LITMIR.BIZ

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she yelled back.

      Okay, so maybe the Barbie doll crack was a low blow. But it wasn’t like she was the only one who had a reason to be irritated. Visiting the Midwest in late February had to rank in the top five on Broderick’s personal list of things that would never occur to a sane person. Yet here he was, and the circumstances that had brought him here weren’t even close to being the best. There were no guarantees on how long he could actually stay, so every second counted. It stood to reason that he hadn’t bothered to factor time into his already-tight schedule for dealing with distracted women drivers and the traffic accidents that they inevitably caused.

      And now that his schedule was shot to hell because of one such driver, she was giving him attitude when he was the one who should be furious? What the hell ever. She was over there right now, inspecting her bumper like it was in danger of falling off. Taking picture after picture of it with her laptop-sized cell phone, from as many different angles as she could manage, in case he was thinking about running back to his Hummer before the police arrived and fleeing the scene. She had no idea that, as far as traffic accidents went, she should’ve been happy that he was the one who’d rammed her toy car and not some psychotic maniac, because a scratch on her bumper could’ve ended up being the very least of her worries.

      Just last month, his firm had been called in to investigate a kidnapping that had gone horribly wrong long before someone thought to refer the young woman’s distraught parents to him. After nearly a week of local police and FBI involvement, it had taken his men just over two days to find the girl, but by then the only thing that their discovery could offer her parents and local police was closure. That and the identity of her kidnapper—a psychopath who, among other things, had regularly staged minor traffic accidents to lure unsuspecting women into his sadistic trap. It was how he’d gotten their daughter, his last victim.

      Minor traffic infractions just like this one. And unsuspecting women just like the one snapping pictures right now.

      Where the hell were the police, anyway?

      Against his better judgment, he walked over to where she was leaning back against the passenger door of her Jaguar, working her cell phone like a speed demon, to find out. When his shadow fell over her, she looked up, saw him standing there and uttered the sexiest sigh that he’d ever heard. Somewhere along the shaft of his semi-sleeping penis, a nerve yawned and stretched.

      Tongue in cheek, he said, “Excuse me, but when you said you’d already called the police, you did mean today, right?” He didn’t need to actually see her eyes to know that she rolled them.

      Hard.

      “Of course I called them today. Trust me, I would not be standing here indulging your obvious mental instability if I wasn’t absolutely certain that they were on the way.”

      The tiny diamond stud in her left nostril was a sparkling stranger in a landscape of even tinier cocoa-colored freckles sprinkled across the bridge of her nose. It, unlike her forked tongue, was attractive, he thought as a grin played with his lips. “I’m sorry, but did you just call me unstable?”

      “I believe so, yes,” she said, dropping her cell phone into her purse and then taking out a makeup compact. She flipped it open and inspected her lip gloss critically. “If I’d known exactly how unstable, I would’ve locked myself inside my car from the very beginning and called in the National Guard, instead.”

      “Which reminds me,” Broderick sniped back at her without missing a beat. “In situations like this, that’s precisely what you should do. Another time, you might consider staying inside your car while you wait for the police or anyone else to arrive. I’m just saying,” he quickly added when she bristled visibly. “If I were, say, a serial killer, you would have just walked right into my trap.”

      “Are you a serial killer?”

      He wished he could see her eyes. “Fortunately for you, no, I’m not.”

      “Well, that’s a relief.”

      “Isn’t it?”

      * * *

      Five months, Broderick suddenly remembered as he watched her lips form the words that she spoke. That’s how long it’d been since he last made time in his schedule or room in his bed for a woman. Five months.

      Crazy work hours, dangerous working conditions and near-constant travel. They were all to blame for his forced celibacy. Mostly, anyway. In his line of work, maintaining a relationship was like being burdened with a second job, especially since he was never really off duty from the first one. There was no such thing as a typical assignment, set time frames or guaranteed outcomes, and he liked it that way. Women? Not so much, especially since those same improbabilities applied to his personal life, as well. He had long since made peace with the fact that his career choice meant that he’d probably die a lonely old man, but in the meantime, he’d been known to occasionally carve out a little time for a no-strings-attached fling.

      He wondered if she’d be willing to join him. Then he said, “You know, the fact that you can joke about your personal safety is very telling. A random encounter like this one, on the interstate—any interstate—could’ve ended very differently for you.”

      “Then I guess it’s lucky for you that it didn’t, Mr...?”

      “Cannon. Broderick Cannon.” He made himself look away from her mouth. “And you are?”

      “Quite capable of defending myself, Mr. Cannon.”

      Her glistening lips curved into a smile so charming and so innocently sweet that every nerve in his penis simultaneously sputtered. His gaze wandered back down to her mouth just as twin dimples sank into her cheeks, a third one winked out at him from the center of her chin and a soft giggle eased out from between even, white teeth. A second later, it flickered back up, locked on to the dim of her eyes behind her dark lenses and narrowed speculatively.

      “And, oh, look!” she exclaimed in a childlike voice. “Just in case you really are a serial killer, here come the police. I feel safer already.” Sidestepping around him carefully, she walked off and left him standing there with visions of his tongue dancing between her thighs flashing before his eyes.

      It wasn’t until a half hour later, when their fender bender had been duly documented and his was the last vehicle to drive away from the scene, that Broderick took the time to look at her insurance information and the business card that she’d grudgingly handed him before jumping into her car and speeding away. It was printed on soft pink parchment paper and lightly scented. He’d been too busy staring at her to pay it much attention before then.

      Her name, he thought as he wondered exactly what kind of fly-by-night operation Carrington Consulting was, was Elise Carrington.

       Chapter 3

      Classical music was billowing from underneath the study doors, filling the dimly lit foyer, when Elise finally made it home. Knowing that her sister was undoubtedly in the midst of it and hoping to avoid running into her just yet, Elise closed the door as quietly as she could and tiptoed to the coat closet to hang up her coat. After the ridiculous afternoon she’d just had, the last thing she was in the mood for was one of her sister’s nerve-jangling inquisitions. The drive home was stressful enough as it was, without having to get into a whole thing with Olivia as soon as she walked through the door. Right now, all she wanted to do was change into something loose and comfortable, get her hands on a couple of aspirin and then wash them down with a glass of white wine. She’d come clean to Olivia later.

      Under the cover of Tchaikovsky’s urgent-sounding crescendos, Elise began creeping toward the staircase at the far end of the foyer. Holding her breath and moving on the tips of her toes, she narrowly avoided teetering sideways into the centerpiece of the foyer—a marble, French baroque-style pedestal table—by a hair and froze for five long seconds. Satisfied that Olivia hadn’t heard her, she started carefully inching forward again. She had almost reached the bottom step when the volume of the music

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