Fatal Deception by Katie Reus Page A

in Harrison’s armor. He might as well have been carved from stone the way he stood there, completely unreadable.
    Mara sighed and pulled out one of the chairs at the island. She collapsed in it as she shut the file. “I befriended the woman he was… involved with.”
    “Danika Boyko?”
    She nodded. “The woman was—is—exceptionally beautiful. He found her when she was just seventeen and kept her for himself instead of adding her to his ‘stable’ of women, as he liked to call them.” Mara shuddered as she remembered having to fake being polite to Neville. Before she’d taken him and his organization down. “Danika didn’t have any friends, but we met at the gym he allowed her to go to. Our meeting obviously wasn’t an accident. I targeted her and since our friendship made her happy and he thought I was a stupid socialite, he let Danika keep me in her life. Which meant I was invited to a lot of social events, including ones at his house. The man was such a freak. He loved entertaining all the time, as if he just needed to show off all his wealth. Money he made on the abuse of so many women. Girls, really.” Some of the females they’d saved from one of his underground sex-rings in London had been in their teens. Mara still couldn’t get some of the images out of her head. “When we took down his operation it was in conjunction with Interpol. I wasn’t part of the raids in other countries, but I’ve seen the pictures of the women we helped free. Their faces…” She couldn’t go on. There had been so many damn faces. Until meeting Harrison, her dreams had been haunted.
    Her husband’s face softened a fraction. “Is that why you retired?”
    Swallowing hard, she nodded. “My boss told me that this was the toughest case he’d ever seen and I’d never have to deal with anything like it again, but the world is a messed up place. I knew he was wrong. There’s way worse out there and I just couldn’t do it anymore. I’d lost my love of the job long before we wrapped up the case and knew if I stayed in, I’d die inside.” Leaving had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done because it had been all she’d known for so long. But she hadn’t wanted to end up like so many of her colleagues, divorced, jaded and many had drinking and other substance abuse problems. The job would have slowly suffocated her.
    “Why Miami?”
    The shift of topic was subtle. He wasn’t asking about the case anymore, but her. “Because it’s as different from London as you can get. The weather, the people, everything. I needed something completely different. A clean break. I thought about going back to Boston for a while, but…” She shrugged.
    “But what?”
    “I met you and Miami started to feel like home so I decided to stay.”
    His jaw clenched, but he didn’t respond. He slid the file closer to him then flipped it open again even though she knew Harrison would have already memorized the entire thing. He was gathering his thoughts right now, though about what, she could only guess. Finally he looked up, his dark eyes penetrating. “Tell me about your bullet wounds.”
    Her eyes widened and she shrugged. Not because getting shot wasn’t a big deal—it had hurt worse than anything she’d ever experienced—but because it had nothing to do with the Perdue case or Harrison. “I was almost killed during an assignment six years ago, but it has nothing to do with what’s going on now.” She’d been in Africa and the extraction had been hell, but she didn’t expand on it because telling him about the Perdue case was one thing. Telling him about all her cases was another entirely. She respected her former colleagues and former job too much to just spill all her secrets.
    His nod was sharp, as if he understood why she wasn’t expanding. Harrison had scars all over his body, mostly knife wounds, and she’d never pressed him to tell her about them. She knew the story behind some, but not all, and she