A Dom is Forever (Masters and Mercenaries #3)(13)

Brian Molina had been a hopeless drug addict. He’d hid it pretty well, but he’d do anything for another hit. Even kill his brother and allow someone else to assume his identity for perfectly nefarious reasons. It was really too bad that Brian had finally met the needle that didn’t love him back. One dose of pure uncut China White and there were no Molinas left to claim he wasn’t exactly who he said he was.

He’d been Thomas Molina for years. The poor cripple had been so isolated and secluded no one had questioned him at all when he’d taken over the United One Fund. A little weight gain. A lot of plastic surgery and he’d become wealthy and powerful and deeply interested in the plight of people in war zones.

Yes. He liked war zones. War zones were the perfect retail grounds for what he liked to sell. Guns. Mines. Grenades.

Now bio weapons. Yes, that was the wave of the future. A good bio weapon could wipe out a population and leave the infrastructure standing, waiting for the victors to take over. He was the bloody motherf*cking pimp daddy of warfare. And he had the perfect shipping system. No one checked United One Fund’s shipments. No one thought to question the saint of the Western world.

He smuggled weapons into war zones under the veneer of lending aid to all the children.

Fuck children. He didn’t want them or need them, though lately he had started to believe that Thomas Molina would do well with a wife. Sweet, na?ve, been-there-before Avery wouldn’t even question why he left the light off when he f*cked her. She would believe him. She wouldn’t question him because he’d become Thomas Molina in every way.

And all with the help of the finest institution known to man. The bloody CIA. Well, maybe not the whole CIA, but with the help of one righteous bastard of an agent, he’d gone from pathetic errand boy to running a black market weapons empire.

It was supposed to be a get-rich-quick scheme. The trouble was, he’d found he rather liked the game. He liked being Thomas Molina. He liked the wealthy parties and the elegant gatherings. He liked the way Avery looked at him.

He couldn’t fool himself. He’d fallen under her spell. There was something about her that simply called to him. He would have the little fool all to himself, but she wasn’t going to change his plans.

It would be best, however, if she had no ties to her past life. Her continuing obsession with gaining forgiveness from her former in-laws kept her too much in their world. And he would definitely prefer she have no family beyond him when he finally brought her into the fold.

A quick phone call and it was done. He had to remind them every now and then of just how much Avery had hurt them. The wounds ran deep, but it was good to open them back up every now and then. The last thing he wanted was for Avery to get close to anyone but him. He would take her with him all over the world, never staying in one place more than a month or two. She would be forced to cling to him. The travel would bond them together. Eventually he could even “find” a cure for his ailment and be normal around her.

But first he had to deal with the Lachlan Bates situation. He opened the folder and picked up the small scanner from his desk. His personal files were more important than anything else. The scanner immediately sent the file to his tablet, and then he would lock up the original at his town house.

Lachlan Bates wasn’t a man, but a code. He had a shipment going out next month. Lachlan Bates was the carefully selected code for a new buyer. The amount of the donation was code for the type of arms, number of each type, and country of delivery. In this case, the buyer was very interested in Thomas’s large shipment of P90s and several other high-priced items.

It was perfect. It meant his next shipment would be full. It meant he would be bringing in about ten million.

Taking over Thomas Molina’s life had brought him a nice stash of cash, but turning his charity into an arms retailer was going to bring him what he truly craved. Power.

He would have the power, and he would have the woman he wanted, too.

Avery was sweet, perfectly innocent.

It was up to him to see just how much he could corrupt her. He looked forward to the job.

But first he had to deal with the problem of Eli Nelson. Fuck but he wished the former CIA agent hadn’t gotten exposed. The man was quickly becoming a pain in his ass.

And Thomas didn’t like pains in his ass.





Chapter Three


The next day, Avery stared at the mummy in his glass case, but her mind kept flitting to other things. She thought about her dinner the night before. Adam and Jake were such a cute couple. She hated to admit it, but she’d enjoyed hearing American accents again. Adam had made a heavenly dinner, and she’d briefly forgotten how lonely she was. She was trying not to think about it today.

The Egypt Gallery held many wonders, some as lovely as the Greek and Roman rooms, but the mummies were definitely interesting in a less aesthetically pleasing way. She was standing in a room with a person who had lived centuries before. Millennia. A deep connection to a distant past. She was being fanciful, but it was her day off. She could let her mind do that wandering thing it so often did and not be worried she would screw up a big deal like the one with Lachlan Bates that Thomas had taken off her plate. It had been odd. He usually didn’t like to take care of things himself. He had told her on many occasions that he’d hired her so he didn’t have to talk to people.

But she was relieved he was taking more of an interest in their donors. Maybe it meant he would be more sociable. And it wasn’t like he never talked to donors. He’d pulled three files from Monica’s desk this year, all over a million dollars.