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Keller must be catching a chopper. Always on the go.
    He started to ask where but bit back the question, knowing the answer would be cryptic. Information was dispensed on a need-to-know basis.
    “This man called himself Vincent. It has to be a trap.” Quinton scrubbed a hand over his face. “I’m going to Tennessee tomorrow to check him out.”
    “I’ll see what I can find out about him, if it’s a fake name or if Vincent Valtrez exists,” Keller said. “Be careful.”
    “Don’t worry,” Quinton said, the ice back in his veins. “If it’s a trap, he won’t walk away alive.”
    When he met the man tomorrow, he’d probe his mind. Find out his real agenda. And if he posed a danger or a threat, he’d dispose of him just as he did his usual marks.
    Then once again the Ghost would be safe. That is, unless Annabelle Armstrong decided to talk.
    No… she wouldn’t. He’d do whatever was necessary to keep her quiet.
    Annabelle shivered as she drove to the bed-and-breakfast, an antebellum mansion that was supposedly haunted by the spirit of a war-torn lover.
    According to the legend, the woman had stayed behind to wait on the man she loved, but he had betrayed her and never returned home. Guests often claimed they heard her sobs at night as she roamed restlessly through the attic, and some said on a foggy night you could see the silhouette of her face pressed against the attic’s oval window.
    Annabelle scoffed at the story. The woman should have known not to trust the man. Annabelle’s own father had taught her that lesson well when he’d deserted her.
    She gripped the steering wheel of her VW tighter. She’d been convinced that she could handle a confrontation with Quinton because he had saved her life.
    Then he’d threatened to take it.
    She’d never met anyone like him. Cold. A loner. A man with secrets.
    A man who intrigued her because he both aroused her with his dark sensuality and terrified her with the fury simmering in his brooding, intense gaze.
    She wanted to know more about him.
    Damn her curious nature, her thirst to unveil the facts and find the story behind the story.
    Because if Quinton had killed those suspected terrorists, he was an assassin. And if demons existed, if he was a demon…
    God, she would be crazy to go up against him.
    What was she thinking?
    She parked in front of the B and B and climbed out, searching the shadows as she rushed up the oyster-shell walkway, then inside. The house was eerily quiet, the wooden steps creaking as she climbed to the second floor. The whisper of the wind echoing off the ocean whistled through the eaves of the empty hallway. A cold chill crawled along her nerve endings, the soft sound of someone crying floating to her from the attic.
    The woman’s ghost…
    She’d never stayed in a haunted place, but the prospect had fascinated her when she’d first arrived. Now, the thought unnerved her.
    Hand trembling, she jammed the key into the lock and opened the door. The second-floor rooms had been built in a square surrounding a garden area below, each with French doors and a wrought-iron patio overlooking the garden. A faint stream of moonlight streaked the room, the window sheers flapping from the heat vent below.
    Her foot hit something, though, and she glanced down. A plain manila envelope lay on the braided rug in the entryway. Someone must have slipped it under her door while she was out.
    Nerves gathered, catching in her throat as she picked the envelope up and flipped it over in search of a name or return address, but as she expected it was blank. Forcing air into her lungs, she flipped the clasp open, biting back a gasp at the sight of the photo.
    A dead man, shot once in the temple, lay on a sea of white bricks with bloodred rose petals surrounding him, his house behind him in shambles and flames from an obvious explosion.
    She recognized the man immediately—Carim Vigontol, a well-known suspected terrorist who had escaped the law on