The Renegade Steals A Lady

“For now, all I want is for you to get in that bath.”

Liar. Marco knew what he wanted. Just once he wanted her to look at him like he was something other than a drug-stealing scumbag. He wanted her to look at him like she had the last time he’d been in her apartment, the night they’d made love.

“I won’t help you again,” Paige said. “Why don’t you just go away and leave me alone?”

“I can’t do that.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I’ll be going, all right, but I won’t be leaving you alone. I’m taking you with me.”

Dear Reader,

There’s so much great reading in store for you this month that it’s hard to know where to begin, but I’ll start with bestselling author and reader favorite Fiona Brand. She’s back with another of her irresistible Alpha heroes in Marrying McCabe. There’s something about those Aussie men that a reader just can’t resist—and heroine Roma Lombard is in the same boat when she meets Ben McCabe. He’s got trouble—and passion—written all over him.

Our FIRSTBORN SONS continuity continues with Born To Protect, by Virginia Kantra. Follow ex-Navy SEAL Jack Dalton to Montana, where his princess (and I mean that literally) awaits. A new book by Ingrid Weaver is always a treat, so save some reading time for Fugitive Hearts, a perfect mix of suspense and romance. Round out the month with new novels by Linda Castillo, who offers A Hero To Hold (and trust me, you’ll definitely want to hold this guy!); Barbara Ankrum, who proves the truth of her title, This Perfect Stranger; and Vickie Taylor, with The Renegade Steals a Lady (and also, I promise, your heart).

And if that weren’t enough excitement for one month, don’t forget to enter our Silhouette Makes You a Star contest. Details are in every book.

Enjoy!

Leslie J. Wainger

Executive Senior Editor

The Renegade Steals a Lady

Vickie Taylor

This book is dedicated to the loyal canines who serve our law-enforcement agencies and military everywhere.

VICKIE TAYLOR

has always loved books—the way they look, the way they feel and most especially the way the stories inside them bring whole new worlds to life. She views her recent transition from reading to writing books as a natural extension of this longtime love. Vickie lives in Aubrey, Texas, a small town dubbed “The Heart of Horse Country,” where, in addition to writing romance novels, she raises American quarter horses and volunteers her time to help homeless and abandoned animals. Vickie loves to hear from readers. Write to her at: P.O. Box 633, Aubrey, TX 76227.

Contents

Prologue

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

Prologue

Paige Burkett arched in her lover’s arms. Beneath her palms, his shoulders shuddered like a locomotive, straining for that first forward inch under a heavy load. Paige’s head tipped back. Her mouth fell open in a silent gasp and she hung there, eyes closed, suspended in the moment like a fly in amber.

The curtains above the bedside window parted, exhaling a breeze as hot and humid as a human breath. Overhead, the lazy spin of the ceiling fan circulated the smells of summer—the tangy brine of the Texas Gulf Coast, sweet rosemary from the pots lining the porch below, and sweat. Warm, moist flesh entwined with warm, moist flesh.

“Open your eyes,” the man above her commanded, and she complied, helpless to deny him.

Moonlight flowed like mercury over his glistening olive skin. Black hair, half an inch overdue for a trim, curled damply on the back of his neck. A twelve-hour shadow framed the sensuous curve of his mouth.

But it was his eyes that drew her attention, as they had since she’d first caught him watching her almost a month ago. The eyes of an angel, she’d thought then. Not the innocent orbs of some winged cherub, but the deep soulful wells of a mortal creature, torn between the heavenly aspirations of the divine and the sins of the damned. Dark, beckoning, full from their first glance of the inevitability of this moment, his eyes had called to her. Drawn her in even when better judgment warned her away.

Three years. For three years she’d denied herself this closeness. Told herself she didn’t need a man. Didn’t want one. Then one look from him, and she’d wanted nothing else.

Damn Marco Angelosi and his angel’s eyes.

He must have sensed the change in her mood. “Paige?”

She turned her head aside, away from his eyes. “It’s all right.”

“No.” Clasping her chin between his thumb and fore-finger, he nudged her face toward him. His black eyes probed deep inside her, to the root of her secrets. “It’s not.”

A subtle shift by him broke the fledgling bond their bodies had formed. His absence left her bereft, a hollow outline of the woman she had been. Anger flourished in the empty space.

It had to be all right. Marco might have started this thing between them, watching her all the time with those haunted eyes, but she was the one who had invited him inside tonight. Invited him to her bed.

She needed this. Needed him. Needed to feel like a woman again, if only for one night.

Paige surged up. A soft chop cut the arm he’d been leaning on from beneath him, and she flipped him easily to his back. Straddling his chest, she pinned his wrists above his head. “Then you’re just going to have to make it all right, Angelosi. Because I’m not letting you go until you finish what you started.”

He took stock of her for another long moment. Apparently he was satisfied with what he saw. A smile ghosted around the corners of his mouth, then disappeared, gone before it ever really materialized. With a flick of his wrists, he reversed her grip so that it was he who held her captive.

Her breath caught as he pulled her close. The hair on his chest fired erotic shocks where it grazed her aching nipples. His lips hovered over hers, close but not touching. Gently he wound her arms around his waist.

“Then hold on tight, Burkett, because I plan to make it a lot better than all right.”

The promise tingled like a shower of tiny meteors on her skin. She reached for his face, but he was gone, working his way down her throat, touching, licking and kissing as he lowered himself. He paused to settle his mouth on her left breast, pulling the breath from her chest as his cheeks hollowed, suckled.

Cool air teased the slippery trail he left behind when his lips wandered along her ribs. He wriggled his hips between her splayed knees, sliding down the bed on his back. Pausing again, his tongue delved into her navel, then dipped lower.

Sharp sparks of pleasure darted from her core. She swayed, falling forward until only a white-knuckled grip on the headboard kept her upright. Electricity arced around her, through her. Her skin grew unbearably tight. Unbearably hot. Her blood thickened until the cells pulsed through her veins in great, throbbing knots.

“Now, Marco,” she groaned. “Oh, now.” Releasing the headboard, she clutched at his hair.

He pulled her down, rolled, and covered her with his hot, damp length. Perspiration beaded at his temples. Sinew corded in his neck and he bared his teeth, stark white against a swarthy complexion. Lacing his fingers with hers above her head, he pushed their hands against the mattress, levering his upper body away and driving his lower body inside.

Filled at last by his hardness and heat, Paige mewled her approval.

“Ah, that’s better.” That not-quite-there smile crossed his lips again, pure male satisfaction, she was sure.

Gradually adjusting to his thick intrusion, she stroked her hands down his smooth back, marveling at the power of his gathered muscles and the tremble of need, barely contained. Cupping his backside, she pulled him closer, taking his full measure.

“Much better,” she agreed.

His smile disappeared as he groaned. He eased away from her, then rolled forward, a thick wave tumbling heavily ashore. Again and again he moved over her, as rhythmic as the sea. And as deep.

The current of his passion dragged her under. She’d never felt more alive than she did at that moment, yet she was drowning. In him. The deeper he took her, the more intensely she felt the onrush of something even more dangerous, something as powerful—and unstoppable—as the tide.

Dark eyes bid her surrender to the flow.

Fear clutched at her from the shadows. Head thrown back, she gasped for air, for coherence. Her fingers bit deep into his shoulders.

His body pierced hers furiously. Seductively. Enticing her to match his pace. “Come on, let go.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

No, she mouthed soundlessly, her head thrashing from side to side.

Yes, his eyes commanded.

Gulping down her panic at the consuming void she felt approaching, she squeezed her eyes shut.

Growling, he interrupted his rhythm. With his teeth bearing down on the flesh of her neck, he wedged his hand between them, his fingers touched her where all her nerves joined together. Swirling. Spiraling. Creating a riptide of sensation.

She pushed at his shoulders. Cried out once.

And gave herself over to the vortex.

Wonder cascaded over her like moonlight on the crest of a whitecap. One by one the molecules of her body disassembled into pure energy and danced in the beam. Marco pulled back and thrust once more, then his back went rigid. He cried her name, guttural and raw, as his body pulsed inside her.

Paige held on to him as if he was the last life preserver on a sinking ship. She clutched with arms, legs, body, while the surge swelled around them, lifted them. She held him so close their hearts beat as one, their minds connected, both tumultuous.

It wasn’t until he gently kissed the tip of her nose and the creases of her eyelids that she realized the maelstrom had passed.

Still dazed by the intensity of what they’d shared, she rolled to her side, tucking her hands beneath her cheek. Without a word she waited for the shift of the mattress that would signal Marco’s exit from her bed, but Marco didn’t leave. Instead he wrapped his arms around her. He held her securely, almost possessively. One of his firm thighs insinuated itself between her knees and his beard stubble razed the back of her head as he smoothed her hair with his cheek.

Seconds, then minutes, ticked away. The flush gradually cooled from her skin. She shivered, and Marco pulled a blanket up and tucked it around her shoulders.

“Sleep,” he murmured.

But surprise—and the warm current of his breath behind her ear—held sleep at bay. She wasn’t sure what she had expected tonight, but it certainly hadn’t been this. A joining that transcended sex into intimacy in its purest form.

He’d known exactly how to touch, how to move, to elicit her response. Like master and puppet he’d pulled her strings, and she’d danced for him. She’d held nothing back. She couldn’t have stopped the shattering climax he’d wrung from her even if she had wanted to—which she hadn’t.

No man had ever affected her so deeply. Touched her on such an elemental level. Had he summoned her very soul, she would have answered his call.

And that frightened her.

Marco possessed a will few men could match. He was intense. Driven. Obsessive in the pursuit of whatever—or whomever—he went after. Compulsive in the protection of anything in his keep. He would want too much from a woman, a lover. Demand too much.

More than she was willing to give.

Three years ago she’d given everything she had to a man. So much that when he walked out, there’d been nothing left of herself for her.

She’d worked hard since then to take charge of her life, to regain her independence, her self-respect. She didn’t plan to give it up to another man.

Not even a man with a sinful body and angel’s eyes.

The grandfather clock downstairs chimed twelve bells. Midnight. Appropriately, heralding both a new day and a time come to an end. For her first night with Marco Angelosi, she vowed, would also be her last.

Morning dawned in shades of gray instead of the pink and orange hues more common to coastal Texas. Paige welcomed the dull skies. A full-strength August sun would have been murder on her irritated eyes. She hadn’t slept much last night.

Despite the gunmetal canopy hanging overhead, she jammed on a pair of aviator sunglasses before stepping out of the Battan Industries warehouse she and her canine police partner, a German shepherd named Bravo, had just wasted another morning searching. This raid hadn’t turned up anything more than the last five.

Gulls screeched and circled above the nearby docks. A sea breeze toyed with the hair around her face. She tucked the yellow locks behind her ears and surreptitiously scanned the parking area for Marco.

Not that he had any reason to be here. He hadn’t been appointed to the multiagency task force assembled to investigate the influx of a new cocaine derivative called “Magic” into the area. But then, he hadn’t had a reason to be at any of the other task force busts, either, yet he had shown up at each and every one.

Department gossip rumored he was jealous. As Port Kingston Police Department’s best narcotics detective, he’d been the leading candidate to head up the task force. But for reasons unknown, his name had been left off the final postings.

Paige didn’t believe he was jealous. Marco was too much his own man to worry about office politics. She suspected his reasons for showing up where she was working were more personal. Or at least they had been. Today he had no personal reason to be here. Not after the way they’d parted.

Standing in her kitchen doorway at dawn, her bare feet chilling on the checkerboard tile floor and a terry robe wrapped around her like a suit of armor, she’d told him she couldn’t see him again.

He had taken her rebuff stoically, but something disturbing had simmered just beneath the black slate surfaces of his eyes. Something volatile and yet vulnerable. Not quite frightening, but not terribly comforting, either.

For a moment she’d thought he might argue. For a moment she’d wished he would. But Marco had apparently been raised to listen when a lady says no. In the end, his only rebuke had been a clipped goodbye and an unsettling look from eyes turned cold and hard as polished obsidian.

She’d spent the quiet morning hours afterward convincing herself that she’d done the right thing.

Outside the bedroom, men like him had little use for women like her. In their eyes, she was a lowly canine patrol officer, young, blond and petite, and therefore naive, witless and weak.

He was a renegade narcotics detective. Seasoned. Some might say jaded. Not to mention tall, dark and devastatingly handsome, his near-perfect Mediterranean features flawed only by a nose slightly bent in the middle, and an attitude to match. His station-house poodle jokes about the canine squad were legend in the department.

Despite the way it had felt between them last night, he would never see her for the cop—or the woman—she was, and she wouldn’t let herself be used by a man who saw her as anything less. Not ever again.

She slammed the steel door of the warehouse, but the noise made her jerk as if she’d been jarred from a dream—or a nightmare. Bravo thumped his tail against her thigh and whined. Rubbing his favorite spot behind his ears, reassuring them both, she set out across the parking lot.

A dozen or so officers and agents milled around in wind-breakers emblazoned with Police, DEA or Customs in big, block letters. A few of the men waved. Not in the mood for conversation, she fluttered her hand as she passed by. With any luck, she could make a getaway before one of them hailed her.

“Well, Officer Burkett,” Assistant District Attorney Jarvis Bickham chirped from behind her. Paige would have known it was Bickham even if she hadn’t recognized his voice. The parrot beak he called a nose cast a long shadow in front of them as he fell in step beside her. “How are you this fine morning?”

Grinding her teeth in an effort to crush her annoyance, she cut him a hard look. “Frustrated. Just like all those other cops over there.” She waved toward the cluster of men. “Where’s the Magic your source keeps promising us?”

More and more of the drug had been turning up on the streets of Port Kingston and nearby cities every day. So far, the task force had had no luck in tracing it despite the A.D.A.’s snitch, who was supposed to be feeding them information. As if created by the sorcery it was named for, the Magic seemed to appear from nowhere.

Supercoke, the users called it. It was a form of cocaine, ultrarefined and baked into hard bricks fifty or sixty times more potent than standard coke. Its potency meant smugglers could import smaller quantities—thus eluding detection more easily—and earn the same or greater payout.

It also meant death for the uninformed kids who didn’t properly dilute the stuff before they smoked it.

Bickham tugged at his tie uncomfortably. “There were drugs, right where my source said they would be.”

She gave a derisive snort. “A few kilos of low-quality marijuana, just like last time. It’s probably worth less than the cheap pottery it was stuffed in.”

Cheap imported flowerpots of thick ceramic, glazed in colorful geometric patterns, to be exact. Five of them. But the shipping label said six. One was missing, along with the marijuana that had probably been in it. A payoff to one of the customs agents, maybe. Or stolen by a warehouse worker.

She made a mental note to check the employee roster later, and to double-check the packing slips from the other low-yield busts the task force had made this month. It was possible this wasn’t the first time they hadn’t gotten all of the dope.

“Look,” the A.D.A. said a bit too brightly, as if glad to find an excuse to change the subject. “There’s Detective Angelosi.”

Paige’s heart lurched. She stopped. At her side, Bravo automatically sat. Lowering her sunglasses, she squinted at the figure hovering around her car. It was Marco, all right.

“Maybe he’s feeling a bit more optimistic today than you,” Bickham said.

Paige shrugged noncommittally. “I doubt it.” Not after the way he’d looked when he’d left her place this morning.

Her stomach fluttered. She jammed the glasses back on her face. Maybe she’d go chat with those Drug Enforcement Administration guys, after all.

“Why don’t we just go see?” Before she could slip away, Bickham hooked his arm around hers in a grip so tight it pinched, and dragged her forward. “Angelosi?” he called.

Marco looked over his shoulder. Paige caught a glimpse of deep blue circles under reddened eyes. Sagging cheeks. An unshaved jaw. He looked just like she felt—like hell.

He scanned the lot to see who’d called. She tensed, waiting for the jolt she always felt when that dark gaze landed on her. But the jolt never came.

His gaze cut across her as if she didn’t exist, then he walked away, his shoulders hunched and his forearms guarding his middle as if his stomach hurt.

Anger pooled in her gut. The brush-off shouldn’t have surprised her, she supposed, given the way she’d treated him this morning.

But this was work, not her bedroom. She was a cop, dammit. He would show her the respect she deserved. On the job, at least.

She exploded after him. Halfway across the parking area, she caught him with Bravo at her side, Bickham on her heels and in full view of the dozen officers and agents standing around. A couple of the others gathered closer, probably sensing something was wrong in the way she reached for Marco’s sleeve and spun him to her.

“Paige, no—” he started, then stopped. For a moment, his eyes held the same vulnerability she’d seen this morning in her kitchen, and then regret, bone deep.

Bravo whined. The dog’s tail thumped on Paige’s leg as he stepped forward, sat in front of Marco and barked, then scratched at Marco’s foot.

Paige’s face wrinkled as if she’d aged decades in the span of a second. The task force officers formed ranks behind her, recognizing Bravo’s “hit” signal, the sign that he’d found drugs.

“Marco?” she whispered. The tightness in her chest prevented her from speaking louder.

Marco’s eyes went blank. Carefully, painfully blank. Sighing, he let his hands fall to his sides. His jacket opened, and the packages he’d been hiding beneath tumbled out.

“Marco…” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the five kilos of marijuana piled at his feet.

At least she needn’t second-guess her decision this morning to end their affair. Nor her presumption that he would only have used her.

Because he already had used her. He’d been using her all along, apparently, her and Bravo both, to find his drugs.

So he could steal them.

Chapter 1

Six months later

Midnight. Fitting, Paige thought, checking the luminous hands on her watch as she ran.

Midnight, moonlight, the bay of hounds muffled by a chilling mist—what better backdrop for a manhunt? Especially when the man being hunted was Marco Angelosi. Marco was a man of shadow and light, comfortable in the dark and as hard to get a handle on as a fistful of fog.

At one time he’d been a good cop. Dedicated. Driven. Although his methods were sometimes unorthodox, he’d had the best arrest record on the force, and his cases stuck.

But that Marco had been an illusion. What was fog, anyway, but a trick of the light?

Thin air.

As thin as the sharp, frosty air she couldn’t seem to pull enough of into her heaving lungs as Bravo, nose deep to the ground, pulled her along the rocky terrain of Lake Rowan State Park, fifteen miles north of Port Kingston.

“Break, Bravo.” She pulled the dog to a stop and listened, but the howling of the other canines had long ago faded into the night behind her.

Her sergeant would have her cleaning kennels until Christmas when he found out she’d broken off from the grid search and circled the lake on her own. Eventually he’d forgive her, though. He had to; he was her brother.

Besides, Sergeant Matt Burkett and the others were barking up the wrong road. She knew Marco Angelosi. Knew him intimately. She knew the confidence he had in his body.

He wasn’t on the highway.

She looked back at the black lacquer surface of Lake Rowan. That’s where Marco had gone. He’d swum the lake.

Never mind that it was February and the water temperature couldn’t be sixty degrees, or that the narrowest crossing from shore to shore spanned better than a mile.

Marco wouldn’t take the easy way.

Bending over against a stitch in her side, she raised her head to get her bearings. The shifting fog glowed around her, reflecting the light of the three-quarter moon and limiting her visibility to twenty or thirty feet in front of her. Curse this weather. It was making the job ten times harder than it should have been, and the job was hard enough already, emotionally and physically.