LITMIR.BIZ

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any information he learned would be inadmissible, he couldn’t risk a leak, which was a real possibility if he attempted the legal route by obtaining a court ordered tap. She didn’t own a cellular telephone, but she did have a beeper. He also hadn’t been able to determine whether or not she had another extension in her bedroom.

      He reined in the baser thoughts that readily flowed through his mind when he considered the means by which to gain entrance to Dr. Romine’s bedroom.

      Shoving his hand through his hair, he stepped off her porch into the bright morning sunlight and headed across the small concrete courtyard bordered with overgrown, neglected foliage to the stairs leading up to his apartment. He’d stretched the boundaries of the law before to suit his own ends and he wasn’t above doing so now. When it came to tracking down those on the FBI’s most wanted list, he wouldn’t hesitate to stretch the rules to the point of breaking. Every now and then, he’d even managed a few stress cracks, but never had he ever completely ignored the laws he’d sworn to uphold. That didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy a challenge, and the Romine case definitely qualified.

      Except Chase Bend-the-Rules Bracken had a problem. A problem that consisted of his body’s reaction to his only lead in the case he had to solve, or he’d be donating his dark blue suits to the Goodwill.

      With a sigh of self-disgust, he walked into his apartment and headed straight for the locked spare bedroom. He flipped on the light and crossed the room, ignoring the high-powered scope set up near the window. Without bothering to sit, he leaned over and punched a series of keys on the computer keyboard. In the recorder next to him, surveillance tapes whirred to life then paused until triggered by the subject’s telephone. The red lights on the recording devices glowed.

      He was ready, in the preliminary sense. If Jared Romine contacted his sister by telephone, Chase would know about it. His gut told him the rogue agent wouldn’t be so careless; it wasn’t Romine’s style considering he’d been underground for almost three years without so much as a hint to his whereabouts. The Bureau knew that somehow Romine maintained contact with his sister. Chase needed to determine exactly how the murdering agent did it. Then and only then would he be able to track the suspect down.

      He arrogantly figured within two weeks he’d know everything he needed to finally apprehend Jared Romine.

      A slow smile spread across his face. He wouldn’t uncover the information by using any of the high-tech surveillance equipment lining the walls of the spare bedroom. He’d learn it the old-fashioned way, by interrogating the suspect’s sister, in ways Chase was positive would never be found in any reference manual.

      LONG HOURS WEREN’T NEW to Dee. Nor were shifts that extended long beyond her scheduled twelve hours. She learned to survive the grueling pace by napping whenever possible and drinking as much strong black coffee as her stomach lining could tolerate.

      After the weekend she’d spent at the county hospital, followed by the fourteen-hour labor and delivery of Erma Dalton’s sixth child, she should be exhausted, but serving her internship in a busy Los Angeles emergency room two years ago had conditioned her for the endless hours young physicians often handled in the beginning of their careers.

      Every other weekend she served as an E.R. resident at the Berkeley County Hospital, but this past weekend had been particularly rough as she’d had to pull a double shift to cover for a colleague away on holiday. After that, she only had a four-hour break before starting her own second shift of the weekend. Sneaking what little sleep she could manage during the occasional lull, she’d made it through the roughest forty-eight hours she could remember since her early intern days. Her plans to sleep until noon, however, had been effectively derailed by her new upstairs neighbor.

      Her very handsome and sexy new upstairs neighbor, with wavy black hair, eyes such an interesting shade of blue they looked almost lilac. Add in the sweet musky scent that clung to his skin, and her dormant feminine instincts had awakened from slumber.

      Just what she didn’t need. Or want.

      At first she’d tried to write off her physical reaction to the newcomer as nothing more than sheer exhaustion. So what if she’d experienced an accompanying thrum of anticipation when she’d first looked into his intense gaze. She’d had an extraordinarily busy weekend and probably only slept seven out of the last sixty hours. As dog-tired as she’d been, was it so unusual for her to feel a rush of longing when a tall, gorgeous stranger asked to borrow her phone?

      For her, yes. He made her uneasy, in a man/woman, sexual desires running in high gear sort of way. As far as explanations went, she couldn’t find one worthy enough to rationalize the way her heart had ricocheted around in her chest when he’d laid his hand on her hip as he squeezed past her in the kitchen, or the way her thighs had tingled when he’d brushed against her.

      No doubt about it. Coach Bracken made her hot.

      Too bad a cool shower, followed up with a steaming cup of herbal tea and a crispy toasted bagel slathered with her favorite strawberry cream cheese, did nothing to alleviate the sneaking suspicion that sexual deprivation, not lack of sleep, was her problem.

      At five minutes before noon, she pulled into the rear of the clinic and parked beneath the voluminous shade of an ancient elm. After locking her used Honda Civic, she followed the concrete path along the side of the building to the front door. There wouldn’t be any patients waiting for her, with the exception of Erma Dalton, whom she hoped to send home soon, which would give her time to get caught up on paperwork.

      She climbed the wooden steps of the old Victorian where the Cole Harbor clinic was housed. The bottom floor had been converted to a medical office over sixty years before by the first Doc Claymore, with the living quarters taking up the two top floors. Three generations later, the clinic still existed, but the gruff old buzzard Dee put up with was the last of his line.

      She pushed open the door and breathed in the sterile scent of disinfectant mingled with the more tantalizing aroma of the mulberry scented candle burning in the reception area. Netta, the clinic’s receptionist, was just pulling her oversize canvas bag from the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet.

      “Good afternoon, Netta. Any messages?”

      Netta, who dressed like a twenty-two-year-old, although Dee and Lucille both swore she couldn’t be a day under thirty-five, dropped her bag on the desk. She gave the short hem of the black knit skirt hugging her ample bottom a tug, followed by a dramatic put-upon sigh. The receptionist’s job was to take messages and schedule appointments. In Dee’s opinion, they were lucky to get that much from the five-foot-two bottle blonde, and had learned early on anything more taxing than answering the phone was asking for trouble. If it was up to Dee, Netta Engels would be history and she’d hire a real front-end person capable of taking the administrative load off the shoulders of Lucille, the registered nurse who’d worked for Doc Claymore the last twenty-five years. The decision wasn’t Dee’s, however, and for reasons that defied common sense, cantankerous old Claymore liked Netta.

      As did ninety-eight percent of the male population of Cole Harbor, Dee thought with disgust, certain Netta’s talents went far beyond the kind best put to use in an office.

      Two more months, Dee told herself. Provided she came to a decision about where she wanted to practice medicine once her contractual obligation with the government ended. One thing she knew for certain, no matter which offer she accepted, it’d be in a very large metropolitan area where she’d just be another face in a very large crowd. She had managed to narrow her choices down and was seriously entertaining offers from Presbyterian Hospital in New York, Boston’s Massachusetts General and a rather lucrative offer from a private, smaller bed facility in Miami, which would include a gradual partnership buy-in with stock options. Since living on the Atlantic Coast, she decided she preferred the eastern coastal regions to those on the Pacific, and was even beginning to like the idea of a white Christmas, a feature which would effectively eliminate Miami from her list. So, she wasn’t sure she was quite ready to narrow her choices just yet.

      Netta thrust a small stack of pink messages in front of her, then sashayed around the counter in an overpowering cloud of perfume. “I have a lunch date,” she

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