Sharon Ashwood - Possessed by a Warrior

The tech waved Sam’s iPhone, a harried look on his face. “For you. It’s Death.”

* * *

“Sam, I need you and the others at Oakwood pronto. Code...whatever. Code the whole damned spectrum. Just get your butts over here.”

Jack Anderson, also known as Death, threw the phone onto the seat beside him, needing both hands on the wheel. He should have been using the hands-free option, but driving with undue care and attention wasn’t Jack’s issue.

It was the jackass trying to make a hood ornament out of his Porsche that was the problem. Not that anything could outrun his silver Porsche 911 GT2 RS—or at least not here, on the back roads of Wingman County, where soccer-mom SUVs and handyman trucks ruled the two-lane highways. Except the car behind him was a black Mercedes SLS complete with a sniper in the passenger seat.

Jack navigated a sharp turn, hugging the cliff and ignoring the sheer drop to his right. A bullet punched through the back windshield and tore through the leather seat. Bloody barbarians!

He could have sworn the bullet had glinted like silver. They know I’m a vampire. Jack stepped on the accelerator, taking advantage of a straight stretch of road to leap ahead. Then the downshift, left turn, and he was on the wooded road leading home.

The next bullet made a spiderweb of the windshield. Who are these guys? They were bad shots, or maybe just not up to Jack’s standards. Sam would have taken out a tire and sent the car over the cliff. That was how you ended a car chase: one bullet, no fuss.

He’d picked up the yahoos on his tail about halfway home, just after he’d left the populated part of the coast. They’d started shooting as soon as he was on the treacherous cliff road and couldn’t get away. Jack drove as fast as he could, but the twists and turns held him back. The fact that it was two in the morning and pitch-black didn’t help, either. Vampire night vision only did so much.

Just like his so-called immortality had its limitations. He was hard to kill, but a silver bullet or a fiery crash could take him out. Whoever was behind this attack had done his or her homework.

What do they want? There were plenty of people who wanted him dead. Okay, extra-dead. Re-dead. Whatever. Which ones were these?

Another turn, this time to the right. Now it would be safe to jump out of the car, vampire-quick, but he was almost home. He could do it. He could beat them.

He could see the massive iron gate of Oakwood, his mansion with its handpicked security staff. Oaks flanked the entrance, huge, gnarled sentries. Thank God. Jack’s heart leaped with relief. Safe.

Then, finally, a bullet took out the rear tire. The Porsche bucked and slid. Jack swore, one curse running into the next. He’d been going too fast, and...

Chapter 2

“Is there a problem, Ms. Anderson?” said the attorney, who was visibly sweating in his penguin suit of funereal black.

Is there a problem? Chloe mused, tears threatening to seep through her defenses. Let’s see. My billionaire playboy uncle Jack wrapped his Porsche around the oak tree out front because he supposedly drank too much at the yacht club, and now our dysfunctional relations are circling like hungry raptors. And, oh, yeah, he named me executor. Fun times.

The sarcasm couldn’t shut down the pain squeezing her heart. She already missed her uncle like crazy—but right now it was her job to be cool, collected and businesslike.

“No, there’s no problem,” she said in a tight voice, memories choking her until her words were little more than a whisper.

Thankfully, she hadn’t been the one to identify Jack—his butler had done that honor before she’d even arrived at Oakwood. The faithful old servant had quit after that. She didn’t blame him one bit.

Chloe swallowed hard, feeling faint as she unfolded the scrap of notepaper with the combination to her uncle’s private wall safe. It was slow going because her hands were clumsy and sweaty. The cause wasn’t nerves, exactly. It was more like her body’s attempt to melt away so she wouldn’t have to deal with whatever was behind that steel door. Opening the safe was like admitting Jack was gone. She didn’t want to believe it.

What happened, Jack? Did you really drive home drunk? For a moment, tears blurred the numbers on the notepaper. It just doesn’t make sense. None of it does.

For one thing, Jack was never a drinker. Chloe had told that to the police. They’d given her a pitying look, as if she were a rosy-cheeked innocent. In the end, they hadn’t listened to a word she’d said.

Her tears dried as she felt a pair of steel-gray eyes boring a hole between her shoulders. Irritation flooded her, momentarily washing out grief and the daunting sense of responsibility thrust on her as executor. Is there a problem? Oh, yeah, there’s a problem. The room is a thousand degrees, my feet hurt in these stupid shoes and that guy over there is giving me the screaming willies.

The guy in question was named Sam Ralston. He’d shown up for the funeral along with two of Uncle Jack’s other friends. They were big, handsome men, pleasant, mixed with the other richy-rich guests well enough, but there was something off about the lot of them. Something other.

Who was Ralston to Uncle Jack? It was hard to say. Although she referred to Jack as her uncle, he was actually a distant cousin, and she’d never quite worked out his place in the family tree. Even though Jack had been her guardian after her parents’ death, he’d not been around a lot of the time. At fourteen, it wasn’t as if she’d needed supervision 24/7—at least not once the initial shock had passed. So, there were chunks of Jack’s life she knew nothing about, Sam Ralston among them.

Jack had named him as the other executor, which was why he was here with her and Mr. Littleton, the family lawyer. Whatever was in the safe Jack had installed in his palatial bedroom would have to be documented as part of the estate, even if it was meant for Chloe.

Too bad. When she’d found out Ralston would be her partner in settling the estate, Chloe had actually shivered, as if someone had opened a refrigerator door right behind her.

“Do you need help?” Ralston asked, his baritone voice threaded with impatience.

“No,” Chloe returned.

“You know you need a key, too. The safe has a double lock.”

“Got it.” She turned and gave Ralston a look over her shoulder.

The view, at least, was no hardship. More than once, she’d found herself staring at him, her body clenching with an unexpected and unwelcome fever of desire. He was somewhere in his thirties, tall and hard-bodied, with thick dark hair combed back from a broad forehead. He had the kind of face advertisers of leather jackets and fast cars would have liked—strong bones, a few character lines, and a dark shadow of beard no razor could quite obliterate. His nose was blade straight, his lips full and sculpted above a slightly cleft chin. The set of his head and shoulders said he owned whatever room he was in, and the rest of the planet besides.

Yummy and forbidding at the same time.

At the moment, he was returning her glare with a face carefully scraped clean of expression—and yet every line of his body screamed “Hurry up!”

So what’s the rush? she wondered. He’d been like this—barely repressed urgency—ever since he arrived.

A career as a wedding planner had honed Chloe’s skills at reading people. Too many couples ordered an event based on what they thought was correct rather than what was in their hearts. Chloe was good at ferreting out the truth from a shared look, an inflection in the voice, a finger drawn down the picture of a fluffy white dress in a magazine.

Just like her gut said Ralston and his buddies might have fat wallets and Italian-cut suits, but they’d break heads just as easily as they tossed back their single-malt whiskey. Now he was standing a little to the side, just out of the splash of late afternoon sunlight pouring through the French doors—a shady guy staying in the shade.