Beatrice had seconds—maybe three. She couldn’t accuse one of the most powerful and connected businessmen in Boston without proof, and if she spoke out, Pendleton’s armed guards stationed outside would likely put a bullet in both their heads before dawn.
She needed a diversion. She needed chaos.
Without a sound, Beatrice turned to the sideboard, picking up a heavy, frosted silver pitcher filled with ice water.
One step.
Two.
Three.
She passed directly behind Pendleton’s chair, her large frame casting a long shadow over the table. With calculated precision, she deliberately hooked the toe of her heavy work boot beneath the frayed edge of the heavy wool Persian rug.
Her foot caught.
The heavy silver pitcher slipped from her fingers, tumbling through the air—
*CRASH.*
Ice-cold water exploded across Pendleton’s lap, soaking his expensive woolen trousers and splashing violently over the contracts spread across the table.
“Good lord!” Pendleton shrieked, leaping out of his chair with a force that knocked his mahogany seat backward onto the stone floor. He clawed frantically at his soaked groin, sputtering curses. “Clumsy cow! Look what you’ve done!”
“My profound apologies, sir,” Beatrice said, her voice dripping with false contrition as she threw herself forward, grabbing a linen napkin and aggressively swiping at the ruined papers on the table. In one lightning-fast motion, her thick fingers slid beneath the fraudulent contract, sweeping it off the table and burying it deep inside the folds of her oversized apron, replacing it instantly with a blank sheet of guest stationery she had snatched from the sideboard.
“Get her out of my sight!” Pendleton roared, shaking water from his coat tails like a wet dog, his face purple with rage. “Whitmore, fire this incompetent beast this instant, or the deal is off!”
Caleb stood up, his dark eyes flashing with sudden, dangerous suspicion—not at Beatrice, but at the sheer panic in Pendleton’s frantic attempts to scoop up the wet papers. Caleb had known men like Pendleton; he recognized the look of a trapped rat.
“Beatrice, leave the room,” Caleb commanded quietly, his gaze locked on the Boston executive.
“Gladly, Mr. Whitmore,” she said, her back straight as a ramrod as she swept toward the kitchen doors, the stolen document safely hidden against her ribs.
The heavy oak doors clicked shut behind her, but Beatrice didn’t run to the kitchen. Instead, she pressed her ear against the carved wood, her heart pounding against her ribs like a sledgehammer.
“Now, gentlemen,” Caleb’s voice rang out, cold as an alpine ridge. “Let us look at that contract again before I put my signature to paper.”
“There is nothing to look at, Whitmore!” Pendleton barked, his voice climbing an octave in pure panic. “Just sign the damn line!”
A heavy, sickening thud echoed through the wood, followed by the terrifying, unmistakable click of a revolver hammer being pulled back.
“Step away from the table, Pendleton,” Caleb growled, the raw, violent edge of his former mountain-man days bleeding into his voice. “Vance, drop that derringer in your coat pocket right now, or I’ll blow a hole through your chest that you won’t walk away from.”
Inside the kitchen, Beatrice’s breath caught in her throat. She looked down at the paper clutched in her flour-dusted hands, realizing with a sickening jolt that she was holding the key to a bloody corporate execution. But before she could even process the danger mounting on the other side of the door, a heavy hand clamped violently over her mouth from behind.
An arm made of solid iron wrapped around her throat, cutting off her oxygen.
“Give me the paper, fat woman,” a raspy, unfamiliar voice hissed directly into her ear, the barrel of a cold pistol pressing hard against her temple. “Or I blow your brains across this filthy floor.”
Struggling fiercely, Beatrice planted her heels into the floorboards, her lungs burning for air. Her mind raced with a desperate, frantic terror. She had saved Caleb’s empire from the wolves in the dining room, but she had walked straight into a trap in the dark.
“I said, *hand it over!*” the voice snarled, the pressure on her temple increasing.
With her vision beginning to blur at the edges, Beatrice didn’t scream. Instead, using every ounce of her heavy, formidable frame, she threw her entire weight backward into the unseen assailant, slamming him hard against the stacked cast-iron skillets by the hearth.
*Clatter-bang!*
Iron pans rained down in a deafening avalanche, crushing the man’s shins and sending his pistol skittering across the flagstones. Beatrice spun around, her eyes wild, her chest heaving as she raised her heavy iron skillet high above her head like a executioner’s axe.
The man groaning on the floor, tangled in pots and pans, wasn’t a hired thug from town. It was the pale-eyed secretary, Vance, his disguise slipping as he clutched his bleeding shin. But before Beatrice could bring the iron down, the dining room doors blew wide open with a splintering crash.
Caleb stood in the threshold, his revolver smoking in his right hand, his eyes wild and blazing with a terrifying, primal fury. His gaze swept from the groaning secretary on the floor to the heavy iron skillet in Beatrice’s trembling hands, and finally to the crumpled document clutched in her apron.
For three terrifying heartbeats, neither of them moved. The wind screamed outside the high frosted windows, rattling the glass as if desperate to break in.
Then, Caleb’s gaze softened, a profound, staggering realization washing over the hard angles of his face. He looked at the woman who had walked into his nightmare and calmly dismantled a conspiracy.
“You found it,” Caleb whispered hoarsely, lowering his gun.
Beatrice let out a long, shuddering breath, lowering her skillet with a dull clang. She reached into her apron, pulled out the damp, incriminating paper, and held it out to him. “They were going to take everything, Mr. Whitmore.”
Caleb took the paper from her hand, his fingers brushing against hers. He didn’t look at the contract. Instead, his dark eyes locked onto hers, burning with an intensity far hotter than the hearth fire.
“My name is Caleb,” he murmured, his voice thick with an emotion he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in a decade. “And you are not going anywhere tonight.”