Undercover Colton
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Addison Fox
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18
HarlequinChapter 1
He really was a bastard.
Not in the illegitimate use of the word, Dominic Colton reflected, but in every other way that counted.
And it all centered on the woman who sat opposite him.
If the circumstances were different, he’d give in to the inconvenient feelings roiling in his chest. Her long flowing red hair, strong shoulders and sculpted arms, and a figure-hugging midnight blue dress had his mouth watering far more effectively than the lasagna on the plate before him. But it was the intelligence he saw in her rich hazel eyes, reflecting in the candlelight between them, that had really done him in.
Samantha Evans was quite a woman.
Their oh-so-convenient meeting, on a construction site where he worked the crew while she supervised the landscaping, had been the perfect cover. To her, he was Dom Conner, a hardworking contractor working his way up to owning his own construction company. He’d worked some construction in college and had enough basic knowledge of how the job operated. The backstory he’d built up for himself had sung well beneath the subtle attraction humming between them.
In reality, he was Dominic Colton, FBI agent in the International Corruption Unit, based out of Denver. He and his team had been following a series of leads that started with a disgraced senator on the take to overlook drug smuggling and had ultimately led him here: to Blue Larkspur, Colorado.
It felt a million miles away from his condo downtown, but he’d settled in well these past few weeks, his chameleon personality easily fitting in. His knowledge of the area, being born and raised here, hadn’t hurt, either.
He’d always taken pride in that skill, he considered as he took in the lovely woman sitting across from him. His simple ease in fitting in no matter where he was. Whether it was due to coming from a large family or, even more specifically, being a triplet inside that large family, Dom didn’t know. All he did know was that it had made him a strong asset to the Bureau and was a key requirement for his job.
So why did he feel like a wolf in sheep’s clothing tonight?
Sami Evans had no idea what had brought Dom into her life. It wasn’t a simple, happy accident like their first brunch date suggested, the two of them randomly meeting on a jobsite. Rather it was a carefully calculated attempt to get close to her and get underneath what she knew and how long she’d known it.
Because she might not know he was Dom Colton, son of disgraced and deceased judge Ben Colton of Lark’s County. But he knew damn well who she was: The daughter of Mike “Lone Wolf” Evans, the current head of the Warlords motorcycle club.
Her father ran the Colorado branch of the international MC gang, believed for years to have been dormant. Only things seemed to have cropped back up, both in Europe as well as in select locations in the western part of the United States. Dom and his team had been keeping a close eye on these developments but when news of the gang settling here in Colorado became more rampant, drug traffic increasing in their wake, the FBI put Dom undercover.
Lone Wolf’s daughter sat at the heart of his mission.
What did Sami Evans know?
And why did the first woman who’d infiltrated his senses with all the finesse of a sledgehammer have to be the one at the heart of his investigation?
You’re in over your head, Sami-girl.
That thought had whispered through her mind over and over today and well into this evening as she’d considered her date with Dom Conner. The man made her mouth water and that was no small feat, seeing as how she spent the majority of her days around muscles and testosterone.
If she were honest with herself, she’d long believed herself immune. She had a good, thriving landscaping business. It kept her outdoors, happy and productive, and had been profitable enough she’d bought a house the prior year.
The life she’d imagined for herself was finally coming true and she didn’t need anyone’s interference or the sudden input of a man to get in the way of those things.
Hadn’t she seen her mother live that life?
Worse, Sami thought as she reached for her drink, a light shudder skating the length of her spine, hadn’t her mother paid for that choice with her life.
“Everything okay?” Dom asked, his dark blue eyes serious from across the table.
And totally focused on her.
She took a moment to swallow her wine, trying to find some equilibrium in that fortifying sip. The gloomy thoughts that surrounded her memories of her mother never failed to ruin her mood. But she’d believed herself to have a handle on them.
So why were they cropping up on the best date she’d had in years?
Dom Conner.
Had she ever met a man who was so totally focused on her? Engaged and interested in what she had to say and, by extension, interested in her?
Sure, she’d had relationships. Although she avoided dating men from the jobsites she was on, she did go out from time to time. There was that junior professor from the university one of her friends had introduced her to. She and Sean had dated a few months. They’d hit it off well and enjoyed each other’s company, but nothing had ever really sparked.
Without that sparkling tingle, she’d let things fizzle out.
Same with Jason, the accountant who had a small office in downtown Blue Larkspur, and Shane, the mechanic she knew from high school and had gotten reacquainted with one night while out at The Corner Pocket, the local bar in town she favored.
Nice guys, she thought. More, they were good guys, every one of them. Yet somewhere in the process of getting-to-know-you, something fizzled out.
Was it her?
She’d often wondered if growing up under the watchful and, she now knew, criminal, eye of Mike Evans had tainted her somehow. Was she unworthy of something good? Of a solid, mutually satisfying relationship?
Since Dom was still staring at her, Sami surfaced from the morose direction of her thoughts. “Good. I’m good.”
“You sure?” Dom kept his question casual as he reached for his own glass of wine but she didn’t miss the careful look that had settled into his smile.
Like someone trying to soothe and calm a wild animal.
“I am. I just got distracted for a moment. Woolgathering, my mother used to call it.”
“Care to tell me about it?”
“Will you run screaming if I confessed this is the best date I’ve been on—” she hesitated, nearly tripping over the words oh about ever, and instead opted for, “in a long time.”
“Will you run screaming or think I’m handing you a line if I tell you the same?”
“No.”
“Then same.” His smile broadened, which was doing something to her stomach.
That expression remained, directed at her as their waiter cleared their plates with swift efficiency. It was a nice grin, she admitted to herself. Confident, yet warm, with white even teeth and the lightest dent of a dimple in his left cheek. It was a smile that said he was enjoying himself and, in that knowledge, she had to admit the same.
And what was she doing sitting here, thinking about her messed up family when she should be focused on the six feet of interested hotness across the table?
While she might consider herself immune to muscles and testosterone, she’d had a damned difficult time ignoring either on Dom. The man was sculpted like a Greek god, she knew, remembering the way he looked on the Traverson job. A week ago, they’d had a particularly hot spring afternoon and she’d seen him shirtless, laying a section of roof. She’d been helpless to do anything but stand there, her shovel in hand and a pile of mulch at her feet, and just stare up at him walking that roof with the nimbleness of a cat.
It had only been the lightning quick joke of her own foreman, Steve, that had gotten her moving. His whispered, “Ogle much, Boss?” as he handed her a bottle of water before moving on had pulled her out of her reverie and, with hasty movements, she’d focused back on her mulch.
After, of course, downing the entire bottle of water.
Goodness, she was only human. And Dom’s muscles were something rather spectacular. And, if she were fair, the last time she’d had sex had been with Shane and that was nearly two years ago.
Two very long years, she suddenly realized as she caught sight of Dom’s warm smile once more.
“And here I go again.” She determinedly pulled herself back to the present. “This is a great place. I’ve been wanting to come here but haven’t had the chance. The food’s really good.”
A further sign that Blue Larkspur was a quietly growing city. Her business had seen the benefits as well, building solid and steady for the past several years. It had been enough to buy her own home and to add staff each season to take on more work. She’d further branched out into some interior landscape work as well as holiday decorations, those expansions ensuring she and her staff had work through the winter months.
All in all, it was good to be busy. And it was a dream come true to be in a place where she could do what she loved.
“Food’s good,” Dom agreed before lowering his voice. “The company’s even better.”
She blushed, the eternal curse of the fair-skinned redhead, but couldn’t deny how good his words felt. Or how nice it was to be out on a date with an appreciative and attractive man sitting opposite her.
It might have been two depressing years since she’d had sex, but in the ensuing twenty-four months she’d been in a total dating slump, too. Two lukewarm first dates and a third about six months ago had firmly put her in her current emotional desert.
And using her career and getting her business up, running and thriving was fast becoming an old excuse even she was sick of.
What would be the harm in taking their date further? Dating slump aside, he was the most interesting man she’d ever met. And he had a way about him that was attentive and charming without veering into leering or lecherous.
Men wanted sex. And, as she well knew, women did, too. But a flashing neon sign that suggested a date was simply a required social nicety to get to the main event had always turned her off. Because no matter how great the sex, eventually you had to get out of bed. And she’d always appreciated spending time with someone who could effectively keep her attention in both places.
“Do you want dessert?”
Dom’s question—genuinely innocent as he tapped the small menu their waiter had discreetly laid down a short while ago—pulled Sami from her increasingly heated thoughts.
A question that gave her a rather specific opportunity.
“Would you like anything?” she asked, already weighing what she was about to do.
“I could share something.”
“I might have just the thing, then.” She toyed with the stem of her wine glass, but never broke eye contact. “Maybe we skip dessert here and head back to my place for coffee instead.”
Any number of warning signs went off in Dom’s head as he followed behind Sami’s car toward her home. He’d spent enough of his adult dating life to know that an invitation for coffee usually wasn’t one. Nor was the suggestion to come directly to his date’s home for said coffee at all about sharing a hit of caffeine before the date ended.
It was about sex.
Only about sex.
And he was a lying jerk, job or no job, if he even considered taking any hint of what she was offering.
But damn, the woman intrigued him. She was bright and warm, beautiful and effervescent, in a way that made him feel better just being in her company.
Yet here he was, following her through the familiar streets of Blue Larkspur, pretending he had no idea where she lived even though he knew, down to the floor plans, the layout of her home.
He’d wanted to pick her up for their evening out but she’d had a late job and suggested she’d just clean up quickly at a friend’s house and then meet him. Whether true or not, he’d accepted the reason as her right to handle their date as she saw fit. As a man who worked in law enforcement and had five sisters, he knew a woman couldn’t be too careful. He’d admired Sami’s focus on her own plans and keeping control of the situation.
Even if the lightest whisper had drifted through his mind that she might be hiding something at home.
Only she’d turned the tables on him once more. Forget the blinding attraction that was rapidly messing with his common sense and basic human decency. She’d invited him home with a rather unmistakable invitation to come over...and likely stay.
Which meant there was no chance he’d find any hint of Lone Wolf Evans’s nefarious deeds hidden in the nooks and crannies of her place.
A list of Dad’s upcoming planned jobs tacked to the fridge with a magnet? Not bloody likely.
Only now, he had to find a way to tamp down on the attraction that was already messing with his focus and let her down easy.
Because damn it, he was attracted to her. More than he’d expected and far more than he should be. He’d never been a man who used his job as an excuse, and he wasn’t about to start now. The job was his life, and he was honor bound to execute his duties, but that didn’t mean he used people as collateral damage in the process.
Yet he knew, way down deep, that if he slept with Sami Evans, she’d most surely be collateral damage.
He couldn’t tell her who he was or why he was there. And even if his instincts were right that she had no knowledge of her father’s crimes, he did and that was all that mattered.
The Internal Corruption Unit had been watching Mike Evans for a while. By the time Dom was fully briefed, the situation had grown more suspicious by the day. The Warlords, believed dormant since the ICU had worked with Interpol five years before to take them down, had seemingly risen from the dead. An international gang that was causing considerable issues with the drug trade—and its flow—across Europe was gaining a stronghold here in the US as well.
Lone Wolf Evans had been rumored to be a part of several violent acts by the Warlords over the past three months, but the motorcycle club hadn’t done anything concrete enough to get caught. Their low-level underlings had managed to escape any verifiable charges, too, no matter how hard the ICU tried to make some things stick.
Drug trafficking. Nope.
Running numbers. Dead end there, too.
Even a possible arson rap had been impossible to lay down, the crime committed against another known drug runner in the region.
Not that Dom minded the MC doing the government’s work for them, but they hadn’t simply eradicated their competition. He knew damn well they’d cleaned out any sellable drug caches before setting the fire.
They were careful. Controlled. And clearly capable of handling anything that got in their way.
Which brought him right back to tonight. What did Mike’s daughter know?
She doesn’t know anything.
That thought had tantalized Dom on their first date, growing louder as their second date meandered through any number of conversational topics. Even with his misgivings about what she might be hiding in her home, he was more and more convinced Sami Evans didn’t know anything.
He’d probed a bit on her family. Those casual discussions when you shared information of your own before asking for the same from your date. He never spoke of his own family, his feelings about Ben Colton determinedly off-limits to everyone, but he’d built a pretty solid backstory as Dom Conner that would stick if questioned. Raised by a single mother, she’d given him a good heart and determination in spades, even if he’d stumbled a bit as a headstrong teenager. Stumbles that had resulted in the lion tattoo on his forearm, one fang showing as the sign that he’d completed his initiation ritual.
It had been an idea that had stuck in his early days on the ICU and while he didn’t love wearing a permanent mark that could identify him, the tattoo had come in handy on undercover work. With an easily whipped up story about gang initiation, he’d used the lion to his advantage on more than a few occasions.
And if his fellow triplets, Ezra and Oliver, liked to rib him about it, well, he could live with that. He’d grown attached to his tattoo over the years.
That lion also enhanced the fictional story of his redemption. How he was now focused on making his own way in the world and even more determined to make his devoted mother proud. And, as the universe’s reward for all her self-sacrifice in raising him, she’d found the love of her life in the form of a stepfather Dom loved and respected.
It worked because there was enough pathos in his made-up early days to engender trust in someone who’d experienced the same, and enough of a happy ending to calm anyone nervous who hadn’t. While his little story was all further reinforcement of his earlier thoughts that he really was a bastard of the first water, his made-up family history got the job done.
And yeah, technically, the underlying details weren’t a lie. His father was out of the picture and his mother had become a single parent the year Dom turned sixteen, betrayed by a man she’d believed she knew. There was no beloved stepfather but that was only because he’d heard from his siblings that their mother diligently refused to give into her growing feelings for police chief Theodore Lawson.
But the story beats were all wrong.
Because Dom Colton’s father had lived a double life for years, dying in a car accident on a snowy road shortly after his crimes came to life. Dom and his eleven siblings had all been forced to live with the grief of losing someone they loved and then the added anguish of learning that man wasn’t someone they’d truly known.
A county judge who’d worked the system to his corrupt advantage, taking bribes and kickbacks from the owners of both private prisons and juvenile detention centers to sentence more adults and kids to their facilities. His unceremonious removal from the bench had been the state’s recourse.
Dom and his siblings had been determined to right the wrongs for those who’d been imprisoned by their father’s greed—and anyone else falsely put into jail.
It had been an odd coincidence, as Dom had gotten deeper in on this case, that his father’s crimes had reflected a near mirror image of his work. Ronald Spence, one of the last men his father had put in jail, had come to the Coltons’ Truth Foundation seeking a review of his case. Although there were significant reasons to believe the man had been involved in the drugs moving through the state and on even farther west, his siblings, Caleb and Morgan, had ultimately gotten the man justice when it was discovered Clay Houseman had perpetrated the crimes.
But it was also further proof of how much moved in the shadows—and how little of it law enforcement could keep a handle on.
So no, the family history he’d shared with Sami wasn’t true. His truth was far worse. A blight on the name of Colton they’d spent the ensuing decades trying to redeem. It was intimately tied to his determination to do his job with decency and honor. And because of that maniacal focus his entire adult life, he was now going to need to find a way to leave her after their shared cup of coffee.
Because his made-up story—of a single mother and devoted stepfather—meant he couldn’t sleep with her, no matter how badly he wanted her.
No matter how badly the words burned the tip of his tongue to tell her the truth.
