An Affair of Deceit Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Jamie Michele

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Montlake Romance

  PO Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611099560

  ISBN-10: 1611099560

  For my father.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  HUMID AIR AS oppressive as a wet wool blanket enveloped Abigail Mason the moment she stepped outside of her Washington, DC, row home.

  As she turned to close the door to her place, she shrugged off her suit jacket, revealing a pale-pink shell that she’d cover back up before she neared her office. It wouldn’t do for anyone she knew to see her arms exposed, but now, at the end of one of the hottest summers on record, she was willing to commute half-dressed. Slinging the jacket over one arm, she checked her watch, although she knew what time it would be. Calibrated to the second, her morning routine never wavered. She exited her home at twenty to six, which gave her five minutes to walk two and a half blocks to the U Street Metro stop. Every weekday, that was. For some absurd reason, Yellow and Green Line trains didn’t start until after eight a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. That meant she…

  “Miss Mason?”

  Her heart stalled out at the sound of a nearby male voice. Abruptly, she stopped thinking about train schedules and calculated her options for self-defense. While she lived in a safe neighborhood, a woman was never completely safe anywhere, not even in her own home…or while standing outside of it.

  She wheeled around, holding her large tote bag to her chest like a shield. Its hard leather sides might deflect a knife or a fist, but they’d work about as well as cardboard against a bullet. Quickly, she tried to think of what she’d do if she saw a gun, but within seconds of turning to face the interloper, she realized that the lanky man standing on the steps to her small porch wasn’t holding a weapon. Moreover, he wasn’t threatening her. He wore a simple black suit, white shirt, and black tie, and was handsome in a disheveled way, with a head of short brown curls and a boyish grin. His teeth gleamed starkly white against his tanned skin.

  Salesman. She relaxed her posture just enough so her butt cheeks weren’t quite so clenched.

  “You’ve got fantastic timing,” he said. “I was just about to knock. You’re Abigail Mason, right?”

  Who would knock at a stranger’s door before six a.m.?

  And why would he know her name?

  Not a salesman, then. Abigail clutched her bag more tightly to her chest and scanned him for signs of weakness. She saw nothing obviously wrong with his slim frame, but his nose was a bit crooked, just like his smile. The unnatural asymmetry of that nose told her he was a fighter, despite his friendly pretense. Only a man who fought either for a living or out of habit didn’t bother getting a broken nose fixed.

  She would go for his eyes if he attacked. His nose might have lost all sensitivity, but eyes were always vulnerable. “Do I know you?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. I’m James Riley. I’m looking for your father.”

  “My father?” She bit back a gasp as grainy images of a stern man she hadn’t seen since she was eight flashed like an old movie in her mind.

  “Peter Mason is your father, right?”

  Yes, that was his name. Her mother had forbidden it to be spoken aloud, but Abigail recalled his crisp, dispassionate signature on the checks he sent after he left. That had been their only connection with him in twenty years. The money had been necessary for their survival, especially in those early years after they left Taiwan for America as they struggled to establish a foothold in a new country. But money was no substitute for a parent, especially not one who had been so attached to his daughter.

  Or so it’d seemed to her at the time. Abigail had long since revised her opinion of her father’s apparent devotion to her. A man doesn’t abandon his family when he loves them. “I can’t help you. Sorry.”

  A wrinkle of uncertainty creased the space between the young man’s eyebrows. It satisfied her to think that he was confused by her lack of concern. But she was hardly going to talk to some handsome stranger on the street about a personal matter. And even then, she was more likely to chat with a squirrel about nuts than any human about her father.

  He lifted his palms vertically in a plea for time. “No, I’m the one who should be apologizing. I know you haven’t seen your dad in a long time, and you’re not likely to want to talk about him, but he’s recently gone missing, and I think he may try to contact you. Has he called?”

  “Recently gone missing?” Abigail nearly choked on her laugh. But it wasn’t funny. To say that her father was recently missing was an insult to everything she’d been through. She cleared her throat and stared hard at the man in the government suit. A tiny American flag graced his left lapel. Naturally. “Mr. Riley, my father has been missing from my life for some time. You’ll excuse me if I don’t feel much concern for his whereabouts now.”

  “I understand your reluctance to assist us. I’m aware of your long-standing estrangement from him. But he hasn’t been missing all this time. He’s continued to work for the State Department. We only lost track of him in Arles four days ago.”

  She clenched the muscles in her jaw to keep it from gaping open. Every phrase he’d said inspired a question, but only one presented itself in the voice of a child:

  Do you know why my father left me?

  Her throat constricted. Damn it all! She’d tried so hard to stop thinking about her father. But as tough as she’d become, she would always be the little girl who still worried that her daddy had gone away because she’d been bad.

  No. She exhaled firmly. She was no longer interested in where he was or why he’d left. She refused to be.

  “I’d like to help, but I know nothing about him,” she said, and glanced again at her watch. Two good minutes gone forever to this pointless conversation about a man so disconnected from her that he might as well be dead. “Good luck with your man-hunt. If you don’t mind, I have a train to catch.”

  She straightened her shoulders and walked forward, headed down the steps of her porch, intending to march straight through him if he didn’t move out of her way. But as she reached the first step and came almost nose-to-nose with the man standing on the one below, the smell of lemons and something darker and muskier tugged at her senses. She breathed in, distracted by the unusual yet familiar perfume.

  How odd. How lovely.

  This government man with the crooked nose smelled like a perfect cup of hot black tea.

  Her eyes flew to his, which in the warm luminescence of dawn had become the bright yellow-green of Spanish olives. He smiled that crooked little grin he’d given her when she’d first noticed him.

  She wouldn’t be charmed by him, even if he did smell like her favorite beverage. Had he known? Or did he always spritz Lipton and lemon on himself in the morning?

  It didn’t matter. She didn’t care, and she had to go. Making the train was now in doubt, but Abigail Mason had no room in her world for doubt. She looked pointedly to the street. “Excuse me.”

  “Sorry.” He stepped out of her way, sweeping his hand toward the road, as if he’d been escorting her instead of accosting her. “You’re certainly free to leave.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “But I hope you’ll call me if he tries to get in touch with you.”

  “I can’t imagine that he has my phone number or a clue where I live. If you really want to find the man, I suggest that you move on to your next lead. I have nothing to give you.”

  Dropping her chin an inch, she gave him her most frigid angry-schoolmarm glare. The chilling expression usually had the effect of making the recipient feel like they’d done something very, very wrong.

  Not on this man. His cheerful smile didn’t fade. As she passed, he slipped a business card into her tote bag. “Just call me if you think of something, OK?”

  She ignored him and strode to the sidewalk, doing her best to keep her ankles steady as she pretended that someone hadn’t just poked a sharp stick into the very softest part of her heart.

  Father?

  More like betrayer, traitor, or liar.

  But mostly: coward.

  Those and several more livid descriptions of her father came to Abigail’s mind as she walked briskly toward the Metro stop at U Street.

  Back when she still called him “Daddy,” Peter Mason had worked for the US State Department as a liaison w
ith the American Institute in Taiwan. A career diplomat, but that description hadn’t fit the man she had known. Peter Mason had been hard and exacting, and sparing with his praise. He was hardly the type to negotiate treaties or host cocktail parties for foreign dignitaries. She’d never given it a lot of thought, but he really hadn’t been a diplomatic sort of man. Back then, though, diplomacy in the Taiwan Strait wasn’t a game for aristocrats. It was more like a slowly simmering pot that could boil over at the slightest provocation, and it was only held in place by the expert grip of America’s best military and intelligence chess players.

  Her stomach flew into her throat as she felt the sensation of falling. Startled, she flailed her hands for support, and found the tacky rubber handrail of the subway station escalator.

  She shook her head, chastising herself. This was a big city. It was dangerous to lose awareness of her surroundings, though she spent so much time at the courthouse she could probably get there blindfolded.

  Now, as she descended into the damp underground, an approaching train rattled into the station. Irritation welled. She didn’t need to check her watch. That train was the one she wanted, but because of James Riley’s unexpected interrogation, her morning was off schedule.

  It simply wouldn’t do.

  She squeezed down the left side of the escalator, past the standing row of suited businessmen and a couple of college kids with backpacks. Her heels hit the concrete platform, and she jogged through the train’s open door without breaking stride. She found a seat facing forward and pulled her bag onto her lap. Food and drink were prohibited on Metro trains, so she left her coffee mug in her tote.

  She’d made it. The steady rumbling of the train massaged her still-clenched muscles, letting her relax, at least as much as she could in public. Her mind drifted back to her father.

  She stifled a black chuckle. She had no idea how to contact him, and if she ever did speak to him, there would be several other questions she would ask him before she got around to chatting about why he’d disappeared from the State Department’s radar.

  Starting with, What kind of coward abandons his wife and child?

  A station whizzed into view with staccato flashes of fluorescent yellow. The train slowed to a stop, let passengers on board, and then continued onward into the black tunnel. Abigail stared out a window, but she could only see her reflection, her face an ivory oval, her hair the stick-straight, blacker-than-night strands that announced her Asian ethnicity from any angle. The shape of her dark-brown eyes, too, was typical of her mother’s Chinese ancestry, with a small fold of skin covering their tear ducts, giving them a half-moon appearance. Her determinedly downward-pointing eyelashes required disciplined use of an eyelash curler—Shiseido made the best one—but if she didn’t go through the daily regimen, people would ask her all day if she’d had enough sleep.

  Only in America could people be so kindly and yet so offensive at the same time.

  She gave herself a wry smile in the mirrorlike glass of the train window. That probably wasn’t quite true. People could be obliviously offensive in any part of the world.

  At any rate, she’d long ago come to terms with her appearance. What she saw now when she looked at herself was basically a younger version of her mother.

  She looked nothing like her father. Hardly a whisper of his sharp-boned, European-origin features graced her face. The only sign that she wasn’t of pure Asian blood was in her nose, which was just as wide but longer than her mother’s flatter, almost button-like nasal protrusion.

  Her father’s genes finally wrested some influence when it came to her nose, it seemed.

  She sighed, confused for the first time in recent memory. Who was this James Riley, and what gave him the right to push her father back into her mind after all these years of forcibly forgetting him?

  She reached in her bag and pulled out the business card he had given her. It was a thick, pure white piece of card stock. “James Riley, PhD” was embossed in rich black ink in the center of the card. Under his name was a phone number with a DC area code, but with no extension or explanation of which agency he worked for.

  Odd. He’d referenced the State Department and then used the word “we” when saying that he’d lost track of her father, making her think that he was still referring to the State Department and including himself among their number. But his card was devoid of any affiliation, let alone a diplomatic one. Why?

  Her thumb rubbed the slightly raised letters as she further considered the fact that the disarming, well-tanned man from a mystery government agency held a PhD.

  Whomever he worked for, he was probably a desk-job guy. His long legs, from what little she could assess of them inside his suit pants, looked like they might be more comfortable on a long-distance run than in a street fight or jumping across rooftops. While he’d moved with the sure-footed grace of an athlete, everything in his easy, friendly manner told her that he wasn’t accustomed to living in hostile territory.

  Desk jockey, for sure. She knew the type. They were as common as eager young interns around DC. Probably maintained his trim physique by rock-climbing at an indoor gym on the weekends and tackling triathlons four times a year. He looked like a go-getter, the sort of annoyingly optimistic and energetic guy who was forever peddling donation forms around his office for one walk-for-whatever or another.

  But then there was that nose of his, wavy at the bridge like a boxer’s. If not for that telltale bend, she would never have thought of him as a man who’d taken a few hits. Do-gooders like him generally didn’t get punched. He had, though. Somewhere along the line, someone had thought James Riley, PhD, worth fighting, perhaps more than once.

  Or maybe he was a martial artist, as she was. While most practitioners tried to avoid busting an opponent’s face open in a friendly spar, errant hits happened. People got hurt. Noses got broken. She’d once broken her arm defending a roundhouse kick. It happened.

  An enigma had landed on her doorstep that morning. She wondered again exactly whom he worked for.

  His beguiling manner must have been a calculated attempt to get her to trust him, of course, but the faint lines around his eyes and mouth were perfectly matched to his goofy smile. His face slid into a sly grin easily, as though it was his most common expression. A small but distinct vertical wrinkle between his brows had been fainter than his well-worn smile creases, so she could only conclude that he was a generally happy man who nonetheless had a few things in his life about which he fretted.

  People may lie, but their faces tell the truth.

  Abigail, by contrast, knew her own face to be perfectly unlined. She liked it that way, less for its appearance of youth than for the way it thwarted attempts to read her personality. Her face was a blank slate from which no information or advantage could be gained. She hadn’t planned on it; she’d simply been raised to avoid emotional outbursts. That her face bore no scars of expression was a by-product of a dispassionate upbringing. It was the Taoism of her mother’s Chinese culture, perhaps, that had kept extremes of emotion out of the Mason house even after her stoic American father had departed from it.

  Anyway, she rarely found a need to smile. She was the youngest assistant district attorney in Washington, and she fought like a hyena every day for respect. She knew that most people only saw her attractive, mixed-race features, which were often read as “exotic,” or worse, as “cute.” In her experience, most Americans still seemed to think that women of Asian heritage were meek, servile creatures. Never mind the fact that living in Asia was, by and large, no picnic for women.

  The roar under her seat slowed to a rumble, signaling her approaching stop. She gathered her bag and stood, gripping a cold stainless-steel handrail to brace herself against the momentum of the train.

  When the doors swooshed open, Abigail stepped out of the train and onto the platform along with dozens of other commuters. Heads straight, feet purposeful, they strode in concert toward the escalators to head up the tunnel and out onto the street.

  Thick, almost oily air grew more oppressive with every inch as she ascended to ground level. This particular Metro exit deposited commuters near the Navy Memorial Plaza, where a haunting statue of a sailor with his collar turned up against the wind guarded two curved fountains spouting opaque turquoise water.