  He’d put in hundreds of hours of practice with these implements.

  One pin at a time. Apply force. Find the pin that is binding the post and push it up.

  Once inside, he set his gym bag on the receptionist’s desk and removed the explosive device. It was a carefully constructed work of art. Too bad he was the only living person who would see it in such pristine form.

  The exterior tubing was made of thick metal. The inside had a plastic liner, designed to hold the explosive mixture—a simple combination of ground aluminum and carbon tetrachloride that would reduce this room and the office beyond to a heap of debris.

  He would have liked to use a military fuse. But he never bought his bomb-making materials from sources that could be traced. So he was using one designed for fireworks.

  He lit the fuse and glided toward the executive suite at the end of the hall. In an elegantly furnished room fifty feet away, a small man wearing a wrinkled dress shirt bent over his computer keyboard. His dark hair was shot with gray now. His shoulders were slightly hunched. And he was unaware that he had only minutes to live.

  Yet some sixth sense pulled the doctor’s attention away from the computer screen. “Who’s there?”

  Whirling in his chair, he turned to face the door—then froze when he saw the figure blocking the exit—bomb in hand.

  “Who the hell are you? What are you doing here?” he demanded with the arrogance of a man who thinks he’s the one in charge.

  “I’m one of your children, Dr. Cortez. Don’t you recognize me?”

  A jolt of fear flashed in the doctor’s eyes as he reached for the telephone.

  The assassin’s reflexes were excellent. He leaped across the room, kicking Cortez away from his desk, toppling his chair and spilling him onto the tile floor. The doctor lay stunned for a moment, then reached to clasp the back of his head. His palm came away covered with blood.

  The intruder moved farther into the room, staying out of the man’s reach, the bomb held up like a football ready for a touchdown pass.

  Cortez’s gaze flicked from his bloody hand to the intruder’s face, to the bomb with its fuse burning steadily down toward the payload.

  “Don’t,” he whimpered.

  A fierce explosion cut off his plea. Ending two lives—and thirty years of diabolical scientific research.

  Chapter One

  Six months later

  Grace Cunningham picked up her briefcase and walked into the closet-size room that held the copy machine.

  She hated hanging around after her stint in this office was finished. But, if anybody asked, she had a good reason to be here. The last time the great man who’d hired her to organize material for his autobiography had mislaid some of her notes, he’d cost her hours of work.
This evening, she wanted her own copy of the research summary.

  He’d left her at nine, as he always did, and she had no illusions about why. He was using her as a cover to meet another woman. And they weren’t working on his book. Unless he was planning a chapter on “sexual conquests.”

  But as a junior research assistant with a day job at the Smithsonian, Grace wasn’t in a position to complain.

  Everybody in her office kept telling her how lucky she was to score this assignment. She didn’t bother filling them in on the level of stress.

  She’d thought he was taking his honey farther down the hall. But when intimate laughter drifted through the wall from the adjoining office, Grace went rigid. She didn’t want to hear what was going on in there, but she couldn’t turn off the lurid pictures that suddenly flashed into her mind.

  The client was a man of immense power in the capital of the free world. A guy who worked behind the scenes in ways the public couldn’t even imagine. Although a few knew his name, they felt his influence. Only in his late fifties, he was starting to worry about his health.

  Grace had seen the woman—a blonde much younger than her lover. Young enough to flatter his ego.

  Her low, throaty voice drifted through the closed door. “I have an idea you’ll want to try.”

  Grace’s insides clenched. Her mother hadn’t raised her to listen in on a scene like this.

  She turned off the copy machine and then the light as a man wearing a business suit stopped in the corridor outside the next-door office and gave the closed door a smirking look.

  Obviously he knew what was going on in there, too.

  Feeling her face redden, she took a step back into the shadows, hoping he hadn’t seen her and wouldn’t think she was eavesdropping. Every muscle in her body tensed as she listened to the sound of rustling clothing and panting breath through the connecting door.

  Each minute that ticked by felt like a century. Finally she heard the moans of a man reaching orgasm.

  Thankful that her unwanted stint as a voyeur was over—she went still when the cry of satisfaction changed to a loud gasping sound of pain.

  The man she’d seen in the hall ran through the office where Grace was standing and charged through the connecting door into the room where the lovers were closeted. He was shouting something that sounded like, “Ridgeway is down! Repeat. Ridgeway is down!”

  Obviously the guards had gone into panic mode. Seconds later, more footsteps came pounding down the hallway.

  The door between the two offices was open, giving Grace an excellent view of what was going on inside. She pressed her fist against her mouth. A few moments ago she’d been embarrassed by the sounds of lovemaking. Now she was grappling with something far worse.

  Armed bodyguards kicked open the hall door and shoved their way into the office where the man lay unmoving on the beige carpet.

  “Get a doctor,” one of them shouted into the microphone at his collar. “He’s unconscious. Get the defibrillator.”

  A man holstered his weapon and sprinted into the hall, reappearing moments later with a plastic case. Someone else started CPR.

  Grace shrank into the shadows, her heart pounding as she stared at John Ridgeway, head of the Ridgeway Consortium, one of the most prestigious think tanks in DC. This morning he’d been advising the president. Now he was lying gray and unconscious in a back office of the consortium’s downtown headquarters.

  Oh God.

  Her gaze bounced around the room, and she saw Ridgeway’s sex partner crouched in the corner, pulling up the bodice of her black dress to cover her small breasts.

  The woman’s gaze met Grace’s for a couple of frantic heartbeats, then flicked to the right before settling on the bodyguard bearing down on her. Grace knew her name. It was Karen Hilliard.

  The man grabbed Karen by the elbow and pulled her roughly to her feet.

  “What the hell did you do?” he demanded, thrusting his face into hers.

  She raised her chin. “Nothing. I haven’t done anything. Let me go.”

  The man’s hold on her arm tightened. “You’re kidding, right?”

  More footsteps came rapidly down the hall, and an older man with thinning dark hair and unstylish horn-rimmed glasses entered the scene of chaos. Grace recognized him at once. Ian Wickers, Ridgeway’s chief of staff.

  “What’s happened?”

  “Looks like a heart attack.”

  “Will he pull through?”

  “Don’t know. The doc’s on his way.”

  Wickers turned to the guard who held the woman in place. “Take her to the secure room in the basement.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man hustled Karen out. After they were gone, Wickers addressed the room at large, his voice clipped and commanding. “Archer, zip up his fly.”

  One of the bodyguards kneeling over the unconscious man unceremoniously maneuvered his limp penis back inside his underwear and zipped up his pants.

  Wickers kept talking. “Mr. Ridgeway was alone when he had a heart attack. I’m not going to have a scandal cloud the reputation of the consortium.”

  “Yes, sir,” came a chorus of agreement.

  From her hiding place in the next room, Grace watched the unfolding drama, her heart thumping. When her knees threatened to give way, she leaned back against the wall, grappling with her own disbelief.

  It had all happened so fast. Too fast. She should have done something. But what?

  Her brain threatened to shut down. But she forced herself to take deep breaths and stay cool.

  One salient fact leaped out at her, grabbed her by the throat and wouldn’t let go.

  A cover-up.

  She was a witness to a cover-up of major proportions. They’d hauled Karen Hilliard off to the basement and made it look as if John Ridgeway was alone and working late. What was going to happen to Karen Hilliard now? And what would these ruthless men do if they discovered another woman had seen everything? Heard everything. Would they let her live to tell about it?

  Feeling as if she was standing on quicksand, she pressed her hand against the hard surface of the copy machine. If only she’d left the building when her research job was over, she’d be home by now.

  The medics brought a stretcher and loaded the unconscious man onto it.

  “Will he make it?” Wickers asked.

  “He’s already dead. Like Michael Jackson,” the doctor answered.

  After all the frantic activity, the room and the hallway were finally empty. This might be her only chance to get away.

  The security man who had seen her earlier had forgotten about her in the confusion. But when he started thinking clearly, he would remember there’d been a witness.

  She wanted to run. But she forced herself not to panic. Two years ago she’d turned her life upside down and come to Washington on her own. If she could do that, she could get through this.

  At least she’d caught one lucky break. She’d gone shopping with a coworker on her lunch hour at a couple of the boutiques on Seventh Street. Fumbling in her briefcase, she pulled out a black jockey’s cap and jammed it onto her head, pushing her sable-colored locks out of sight.

  She thought about hiding her blue eyes with sunglasses. But that would look strange at night.

  Keeping her head down so the security cameras wouldn’t pick up her face, she stepped out of the copy-machine room.

  But she couldn’t stop the death scene from playing out in her mind. She’d known Ridgeway had heart problems. And hidden them from the public. He was arrogant. And secretive. And he’d thought he could operate outside the laws of God and man.

  She started to turn away. Then from under the sofa, she caught the glint of something that sparkled. As she stared at it, she remembered the split second when Karen had looked at her—then to her right. Toward the couch.

  Every self-protective instinct screamed at Grace to get out of the building before it was too late. But instead of running in the other direction, she
took a quick step toward the couch, then another. Reaching underneath, she felt something that wasn’t part of the office equipment. It was Karen’s beaded evening bag.

  Had it gotten kicked there during the emergency? Or had Karen deliberately hidden it?

  Why? As proof of what had happened?

  Or maybe she’d understood Grace’s dilemma—and handed her a kind of insurance policy.

  With shaking fingers, she shoved the evening bag into her briefcase. Conscious that she had to get out before they locked down the consortium complex, she stood and walked into the hall, striding to the exit as if she’d only been working late.

  “See you next week?” the security guard asked, and she knew he wasn’t in the loop.

  “Yes,” she managed to say in a cheerful voice as she turned in her badge, signed out and walked toward the gate that opened onto Pennsylvania Avenue, praying it was still open.

  BRADY LOCKWOOD bent his muscular six-foot frame so that he could stare into the unpromising depths of the refrigerator, eyeing a red-and-white carton of kung pao chicken and half a Philly cheese steak.

  How old were they, exactly? Probably old enough to send his digestive system into spasms.

  He tossed the takeout containers into the trash, then grabbed a bottle of ginger beer and took a swig, wincing as the sharp bite of the potent soft drink hit his mouth.

  For the past three years he’d lived in Washington, DC, in La Fontana, one of the grand old apartment buildings that lined upper Connecticut Avenue.

  Better get back to work, he told himself, heading for the office down the hall. He’d taken a new case this afternoon. Typical P.I. deadbeat-dad stuff. Not like the interesting assignments he’d gotten from the Light Street Detective Agency.