Better Off Dead. Meryl Sawyer

she decided. Her subconscious wanted to know if men still found her attractive.

      An ice queen, Chad thought. Just his luck. At one point anything in panties had captured his attention.

      Must be getting old.

      The first woman who’d interested him in a long time was frigid. Give Devon a break. Maybe she’d moved here to put a bad relationship behind her. She could be temporarily off men—or have a boyfriend.

      Thanks to three sisters, Chad had a good understanding of how a woman’s mind worked. He got along with women and enjoyed them. He was even willing to go shopping, although that was a stretch.

      He watched Devon disappear. He wanted to kiss her until she was breathless and begging for more. Hell, what he really wanted was to whisk her away to his place and peel that sundress off her.

      Heat pooled in his groin. Chad silently cursed himself for thinking with his dick. Like a siren, Devon called to him, urging him to come closer…and be destroyed.

      DEVON RUSHED OUT of the building, anxious to escape Chad Langston, but she paused to check the street. There were a few people, but none of them looked familiar. She hadn’t been followed.

      She should have turned down the job because she found Chad attractive, but she quite literally couldn’t afford to. She’d been offered lots of jobs, but none of them met her requirements should she need to escape.

      Chad Langston. Quite a hunk. Tall, sun-streaked chestnut-brown hair, blue eyes and a body to die for. No man had the right to possess so much masculine virility. He seemed to know it, she decided, remembering the aggressive boldness in his gaze.

      She would just have to give him the deep freeze until he got the message. No matter how sexy the ripped bod or how adorable his smile, Devon did not need a man in her life. But she had to admit his long sensual look, as close to a caress as you could get without touching, had triggered a bittersweet sensation.

      She hadn’t experienced anything like it for well over a year, when she’d been forced to leave Tyler behind in Houston. She’d immediately recognized the telltale gleam in Chad’s eyes for what it was—lust.

      What had stunned her was her own reaction. She had been too long without a man, but she couldn’t afford to get too close to anyone. The last man to help her had paid with his life.

      Over and over at odd, unexpected times, she kept seeing herself closing Romero’s eyes. Until we meet again, may God keep you in the palm of His hand.

      The weight of the loss, realizing she would never see Romero again swept through her. Where would she be if not for him? Even more lost and lonely than she’d been.

      Guilt had a stranglehold on her emotions. The hit team had killed something vital inside her when they’d murdered Romero. Problem was, she hadn’t died yet.

      Death was terrifyingly final. Knowing she’d caused his murder brought the blur of unfallen tears to her eyes. No more star-filled nights for Romero, no more artists to discover, no more walks through the historic plaza. No more anything.

      She forced herself to hit the speed dial on her cell phone and called Warren. “I got the job. I don’t think they checked my references.”

      “Doesn’t matter. They’re backstopped.”

      From her first relocation, she knew phony credentials and references were fixed so that if they were checked, they would appear to be legitimate.

      “Problem is I need to become an expert at planning a wedding by tomorrow morning.”

      “Try the Internet.”

      “I plan to.” She hesitated a moment before asking, “Has Masterson given the okay to call my sister yet?”

      “No. I’ll let you know when he does.”

      “Any word on selling my condo or the gallery?”

      “Like I’ve told you before, Lindsey Wallace is wanted for murder. WITSEC can’t just quietly sell your assets without attracting attention.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

      Warren was not a warm fuzzy guy. When Derek had been her handler, he had been much more helpful. She supposed Warren thought she knew the ropes since she’d already been relocated once.

      This time she had to take the WITSEC stipend until her assets in Santa Fe could be sold and the money transferred. Meanwhile, like most other WITSEC witnesses, she had to live on the cash her handler doled out and establish credit on her own. Until she had an income stream, she had to live in an apartment the size of a broom closet.

      The need for cash and the office’s setup with a back door and two escape routes made Devon take the job at Aloha. Otherwise, she told herself, she would have steered clear of pushy Chad Langston. For a moment she wondered if she should have told her handler about him. No way, she decided. Warren would have made her look for another job. Except for Chad, this office was perfect.

      She climbed into the temperamental Toyota that Warren had helped her buy. The rattletrap car was rusted, a common occurrence in Hawaii, and probably wouldn’t last another year, but for now it was all she could afford.

      Chad Langston drifted into her mind. His office was just across the courtyard. I’ll drop by tomorrow to see how you’re doing.

      Oh, no, you won’t.

      BROCK HARDESTY STARED at the special map on the wall that he had created for Samantha Robbins/Lindsey Wallace. He’d marked every state where she had attended school or had relatives or friends. He’d tagged the spots where she had vacationed. WITSEC wouldn’t relocate her in any of those places.

      “She’s probably in the Pacific Northwest or California,” he muttered. She hadn’t traveled to those places and had no friends there. But exactly where was she?

      The bitch was smart. He would grant her that. Not only had she evaded his hit team, but Lindsey had been clever enough to change the license plates on Romero Zamora’s car. When the APB went out, the police were looking for the blue Suburban, but they never spotted it because it had different plates.

      He later learned, through a source at FBI headquarters, that she’d driven north to Denver. WITSEC had immediately evacuated her.

      He’d caught hell from Kilmer Cassidy because his agents had muffed it. He reminded the scumbag CEO that he had advised him to have the bitch terminated the first time they had visited PowerTec.

      He had been running checks on new licenses issued by DMVs in the Western states. Hacking into the DMV was a no-brainer. It took a badge number to get into the local police computer. No problem since badge numbers were stored with employment files.

      Once Brock was into the local police computer, it was easy to springboard into the State Police computer. From there, it was a few keystrokes and you were in the DMV database. So far, nothing. He’d run hundreds of pictures of new applicants against an imaging software program with Samantha Robbins/Lindsey Wallace’s photograph on it, but none of them matched the picture of the woman he was after.

      His operatives—the dumb shits who’d let Lindsey Wallace get away—had a contact at the Bank of Santa Fe. The minute her condo or gallery sold and the funds were being transferred, he would know about it.

      It might take years. Romero Zamora had been a popular man with a lot of influential friends. His murder was getting more attention than Brock would have thought. With the media hovering, WITSEC wouldn’t dare sell her assets.

      In the meantime, he would wait. And when no one at Obelisk was paying attention to Number 111 and 32, Brock would arrange for an accident. He hadn’t come this far to suffer fools. He was already grooming another top-notch hit man.

      Man. Like Number 32, women were too emotional. Slitting Zamora’s throat was an unbelievable fuckup. Something only a woman would do.

      One of his telephones rang. The caller ID said it was one of the secret sources he’d developed for Obelisk.

      “Yeah?”