LITMIR.BIZ

      ZEBRA BOOKS

      KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.

       http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

      Contents

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Epilogue

      Chapter 1

      Julian.

      Even watching him from a good distance, Asia Callahan could feel the off-the-charts testosterone roiling off the man. It actually had nothing to do with the fact that he was everything “tall, dark and handsome,” like something a lame romance writer might stuff into some dopey story about rakes and swooning or whatever. In truth, it had everything to do with his inherent chemistry, which absolutely reeked of sex, lustfulness, and all things outright carnal. It was as off the charts as a man could get, bordering on inhuman, in Asia’s opinion. The fact that he had good looks to go with it was merely adding insult to injury, and purely coincidental.

      Or just lethal.

      Asia adjusted her focus slowly, ignoring the ache in her neck as she watched Julian in action through her high-tech night-vision binoculars. He walked with a sinful ease of grace, she noted, for someone so tall and relatively heavy with muscle. Not Mr. Universe heavy, but quite definitively buffed out. Military built, she’d guessed. By now she’d seen him with his shirt off enough times to be pretty familiar with the contours of his upper body. He wasn’t slender or lean or even merely athletic; he was built like a brute…except that in absolute contradiction to his size and body mass, he moved like a god. Smooth, easy, and effortless, and even the slightest casual cock of one hip just oozed a sophisticated style and refinement that a mere brute could never pull off.

      Too bad he was a cold-blooded murderer.

      Or that was the going theory. One she was highly inclined to believe after spending so much time studying his every move. It had nothing to do with the fact that he kept vampire’s hours, sleeping all day and trolling the night. It wasn’t even because he used women like toilet paper, discarding them just about as fast as he got them to drop their panties for him. After all, Asia was a firm believer in women who owned their sexuality. If these crazy chicks wanted a man like Julian to stick it to them, well, that was their right. If he were any other man, she’d say more power to them…or perhaps even “get out of my way.”

      The ones who came crying after a man like that later on—the pathetic ones who thought he was capable of more than a night or two of mind-blowing orgasms—in her opinion, they deserved what they got. Tears and girly emotions had no place in Julian’s scope of interest. And honestly, any time one of them got to walk away with the breath still pushing through their bodies, they ought to consider themselves damn lucky.

      Still, she could almost understand their mistakenness. Julian’s smile alone was not only sexy and compelling, it was enough to make anyone on the receiving end of it feel as if she were the only woman in his world. Hell, she was how many yards away? Even she felt like she was the only woman in his world, and he didn’t even know she was there.

      Not that Asia was known for being the swooning, sentimental type. No, no, no. No one would ever accuse her of having touchy-feely emotionalism or equally girly crap like that. She’d seen way too much in her life, done too much and been too many places to have even the littlest smidge of a star in either of her eyes. So instead of getting weak in the knees or panting and drooling when she saw Julian pull his smooth routine on the women who seemed to flock to him like vultures to a fresh kill, all she saw was a hell of a lot of masculine sex appeal and a man who knew how to use it to further his own untrustworthy agenda.

      Surprise, surprise.

      Unfortunately, for about a baker’s dozen of women to date, his “agenda” had ended in highly suspicious and nefarious disappearances. There had even been a pair of bodies along the way, both men who had been closely associated with a couple of the missing women. Just because there had been no female bodies in his wake didn’t mean he wasn’t guilty as the walking sin he was, it just meant he had a really good hiding place for the—

      Asia pushed away the finality of that train of thought. She reverted to her analysis of her target. Julian was, among these many other things, a nomad. He’d moved through seven states in as many months, finding large cities and enjoying them with a perverse and obvious relish, rather like the way he enjoyed his women…with the arrogance only a genius criminal mind could attain. He thought he was so clever. He thought he was miles above detection.

      Asia, however, had detected him.

      Much to the embarrassment of a few police departments across the United States, she alone had made the connection between Julian and the missing women, painstakingly tracking back over an all but trackless trail, making sure she found proof that he was in every single city on every single date of every single disappearance. Once she had established that, she had taken her proof to the FBI, who hadn’t even known the cases from city to city were linked. After all, he didn’t

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