“Tell me the truth, Cassie, you’ve missed this.”

Her first impulse was to deny Kane’s words, to tell him that she had been perfectly satisfied with her life before the Agency tapped her for this particular assignment.

She’d thought she’d been happy arguing with her neighbor, tending her lawn, fighting with common criminals and making arrests. But she’d been fooling herself, and she knew she’d never be able to fool Kane.

“Yeah, I missed it,” she replied grudgingly. “But that doesn’t mean I’m coming back. I agreed to this one assignment, and that’s all.”

Kane reached out for her hand and twined his fingers with hers. “We were good together, Cassie. We stopped a lot of bad things from happening in the world.”

“But I couldn’t stop you from taking that bullet for me, could I?” she said. Hot tears burned her eyes, and she was appalled that this still had the power to hurt. “If I hadn’t been your lover, if we’d just been partners like we were supposed to be, then you wouldn’t have nearly died. Sorry, I can’t let you take that risk—ever again.”

Dear Reader,

Welcome to Silhouette Bombshell, the hottest new line to hit the bookshelves this summer. Who is the Silhouette Bombshell woman? She’s the bombshell of the new millennium; she’s savvy, sexy and strong. She’s just as comfortable in a cocktail dress as she is brandishing blue steel! Now she’s being featured in the four thrilling reads we’ll be bringing you each month.

What can you expect in a Silhouette Bombshell novel? A high-stakes situation in which the heroine saves the day. She’s the kind of woman who always gets her man—and we’re not just talking about the bad guy. Take a look at this month’s lineup.…

From USA TODAY bestselling author Lindsay McKenna, we have Daughter of Destiny, an action-packed adventure featuring a Native American military pilot on a quest to find the lost ark of her people. Her partner on this dangerous trek? The one man she never thought she’d see again, much less risk her life with!

This month also kicks off ATHENA FORCE, a brand-new twelve-book continuity series featuring friends bonded during their elite training and reunited when one of them is murdered. In Proof, by award-winning author Justine Davis, you’ll meet a forensic investigator on a mission, and the sexy stranger who may have deadly intentions toward her.

Veteran author Carla Cassidy brings us a babe with an attitude—and a sense of humor. Everyone wants to Get Blondie in this story of a smart-mouthed cop and the man she just can’t say no to when it comes to dealing out justice.

Finally, be the first to read hot new novelist Judith Leon’s Code Name: Dove, featuring Nova Blair, the CIA’s secret weapon. Nova’s mission this time? Seduction.

We hope you enjoy this killer lineup!

Sincerely,

Natashya Wilson

Associate Senior Editor, Silhouette Bombshell

Get Blondie
Carla Cassidy

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MILLS & BOON

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

CARLA CASSIDY

isn’t a secret agent or martial-arts expert, but she does consider herself a Bombshell kind of woman. She lives a life of love and adventure in the Midwest with her husband, Frank, and has written over fifty books for Silhouette.

Dedicated to my editor, Julie Barrett.

Thanks for all your work on this project.

Long live Bombshell heroines!

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 1

The tough punk was known as Snake on the streets of Kansas City, but in reality his name was Sammy Watson and he had a long string of outstanding warrants. As he warily faced Officer Cassandra Newton beneath the dirty glare of the overhead street lamp, he appeared more like his street name than his birth name, hissing and coiling in preparation for a fight.

Cassie threw a glance toward the patrol car parked nearby. Her partner, Asia Malone, leaned against the driver door, eating a candy bar that looked minuscule in his massive hand.

A roar from Sammy yanked her attention back where it belonged just as the young man charged her like an enraged bull. With graceful agility she sidestepped the attack, then turned to face him as he stopped and turned back toward her, his breaths coming in short, quick gasps.

“Come on, Sammy. It’s been a long day. We can make this easy, or we can make it hard,” she said as the two circled each other.

“I ain’t making nothing easy on you. No bitch cop is going to take me in.”

“Don’t get her riled, Sammy boy,” Asia called out. “I know what she’s capable of and it isn’t pretty.”

“Shut up, you big, black pile of crap,” Sammy screamed. With a surprisingly quick movement he pulled a knife from his pocket. “Come on, Blondie, let’s tango.”

Cassie sighed wearily. It had been a long day of minor irritations and this kid pulling a knife on her was the last straw. Sometimes young, ignorant creeps just needed to get their butts kicked.

She drew a deep breath and centered herself. Her first kick, sharp and crisp, sent the knife flying out of Sammy’s hand. The second one, delivered to the side of his head, sent him crashing to the ground on his hands and knees.

She put her boot in the center of his back and with a minimum of pressure flattened him to the ground. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you, Sammy…” She slapped cuffs on him and yanked him to his feet. “…I hate to tango.”

She shoved the cuffed prisoner toward her partner. “Thanks for the help,” she said dryly to Asia as he popped the last of the candy bar into his mouth.

He grinned, his white teeth gleaming in the dark of the night. “Poetry in motion,” he said. “You know how much I love to watch you work.”

“Yeah, well you get to do the paperwork when we get back to the station.”

They loaded Sammy into the back seat of their car and within minutes they were on their way back to the Kansas City, Missouri East Patrol Station House.

“I’m going to kill you,” Sammy yelled from the back seat. “You’re dead. You are one dead cop.” He kicked the seat for emphasis.

“Give it a rest, Sammy,” Cassie said. “You’ve got enough warrants against you that you’ll be on Medicare when you finally see freedom again.”

Sammy fell silent, apparently contemplating his future behind bars.

“Ah, Cassie, for years I hoped to be partnered with a person who was bigger than me,” Asia said.

She eyed him with a wry grin. It would have been next to impossible to find a man bigger than Asia. At six foot six inches tall and almost three hundred pounds, Asia had once told her he’d gotten his name because his mother had sworn she was birthing a continent when he’d come into the world.

“I never managed to find a partner bigger than me, but I definitely hit easy street when they put you with me.” He laughed, a deep, robust sound that filled the car. “Hell, I love it that I got a partner who can kick ass better than me any day of the week.”

Cassie loved having a partner whom she trusted and respected. Asia, along with his wife Serena and their four children were so wonderfully normal. And in her thirty-years on earth, Cassie had had very little normal in her life.

“Hey, Serena’s making that rice dish you like so much on Sunday. She asked me to ask you if you want to come over around two and eat with us.”

“I thought you hated that rice dish,” Cassie said as they pulled into the underground parking area.

“I do. I’m planning on sneaking a couple of steaks on the grill.” He grimaced as Sammy began yelling and kicking in the back seat. He looked back at Cassie. “You go on, get out of here. It’s past time for us to be off. I’ll process this schmuck and you can head home.”

“Thanks, Asia.” She bounded out of the patrol car and headed inside to get her personal belongings. It had been a long day and she was exhausted.

The station was relatively quiet. Wednesday nights were usually easy ones. The cops called it the midweek recovery day…the perps of the city were either resting from the past weekend or preparing for the next.

As she made her way to the desk she shared with Asia and four other patrolmen, her fellow cops greeted her.

“Hey, Cassie, we heard another one bit the dust.” Officer Gomez held up two thumbs.

She grinned at the attractive Hispanic man. “We got lucky, spotted him strolling down the sidewalk like he didn’t know he had eight warrants against him,” she replied. Gomez laughed and shook his head.

“Looks like you’ve got a secret admirer,” Jim Johnson, a vice cop said as he finger-combed his scraggly beard.

“What do you mean?”

He pointed toward her desk at the back of the room. “It was delivered just a few minutes ago by some overnight delivery service.”

A long-stemmed white rose stood in a slender gold bud vase. A blood-red ribbon was tied to one end of the rose and the other end to a cell phone.

The sight turned Cassie’s blood cold. No way, she thought as she moved on leaden feet to the desk. No way in hell were they going to sucker her into coming back. She didn’t care what was happening. She didn’t care what was at stake.

She leaned a slender hip against the desk and untied the rose from the compact phone. She knew the phone was impossible to trace and the favorite mode of communication for three groups of people…terrorists, drug dealers and the agency. This one hadn’t come from any drug dealer or terrorist.

She stared at the number pad. All she had to do was hit the redial button and she’d be connected to somebody who would tell her what they wanted her to know.

She didn’t want to know anything. The phone would only be active for a little while, then the activation would be stopped and she’d toss it in the trash.

Irritated by the mere sight of it, she grabbed the vase and the phone and threw the entire mess into the garbage can next to her desk.

“Ah, somebody is really in the doghouse when pretty flowers and a free cell phone don’t even work,” one of the officers teased.

She only wished it were something as simple as a boyfriend in her doghouse. She unlocked the desk drawer and retrieved her car keys from the jumble of items inside. Forget it, she told herself as she walked to her car parked behind the station house.

She had a relatively uncomplicated life now. She wasn’t about to risk it all to go back to work for the agency. She’d left that life five years ago and had never looked back. When they didn’t immediately get a phone call from her they would know she was out of the game permanently.

The agency had a name…SPACE…acronyms that stood for Special Personnel Against Criminal Elements. It was a secret, covert group run by John Etheridge, head of Homeland Security for the United States.

Cassie had been recruited by the agency when she was at the Police Academy in Los Angeles. She’d given SPACE four years of her life, working dangerous assignments all over the world. But she’d left the agency five years ago and vowed she’d never go back.

As she got into her car she drew a deep breath of the early summer night air. After so many years on the West Coast, Cassie had grown to love the Midwest’s four seasons.

Early summer scents brought with them a curious blend of pleasure and bittersweet pain. Kansas City was the city of her early childhood, a childhood that had ended abruptly and inexplicably on the streets of Los Angeles when she’d been eleven.

She consciously shoved thoughts of her past aside as she started her car. She tossed her hat into the back seat of the car, then began the thirty-minute drive from the station house to her ranch in the northern suburbs.

She yawned and checked the clock on the dash. Almost one o’clock. If she and Asia hadn’t spotted Sammy the Snake on the street, she would have already been snuggled into bed and fast asleep.

When she finally pulled into her driveway, she cut the engine and tapped her short nails against the steering wheel. A restless energy had begun to build inside her as the vision of that darned white rose played and replayed in her mind.

If it were earlier she’d have gone to the gym and worked it out. She could always throw some jabs on the punching bag in her spare room, but it was too late and she’d promised Max she’d meet him for breakfast early in the morning.

White Rose. It had been her code name. Another life, she thought. That life had nothing to do with the one she’d carved out for herself over the last five years.

She got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk to her front door. She couldn’t help but feel a burst of pride. Her sidewalk…her front porch…her home and nobody could ever take it away from her.

She would never again sleep on the street or in the shelter of a cardboard box or beneath the thick concrete of a highway overpass. She would never again go to sleep and be afraid of what the night might bring…of what the next day would bring.

Security. It’s what she’d finally attained in the last five years and nobody and nothing would make her risk it. She unlocked the front door, stepped inside and disarmed the security system.

When she closed the door behind her, she knew she wasn’t alone. She didn’t hear a sound, smelled only the scent of lemon oil and glass cleaner from her cleaning frenzy earlier in the day, but she knew in her gut someone had either been inside recently or was still here.

The living room was dark except for a thin stream of illumination that seeped through a crack in the front curtains from a nearby street lamp.

Moving slowly, stealthily, she reached with her right hand into her pocket and pulled out the knife she’d had since she’d been thirteen years old.

The intricately carved handle fit perfectly into her palm and when she tapped the button on the side the switchblade shot out with a faint sound. Not exactly police issue, but she never left home without it.

She shifted it from her right hand to her left, grabbing the sharp point as adrenaline pumped through her. She could hit a target faster, more accurately with the knife than she could with her gun. The knife had kept her alive for many years on the streets.

Her living room was sparsely furnished, as was the rest of the house. There was just enough light to see that there was nobody in the living room. Everything appeared to be just as she had left it when she’d gone to work at three that afternoon.

But the hair stood up on the back of her neck as she quietly advanced from the living room into the kitchen. It was darker and more difficult to discern what lie waiting in the shadows.

She stood in the doorway, willing her breathing to still, the sound of her own heartbeat to silence. Beneath the hum of the refrigerator motor she heard nothing to indicate there was another living, breathing person in the room.

Maybe she was mistaken, still charged with residual energy from the scuffle with Sammy the Snake and from receiving the unexpected communication from the agency. Maybe she was just imagining the nebulous presence of another invading her personal space.

But it had been innate instinct, intense imagination and an almost paranoid level of caution that had kept her alive until now. She’d learned through the years that when any of those three emotions went into action, it was best not to ignore them. And at the moment all three were screaming inside her.

Slowly, not making a sound, she made her way down the hall. The door to the bathroom was closed, as were the doors to the two spare bedrooms. But the door to the master bedroom at the very end of the hall stood open. She never left the doors opened.

The minute she stepped into the doorway of the bedroom she saw him…a tall dark figure standing near the window. An intruder who didn’t belong in the sanctity of her home. The instinct of survival kicked in and she raised the knife to throw…at the last minute a flash of recognition altered her aim.

The knife shot through the air and hit the wall with a sharp thud. Cassie flipped on the light switch to see the handsome dark-haired man standing against the wall, the knife embedded in the Sheetrock an inch from the left of his head.

“Losing your touch?”

“Not likely. If I hadn’t recognized you at the last minute your ear would be pinned against the wall. What are you doing here, Kane?”

She didn’t bother to ask him how he’d entered her house. There wasn’t a locked door or a security system invented that could keep Kane McNabb out if he wanted in.

He moved with a languid grace away from the window and sat on the edge of her bed. “You didn’t call.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.” She walked over to her knife and pulled it out, satisfied to see that a little putty and touch-up paint would easily heal the wall wound.

“Aren’t you intrigued?” Kane asked.

She turned back to face the man who had once been her partner and lover for two years. He hadn’t changed much in the past five years. Like a chameleon, he had the ability to look like a debonair man of means, a disreputable drug lord or a high-ranking foreign government official. He could be whatever the agency wanted him to be. The last time she’d seen him he’d been pale, lifeless and unconscious in a hospital room bed.

Now his eyes were dark and brooding and a remembered flutter of heat ignited in the pit of her stomach. She tried to ignore it. “No, I’m not intrigued. I’m tired.” She bent over and untied the laces of her black boots, then kicked them off.

“You should hear the details before you make any decision.”

“I don’t need to hear the details,” she replied coolly. “I’m not interested…and get off my bed. In fact, get out of my house.” Now that she was closer to him she could smell the scent of his familiar cologne.

To her irritation he didn’t move a muscle. “We need you, Cassie. This is big…really big.”

“I don’t care. I told you I’m not interested. Now, get out.” It was bad enough the agency wanted her back, it was sheer manipulation by them that they’d sent Kane all the way from the L.A. office to recruit her back. It made her more adamant about staying out of all of it.

He stood and moved toward the bedroom door. “So I guess it doesn’t matter to you that within two months’ time tens of thousands of men, women and children will probably be dead and you may be the only person on earth to stop the carnage.” He shrugged. “Pleasant dreams, Cassie.” He left the bedroom and she slammed the door shut behind him.

“Good riddance,” she muttered as she removed her flashlight and billy club from her belt, then took off her service revolver. As she placed the knife and gun in the drawer next to her bed, she tried not to think about what he’d said.

Tens of thousands of men, women and children, and she was the only person on earth to stop the carnage. She was sure Kane had added on that last part in an effort to appeal to her ego, but it hadn’t worked. The agency had hundreds of agents, including other females as effective as she was.

She sat on the edge of the bed and worked the tie out of her hair, allowing the long blond strands to spill free around her shoulders. Damn them. And damn him for intruding back into her life.

Her fingers moved to the top of her light blue uniform shirt, but instead of unbuttoning the buttons, her hands fell back into her lap. Tens of thousands of men, women and children. What could possibly be brewing in the underworld? Was it a terrorist plot of some sort? Certainly the world was ripe for such potential.

Damn them, she thought once again as she rose from the bed and yanked open the bedroom door. The scent of brewing coffee had just begun to make its way down the hall.

With a new rise of irritation welling up inside her, she followed the scent to the kitchen and turned on the light. Kane sat at the table, two cups in front of him awaiting the brew…and obviously her.

She wasn’t sure what she hated more, the fact that he’d found her special stash of vanilla-flavored coffee or that he knew her so well he’d anticipated her inability to remain completely uninvolved on all levels.

She threw herself into the chair opposite his, unsure if she was angry with him or angry with herself for playing right into his hands.

“I’m not promising anything, but I’ll admit, you’ve piqued my interest.”

He nodded and stood to grab the coffee carafe. “Ever hear of Adam Mercer?” he asked as he filled their cups with the fresh brew.

“Adam Mercer?” She frowned. “Isn’t he some sort of rich philanthropist?” She watched as he returned the coffee carafe to the machine. Kane moved with an almost feline grace that belied the strength and power she knew him capable of.

He returned to the chair opposite hers and wrapped a hand around his coffee mug. “Adam Mercer…fifty-four years old, wealthy as Midas and the behind the scenes leader of a grass roots coalition called MAD.”

“MAD…as in Men Against Drugs?” Kane nodded and she racked her brain to think of everything she knew about that particular organization. It was easier to focus on the matter at hand than to sort out her emotions about seeing Kane again. “All I really know about the organization is that they run several shelters around town.”

“They run a hell of a lot more than a few shelters,” Kane replied. He paused a moment to take a drink of his coffee, then continued. “At the moment MAD runs dozens of shelters in cities all across the nation. They also maintain several rehabilitation centers specifically geared toward substance abuse.”

“What does this all have to do with the death of thousands of men, women and children?” she asked impatiently. Kane McNabb had always liked the sound of his own voice.

“Adam Mercer and his organization has lobbied for law changes, provided drug education and paid for antidrug advertising. The agency began to monitor the group when it realized that MAD was gaining not only huge political support, but also amassing a cultlike following with the movers and shakers of the country.”

“Just get to the point, please.”

“Patience was never one of your strong suits.” His dark eyes gave nothing of himself away. “Bottom line…three years ago Adam lost his only daughter to a drug overdose. He lost his daughter, then months after that his wife left him and we think he’s gone off the deep end. The man has lost his mind to hatred and an obsessive need to wipe out all drug use.”

He paused to take another sip of his coffee. “Several months ago a new kind of marijuana and cocaine hit the streets. It was called Blue…Blue grass or Blue snow…because it has a faint blue tinge to it. It’s better, purer and stronger than anything that’s hit the streets in years.”

“I heard a couple of vice cops talking about it,” she said and sat up straighter in her chair. “They said it was the most potent stuff they’d ever seen, but if I remember right, nobody ever figured out where it came from.”

“A month ago it dried up. You can’t find any Blue on the streets anywhere in any city right now. The demand is huge, but the supply is gone.”

“So what does this have to do with Adam Mercer?”

“He supplied the original Blue, then he pulled it off the market to create an enormous demand.”

Cassie stared at Kane in disbelief. “That doesn’t make sense. You just told me the man is over-the-top antidrug and now you’re telling me he’s become a drug czar providing the best dope in America? That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, but there’s a method behind the madness,” Kane replied. He shoved his coffee mug to the side and leaned across the table toward her. “He’s managed to create a huge supply of Blue and our sources tell us in the next couple of months he intends to flood the market with more Blue…except this time the drugs will be highly lethal. He’ll kill the users, put the dealers out of business and rid the world of the scourge of drugs.”

Cassie leaned back in her chair, stunned by the ramifications of what he’d just told her. “But that’s insane,” she said softly. “It’s not only insane, it won’t work. The minute people started dying, we’d be able to get an alert to the public about the tainted drugs.”

“You know that and I know that, but apparently Mercer has lost touch with reality.” Kane’s dark gaze held hers. “He’s crazy all right, but also highly intelligent.”

“So what are you doing here talking to me?”

“We need somebody to get inside the organization…get up close and personal to Adam Mercer.”

“And what makes you think I can get up close and personal with him?”

His gaze slowly slid the length of her. “Because Adam Mercer has a weakness for sexy, long-legged blondes.”

The heat that had flickered to life in her stomach moments before intensified beneath his gaze. “So how would somebody go about meeting Adam Mercer?”

“Mercer frequents a nightclub called Night Life. It’s an upscale kind of place and his last two relationships have been with waitresses that work there. We’ve got a contact there and whomever we send in will have a job as a cocktail waitress.”

There was no way she was going to get roped into this, she told herself. “There are plenty of other women in the agency that can do this. I’m not interested.”

She stood and carried her cup to the sink, where she emptied out the coffee, shut off the coffeemaker and turned back to him. “Get somebody else. I have a nice, uncomplicated, complete life here. I don’t intend to screw it up.”

“Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I just thought maybe you’d be personally interested in this particular job.”

She eyed him warily. “What do you mean…personally interested?”

He finished the last of the coffee in his cup and also stood. “Adam Mercer and his team have worked with drug addicts in this city and others for years. Sources tell us he maintains a data base with the names of all the people he’s helped in the cities where MAD works. It’s possible at one time or another he ran into your mother. It’s possible he might have some information about both your mother and your brother.”

“Get out.” She was grateful her voice contained nothing more than the cold command, grateful that there was no indication of the emotions his words had stirred.

“Cassie…”

“I mean it, Kane. Get out of here now.”

He placed a piece of paper on the table, then moved to the back door and grabbed the handle. “Twenty-four hours, Cassie. You have twenty-four hours to make up your mind. That’s the address where you can find us.” With these final words he slipped through the door.

She reset her alarm system, then stalked out of the kitchen and into the spare bedroom that held nothing but her punching bag.

She pulled on the lightweight red gloves, then the padded foot protectors. She drew several deep, cleansing breaths in an attempt to gain control of the emotions that threatened to surface.

Thoughts of her mother always brought with them a strange combination of bittersweet longing and anger. Mingling with those two emotions was a tinge of reluctant excitement as she thought of going back to work for the agency.

However, the most threatening, confusing emotions she felt at the moment concerned Kane McNabb. She’d thought she’d forgotten him. She’d worked so hard to forget everything about him. But seeing him again had forced memories back into her head…the memory of lying in his arms, of feeling his body against her own, of seeing him almost die.

She delivered a roundhouse kick to the bag, then followed it up with a flurry of punches that left her half-breathless. Damn them.

Damn them for contacting her again and for manipulating her with her past by making Kane the contact. As if it wasn’t bad enough seeing him again, he’d given her the one compelling reason she’d find it difficult to say no.

Chapter 2

Cassie didn’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. She woke up on the wrong side of the world. She’d slept restlessly, her sleep filled with nightmares that weren’t so much the fantasies of unconsciousness, but rather memories she’d spent her adult life trying to forget.

The morning was heralded in when her neighbor, Ralph Watters started his lawn mower. Like clockwork, every Saturday morning at precisely eight o’clock, the man began yardwork.

Cassie might have gotten used to the monotonous whir of the mower, but Ralph didn’t stop there. After the mower he cranked up a weed eater and after whacking weeds to an inch of their lives, he used a high power blower to blast ever speck of grass, dirt and dog crap off his driveway and sidewalk.

Many an early Saturday Cassie had fantasized about taking that blower and blowing old Mr. Watters into the next subdivision.

She might have forgiven the man his fanatical fixation with noisy machines if he wasn’t such a cantankerous old fart whose pastime was making Cassie’s life miserable.

She pulled herself out of bed to the growl of the nearby mower and padded into the kitchen to get the coffee started. Surely a cup of coffee and a hot shower would help the foul mood she felt building inside her.

Moments later she stood beneath a hot spray of water, trying to forget her late-night visitor, trying not to remember the words Kane had spoken to her.

Drugs and death. The combination was certainly not anything new, but the scenario Kane had painted had been chilling.

And if that wasn’t incentive enough for her to join the team, Kane had found it necessary to dangle the carrot of the possibility of gaining information about her mother and her brother.

She stepped out of the shower and, wrapped in a towel, went back into her bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed she pulled open the drawer in her nightstand.

Inside were several items…a box of tissues, a half-eaten bag of M&M’s, a manila folder filled with papers and a small silver trinket box. It was the trinket box she withdrew and placed on the bed next to her.

She rarely opened it, almost never took out the item it contained, but she opened it now and stared at the thin gold chain and gold heart-shaped locket that rested inside.

When she’d been twelve years old she’d nearly lost her life protecting the necklace when an older street kid had tried to take it away from her. The necklace was the only link she had to the mother who had abandoned her and the little brother who had called her Ci-Ci.

The teenage punk had managed to yank the chain from her neck, but he’d dropped it. When he bent down to the sidewalk to swipe it up, Cassie discovered the power she had in her legs. She’d already spent a year on the streets, alone and afraid, surviving by instincts she didn’t understand and didn’t question.

As the punk had bent over she’d kicked him, connecting with his upper chest. He fell to the sidewalk, his breath whooshing out of his lungs like air from a depleted balloon. Pumping with adrenaline, she’d kicked him one more time in the ribs, then had scooped up her necklace and run like the wind.

She’d never had the chain fixed. It was still broken and was too small for her neck now anyway. She picked up the locket and held it for a long moment in her hand. It was cool, and yet burned her palm as if on fire.

Her mother had given it to her the week before they’d left their home in Kansas City to travel to California to start a new life. Cassie had been thrilled with the unexpected present. Of course, she hadn’t known at the time that it was a going-away present and she would eventually be left behind while her mother, her brother and her mother’s boyfriend went off into the sunset.

She opened it and stared at the two tiny photos held within. The one on the left side was of a blond woman with too much makeup and a desperate kind of hunger in her smile. On the right was the image of a little boy with a blond crew cut and laughing eyes.

She touched the picture of the child with her index finger. Billy. He’d been five when her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had dumped her out of a battered pickup on the streets of Los Angeles. The last vision she’d had of him was of his sad little face peeking out the grimy back window of a pickup truck.

“We’ll be back in an hour.” Cassie could still hear her mother’s voice as the pickup zoomed away.

Back in an hour, yeah, right. She shoved aside an ache that never completely went away and snapped the locket closed. She threw it into the trinket box, then placed the box back in the drawer and slammed it shut. That hour had stretched into forever.

For just a moment she was that child again, standing on the street corner waiting for her family to return. She could taste the fear that had twisted up from her stomach. She swallowed hard and shook her head to dispel the images.

In a moment of weakness she’d told Kane about her past. And now she hated the fact that he knew her Achilles’ heel.

She hastily pulled on a pair of red workout shorts, a matching sports bra and a large white tank shirt. It was Kane’s fault that she was in a foul mood since opening her eyes this morning.

Kane McNabb was just as sinfully handsome now as he’d been five years before. The two of them had made a terrific team. Like synchronized swimmers, they’d worked with one mind, swimming the waters of danger in perfect rhythm.

They’d spent two weeks in Libya posing as husband and wife scientists in an effort to learn how close Qaddafi really was to obtaining nuclear weapons. They’d pretended to be brother and sister for several weeks to infiltrate a cult in South Carolina.

Their assignments took them far away from home or as near as their own city as they took care of problems that fell through the bureaucratic cracks of other agencies.

He’d also been the best lover she’d ever had. But that was the past and the past was best left alone.

After two cups of coffee she felt lucid enough to get behind the steering wheel of her car. Max would be expecting her between now and noon for their ritual Saturday morning breakfast. If anyone could put her right with the world again it was Max Monroe.

Before she left the house, she grabbed the address that Kane had left on the table the night before and shoved it into the bottom of her tan purse.

The June sun was already hot despite the early hour as Cassie left her house by the front door. As if on cue before she could reach her red Mustang in the driveway the sound of the lawn mower came to an abrupt halt.

“Ms. Newton…Cassandra.” Ralph hurried toward her, his bulldog features in a pregrowl expression.

Cassie hesitated. She had two choices…quickly jump in her car and drive away or stand and bicker with her pesky neighbor. Before she could make a choice he stood directly in front of her. Procrastination would one day be the death of her, she thought with a sigh.

“I’ve been trying to speak to you for the past week,” Ralph exclaimed, his jowls flopping with each word. “Haven’t you received any of my notes?”

About every other day for the past two weeks Ralph had been taping notes to her front door. She could wall-paper her bathroom with all the notes he’d left.

“Mr. Watters, I’ve read your notes, but we have nothing more to discuss.” Cassie tried to keep her voice pleasant.

“I want that tree cut down.” The tree he referred to was a lush sugar maple just inside her property line in the backyard. Ralph was obviously not a member of the Hug a Tree Association.

“We’ve been through this a dozen times. I’m not cutting down that tree.” She smiled in an attempt to soften her words.

“That tree is a nuisance. It sheds seeds all over my property in the spring and leaves in the fall.”

“But it’s a beautiful tree and it provides wonderful shade,” she replied.

“Then what about that bush?” He pointed to the bush next to her front porch.

“What about it?”

“It’s dead,” he exclaimed.

“It’s dormant,” she countered.

He snorted. “If I was that dormant they’d have me in a coffin and buried six feet under.” A spot of spittle flew out of his mouth and landed on his chin. He swiped at it with the back of his hand and drew a deep breath. “I’m just trying to be a good neighbor here, you know, keep the neighborhood looking nice.”

Cassie had to fight the impulse to snort back at him. “And I appreciate it. Have a nice day, Mr. Watters.” Before giving him an opportunity to reply she slid into her car and started the engine with a roar.

She backed down the driveway, then threw the car into first gear and popped the clutch. Tires whined, then grabbed with a squeal as she peeled down the street.

An utterly childish display, Cassandra Marie Newton. Still, she smiled in satisfaction as she imagined Ralph’s outrage at her antics. Sometimes being childish was mentally healthy.

She shoved thoughts of Ralph Watters out of her mind as she made the fifteen-minute drive from her home to Good Life Gardens, the assisted-living facility where Max lived.

Built with a flair of Spanish-flavored architecture, Good Life Gardens was an immense sprawl of buildings on twenty acres of lush, treed acreage. When Cassie had moved Max from California, it had taken her months to find a place she thought worthy of Max’s presence. Good Life Gardens had lived up to her expectations.

The complex was enormous, but Max was never difficult to find. If he wasn’t in his apartment, all she had to do was check the common areas, and wherever there was the biggest gathering of little old women, Max would be in the center.

Max loved the women, but Saturday mornings were devoted to the little girl he’d met on the streets of Los Angeles, the teenager he’d taught everything he knew, the woman he loved like a daughter.

Cassie could smell the scent of cooked breakfast sausage before she reached his door. The savory scent brought back memories. The first meal Max had ever cooked for her had been sausage and eggs.

She’d been almost fourteen and after three years of living on fruit swiped from an open market and whatever could be found in Dumpsters and trash cans, those eggs and sausage had seemed like a gift from a God she’d begun to think had forgotten her.

She rapped on the door twice, then turned the knob as Max’s deep voice boomed a welcome. She found him in the kitchen pulling a tray of golden-brown biscuits from the oven.

“Juice is in the fridge, coffee’s made and breakfast will be ready in another ten minutes or so.”

“And good morning to you, too.” Cassie walked over to him and bent to plant a kiss on the top of his head.

He grinned at her. “It will be a good morning if this new egg casserole recipe lives up to its ingredients.”

Cassie poured herself a tall glass of orange juice then sat at the small oak table and watched him finish the breakfast preparations.

Max Monroe, known as “Mad Max” in his Hollywood stuntman days was still handsome at almost seventy years old. His hair, so black and shiny when she’d first met him, now sported shiny strands of silver. His features were ruggedly handsome and his brown eyes snapped with the gift of laughter and an exuberant love of life.

Too many movie stunts had put him in a wheelchair. Although he wasn’t paralyzed, crushed and shattered discs in his back caused him excruciating pain when he tried to stand on his feet. A yearlong bout with a whiskey bottle had made him nearly lose his mind.

He’d always said that finding Cassie had saved his life, but she knew the truth. If it hadn’t been for Max Monroe Cassie would have probably been in jail, or on drugs, or a prostitute…or dead.

Although Cassie had continued to live on the streets of L.A. until she was seventeen, Max had taken her under his wing. He’d taught her everything he knew about physical strength and skill, about martial arts and achieving death-defying feats.

He’d also educated her so that she could get her GED and build something of her life. He’d been her savior and she would die for him.

They didn’t speak until breakfast was ready and Max had wheeled himself to the table opposite where she sat. “You got that look,” he observed as he passed her the plate of biscuits.

“What look?”

“You know, the one where you look like you want to tear somebody’s head off and spit down their neck. Old Ralph giving you a hard time again?” he guessed correctly.

Cassie laughed, already feeling her foul mood transforming into something more positive. “The man is relentless.” She pulled apart a biscuit and began to slather each half with butter. “Out of all the neighborhoods in Kansas City, out of all the people I could live next to, I get Mr. Rogers with an attitude.”

Max laughed and shoved the plate of sausage patties closer to her. “You take the man too seriously.”

“Too seriously? He wants me to cut down that beautiful tree in my backyard. Now this morning he asked me what I was going to do about one of the bushes by my front porch.”

“You mean that dead bush?”

“It’s dormant, not dead.”

Max raised an eyebrow and eyed her wryly. “He’s a lonely old man.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t be so lonely if he wasn’t such a pain in the neck,” she retorted.

The last of her irritation faded as they began to eat and indulged in small talk. Max told her about his lady friends and the most recent social activities he’d attended and she talked about her plans to redecorate her living room.

It was the kind of benign chatter between two old friends that was comforting in its utter banality.

It wasn’t until they were clearing the table that Cassie decided it was time to move out of the small talk arena and into what was really on her mind. “I had a late-night visitor last night.”

Max made no reply. He knew her well enough to know she’d tell him what she wanted him to know in her own time.

“I thought it was a burglar and almost took his nose off with my knife, but it was Kane.” Even just saying his name aloud caused a wistful regret to sweep through her.

“Been a long time,” Max said.

“Yes, it has.” She sighed. “The agency wants me back.”

Max motioned toward the coffeepot. “Pour us each a cup and let’s go into the living room and you can tell me all about it.” He disappeared out of the small kitchen.

Cassie poured the two cups of coffee and followed Max into the bright, airy living room. One entire wall held an entertainment system that contained a huge television set and Max’s movie collection.

In the sixties and seventies Max had worked as a stuntman in over a hundred action-adventure and Western films. No matter how small or large his part, he owned a copy of every movie he’d ever been in.

The little old ladies who lived in the complex loved movie night when they all gathered in a great room and watched one of Max’s movies as he narrated his part in the film.

Cassie set his coffee cup on the tray next to where he sat, then placed her own on the coffee table. But she didn’t sit. Talking about Kane, talking about the agency made her far too restless.

“Tell me,” Max said as she paced back and forth before him. “What do they want from you?”

Briefly she told Max what Kane had told her the night before, about Adam Mercer, his suspected plans and his deadly drug called Blue. It sounded just as crazy now as it had when Kane had explained it to her the night before. It sounded so crazy it had a terrifying ring of truth to it.

Max listened without expression, occasionally taking a sip of his coffee and nodding his head. “So what exactly do they want from you?” he asked when she’d finished.

“They want me to go undercover, get close to Adam Mercer and find out when and where the tainted drug shipment is to arrive.” She flopped down on the sofa.

Max finished the last sip of coffee and set his cup down. “I wish you were still doing stunt work. I’d worry much less about you.”

She smiled at him affectionately. “You know I just did those movies to pay for college. I never really wanted to be a movie stuntwoman,” she replied. Between her eighteenth and her twenty-first birthday, Cassie had done stunt work in a number of movies thanks to Max’s training. “You know my goal was always to be a cop.”

“I know, but you would have been one of the best stuntwomen in the business.” Max shook his head, his eyes filled with reflections of the past. “I’ll never forget that first time I saw you. I’d heard about you for weeks. All the security guards were talking about the kid who kept sneaking onto the lot.”

Cassie smiled at the memory. Max had been working as a stunt coordinator on a movie on the Embassy Pictures studio lot where Cassie had been hanging out.

She loved the lot, where magic abounded in warehouses filled with furniture and scene backdrops, old costumes and various props. Although security was tight around the lot, Cassie always managed to find a way inside.

She’d watch the action as the various movie scenes were shot, join the lunch lines for the hearty fare served in the cafeteria and pretend to be one of the extras until somebody caught on to her. Then she’d scamper like a rat, afraid that if she were caught, afraid that if somebody found out she had no parents, no home, she’d be sent to a foster home. She had heard too many horror stories about foster care from other kids living on the streets to want to try that avenue.

“That first time I saw you running down the lot, then darting into that alley and climbing the fence like a monkey, I knew you were something special. You had physical abilities I’d only dreamed of possessing.”

She smiled. “And the first time I saw you I thought you were some kind of pervert trying to pick me up for nefarious activities.”

Max laughed again then sobered and clasped his hands together in his lap. “Don’t forget, it was your stunt work that brought you to the attention of the agency.”

“I know.” She frowned thoughtfully. It hadn’t just been her stunt work alone that had brought her to the attention of SPACE. She’d just finished the police academy and was enrolled in criminology courses at the community college when a man from SPACE had contacted her about working for them.

“So when do you start?”

She stood once again. “I haven’t decided if I’m going to do it yet.”

“Yes, you have.” He smiled, the smile of a man who knew her too well. “If you hadn’t already decided to work with the agency, you wouldn’t have told me about any of it.”

He was right. She walked over to the sliding glass doors that led out onto a tiny patio. Beyond the patio was a tall wooden privacy fence.

She stared at the fence for a long moment as she contemplated going back to work for SPACE. She knew the kind of calculation that went into each assignment the agency made. If they had tapped her it was because they believed she was the best agent for this particular job.

She was a cop, sworn to protect her community and this was even bigger than her community. How could she turn her back and walk away? The possibility that she might discover something about her mother and brother’s whereabouts would be a nice by-product.

“Kane thinks it’s possible Adam Mercer might have information about my mother,” she finally said.

“Is that possible?”

She turned from the sliding door to face Max. “I suppose. We know that ten years ago she left California and came back here to her roots. We also know that she was arrested on possession charges here in Kansas City. But no one has heard from her since. I’d say it’s quite likely she and Adam Mercer could have crossed paths at one point or another, though. It’s also a rumor that Mercer keeps records of all the addicts he helps.”

“Then you have to do this, Cassie,” Max said. “You might finally get the answers you’ve been seeking.”

“Maybe.” She knew better than to get her hopes up. She’d gone into police work in the first place in the hopes that the job might help her find her missing family. She needed to know that they were okay, especially the baby brother she’d adored.

She’d hired a private investigator just last year to try to find her mother and brother, but his search had yielded no results. Even though she was angry with her mother’s choices, she needed to know why she’d been thrown away.

“You’ll never be completely at peace until you resolve the issues from your childhood.”

“Have you been watching Dr. Phil again?” she teased.

“You need to heal the wounds of your inner child.”

“Okay, enough already.”

“You also need to resolve your feelings where Kane is concerned. You need closure on several levels,” Max finished.

Cassie wanted to argue with him, to tell him that he was espousing a bunch of psychobabble. But his words shot straight to her heart, to all the wounded areas that existed inside her, and as much as she hated to admit it, she knew he was right.

Chapter 3

Cassie compared the address on the slip of paper Kane had left her to the one on the front of the downtown brick six-story building. The addresses were the same although the sign on the building proclaimed the establishment on the ground level to be Eddie’s Employment Agency. The floors above the employment agency appeared to be empty.

The building was in an area of Kansas City that hadn’t yet seen the efforts of revitalization of the downtown area. The buildings on either side appeared abandoned, storefronts boarded with plywood that sported the usual colorful and obscene graffiti.

The street was relatively deserted considering it was just after noon, but she wasn’t surprised that SPACE would choose this kind of area for a mobile base.

During the four years that Cassie had worked with the agency, she’d frequented a number of “fronts” in a number of cities used for conducting business. They

were usually set up in areas where there was little foot traffic and where it wasn’t unusual for stores to appear and disappear in short time.

It had been explained to Cassie at her recruitment that because much of what SPACE did pertained to national security and many of the agents found it necessary to work outside of the law, the agency was top secret.

The agency had been dealing more and more with domestic matters following 9/11, while other agencies like the CIA and FBI focused more on terrorists.

Cassie didn’t know where the home office of the agency was, but she suspected it was somewhere in Washington, D.C. She’d always worked out of mobile offices like the one she had just left.

In truth, she knew very little about the agency, although Kane had once told her part of the history. It had begun in the mid-eighties as one of many covert agencies run by the government to deal with problems both foreign and domestic that might need special handling. The agents didn’t have to worry about the restrictions that often bound the hands of law enforcement and were highly trained both physically and mentally for all circumstances.

Cassie wasn’t sure how their recruitment ordinarily worked. She’d come to the attention of somebody because of her stunt work in several movies. Apparently an extensive background check had been run on her and they liked what they saw. It didn’t hurt that she had no family. In fact, Kane had told her the agency preferred their operatives to have no families.

Ancient history and in a few minutes she would be back in the fold of the agency she’d left behind.

She remained in the car for a long moment, staring at the old brick building. It wasn’t too late to change her mind, to turn her car around and forget everything that Kane had told her the night before.

She could go back to her ordinary life, arresting bad guys, bickering with her cantankerous neighbor and having breakfast with Max.

All she’d have to worry about were the nightmares that would plague her as she thought of the danger hitting the streets in the form of a deadly drug.

In truth, she had no choice. She hated nightmares.

She got out of her car and approached the building, aware that once she opened the door and walked inside the relatively peaceful life she’d built for herself would be transformed into something much different.

The interior looked like a hundred other employment agencies. Plastic orange chairs lined one wall, a table provided a place to fill out applications and a water cooler occasionally gurgled from its position in one corner.

A receptionist at a small metal desk looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. “Hi, can I help you?”

“I’d like to fill out an application,” Cassie said.

At that moment a door behind the receptionist’s desk opened and a tall gray-haired man stepped into view. “Cassie, it’s good to see you.”

“Hello, Greg.” Cassie smiled at Greg Cole, the man who had recruited her into the agency years ago.

“Why don’t you come on back. I’ve been hoping you’d show up.”

A sense of déjà vu filled Cassie as she followed him down a long hallway and into a private office. He motioned her into one of the two chairs that faced a large, mahogany desk.

She sank down in one of the chairs, suddenly feeling much like she had nine years ago when she’d had her first private meeting with Greg. Excitement and anxiety battled each other inside her as she waited for Greg to get settled in the chair behind the desk.

Once he was seated, he smiled at her again. “You look good, Cassie.”

“It’s all that good, clean normal living I’ve been doing,” she replied and felt herself begin to relax. The old, familiar excitement was quickly taking over the anxiety. She recognized that she was not only back with the agency physically, but emotionally as well.

Greg Cole was a distinguished-looking man about fifty years old. With his steel-gray hair and blue eyes, clad in a three-piece tailored pale gray suit he looked like he’d come from the same mold as a thousand other successful businessmen.

But Cassie had seen Greg put a bullet between the eyes of a paid assassin yards away. She’d seen him scale a twenty-foot fence like a monkey climbing a tree. Greg was much more than a man behind a desk pushing papers.

“Something is agreeing with you,” he said. “We’ve heard good things about you since you’ve been away

from us. Eight commendations, a folder full of civilian praise for you and a stellar record that proves you’re better than most police officers.”

So they’d kept tabs on her since she’d left the agency. Somehow she wasn’t surprised. “I try to be the best at what I do.”

“You were one of the best agents we ever had when it came to working the streets.”

That had been Cassie’s specialty. Her early experiences on the streets of L.A. had given her an insight into the language, the nuances, the underbelly of that world that few people truly understood.

It was something that couldn’t be taught, but had to be experienced and it was part of what had made her valuable to the agency. She’d been useful in information gathering from the streets, able to tap into gangs, drug dealers and weapon deals by knowing who to listen to and what to say.

“You know what they say, you can take the girl off the street, but you can’t take the street out of the girl,” she said.

“I don’t know about that, you manage to clean up pretty well.” Greg’s smile not only held genuine affection, but respect as well.

During the time she had worked for the agency, Greg had always been the superior she reported to and she’d never doubted the man’s integrity and belief in all the agency stood for. She hadn’t left because she didn’t believe in their work. She’d left before she could completely destroy one of their top men.

However, she also knew that Greg’s loyalty was to the agency and agents were expendable when it came to protecting SPACE.

He leaned back in the chair and patted his breast pocket absently. Cassie smiled, realizing the pocket that had always held a pack of cigarettes was empty. “How long since you quit?”

“Six months, but old habits die hard. Kane filled you in?” She nodded and Greg continued. “It’s an insidious plot devised by a devious man.”

“Sounds like a nutcase with a nutty plan,” she said.

“Perhaps, but it’s a mistake to go into this and think Adam Mercer is just your garden variety nut. He’s far too intelligent, far too resourceful to be written off so easily.”

A knock on the door interrupted the conversation. “Come in,” Greg called and Cassie half turned in her chair to see Kane enter the room.

Instantly she felt every muscle in her body tense. She hadn’t expected him to be here.

“Cassie,” he said and nodded in her direction, then took the chair next to hers. She nodded back at him, then returned her attention to Greg.

Shock had gotten her through last night’s unexpected meeting with him but seeing him again now brought forth feelings she hadn’t expected…or wanted.

There was that initial blaze of physical attraction that had always burned inside her for him. It was an attraction built not only on the mysterious forces that worked between a man and a woman, but also on memories of their explosive lovemaking and the intimacies they had once shared. But she also felt guilt…for what had happened on their last assignment. And for leaving him and the agency behind.

“Kane, now that you’re here we can all go over the game plan,” Greg said.

She shot a quick glance at Kane who, despite being seated, radiated with an underlying taut energy. He didn’t return her gaze. Kane smelled the same as she remembered, a wonderful blend of wildness and spice. But she didn’t remember his eyes being as dark, as brooding as they were now.

“We have to stop this shipment.” Greg looked at Kane, then to Cassie.

She shook her head ruefully. “It seems strange. You’re asking me to save the people who under normal circumstances I’d be arresting…drug users and dealers.”

“That’s true and yes, we find ourselves in an unusual position here. But it isn’t just the guilty we’re trying to protect. Innocent lives will be affected if this drug gets on the market. We’re talking about first-time users, college students who succumb to peer pressure, even kids who mistakenly get hold of it.”

“We can worry about the dope dealers and users later,” Kane said. “Right now the man we need to get off the streets is Adam Mercer.”

“Why aren’t the local authorities taking care of this?” Cassie asked. She’d never been certain what criteria were used to determine if the agency would get involved.

“We took it over due to the special circumstances of the potential for thousands of deaths,” Greg explained. “We’re coordinating with DEA.”

“Okay, so what’s the plan?” Kane asked.

As Greg outlined how it would go down, what would be expected of her and the dangers, Cassie wondered what Kane was thinking.

He’d always been difficult to read, but there had been a time when he’d shared more of himself with her than she suspected he ever had anyone else. And she’d simply turned her back on him and walked away. He had to hate her now…or maybe their relationship had never meant enough to him to warrant that kind of intense emotion.

She’d halfway hoped that he was simply the contact man and would have nothing else to do with the actual operation. But the fact that he was here told her she’d have to work directly with Kane. They couldn’t fix old wounds now. Not after all this time.

She focused her full attention back on Greg. “One thing you have to understand, Cassie. You’ll be deep undercover and that means little or no backup.”

“I understand that,” she replied.

“You sure you’re up to it?” Kane asked. “I mean, it’s been a long time since you’ve played this kind of game.”

Her back stiffened as she sensed him questioning her competency. “I’m in better shape physically and mentally now than I’ve ever been. Just because I haven’t played the game in a while doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten how to play.”

“Then you’re in?” Greg asked.

“I’m in.”

“Kane will be your contact. Is that going to be a problem?”

For the first time Kane looked at her and in his dark gaze she thought she saw the hint of challenge. “No problem here,” he said.

“Fine with me,” she replied and looked back at Greg.

“Good, then we’re set to begin.” Once again Greg went over the plans, detailing the work that would be done before Cassie went undercover.

It was nearly two hours later when she left Eddie’s Employment Agency and headed for the station house. She needed to arrange for time off her job, which shouldn’t be a problem as she had plenty of vacation time accrued.

She knew that within the next couple of hours Eddie’s Employment Agency would be shut down. All the equipment would be moved and there would be no evidence that a business had been there.

She pulled into the parking lot behind the station house but remained in her car.

She’d have to come up with a logical reason for requesting time off. If she didn’t, Asia would wonder what was going on and she knew how relentless her partner could be if he smelled any kind of a mystery.

A rush of adrenaline filled her as the full realization of what she’d agreed to hit her. White Rose was back in action.

Kane sat in a car parked in the lot of a Motel 6 located on the north side of Kansas City. He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel then checked his watch.

Quarter until eight. Another fifteen minutes and she should arrive at this location. He’d never known Cassie to be late.

He leaned back against the headrest and thought of the woman who had been his partner five years ago.

Cassandra Newton had been the best partner he’d ever had. She’d not only been exceptionally bright, but tough as nails as well. She had amazing physical ability. She could punch like a man, kick like a kangaroo, and had moves that would made Jackie Chan turn green with envy.

She was almost as deadly with a gun as she was with her knives and she had a natural cunning that made her a survivor. She’d been a hell of a partner. She’d been the one lover he hadn’t been able to forget.

He leaned forward and switched the air-conditioner fan from low to high, his thoughts still consumed by Cassie. He’d kept tabs on her over the past five years even though he knew if she found this out she’d despise him for it.

He knew she liked her toast light, her pizza with mushrooms and her coffee black. He knew she worked out at a gym near her home four or five times a week, that she’d received nearly a dozen commendations as a police officer and that she hadn’t dated anyone in the five years since they’d been together.

He knew all that about her, but he didn’t know why she’d walked out on him and the agency when he’d needed her most. An edge of anger rose up inside him and he consciously shoved it aside. He couldn’t let their past complicate the job they had to do now.

The streak of color he’d enjoyed in the sky lasted only minutes, then was gone in the purple shades of early night. There were only a few cars parked in the spaces in front of the motel rooms. Business wasn’t booming for this particular motel.

He tapped his fingers once again on the steering wheel as he waited impatiently for her to show up.

He hadn’t wanted to bring her back in. She’d managed to do what so many agents found impossible…build a normal life as a productive citizen. He hadn’t wanted to screw things up for her, pluck her from her ordinary existence and place her into danger.

However, Cole had insisted that she was the right woman, the only woman for this particular job. Kane knew there was nothing Cole would like better than to pull Cassie back into the fold, to get out of her “retirement” and working once again for the agency.

But, Kane had to admit, Cassie was the best woman for this job. She was not only Adam Mercer’s type, but she knew the city. If she was going to work it, then Kane wouldn’t allow any other agent to work with her but him. He knew her. He knew how she thought, how she worked. He knew her strengths and her weaknesses. There was no way he’d allow any other man to back her up.

Deep in his heart, he’d known she would take the job. Cassie was an adrenaline junkie. In this they were on the same wavelength. And if that hadn’t been incentive enough to bring her on board, he’d known the information about her family would entice her. He’d felt guilty

about using that particular card to get her back into the game but he knew it was a shoe-in.

When she’d first joined the agency a search had been conducted for the mother who had abandoned her and the brother she’d never seen again. But even the agency, with its far-reaching tentacles and information highways couldn’t find the scent of a ghost.

He sat up straighter in his seat as he saw Cassie’s red Mustang approach, then turn into the parking lot. She pulled up in front of room 115 just as she’d been instructed and parked.

She slid out of the car, her long blond ponytail keeping time with her subtle hip movement as she strode from the car to the door of the motel room. She carried nothing with her but the motel room key, but he knew beneath her short skirt and blouse she had no less than two knives hidden. Cassie never went anywhere without her knives.

He knew the minute she spied him. Her gaze met his, then slid away as if she didn’t know him. But her back stiffened and her gait appeared less fluid.

Working with her again was going to be both exhilarating and torturous. She was the most complicated woman he’d ever known, independent and competent and yet exuding a vulnerability that she seemed unaware of and would anger her if she became aware of it.

Working with her again would have been so much easier if they hadn’t shared a past…an intense past both as partners and lovers.

She didn’t seem to suffer any regrets about walking away from him. In the brief time he’d seen her two nights ago in her apartment and again yesterday in Cole’s mobile office, she’d been cool and collected.

Again a burn of anger built inside him, but he forced it down. There was no place for anger…or any other kind of emotion where she was concerned. Emotion was dangerous. He had to remember that, it might make the difference between life and death.

As she disappeared into the motel room, he shut off the engine of his car and got out. It was just after eight but the lateness of the hour hadn’t done much to ease the heat and humidity of the day. Early June and already records were being broken. July would be a killer unless the current weather pattern broke.

From the trunk of his car he removed a suitcase, then headed toward the motel room where Cassie would be staying for the next couple of days.

If Cassie thought this was going to be all business, she was in for a shock. Because he still had questions she’d never answered. Questions that would finally let him close the door on their past.

Let the games begin.

Chapter 4

Cassie stepped into the motel room and looked around, knowing she had only moments before Kane would come in. A quick glance around the room showed it to be like any other budget motel room in the city.

Two beds covered with identical shabby gold spreads, shag carpeting that was probably older than Cassie’s thirty years. A small table took up the space of one corner and a television was bolted to the top of a set of dresser drawers.

This would be her home for the next couple of days, until Kane deemed her ready for the undercover task ahead of her. She would not be lounging in bed and ordering up room service. She would be spending her time learning everything there was to know about Adam Mercer and whatever persona they had chosen for her to become.

She heard a brisk knock on the door. Kane. She drew a deep breath, steeling herself for what lay ahead and opened the door.

He breezed past her and dropped the suitcase he carried on top of the bed closest to the door. She closed and locked the door behind him, then turned to face him.

“Ready to begin?” he asked.

No hello, no how are you. All business. If that’s the way he wanted it, fine with her. “Whenever you are,” she replied. She sat in one of the chairs at the tiny round table in the corner of the room.

He opened the suitcase and withdrew a thick manila folder. “You took care of what you needed to in order to disappear for an extended period of time?”

She nodded. “I’m on vacation with the police force and I told my partner that I was leaving town to chase down a lead on my mother and didn’t know when I’d return.”

Kane tossed the folder onto the top of the table and sat down in the chair opposite her. “Everything you need to know about Adam Mercer and everything you need to know about Jessica Sinclair.”

“Jessica Sinclair?”

“That’s your cover. You need to learn everything in that folder backward and forward. I don’t need to tell you that your life might depend on it.”

The file was thick, filled with information she’d need to know as well as she knew her own name. “How long do I have before I go in?” she asked.

“Three days. You’ll spend three days here memorizing those things, getting into character, then we’ll move you to your new living quarters and you’ll start your new waitress job at Night Life on Saturday night.”

He pulled a new cell phone from his pocket and placed it on the table. “I’ll be your only contact. Speed dial one to connect with me day or night. The phone is legit and registered under the name of Jessica Sinclair.”

His eyes were dark, enigmatic as he gazed at her. “For the next three days you’re going to be dependent on me for everything. I’ll bring you your meals and whatever else you might need while you’re here.”

She hated this part, the utter dependency on anyone and especially this person. But she also knew the necessity for it. Before she could respond to him, a knock sounded at the door.

“That must be Carolyn,” he said. He got up, ignoring the question on Cassie’s face.

He opened the door to allow in a short, squat dark-haired middle-aged woman carrying two small suitcases. She set the suitcases just inside the door and threw herself into Kane’s arms. “Kane, my darling man, it’s been too long. You’re just as handsome as ever.” She gave his cheek a playful love slap.

“Carolyn, you little bundle of dynamite, you make my heart pound with desire,” he replied, causing the plump woman to giggle like a schoolgirl.

Kane had the capacity to charm a nun into bad habits…or out of her habit when he wanted. Of course, in the time Cassie had spent with him so far there had been none of his easy charm directed at her.

And that’s the way I want it, she reminded herself. Strictly business, the way it should have been when they’d worked together before.

“Carolyn, this is Cassie Newton,” Kane said as Cassie stood. “Cassie, this is Carolyn McIntyre, makeup artist extraordinaire.”

“Oh, my, Cassie Newton, it’s such a pleasure to meet you.” Carolyn grabbed both Cassie’s hands in hers and squeezed tightly, her eyes sparkling in obvious admiration. “I’ve heard so much about you from people in the agency. You’re a legend.”

Cassie laughed with a touch of self-consciousness. “I don’t know about that, but it’s nice to meet you, too, Carolyn.”

“Carolyn is going to give you a makeover,” Kane said. “You’ve spent time on the streets in your job as a police officer. It’s her job to make you look different enough that nobody will recognize you as Cassandra Newton or Officer Newton.”

Carolyn reached up and grabbed Cassie by the chin, her green eyes narrowed in concentration as she turned Cassie’s face first one way, then the other. “Good bone structure…nice skin…we’ll have to do something about the eyes and the hair, both are too distinctive.”

Carolyn whipped around to face Kane. “Out,” she said and pointed to the door. “No good artist ever works in front of an audience.”

Kane opened his mouth to protest, but Carolyn was having nothing to do with it. She grabbed him by the arm and propelled him toward the door. She moved like a minitank, with determination and purpose, not stopping until Kane was out the door. “Come back in three hours or so and you can see the finished result.”

Three hours? What in the heck did the woman intend to do to her? Cassie wondered.

Carolyn turned back to face Cassie and rubbed her hands together in a gesture of extreme anticipation. “Now, we get to work.”

Was it Cassie’s imagination or did Carolyn have the slightly demented look of a mad scientist?

Two and a half hours later Cassie stood in the bathroom in front of the mirror and stared at the reflection of a stranger.

Carolyn wasn’t just an artist, she was a wizard and had managed to transform Cassie into someone else.

Gone was her trademark long ponytail. Instead her hair had been cut to shoulder length and feathered around her face in a sort of long shag.

Contact lenses changed her eye color from blue to deep green and the makeup Carolyn had applied had subtly changed the shape of her face, giving her higher cheekbones and a slightly exotic look.

While Carolyn had worked, she’d chattered nonstop about skin and hair care. “Never sleep in your makeup,” she said. “No matter how late it is, no matter how tired you are, always clean your makeup off to let your pores breathe.”

Cassie was about to go undercover on an assignment where the stakes were high and a mistake could mean her life and Carolyn was worried about her having clean facial pores.

Still, even though the woman had chattered like teeth on an icy night, she knew her business. Cassie didn’t look like Cassie, but she had to admit, she liked the new look.

The bathroom, on the other hand, looked like a war zone. Carolyn had pronounced herself an artist, and apparently her palette was not only Cassie’s face but also anything in a ten-foot radius.

Base powder speckled the sink, along with an array of various eye-shadow colors. A contact lens hung on the faucet, like an errant eye glaring askew. It had taken Cassie twenty minutes to finally get the hang of putting something foreign in her eyes.

The remnants of her hair littered the floor, looking one-dimensional and boring compared to the silver highlights Carolyn had added to her new do.

Yes, Carolyn had done a heck of a job, but apparently cleanup wasn’t in her job description. Cassie had managed to tidy up most of the sink when she heard the door to the motel open, then close.

She turned and saw Kane entering the room. He walked to the doorway of the bathroom, stopped abruptly and stared at her. “Amazing,” he said softly. “You look absolutely amazing.”

For just a moment his gaze felt hot…hungry on her and heat ignited deep within her. But as quickly as it had appeared, the look in his eyes disappeared and a cold, hard darkness took its place. “At least nobody should recognize you unless they know you pretty well.”

He turned and walked over to the bed and once again opened the suitcase he’d brought in with him earlier in the evening. “You’ll find everything you need for the next couple of days here…pajamas, clean clothing and toiletries. If there’s anything else you specially need or want, let me know and I’ll see that you get it.”

“All right.”

“It’s late. I’m going to get out of here and let you get a good night’s sleep.” He motioned toward the folder on the table. “You have a lot of work ahead of you.” He moved to the motel room door and opened it. “I’ll be back first thing in the morning. And Cassie…welcome back.” With these words he turned and left the room.

Welcome back, indeed, she thought. She walked to the door and locked it then peeked out the heavy, puke-green curtains. What was it about motel rooms and that particular color of green?

Her car was gone, magically taken away to erase any connection between Jessica Sinclair and Cassandra Newton. In place of her sweet little red Mustang was a banged-up blue Escort. She’d miss her little muscle car, just like she had a feeling she would miss her old life before this was all over.

She turned away from the window and sat on the bed next to the suitcase. She didn’t want to think of Kane, but she couldn’t help it. His familiar scent still lingered in the room, haunting her with memories of their shared past.

They’d begun their relationship as partners, two committed people working for the good of the country. They’d flown to exotic locations, worked both in squalor and in splendor. By the end of that second year of their partnership, their relationship had become personal.

It had been a tumultuous affair, filled with the danger of their jobs and an explosive passion neither had been able to deny. The most difficult thing she’d ever done in her life was walk away from him. But she was determined that she stay personally removed from him.

The air-conditioner unit in the wall clicked on and began a loud hum. She opened the suitcase to see what was inside. As Kane had said, she found clean, comfortable clothing, the usual toiletries and a cotton nightshirt. All in her size. In the bottom of the case she found a tube of pear-scented moisturizing body cream.

He’d remembered.

She clutched the bottle to her heart and closed her eyes. A well of emotion pressed tightly in her chest. One of her nightly rituals was to apply the sweet-scented cream to her arms and legs. It touched her more than she cared to admit.

She tossed the tube on the nightstand and stood, eyeing the folder that sat waiting for her on the table. Better to focus on work than on her softening resolve to keep her work with Kane strictly professional.

“Where did you go to high school?” Kane barked the question from his position in a chair at the table.

Cassie paced back and forth in front of her unmade bed, thinking that he sounded like a drill sergeant. “Lincoln High school,” she replied.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Mary…Mary Sinclair and my father was Joseph. They died in a car accident when I was eighteen and my brother, Jimmy, was eight.”

“What was your address in Des Moines?”

Cassie stopped her pacing, frozen as she drew a blank. She stared at Kane with frustration.

“Bang, you’re dead,” he said.

He was right. It was the kind of lapse in memory that got you killed when you went undercover. She sank down on the edge of the bed, exhausted both mentally and physically. They’d been at it for the past three hours, Kane firing questions and her answering.

“You’re right,” she said tiredly.

“We’ll take a break, eat some dinner, then start again.”

She wanted to protest. What she really wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep for about ten hours. She’d stayed up most of the night studying the information in the file, then had gotten up before dawn to study some more.

“I feel like a college student cramming for finals,” she said.

He rose from his chair. “Yeah, but in this case if you flunk your final, you might lose your life.”

“I know…I know.”

“So what are you hungry for?”

“I don’t care as long as it isn’t another hamburger.” He’d brought her a burger and fries for lunch. “Surprise me.”

She immediately wanted to call the words back as a muscle in his jaw ticked and his eyes darkened.

“I’ll be back,” he said and left the room.

Cassie rubbed the center of her forehead where a headache threatened to take hold. Surprise me. How many times in their past relationship had they said those words to each other…a hundred? A thousand?

“If we get out of this alive, want me to tell you what I’m going to do to you?” he whispered when they’d been trapped in a cooler on a ship smuggling explosives to the Philippines and left to die.

“No, don’t tell me. Surprise me,” she’d replied.

“Want to know what I’m going to do with you when we get back to your place?” he’d asked, his eyes lit with fires that had burned her from the inside out.

“Surprise me,” she’d whispered breathlessly.

She now got up and began to pace once again in an attempt to erase the past from her mind. So far, Kane certainly hadn’t acknowledged that they’d shared any kind of a past. He hadn’t asked her why she’d left. He apparently had moved on.

It was important that she do the same.

All she had to do was get through these three days in the motel room. After that she’d be undercover and immersed in the job. There would be no time for thoughts of Kane, no time for entertaining any regrets that might plague her even temporarily.

He was back within twenty minutes, bringing with him Chinese takeout. He opened the containers as she got out the paper plates and chopsticks.

Moments later they were seated at the table across from each other, eating in silence that quickly became oppressive and heavy.

“Has the agency kept you busy in the last couple of years?” she asked, unable to stand the silence any longer.

“Fairly busy.” He speared a piece of sweet and sour chicken with one chopstick. Cassie swallowed a smile. He was adroit at almost everything else, but had never mastered the art of chopsticks.

“Domestic or foreign?” she asked, trying to draw him into something that resembled a normal conversation.

“Both. Did you follow the Brahm’s case?”

“The guy in New York selling arms to Iraq?”

He nodded. “We were in on that. It took almost a year to build the case.”

“Tell me about it,” she urged, eager to keep the silence at bay.

To her relief, he did. As he told her the details of the operation that had taken place two years before, his eyes lit with animation and he appeared to relax.

Cassie found herself relaxing as well as the tension between them disappeared at least for the moment. As Kane explained the various operations he’d been a part of for the past five years, Cassie asked questions to keep him talking.

She had always enjoyed Kane when he spoke with passion and conviction, and that’s what he exhibited whenever he talked about the job. The darkness left his eyes and his features softened.

Clad in a pair of tight jeans and a black T-shirt, there was a look of danger about him. His dark hair was carelessly mussed, but that only added to his attractiveness.

As he filled her in on his work over the last five years, she found herself wondering about his personal life. He told her where he’d been and what he’d done for the job, but he didn’t mention anything about the days, weeks and months that he wasn’t working on an operation or in recovery from his bullet wound.

When they’d been together, they’d spent much of their off time in Hawaii indulging in their passion not only for each other, but for scuba diving.

“You still diving on your downtime?” she asked.

With that simple question she shattered the mood. Shutters dropped over his eyes and he shoved his plate away from in front of him. “No, and that’s enough idle chatter. Time to get back to work.”

If she thought he’d been relentless in his drilling of her before, there was a new intensity now. He fired question after question at her, his expression revealing satisfaction when she answered and disapproval when she faltered.

He was a hard taskmaster, pushing her harder and harder until she finally cried uncle. “Enough,” she said and collapsed on her bed. “That’s enough for tonight. I’m exhausted and my brain shut off about an hour ago.”

“Actually, an hour and a half ago according to my assessment.”

To her surprise, one corner of his lips curved upward in a half smile. It was like a gift after their grueling hours of work.

She felt herself responding to his smile, not just with a smile of her own but with a warmth that suffused her entire body.

“You did better than I expected with just a night of study,” he said as he got up stiffly from his chair and stretched his arms over his head. “I have no doubt at all that by Saturday morning you’ll be ready to go.”

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” she said, pleasantly surprised by his words.

“I’ve never doubted your abilities when it comes to the job.” He dropped his arms and held her gaze. She held her breath as she waited for him to say something more. There were unspoken words in his tired eyes and her heart quickened as a new tension sprang up between them.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” he finally said, then opened the door and disappeared out into the night.

She locked the door behind him, then took a long hot shower and pulled on her short-sleeved nightshirt. She kept her mind carefully blank as she sat on the edge of the bed and applied the lotion to her arms, legs and throat. The scent of pears filled the air and her heart filled with a loneliness she hadn’t experienced in years.

As she crawled into bed and shut off the light, the air conditioner kicked on. As she listened to the monotonous hum, the loneliness swelled inside her.

It wasn’t an emotion she’d experienced often in her life. She could only remember two other times. The first had been on that initial day and night she’d found herself alone on the streets of L.A. At eleven years old she hadn’t understood the deep ache and in any case it hadn’t lasted as the need to survive was far more important.

The second time she’d experienced this kind of lonely had been in the days and weeks after she’d walked away from Kane and the agency that had brought them together.

Even though she’d known she’d made the best choice for herself and for him, that didn’t stop her from missing him. She’d missed his smell, the cast of his smile and the way he looked at her when he wanted her.

She’d missed him, but she’d gotten over it. She’d gotten over him.

Maybe she was just feeling lonely because she missed her house, her things and her life. Surely it was a temporary emotion and would go away once this crazy job was done. The job, yes, that’s what she needed to focus on. Getting it done without getting killed, then forgetting Kane and the agency for good.

With this reassuring thought in mind, Cassie fell into an exhausted sleep.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.