Their Virgin Hostage

Law sent his brother a long look. He had a feeling Riley was on the right track. He wasn’t the technophile Riley was, but even he knew that it was damn hard to fill up a tablet with nothing but forty books, a couple of games, and some photos. There should be tons of space left. She didn’t have any video on the system to eat up her memory. No audio, either.

“You don’t have a virus, but you do have a rat fink bastard,” Law growled. He hated Jansen more and more every single minute.

Riley nodded at him, then turned to Kinley, reaching out for her. She took his hand, and he tugged lightly, pulling her into his lap.

Yeah, something had definitely happened. Kinley seemed awfully comfortable naked in Riley’s lap, and he wrapped his arms around their bare bundle of femininity with an air of familiarity. Law might not have to worry about losing his brother after all.

He glanced over at Dominic, who looked both as surprised and pleased as he was.

“Pet, you amaze me.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t do anything.”

Dominic nodded at her perched on Riley’s lap. “Are you sure?”

Kinley blushed, and Riley utterly ignored him, though he tightened his arm around Kinley’s waist, pulling her closer.

Then Riley was all business again, pointing at the screen with his free hand. “It’s all about these photographs. Everything we need is in here. It’s called steganography.”

Kinley frowned. “Like stegosaurus?”

Dominic shook his head, his affection for Kinley visible. “No, pet, it’s not a dinosaur. Quite the contrary, this is on the cutting edge of criminal practices.”

“I’m going to kill that fucker,” Law snarled.

Jansen was willing to let Kinley carry his fucking criminal banking information? He was going to die and slowly. Technology might be Riley’s forte. Dominic might be the money behind their operation. But Law was the muscle, and that meant he got to kill Greg Jansen. He knew just how he’d do it, too. He was going to eviscerate the son of a bitch, but not so much that he died immediately. Oh, no. He wanted to make sure Jansen suffered for a nice long time.

“Killing aside,” Riley interrupted Law’s vivid fantasy, “steganography is the act of hiding secret messages in seemingly innocent data. You see this picture as a whole, but the computer sees it as a series of data bytes. What criminals do is imbed their information in the very fabric of whatever they’re corrupting. In this instance, Jansen is hiding his financials in these photos.”

Kinley frowned at Riley. “All I see is a picture.”

Riley clicked a few keys and an entirely different screen came up. “That’s because you have to know how to extract the code. And there it is.”

Kinley gasped. “That looks like an accounting report. Like one of my accounting reports.”

Dominic cursed. “Well, now we know where he put the second set of books to Kinley’s charity. What does it say, Riley?”

“That Hope House is doing just fine. He’s had a mole in your organization for about a year as far as I can tell. He’s the one who made you think your charity was going under. You have an employee named Fred Buck who sent through these records.” Riley scrolled through the files with a scowl.

“Yes. He was in charge of my donations. Are you saying I have more than I thought I had?” Kinley put a hand to her mouth. “I feel so stupid.”

Law reached for her. “You aren’t stupid. Baby, they played you. You couldn’t have known. He sent this guy in before you had even met him. He selected you as his target, and you didn’t have a chance. I bet Jansen swept you off your feet, then arranged one distraction after another from the charity.”

He knew how Jansen worked. He’d seen a ploy like that before. The last thing he wanted was for Kinley to beat herself up with guilt.

“He absolutely swept me off my feet. Two days after I met him, he took me on a date to Paris. We spent a week there. In separate rooms, but I’d never been. I’d never taken the time before. It was so different.”

“He knew how to dazzle you,” Dominic said. “I understand that Alaska isn’t Paris, but we brought you with us for the right reasons. I want you to think about that when the tabloids start gossiping about us.”

Law followed Dominic’s line of thinking, and he was in complete agreement. “Yes. We didn’t play you properly at all.”

Kinley smiled slightly. “You didn’t have to. You took off your shirts.”

Dominic and Riley laughed.

Law couldn’t. He couldn’t stand the thought of losing her now. “I’m just saying that we’ve been real with you because what we wanted from you in return is real.”

Panic had flooded his system when Riley had shown him the crap Jansen had put on her computer. Everyone else had seemed happy to find some concrete evidence, but Law had known it was the beginning of the end. He’d thought he would have more time with her. He’d thought he could take a week or two to bind her to them, so that when Jansen was behind bars, she’d stay.

Now… Well, fuck. He didn’t see how it was going to work.

She leaned over the table, her breasts swaying enticingly. She reached out and cupped his face. “Is it real? I don’t know what’s real anymore. I thought those were just harmless pictures. Now I have to question every one of them. Everything. Annabelle tried to tell me, didn’t she? I was stubborn, and I didn’t want to listen.”

Law knew that story. “She tried to explain her suspicions about him to you, and you nearly walked out on her. She was terrified of losing you.”

Tears pooled in Kinley’s eyes. “I was afraid of everything and everyone falling apart around me. She sent you to save me, didn’t she? I know it sounds dumb, but if I can keep Annabelle, I think I might be all right.”

“Baby, she loves you. And we approached her. She wanted us to talk to you, but we couldn’t tell how you would react. If we had, and you’d confronted Greg… We were worried for you. And given that you’d been a bit upset when Annabelle tried to talk to you—”

“I was a raging bitch,” Kinley acknowledged. “But I felt wretched for marrying a man I didn’t love and didn’t want to admit it because I thought I didn’t have a choice. I thought my family would collapse if I didn’t.”

“Given all that, we decided to take a ‘wait-and-see’ approach,” Law explained.

“Until Jansen took out that policy on you two weeks before your wedding,” Dominic continued. “Then all bets were off. We couldn’t allow you to marry him and we didn’t exactly have the proof we needed.”

“It was a desperation play.” Riley admitted, cuddling her against him and stroking her hair. “Although I didn’t think Law would let your marriage to Jansen happen. When we decided to kidnap you, he practically did his happy dance.”

“I don’t dance,” Law retorted. “But I was happy. Kinley, I know the way we saved you was unorthodox, but we really were thinking of you. I truly believe he planned to kill you on your honeymoon. And I think that tablet proves it.”

“He was using me to take his information to his contact?” Kinley frowned.

“That’s my guess.” Riley tapped on a few more keys. “And it looks like he’s using your charity to smuggle something into the country. I can’t tell what. It’s in a numeric code. Stock 2445. That’s all the description I’ve got. Damn, that is some expensive shit if I’m reading this right.”

“But what is it?” Kinley looked totally puzzled.

“It could be anything,” Dominic explained. “It could be cash, bonds, drugs…anything, but he’s moving it through your charity. I suspect it has something to do with the new manufacturers he found for you. They’re shipping him something in those boxes. Not a lot of people look through charity donation shipments.”

“That bastard.” Kinley looked ready to spit nails.

Riley soothed her with a caress. “We’re getting closer to nailing him. This strongly suggests that he’s using your U.S. based nonprofit to move funds offshore so the mafia can use it for their purposes. I think this is what we’ve been looking for so we can get him on RICO charges. A forensic accountant should be able to take him down.”

Dominic sighed. “I would love to know what kind of product he’s moving. Please let it be drugs.”

Because that might up the time the fucker spent in the can. Except Law wanted to make sure Jansen never saw the inside of a jail cell. A morgue was a better place for scum like him. “Let’s see what the feds say. We can call them in the morning.”

Dominic nodded and turned to Kinley. “We have some inside contacts at the FBI and the Department of Justice. We’ll get them out here. I’m hesitant to send them the information. I would rather talk to them in person. Explain.”

Kinley reached for Dominic’s hand. Already she was looking to them for comfort, seeking out her men. He just hoped her burgeoning trust was enough to make her stay after the dust settled.

“Shouldn’t we go to Washington?”

“Where I can’t control the meeting? Where Jansen has hired scumbags who might try to pick us off and take you back?” Law asked. “Not on your life—and that’s what’s at stake. No. The feds will come here and look over the evidence. We’ll call our lawyers in the morning and set up a meeting. Until then, we stay put.”

And after everything had gone down? Law didn’t know. There would be a ton of questions, of course. From reporters, from the feds, from freaking society. It would come at them from all sides. They would be tested.

He wasn’t sure they were strong enough yet.

Could he handle it if Kinley walked away?

He needed more time to bind her to all three of them, to make her understand exactly what they could offer her.

But time had just run out.

* * * *

“Did you make the call?”

Dominic turned to Riley, who had just asked the question. Sunlight filtered into the office, showing off the deep, rich hues of the mahogany and leather furnishings. “Yes. I talked to Kellan. He and Eric will call their contact at the DOJ. Someone from the FBI will call us soon about arranging a meeting. It could take a day or two before anyone can get here. Kinley signed an affidavit for the feds stating that she was never a hostage. Kellan is making sure the FBI sees that before he proceeds. Hopefully, that will keep them from arresting us.”

Kinley was sitting on top of the large desk and had been for some time. She stared over her shoulder at one of the computers Riley was working on, her hand on his shoulder as he typed. It seemed she always had a hand on one of them now. She was an affectionate woman, showing her caring with frequent hugs and handholding. She’d curled against them most of the night. Dominic smiled fondly at the memory of her in his lap this morning, eating breakfast from his plate.

“Do you think that will satisfy the feds?” Kinley asked, straightening to look at him.

Law left his place on the couch and walked to her. “I don’t know, baby. I suppose they could assume that we forced you to sign it, but I’m counting on Kellan to smooth it all over. There’s no way to know until we actually meet with the FBI.”

Dominic hoped it was enough. He’d been playing through the scenarios and he didn’t like a few of them.

“But all that information was on my tablet. How can I prove Greg loaded it on there?” Kinley asked, neatly summing up at least one of the ways they could get fucked.

“I’m working on that.” Riley looked up briefly from his place behind the massive desk that dominated the room. He’d spent most of the morning with computers around him, all cluttering the top of the desk. “Thankfully, the last two of these photos were sent in e-mail. I’m almost sure I can trace them straight back to Jansen’s computer.”

“I got busy with the wedding. He insisted that he needed to update the tablet’s software before we went on our honeymoon, but I couldn’t find the time to figure out how since I’d never done it. But I didn’t give him the tablet to update until the last minute. Maybe that’s why he had to e-mail them,” Kinley explained.

“Whatever the reason, he got caught in his own trap.” Riley never looked up. “He tried to keep you so busy with the wedding that you couldn’t see straight.”

“The wedding planner had me on this crazy schedule.” She closed her eyes. “Damn it. I’m an idiot. The wedding planner was in on it, too. Greg insisted we use her. Becks said she was the best. Becks was in charge of the charity for most of the last couple of months because I was dealing with wedding details. I just walked right into their trap, didn’t I?”

Law wrapped an arm around her. “Don’t blame yourself. Jansen is very good at what he does. And he had a lot of help.”