Taken

“But we’re in the final stages of closing the deal. Everything’s set to go into motion the instant the takeover papers are signed. Do you think that’s a good idea?”

No, it was a decidedly bad idea. The not-altogether-friendly leveraged buyout of his second-largest competitor would give him a marketing edge in the nation’s distribution system, one of the many areas in which Blackwell & Blackwell owned businesses. But Ryder couldn’t help himself. He was going to find this woman who’d impersonated Carol Lambert, the woman in the rented Audi, and he was going to find her now.

BY THE END of the week, Ryder had been forced to accept that his finding her wasn’t going to be easily checked off his agenda.

It was a Sunday and along with Blackwell & Blackwell’s own security team, he was paying three detective firms double their going rate to find her.

Only it was beginning to look like no amount of money was going to be able to uncover the true identity of the woman who’d screwed him… twice.

Coleman told him that perhaps it was time to admit defeat and move on. Besides, the company could write the loss off. There was the Stanton deal in limbo and very possibly in danger of unraveling altogether. But Ryder couldn’t seem to think of anything else.

“Are you all right, son?”

Ryder looked at his father, walking next to him along the Coney Island boardwalk. The place where he’d grown up, but now only visited when he saw his father every other Sunday.

“That’s the third time you’ve asked me,” Ryder said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his Lauren khakis.

Growing up, he’d heard countless times how much he and his father looked alike. Some of the family’s relatives had even taken to calling him Junior, though his father’s name was Alan. But time had erased those physical similarities. And while Ryder only lived across the river in Manhattan, it might as well have been across the Atlantic as far as their lifestyles went. His father would take the train into town every now and again for coffee and to go to a museum exhibit or an off-off-Broadway show, but otherwise their lives were separate. And had been since Ryder’s mother had died of breast cancer fifteen years ago.

Of course, it didn’t help that their differences extended to their own personal ideologies.

Being born a Blackwell, his father had once told him, was no different than being born under any other name, despite the historical and cultural significance it once held in New York. Ryder would always remember that conversation, held when he’d come home soaked on a rainy Tuesday in April. He was nine and he’d just learned that his ancestors had been instrumental in the building of Manhattan and that even his grandfather, his father’s father, had enjoyed great wealth, until the mid 1950s when the family had been bankrupted.

His father? His take was that it had probably happened for a good reason. While Alan Blackwell had been educated at Harvard and enjoyed a privileged upbringing, he’d adjusted amazingly well to his new station in life. In fact, it seemed to suit him better, his mother used to say. Rather than working as the CEO of the family company and attending Broadway openings and Lincoln Center charity events, he’d taught American Lit at NYU for most of his career, and had just recently retired, speaking here and there when invited.

Otherwise he lived a quiet life in Brooklyn, visiting his favorite bakery every morning, reading the newspaper, or with his nose in whatever obscure book he’d picked up from the used bookstore on the corner.

But whereas his father had experienced life on both sides of the fence, young Ryder had spent his youth with his fingers fused to the fence links, staring longingly at the skyline across the river. Driven not only to recover his family’s longstanding wealth and status, but to up the ante on both counts.

And at thirty-six he’d done all that and more.

“And that’s the third time you haven’t answered me.” His father chuckled quietly then put his arm around his son’s shoulders. “Ask the experienced, not the learned.”

Ryder offered a half grin. His life had been filled with quotes from one source or another. Mostly his father had been trying to convince him that it wasn’t how much he had in his pockets but the love he held in his heart that was the true measure of a good man.

Ryder had in turn spent most of his life ignoring that advice.

“Just some things going on at work,” he said.

“Anything you’d like to share?”

“No, no.”

“And here I thought the problem might be a woman.” The senior Blackwell drew to a stop near the edge of the boardwalk and squinted out at the sparkling Atlantic. “You know, one of your mother’s biggest regrets was that she never got to enjoy a grandchild.”

“If I remember correctly, you were the one to say that I probably would never have children.”

“That’s because you have to find a good woman first. And you move too fast to catch bad women, much less good ones.” He looked at him. “Up until recently I at least hoped you’d make an effort at continuing the Blackwell name if just for legacy’s sake.”

“I thought you didn’t buy into any of that.”

“I don’t. But you do. Me? I’d just like to have a grandson or granddaughter who I can teach to play chess. Or at least know that my son, my only child, will finally learn what it means to know love.”

“I know love. I had it with Mom. With you.”

“And when I’m gone?”

Ryder also stared out at the ocean. “Are you planning on a trip I don’t know about?”

“No. But it’s something that’s been on my mind a lot lately.”

“I told you it was a bad idea when you retired—”

“I was forced out, Ryder. There’s nothing more irritating than a rambling old man who can’t find his notes.”

“So teach somewhere here. At a Brooklyn school.”

“My teaching days are over.” They began walking again. “Besides, if I couldn’t teach my own son, tell me what impact I’d really have on other’s children.”

It wasn’t like his father to talk about death in such a direct way. And Ryder wasn’t sure how to take it. While he’d heard other parents talk to their children about the impending visit from the Grim Reaper, even if that visit was some twenty to thirty years in the future, his father had never been like that. There were too many topics to discuss, politics to cut through.

“A wiser man, perhaps, might have figured out early on that the way to teach you was to misteach you.”

“How do you mean?”

“If I had encouraged you, no insisted on, you rebuilding the family fortune, you would have rebelled and done the opposite. Had I told you having a wife and children would only saddle you down, you probably would be married fifteen years now with three kids.”

Ryder chuckled. “Reverse psychology. But you’re leaving out that I would have seen through such a ruse. Besides, you could never have done it. It goes against everything you are. Everything you taught me to be.”

“But you’re still not married.”

“Why don’t you travel, Pops? You and mom always talked about wanting to travel.”

In fact, he’d arranged a month-long tour of England, Scotland and Ireland while his mother was still well enough to travel.

“I’m too old for the hassle. Besides, that was your mom’s and my dream. Without her…well, without her it wouldn’t be the same.”

And one day, perhaps soon, Ryder would be faced with life without his father in it. And for the first time he accepted that it wouldn’t be the same, either.

5

THE FOLLOWING FRIDAY everyone around Ryder had officially admitted defeat. But Ryder refused to raise the white flag.

He stood at the windows of his office staring out from his elevated spot at the buildings of Manhattan spread out before him like a giant’s handful of mismatched dice. Somewhere out there was the woman who had set his sheets on fire, then outwitted him. And he intended to find her. Whatever it took.

He turned back to his desk and the telephone book he had opened to with the listing of detective agencies in the tri-borough area. Being in Brooklyn with his father last weekend had given him a couple of ideas by reminding him that he hadn’t always been standing at the top of the mountain. He’d gotten a raw view from the gutters looking up, as well. After a four-year stint in the marines, he’d received his degree from Columbia, then had emerged onto the social scene using his family name as his passport with which to rebuild the Blackwell empire. Within six years, he’d sat at the helm of the first company at which he’d worked. Two years after that, he’d bought the company and taken it private and had been expanding the business ever since.

And he hadn’t gotten where he was now without getting his hands dirty from time to time. And the mystery woman made him want to thrust both hands directly into the black dirt.

Ryder noted the name and address of a Brooklyn detective agency then picked up the phone. Sometimes it took a fellow gutter rat to find another one in the maze that was the criminal underworld. He picked up the phone and placed the call.

THE BROOKLYN detective agency was little more than a small storefront that could have easily have been a travel agency or a take-out restaurant, not unlike the other businesses around it. The furniture was old, but the place was clean. And P.I. Kylie Capshaw had the tough exterior of someone who’d spent more than a few years foraging around in the gutters, both as a result of the hand life had dealt her, as well as to succeed as a woman in her chosen profession.

“Mr. Blackwell. A pleasure.” She said, extended her hand.

“Ryder, please,” he said, returning her firm shake. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and well-worn cowboy boots he suspected were steel-toed and capable of doing a fair amount of damage should anyone cross her. And she looked like the type who wouldn’t hesitate to do that damage.

“Slumming it, huh?” she questioned, taking two mugs out of a metal desk drawer then crossing to a coffeemaker.

Ryder glanced at his Lagerfeld suit. He hadn’t thought about changing his clothes to take the late-afternoon meeting. “In a manner of speaking.”

“So tell me,” she said, sitting down behind the old metal desk covered with paperwork. She took a bottle of Bailey’s from a different drawer then poured the Irish cream into the coffee and handed him a cup. Ryder took it then watched as she sipped hers. “How do you think I’ll be able to help you where others haven’t been able to? Because I get the feeling that you’re not here for a personal matter you don’t want others to know about. Am I right?”

“Spot on.”

“Who’ve you been to?”

He told her.

“Ah. The Big Three.” She raised her brows. “And they haven’t been able to get what you want?”

“No. While this is a white-collar crime, a blue-collar criminal committed it.”

“And your reasoning is that it takes a blue-collar gal to find a blue-collar criminal.”

Her words weren’t so much as a question as they were a statement. “Yes,” Ryder answered simply.

Kylie grinned. “Then it looks like you’ve come to the right place….”

BETWEEN Seline’s legs vibrated one of the most powerful machines built by man, and something she’d been craving ever since sneaking out of Ryder Blackwell’s bed the week before. The custom black Ducati 999R Xerox motorcycle with a Testastretta 143-hp engine gave her a sense of freedom not even a car could afford her. And as she ran it down the empty roads in rural southwest Wisconsin, the roar drowning out all other sounds, the air whipping around her black leather-clad body, she felt like a hellcat demon on a mission.

That is, if she ignored that there was no real mission, to rid the brand of Ryder’s touch from her skin.

It had been nine days since she’d pulled one of the biggest cons of her career. Yet a sense of a job incomplete tailed her like a state trooper with his siren blaring. Returning home usually calmed her, allowed her distance from her last job in order to concentrate on what needed to be done to ensure her security and to focus on the next con. But not this time. This time, her mind ceaselessly returned to Blackwell & Blackwell. Or more specifically to the man who sat at the helm.

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