White Hot

Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1

THE MORNING SUN burst through the gap in the drapes, making me squint. I blinked a couple of times as it seared my retinas then focused on the back of the man lying beside me on the bed.

As backs went, it was pretty good—tanned and broad with cords of muscle running along each side of the spine and well-developed shoulders that spoke of a serious gym habit. A tribal tattoo covered the uppermost shoulder, disappearing from view around the front of his body and extending partway down his arm. I couldn’t resist leaning forward to trace the pattern with my tongue.

The owner of the tattoo let out a low groan, and as he did so, I felt hot breath on the back of my neck. A pleasant sensation of warmth flooded through me as an arm wrapped around my waist from behind.

I smiled. Who wouldn’t? “Good morning, boys.”

I had no idea what their names were. Probably they’d told me at some point, but I’d long since forgotten, and to be honest, I didn’t really care. After all, I was only interested in one night.

But it seemed as if guy number two was interested in a good morning as well, judging by the rapidly hardening bulge pressed against my ass. I couldn’t complain about that. Guy number one decided to turn it into a contest over who could make me happy first, and I couldn’t complain about that either. I’d gone beyond happy and was fast heading for delirious when my phone rang.

Not my everyday phone with the number that every Tom, d**k, and cold-calling salesman had. No, this was the one I had to answer.

Groaning, I pushed both men away, rolled over, and picked the damn thing up from the nightstand. “This had better be an emergency.”

“Is that any way to greet your best friend in the whole world?”

“You’re not my best friend anymore. I have two very good friends with me right now, and they were introducing me to a whole new universe until you interrupted.”

My friend, my best friend, chuckled. “You’re gonna have to put your boy toys away, you little slut. I’ve got a job for you.”

“What job?”

“It’s right up your street. Alley. Whatever. Now, get dressed and come to the office.”

“You’d better have coffee waiting.”

Dammit.

I hung up and turned back to my entertainment, both of whom waited patiently like well-trained circus animals. They certainly knew all the tricks.

“Sorry, boys. Gotta go.”

The one on the left pouted. Kinda cute. How old was he? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Yes, about five years younger than me.

“Ten more minutes, babe,” the one on the right said. “You won’t regret it.”

Fast-forward half an hour, and I hustled down the street, late as usual. Although I still wore last night’s clothes, I’d spent five minutes in the hotel bathroom taming my hair, and I always carried a toothbrush and toothpaste in my purse, so at least I was vaguely presentable—as long as you counted a pair of tight leather pants, four-inch heels, and a red satin bustier as appropriate business attire.

The cab ride to the office took another fifteen minutes, and when I swung my ass through the doors to reception at Blackwood Security, Lottie behind the desk tapped her watch.

“They’re waiting. Conference room two.”

I went via my office to pick up a jacket on the way. Whistles and catcalls followed me as I strode across the main office floor, but I held my head high. I’d had plenty of practice, after all.

“Hey, Double D! Did you forget to go home last night?”

“Dirty Dan! You living up to your name again?”

I let my middle finger do the talking. The only other answer I could have given was, “yes.”

While the men laughed, I grabbed a candy bar out of my desk drawer then shrugged into the tailored jacket hanging over the back of my chair. Heads swivelled as I retraced my steps through the room, fifteen pairs of eyes tracking my ass’s progress.

Who cared? Let them look.

Conference room two was right ahead, and I grew kind of curious as I got closer. My diary had been empty when I left last night, and Emmy hadn’t said much on the phone.

A job that was right up my street? That meant it was either big or serious, because as the deputy head of investigations at Blackwood, anything run-of-the-mill would have been punted down the ranks to one of my merry men. I had a couple of thousand of those, spread out across the globe everywhere from Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe.

Security was big business, and Blackwood was one of the biggest.

No, Emmy wouldn’t have dragged me in on my day off unless the case was important, especially when she knew I’d gone on a “date.” We understood each other. Our friendship had lasted, what, eleven years? Twelve?

I knocked once, pasted a smile on my face, stuck my t**s out, and pushed open the door.

What the…?

Okay, that wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting. Or rather, who.

The aroma of fresh coffee floated across to me, but only Emmy had a cup in front of her. The other three occupants of the room had glasses of juice.

Emmy sat at the head of the glass table, impeccably dressed as always in a fancy pantsuit. Black, just like her soul. She turned her head as I stepped into the room and regarded me with impassive eyes that gave nothing away.

Hmm.

On the long side of the table, facing me, three boys perched in leather chairs far too big for their small frames. I resisted the urge to check if their feet touched the floor as I tugged my jacket around me and tried to subtly do up the buttons.

The oldest couldn’t have been more than fourteen and the smallest maybe nine or ten. More than that, they had a look I recognised. Street kids. Why did I recognise it? Because in the dim and distant past, I’d been there myself.

Emmy had too. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Boys, this is the lady I was telling you about.” She turned to me. “Dan, meet Trick, Vine, and Race.”

Three faces looked at me then dropped to my chest. I glanced down. Red lace still stuck out of the gap in my jacket, and I shot Emmy an evil glare. Why hadn’t she warned me?

A faint smirk crossed her face then disappeared almost instantly. She was in work mode. Emotionless. Dispassionate.

“The boys have come to us about doing a small job for them.”

“Like a job, job?”

Not some sort of charity work? Emmy often helped waifs and strays, but she didn’t usually bring them to the office, especially when I was there. Being around children made me miserable—a bad case of wanting what I couldn’t have, I suppose—and I tried to avoid them.

Emmy, on the other hand, believed in immersion therapy. If something made her uncomfortable, she kept doing it until it didn’t worry her anymore. Which may have worked for public speaking or a fear of spiders but not an inability to have kids. And now she’d invited a gang of them in to chat and possibly more.

“Indeed. A job, job.”

I tried to keep the incredulous look off my face. My charge-out rate was $800 an hour, and Emmy didn’t roll out of bed for less than five figures. These kids looked as if they could barely scrape together enough change for their next Happy Meal.

“Okaaaay.”

Emmy turned to the biggest of the three, who sat in the middle and wore a jacket at least four sizes too large for his skinny body. “Trick, why don’t you tell Dan the same story you told me?”

Oh, this was going to be good. Could Emmy be playing a particularly unamusing prank?

Trick started to speak, revealing a missing front tooth. Had he been fighting? Or did he just have bad dental hygiene?

“See, there’s this guy, and he’s been arrested, like. But he didn’t do it. We know that, don’t we?”

Murmurs of agreement came from both sides of him.

“He wouldn’t do nothing like that,” the kid on his left added.

“He’s too kind, you get it? He wouldn’t hurt no one. He gives up all his spare time to help us with music stuff.”

“We’re gonna make it big,” the second kid said, emphasising his words with his hands. “He told us we got talent.”

The boy might have had talent, but he also had purple hair and a ring through his nose, and someone had shaved lines through his eyebrows so they looked like tiny zebras.

The tall kid cut in again. “We got to get him out, yeah? So he can work with us kids again.”

Kid number two—Race? Vine?—spoke once more. “There ain’t no one else who cares. The rest of the grown-ups, they just tell us to shut up and keep out their ways.”

“So, what did he do?” I asked. Joyriding? Drugs? Burglary? A bit of petty theft?

“He pays for our instruments with his own money. Otherwise we wouldn’t have none.”

“I mean, what did he do to get arrested?”

“He’s teaching me to play the guitar,” said the second kid.

The third kid, the smallest one, stared at me with big blue eyes that didn’t match his darker skin, unspeaking. He was kind of cute.

I looked at Emmy, and she refused to meet my gaze. This had to be a joke, surely?

“You in the middle. Trick?” I pointed one black-tipped finger at him. “What’s your friend in jail for?”

“Oh. Yeah. Murder.”

Emmy looked nonchalantly out of the window, and I reached under the table with my foot. Dammit. She was out of range of my pointy-toed boots. She realised what I was attempting and rolled her chair back another six inches, just to be sure.

Why was she doing this to me? Was this because I accidentally crashed her Corvette the other week? I’d promised to get that repaired.

“Murder?” I asked.

“Yeah, but he didn’t do it, and we need him back because otherwise we got no chance of getting a record deal.”

A laugh bubbled up in my throat, and I tamped it down. It was too early in the morning for this. Slowly, deliberately, I reached out for the jug of coffee in front of me and poured a cup. Caffeine would help. Caffeine helped everything. I took a sip, scalding my lips before I asked the dreaded question.

“So, boys, who did he kill?”

“He didn’t!” the second kid insisted.

“Okay, who have the cops accused him of killing?”

This promised to be a long day, didn’t it?

“Just some girl. Don’t know who she was,” Trick said.

“Even if she was just some girl, Trick, murder is a very serious business.”

Oh, good grief, now I sounded like someone’s mother. Not mine, obviously. She wouldn’t have noticed if I’d held a gang initiation in the kitchen, she was so off her head on c***k all the time.

He gave me a sullen look. “Yeah, I know, but it’s a setup. Someone else must have done it.”

“And we want you to find out who!” the second one said, fidgeting in his seat.

Emmy finally decided to speak. “The boys have got a proposition for us. If we help them find out who the real killer is, they’ll pay our fees out of the royalties they get for their first album.”

So, basically what she meant was that we’d be working for free, then. Not that I had anything against pro-bono work, but my diary was already crammed full with paying clients.

Her lips quirked up at the corners. “And when I say we, I mean you.”

Oh, this was definitely about the car. Yes, it had been a birthday gift from her husband, and no, I hadn’t exactly asked to borrow it, but it was only a small c***k in the bodywork. Okay, cracks.

“When they told me their story, my mind accelerated straight to you. You’re so driven when it comes to these things.”

That was it. As soon as I got out of this meeting, I was going to take her damned Corvette and shove it into her f*****g lake.

I pushed my chair back.

“Trick, how about you tell Dan who your friend is?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s the Ghost.”

I stopped my chair mid-wheel. “The Ghost? Are you serious?”

Everyone had heard of the Ghost. Maybe not last week, when he’d just been a DJ-s***h-music producer with a fetish for privacy, but since Sunday, two days ago, he’d been all over the news.

According to The New York Times, the Ghost was currently the most sought-after producer in the business, and even if you didn’t know him, you knew his songs. They were like little earworms that burrowed into your brain and played on repeat. I’d even heard him play live myself once, at a fashion show, although he’d skipped the after-party and disappeared right after his set.

And last weekend, he’d been found unconscious and covered in blood behind the wheel of his crashed car on the outskirts of Richmond. Only the blood didn’t all belong to him. In the aftermath, the cops had found the naked body of a young woman in his bed. Stabbed, shot, or strangled, depending on which news channel you chose to believe.

Emmy was giving me this?

That was it. I’d drown her Dodge Viper as well. The Ghost case promised to be a messy spectacle played out in front of the media, and maybe, just maybe, I’d like to actually take some of the vacation I’d been accruing for the past decade.

“Yeah. The Ghost’s our friend,” the older boy said. “Only we didn’t even know it was him until we saw his face on TV. We just called him Ethan, and he’s always looked out for us. He used to live on the same block, see?”

“Trick’s right,” Emmy said. “The Ghost did a lot of good. He ran a music project for the neighbourhood kids.”

“Kept us off the streets.”

“Crime rates in that area halved after he became involved.”

Emmy ran her own charity to assist the homeless. I helped her, but while she worked mainly with children and young adults in Richmond and London, I concentrated on shelters for domestic violence. We each chose what resonated with us the most. Suddenly, her motives for taking on this case became a little clearer—ninety percent revenge, ten percent empathy. And while I sympathised with the boys’ cause, Emmy was still a b***h for forcing this on me.

“Did you ever work with him?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “He had his own area buttoned up pretty tight. I met him a couple of times, though. He wasn’t what the papers have made him out to be.”

Now, that was interesting. The media had turned on the Ghost since his arrest, with the headlines growing more sensational by the day. Yesterday’s front page had suggested he could be into devil worship. Last week, they’d been singing his praises, full of news of his five MTV awards and speculating about possible Grammy nominations, and now they’d demonised him.

I didn’t trust reporters, especially after they’d dubbed Emmy the Black Widow when they thought she’d killed her husband, and Emmy was usually an excellent judge of character. She said it came from having met so many assholes in her time. And from the way she spoke, I was working this case whether I wanted to or not.

I sighed. “Give me a few minutes. I need to get my laptop and a notepad.”

Emmy grinned at the three young faces in triumph, and they beamed back at her. Four against one.

What had I gotten myself into?