Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Josie McAdams has built her life on rules. As an intelligence specialist for Jameson Force Seattle, she’s made a career out of turning chaos into order and catching the bad guys before they strike. But when a mission on the docks goes wrong and a handsome smuggler saves her life, Josie is forced to face the one rule she’s never dared to break—trusting a criminal.
Having spent years running contraband through Puget Sound’s fog-shrouded channels, Finn Marlowe is no stranger to walking the razor’s edge between outlaw and survivor. When the beautiful woman he pulled from the water approaches him for help dismantling a human-trafficking ring, he’s hard-pressed to turn her away. When he discovers the same network he’s been working for is behind the trafficking, Finn knows he could lose everything by getting involved, but turning a blind eye could cost him even more.
She’s sworn to the law. He lives outside it. But as their uneasy alliance deepens, attraction sparks into something neither can control—and every secret they keep could be the one that gets them killed. When the tides turn and bullets start flying, Josie and Finn discover that sometimes the only safe harbor to hide… is in each other’s arms
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER 1
Josie
The air smells of salt and old fish, pretty much the smell of every working waterfront in the Pacific Northwest. I’m thirty yards away, lying flat on my belly in wet pine scrub, photographing a boat that does not belong here.
I’ve got my long lens on, flash off, a microfiber cloth draped over the body so as not to catch a stray beam of light that might come my way.
I’m on an elevated bluff and below me is the dock. It’s a single-vessel slip, about sixty feet of weathered planking running out into the channel. According to the property records, it’s been owned by the same fishing family for ninety years, but the owners are in Arizona for the off-season. The dock has been unattended since they left, and BOB hypothesized that it had a high probability of seeing action. He flagged it late yesterday afternoon and I double-checked the data. The pattern was too clean to be coincidence and too small to be anything else.
Good ol’ BOB. He’s the artificial intelligence system created by brains smarter than me at Jameson Force Seattle and is my main partner within the company. The B-O-B doesn’t stand for anything in particular. It’s more of an easy, affectionate human name. He runs predictive analysis across whatever data points I feed him, and he’s very good at noticing things that I might not.
As the company’s lead intelligence specialist, it was a tough pill to swallow that I simply couldn’t be the smartest, but now we’re good friends. I implicitly trusted him when he told me this desolate fishing dock near Anacortes on Fidalgo Island might be a prime spot for human traffickers to off-load women smuggled in from Canada.
The FBI brought Jameson onto this case six weeks ago. They’ve been working a maritime trafficking pipeline for the better part of a year. The women—mostly Eastern European and Southeast Asian—are brought into Canada and then moved through Vancouver into the Salish Sea. From there, it’s easy enough to avoid the maritime authorities and off-load them at any number of abandoned docks like this one, where they’ll be distributed into the American economy.
Why would the FBI hire a private security consulting firm?
Mainly because we have bigger and better toys, the least of which is BOB.
I put my eye back up to the camera and snap off a flurry of photos—three men in dark jackets with knit caps on their heads for warmth. They’re illuminated by a single light attached to the top of a pole halfway out on the dock, but it’s not good enough for me to identify any distinguishing characteristics. One of them smokes a cigarette, and once in a while, the smell wafts up my way.
Then I hear it… an engine. Out of the black night, a forty-foot boat with a black hull and no running lights appears. The engine cuts and the boat drifts in slowly. Whoever’s at the helm has done this before, but in my research of maritime smuggling, I learned that these are some of the most accomplished boat captains around.
The temperature dropped after sundown and my fingers are stiff from the cold. I want to roll and stretch my back, but I don’t dare move. Surveillance is a discipline of not moving, and I’m very good at it.
The boat reaches the dock and two men come down from the small wheelhouse while one of the men on the dock ties off the bow line. Someone says something, mumbled words I can’t make out, and another man laughs.