The Renegade Steals A Lady. Vickie Taylor

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.

      Or had he found her?

      He was looking right at her. He couldn’t possibly see her through the fog, in her little stand of trees, yet she felt certain he knew she was there. Could he feel her presence the way she felt his? The possibility set her blood pounding even harder.

      His head snapped to his left. Brush crackled and twigs popped.

      Bravo? Had he caught up to Marco already?

      She moved from behind the tree trunk to call instructions to the dog. As she did, Marco leaped into a clump of scrub around the base of a cottonwood tree.

      A few bushes wouldn’t protect him from Bravo. She ordered her feet to run. Heading out along the edge of the precipice, she opened her mouth to yell.

      The words never had a chance to form in her throat. She saw the muzzle of a gun flash from the spot where Marco had disappeared. Instinctively she skidded to a halt, bracing for the impact of the bullet even before she heard the shot.

      Her feet slipped on the rocks. She flailed her arms, struggling madly to regain her balance. A puff of air breezed by her temple. She wasn’t sure if the bullet hit her or not, because she was already falling.

      She grasped at branches, at roots, but couldn’t hold on. Down she fell, tumbling, twisting, bouncing along the slope until there was nothing but the pounding of her body on rock, the snaring of her clothes and skin on brush.

      Her last thought before darkness overcame her was of Marco, not as he’d looked on the rocks in prisoner’s garb, but as he’d looked in her bed. Naked. Virile.

      And hungry.

      Lying in the brush behind the man he’d just choked into unconsciousness, Marco forced himself to ease his forearm off the shooter’s throat just short of killing him.

      The bastard had shot her. Shot Paige.

      Pushing the man’s prone body away, Marco jumped up to run, but spared one last scathing glance for the limp form at his feet. He needed to get to Paige, but if he was going to make any sense of what was happening to him, to them, Marco needed to know who this man was.

      That evening, while working on a prison crew cleaning up litter from the side of the highway, another prisoner, Tomas Oberas, had picked a fight with Marco, getting them both sent back to the lockup early. At the time, Marco had wondered what was going on. He’d never had a problem with Oberas before. On the way back to the prison, he got his answer.

      The fight was a setup. Someone had wanted Marco on that van, with only one guard and no other prisoners except for Oberas. They’d wanted him there because they’d wanted him. And they’d nearly gotten him.

      He’d barely escaped alive when they’d forced the van off the road. Then this man, and others like him, came after Marco. If it hadn’t been for the dense woods and nightfall, he would never have evaded them.

      He hadn’t escaped them, yet, he thought, reminding himself not to get cocky. They were a determined group. He wasn’t sure what they wanted from him, but whatever it was, they wanted it badly.

      Counting each precious second wasted, Marco dug his toe under the man’s shoulder and flipped him over. Whoever the guy was, he wasn’t the one behind all this, of that much Marco was sure. Arranging a prison break took money. More money than a man wearing a stained sheepskin jacket, faded camouflage and boots with cracked soles would have.

      He was just a hired gun. But