LITMIR.BIZ

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Hell, hell, hell. All signs pointed to her having about an hour before the migraine really hit, and after that, she’d be more useless than a paper hat in a rainstorm. She shoved her hand into the cargo pocket on the side of her leg, checking for the bottle of ibuprofen she always carried. It didn’t always help, but sometimes, if she swallowed at least four of the little orange pills in time, she could head off the worst of it.

      Sometimes.

      Please, let them work this time. Tara needed her.

      Or maybe Sabrina needed to look for Tara. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they not give up, that they find the man who snatched her off the mountain. That they find her.

      Don’t think about what condition she’d be in when they found her. Don’t think.

      Pressing the pills to her mouth, Sabrina swallowed them dry, their hard edges scraping the inside of her throat. She reached up to pull at the rubber band that was holding her hair in place. Keeping her heavy, black hair out of her eyes was always a plus on the job, but at that moment, the ponytail just made her scalp ache. As her hair fell around her shoulders, doing nothing to ease the pain in her head, she heard the slow crunch of tires on gravel. Pulling the rubber band around her wrist, she turned to see an unmarked police cruiser crawl slowly through the mist. The brown sedan slowed to a halt several yards away, and that’s when she finally noticed that a thin yet relentless drizzle had coated her arms and face—the trees had probably protected the team from it while they had been under their cover.

      Though it was an unmarked vehicle, it had one of those bubble lights resting precariously on the roof, as if the driver had tossed it up there in a hurry. Her head started to throb in time with the flashing red light as it broke up the gray and green of their surroundings. She could just make out the silhouette of the lone driver behind the windshield whenever the wipers pushed the mist out of the way for a moment. The driver turned the engine off, but he didn’t get out.

      Whatever.

      Wrapping her arms around her body, Sabrina tried to ignore her growing discomfort. She had a job to do, and if some lazy cop was afraid of getting a little wet, so be it. After setting her bag on the damp ground, she opened it and pulled out a small piece of waterproof tarp. Crouching down next to the backpack, she used rocks to make a little tent with the tarp over a portion of the tire track. That would preserve most of the track if it started to rain hard, and the cops could cast it at their leisure—which apparently they had a lot of, since the officer behind her still hadn’t come out of his car. She got a small camera out of the pack and took a few flash pictures, just in case.

      At the sound of a car door finally slamming behind her, Sabrina stood, her back still to their visitor, and tossed the camera back in her bag. Her head throbbing in time with her suddenly racing pulse, she shoved her damp hair out of her eyes, then twisted it into a loose, wet braid. God, telling the cop what they’d discovered was not going to be easy. Because someone had gone missing on Renegade Ridge, and for the second time, Sabrina had no clues left on how to find her.

      “Ms. Adelante.”

      She was just about to tell the speaker that Ms. Adelante was her mother and to call her Sabrina, when something about his low baritone struck her as familiar. She closed her eyes, just for a moment, wishing hard that the cop would be a stranger. Then she turned, knowing before she saw his face exactly who he was.

      “Aaron.” His name came out almost on a sigh.

      The drizzle was growing heavier, and it coated Aaron Donovan’s tousled, slightly too-long brown hair with shiny droplets. His eyes were set so deep, Jessie had once commented that they always seemed to either be glaring at you or using their X-ray powers to look at your bones. They were fixated on her at the moment, and she had no doubt Aaron was glaring today. The thin jacket he wore over his black dress pants and gray shirt and tie was already soaked through, but he didn’t seem to feel the cold.

      “Storm coming,” he said when he reached her, and there were a thousand unspoken words contained within that one phrase. Aaron Donovan stole her breath, and not just because of his physical presence.

      The detective’s deep voice sounded calm, reasonable, almost as if he were informing her that her car was parked in a disabled spot or that she’d just jay-walked across Main Street. But beneath that calm was a man ready to snap—and she knew that he’d long ago marked her as the reason. It was in the restlessness that hummed off his body, the mix of anger and steely resolve still in his expression. And to tell the truth, it scared her.

      “Yes, Detective, there’s a storm coming,” she said, proud of herself for keeping her voice strong and calm, despite the fact that every muscle in her body was so tense, she thought she might break into a million pieces at the slightest touch. Not that he would ever think of touching her.

      They stared at each other, the thousand unsaid words still hanging between them, a thousand accusations in Aaron Donovan’s still, gray eyes. It was Sabrina who turned away first, looking up to where wispy, almost-black clouds were rapidly rolling underneath the overcast sky, pushed along by a wind that was getting stronger by the minute.

      “How long are you going to keep up the search?” he asked quietly.

      The search had just started. It was an inappropriate question, and he knew it.

      Don’t break down. Don’t cry. Don’t show that female weakness—you can’t afford it. Sabrina took a moment just to breathe, to get control of the swirl of emotions threatening to make her lose it completely. “As long as we can,” she finally replied, her eyes still turned up to the sky. She knew he wanted to hear the words “as long as it takes” come out of her mouth, but that was one promise she’d broken before. She’d never make it again, especially not to him. “But I need to tell you—” God, she didn’t want to tell him they’d lost another young girl. Not him. She didn’t think she could stand to see that blame in his eyes again.

      I had no choice, you son of a bitch. Get out of my head.

      “Your department took two hours to call us out here,” she snapped finally, looking him in the eye once more. “No one knows the parklands like we do. They should have called us in sooner.”

      And that’s when he knew. He understood what she was about to tell him, and the knowledge drained the color from his face, his full, chiseled mouth growing even harder. One hand darted under his jacket, no doubt to find the gun tucked into a shoulder holster. But there was no one to threaten. No one to shoot. Tara had vanished, and so had the man who’d met her on the ridge, leaving a chilling story told in footprints behind them.

      “Not again,” he finally managed, sounding as if he would choke on the words.

      Without thinking, she reached for him, just to put a hand on his arm, to offer some comfort. With a barely audible hiss, he moved out of her reach, so her fingers only grazed his sleeve. And then they could only stare at each other.

      Sabrina broke the silence when she couldn’t stand it anymore. “Cast this tire track. I think it’s important.” His face darkened for a moment, and then he gave her a curt nod, reaching for his own radio. It only took him a minute to mobilize the department crime scene techs, asking them to come out to the ridge with some dental stone as soon as possible. The drizzle wouldn’t harm the track for a while, but full-fledged rain would.

      “Bree?” Behind her, she heard Alex crunching down on the gravel road.

      “Wha—?” God, she hoped she’d been wrong about the car. She hoped they had discovered something she’d missed.

      “You’ll want to see what we found,” Alex continued, addressing Aaron this time. “I can show you.”

      Ah, so Alex was rescuing her from the big, bad detective. And heaven help her, she wanted to be rescued.

      Stealing a glance at Aaron, who’d since gotten off his radio, she saw the corner of his hard mouth twitch upward, giving a slightly mocking edge to his expression. Guess he knew just how much she wanted to run away from him. But it was important that one of them take the police up to the clearing—it

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