Unbeatable Love Read online

  “Well, that’s fucking bold,” Marcus said under his breath low enough that only Harper heard.

  “Bold, indeed,” she announced. “But they are now holding something that no one within a thousand miles can compete with—nuclear capability.”

  Softly spoken swearwords filled the room as the agents around the table realized the severity of the situation.

  “Department of Energy has no international capabilities.” Estes looked at the newbie at the other end of the table. “This is why the President has dropped this live grenade in our lap. Good thing is, we’re not in this foxhole alone.” He looked around the table, pausing at each face. “This is our new task force. I want each of you to brush up on your Spanish, everything Central American, nuclear capabilities and SV-16.”

  He pointed to three-inch thick binders sitting at a back table. “That’s your homework for the weekend. On Monday we will be meeting at the Department of Homeland Security.”

  Grumbles filled the room. “At least you guys get to take the weekend off. I’ll be working with almost every alphabet agency in D.C. trying to hash out a plan that we can kick off on Monday.” Estes rubbed fingers over his forehead. Quietly he added, “I just hope I can kiss my wife and kids goodnight and catch a few hours’ sleep in my own bed.” He looked up and called, “Dismissed.”

  When Marcus started to stand, SSA Estes held up a hand. “I’d like you two to stay.”

  Catching Harper’s glance, his friend gave a small shrug. Well, damn. She didn’t know what was happening either.

  When the last person wandered out of the room, tome in hand, their boss asked him to close the door.

  When he sat down, SSA Estes let out a long slow breath. “You two know a whole lot more than what’s in those books.” He nodded toward the remaining two binders. “We’ve lived it, together, for years. I just want to bring everybody else up to speed.”

  As though he’d shed the boss persona and morphed into their friend Mike, he leaned, putting his forearms on the table, and folded his hands. When his gaze met Harper’s, regret washed over his face. “I’m terribly sorry that I’m not going to be able to make it to the wedding this weekend. Trust me, I would much rather be there toasting your future than dealing with this shit. Anna was looking forward to a night in adult company without the kids.”

  “I completely understand.” Harper reached over and patted his clasped hands. “The situation is so much more important than my quick little shotgun wedding.”

  Mike laughed out loud. “I’ve met your friends. I doubt any will be carrying shotguns but I’m quite sure there will be enough hidden weapons in that church and reception to stop Rafe from running away.” Then he gave her the warmest smile. “He’s one lucky man, but I think he knows that.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Harper looked like she was ready to cry.

  Their boss quickly turned his attention to Marcus. “I’m putting you as our representative on the joint task force. When Harper returns from her honeymoon, she will be your liaison with this department. You’ll have an entire team behind you, but you will be the eyes and ears for us on this task force. Knowing Homeland, you will be reporting in over there until this mission is finished.”

  “Yes, sir.” The thought of working over at Homeland Security didn’t thrill him until he remembered that Tori worked there. He might get to see her, every day.

  SSA Estes grimaced. “By the looks of things, I’ll be over there every day next week, so we’ll keep in touch until Harper returns.” He stood in dismissal. “I’ll see you on Monday.” He turned to Harper and gave her a loose hug, whispering something in her ear that made her sniff as though holding back tears.

  When she stepped away from their boss, his smile was almost fatherly. “I look forward to greeting Mrs. Harper Silva when you get back.”

  Just before they stepped through the door, he added, “You two have a great weekend.”

  Marcus was going to be on a date with Tori. He was going to have the best weekend of his life.

  Chapter 5

  Tori sat clean-faced on the deeply cushioned stool in her spa-like bathroom in front of the professional makeup mirrors. When she bought the three-bedroom, three bath condo next to Harper and down the hall from Katlin, she had combined two of the bathrooms into one, adding both a glassed-in shower and a spa tub. She had used four feet of wall space for the makeup counter, importing the special lighted wall mirror from Europe.

  Glancing at the drawers on either side of her long legs, then back to the woman in the mirror, she debated as to who she wanted to be that night. There was going to be a party so she could go for the sultry seductress look. But they were going to be in a church so perhaps taking on the appearance of the girl next door would be better. Thoughts of Marcus holding her as they danced filled her head. She could practically feel his hands on her waist. What would he expect her to look like?

  The grin that met her in the mirror was one holding back laughter. The man had seen her at her absolute worst while he certainly wasn’t feeling his best either. She cringed imagining how horrible she must’ve looked the morning she had walked into Katlin’s condo to find Marcus on the couch recuperating from surgery. Tori had been bloated with menstrual cramps that had kept her up much of the night, she hadn’t bothered to brush out her hair, and wore absolutely no makeup. She’d been desperate for coffee. Her teammates had seen her in worse shape, but she had never let a man view her in such a terrible condition. Anything over her appearance that morning would be considered acceptable.

  No one wanted to see the real Victoria Denton. Not even Tori. She wasn’t even sure who that person was anymore. For more than half her life, she had sat in front of bright lights and applied makeup like a personality. By the time she donned the clothes, she had morphed into whatever was needed for the photograph, or these days, to maintain her cover.

  Tori pulled open drawer after drawer, each filled with different colors, as though searching for the right character to paint on her face.

  At fourteen, she’d learned she had a unique complexion. Her mother had dragged her to a high-end department store where they could never afford to shop to learn to put on makeup, not that Tori had wanted to smear anything on her face.

  Taller than most boys her age at five-feet eleven inches, she could dunk a basketball over their heads, catch a football and plow through a wall of older teenagers, and flip twisting perfectly off the balance beam. Her mother had worked two jobs so she could take tumbling and gymnastics starting the day after her fourth birthday, but Tori loved all sports, the more physical the better. She was damn good at anything she put her mind to, strong, agile, and graceful. What she couldn’t do as a high school freshman was get a date for homecoming.

  Surrounded by shoppers, listening to music that only her mother could enjoy, the young makeup saleswoman couldn’t decide which colors would look best with Tori’s skin tone. She called over the manager of that department, a woman her mom’s age, who inspected Tori head to toe before her gaze ran over her mother. Tori wasn’t sure she liked this woman. Fourteen years later, she hated her to the bottom of her soul.

  That day, Connie Martin changed her life forever.

  Tori stared objectively at the face in the mirror. Who, and if she were to be honest with herself, what, did she want to be tonight? That pivotal day long ago, she’d learned she could be a chameleon. With her mixed heritage, she could look Italian with just a drop of green added to her foundation, Middle Eastern by adding browns, Caucasian with a dollop of white, Latino with a little bit of red, African with some blacks and grays.

  She could transform her appearance to fit in almost anywhere in the world. Since the Ladies of Black Swan worked globally, that talent had come in handy on so many occasions as she and her teammates went undercover to ferret out bad guys.

  As a teenager, though, that ability had made her mother, and Connie, nearly a million dollars. Money Tori had earned holding positions under blazing lights until her musc
les ached, all while tolerating rude photographers as they alternately placated and insulted her.

  Tori stared at the tray with colors that went more red than brown. She decided to go with light Latino for the wedding. Marcus’s mother was Mexican and his father was Caucasian so she’d to try to match him. Pulling out the third and fifth drawers, she extracted plastic trays with the appropriate colored makeup. As she applied a base cream, her thoughts returned to the very beginning of her modeling career.

  Within weeks of her first makeover, Tori had a contract with one of the leading modeling agencies in the world—represented, of course, by the newly formed Connie Martin Talent Agency. Over the next several months, Tori did more homework on airplane trays and hotel desks as she jetted to Paris, Milan, Rio and even above the Arctic Circle for a catalog shoot of winter clothing.

  She missed her friends. Even when they were home, the girls Tori had hung out with most of her life were involved in afterschool sports which meant weekend tournaments or games. Once, she had wandered over to the park on a Saturday morning and dropped into a co-ed pickup game of basketball. It had felt so wonderful just being herself again…until she returned home. Her mother had yelled at her for thirty minutes straight.

  The one-sided conversation was filled with what-ifs. What if Tori had fallen and sprained her wrist, broken her arm, twisted her ankle? What would happen to them if she couldn’t complete her next modeling job? Being an only child, raised by a single mother, it was Tori’s responsibility to literally put food on the table since her mother quit her jobs to travel with her and oversee her career. Often Tori envied normal teenagers.

  After missing so much school, her mother had declared her homeschooled and found an online source. With so much time on her hands, and there had been hours and hours of sitting around as gaffs positioned and repositioned props and reflectors, Tori had finished high school classes by the time she was sixteen.

  Since she hated not knowing what people were saying around her, she tackled languages and had learned four in the next year. English, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese were all romantic languages—as in the language of the Roman Empire not of the heart, another tidbit she had discovered—thus they were extremely similar. Surrounded by people who spoke only those languages, it became even easier for her to pick up dialect and colloquialisms. She loved surprising the local workers when she replied to their lewd comments not just in their own language but as though they had been lifetime neighbors.

  Her talent for effortlessly picking up languages and idiosyncrasies had come in extremely handy as Lady Falcon. She smiled in the mirror as she mixed and tested her foundation coloring, remembering how the SV-16 terrorist thought she was from El Salvador.

  Finally happy with the shade, she sponged it on her entire face and down her neck, blending over her collarbone.

  As requests for her as a model increased, so did her mother’s demands. The damn woman carried a set of scales in her luggage. If Tori gained more than two pounds, her mother would readjust her food. When menstrual cycle bloating became a problem, her mother put her on the pill, but again, regulated every ounce of food she ate. Morning calisthenics were also overseen by her mother which sometimes required her to get up at four o’clock in the morning, work out for an hour, shower, and be on the set by six for hair and makeup.

  The day Tori turned eighteen, she was done. Even though she had earned a bachelor’s degree online, she wanted to go to college. Alone. Far away from her mother and Connie.

  For four years she had listened to older models talk about everything from contracts to sex. On her eighteenth birthday, she no longer had a contract and she’d never had sex. What she had was her freedom, and access to a little bit of money that had been protected under U.S. child labor laws. The day before, her newly-hired entertainment attorney had informed her that her mother and Connie had badly mismanaged nearly every dime she had made overseas. But she had enough for her first year of college and still be able to eat more than Ramen noodles.

  As Tori stepped into the formfitting gold dress that brought out the brown tones in her skin, she smoothed it over her hips so the hemline came a few inches above her knees. Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she was pleased with her choices. The demure scoop neckline didn’t show any cleavage, not that she had much, the length was perfect for a wedding, and the way it hugged her curves was enough to tease Marcus—which she decided right then was her intent for the night.

  Her self-imposed dry spell would end with Marcus inside her. Tonight. Maybe he’d even become her new fuck-buddy. If not, a wedding was a great excuse for a one-night stand. She only hoped that he was good in bed. Yeah, she knew she had a shitty attitude about sex and blamed her mother for that, as well as a whole stream of other psychosis.

  Tori had never gotten that date to homecoming, or any other time. At eighteen-years-old, she had never been kissed, even though dozens of men had seen her naked as dressers had stripped her out of one outfit and assisted her into the next. When she worked stateside, only women had been allowed in her dressing room, but she worked overseas more often where those rules did not apply.

  The social scene in college hadn’t been easy for her. Since Tori hadn’t attended high school, she’d missed stumbling through her first date, her first kiss, and the loss of her virginity. Although she had traveled all over the globe, so many other girls in her dorm were worldlier when it came to the opposite sex.

  During her first week in college Tori had gone light on her makeup. Although she knew how to reshape the contours of her cheeks and accent her eyes so they looked huge, she chose not to do any of that. In her mind, she was just Tori, no longer the child supermodel called Vi.

  The hated name had been a collaboration, of which she had no say in the matter. Connie wanted her simply known as the capital letter V. Her mother had seen this as the first of many power struggles and insisted she be named Annalise, her middle name. Tori was thrilled when that idea had been nixed. In the end, they had finally agreed that her professional name could be spelled Vi and pronounced like the letter V.

  On the huge college campus, nearly two thousand miles away from her mother, she became Tori, her high school nickname. A fresh new start. Or so she’d thought.

  Her phone rang, and she snatched it off the counter. She smiled and shivered deep inside when the caller ID showed it was Marcus. Looking at the time, though, she hadn’t expected him for another ten minutes. A shot of cold fear ran through her. What if something had come up at work and he now couldn’t accompany her to the wedding?

  “Please tell me you’re not canceling on me.” She didn’t hide the begging in her voice.

  Marcus chuckled. “No way in hell would I stand you up for a date. I was just going to tell you that I’m running approximately two minutes late thanks to traffic.”

  “Whew.” Tori was truly relieved. “I was so afraid I was going to have to go to this wedding by myself. Have I thanked you for being my plus one?”

  “Have I thanked you for being my plus one?” He parlayed back.

  “I’m looking forward to this date, but I’m also thankful you’re running a few minutes late.” She still had several things to do. She looked down at her bare feet, makeup strewn across the counter, and she hadn’t put her weapons into a small purse.

  “I know the front door code changes all the time—”

  Tori cut him off. “No worries. I’ll be waiting for you down in the lobby. No need to waste time just to be chivalrous.”

  “That’ll work. I’ll see you in seven minutes then.” He sounded excited about their date which just made Tori even more anxious.

  “See you then.” She hung up the phone. She was OCD about cleaning up and putting everything away exactly where it had come from. Perhaps it was just good habits she had developed living in and out of a suitcase and on the road. Everything had its place and if you returned it there after each use, you’d find it there when you needed it in a hurry. Also, if i
t was properly stored, no one could steal it. Lessons she’d learned the hard way on her first photo shoot.

  Accustomed to multitasking, Tori slid into her gold strappy high heels while stuffing her small carry gun, lipstick, additional magazine, compact, throwing stars and touchup foundation into the sparkly gold and black bag. She checked her hair one more time then fussed with a small strand that didn’t want to stay in place. Another douse of hairspray tamed the little beast.

  She slid on her black watch with gold trim noting the time. Grabbing her necklace and earrings, Tori headed out the door. While waiting for the elevator she poked the onyx cabochon ear rings surrounded by braided gold into the holes in her ears. On her way down to the lobby, she was able to fasten the matching necklace. By the time the door slid open, she was as ready as she was ever going to be.

  Striding across the small lobby to the glass door she watched the dark blue Civic Coupe pull up to the front. Tori smiled when Marcus stepped out of the car to greet her at the door.

  Stopping four feet away, he simply stared at her. “You are the most beautiful woman I think I’ve ever seen.”

  His honesty made her blush.

  “You clean up pretty good yourself.” She closed the distance because she wanted to touch him. Pretending there was something wrong with his tie, she readjusted it. When she lifted her hands, he grabbed one. Turning it over, he kissed her palm.

  Tori wanted to melt. No man had ever shown her such personal affection. On the other hand, she’d never kept one around long enough for him to really get to know her. Marcus knew her casually, socially, and through discussions they’d had at parties. He’d been a friend for…wow, over two years.

  This was new territory for her. She never had male friends until she’d moved to D.C. with her Black Swan team. Hell, she hadn’t had female friends either until their secret training. Now she had lots of both and liked it.