Protecting His Witness. Marie Ferrarella

woman seemed like a walking contradiction.

      “You never know,” he answered, going with her last comment. “I like reading.”

      She merely nodded, as if she expected everyone to feel that way about books. Zack let the topic drop. He noticed her plate was empty. The next second, she was getting up, taking it to the sink. He quickly polished off the last of his eggs and toast. He could have eaten more.

      “This was good,” he told her.

      “It was simple,” she replied, ignoring the compliment he had given her.

      Leaning his palms against the table top, Zack slowly pushed himself up to his feet. Damn, he still felt wobbly. He had no patience with infirmity when he was the one who was infirm. This was going to be a problem, he thought.

      Approaching her, he asked suddenly, “Do you have a car?”

      She turned around from the sink and looked at him for a second, trying to read his expression before she answered. Did he want to take her car? If so, he was in no shape to drive.

      “Yes.” She let the single word hang in the air for a minute before asking, “Why?”

      He didn’t like asking for favors, especially from people he didn’t know, but he needed to get back and Aurora’s public transportation left a great deal to be desired.

      “Look, you’ve already gone more than out of your way for me—”

      She saw no reason to dispute that. “Yes.”

      He couldn’t tell if she was agreeing with him, or tossing out the word just to make him get to the point faster. “I need a ride,” he told her bluntly. “Someone slashed the tires on my car.”

      She wondered if it was actually his car, or if he’d stolen it. “Before or after they shot you?”

      “Probably before.” He stopped himself, his words replaying themselves in his head. “This sounds like some kind of melodrama, doesn’t it?”

      Her mouth curved slightly. “One that went straight to video,” she agreed.

      For a moment, Zack wrestled with his thoughts. He’d been undercover for several months now and things were obviously coming to a head. But his gut told him that this woman had no connections to the identity-theft ring he and his team were trying to break up. Wounded, bleeding and disoriented, he had come to her, she hadn’t sought him out. That made her an outsider.

      He didn’t want to repay her act of kindness by telling her a lie. He really didn’t have to tell her very much at all beyond a few nebulous pieces of information. At the very least, she deserved to know who she’d gone out of her way for.

      “My name’s Zack McIntyre.”

      “Okay,” she said gamely. “Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

      She really didn’t want to know anything, did she? That either made her incredibly unique, or afraid of something. “No, but you didn’t ask me what my name was after you told me yours.”

      Slender shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug. “I figured if you wanted me to know, you’d tell me.” She looked at him as if her point was made. “And you did.”

      Zack shook his head. His sisters could certainly take a few pointers from her. They acted as if they had the right to know every single detail of his life.

      “You don’t have any curiosity, do you?” he marveled.

      “I know all I need to know to get me through the day,” she replied complacently.

      He didn’t have to be a mind reader to know that as far as she was concerned, that was enough.

      Zack watched her as she got ready to leave. “I’d be careful if I were you,” he told her.

      He was kidding, she told herself. But she still couldn’t bank down the fear that suddenly spiked through her. Was he giving her a veiled warning? She succeeded in keeping her voice cool as she asked him, “And why’s that?”

      He watched as she slipped on her high heels. They gave her an extra four inches. “Well, a woman with no curiosity is a rare creature. Someone might be tempted to kidnap you and put you in a museum dedicated to rare and mythical creatures—like the unicorn.”

      Kasey slipped her purse straps onto her shoulder. “There are no such things as unicorns.”

      He winked at her as she crossed to the door. “Or so they’d like us to think.”

      It was just a simple little movement, a flutter of an eyelid. Why did that feel so unsettling? She hadn’t even looked at another man since Jim had died. Hadn’t even thought about anyone else. Where was this coming from?

      It didn’t matter where it was coming from, she upbraided herself sternly. What mattered was sending this man on his way, out of her life.

      “Where do you want me to drop you off?” she asked as she opened the front door.

      Home, Zack thought. Either the bachelor digs where he kept most of his clothes, or better yet, his mother’s house where he and his brother and sisters had grown up. Just the sight of his mother would make him feel that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. Especially now that Lila McIntyre was finally going to be marrying the man she should have been married to all along, her former partner and the current chief of detectives, Brian Cavanaugh. She would have had a much more peaceful life had she been Brian’s wife and not his father’s. They would all have had more peaceful lives if she’d married Brian instead.

      Zack locked away the thought. No point in going there. And physically, he couldn’t go to his mother’s house anyway, not right now. Until he was told otherwise, until his captain pulled him off the case, he was still Danny Masters, a hacking genius with a talent for resurrecting information on so-called reformatted hard drives and with an unending need for other people’s money.

      So for now, he would return to the run-down motel room where he’d been staying for the duration of this charade. Because Danny Masters couldn’t afford any better digs. Master computer wizard though he was and blessed with a silver tongue, he had one very bad fatal flaw. He gambled. On anything and anyone. Which made him the ideal employee for an unscrupulous employer. His addiction made him easier to control, easier to have power over. In essence, “Danny Masters” owed his soul to the company store.

      He leaned against the whitewashed brick as he waited for her to lock the front door. “I’ll give you the address,” he promised, “once we get into your car.”

      The look in her eyes was wary, as if she was debating whether or not to believe him. And then she seemed to make up her mind and nodded, tucking her purse under her arm.

      “All right,” she announced briskly, turning away from the house, “let’s go.”

      Zack caught his lower lip between his teeth to suppress any sound of discomfort that might escape. His side really hurt. He fell into place beside his solemn angel of mercy, moving not nearly as quickly as he would have liked to.

      But he was making progress, which was all that counted to him. His life and his job had taught him how to be a patient man.

      Andrew Cavanaugh threw open the front door before his younger brother even took his finger off the doorbell. Brian had the keys to his house, as he had to Brian’s, but an inherent respect for each other’s privacy kept those keys in his pocket.

      “We need to talk,” Andrew declared, doing his best to harness the emotions that had prompted him to call and ask Brian to come over as quickly as possible.

      “As I recall, you do that far better than me, big brother.” Chief of Detectives Brian Cavanaugh braced himself as walked into his older brother’s house.

      The former chief of police had summoned him via a voice message that he’d left on his answering machine. Andrew’s message, unlike his normal,