Hard to Forget Read online

  A warning ignored...a love denied

  Four years ago, Major Jack Ballentyne followed Special Agent Lowry Fisk into a death trap. Fortunately, both of them lived to tell the tale, but when he had Lowry drummed out of the British Intelligence Service for her own safety—and his own peace of mind—he knew she’d never forgive him.

  Lowry Fisk knew, she just knew, that the Service had a mole, and it was up to the Assassins, the secret black-ops unit of the Service she and Jack belonged to, to find him. And as the Assassins leader, Jack should have believed her, even though she had little evidence beyond a gut feeling. But when he hadn’t, she’d taken it upon herself to find the traitor—and ended up assaulted, shot, and left for dead. Jack had come to her rescue, but it had been too little, too late. Now all she wants to do is forget the attack, the Service, and the sexy, steely-eyed Major with the power to make her feel weak.

  But the mole is on the move, and he’s coming for Lowry to finish what he started. Jack has to get the stubborn, dangerously gorgeous woman to let him back into her life and allow him to protect her—without allowing her to worm her way into his heart.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Lindsey Hughes. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Ignite is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Tracy Montoya

  Cover design by Heather Howland

  ISBN 978-1-63375-083-8

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition October 2014

  Hannah, Rupert, Josh, Dylan, Max: Live, love and laugh—always.

  Prologue

  A slum warehouse in London. The air rank with cordite and death. Hardly the most auspicious place to die.

  And she was dying… Frankly? Bring it on.

  Men, wholly dressed in close-fitting black, their faces ugly with smears of olive camouflage paint, hovered in uneasy formation, ever alert as the wide arcs of their flashlight beams cut the dark.

  Four, maybe five, crouched beside her. Fussing.

  Not a one of them urged her to focus. Not a one of them pleaded for her to hang on. No one muttered her name. Not to encourage. Not to comfort. Not to calm.

  She’d broken ranks.

  Even close to death, she was persona non grata.

  So, with her life slipping away, she reminded herself who she was. Lowry Fisk. Special Agent. Purportedly a conspiracy theorist—most definitely a pain in the ass to them all.

  Them being the British Intelligence Service. Them being the Assassins, a “plausibly deniable” unit loosely affiliated to both MI6 and MI5.

  Them being him.

  Jack Ballentyne. Her commanding officer. A man she loved and hated in equal measure. There, with nothing to lose, she could finally admit it. If just to herself.

  “Water,” she croaked.

  Jack looked up.

  Christ, had she not been all-too familiar with it, his grim expression would have stopped her heart.

  His lips drawn thin in the barely there light, he shook his head. “Nil by mouth.” Then he went back to ministering to her leg.

  What, did he honestly think she would survive this injury? What difference could a few sips of water make? Bastard. But no way would she beg.

  She shut her eyes. Why wasn’t she cold? Surely the concrete floor, hard and unforgiving beneath her back, should have chilled her? What came after numb? Because she was obviously way past that.

  Hardly surprising, when she was lying in a small lake of her own blood gushing freely. Warm. Wet. Slippery. Definitely slippery, given the number of sliding hands trying to fix tight around the flesh of her thigh to stop the flow.

  Getting shot was messy.

  Funny, she’d always imagined a bullet would bring agony. She didn’t feel a thing. Did a body shut down that fast? She hoped so—for the sake of those poor girls they’d tried and failed to save.

  Her heart fluttered weakly. Like a frantic but fatigued bird caught in a net. She eased her head to the side. Her gaze skirted humps of fallen men, tumbled barricades of wooden crates, two abandoned cars, doors wide open to provide cover that had failed. All obscenely small in the shadowy, wide expanse of the warehouse.

  A row of steel cages, animal-sized, lined the far, far wall. She’d spent forty-eight hours cramped in one of those. Waiting for the Assassins to strike as scheduled. Confident she’d be rescued. Fully aware that once the warehouse was secure and the heads of the United Baltic Cartel had been dealt with, she’d be disciplined for daring to pre-empt Jack and his team’s mission to finish the UBC once and for all.

  Her defense that they’d left her no choice but to go maverick wouldn’t save her from sanction. Not when she’d contravened Jack’s direct orders to leave all things connected with the UBC the hell alone.

  For months and months, she’d tried to warn them that the UBC—vicious orchestrators of the tidal crime wave, including the sex trafficking of underage girls, that had lashed Britain’s shores for too many years—had protection from someone high up within the Intelligence Service.

  Naturally, given her reputation as the Service’s pet serial fantasist, eyes had lifted heavenwards and sighs had been heaved.

  Before this mission, there’d been other instances of black ops going awry. Subtly, occasionally, so very cleverly avoiding suspicion. The wrong address, a mistaken time, missions delayed. Bad guys slipping the net—hey, shit happened.

  But she’d noticed a pattern. Connected to the United Baltic Cartel.

  With admittedly only her gut instinct as evidence, she’d confided her suspicion that someone connected with the Service was dirty. Discreetly at first, only growing more adamant and vocal when her fears were ignored. Then, as the jokes at her expense had increased and her credibility had plummeted, she’d shared with anyone who might believe her.

  No one had. They’d been too busy smirking and, eventually, too busy beating a hasty retreat whenever she approached. Bastards.

  Not that she had let that stubborn wall of blind denial stop her.

  No. She’d dug deeper for details. She’d watched each of her colleagues more closely. She’d publically held Jack to account, defying his orders when necessary, in her struggle for vindication.

  And hadn’t that just backfired spectacularly.

  Desperate for concrete proof, and suspecting the cartel would have prior warning of the Assassins’ planned attack against them, she’d gone in undercover to intercept a “shipment” of young women from Moldova with neither the safeguard of a handler nor permission. She’d hoped one of the traffickers might let something slip—a clue as to the identity of the Service agent or agents selling information and protection to whoever could pay the price.

  Passing herself off as one of the stolen young women destined for the sex trade had been easier than she’d anticipated. With half the “fresh flesh” shipment dead from dehydration on arrival at the makeshift dock on a deserted stretch of the river Thames, she’d used the ensuing panic and chaos to blend in with the surviving girls and joined them in their trapped-animal confinement.

  From her cage, she’d whispered promises to the remaining eight girls. Two not yet sixteen years of age. Promises that they’d be safe, that good men wou
ld come.

  And come they had, just as planned. But too late to save. Either her or the terrified young women.

  She dragged her eyes away from the row of corpses still trapped. Each in their own cage. Each shot in the head.

  Straightening her own head, she stared at Jack. The tourniquet he’d lashed around her thigh pinched deep as he tightened it savagely. He could have prevented this. The senseless body count. He should have listened to her.

  The cartel had known Jack and his team were coming. A man in a balaclava, full of authoritative swagger, had shown up at the warehouse to alert them while she’d been in the cages with the girls. He’d ordered the traffickers to weapon-up heavily and prepare for a fight. To the death.

  And then he’d noticed her, the man who was likely tied to the Service and had betrayed them all time and again. Not cowering at the rear of her cage like the other girls, but crouching forward. Watching him. Listening.

  He’d looked at his watch and had smiled a smile as cold as the mid-winter Siberian plains. Then he’d ordered her release. What had followed, what he’d done to her—

  She battened down her eyelids tighter and swallowed. Not going there. Not going there.

  She focused her mind on the way, just minutes before the Assassins had hit the warehouse a half hour earlier than scheduled, he’d casually walked the line of cages after finishing with her. Calmly killing first one girl, then another, then another. Turning to gauge her reaction following each execution, the smug smile contorting his lips a macabre promise that her turn would come.

  The traffickers, who only moments before had been caterwauling filthy jeers of encouragement, scattered into position at the earlier-than-anticipated yelled warning for all weapons to be dropped. Not the man with the flat, dead eyes, though. No, he’d frozen momentarily, his gun mid-aim at the head of a cowering girl. Then, with gunfire, shouts, and death cries filling the warehouse, he’d moved fast, using the dark, the stacks of wood crates, and the confused chaos to cover his escape.

  Still prostrate on her back, her arms thrown wide as if nailed to a crucifix, she could have lain prone. Should have lain prone.

  But her broken promise to the girls that she’d keep them safe, and a fierce need to see justice done for those she had failed, had launched her to her feet. No way was that faceless, nameless, murdering rapist bastard getting away.

  She’d given chase. A bullet had brought her down.

  Unable to move, she’d watched the hidden steel door swing close as he disappeared, unchallenged, into the night.

  She’d overheard her rescuers talking about all eight girls being dead. But only three girls had been killed by her attacker. She knew that for a fact. Bile, sour with revulsion and seasoned with fear, burned her throat. Five of the girls had still been alive when she’d chased after the man intent on escape. Who’d killed them? Who among the agents scattered in the dark was a traitor? Who was working with the man in the balaclava?

  She forced her eyelids to lift.

  Jack was staring at her. His face gaunt in silent fury. Oh, he had a temper, a temper he wasn’t shy to show. But never before had she seen him actually shake with rage. “Survive the bullet I drilled into you, and I will see you discharged.”

  Her mind, sluggish and distant, centered abruptly and sharpened. Jack had shot her? He was responsible? For letting the sociopath who had violated her and murdered those girls in cold blood get away? “You always were an arrogant son of a bitch, Ballentyne.” Her emotional scale swung all the way in hate’s favor.

  One last chance. She was fading fast. She’d share what she knew, make this her final statement. Then they’d get no more from her. Not the Service. Not Jack. They could have the facts, but nothing personal. Not the rape. Not the rape.

  Their problem, should they choose not to believe her.

  Her tone hollow, she began a slow account detailing the past forty-eight hours. Not the rape. Not the rape.

  When finished, she raised a wall of silence and refused to engage. At all. With anyone. Her retreat, her control, against the pain of defeat and betrayal.

  And no one dared protest when three months later, Special Agent Lowry Fisk—survivor against all odds, mute, and still a patient at the private hospital for those suffering from post-traumatic shock—was court marshaled in her absence. Not when it was Major Jack Ballentyne, Commanding Officer of the elite unit unofficially nicknamed “The Assassins,” who leveled the charge of gross insubordination against her.

  Chapter One

  The Wainwright Gallery, London.

  Four years later.

  His back to the jostling guests, Jack Ballentyne studied the wild spread of vivid canvases lining the expanse of whitewashed brick wall. Lowry’s work was good. Damn good. The colors strong and vibrant. The brush strokes bold and unhesitant, spirited even.

  He hadn’t broken her, not completely.

  For the first time since the order had come through for him to get back in contact with her to deliver a warning, the knot in his gut eased. Turning his back on the paintings, he leaned against a faux-rusted iron girder—one of twelve such vertical supports lending an artisan chicness to the excruciatingly fashionable gallery.

  He scoured the heaving throng of guests for his target—Lowry-bloody-Fisk. Finding her in this mob wouldn’t be easy. But then, when had she ever done simple?

  Certainly never in the two years she’d spent under his command. Not even for one goddamn day.

  That she had compromised him as a professional, he could forgive—just. That she had compromised him as a man? Not. A. Chance.

  He’d unashamedly shagged half of London to lay her ghost to rest. Yet still she haunted him. Four fucking years of her drifting into his mind uninvited. One thousand four hundred and sixty disturbed sleeps—those stormy gray-green eyes of hers dark with pain. Accusing him of betrayal, of letting her down. Small wonder he was an insomniac.

  Irritated, suddenly impatient, he re-scanned the press of bodies. The rich, the titled, the celebrated. Standout colors of couture frocks hurt his eyes. The heavy mix of competing scents and colognes curled his nostrils. Before joining the Service, with his pedigree, he’d been destined for a lead role among the socially elite. Thank fuck he’d rejected it.

  Now where the hell was she?

  As if warned of his darkening mood, the throng magically parted.

  And all breath slammed from his chest.

  Lowry-bloody-Fisk. Standing surrounded, yet isolated. Her eyes, wide and watchful, darting over her guests in an exclamation of distrust and suspicion. Her body, long and lithe, delicately turned with tempting soft curves, taut and under strain, poised for imminent flight.

  Fuck. A tethered goat, helpless bait in a lion’s den, could not have looked more panicked. Was he to blame? Is that what he’d done to her? There was no denying he’d been tough on her. He’d had to be—she’d redefined pain in the ass. And, not content with taxing his patience and testing his temper, she’d had to go and tempt him. Tempt him into giving a damn, when he’d long ago vowed never again to allow anyone to get close enough to make him care. He’d only screw up. Best way to keep them safe? Get them to stay the hell away.

  Lowry’s head swung in his direction, a stray tendril of her hair catching in the crease of her lips.

  His lungs kicked back into action. He spun on his heel fast. Oh, they’d duel tonight—but not yet. Not until he had a grip. Not until he remembered he was not supposed. To. Give. A. Fuck.

  Teeth clenched, he rolled his back muscles against the knot bridging his shoulders. Christ, he needed a drink. Something strong to scorch on the way down, then slow-burn like a sonofabitch when it hit his gut.

  Lowry-bloody-Fisk.

  He’d first hyphenated her name on learning she’d been assigned to his team. Within a week, his curse had strengthened to the unprintable. Across the seven languages and innumerable dialects in which he was fluent.

  Her first public challenge to his leadership, he’d la
ughed off. Her second, third, fourth, and fifth, he’d let pass with a sharp reprimand. He’d benched her for the sixth, insisting she be anchored to a desk. Even then she hadn’t quit. If anything, she’d become even more of a pain in the ass. Imagining subterfuge and corruption where none existed. Quietly defying his orders as if they were nuns’ farts, best politely ignored.

  Her seventh challenge had finished her—he shot her. Fuck near killed her.

  His gut twisted. The memory of her—prone, her blood leaking a lake between his fingers, the pearl-blond of her hair a halo against the filthy concrete floor—as crystal clear as the night it had happened four years ago.

  Some man, all soft, sweaty, and city slick in tailored pinstripes, staggered against him carelessly, jolting him back to the present.

  Without thought, Jack shouldered back hard. No apology. Not even when the man stumbled and would have fallen, had his indignant companions not caught him.

  Deadpan, he stared the group down, not giving an inch until they shambled off. Idiotic, because his orders had been simple, but specific—stay the fuck off radar. But Lowry had him ready to split open his own skin. A minor contretemps eased the pressure.

  A silver tray floated into sight. He snatched a flute of pale gold liquid, the bubbles still rising and breaking in a soft hiss. Bloody champagne. He’d have sacrificed his right bollock for something a lot stronger.

  The pretty server—body like a goddess—paused, checked him out, and, judging by the blatant invitation in her eyes, she liked the view.

  Jack saluted her with his drink and slow-grinned his own appreciation. His eyebrows slowly climbed of their own volition when she winked in an unspoken promise that she’d be back to collect…and he knew she wasn’t referring to his glass.

  His body tightened in anticipation. Maybe a few hours solace in the arms of a beautiful woman was just what he needed—because his job sure wasn’t providing the distraction he craved like an addict. It hadn’t for a while.

  He scoured an open palm across the length of his face and grimaced when his fingers met the two- or maybe three-day-old stubble shadowing his chin. Shit. Casually—and, he had to concede, carelessly—dressed head to toe in black, from his grandfather’s battered leather flying jacket to his scuffed, albeit hand-tooled leather boots, he had to look like an over-aged delinquent with a Goth complex. Not that he cared, but he couldn’t afford to be memorable. His job might not be cutting it right now, but it was his life, and recognition would see him flying a desk faster than Alice from Data Retrieval shucked her panties.