bone deep.
Bravo whined. The dog’s tail thumped on Paige’s leg as he stepped forward, sat in front of Marco and barked, then scratched at Marco’s foot.
Paige’s face wrinkled as if she’d aged decades in the span of a second. The task force officers formed ranks behind her, recognizing Bravo’s “hit” signal, the sign that he’d found drugs.
“Marco?” she whispered. The tightness in her chest prevented her from speaking louder.
Marco’s eyes went blank. Carefully, painfully blank. Sighing, he let his hands fall to his sides. His jacket opened, and the packages he’d been hiding beneath tumbled out.
“Marco…” Her voice trailed off as she stared at the five kilos of marijuana piled at his feet.
At least she needn’t second-guess her decision this morning to end their affair. Nor her presumption that he would only have used her.
Because he already had used her. He’d been using her all along, apparently, her and Bravo both, to find his drugs.
So he could steal them.
Chapter 1
Six months later
Midnight. Fitting, Paige thought, checking the luminous hands on her watch as she ran.
Midnight, moonlight, the bay of hounds muffled by a chilling mist—what better backdrop for a manhunt? Especially when the man being hunted was Marco Angelosi. Marco was a man of shadow and light, comfortable in the dark and as hard to get a handle on as a fistful of fog.
At one time he’d been a good cop. Dedicated. Driven. Although his methods were sometimes unorthodox, he’d had the best arrest record on the force, and his cases stuck.
But that Marco had been an illusion. What was fog, anyway, but a trick of the light?
Thin air.
As thin as the sharp, frosty air she couldn’t seem to pull enough of into her heaving lungs as Bravo, nose deep to the ground, pulled her along the rocky terrain of Lake Rowan State Park, fifteen miles north of Port Kingston.
“Break, Bravo.” She pulled the dog to a stop and listened, but the howling of the other canines had long ago faded into the night behind her.
Her sergeant would have her cleaning kennels until Christmas when he found out she’d broken off from the grid search and circled the lake on her own. Eventually he’d forgive her, though. He had to; he was her brother.
Besides, Sergeant Matt Burkett and the others were barking up the wrong road. She knew Marco Angelosi. Knew him intimately. She knew the confidence he had in his body.
He wasn’t on the highway.
She looked back at the black lacquer surface of Lake Rowan. That’s where Marco had gone. He’d swum the lake.
Never mind that it was February and the water temperature couldn’t be sixty degrees, or that the narrowest crossing from shore to shore spanned better than a mile.
Marco wouldn’t take the easy way.
Bending over against a stitch in her side, she raised her head to get her bearings. The shifting fog glowed around her, reflecting the light of the three-quarter moon and limiting her visibility to twenty or thirty feet in front of her. Curse this weather. It was making the job ten times harder than it should have been, and the job was hard enough already, emotionally and physically.
She shivered. Bravo let out a high whine.
Her hand automatically fell to the pleasure spot behind the dog’s ear and rubbed. “It’s all right, B. We’ll find him.”
No matter what, she added silently.
Marco couldn’t just walk away from a prison van wreck and pick up life where he’d left off. She would find him.
And then she would send him back.
Her fingers clenched around Bravo’s leash. Apprehending Marco wasn’t just her sworn duty as a peace officer; it was a matter of dignity.
After his arrest, Paige had quietly resigned from the task force. She didn’t deserve the post. She’d made a mistake, allowed her objectivity to be compromised and because of it the entire investigation could have been compromised. The combined agencies working the case still hadn’t found the source of the Magic, but at least no more evidence had disappeared from the drug shipments they had found.
Bravo’s nose twitched, turned into the breeze, snuffling. He had a scent. Marco?
Her skin tingled at the mere passing of his name through her mind. Like some genetically programmed reaction, the feeling was intense, instinctive and unstoppable. For a moment he was there, touching her again, his broad fingertips skimming expertly over her breasts, her belly, the insides of her thighs.
A moan rumbled up her throat, but she snatched it back, tamping down the surging warmth inside her by concentrating on the cold of the night. The chill seeped under her jacket and she felt the charge in the air. Her nostrils flared.
He was here; she felt him.
They’d been together only that one night, but oh, what a night. Chemically, electrically, she was still connected to him. She feared she always would be.
Bravo strained at his collar, eager to get back to work. Her breath less labored now, Paige stamped her boots in the fallen leaves, forcing circulation to her toes, and motioned Bravo forward with a flick of her hand.
The dog tugged her along as he picked up speed. He whined again and his tail thumped Paige’s thigh as she scrambled for footing on the slippery ground. He snuffled the base of a rocky hill, not terribly tall—twenty, maybe twenty-five feet high—but steep. On another night, another search, she might have taken Bravo around. But not tonight. Not when it was Marco she was after.
Her own heartbeat reflecting Bravo’s near-giddy excitement, she let go of the leash, urged Bravo on and scrambled up the hillside. Her fingers scratched at soil and rocks, clinging even where there were no handholds.
Finally she dragged herself over the top edge and, puffing hard, propped herself against a narrow trunk in a stand of pine.
Her first thought was for Bravo, loping up the trail ahead. The dog wouldn’t wait for her. He’d follow the scent, as he’d been trained, unless she called him back. It was up to her to follow him, which, in this fog, wouldn’t be easy.
Her second thought wasn’t a thought at all, but a pain, like a hand wringing dry her heart. On the hillside above her, a rock outcropping burst through the mist. On that rock stood the figure of a man.
Fog wafted across his outline like ribbons of silk, making him appear magical, ethereal. Prisoner’s coveralls plastered his figure like a bright orange second skin, detailing every curve, every bulge of a muscular physique she knew too well.
Her skin zinged. The temperature seemed to warm ten degrees in as many seconds, or at least the cold no longer mattered.
She’d found him.
