LITMIR.BIZ

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      She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

      He let out a rough breath and looked away from her, staring at the half-finished puzzle on the coffee table. Just beyond, a pair of dirty sneakers lay near the back door. “You have a kid?”

      Her heart jumped. “A son,” she admitted, because she knew the safest lies grew from the truth.

      “Where is he?”

      “At day care,” she lied automatically.

      “Are you sure?”

      “I talked to them less than an hour ago.” The truth.

      “Why didn’t you pick him up on the way home?”

      The questions just kept coming, one after another. “I was hoping to rest for a few minutes, get rid of my headache.” Hoping the phone would ring and she would receive her next set of instructions.

      Before Liam could fire off another query, she launched one of her own. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on,” she suggested. “You say you’re with the FBI. What could you possibly want with me?”

      From the time she’d pulled the gun on him, something had changed. His stony expression had softened, the hard edges to his voice had vanished. He’d been almost human. But that all changed now. The man from the lobby returned, and with his arrival, the oxygen fled the small family room.

      “I—” He hesitated, swore softly, rolled to his feet. He paced to the window overlooking her shady backyard and just stood there, with his hand braced against the frame. The sinking sun cut in around him, casting him in silhouette, forcing Danielle to wonder what he saw. She didn’t need her intuitive Gypsy blood to realize it wasn’t her son’s deserted jungle gym.

      “Look,” she said, standing. Part of her wanted to take his wrist and drag him to the front door, just as he’d led her to the sofa. Another part of her wanted to step closer, put a hand to the wrinkled cotton shirt stretched across his wide shoulders.

      She did neither. “I really need to start dinner—”

      He swung toward her. “Three days ago Senator Gregory of New York was found dead in his hotel room.”

      Danielle went very still. She wasn’t a news junkie, but she’d have to be a hermit to have missed the story that had dominated the media for the past several days. Gregory was a young man, a political golden boy lauded as the next great hope for the country. And he’d been in prime health.

      Until he turned up dead.

      The hotel room had been locked from the inside, Danielle recalled. They’d had to break down the door to get to him, after he failed to answer the phone. The coroner estimated he’d been dead for several hours before they found him. There were no marks on his body, no signs of trauma or physical distress. The autopsy had revealed nothing.

      The man’s heart, strong and healthy, with valves not the least bit blocked, had simply stopped beating.

      Her own heart kicked up a notch. “What does that have to do with me?”

      Liam scrubbed a hand over his face. “I— Christ, I don’t know.”

      It wasn’t the answer she was expecting. Somehow, she hadn’t figured Liam Brooks, allegedly special agent of the FBI, was a man to admit he didn’t know everything. “Then why are you here?”

      He closed the distance between them, making the room shrink with each step he took. She stood fascinated, wondering how he could cover in three steps the same territory that took her at least six.

      “A note,” he said roughly. “I received a handwritten note with your name on it.”

      Her breath caught. “My name?”

      “Your name, and the mention of Chicago.”

      And now her son was gone. “I don’t understand.” She’d never met the senator from New York, had no idea how her son’s disappearance could be connected to his alleged murder.

      Liam’s expression hardened. “Neither do I,” he admitted. “Neither do I.”

      The dark clouds she’d sensed all afternoon rolled closer. She swallowed against a horrible sense of inevitability and reminded herself nothing had changed. This man’s story didn’t change the instructions she’d received, instructions she intended to follow.

      “You can see everything is fine,” she said, overriding the voice inside, the one that scraped against her throat, screaming for her to tell him what she knew. Let him help. She’d never been one to play by the rules, after all. She’d always preferred following her own path. Finding a loophole or a workaround.

      But with her son’s life on the line, this time she had no choice. “If anything happens, I’ll—”

      “Damn it.” He moved so fast she never had a chance to back away. He took her shoulders in his hands, his big, strong, surprisingly gentle hands, and held on tight. “If anything happens, it will already be too late, don’t you understand that?”

      She swallowed hard. “I’m sure it’s all just some misunderstanding,” she forced herself to say. She needed him to leave, damn it. “Maybe there are two Danielle Caldwells in Chicago.”

      His mouth flattened into a hard line. “You can hope.” He put her Derringer onto the table, then flipped open the wallet with his badge and handed her a small embossed card. “I’m staying at the Manor. Call me if something changes.”

      She ran the tip of her index finger along the raised, blue letters of his name. “I will.” The words hurt, because she knew they were not true. She would not call him, would not ask for his help. “Thanks for checking on me,” she said with a casualness at complete odds with the tension arcing between them. Forcing a smile, she led him to the front of the house and opened the door.

      He stepped into the hazy shades of early evening. A warm breeze blew in from the lake several miles away. “You’d better go get your son.”

      They were simple words. Easy. Casual. And yet they destroyed the tenuous hold on her emotions. “Yes.”

      He held her gaze a moment longer than was comfortable, his dark, penetrating eyes lingering on her face, much the way he’d held her hand longer than necessary. “Just be careful,” he said at last, then turned and walked away.

      Come back! The words vaulted from deep inside her, but Danielle refused to give them voice. She stood there in the open door of her small home, watching Alex’s neighborhood buddies across the street shoot hoops, as FBI Special Agent Liam Brooks, and any help he might be able to offer, drove away.

      She was hiding something. That much Liam knew. She put up a good front, played a good game, but Liam was too well trained to miss the clues. He’d spent years watching people, studying them, analyzing them. He knew how to read between the lines, the lies. And even though Danielle Caldwell pretended valiantly that her life was in perfect order, he’d seen the truth in the way those startling green eyes had glittered, the way her fine-boned hands had trembled.

      Liam pushed away from the window of his fourteenth-floor suite at the Stirling Manor and stalked toward the bottle of scotch he’d ordered from room service. He poured the single malt into a tumbler and lifted it to his mouth but didn’t throw the warm liquid back. He wasn’t ready to numb himself. Wasn’t ready to take a short cut and stop thinking.

      Wasn’t ready to turn his back on Danielle.

      She didn’t trust him, didn’t want his help. She’d made that abundantly clear; he just didn’t understand why. He was one of the good guys, but she’d looked at him with abject horror, as though she’d expected him to suddenly grow horns and do horrible, lewd things to her.

      Or her son.

      The thought stopped him cold. Her son.

      A child changed everything, introduced

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