She’d watched them bury her partner.

They came after former FBI agent Isabel Cooper in her hotel room. Drugged and fighting for her life, she ran right into the arms of a dead man. But Ben Scanlon was very much alive, and now her life was in his hands, too.

Now he was back...and coming to her rescue.

His face was rougher and his hair longer than when they’d last met, but he still carried himself like a born Texan. Undercover with the same redneck mafia that was after her, Scanlon thought he could save Isabel without revisiting their past together. But when every step led to a trap, and every touch they shared had a consequence, he wasn’t going to waste a second chance—or another bullet.

His eyes darkened as his gaze leveled with hers. “I just want you safe. It’s what I’ve wanted from the beginning of this whole mess.”

Her heart contracted. “Scanlon—”

His head dipped. For a second, she was certain he was going to kiss her. But he froze in place, his gaze falling to rest on her parted lips. “Damn it, Cooper—”

It was a familiar point in time, she realized. A point of no return, when the tension buzzing between them could take on a new and dangerous tenor. They’d reached this point before, during long and harrowing cases when the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control. Moments when a little human connection provided a temptation almost too exquisite to resist.

But one of them always moved. Always backed away before they did something that couldn’t be undone. She waited for the inevitable retreat, for Scanlon to pull away and rise to his feet, putting distance and cold air between them.

That moment never came.

Secret Hideout
Paula Graves

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alabama native Paula Graves wrote her first book, a mystery starring herself and her neighborhood friends, at the age of six. A voracious reader, Paula loves books that pair tantalizing mystery with compelling romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she works as a creative director for a Birmingham advertising agency and spends time with her family and friends. She is a member of Southern Magic Romance Writers, Heart of Dixie Romance Writers and Romance Writers of America.

Paula invites readers to visit her website, www.paulagraves.com.

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CAST OF CHARACTERS

Isabel Cooper—Ambushed and drugged by masked men in the hotel where she’s staying, the former FBI agent gets away with the help of her dead partner’s ghost. But when she wakes to find him very much alive, how far will she go to help the man who deceived her into believing he was dead?

Ben Scanlon—The bomb meant for his partner came close to killing him instead. When his boss gave him the chance to “die” in order to go undercover to find the backwoods bomber who targeted his partner, he took it. Will the investigation also answer his lingering questions about his father’s death?

Adam Brand—The FBI Special Agent in Charge let Isabel believe her partner died. Does he have a hidden agenda now that he wants them working together again?

Addie Tolliver—The middle-aged store owner is the head of the Swain crime family now that her brother Jasper is doing life in jail. Is she as wily as her brother, or could she be the weak link that could help topple the whole family?

J. T. Swain—The mysterious new Swain seems to have links to a band of crooked mercenaries who have given Isabel’s family trouble before. Is the Swain family business looking to expand their criminal enterprise?

Dahlia McCoy—Despite Scanlon’s attempt to court her to take advantage of her brother’s connection to the Swains, the pretty accountant seems to be squeaky clean. But is there more to Dahlia than Scanlon thinks?

Opal Butler—Jasper Swain’s other sister has never shown any interest in the family business. So why is she back in town and what is her agenda?

For Jenn, my critique partner, who keeps me honest and keeps me writing. Thanks for everything you do.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

The man down the hall was definitely watching her. And given how grubby she looked at the moment, Isabel Cooper didn’t think he was ogling her for the usual reasons.

Reaching for the handle of the ice machine door, she dropped her room key card on purpose, giving herself an excuse to shift position and sneak a better look at the man lurking at the end of the hall. He was lean and sandy-haired, wearing a simple black T-shirt and faded jeans. As her gaze rose toward him, he looked away. But she was certain he’d been staring.

Hair prickling on the back of her neck, she scooped ice into her bucket and headed back to her room. The carpeted hallway muffled even her own footsteps, so she couldn’t hear anyone moving up the hallway behind her.

But she could feel him.

Even though her room was straight ahead, she hooked a quick left into the elevator alcove. It was a dead end, but it gave her a chance to set herself for a fight.

She waited, her breath burning in her lungs.

But no one appeared around the corner.

The elevator dinged behind her, making her jump. The couple emerging from the elevator gave her a curious look. In the mirrored back of the open elevator, she caught a glimpse of her reflection, a wild-eyed brunette in a T-shirt and yoga pants, her feet stuck in a pair of fleece-lined house shoes and her unruly curls caught up in a lopsided ponytail.

The couple turned left, toward her own hotel room. She followed, darting a quick look down the hallway where she’d seen the loitering man. The corridor was empty.

Isabel released a puff of air. Wasn’t it time to stop looking for criminals around every corner? Six months had already passed since she’d resigned from the FBI and returned home to work for her brother.

Six months since she’d buried her partner and said her final goodbye to the man she’d worked with for years, since she was a snot-nosed green agent fresh out of Quantico.

God, she missed him.

Trudging to her hotel room, she pushed the painful thoughts of Scanlon from her mind, thinking about the man she’d seen in the hallway instead. He hadn’t looked familiar. And apparently she’d only imagined that he’d shadowed her up the hallway.

Tucking the ice bucket under one arm, she swiped the key card in the lock and let herself inside the hotel room. The door clicked shut, engaging the automatic lock. On instinct, she engaged the safety lock as well, waiting for the prickling sensation on the back of her neck to subside. But it lingered, the tingle of a thousand spider legs dancing across her skin.

She darted to the mirrored dresser, put down the ice bucket next to her overnight case and unzipped the bag, feeling inside for her Beretta 9 mm. She shouldn’t have left the room without her weapon, but there was nowhere she could hide it in her yoga pants, and she hadn’t wanted to alarm the other hotel visitors.

She ran her hands around the inside of her bag one more time, her fingers moving frantically in search of the weapon.

It wasn’t there.

Her heart lurched into higher gear, pounding against her breastbone, as she picked up the bag to see if it could have fallen out without her noticing.

As she moved, her gaze glanced across the mirror on the wall above the dresser. Her heart jolted as she saw a man in a black ski mask standing a few inches behind her, holding her Beretta in his gloved hand.

Terror sucked the breath from her lungs.

“Looking for this?” The man behind the mask spoke in a low, pronounced drawl, the unabashed rural accent of the north Alabama hills.

“You can take all my money,” she said, careful to sound neither too weak nor too strong. “Take the gun, too. I won’t give you any trouble.”

The man laughed. “Turn around.”

She obeyed, sucking in another quick breath when she realized the man was not alone. A second man, similarly masked and clad in a dark long-sleeved T-shirt and pants, stood nearby, watching her. He didn’t seem to be armed but was large enough, muscular enough, to pose a problem if she had to fight her way out of the situation.

The adrenaline coursing through her veins screamed for her to run. Catch them by surprise. But she’d engaged the safety lock—she’d never get it open in time to make her escape.

Was that the point of the man down the hall? To spook her into taking the extra precaution?

Think, Cooper. How do you get out of this?

“What do you want?” she asked, her voice strained.

“You don’t know?” The man sounded surprised.

“You don’t want money?” she asked, though it was clear her assailants weren’t here for anything as ordinary as robbery.

“Agent Cooper, you’re too smart to play games with us.”

Which answered one question, she thought. They knew who she was. Their agenda was personal, not random.

But why? She wasn’t working a case of any sort—she was here in Fort Payne, Alabama, to give a talk to some mystery writers about investigative procedure. It had been months since she’d worked any cases for the FBI, and she wasn’t even working an open case with Cooper Security at the moment.

What would bring three armed men to her hotel room?

“I don’t know what you want from me,” she said aloud.

The man holding the gun on her glanced toward the other man. Isabel took advantage of his brief inattention and grabbed the ice bucket off the dresser, swinging it at his gun hand. The Beretta went flying, smacking against the motel room wall.

She ran to the door, her fingers clawing at the safety latch. As it flipped open, hands circled her throat and gave a backward jerk. She choked as her windpipe began to close from the pressure, black spots forming in her vision.

“Do it now!” her captor growled, dragging her onto the bed. Terror eclipsed the sense of suffocation as she struggled against the hands holding her down. The pressure on her throat eased, and she sucked in a lungful of air. Her vision returned in time to see a flash of a needle descending toward her neck.

She screamed for help, fighting harder. The man who’d had her gun shoved his gloved hand against her mouth, laughing as she bit at the leather. “Scream again, and we’ll kill you now.”

The needle descended, pricking the side of her neck.

The men held her in place, laughing at her struggles, until she felt her lungs burning for air. The room began to spin and grow strangely out of proportion. On the wall, the bland painting of daffodils started to melt, the colors sliding down the wall to pool atop the dresser.

One of the men had moved away from her, she realized, wondering how that could be possible when it seemed as if a dozen pair of hands still held her down.

She felt powerless to move against the pressure keeping her immobile. Forcing her gaze upward, she found herself staring into a pair of piercing blue eyes.

Jasper Swain, she thought, giving a start when she realized the words had escaped her aching throat in a rasp.

The blue eyes widened.

Then they bled.

And she screamed.

* * *

THE CRY DIED QUICKLY, but he knew what he’d heard. It was her. And she wasn’t alone.

He flattened himself against the wall of the ice maker alcove down the hall from her room, knowing how disastrous it would be if one of the men inside caught sight of him. But he couldn’t let them take her out of here.

He’d considered calling in a tip to the police, but the men in that room were dangerous, reckless men who’d have little compunction about leaving a small-town cop bleeding out in a hotel corridor. The cops would be more likely to get in his way than help him get her to safety.

He closed his fingers around the Glock hidden in the pocket of his windbreaker, grimacing. He wasn’t the world’s best marksman himself. But unlike local law enforcement officers, at least he knew what he was up against from the start.

How in hell did they think they were going to get her out of here? Was that even the plan anymore? He’d been damned lucky to hear about what the Swains were planning in the first place, considering how close-mouthed the people of Bolen Bluff, Alabama, could be.

He’d overheard the conversation while snooping around Tolliver Feed and Seed. Hidden in the back room, he’d eavesdropped on two Swain clansmen talking cryptically about an operation the next day, something to do with a woman at a Fort Payne hotel.

And if the Swains were up to something, it was bad news.

Down the hall, a door opened, and he heard scuffling sounds. He forced himself to remain in place as footsteps thudded down the hall toward his position.

He edged toward the ice machine, tugging the bill of his baseball cap lower over his face. He didn’t have an ice bucket, but someone had helpfully left spares stacked on top of the machine, so he grabbed one of those and opened the ice machine bin. As he dug into the ice, he heard footsteps shuffling past him at a quick clip.

Once they’d passed, he took a quick look down the hall after them. He caught sight of a mass of dark curls and his heart gave a disconcerting flip.

Two men flanked her, holding her up as she sagged against them. A third man lagged behind, watching their backs. All of them wore caps low over their faces, just like his.

They were heading for the stairs.

He waited for them to enter the stairwell before he hurried after them. Cracking the door open, he listened for a second, trying to gauge how far ahead they were.

The footsteps echoed in the cavernous stairwell, making it hard to be sure where the sounds were coming from. He slipped into the stairwell and eased after them, keeping close to the wall to stay out of sight.

He had no idea how he was going to get her away from them without being seen, but if it came to a choice, he’d risk identification to save her. Whatever it took, he was going to get Isabel Cooper away from her captors.

What happened after that, however, would be anyone’s guess.

* * *

SHE WAS IN A CAVERN. A tall, twisting cavern, painted in hieroglyphics that almost seemed like words.

Almost.

The almost-words shimmered on the walls as if they were painted with glitter. Sometimes they slid down the walls and slid back up again, making her dizzy.

And still she and her captors descended. Down, down, down, into the pits of hell.

Jasper Swain’s eyes had stopped bleeding. At least, she thought they had. He’d taken off the mask, but his cap bill was so low that all she could see of his face was a deep shadow.

And she knew he wasn’t Jasper Swain, either. Swain was still in prison in St. Clair County, not due for his next parole hearing for at least five more years. Her head was playing games with her.

She remembered a needle. They’d shot her full of something. Something potent. That was why the walls were melting and she was seeing people who weren’t there.

“What do you want with me?” she asked, raising her head to look at the one she still thought of as Swain.

He didn’t answer, and his shadowy face seemed to undulate in front of her eyes. She dragged her gaze away from the mesmerizing dance and gazed upward, wondering if someone had heard her screams.

What she saw on the landing above nearly made her racing heart stop in its tracks.

She was seeing another person who wasn’t there.

Couldn’t be there.

The face was almost as familiar to her now as her own reflection in the mirror. Maybe even more familiar, considering how much she’d seemed to change over the last six months. He’d changed little at all. A little more scruffy, as if her hallucinating mind had conjured up the beard stubble she’d secretly wanted to see on his clean-shaven jaw. His hair was longer, too, no longer combed back into a neatly groomed cut that seemed to scream “federal agent.”

Oh, Scanlon, she thought, blinking back sudden tears when his ghost disappeared from sight. A fresh sense of loss overwhelmed her, oddly energizing. Rage infused her—rage at her own sense of powerlessness, at the ravening grief slowly eating her from the inside out.

He’s gone. He’s not coming back. And you’ll be gone, too, if you don’t get your head back together and figure out how to get away from these goons.

The walls around her closed in, threatening to trigger claustrophobia. Seeing what she thought was an exit door on the next stair landing, she focused hard, making out the number two. Second floor.

She knew the first-floor door opened onto a narrow corridor from which a person could either head down the hall to the front lobby or go out a side door to the parking lot. She’d gone that route earlier that morning, when a couple of the conference coordinators had taken her out for breakfast.

If they got her to the first floor, they’d be out to the parking lot before her screams could grab anyone’s attention.

She tensed her muscles and glanced upward again, hoping to see Scanlon’s ghost. But he didn’t make a reappearance. She tamped down a rush of sorrow.

Now, she thought.

She let herself sag heavily against the two men holding her upright. The sudden shift in weight caught them by surprise, giving her an opening.

Swinging as hard as she could, she jabbed her elbows into their crotches and pushed to her feet, jerking free as they reacted to the pain of her blows.

The door to the second floor was right in front of her, shimmering and undulating. She pushed through it, ignoring the ruckus behind her.

“Get her,” she heard one man say, his voice a pained croak.

She didn’t look back, racing down a writhing, spinning tunnel. There was still enough sense left in her drugged-out brain to realize she was running down the second-floor hallway of the hotel. She gave a half second’s thought to banging on the doors, looking for help, but she suspected the people inside those rooms, even if they answered her knocks, would see her swaying and drunk-eyed and slam the door in her face.

Worse, the men she heard pounding down the hall behind her might kill anyone who answered.

She found her strength flagging, and even though she had put a fair amount of space between herself and the men running behind her, she knew they must be gaining.

She had blown past the elevators, knowing she couldn’t risk waiting for one to arrive, but there was a second set of stairs at the end of the corridor that led down to the parking lot. It was on the opposite side of the hotel from where she’d parked her little green Ford Mustang, but at least she’d be outside with more room to maneuver.

She hit the door to the stairwell at a dead run, stumbling into the railing and nearly pitching headfirst down the stairs.

She heard footsteps pounding from above her, coming down a flight of stairs at a clip. Had one of them circled back, anticipating her destination?

She started running down the steps, but whatever they had injected into her neck was hitting its stride, making her head swim as if she’d just spent the last ten minutes riding a tilt-a-whirl. She stumbled a few steps above the landing and pitched forward, landing hard.

The air whooshed from her lungs, making her vision go black. As she struggled to breathe again, she heard a thudding of footsteps racing down to where she lay.

She tried to push to her feet, but she didn’t have the strength. She felt a pair of strong, warm hands drag her to her feet. She blinked, trying to make sense of what she was seeing.

The ghost of Ben Scanlon stared back at her, his blue eyes soft and so beautifully familiar that tears filmed over her eyes, blurring his features.

“Scanlon,” she whispered.

“No time, sugar,” he answered in Scanlon’s voice, the cocky Texas twang she’d first hated, then grown to love.

But he was dead. She’d seen the aftermath of the explosion. Examined the autopsy report. Watched his casket lowered into a grave in the tiny town of Maribel, Texas. Held his mama’s hand as she’d cried.

She was hallucinating. One of her captors had found her and grabbed her again. That was all it could be.

But she didn’t have the strength to fight anymore. The appearance of Scanlon’s ghost seemed like a mercy, one last chance to be with her partner again before she met whatever fate her captors had planned for her.

Giving in to the fantasy, she stopped resisting and let Scanlon’s ghost lead her quickly down the stairs and out into the blinding sunlight.

He slipped a jacket over her shoulders as they reached the side of a dark green van. Dragging her around until her back met the solid wall of the panel van, he pulled the cap off his own head and shoved it onto hers.

She blinked with confusion, opening her mouth to ask what he was doing. A strange halo limned his body, an aura of brilliant blues and dazzling greens. She’d never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

His hands cradled her face, his touch crackling like electricity. His bent head blocked out the sunlight as he touched his mouth to hers.

Fire flowed from his lips into hers, poured through her veins in a flood of bright sensation, immolating her from the inside out.

She wound her arms around his neck and pressed closer until she melted into him, their bodies melding until she no longer existed outside of him. A low groan rumbled through her. She didn’t know which of them had made the sound.

The world disappeared into a brilliant pinpoint of light, pulsating with colors that throbbed and danced until they finally exploded like supernova.

The fireworks fell away, fading into a cold, black void, and it was a long time before Isabel formed a conscious thought again.

Chapter Two

Consciousness returned in sickening waves, crashing against a wall of agony in her head. Even the small effort of opening her eyes seemed beyond Isabel’s strength, so she suffered awhile longer in a dark cocoon, willing the nausea to subside.

Where was she? Why so much pain? Why had she been asleep?

Movement nearby forced her to open her eyes. Wincing as light needled into her brain, she bit back a moan and focused on a man standing with his back to her as he stirred something in a battered pot on an old gas range.

Scanlon, she thought, even though she knew it couldn’t be so.

Then he turned to grab a spice tin from the counter beside the range, making her gasp. The aquiline nose and stubborn chin definitely belonged to her former FBI partner.

Her dead partner.

He turned around at her gasp, his blue eyes soft. “Hey there, Cooper. Back among the living?”

She shook her head, seized by fear. Had she lost her mind? Was that why she couldn’t remember where she was or why she was here? “You’re dead.”

“Cooper—”

“No, you died! Six months ago! I saw footage of the explosion. I—I read the autopsy report.” She swiped tears from her cheeks with a jerk of her hand. “I held your mama’s hand as we buried you—”

Pain flickered across his expression. “I know.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts!” If she wasn’t dreaming, then she was crazy. Loss could do that, and she’d been hiding her own grief all this time, trying not to worry her family or even admit to herself how important Scanlon had been to her—

“I’m not a ghost.” He crouched beside her, threading his solid fingers between her own. The warmth from his hands worked its way up her arm into her chest. Hot tears burned her eyes and she let them fall, staring at him in disbelief. She reached up to touch his stubbled jaw, wondering if her hand would slide right through him. But he was solid. Warm.

Alive.

He caught her face between his hands and made her look into his eyes. “I know it’s confusing, but I’m here. I didn’t die in the explosion. I was there, but I escaped.”

An ache settled in the center of her chest. “But you let me think you were dead.” The buoyant happiness that had kept her upright for the past few seconds fled as suddenly as it had arrived, supplanted by a rush of anger. She pushed against him. “You were alive and you let me think you were dead!”

“It’s complicated—”

“How could you do that to me? We were partners! You don’t do that to your partner!” Growling, she tried to throw off the patchwork quilt tangled around her legs, but the pain in her head grew excruciating. She jammed the heels of her hands into her temples, certain her head was going to explode.

The bed beneath her shifted, making the world roil around her again. Scanlon’s hands closed around her upper arms, steadying her. “You have to calm down. You’re still suffering the effects of whatever they gave you.”

An image darted through her brain. A flash of light on the point of a needle. A corresponding sting pricked the side of her neck. The alarming memory did more to dispel her escalating rage than anything Scanlon could have said.

“Somebody shot me up with something.”

“I know. There’s a needle mark near your carotid, and you were hallucinating before you passed out.” His voice emerged as hard as steel. “Stupid cretins could have killed you.”

“Who?” Why couldn’t she remember anything more than the needle? It felt as if she’d walked into a solid wall, nothing but blankness wherever she looked. “Who did this to me?”

“I’m not sure.” He dropped his hands from her arms and averted his gaze. She realized he wasn’t telling her the truth.

But why?

She changed tacks. “Any idea what they shot me up with?”

“Not sure about that, either.” He stood and crossed to the saucepan on the stove. “Food will help, whatever it was. Dilute the effects, at least.”

She wasn’t sure her rolling stomach could handle a glass of water, much less whatever it was he was pouring from the saucepan into a bowl. As he pulled a sleeve of plain crackers from a nearby cabinet, he asked, “You want to eat in bed or do you feel like sitting up at the table?”

“I don’t know if I can hold anything down.”

“Give it a try, at least.” He brought the bowl of steaming liquid to the bed, which she now realized was actually a futon sofa that took up half the wall in the small room. The rest of the room was cramped by the furnishings—a stove, a sink and a refrigerator, plus a card table that seemed to serve as a dining table, sat across from her. A door, the futon and a small bookshelf took up the wall behind her. The narrow end wall was just large enough to accommodate a low table with a television set that looked decades old.

“Where are we?” she asked.

He placed the bowl of soup on a portable tray table pulled from the narrow space between the stove and the refrigerator. “Soup first. I’ll tell you everything in a minute, I promise.”

She eyed the bowl, a little freaked out at being suspicious of Ben Scanlon. “What is that?”

“Chicken noodle soup.” He set the tray table in front of her. Up close, she noticed for the first time a wicked-looking scar on the back of his left hand.

He saw her reaction. “I didn’t escape the bomb entirely.” He turned his hand over, palm up, and she saw that the scar extended to his palm as well. “A piece of bomb shrapnel went straight through my hand. Hurt like hell.”

Any hint of appetite fled. “Any other injuries?”

“Scrapes and cuts. I got knocked into the river by the blast. Lost consciousness and damned near drowned before I came to and coughed up the water I’d inhaled.”

“They said they identified your body—” She shuddered, the memory of that day flooding back with fresh sharpness.

“Brand arranged it.”

She stared at him. “Adam Brand knew you were alive the whole time?” The SAC—Special Agent in Charge—had been one of the few people who’d seemed to understand her difficulty in dealing with Scanlon’s murder. Brand knew she’d felt guilty when she learned her partner had intercepted a note meant for her and gotten killed trying to protect her. He’d even understood her choice to leave the FBI.

So he wouldn’t have to lie to her face every day?

“We couldn’t let anyone connect me to what I’m doing here.” Scanlon slanted a guilty look at her. “Even you.”

Especially me, she thought blackly. “Where is here?”

“First, let’s get a little chicken noodle soup into you before you keel over on me.”

“Not until you tell me what the hell’s going on.” She pressed her lips together.

Scanlon sighed. “Where do you want me to start?”

“The explosion,” she said flatly. “That message was left on my desk. Morelli told me that much. You took my message from Morelli and met with my informant. Why would you do that? Why wouldn’t you call me, at least?”

Scanlon’s scarred hand stretched toward her for a second before dropping back to his lap. “I thought it was a setup.”

“So you went in my place? Without any backup?”

“Brand was with me, watching in case anything went hinky.”

She tamped down her simmering anger, trying to be dispassionate. “Did you trigger a booby trap?” That was the finding after an exhaustive postmortem of the explosion. But now she wondered if anything Brand had told her was the truth.

“It was on a delay—meant to give me time to get all the way inside before it blew. But I saw—something—” He frowned, as if making a mental effort to return to that moment in time. “I had a concussion from the blast. It seems to have erased my memories of what happened when I stepped inside the warehouse.”

“Then how do you know you spotted something?”

Scanlon’s mouth curved slightly. “I was wired for sound, at least until I ended up in the river. Brand told me I said something about a trap and then all of a sudden I was hauling butt away from the place.”

The temperature in the room seemed to drop a few degrees as Isabel pictured, not for the first time, what those last few seconds before the blast must have felt like for him. At least, this time, she could add a happier ending.

If he’s telling the truth, a bleak voice in the back of her head added.

She needed to talk to Brand. She had trouble believing he’d known this whole time. He had been so supportive—

“I quit the FBI within two weeks, you know,” she said aloud. “It was hard enough to go into that office every day and see your empty desk. When they brought in a new agent—”

“I know. Brand told me.” Scanlon leaned toward her, his expression troubled. “Go back to the Bureau. Brand will take you back—I know he will. As soon as we get you out of here.”

The last thing she wanted was to go back to the FBI, especially if Scanlon was telling her the truth. The idea that people she believed she could trust would lie to her this way…

She felt completely betrayed.

“I’m working with my brother now,” she said aloud. “At the security company. We’re doing good things there.”

“I thought you weren’t happy about your brother’s security company when he first came up with the idea.”

She hadn’t been thrilled. Her experiences with private security firms while working for the FBI had been more negative than positive. But Jesse’s concept for the security firm appealed to her. The big jobs they undertook financed the low-cost and pro bono cases Cooper Security chose on an individual, need-by-need basis.

“Things have changed,” she admitted.

Scanlon’s eyes narrowed. “I guess they have.” He waved at the bowl of soup. “At least have a bite or two. It’ll help your body fight off the effects of what they gave you.”

She forced herself to eat a few bites of the soup, knowing Scanlon had a stubborn streak that was nearly impossible to thwart. If she wanted answers, she’d have to play along with his rules, even if a bowl of chicken noodle soup was the last thing she wanted at the moment.

But she managed to finish half the bowl and even nibble on a couple of crackers by the time Scanlon had poured the rest of the soup into a plastic container and put it in the small refrigerator next to the stove.

She had so many questions racing through her mind, she felt overwhelmed, especially since the food had done nothing to ease her raging headache. She couldn’t think with her pulse pounding in her ears. The lights inside were dimmed, and heavy curtains shut out whatever light might be coming from outside the windows, but her eyes still ached from the glare.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” she said. To her alarm, the words came out slurred.

Scanlon crossed quickly to the futon and helped her up. Tugging her hand away from his when he showed every sign of walking with her to the bathroom, she said, “I can handle this myself. Just point me in the right direction.”

He stared back at her, his expression hard to read.

Unease fluttered in her stomach. “Please don’t tell me the bathroom’s outdoors.”

His expression cleared. “No. Through that door, take a right down the hall and it’s the first door on the left.”

She followed his directions and entered the tiny bathroom. It had a toilet and an ancient pedestal sink on one side of the room, and an even more ancient claw-foot tub on the other. She looked longingly at the tub, tempted by the thought of a nice, hot bath, but settled for running cold water in the sink and splashing it on her hot face.

As she was about to head back to the front room, her gaze caught on the window next to the toilet. It was closed off by thick green curtains. She eased the curtains open and took a peek outside, squinting as bright daylight assaulted her eyes.

There were woods outside, dense with new growth. The house seemed to have very little in the way of a yard.

Movement outside caught her eye. A man, she realized. His dark green baseball cap came into view first, dipped forward as the wearer looked down, watching his footing.

Instinctively, she narrowed the opening in the curtains to a crack. As he emerged into the clearing behind the house, the man in the cap looked up, directly toward the window.

Her heart gave a little flop.

She’d seen him before.

He wore a black T-shirt under a faded denim jacket. His jeans were equally faded. His sandy hair curled lightly around the edge of the cap.

Where had she seen him before? She could picture him in her mind, sandy hair, black T-shirt, faded jeans—

No cap. He hadn’t been wearing a cap. Not then.

The door behind her opened, making her whirl around in alarm. The sudden movement made her vision swim, and she had to grab the sink to keep from toppling over.

Scanlon rushed in, cupping her elbow to steady her. “Go to my bedroom. Now. Hide in the closet. No time to explain—”

“There’s a man outside. I know I’ve seen him before—”

“There’s more than one man outside,” Scanlon said tersely, leading her across the hall to a small, spare bedroom. He opened the door next to the bed to reveal a tiny closet and nudged her inside. “Just stay here and be quiet, no matter what you hear. Promise me.”

She nodded. “Are you in danger?”

He brushed her cheek with his fingertips. “I’m always in danger these days, Cooper.” He closed the door, plunging the cramped closet into darkness.

* * *

BEN SCANLON RECOVERED HIS CALM as he walked to the front room. Already, Davy McCoy was banging on the door, commencing the visit Scanlon had been expecting since he’d grabbed Isabel Cooper at the Fort Payne hotel and rushed her out to the van the FBI resident agency in Huntsville had supplied. He hadn’t gotten a good look at any of the men, but he knew Davy was involved. Davy was the one he’d overheard making plans for the ambush.

He swept a final glance around the living room, making sure he’d left no signs of Isabel’s presence. She’d slipped on her shoes before she’d gone to the bathroom, and he’d already returned the futon to its sofa position.

He took a deep breath and opened the door.

Davy McCoy was a short, wiry man in his midtwenties, with dark hair thinning prematurely and a sneering smile that was a permanent fixture on his vulpine face. He didn’t wait to be asked in, pushing past Scanlon and entering the living room.

“You cookin’ somethin’?” He sniffed the air.

“Just soup.”

Davy eyed the bowl in the sink. “Been out today?”

The van Scanlon had driven to the hotel was hidden in an abandoned barn a half mile down the mountain, where he’d left his battered old Ford pickup while he was in Fort Payne. But he and Isabel hadn’t been back long. If Davy had touched the hood of the Ford, would it still be warm?

“Drove over to Silorville Pond to see if the bluegills were bedding,” he answered, the lie effortless. Lying came all too easy to him these days. “No luck.”

“Little early yet, I guess.”

Scanlon knew Davy didn’t have a particular reason to suspect he’d been involved in thwarting the attempted abduction. Nobody among Bolen Bluff’s tight-knit community of weed growers and meth mechanics knew what he’d overheard that night at the feed store. He’d made damned sure he wasn’t seen.

But he’d been in Bolen Bluff only a few months. Strangers were automatically suspect. The paranoia among the Swain clan was legendary. One wrong move could get a man killed.

Scanlon knew that better than anyone.

Davy was clearly searching the room with his gaze. He didn’t even bother to hide it. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”

Scanlon nodded toward the hallway, hoping the rapid thump of his pulse wasn’t audible. It swished so loudly in his ears he barely heard Davy’s footsteps as he clomped down the hall.

He went to close the front door that Davy had left open and spotted Bobby Rawlings standing out in the yard, watching him through narrowed eyes. Rawlings was even scarier than McCoy in some ways. He was a Swain by blood, son of one of old Jasper’s cousins. That gave him even more carte blanche for violence around these parts than Davy, who was only a Swain clan member out of criminal loyalty.

He gave Rawlings a wave. Rawlings didn’t wave back. Scanlon hadn’t expected he would.

He closed the door and turned as Davy’s heavy bootfalls heralded his return. “You and Bobby been out hunting coyote this morning?”

“Yeah,” Davy answered flatly.

“Any luck?”

“Got close, once. Just missed the bitch.” Davy shrugged. “We’ll find her again. Next time, ain’t gonna mess around—just put a bullet straight in her brain.”

Scanlon’s blood chilled.

“Thanks for the use of your facilities.” Davy slanted a look at Scanlon. “Reckon you’ll be comin’ to town Saturday?”

“I can,” he said carefully, not sure where Davy was going with the question.

“Addie Tolliver’s throwin’ a barbecue Saturday afternoon for Leamon’s birthday.”

Addie Tolliver was one of the Swain sisters. She and her son Leamon ran the feed shop in town, and he was pretty sure that Addie was the main mover and shaker in the Swain family’s meth and weed business. The family often used the store’s back room as a meeting place. He also suspected that the storage area may have been a temporary holding area for drug shipments going out to other parts of the state, though the one time he’d been able to sneak into the back room, all he’d accomplished was overhearing the plan to go after Isabel.

“The Brubakers are comin’ over from Higdon to play,” Davy continued. “Ever heard ’em?” When Scanlon shook his head, Davy gave him a look that smacked of disappointment. “They’re an old bluegrass family. The young ones are still playing the old stuff. You’d like it.”

Scanlon knew better than to assume he was being invited to the barbecue. He was still too new in town. He waited for Davy to let the punch line drop.

“Addie’s lookin’ for someone to watch the feed store for her while everybody’s at the barbecue. Said she’ll pay six bucks an hour for three hours. Under the table. Won’t be much to it—most everybody else in town will be at the barbecue.”

Everybody but the new guy, Scanlon thought, tamping down a flash of annoyance. He’d known going into this undercover operation that it would be a long-term assignment. He couldn’t expect an insular drug-dealing clan to take him to their bosom after a few months.

“I can do that,” he said aloud.

“Good. I’ll tell Addie you’ll be there. Two o’clock on Saturday.” Davy walked to the door and opened it. “She mentioned you by name, you know. Asked me to check with you specifically.”

Scanlon smiled. “Tell her I said thanks. I sure can use the extra money.”

Davy’s gaze dropped to Scanlon’s scarred hand. “Reckon the government’s not exactly real generous these days.”

“No. You’d think they’d want to do a little more to reward a fellow who took a bullet in their godforsaken wars.”

“Just be at the feed store Saturday. Maybe if you do a good job then, Addie or one of the other Swains will find more jobs for you to do.” Davy headed out the door, pulling it closed behind him.

Scanlon released a long, slow breath. Not quite what he’d expected when he’d spotted Davy McCoy coming out of the woods.

But was his sense of relief premature? The Swains had been plying their criminal trade for a lot of years now. They might not be brain surgeons, but they were as wily and vicious as the coyotes Davy McCoy liked to hunt.

Maybe they really didn’t suspect his involvement in helping Isabel get away. But he couldn’t afford to assume he was safe from scrutiny. He had to figure out a way to get Isabel back to safety as soon as possible.

For his sake as well as hers.

Chapter Three

The closet seemed to grow darker as time passed, despite the thin shaft of light drifting into the cramped space from the bedroom outside. The odor of old cedar tickled her nose, threatening more than once to make her sneeze. She had held the urge in check, hearing heavy footfalls from the hall that she knew didn’t belong to Ben Scanlon.

The ache in her head had eased a little, probably thanks to the food he’d insisted she put in her stomach to dilute the effects of whatever drug her ambushers had injected into her. Her memory was starting to leach back into her brain as well, at least the moments preceding whatever had happened to her.

She’d gone out of her room at some point that morning. She remembered getting ice and then—something. Something had happened after she went to get the ice.

But what?

She pressed the heels of her hands against her forehead. She’d carried the ice bucket out of the room, down the hall—her room wasn’t far from the elevators, but the ice maker was all the way down the hall, near the stairs—

An image flashed into her mind. A reflection of herself in the mirrored back of an elevator car. She looked tired and bedraggled in the image, dressed in sloppy clothes, with no makeup and her hair in a messy ponytail.

That meant something. Why did it mean something?

Had she gone somewhere on the elevator?

No, not on the elevator. She’d gone to the elevator alcove to get out of sight. Hadn’t she?

But why had she wanted to be out of sight?

Swallowing a growl of frustration, she retraced her steps. Out the hotel room door. Down the hall, ice bucket in hand.

She’d dropped her key card. She could hear it hit softly on the vinyl flooring in front of the ice machine. She’d bent to pick it up—

And looked behind her on purpose. At the man.

Sandy hair. Black T-shirt. Faded jeans. Just like the man she’d spotted in the woods behind Scanlon’s house.

“Isabel?”

Scanlon’s quiet voice made her jump. Heart jackrabbiting, she answered in an equally soft voice, “Yeah?”

“It’s safe to come out now.”

She grabbed the doorknob and hauled herself unsteadily to her feet to let herself out. The dim bedroom seemed unbearably bright, forcing her to squint.

She spotted Scanlon a few feet from the door, studying her with troubled blue eyes. He looked as if he was about to speak again, but she preempted him. “I know where I saw that man outside your house before.”

“I do, too,” Scanlon said bluntly. “I’m pretty sure he’s one of the men who ambushed you this morning at the hotel.” He reached out and brushed a clump of curls out of her eyes. “Cooper, as soon as I can get in touch with Brand, we’re getting you out of here and back home to your family.”

The idea of returning home to the pretty little farmhouse in Gossamer Ridge, Alabama, that she’d bought a couple of months earlier was only partially tempting. She had finally begun to think of Chickasaw County as home again, after so many years away. And she’d loved the stately old house on sight.

But being back with Scanlon again, feeling the crackle of danger filling the air around them with every passing second, she realized how much she’d lost when that warehouse in Virginia had blown up and ripped him out of her life.

Being with him here, both alive, both in trouble, was like taking her first full, sweet breath after drowning in grief for so many long, excruciating months.

No matter what lies he’d told her, what secrets he was keeping now, she knew she couldn’t walk away from him and return to the new life she’d built in Chickasaw County. She was his partner. Lies or no lies, watching his back was her job.

“No,” she said, her voice strong and firm. “Whatever you’ve gotten into here, you need backup. You need me.”

“Cooper—”

“Shut up, Scanlon. I’m not going anywhere.”

* * *

“I’M NOT SURE IT’S A BAD IDEA,” Adam Brand told Scanlon an hour of futile argument later.

“Not a bad idea?” Scanlon gripped the satellite phone more tightly, pressing his lips into a thin line at the sight of Isabel’s look of triumph. He turned his back to her and lowered his voice. “Have you lost your mind?”

“You were a good team once. Who says you can’t be again?” Brand’s voice sounded tinny and faint over the satellite. Non-emergency communications between Scanlon and his SAC were supposed to be rare and carefully scheduled, carried out only over the satellite phone, which Scanlon kept locked in a metal box hidden beneath a loose floorboard in the linen closet.

“If the Swains discover she’s here—”

“Don’t let that happen,” Brand said reasonably. “They don’t make a lot of visits there—”

“They visited today.” Scanlon told Brand about Davy McCoy’s unexpected appearance.

“Sounds like a breakthrough to me,” Brand said. “And the invitation came from Addie Tolliver herself?”

“That’s what Davy said. I think it’s a test.”

“I’d concur.”

“But I can’t have Isabel staying here,” Scanlon added, the extra layer of desperation in his voice having little to do with his worry about her safety.

He was still feeling the effects of the kiss he’d planted on his partner at the Fort Payne Mountain View Inn.

Right now, she was watching him with that excited grin she got when a case started going her way, and it was all he could do to keep from hanging up on Brand and hauling her back to his bedroom to kiss that smile off her smug little face. Six months away from her had done nothing to quench the passion he’d been nurturing for almost as long as he’d known her.

But Brand didn’t know anything about those feelings. Isabel certainly didn’t have a clue. He’d worked hard to keep his attraction to her carefully hidden, staying within the bounds of their professional relationship.

“You’ve been puzzling over those files for months now without being able to figure out if any of the Swains are even involved in last year’s bombings. The bombings were Cooper’s baby in the first place—let her do the profiling work while you’re out in the field. She can give it a fresh eye.”

Any other agent, and Scanlon would have agreed without another argument. He hated pushing around paper, looking for clues, much preferring to be out in the field.

But Cooper wasn’t any other agent. “If they catch her here, we’re both dead.”

“So don’t let them catch her,” Brand responded, reprising his earlier argument.

Scanlon growled with frustration. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you planned this.”

“Good thing you know better,” Brand said.

“She’s going to need clothes. A weapon.”

“Maybe they left my Beretta and my clothes in my hotel room,” Isabel suggested. “Can they look?”

Scanlon passed along the information to Brand.

“We’ve already secured her clothing. The Beretta was there, as well. But there’s going to be the matter of her family. They’ll be looking for her.”

“That’s why we should send her home to them. Let the bad guys think she got to a safe place and contacted her family.”

“My brothers and sisters aren’t going to believe just any old story,” Isabel warned from her position near the stove. “You’ll have to let me talk to one of them.”

“Let her call one of them,” Brand said.

“We can’t take that chance—”

“I’ll have the Huntsville office deliver a new phone with her clothes and her weapon when an agent comes to pick up the van this evening,” Brand said calmly. “Let her call one of her family on the phone you’ve got.” He hung up without warning.

Scanlon swore under his breath.

“Boy, didn’t take long for you to go all lone wolf,” Isabel said, her tone flippant. But he knew her well enough to recognize the hurt in her dark eyes.

“Everything here’s so dangerous,” he said quietly. “I don’t want you in the middle of it.”

“I’m trained to be in the middle of it.” She lifted her chin, trying to look tough, but she wobbled a little, lingering weakness from the drug injection betraying her.

He couldn’t hold back a smile, slipping his hand under her elbow to steady her. His fingers seemed to burn where he touched her. “I know.”

“This investigation has to do with the serial bomber, doesn’t it?” she asked, letting him lead her to the futon sofa.

He dropped beside her, allowing himself the secret pleasure of sitting close enough that their arms brushed when they moved. “It does,” he admitted. “At least, we think it’s connected. Either way, I’ll be happy to bring the bastards down.”

He had his own personal reasons for wanting the Swains to pay for their crimes, reasons that had nothing to do with the serial bomber investigation. Even Adam Brand didn’t know what motivated him, as far as Scanlon knew. Then again, the wily SAC had a way of learning things only God himself could know.

“Well, you have plenty of time now to bring me up to speed.” She nudged him with her shoulder, a light, friendly touch that shouldn’t have sent fire pouring into his gut.

But it had. And now the memory of the kiss outside the hotel—the kiss she didn’t even remember because she was so drugged up she could barely stand—assaulted his mind with a barrage of images designed to make him crazy.

He wanted to kiss her again, this time when she was conscious and would know what it meant when her lips pressed back against his. Her reaction to his kiss had caught him by surprise, a fierce, passionate response that had almost knocked him from his own feet.

Had she known it was him? Or had she been hallucinating some phantom lover, one she saw as more than just a partner and friend? The question had damned near begun to haunt him.

He crossed to the stove, needing distance from her. “At the time of the Virginia bombing, we’d already begun looking at older blasts that might fit the bomber’s MO.”

“Right—the explosion in Rome, Georgia, that killed a judge, and there was a bombing here in north Alabama—” She paused, her brow crinkling. “Are we still in north Alabama?”

“Yeah. A place called Bolen Bluff, about fifteen miles northeast of Fort Payne.”

Her eyebrows notched upwards. “Jasper Swain’s hometown.”

Scanlon nodded. “Exactly.”

“But Swain’s been in jail for over twenty years,” she said. “We talked about the possibility of a copycat, but—”

“But the Swains are concentrating on meth and weed these days,” he finished for her. “I know. But the MO was so close to the Swain bombings. And the bomb in Virginia happened only after we started snooping into the Swains’ business.”

“You think they targeted us specifically?”

“Targeted you,” he said flatly. He’d let her run the investigation into Jasper Swain’s bombings, despite his own personal interest in the case. He’d even let her be the one to go visit Jasper at the jail in St. Clair County, afraid the old man might recognize him even after all these years.

Funny to think about now, considering he was living in the middle of the bloody Swains, trying to worm his way into the family business.

That had been Brand’s idea, too. He’d seen a golden opportunity to kill off Scanlon’s old self and create a whole new person for the undercover assignment he’d been thinking about for months.

“They’re up to more than just drugs and protection down there,” Brand had insisted soon after the bombing, while Scanlon had been hidden away at the SAC’s hunting retreat in central Virginia. Scanlon had agreed to the undercover assignment and headed south to Alabama as soon as he recovered from the worst of his injuries.

Fortunately, he apparently looked different enough from the child he’d been the last time he was in Bolen Bluff that nobody had recognized him at all, at least as far as he knew.

“This was Brand’s idea—sending you here.” Isabel echoed his own thoughts so closely he had to smile. After years of working together, they’d formed the habit of finishing each other’s sentences, their minds honed to think in similar directions.

It was the differences between them—her logical, scholarly approach contrasting with his more freewheeling, improvisational style—that had made them a good team. Brand had never tried assigning them to work with other agents after the first few times they’d worked together on cases.

“Yeah, Brand thinks the Swains may be up to more than just cooking meth and harvesting weed.”

“Does he think the bombs in Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama are connected to the Swains, too?” she asked. “Did you finally make a connection between the victims?”

The bombing cases he and Isabel had been investigating centered on attacks on targets that, as far as they could tell, seemed completely random. The first had been the murder of a Georgia family court judge, which had seemed significant at the time in terms of motive—until the second bombing took out the office of a small movie theater a few miles west of Meridian, Mississippi.

A third blast had destroyed half a warehouse in Gadsden, Alabama, and a fourth blew up a junkyard in western Birmingham. Only the judge died in the bombings. The others had suffered property damage only.

“We still haven’t figured out any connection,” he admitted. “None of the people have any overt relationship to each other, and if there’s a covert one, we haven’t come across it yet.”

“I’ve thought about the cases from time to time,” Isabel admitted, flashing him a faint smile. “You know how I like a puzzle. But Jesse’s kept me pretty busy since I started working for him, and then there was the business last month with my brother Rick and his wife—”

“Rick got married?” The last Scanlon had heard, Isabel’s brother was having trouble settling in at his new job with Cooper Security. Something about personality conflicts with his brother, Jesse, who ran the company.

“He did,” she said, her smile widening. “He reconnected with someone he knew when he was working at MacLear.”

Isabel’s brother Rick had worked for years at a private security contractor, MacLear Enterprises, before the company had been busted for running a secret criminal enterprise under the table. The company owner, Jackson Melville, was under indictment for the actions of the company’s secret SSU—Special Services Unit—which had kidnapped a child and terrorized a woman from California.

Isabel’s brother Rick had nothing to do with the SSU—according to Isabel, Rick hadn’t even known the unit existed. But the entire company had collapsed under the weight of the allegations against Melville and the SSU, Rick’s field operative position included.

“Was she another MacLear agent?” Scanlon asked.

“No—she was a CIA agent.” She smiled at his arched eyebrow. “Apparently they got hot and heavy when they were both working out of Kaziristan about three years ago. They reconnected last month—she was targeted by assassins—”

“Boy, you die for a few months and you miss out on everything,” he muttered drily.

“Oh! Did Brand tell you what we learned about the old MacLear SSU?”

Scanlon and his boss had conversed about little besides the undercover case he was working, and isolated as he was up here in the north Alabama mountains, Scanlon didn’t have much access to news, either. He’d left his BlackBerry and laptop behind when he became Mark Shipley, the disabled vet with just enough disability pay to buy this ramshackle cabin in the middle of nowhere. “What about the SSU?”

“They’re still operating. At least, the ones who escaped indictment or capture. And they may be picking up new members.”

Alarm rippled through him. “How do you know?”

“They went after Amanda—Rick’s wife. Turns out Khalid Mazir, one of the candidates for president of Kaziristan, was an al Adar mole. Rick’s wife, Amanda, was the only person outside al Adar who knew about Mazir’s terrorist ties—the guy kidnapped and tortured her a few years ago. She got away, and I guess it wouldn’t have mattered much if she hadn’t seen Mazir’s face.”

“So she could identify him as an al Adar operative, which would mess with his plans to become president?”

“Exactly.”

“And this guy hired SSU people to, what? Assassinate her?”

“Damned near succeeded,” Isabel said with a grimace.

“I wonder if they were operating as far back as last summer,” Scanlon mused.

“When the first bombing happened?”

He shrugged. “Probably not connected, but I know some of the SSU were explosives and munitions experts. What if they studied Jasper Swain’s MO and decided to mimic it?”

Her brow creased in thought. “It’s a pretty old fashioned MO. His style is primitive compared to the electronically triggered explosives available these days. Honestly, I don’t know why anyone would use that kind of bomb if they had other options.”

“Unless it’s sentimental somehow.”

“Sentimental?”

“Maybe the serial bomber is a fan of old Jasper. Maybe he builds the bombs the Swain way as a tribute.”

Isabel looked skeptical. “Wouldn’t a more famous bomber be a better choice? Someone like the Unabomber or Rudolph—”

Scanlon shook his head. “I don’t know. I’m just spitballing at this point.” He held out his hand to her, bracing himself for the feel of her warm, strong hand in his.

She took his hand, and the tingling commenced, but he managed not to let her see how she affected him as he pulled her to her feet. She gave him a quizzical look but followed as he led her into the hall.

“I keep the files in here.” He opened the linen closet door and pulled up a loose floorboard. Besides the lockbox with the satellite phone, he also kept hidden a rectangular plastic box marked MISALGA, the Bureau shorthand for the bombing cases in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. He opened the box and handed her the thick portfolio where he kept copies of all the files on the case. “You up to a little light reading?”

She took the portfolio and grinned at him. “You bet.”

They both turned to head back into the living room when a sound from the front of the house brought them up short.

A second later, someone knocked on the door.

“Closet,” he said tersely, nodding toward the bedroom.

Holding onto the portfolio, Isabel disappeared behind the bedroom door, while Scanlon hurried to the living room and took a quick look at the porch through the window beside the door.

A curvy blond woman dressed in a linen suit stood in front of the door, glancing at her watch. Scanlon closed his eyes and released a sigh of frustration.

Dahlia was back.

“Mark, are you in there?”

He opened the door and pasted a smile on his face. “When did you get back in town?”

“Just a little while ago.” Dahlia McCoy lifted to her tiptoes and brushed her pink lips against his. “I ran into Davy in town and he said you were home, so I thought I’d drop by to say hello before I go back to the office.”

She entered without being asked, shrugging off her jacket to bare her toned, sun-kissed arms. She went straight to the refrigerator and pulled out a can of Diet Coke. Settling on the sofa as if she intended to stay awhile, she smiled at Scanlon.

He smiled back, hiding his dismay with the skill of a now-practiced liar.

He’d forgotten to tell Isabel about his girlfriend.

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