A Candidate For The Kiss

  A Candidate For The Kiss

  by Angela Knight

  To my reader:

  I was watching James Bond do something impossible in one of his movies when I thought, "This would be a lot more believable if he was a vampire." And just like that, this story was born.

  Thanks to Alexandria Kendall for letting me play in her Secrets sand-box with my handcuffs and handsome hunks. And thanks to the readers who said, "When are you going to do another vampire story?"

  Well, here it is.

  Angela Knight

  Chapter One

  If they caught her, they'd kill her.

  Dana Ivory looked out the window of the rotting treehouse, peering down at the four men gathered around the bonfire below. She knew that if they discovered her, they'd put a bullet in her brain and dump her body so far out in the woods nobody would ever find anything but bones.

  But if Dana could keep the four from catching her, she'd live to blow their plans to hell and make her own reputation. All she needed was guts and luck. Guts she had. Luck... well, she'd see.

  Her hand shaking, Dana angled the microphone further out the window to better pick up the conversation going on below.

  "Nothin'll put the fear in the mongrel races and traitor whites like killing the President they all elected."

  "Shit, they'll piss themselves wonderin' where the next bullet's coming from!"

  "And right-thinking whites'll flock to our banner. It'll finally be the start of our holy war."

  The voices carried clearly in the warm summer air. Dana just prayed her tape recorder was picking them up half that well.

  She swallowed against a queasy blend of terror and excitement. This time tomorrow, her byline wouldn't just be on the front page of The Adamsburg Weekly Tribune. Once the national wire services picked up this story, the words "By Dana Ivory" would be on every paper in the country.

  And four white supremacists would be in jail for plotting the assassination of the President of the United States.

  All thanks to Dana and their ringleader's nephew.

  Jimmy Satterfield had sidled up to her just that morning to whisper that the local chapter of the White Aryan Brotherhood was meeting in the woods outside town. That in itself got Dana's attention, because Jimmy was so terrified of his uncle, he'd normally never breathe a word about anything Joe Satterfield or the WAB was up to.

  "I ain't no snitch," Jimmy whispered, his voice hoarse and earnest with terror. "But this thing is so fuckin' big, anybody who even knows about it could go to jail. And not in no candy-ass state prison either. Hard time. Leavenworth time. Time I ain't gonna do for no Hitler-lovin' bastard, even if he is my uncle."

  "But what are they planning?"

  "Hide in the old treehouse just before sunset. You'll find out"

  Dana had gone to the sheriff, of course. Steve Hannah should have jumped at the tip; he already suspected Joe and his crew in a string of convenience store robberies and drug deals he'd never been able to prove in court.

  But instead of mobilizing his men for a raid—or even sending a deputy with Dana to investigate—Hannah had given her a verbal pat on the head and told her the elementary school was holding a nice pageant she ought to do a story on.

  Well, she'd already written that story, dammit. Six times in the six years she'd been at The Adamsburg Weekly Tribune. What Dana hadn't done was an exposé that would send the WAB straight to jail, leaving the crime rate of Adamsburg, S.C. to plummet for at least a decade.

  So she'd headed for the treehouse a couple of hours before the boys were due, picked her way over the rotting pine boards to a relatively solid spot, and started setting up her microphone, tape recorder and camera.

  The treehouse wasn't the most comfortable perch in the world. Neighborhood kids had built it in the limbs of the old oak more than ten years ago, cobbling together pine plank walls and a sloping roof now pocked with several fist-sized holes. The whole thing smelled damp and unpleasant from the rot, mildew and wildlife that had moved in over the years.

  But if the ambiance wasn't exactly Martha Stewart, it also wasn't enough to keep Dana away from a good story. She'd pushed a desiccated mouse carcass aside with the toe of her running shoe, swept off a relatively clean patch next to the opening that served as a window, and sat down to wait.

  The four WAB boys had showed up just before sunset, jouncing through the woods in a rusted white pickup, one man holding on for dear life in the back. As they got out of the truck, Dana recognized them as a fairly sinister quartet she knew from covering various bond hearings over the years.

  There was round, snake-mean Bill Mason, who put his wife in the hospital once a month; Skeeter Jones, a tall man who reminded Dana of a ferret with his long body and narrow head; and buck-toothed Tony Brown, who grew marijuana out in the woods and guarded his crop with a sawed-off shotgun. But the worst of the bunch was Donnie Anders, hulking, bearded and fresh out of prison for beating a buddy to death over a bar tab. Oddly, there was no sign of Joe Satterfield, the leader of the Brotherhood chapter. Dana wondered where he was.

  They'd built a fire, rolled a couple of joints, and started working their way through a couple of twelve-packs as they told lies about women and who'd told whose boss to go to hell. Dana began to suspect she was courting the attentions of the area's chigger population for nothing.

  Then the conversation wandered to President Daniel Grayson's upcoming speech at the University of South Carolina. Dana was just wondering what possible interest the boys could have in that surprisingly intellectual topic when Skeeter Jones drawled, "This'll be bigger than the time we bombed that church."

  She almost dropped her mike. The Mount Zion Baptist Church in nearby Newberry had blown up on Christmas day last year, killing the African-American pastor who'd come in to open up for services.

  "No kidding, asshole," Anders said, spitting a spray of tobacco juice into the fire. "Putting a bullet in the President is definitely bigger than blowing up a preacher."

  "Too bad the damn bomb went off early," Mason grumbled. "We coulda got us a whole church full."

  Being a pastor's daughter, Dana was so horrified they'd bombed the church that the assassination plot took a moment to register. By the time she'd recovered from the shock, the four were already discussing the expert they were bringing in to murder Grayson.

  Oh, God, Dana thought, as her heart began to lunge in her chest. These boys are actually planning to murder the President of the United States.

  She spent the next half-hour listening in appalled fascination and planning the biggest story of her career.

  Now Anders popped the top on his beer with a violent gesture of one grimy hand. "It's a helluvalot of money to give some bastard from out-of-state. I still say we should do it ourselves and keep the cash"

  Mason hooted. "Yeah, right. We'd have the Secret Service so far up our ass we'd be pulling badges out of our teeth. This guy is good. Hell, Joe said he's the one that did that judge in Alabama..."

  "Maybe he's good. Maybe he ain't." Anders' little black eyes gleamed in the firelight, feral and mean over his scraggly beard. "And if he ain't, maybe he gets caught and sings to the Feds about what we hired him to..."

  Something growled.

  A rush of blackness detached itself from the night and snatched Anders off the ground, then swung him around like a rag and slammed him against the nearest tree.

  Dana jumped.

  Anders must have tipped the scales at well over two hundred pounds, but now a man held him pinned so far up the trunk his cowboy-booted feet swung six inches from the dirt.

  "Let's get something straight, asshole" The man's voice was cold, calm and so deep it seemed to rumble in the bones. "I do not sing for
the Feds, I do not tap dance for the Feds, I do not provide the Feds with entertainment of any kind. And I sure as hell don't tell the Feds who hired me to do a job!"

  That was the assassin?

  Anders' square face twisted with rage. But as he met the stranger's narrow gaze, his expression slowly changed, eyes widening until the whites showed. Wheezing from the pressure of the big hand pinning him to the tree, he gasped out, "I didn't mean nuthin'."

  Dana blinked. Anders had just done five years in prison for voluntary manslaughter. What had he seen in the other man's face that was nasty enough to make him back down?

  True, the stranger was big, with a good four inches on Anders' six feet. Thick biceps shifted and bulged in his extended arm as he held the ex-con pinned, and the black T-shirt he wore molded to the curves of a powerful chest. But Anders was pretty beefy himself, despite the layer of fat covering his muscle, so it wasn't just the other's brawn that had him sweating.

  Gazing at the stranger, Dana silently admitted he could make her sweat a little too. His profile looked as if it should be stamped on a Roman coin: handsome and arrogant, with an aquiline nose, high forehead, starkly masculine cheekbones and a square chin. The only soft thing about him was the wavy dark hair that brushed the tops of his broad shoulders.

  But handsome or not, he stared at Anders with such menacing intensity Dana felt the hair rise on the back of her own neck. She was relieved when Joe Satterfield stepped out of the woods, his smile placating. "Uh, Jackson, you can turn him loose now. Donnie's harmless."

  Like hell, Dana thought, but the assassin stepped back and let Anders drop. As the ex-con stumbled and tried to regain his balance, Jackson turned his back and walked away. An act of either courage or ignorance, considering Anders had hit the last man he'd killed from behind.

  "So let's talk business." Accepting a beer from Skeeter, Jackson popped the top and took a long swallow. "Jonah said you want me to kill somebody big, but he didn't say who."

  "How do we know you ain't wearing a wire?" Anders demanded, sullen hostility growling in his voice as he stumped toward the fire. Dana tensed, suspecting he'd feel compelled to do something nasty after the way he'd been humiliated.

  Jackson shrugged, handed his beer back to Skeeter, and reached for the hem of his black T-shirt. In one easy gesture, he pulled it over his head.

  Oh, my.

  Why the hell was the man making his living with a gun when women everywhere would have paid just to look at his body?

  Broad expanses of fluid muscle formed Jackson's pecs, and his abdomen and ribs were sculpted in tight ridges that could have been chiseled by Michelangelo. Dark chest hair grew in a silky ruff across his chest, narrowing to flow downward toward the snap of his jeans. When he turned his back, the firelight gleamed across smooth, rippling contours that formed a beautiful V from broad shoulders to narrow waist, drawing attention to a pair of buns clad in black denim that were as tight and round as cantaloupes.

  The man could have played the lead in one of Dana's guilty fantasies.

  God, she thought, it's a shame he's a racist pig.

  When Jackson faced around again, he lifted a thick brow. "Is that enough, or do I have to drop my pants?"

  Satterfield gave an uncomfortable laugh. "Hell, boy, I think you've made your point."

  A small voice in the back of Dana's mind whispered, Damn! She winced in guilt. Here she was, ogling a killer. No matter how sexy he was, his job description included sniper scopes and grassy knolls. Her parents were probably spinning in their graves.

  Jackson shrugged back into his shirt with a lithe twist of his torso, reclaimed his beer, and sat on the ground next to Skeeter, stretching his long legs out in front of him. "Now that we got that settled—who am I killing?"

  Satterfield wandered over and eased his considerable bulk onto a fallen log, his checkered shirt straining over his belly. He splayed his jeans-clad legs far apart to balance his gut and scratched the two-day growth of gray stubble on his chin. "Like I told you on the phone, what we got for you ain't gonna be easy. But Mr. Howard says you're the man to do it, and that's good enough for me"

  Dana frowned. Was he talking about Jonah Howard, the Idaho racist who'd founded the White Aryan Brotherhood?

  Jackson sipped his beer. "Yeah, I've done a lot of work for Jonah."

  Which answers that question, Dana thought.

  And what kind of "work" had Jackson been doing? A magazine article she'd read a few months back had called Howard "the suspected mastermind behind the WAB's domestic terrorism." Had Jackson been involved too?

  "Well, now you can do something for us." Satterfield leaned forward and looked Jackson in the eye. "We want you to execute Daniel Grayson as a traitor to the white race."

  Jackson's beer hesitated in mid-tip. "That is big." The assassin resumed his sip. "And you're right—it's not going to be easy. Not gonna be cheap, either. What do you have in mind?"

  Satterfield told him about the President's planned trip to South Carolina. Dana listened, barely breathing, her hand sweating on the barrel of the boom microphone, her mind buzzing with questions and half-formed plans.

  Should she call the FBI or the Secret Service? Did the Secret Service even have a South Carolina office? Could she get an agent to meet her so she could turn over the tape? She'd have to make some phone calls and find out.

  Then, while the Feds were rounding up the WAB and their handsome assassin, Dana would write the exclusive of a lifetime. No more living on chicken salad sandwiches and driving a ten-year-old Mazda. No more working for a small town weekly for slave wages. This was her ticket to The New York Times.

  " ...really think you can do this?" Bill Mason asked. Dana snapped back to attention.

  Jackson propped his beer can on his flat belly. "It's gonna take some planning." He slanted Satterfield a look. "And money. Figuring out the best time and place to hit him..."

  "We thought you could do it in the Carolina Coliseum as he gives the speech"

  Jackson snorted. "I'd never get out of there alive. It'll have to be before that, while he's on the way. Or after."

  "Could bomb the Coliseum," Tony Brown suggested as he picked his buck teeth with a match.

  The assassin shot him a scornful look. "What, you think the Feds are going to let me park a tractor trailer full of fertilizer on the lawn? Get serious. I'm gonna have to work on this awhile, use my contacts in the Service" He turned to meet Satterfield's hopeful stare. "And you're going to have to make it worth my time."

  "A real patriot would do it for free." Anders spat into a pile of dead leaves.

  Jackson smiled, his teeth flashing white in the firelight. "Even a patriot's gotta eat"

  "We got money" Satterfield nodded at Mason, who pulled a suitcase into the light and flipped it open with a flourish.

  Jackson leaned forward to peer at the bundles of green inside. "Quite a stash"

  "We been raising cash for months," Satterfield told him. "Robbed a couple banks, a few convenience stores, sold a lot of dope. We was planning to buy a truckload of fertilizer and fuel oil, maybe blow something up. But then I heard Grayson was comin', and I thought—here's a chance to make a real difference."

  "We'll be famous!" Skeeter said happily.

  Satterfield shot him a look. "I hope to hell not. That would mean we got caught, and I ain't getting caught. Some other fool can be Lee Harvey Oswald."

  Jackson got to his feet and stretched, putting one hand to the small of his back as he arched his spine. "No, he's right. Y'all are gonna be famous" In one smooth gesture, he pulled out a flat black case and flipped it open on something that glittered in the firelight. Something that looked a lot like a badge.

  His white teeth flashed in a malicious grin. "I'm a federal agent, and you assholes are busted"

  Dana's jaw dropped.

  Safe, she thought, dizzy with relief. I'm safe. And so is the President.

  "I knew it!" Anders howled, exploding off the ground where he'd crouched in a
sullen knot.

  "Freeze!" a strange voice barked. "Federal agents! Throw down your weapons and raise your hands."

  There was a concerted rustle, the crunch of feet stepping on leaves. A ring of men stepped out of the darkness, bulky and menacing in black body armor, their assault rifles leveled.

  Donnie froze, staring wild-eyed at the muzzles ringing them. "You heard the man, y'all." Jackson grinned mockingly. "Dump the guns and raise your hands"

  As an assortment of hardware began thudding to the ground, it occurred to Dana that she'd better reveal herself to the Feds as quickly as possible. Especially if she wanted an interview with J. Edgar Gorgeous down there. Which she did.

  God, what a story this was going to be. And it looked like she'd even live to tell it.

  Trying to decide when to draw attention to herself, Dana watched as the agents handcuffed their prisoners. Anders was being his usual charming self—cursing, demanding a lawyer, refusing to lie on the ground so he could be searched. Frustrated, the agent guarding him stepped closer, gesturing with the muzzle of his gun.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  An agent moving to help Anders' captor tripped on a root and fell against his comrade. The first agent automatically braced him with one hand... and Anders struck like a snake, grabbing the man's gun and ripping it out of his grip. The guard snatched for it, but Anders jumped back, bringing the weapon to bear on both men. Even as everyone else swung to cover him, he opened fire in a thunderous explosion of sound. The two agents went down in a heap.

  Before Anders could fire again, Jackson was on him with a roar of rage, smashing the gun out of his hands as he grabbed the ex-con by the hair.

  Dana was still wondering how anybody could move that fast when the agent opened his mouth—were those fangs?—and dove, growling, straight for Anders' throat.

  What the hell is he doing? Dana thought, incredulous.

  Anders grabbed Jackson's head to try to force him back, but his jaws were locked tight. Blood poured down the ex-con's throat, black

  and wet in the firelight.