the carriage.
2
“DROP THE KNIFE.”
“I don’t think so.” Max Dalton held the small pocketknife steady as he stared down the barrel of Eli Whitacker’s Glock 9mm. Not exactly an ideal situation. He’d broken into the abandoned warehouse hoping to find a clue as to where Whitacker might have stashed the girl, but he’d never expected to find Whitacker himself.
Max never considered that he might not walk out of the warehouse at all. That things weren’t going exactly as planned was an understatement, to say the least.
“I said,” Eli repeated, “drop the knife.”
Max tried to calculate his odds, came up with a depressingly low probability of success, and let the blade clatter to the concrete floor.
“Good boy. And now if you’d be good enough to get down on your knees.”
“I don’t think so.”
Eli’s grin widened. “No problem. You can die just as well standing up.”
Eli’s finger moved, gently squeezing the triggerthat would, at any moment, fire a shot of lead into Max’s gut.
He did the only thing he could do, even though it was futile and useless—he tried to dive to the left.
And as he did, his eardrums burst as a shot rang out. He flinched automatically, anticipating the pain of the bullet connecting with soft flesh.
But there was no pain. Just Eli standing there, a red stain spreading out on his chest, and a blood bubble forming at his mouth.
Eli fell to his knees, revealing the woman behind him, a gun held tight in her shaking hands.
Her.
Dark hair that fell in soft curves to brush against her shoulders. A square jaw and dancing green eyes. Long dancer’s legs that he could imagine wrapped tightly around him.
He saw her, and he wanted. Craved. Needed.
She was his fantasy. His inspiration. His complete and total distraction.
“Alyssa,” he heard himself whisper. “Alyssa, you’re alive.”
CHRISTOPHER HYDE stared at the computer screen, frowned, then methodically backspaced over the last bit of text he’d written, changing Alyssa to Alicia.
He shook his head. Still too close, what with the letter A. He backspaced again, and suddenly the femme fatale’s name in his second Max Dalton novel became Natalia.
Better.
Better still if he would go in and change the description, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that. Maybe once the whole book was finished he’d change her hair from black to red. Right now, though, he could only see the girl in his imagination. Alyssa-called-Natalia.
And, yeah, she was the girl of his dreams.
He’d started writing the Max Dalton series before he’d met Alyssa. The character had been in his head for years—an obscenely wealthy freelance operative who traveled the world on assignment for the highest bidder. Max had Chris’s own wanderlust, and although Chris had never rescued a child kidnapped by terrorists or scaled a mountain range trying to find ancient artifacts before the bad guys located them, he poured his own fantasies into the character. His childhood had been staid, boring. He’d seen nothing other than his small Texas hometown, population 712, until he was twenty years old. But he’d read every National Geographic that came in the mail cover to cover, and he’d fantasized about seeing those places himself. About having adventures all over the world.
His journalism degree had been his ticket out, and now he earned his keep by traveling the globe and writing about it for tourists. And with any luck, one day he’d supplement that income with royalties from the Max Dalton novels he was currently trying to sell.
He’d landed an agent with the first book, and she was about to begin pitching it to publishers. The entire process was nerve-wracking, and he was trying to bury the nervousness by burying himself in the second Max Dalton adventure. An adventure in which Max teamed up with another operative—a female—who may or may not be an ally, and who was most definitely a lover.
And who in his head was all Alyssa.
Chris still remembered the day she’d moved in. She’d been trying to drag a battered, butt-ugly recliner from her rental truck to her apartment. He’d offered either to help her carry it or torch it, her choice. She’d gawked at him for a long second, and at first he’d feared he’d gone too far. Then she’d collapsed into the recliner, bent over with peals of laughter. The chair was a gift from her father, she’d said. “He has terrible taste, and he never should have spent the money on the damn thing, but I love him.” She shrugged. “So it’ll get a place of honor in the living room.”
The next day, she’d knocked on his door, and invited him over to see how she’d “done up that hideous chair.” He’d walked inside, then breathed deeply of the smell of cinnamon and cloves that seemed to fill her apartment, a scent that now belonged entirely to Alyssa, prompting delicious thoughts of her at random times and locations. Especially now, during the holiday season.
As for the chair, it was tucked into a corner next to an absolutely hideous gold-plated floor lamp decorated with flying cupids. She’d hung a velvet painting of dogs playing poker behind the chair, and set off the entire area with a small gold shag rug that looked like a reject from an Austin Powers movie set. The corner was in utter contrast to the rest of the living room, with its soft lines and feminine colors.
“I’m calling it the corner of testosterone,” she said, and he could see her lips twitch with suppressed laughter.
“I think my testosterone is offended,” he’d said dryly. She’d stared for a moment, and then her laugh had burst forth. “Seriously, though, I like it.”
And that combination—that subtly sexy girl who was willing to be a little bit silly because she loved her dad—completely swept Chris off his feet.
Not that he’d told Alyssa that. Alyssa knew he was alive, of course, but she thought of him as a friend, not a flesh-and-blood man. A sad state of affairs for which he had no one to blame but himself.
At first, she’d been dating some guy—Bob, Bill, something—who had never been good enough for Alyssa. And Chris didn’t put the moves on attached women, no matter how sexy they were.
But even when that happy day had come and she’d kicked Bob to the curb, Chris still hadn’t made a move. Hadn’t even hinted how he felt.
She’d come to him, told him about the breakup, and suggested they watch something fast-paced and mindless on his big-screen television.
He couldn’t say no, of course, and though she’d seemed fascinated by the car chases and explosions, he’d spent the movie wondering how to tell the woman who’d become one of his best friends that he’d fallen hard and fast for her. And then, when the movie had ended, she’d smiled at him with sad eyes and reached for his hands. There’d been a window of opportunity right then. A single short window during which he could have done what Max Dalton would have so smoothly done—leaned
