Chapter 1 - The Silver Trap
“Don’t let them take me.”
The words left Evelyn Mercer’s mouth against a stranger’s lips. A second earlier, she had been standing beneath a crystal chandelier in the ballroom of the Marlowe Hotel, wearing a silver dress selected by the man she was supposed to marry. A second later, both of her hands were gripping the lapels of a man she had never met. And she was kissing him. Not gently. Not romantically. Desperately. Two hundred guests watched. The orchestra kept playing for perhaps three confused beats before the violinist nearest the dance floor lowered his bow. Champagne glasses stopped halfway to painted mouths. Someone whispered Evelyn’s name. Across the ballroom, her fiancé dropped his drink. The crystal shattered near his shoes. Evelyn heard it. But she did not turn around.
The stranger did something she had not expected. He kissed her back. His hand settled against the small of her back, firm but strangely careful, and for one dizzying moment the stunt she had planned in the last thirty seconds of her life stopped feeling like a stunt. Then Evelyn remembered why she was doing it. She pulled away.
The stranger was tall, broad through the shoulders, dressed in a charcoal suit without a tie. His dark brown hair was cut short at the sides, and a pale scar traced the edge of his left jaw. His eyes were gray. Not soft gray. Winter gray. They studied her without embarrassment.
“You all right?” he asked.
Evelyn swallowed hard, trying to keep her knees from buckling under the heavy silk of her hemline. “No.”
He glanced over her bare shoulder toward the parting crowd. “Is that the problem coming toward us?”
She finally turned. Grant Holloway was crossing the polished marble floor. Her future husband. Or, more accurately, the man her father had chosen as the price of keeping Mercer Freight alive. Grant was thirty-eight, handsome in the polished, expensive way that photographers liked. He had perfect teeth, a tailored tuxedo, and the smooth confidence of someone who had spent his entire adult life being told that wanting something was usually enough to own it.
Until tonight. Now his face looked bloodless. Evelyn expected pure rage, but what she saw first in his eyes was naked, unadulterated terror. He stopped several feet away, refusing to look at Evelyn. His eyes were glued to the stranger.
“Evelyn,” Grant managed, his voice trembling at the edges.
She raised her chin, cold pride surging through her veins. “The engagement is over.”
Grant barely seemed to hear her. His entire focus remained locked onto the stranger. “What are you doing here?”
The man beside Evelyn slipped one hand into his trouser pocket, relaxed as a predator watching sheep. “Attending a party.”
“You weren’t invited.”
“I was.”
“By whom?”
The stranger smiled faintly, a razor-thin curve of his mouth. “That seems far less important than the fact that the woman you planned to marry just begged a total stranger not to let you take her.”
Grant’s gaze snapped toward Evelyn. “You told him?”
“I told him nothing.”
“That’s true,” Cole agreed softly.
Grant stared at him, humiliation and panic fighting for dominance. “You have no idea what you’re involving yourself in, Maddox.”
“I usually know exactly what I’m involving myself in.”
“Evelyn.” Grant’s voice dropped into that low, venomous tone she had learned to dread. “Come here.”
Evelyn remembered when he had used that tone in his private high-rise office three weeks ago. Her father owed nearly nine million dollars. Their warehouses were mortgaged, and their river terminal faced foreclosure. Grant had bought the debt, smiling coldly while presenting an ultimatum: marry him or watch her family drown in bankruptcy court.
“Come here,” Grant repeated, reaching for her wrist.
Evelyn stepped backward. Cole moved only half an inch, but suddenly he was an immovable granite wall between them.
“Do you even know who he is?” Grant hissed at her.
“No,” Evelyn said honestly.
“Cole Maddox,” Cole introduced himself, his voice carrying clearly across the silent room.
Murmurs rippled through the elite crowd like wildfire. Business moguls stepped away from the tables. Grant’s own partners looked as if they were seeing a ghost. Grant took a jagged breath, his knuckles whitening. “You picked the worst possible man in this city, Evelyn.”
May you like
“For you, maybe,” Cole countered.
Evelyn pulled the folded document from her silver evening bag—the secret contract her father had signed surrendering their docks within seventy-two hours if she bolted. She raised it high before the flashing cameras of the society press. “You bought my father, Grant. But you never bought me. The wedding is off.”
