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
