LITMIR.BIZ

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To Viki and Jan—thanks for being there

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Imagine a family tree that includes Texas cowboys, Choctaw and Cherokee Indians, a Louisiana pirate and a Scottish rebel who battled side by side with William Wallace. With ancestors like that, it’s easy to understand why Texas author and former air force captain Delores Fossen feels as if she was genetically predisposed to writing romances. Along the way to fulfilling her DNA destiny, Delores married an air force top gun who just happens to be of Viking descent. With all those romantic bases covered, she doesn’t have to look too far for inspiration.

      CAST OF CHARACTERS

      Agent Riley McDade—A Justice Department bad boy on assignment to bring down a murdering fertility specialist known as the Baby Maker, who was responsible for Riley’s fiancée’s death.

      Agent Tessa Abbot—She’s always played by the rules. She’s a dedicated agent who’s trying to climb to the top.

      John Abbot—Tessa’s father who’s also a mission director in the Justice Department. Is he so desperate to collar a killer and clear his name that he’s willing to risk Riley’s and his daughter’s lives?

      Dr. Barton Fletcher—aka the Baby Maker. He’s already murdered one federal agent who threatened to shut down his illegal medical procedures.

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter Twelve

      Chapter Thirteen

      Chapter Fourteen

      Chapter Fifteen

      Chapter Sixteen

      Prologue

      Assisted Fertility Clinic

       Dallas, Texas

      “The Baby Maker,” Dr. Barton Fletcher read from the personal memo clipped to the file.

      So that’s what people were calling him these days. He chuckled. It made him sound a little like God.

      Which in a way, he was.

      On occasion he’d created life. And on other occasions, he’d taken life. It all evened out in the end.

      He glanced through the Tates’ quarter-inch-thick file that his staff had put together for him. Aston Tate, a reclusive California software guru with an ego purportedly as large as his net worth, and his heiress wife, Isabel. Eccentric tendencies. Situational values and ethics.

      In other words, his kind of people.

      He’d been lucky finding his kind of people. Or rather, they’d been lucky in finding him—all through word of mouth, of course. He couldn’t advertise certain…aspects of his business. Not that lack of traditional advertisement had hurt. In the three short months the clinic had been open, he’d already assisted eleven couples with his procedure. The Tates would make it an even dozen.

      Like the other eleven couples, the Tates were looking for a perfect baby. A baby genetically engineered to their specifications. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Male. Athletic build. Above average intelligence. Well above average. No imperfections of any kind.

      In other words, the usual.

      The hair and eye color varied from couple to couple, but the rest was a given.

      There was something comforting about predictability.

      Well, maybe.

      Barton Fletcher took another look at the Tates’ file.

      The paperwork and requests were indeed predictable and in order, including the attached memo from Isabel Tate that lauded him as the Baby Maker for a couple who desperately wanted the child of their dreams. However, the fact that everything was in order did nothing to rid him of the knot tightening in his gut.

      Was something wrong?

      The obvious quickly came to mind. Maybe this was some sort of sting operation. The latest attempt by authorities to apprehend him.

      That wasn’t going to happen.

      Because he was always careful.

      Always.

      If these clients were indeed working for law enforcement, then he’d just have to deal with the situation as he had before.

      Give life…take life. It all evened out in the end.

      Chapter One

      Washington, D.C.

      Agent Tessa Abbot walked into the briefing room of the Justice Department’s Special Investigations Unit, took one look at him and came to a complete standstill.

      Her steel-blue gaze riffled over his uncombed hair, down to his three-day-old beard. Possibly four.

      Riley had lost count.

      And then her gaze kept on riffling. Down to his scruffy black T-shirt, jungle fatigues and combat boots caked with mud. Thankfully the color of the T-shirt camouflaged a multitude of other stains that he didn’t want to identify, but blood was a distinct possibility.

      “Why are you here?” Tessa asked.

      Riley lifted his hand in a wait-a-second gesture, gulped down the rest of his lukewarm coffee and prayed the caffeine would kick in soon. The all-night cargo flight from Liberia had left him with a wicked case of jet lag and the mother of all headaches.

      “This is where I’m supposed to be. I’m your husband.”

      And with that, he waited for the excrement to hit the proverbial fan.

      He didn’t have to wait long.

      “You’re what?” Tessa adjusted her stance, shifting her weight from one fashionable snakeskin leather shoe to the other. Not her usual choice of footwear, which Riley knew for a fact tended toward something flat and more functional.

      In

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