Midnight Fire Read online

  Jacko had been scrutinizing the crowd as if they were enemy insurgents, carefully and coldly. He looked down at her. “Yes, ma’am. Lauren. I helped hang them.”

  “So which ones do you like?”

  His dark eyes met hers. “All of them. Every single one.”

  She faked a smile. Wrong answer.

  “But the Morgenstern series is amazing,” he said. “And so is the Lachland residence. Never seen anything like it.”

  Okay. Right answer.

  “I’d really like to see up close what she did with the frames.”

  “Sure thing.” He looked down at her and if she didn’t know better she’d say that was a smile lurking in his eyes. Jacko smiling? Nah.

  But he walked her to the appropriate wall, people parting for them. Jacko snagged a couple of flutes of champagne off a passing silver tray and held one out to her. It was very deftly done, considering the size of his hands.

  It had amazed her during drawing lessons, too. The number 2 pencil looked like a stalk of straw in his huge hands, yet that hand sketched the most delicate images imaginable. He was an expert on hand-drawn maps, and his own were exquisite.

  They stopped in front of the Morgenstern series. Suzanne had gone all out in the presentation. Over the series was a long acrylic rectangle with Morgenstern residence—24 hours laser-etched across the top. The watercolors were framed with a gold passé-partout within an elaborate wrought iron frame holding the entire ensemble together. She’d had the idea of the Morgenstern series as she sat on a park bench across from the façade of the home. It was a Belle Epoque building and by some miracle of light and shadow, each part of the day—sunrise, noon, late afternoon and dusk—highlighted different parts of the façade.

  So she’d done watercolors of the four parts of the day, each a slightly different hue, each shift of the sunlight highlighting different aspects of the ornate façade.

  “Suzanne did a really good job framing them.”

  That earned her an odd look. “The works are yours. Not hers.”

  There was nothing to say to that.

  She sipped the excellent champagne, holding the flute up so it caught the light. The crystal felt good in her hand, catching the light of the overhead chandeliers, so fine it was almost as if the bubbles were caught in air instead of glass.

  She twirled the stem. Her family had had flutes just like this in Boston. Fifty of them. Three lifetimes ago.

  For just a fleeting second sadness descended over her. She’d trained herself, schooled herself against it. Thinking of the past not only did her no good, it was actively dangerous. She had to be present, fully in the moment, every second, because danger could come leaping out of the darkness at any time.

  The only way to survive was to be on her guard and to be grateful for every second, because every second could be her last. No past, no future, only the present.

  And if it hurt her, just a little, not to be able to claim the watercolors and drawings she’d worked so hard on, if it hurt her, just a little, to remember her charmed childhood in Boston that could never come back, too bad.

  That was life.

  “Let’s go look at the Agarwal house sketches over on the east wall.” She tugged at Jacko’s arm.

  “Sure. They’re beautiful. My compliments.” They were crossing the big room and he looked down at her and she thought she saw...again, could that be a smile in the depths of his dark eyes? Jacko was the most serious man she’d ever been around. His emotional tones ran the gamut from sober to grim and back again. Even the hint of a smile was extraordinary.

  “Well, it was thanks to you.” She gave him a sunny smile, straight up at him, and his face froze. It looked like something hurt.

  The sketches of the Agarwal house had come out well, she had to admit. It was thanks to Jacko that she’d been able to sketch the house at all. The Agarwal house was an extraordinary structure built by an Indian venture capitalist heavily invested in green energy. The house was built on a remote vast plot of land on the foothills of Mount Hood and had been designed to blend into the forest.

  Lauren had sketched it in fall and deepest winter and had extrapolated what it would look like in spring and summer. She’d spent three full days filling ten notebooks with sketches.

  When Jacko had heard through Suzanne—who’d received the contract to design the interior décor—that Lauren intended to spend a lot of time on the isolated estate he had insisted on accompanying her. The first time, Lauren had balked. She liked—no, needed—to take her time. She didn’t want to draw hasty sketches with a bored guy tapping his size 14 boot waiting for her to finish up. But it hadn’t been like that, not at all. Jacko seemed to have enormous reserves of patience. He found a bench where he sat quietly, simply waiting for her. Five minutes after she arrived in the morning, Lauren had forgotten Jacko’s presence and only came up for air in the early afternoon after an orgy of sketching to find him waiting in the exact same spot in the exact same position she’d left him in.

  Something told her he’d be able to do that for days and maybe even weeks, not just hours.

  And, truth be told, the fact that he was there, watching over her, allowed her to lose her sense of time and do it right. Without him, there was a bit of her that would have remained tense and alert.

  “You were very kind and very patient with me. I appreciate it.” She looked up and met his eyes and again smiled sunnily at him. He blinked and his face became even more wooden.

  “My pleasure, ma’am.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Lauren.”

  “Lauren,” he repeated dutifully.

  God it was fun teasing him. She tugged at the massive arm under her hand. “So come on, let’s go over to the blue wall.” They turned. “From what I can see of the frames, she did a magnificent—”

  And then it happened.

  And it cut her life in two.

  Copyright © 2014 by Lisa Marie Rice

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank Adam Firestone for demolishing my original plot, though he replaced it with a better one. All the cool stuff is his, all the mistakes are mine.

  Also available from Lisa Marie Rice

  and Carina Press

  Midnight Vengeance

  Midnight Promises

  Midnight Secrets

  About the Author

  Lisa Marie Rice is eternally thirty years old and will never age. She is tall and willowy and beautiful. Men drop at her feet like ripe pears. She has won every major book prize in the world. She is a black belt with advanced degrees in archaeology, nuclear physics and Tibetan literature. She is a concert pianist. Did I mention her Nobel Prize? Of course Lisa Marie Rice is a virtual woman and exists only at the keyboard. She disappears when the monitor winks off.

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  When there’s danger lurking, count on the Men of Midnight to save the day.

  MIDNIGHT VENGEANCE

  “A long-awaited return to Lisa Marie Rice’s beloved Midnight series.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Morton “Jacko” Jackman isn’t afraid of anything. He’s a former Navy SEAL sniper, and he’s been in more firefights than most people have had hot meals. Lauren Dare scares him. Gorgeous, talented and refined, she’s the type of woman who could never be interested in a guy like him. So he’s loved her fiercely in secret. Until now.<
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  MIDNIGHT PROMISES

  “I’d highly recommend MIDNIGHT PROMISES to any romantic suspense reader. You won’t be able to put it down.”

  —Harlequin Junkie blog, Top Pick

  Felicity Ward is no stranger to secrets. Raised in the Witness Protection Program, her whole childhood was a lie. But she couldn’t have known that her family’s secrets—secrets she didn’t even know she was keeping—could spark a nuclear war. And nothing could have prepared her for the tough, sexy warrior who first saves her life and then vows to protect it, no matter what.

  MIDNIGHT SECRETS

  “Every now and then a book falls in my lap that keeps me up all night. MIDNIGHT SECRETS did that exactly!”

  —Bitten by Love Reviews

  Former Navy SEAL Joe Harris nearly died—twice—on a medevac helo after being blown up by an IED. He’s not moving too great these days, but if there was ever a woman designed to jump start a man’s hormones, it would be his new neighbor. Meeting Isabel—loving Isabel—brought Joe back to life, and he’s not going to let anyone take her from him, not even a high-powered politician who needs to keep Isabel from remembering what he’s done.

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  Blood Money follows the lives and loves of Faraday Industries—a family of spies and sanctioned killers. Meet them today!

  BLAMED: A BLOOD MONEY NOVEL

  A Blood Money Novel, book one

  “One of the best romances I’ve read all year.”

  —SmartBitches, Trashy Books

  Beth Faraday, a former assassin who wants nothing more than to stay retired, finds her new life turning anything but normal when sexy British spy and ghost from her past Raleigh Vick shows up in Chicago, determined to protect her from the bounty that’s been placed on her head.

  RIPPED: A BLOOD MONEY NOVEL

  “Gritty, intense and filled to the brim with suspense and intrigue, this romantic suspense series has me hooked.”

  —Fiction Vixen

  A sexy, hot-blooded spy coerces an ice-cold attorney to partner with him to wreak vengeance on the villain who threatens them both.

  Don’t miss CRAZED: A BLOOD MONEY NOVEL, coming October 2015!

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  ISBN-13: 9781459290167

  Midnight Fire

  Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Marie Rice

  Edited by: Angela James

  All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

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