The Raintree Box Set: Raintree: Inferno\Raintree: Haunted\Raintree: Sanctuary Read online

  The Raintree Box Set

  Raintree: Inferno by Linda Howard

  Raintree: Haunted by Linda Winstead Jones

  Raintree: Sanctuary by Bevarly Barton

  Inferno by New York Times bestselling author Linda Howard

  Haunted by RITA® Award winner Linda Winstead Jones

  Sanctuary by New York Times bestselling author Beverly Barton

  Two hundred years after the Raintree clan defeated them, the Ansara wizards are rising up again to take on their bitterest foes. NYT bestselling author Linda Howard heads up this trilogy with INFERNO. As king, it’s up to Dante Raintree to protect his clan, but when Lorna Clay walks into his life, suddenly fire, always his to control, defeats him, leaving him wondering whether Lorna is to blame. Will Dante’s strength be enough to win the fight of his life? In HAUNTED by RITA® award winner Linda Winstead Jones, homicide detective Gideon Raintree must draw upon the gifts he’s kept hidden to stop a relentless serial killer unleashed by dark Ansara wizards. Now he and his alluring new partner, Hope Mallory, are in a race against time to save their love and their family. NYT bestselling author Beverly Barton rounds out the collection with SANTUARY, in which Mercy Raintree must assume her position as guardian of the sacred Raintree home, but doing so threatens to expose her most closely guarded secret…and pits her against Dranir Judah Ansara, who is personally determined to kill her. Will Mercy’s closely guarded secret change not only the outcome of the battle…but also Judah’s own bitter heart?

  Table of Contents

  Raintree: Inferno

  by Linda Howard

  Raintree: Haunted

  by Linda Winstead Jones

  Raintree: Sanctuary

  by Bevarly Barton

  LINDA

  HOWARD

  RAINTREE:

  Inferno

  To Beverly Barton and Linda Winstead Jones, for the years of friendship and all the fun we had planning these books, and to Leslie Wainger, for being everything an editor should be, as well as a friend.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 1

  Sunday

  Dante Raintree stood with his arms crossed as he watched the woman on the monitor. The image was in black and white, to better show details; color distracted the brain. He focused on her hands, watching every move she made, but what struck him most was how uncommonly still she was. She didn’t fidget, or play with her chips, or look around at the other players. She peeked once at her down card, then didn’t touch it again, signaling for another hit by tapping a fingernail on the table. Just because she didn’t seem to be paying attention to the other players, though, didn’t mean she was as unaware as she seemed.

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “Lorna Clay,” replied his chief of security, Al Rayburn.

  “Is that her real name?”

  “It checks out.”

  If Al hadn’t already investigated her, Dante would have been disappointed. He paid Al a lot of money to be efficient and thorough.

  “At first I thought she was counting,” said Al.

  “But she doesn’t pay enough attention.”

  “She’s paying attention, all right,” Dante murmured. “You just don’t see her doing it.” A card counter had to remember every card played. Supposedly counting cards was impossible with the number of decks used by the casinos, but no casino wanted a card counter at its tables. There were those rare individuals who could calculate the odds even with multiple decks.

  “I thought that, too,” said Al. “But look at this piece of tape coming up. Someone she knows comes up to her and speaks, she looks around and starts chatting, completely misses the play of the people to her left—and doesn’t look around even when the deal comes back to her, she just taps that finger. And damned if she didn’t win. Again.”

  Dante watched the tape, rewound it, watched it again. Then he watched it a third time. There had to be something he was missing, because he couldn’t pick out a single giveaway.

  “If she’s cheating,” Al said with something like respect, “she’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

  “What does your gut say?” Dante trusted his chief of security. Al had spent thirty years in the casino business, and some people swore he could spot cheats as soon as they walked in the door. If Al thought she was cheating, then Dante would take action—and he wouldn’t be watching this tape now if something hadn’t made Al uneasy.

  Al scratched the side of his jaw, considering. He was a big, bulky man, but no one who observed him for any length of time would think he was slow, either physically or mentally. Finally he said, “If she isn’t cheating, she’s the luckiest person walking. She wins. Week in, week out, she wins. Never a huge amount, but I ran the numbers, and she’s into us for about five grand a week. Hell, boss, on her way out of the casino she’ll stop by a slot machine, feed a dollar in and walk away with at least fifty. It’s never the same machine, either. I’ve had her watched, I’ve had her followed, I’ve even looked for the same faces in the casino every time she’s in here, and I can’t find a common denominator.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “She came in about half an hour ago. She’s playing blackjack, as usual.”

  “Who’s the dealer?”

  “Cindy.”

  Cindy Josephson was Dante’s best dealer, almost as sharp at spotting a cheater as Al himself. She had been with him since he’d opened Inferno, and he trusted her to run an honest game. “Bring the woman to my office,” Dante said, making a swift decision. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “Got it,” said Al, turning on his heel and leaving the security center, where banks of monitors displayed every angle of the casino.

  Dante left, too, going up to his office. His face was calm. Normally he would leave it to Al to deal with a cheater, but he was curious. How was she doing it? There were a lot of bad cheaters, a few good ones, and every so often one would come along who was the stuff of which legends were made: the cheater who didn’t get caught, even when people were alert and the camera was on him—or, in this case, her.

  It was possible for people to simply be lucky, as most people understood luck. Chance could turn a habitual loser into a big-time winner. Casinos, in fact, thrived on that hope. But luck itself wasn’t habitual, and he knew that what passed for luck was often something else: cheating. Then there was the other kind of luck, the kind he himself possessed, but since it depended not on chance but on who and what he was, he knew it was an innate power and not Dame Fortune’s erratic smiles. Since his power was rare, the odds made it likely the woman he’d been watching was merely a very clever cheat.

  Her skill could provide her with a very good living, he thought, doing some swift calculations in his head. Five grand a week equaled two hundred sixty thousand dollars a year, and that was just from his casino. She probably hit all of them, careful to keep the numbers relatively low so she stayed under the ra