Except 1 CAPA nominated HARD TO HANDLE by Karen Wiesner

Hard to Handle, Book 8 of the Incognito Series
by Karen Wiesner
Romantic Suspense
978-1-60313-469-9 (trade paperback); 978-1-60313-470-5 (electronic)Whiskey Creek Press

Find out more about this book and series:
http://www.angelfire.com/stars4/kswiesner/fiction7a.html

Loyal operative Dez Luttino has graduated from the recruits of the Network, top of his classes and single-mindedly driven to succeed in his duty to his country. What he hadn’t counted on was mentoring his first operative—Nova Granger, once a head-strong, albeit gorgeous, hunting machine who didn’t seem to want to follow any rules except her own. As her team leader years ago, Dez had helped Nova tame her reckless nature and develop a team player attitude. She’s become one of the organization's most valuable operatives.

Little does Nova know that sexy Dez has been instructed to prepare her for an undercover mission that involves felling a ruthless criminal. While Dez has been instructed by his superiors to get close to Nova and encourage her to trust him implicitly, he soon realizes that he’s gone beyond duty and done the unthinkable by falling in love.


Excerpt

Copyright Karen Wiesner


I can’t do it. Nova Granger realized that fact on the wave of fury rising inside her like a tsunami. She’d sat quietly, trying not to make eye contact, as immaculate men dressed and smelling like a million bucks perused the virgin offerings in the brothel showroom. These particular girls, including Nova, were highly prized because they hadn’t yet been ‘spoiled’. As soon as they were, of course, they would be offered to the men who weren’t so choosy. She’d watched four of the pigs incline their heads toward the young girls of their choices, then the pimp’s thugs escorted them upstairs to the bedrooms. None of the girls fought—they’d learned their lessons the hard way during the torturous weeks since being taken from the streets of Chicago, where they’d lived, hand-to-mouth, after running away from somewhere months or years before. Most of them were barely twelve years old. Mere children. Used like a product of pleasure with no thought whatsoever of their rights, their dignity, their choices. Dear God—their souls.
The mission profile had been drilled into her, and she reminded herself forcefully what she was doing here and why she couldn’t act on her own, apart from the primary operation. She was one of team of undercover agents with specific orders. Their intention was to infiltrate the inner sanctum of an interstate human trafficking ring operating seven houses of prostitution around the United States—from Chicago, to Washington, D.C., Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York City, and Boston. A mid-level recruiter employed pimps to handle the houses in each city. Runaways and prostitutes between the ages of twelve and sixteen were “charmed” into trusting pimps who controlled the day-to-day business of handling the girls. Charm quickly turned to threats and horrific violence—of which Nova had taken her share. The girls were rotated, blindfolded, every two weeks, between the prison-like brothels in a city so they couldn’t make connections and never knew exactly where they were at any given time. At this particular chicken shack, clients were willing to pay a fortune for sex with extremely young, virgin girls.
Nova made herself receive the mission objective: Get to the top of the chain, so the ring could be collapsed from the inside out and shut down permanently. She’d been brought in as a teenage runaway on the rumored possibility that the top dog in the ring was also a client. So far, she hadn’t been forced to endure the attentions of any of the men in order to find out who he was. Her fellow operative and the mission leader, Victor Leventhal, who was posing as a pimp, had warned her that her hands-off attitude was the reason for their disinterest in her. That certainly wouldn’t last long.
One customer wore an unstained, soft gray business suit and horned-rimmed glasses. Behind the spectacles, his eyes bulged with excitement as he slowly looked from one girl to the next on the sofas and chairs in the room. Hesitantly, he reached out and touched Nova’s arm. She watched that hand as if it moved in slow motion while a fragile, black piece inside her came unhinged.
No, Daddy. No. Not there. Not where it hurts. Not where it bleeds...
The pig’s hand was soft—too soft, as if he’d soaked in churned butter. Nova gagged on the sickeningly sweet scent of the cologne he wore, mingled with the sweat of his barely-contained anticipation. Everything inside her advised her to rip his arm out—right from the socket. She could make him bleed, the depraved bastard. Don’t you realize how easily I could kill you? With my bare hands?
Nova squeezed her eyes shut. I’ll never let you or your friends touch me again. I’ll never believe you did it because you love me, Daddy.
Opening her eyes, Nova raised her gaze to the pervert, and he instantly drew back at what she knew he saw there. Incredulously, he appeared to realize the danger involved with his secret sin for the first time, and he hurried to the opposite side of the room, to a cluster of girls huddled on a sofa. Nova’s glare followed him. A moment later, as if he could feel her gaze on him like an imminent missile, he glanced back at her over his shoulder, with fear in his cow eyes.
Overhead, the sound of female cries and beds creaking fired the avenging angel inside Nova’s blackened heart. No one’s coming. No one will save them if I don’t.
Movement beside her compelled Nova to glance away to see the little, freckled, red-haired girl being led from the room by one of the thugs. Her long braid hung down her back—the very picture of innocent summers, balancing on a crooked fence, sipping lemonade. Not Pippi Longstocking, my favorite character from the Astrid Lundgren books Mama and me read when I was little. Not the sweet girl with blue fire in her eyes, the one who didn’t want to die. She’d cried that over and over while the pimp taught a new reality. Nova had almost lost her sanity wanting to turn his lesson back on him. Stay alive, Pippi. Endure long enough for me to help you escape. But is that even possible?
Next to her, Dara whimpered, and Nova turned to look at the young girl she’d befriended earlier that day. A thug pulled her up. Nova wanted to grab her back, especially when the pig wrapped his arm around Dara and murmured, “You’ll be my doll. You’ll be part of my collection.” Dara looked back at her, her gaze dark and fearful. Nova saw the message in her eyes—Save me. You’re the only one who can.
Soon, the pimp would make the exchange of hard, cold cash with this diseased bastard for the death of an innocent soul. Dara... Nova’s teeth clenched at the drilled-reminder inside her head: Focus on the mission. You can either save one or all.
In front of Dara being pushed out of the room, the spectacled customer followed Pippi and the thug quickly—nervously, glancing back at Nova. That skittish gaze broke her.
I’ll kill you before I let you touch her again. I can’t save all of you, but I can save a few. And that has to be worth something.
Nova’s hand closed around the narrow-necked vase holding a single, withered rose. Over the past few days, the other flowers in the vase had died one by one, their petals falling to the dingy carpet where they remained. The customers trampled them underfoot over and over, never noticing their existence in their quest for selfish gratification. For the past week, Nova had watched everything, reciting her mission parameters in her head like a prisoner trying to escape the boundaries hemming her in. No more.
With a cry of rage, she broke the bulb bottom of the glass vase and launched herself at the pervert with his arm around Dara. Driving the broken tube deep inside his back, seeing the bloom of deep red staining the back of his immaculate suit, only partially satisfied the bloodlust metastasizing unchecked in Nova’s heart.
She shoved his body to the floor while the girls behind her screamed in shock. There was no time to think: she threw herself onto the nervous pig who’d chosen Pippi and plunged her makeshift weapon into his neck with all her strength. He crumpled like a worthless bit of paper headed for the trash.
When one of the thugs reached for her, she slammed her foot into his chest, smashing him down to the floor while grappling for his silenced handgun. As soon as her blood-soaked hand took possession, she turned the weapon on him and blew his head clean off his shoulders. Whipping around where she was straddling the body, she brought the gun to bear on the other thugs one by one. The screams around her sank into the background, secondary to the agenda filling her head. Kill the men. Kill them all. Make them pay. Redeem the souls of these innocent girls. Maybe save my own soul.
She ran through the house, killing all the men she saw. In the last room upstairs at the end of the hall, she stood over the naked body of a man who’d been raping a young girl until she burst in. He held his hands up in surrender, begging her fruitlessly for his miserable life.
“No. I’m giving her the life you wanted to take away.” Smiling cruelly, Nova kicked him away from the girl to the other side of the bed and emptied the gun’s magazine into his head while the girl screamed, covering her ears. Three soft little coughs preceded the handgun clicking impotently as the breech stayed open. The room filled with the strangely pleasant smell of propellant from the gunplay. Nova lowered the impotent weapon and turned to the little girl. Her body was already covered with fresh bruises.
“Don’t move.” The order came from a commanding voice she recognized.
Vic. Nova raised her head to look at her team leader, posing undercover as the pimp who controlled this chicken shack. An instant later, a sharp pain blossomed in the center of her back. “No,” she murmured. I’m not done. Haven’t saved them all...
The drug inside the dart he shot at her stole into her veins almost immediately and she became dizzy. Colors swirled around her head. For an instant, she thought she smelled her father’s cheap aftershave, felt his weight as he shoved her hard into the bed sheets. She couldn’t breathe with her face in the pillow. She moaned, fighting almost blindly under the effect of the drug as hands caught hers and bound her arms and legs.
Dragging her eyes open a fraction, she saw Vic’s ruggedly handsome face leaning over her. “You shouldn’t have done this,” he whispered. There was pity in his expression and his tone—and understanding. “You shouldn’t have gone off-profile, Nova.”
Barely a week into their infiltration operation, and she’d already screwed up. Tried to save the one and sacrificed the many. “No...”
She never had a chance to fight the suffocating lethargy stealing over her. Helplessly, her eyes slipped closed. Everything went black as she fell out of all time and meaning.


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