Sea Haven 02 - Spirit Bound

covered a multitude of sins, but then women might find that edge of danger exciting as well. Women could be just as easily swayed by the wrong things as men could be by beauty.
    “What the hell are you doing with that?” Glaring at Stefan, trying to intimidate someone impossible to intimidate, Jean-Claude La Roux snatched the small photograph from the hands of his cell mate. “You have no idea who I am.”
    Deliberately Stefan showed his teeth and then spit on the floor of the cell. “That refrain is getting old, Rolex.” He infused total contempt into his tone, calling the man the hated name he’d given him.
    A man like Jean-Claude, the head of a vast crime empire, would detest a common criminal taunting him. It was an affront the man couldn’t accept. In the two months Stefan had been undercover, trying to collect information, he’d had to defend his life on several occasions—a tribute to La Roux’s authority even there in the prison. Jean-Claude hated Stefan, and one word from him had sent several prisoners trying to curry favor by attempting to get rid of Stefan, the thorn in his side.
    There was no doubt that La Roux was every bit as powerful in prison as he was out of it. On the surface, sentencing him for his international crimes in France seemed good. The French prison system wasn’t considered a place to coddle prisoners, but even with mold on the walls and water-stained slime trailing from the ceiling, Jean-Claude managed to appear wealthy and powerful. Every other prisoner gave him a wide berth until Stefan had come along. He goaded La Roux at every opportunity, and not one of the men paid to teach Stefan a lesson, or kill him, had succeeded.
    There was no doubt in Stefan’s mind that given an hour alone with Jean-Claude, if he was free to interrogate him in his own way, he would have all the information the government needed, but here, in this French prison, with guards watching day and night and the government all too aware of their prisoner, he didn’t have a chance to extract what he needed from the man. That left only one possibility. Jean-Claude La Roux had to escape. He sighed. He’d told his handler that same thing many times over the last two months.
    Stefan gestured toward the photograph-covered walls. “You have a lot of pictures, Rolex, but you sure don’t have any letters. I think your woman is on that beach with another man laughing her ass off.”
    Jean-Claude replaced the photograph, his hand smoothing over the glossy paper. Stefan noticed, with some satisfaction, that the crime lord’s fingers trembled when he touched the woman’s face.
    “You do not see a man in any of these photographs, do you?” Jean-Claude looked him over with obvious contempt.
    Stefan knew he wasn’t much to look at. He was tall, with wide, ax-handle shoulders, a thick muscular chest and large arms with bulging muscles. He didn’t look suave or wealthy, or charming. He looked a brute, not very smart, with longish hair and lots of scruff. Scars webbed his skin and his knuckles were callused and shiny. He had a square jaw and dark blue-green eyes that looked straight into other men’s souls and found them guilty. Stefan exuded raw power through sheer physical strength, and men like Jean-Claude automatically dismissed them as muscle and brawn—never looking beneath that surface to see if there was any intelligence behind the mask of a brute.
    In his mind he used his real name, Stefan Prakenskii, as often as possible because, truthfully, he used aliases so often, he was afraid of forgetting who he was. And maybe he had already, long ago, lost his identity. What was he? Who was he? And who really gave a damn anyway? There wasn’t a beautiful woman standing on a beach looking sad, pining away for him—and there never would be. He was successful at his job because he refused to let women, like the one Jean-Claude obsessed over, into his realm of consciousness.
    He glanced again at the pictures covering the stained wall. There were hundreds of them. Jean-Claude had the woman under surveillance for a long time. She had changed little over the years the man had spent in prison, but he was right, there was no man ever photographed with her. Stefan cursed under his breath and turned away from the pictures.
    The woman would get under anyone’s skin if you stared at her long enough. Really, what else was there to do in a tiny prison cell but notice her lips and eyes and all that long glossy hair?