Peter: Dragon Security Volume Two, #1

By Glenna Sinclair

Peter is a stand-alone novel containing over 50,000 words of romantic suspense. If you enjoy the characters, you can continue reading more books in the Dragon Security Volume Two series. This is the first book of the second series.

 

PETER

I was dead for two years. My death faked. I was held captive by a rogue CIA agent who was crazy enough to use an international terrorist cell to steal from everyone. He was literally getting rich on terror. Rescued, my life is no longer my own. My brother is married to my girl, raising my son. He even works at the family business, taking over my goal of stepping into Dad's role when he retires. I'm unmoored, fighting the current of my own life. But then I meet her, and she turns everything upside down. Am I even capable of commitment? Of love? Or am I too broken to be the man she needs me to be?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glenna Sinclair
• Release date: Jan 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9798224437214

Glenna Sinclair

Experience the heart-racing novels of Glenna Sinclair, the master of romantic suspense. Sinclair's books feature strong male protagonists, many with a military background, who face real-world challenges that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Books2read.com/GlennaSinclair Facebook.com/AuthorGlennaSinclair GlennaSinclairAuthor at Gmail dot com

Book preview

Prologue

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Peter

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Five Years Ago...

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I could feel my pulse beating against the dog collar he’d placed around my neck. He hadn’t told me where he was going, but he never did. But this time felt different.

I’d been stuck in this apartment for two years. He wouldn’t let me leave, even before he started putting bombs around my neck and holding guns to my head. He wouldn’t let me go on the internet unless it was absolutely necessary, and then he had to watch my every move to make sure I wasn’t trying to contact someone from my past. Not that I would. My friends and family all thought I was dead. If Megan or Cole or Mom and Dad suddenly got an email from me, they’d think it was a cruel joke.

The plan couldn’t have been more perfect. I’d set up my own kidnapping and captivity.

At first, I’d hoped that I would be able to return to my life after just a few months. Luke Murphy, my sister’s fiancé and our childhood friend, had come up with this plan. He told me that I’d only have to be dead long enough for him to figure out who the bad guys were. Then he brought me here, telling me this guy could protect me. Instead, he was using me to continuously evolve software I’d created for my father’s telecommunications company.

This guy was clearly one of the bad guys. How Luke thought I would be safe here, I would never know. It made me—briefly—wonder if Luke was on the wrong side. But I’d heard this guy on the phone with his friends, and I’d heard him speak to one of my sister’s operatives from her security firm. He had them all fooled.

He was former CIA. And he was using his connections to a terrorist cell in France to terrorize millions of people and steal billions from companies and stock exchanges around the world. It was a brilliant plan, really. He had people convinced that there was a bad group of CIA agents out there, reigning terror on the world, when it was really just him. Fucking brilliant.

And he was using my software to do it.

If I hadn’t begun investigating who was selling my software without a license, if I hadn’t gotten involved in this whole scheme, I’d be back in Houston, living my quiet, boring life. But I would never have met Amber, the beautiful, down-on-her-luck waitress who brightened my evenings by sitting and talking literature with me in the dirty little diner where she worked. I had never met anyone who had such a quirky view of literature as she did. She was convinced she was a stupid girl because of the disadvantages in her life, but she was one of the most intelligent, insightful women I’d ever known.

And she was having my baby. Should have had my baby by now.

How long had I been here? I knew it was more than a year, probably closer to two, but I wasn’t quite sure. If it was two years, that meant my child was fifteen, sixteen months old. Maybe older? I didn’t know. I’d learned that Amber was pregnant, but we never had the chance to talk details.

I wished I’d taken the time to go see her before Luke and I created that stupid car accident. I wished I’d been able to tell her that I arranged to have her inherit my entire estate. That I wanted the child, and I was making provisions for it. I wished I’d...there were a lot of things I wished, and I had a lot of time to think about them now.

I had fantasies of walking into the diner and sweeping Amber off her feet, of taking her away to a much better life than the one she was leading when I left. My fantasies helped me pass the time without obsessing over my future, over the question of whether or not this man would allow me to walk free when he was done with me, after being witness to so much crime.

Like what I was doing now. I was modifying my software so that he could track a bomb in Afghanistan that he was hoping to detonate near a US airbase. He was hoping to create enough upheaval in Washington that they’d stop investigating the French terror cell. He could feel the heat coming down on him and he was panicking. Even as I made the modifications, I found myself hoping that it was too late. That he’d already been found out and someone would come to the rescue before he put the modifications into place.

But hope was becoming something I no longer put much store in.

I’d had my life all planned out. I was going to work in my father’s company and take it over someday. I was going to marry a pretty young woman and have three or four children. At least a boy and a girl. I hadn’t had much luck with women, but things were looking up when I had to leave. Amber was everything I’d always imagined my perfect woman would be. I just imagined I’d meet her at college or at some exclusive dinner party. But Amber was kind. Gentle. And she liked me.

But all that was gone now. All I could do was sit in this room, stare at this computer screen, and hope.

And then the door opened, and my sister was running toward me, Hayden Dubois behind her. She knelt beside me, tears streaming down her face as she touched me, searching my face, touching my body. She was looking for injuries, worried about what he might have done to me.

I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t believe this was real. It had to be a dream. I’d fallen asleep at the computer. Again. The last time I did that, he refused to feed me for three days. I had to wake up, but this was so good. She felt so real. And her tears were so warm on my hands.

Hayden saw the collar. He studied it, his fingers held just a hair from it as he tried to decide how to deal with it. I wanted to tell him not to touch it, but if this was a dream, what difference would it make? Then he was tugging on it and there was a pop and a loud buzz. I thought I was dead. But Hayden removed the collar and held it up where we could see it. The lights were red. He’d pushed the button, but not in time. Hayden disarmed it before he could blow it.

This was real. I was safe. It was really over.

Chapter 1

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Hayden

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I woke with a start, my hand automatically moving to the left side of the bed. I knew—logically—that she wouldn’t be there when my hand landed, but my heart—because of the intense dream I’d just had—was expecting something different.

I closed my eyes, revisiting the images of the dream for a moment. Sam, smiling shyly at me, slowly sliding out of the conservative clothes she’d worn as a remnant of her restrictive upbringing. Seeing her do that for me, seeing her expose a part of herself that she’d never exposed to anyone else, always drove me insane. Even when it was only a dream.

She lay beside me for just a short time, but that time was everything. I didn’t love. I had thought myself incapable of it for a very long time. After my parents were murdered during a robbery in a high-end New York hotel, I was positive I would never be able to love again.

I couldn’t bear the thought of putting myself in that position, in that place where it hurt so incredibly to lose the only people I’d loved and who had loved me. It probably didn’t help that my grandmother was just as broken by my parents’ deaths, and she couldn’t give me the unconditional affection a child that young should have. It didn’t really matter what caused it. It was my reality.

I think a part of me hoped that, when I joined the military, I would die a hero in action. When I didn’t, I had no idea what to do next. I couldn’t go home, because there was no home to go to. So I traveled until Luke Murphy, one of my buddies from the SEALs, called me and told me about the security firm his fiancée was starting. Dragon Security. Was I interested?

Not at first. But now it was my family.

Sam worked for Dragon, and I wasted so much fucking time pretending I wasn’t head over heels for her. Her conservative dress. Her glasses. Her bright red blushes when I teased her. I should have gotten past my damn ego and my fear of commitment and told her how I felt from the beginning. Instead, we hadn’t found each other until a few months before she died.

She died.

I had to remind myself of that after each one of these dreams. Sam, the love of my life, had stepped in front of a bullet for me. It wasn’t until she lay dead in a hospital that I learned she had been already dying, her heart weakened by lupus. She would have left me even if that man—the man who killed my parents—wasn’t released from prison and hadn’t immediately come searching for me, convinced that if not for me, he would never have gone to prison. He was trying to kill me when Sam stepped in front of the bullet. I didn’t even see it coming until it was too late.

I was going to propose that day. I never got the chance.

Now I lay alone in the bed we once shared, in the cozy condo she once owned. I could have bought a much larger house and could have lived in absolute luxury. Goodness knew I had more than enough money, what with the money I inherited from my parents and my grandmother, the money I made at Dragon, and the money Sam had left me. But money meant nothing to me now. Just a way to survive. And being in this condo, moving through the rooms every day, made me feel closer to Sam.

It was a comfort, except on those mornings when I woke from that intense dream, the one where Sam was curled up in my arms the way she used to be, whispering in my ear. Sometimes I heard her voice clearly. Sometimes I didn’t.

I remembered today.

Promise me you’ll take care of Megan, no matter what happens. Promise you’ll take care of her.

Sam and Megan—Megan Bradford-Murphy, owner and founder of Dragon Security—were best friends from childhood. I came into their lives—Sam, Megan, and Luke’s—late. But Luke talked about his ladylove and her best friend so much while we were deployed that I felt like I knew them when I took the job with Dragon. And now...we were still close, Megan, Luke, and I. But there was always a sense that something was missing.

I kept my promise to Sam. I was still keeping it in a roundabout way. I’d stuck by Megan at Dragon and helped her build it into the thriving company it was now. And I’d accepted the position of head of operations when she decided she wanted to step back a little so that she could spend more time with her kids.

My relationship with Megan was complicated. Luke disappeared, and I felt like it was my responsibility to watch over her. Then Sam...and then Luke was back, but he was different. Literally. He’d had his appearance altered and changed his name to be able to hide in the open and watch over Megan. And when the truth came out, when Luke told everyone what was really happening—there were rogue CIA agents and a faked death and a bunch of craziness the FBI and CIA were still straightening out five years later—and Peter came home, things were unalterably different. We knew who our real friends were at the end of the day.

I climbed out of bed, a heavy sigh sneaking past my lips. I felt like I was just going through the motions these days, doing my job—and doing it well—but not really getting any satisfaction out of it. I was watching my friends and colleagues get on with their lives, but I was stuck in neutral, lost without the love of my life. Time to move on, Megan told me. Time to find happiness, she said. It’s what Sam would want, she insisted.

But how do you move on from that kind of connection, that kind of love?

I walked through the lobby of Dragon’s new building a little over an hour later, a cup of coffee in one hand and a laptop case in the other. The consummate businessman. It wasn’t me—at least, not the way I saw myself—but it was the man I’d become.

Morning, boss, Angela, the receptionist on the ground floor, said, a little twinkle in her eye as she watched me walk by.

Morning, I mumbled.

It was early; few people were at their desks at this point in the workday. If the elevator had stopped on the third floor, I would have found dozens of people at their desks, monitoring security systems we provided to customers all over the state. But the fifth floor, where my office was, was pretty much empty.

I shared the floor with the heads of the other departments—investigations, security systems, technology, human resources—but most of them had families, children to get to school and wives to get to work. Vincent wouldn’t arrive till nearly ten. Dominic was normally in by nine. But Waverly...

I paused outside her office door and listened to the steady tap-tap of her fingers on the computer keyboard. She was our head of technology, a brilliant computer guru who could do just about anything we asked of her, even things that seemed impossible. We couldn’t work as efficiently as we did without her.

She was a perfectly nice lady. Easy on the eyes, too. But Sam had been our computer guru. I hated that she had been replaced so easily and so efficiently. Sometimes it felt like that hatred translated into dislike for Waverly. A lot of times, actually, even though I knew it was unfair.

As perceptive as Waverly was, she had to know how I felt every time I saw her. It wasn’t her fault that her predecessor was the only woman I would ever love. But separating her position—still Sam’s position, in my mind and in my heart—from her personality...I just wasn’t there yet.

I continued on to my office and settled behind the desk, trying to distract myself with the busywork that came with running the security operations of such a large firm. There were emails filled with information on current operations,