The Outlaw's Obsession

*You're not on the guest list.* Lena Marchetti does not flinch. She has watched this guard check his tablet three times in the past hour, always swiping left instead of scrolling. She tells him she is with the charity auditing division, that HR confirmed her access yesterday at four-fifteen, and that if he wants to verify it, the HR director is in the gold ballroom at the front table nursing a vodka soda she would rather nobody noticed. He waves her through. Inside, two hundred people in formal wear circulate between marble columns while a jazz quartet sands the edges off *Take Five*. Her partner is stuck behind a jackknifed tanker and will be forty minutes late at best, which means no fire alarm, which means no diversion. The speech starts in twenty minutes, and when Desmond takes the stage his office door locks itself. So Lena goes alone. She passes a silent auction where somebody has bid twelve thousand dollars on a weekend at a vineyard she happens to know is a Desmond shell company, swipes the keycard she has been carrying next to her lipstick all evening, and has the office door open in four seconds. The bug is in her palm, adhesive already peeled, when somebody bumps her. Not hard. Just hard enough. Leather jacket, sandalwood and salt, an apology in an accent that is not from Oregon. By the time she looks up, her hand is empty and the man is already walking away without hurrying, tall, dark-haired, a scar along his jaw. His name is Dante, he wanted the keycard, and he is going to rob the hotel safe tonight to keep a free clinic open. His brother was a doctor there. His brother died six months ago of an overdose, of pills that came through Desmond's network. What Dante has that Lena wants is not on his list at all. He has been watching this hotel, and he saw a nineteen-year-old with red hair crying outside it a night earlier, arguing with a man named Julian Desmond. Her name is Cara Marchetti. She is Lena's sister. She came to Port Meridian three weeks ago to meet a guy from the internet, and she has stopped picking up the phone. A romantic suspense about a woman with a badge and a man with a crew, a stolen drive, a hotel safe, and two people who each need the other's half of the same case. The romance is closed-door.