a German shepherd named Bravo, had just wasted another morning searching. This raid hadn’t turned up anything more than the last five.
Gulls screeched and circled above the nearby docks. A sea breeze toyed with the hair around her face. She tucked the yellow locks behind her ears and surreptitiously scanned the parking area for Marco.
Not that he had any reason to be here. He hadn’t been appointed to the multiagency task force assembled to investigate the influx of a new cocaine derivative called “Magic” into the area. But then, he hadn’t had a reason to be at any of the other task force busts, either, yet he had shown up at each and every one.
Department gossip rumored he was jealous. As Port Kingston Police Department’s best narcotics detective, he’d been the leading candidate to head up the task force. But for reasons unknown, his name had been left off the final postings.
Paige didn’t believe he was jealous. Marco was too much his own man to worry about office politics. She suspected his reasons for showing up where she was working were more personal. Or at least they had been. Today he had no personal reason to be here. Not after the way they’d parted.
Standing in her kitchen doorway at dawn, her bare feet chilling on the checkerboard tile floor and a terry robe wrapped around her like a suit of armor, she’d told him she couldn’t see him again.
He had taken her rebuff stoically, but something disturbing had simmered just beneath the black slate surfaces of his eyes. Something volatile and yet vulnerable. Not quite frightening, but not terribly comforting, either.
For a moment she’d thought he might argue. For a moment she’d wished he would. But Marco had apparently been raised to listen when a lady says no. In the end, his only rebuke had been a clipped goodbye and an unsettling look from eyes turned cold and hard as polished obsidian.
She’d spent the quiet morning hours afterward convincing herself that she’d done the right thing.
Outside the bedroom, men like him had little use for women like her. In their eyes, she was a lowly canine patrol officer, young, blond and petite, and therefore naive, witless and weak.
He was a renegade narcotics detective. Seasoned. Some might say jaded. Not to mention tall, dark and devastatingly handsome, his near-perfect Mediterranean features flawed only by a nose slightly bent in the middle, and an attitude to match. His station-house poodle jokes about the canine squad were legend in the department.
Despite the way it had felt between them last night, he would never see her for the cop—or the woman—she was, and she wouldn’t let herself be used by a man who saw her as anything less. Not ever again.
She slammed the steel door of the warehouse, but the noise made her jerk as if she’d been jarred from a dream—or a nightmare. Bravo thumped his tail against her thigh and whined. Rubbing his favorite spot behind his ears, reassuring them both, she set out across the parking lot.
A dozen or so officers and agents milled around in wind-breakers emblazoned with Police, DEA or Customs in big, block letters. A few of the men waved. Not in the mood for conversation, she fluttered her hand as she passed by. With any luck, she could make a getaway before one of them hailed her.
“Well, Officer Burkett,” Assistant District Attorney Jarvis Bickham chirped from behind her. Paige would have known it was Bickham even if she hadn’t recognized his voice. The parrot beak he called a nose cast a long shadow in front of them as he fell in step beside her. “How are you this fine morning?”
Grinding her teeth in an effort to crush her annoyance, she cut him a hard look. “Frustrated. Just like all those other cops over there.” She waved toward the cluster of men. “Where’s the Magic your source keeps promising us?”
More and more of the drug had been turning up on the streets of Port Kingston and nearby cities every day. So far, the task force had had no luck in tracing it despite the A.D.A.’s snitch, who was supposed to be feeding them information. As if created by the sorcery it was named for, the Magic seemed to appear from nowhere.
Supercoke, the users called it. It was a form of cocaine, ultrarefined and baked into hard bricks fifty or sixty times more potent than standard coke. Its potency meant smugglers could import smaller quantities—thus eluding detection more easily—and earn the same or greater payout.
It also meant death for the uninformed kids who didn’t properly dilute the stuff before they smoked it.
Bickham tugged at his tie uncomfortably. “There were drugs, right where my source said they would be.”
She gave a derisive snort. “A few kilos of low-quality marijuana, just like last time. It’s probably worth less than the cheap pottery it was stuffed in.”
Cheap imported flowerpots of thick ceramic, glazed in colorful geometric patterns, to be exact. Five of them. But the shipping label said six. One was missing, along with the marijuana that had probably been in it. A payoff to one of the customs agents, maybe. Or stolen by a warehouse worker.
She made a mental note to check the employee roster later, and to double-check the packing slips from the other low-yield busts the task force had made this month. It was possible this wasn’t the first time they hadn’t gotten all of the dope.
“Look,” the A.D.A. said a bit too brightly, as if glad to find an excuse to change the subject. “There’s Detective Angelosi.”
Paige’s heart lurched. She stopped. At her side, Bravo automatically sat. Lowering her sunglasses, she squinted at the figure hovering around her car. It was Marco, all right.
“Maybe he’s feeling a bit more optimistic today than you,” Bickham said.
Paige shrugged noncommittally. “I doubt it.” Not after the way he’d looked when he’d left her place this morning.
Her stomach fluttered. She jammed the glasses back on her face. Maybe she’d go chat with those Drug Enforcement Administration guys, after all.
“Why don’t we just go see?” Before she could slip away, Bickham hooked his arm around hers in a grip so tight it pinched, and dragged her forward. “Angelosi?” he called.
Marco looked over his shoulder. Paige caught a glimpse of deep blue circles under reddened eyes. Sagging cheeks. An unshaved jaw. He looked just like she felt—like hell.
He scanned the lot to see who’d called. She tensed, waiting for the jolt she always felt when that dark gaze landed on her. But the jolt never came.
His gaze cut across her as if she didn’t exist, then he walked away, his shoulders hunched and his forearms guarding his middle as if his stomach hurt.
Anger pooled in her gut. The brush-off shouldn’t have surprised her, she supposed, given the way she’d treated him this morning.
But this was work, not her bedroom. She was a cop, dammit. He would show her the respect she deserved. On the job, at least.
She exploded after him. Halfway across the parking area, she caught him with Bravo at her side, Bickham on her heels and in full view of the dozen officers and agents standing around. A couple of the others gathered closer, probably sensing something was wrong in the way she reached for Marco’s sleeve and spun him to her.
“Paige, no—” he started, then stopped. For a moment, his eyes held the same vulnerability
