Upon hearing the news about Blanco and Shriver hooking up, his first thought had been totally selfish. Yes! Two criminals for the price of one. That would show his boss he’d been right to make an end run around authority by involving Cassie Cooper.
But then his irritating conscience had voiced its opinion:
You can’t keep her on the case.
As eager as she might be to help him bring down Shriver, frivolous Cassie was no match for the likes of Jocko Blanco.
Regretfully, he had to terminate Cassie’s mission. No matter how much he lusted to see Shriver cooling his heels in the slammer, he couldn’t justify jeopardizing her life.
David shoved a hand through his hair and paced to the edge of the embankment on the opposite side of the jogging trail. He stared down at the thin ribbon of river several hundred feet below and then he swung his gaze through the rest of the vacant park.
Not too many people out and about this early on a damp, blustery February day. A couple of joggers off in the distance, an elderly man letting his dog take a leak on the trashcan near the park entrance, but no one else.
A heart-stopping thought occurred to him. What if Shriver had discovered Cassie was spying on him for the FBI? What if he had actually hired Blanco to bump her off?
Icy chills shot up his spine.
“Dammit, Cassie.” He glowered, royally pissed off at himself.
He shouldn’t have arranged a meeting. Instead of setting up the rendezvous, he should have just told her over the phone he was pulling her off the case. But he’d needed the tape she’d recorded of Shriver bragging about his exploits. Besides, David thought it only fair he break the news to her in person.
Where in the hell
was
Cassie?
He glanced at his watch again. Eight-fifteen.
Mindlessly, he reached to pat the breast pocket of his London Fog trench coat in search of the cigarettes that were no longer there.
It had been almost a year since he’d kicked the butts but in times of stress the old nicotine hankering still lingered. He’d given up the cigs not long after his ex- fiancée Keeley dumped him. Not because he still had a thing for her and was trying to win her back. No, that ship had sailed. In fact, she married an orthodontist not two months after they had broken up. Nope, he’d quit smoking simply to prove her wrong.
“Face it, David,” Keeley told him the day she’d dramatically yanked off her engagement ring and tossed it in his face. “Your obsessive need to tempt fate and win at all costs is going to be the death of you. And I refuse to hang around and watch it happen.”
“I don’t have an obsessive need to tempt fate,” he’d protested.
“Ha! Look, you can’t even stop smoking long enough to have this conversation with me,” she’d crowed. “What’s puffing on a cancer stick, if not tempting fate?”
So he had quit smoking. He was at least going to win that argument.
But although he was loath to admit it, maybe Keeley had a point. If Cassie’s subversive involvement ended up botching the investigation, his boss would have his head.
And his job.
Shriver would get away and David would lose.
Shit.
At that moment, a woman jogger appeared from under the train trestle. She was too far away for David to see her facial features, but his baser male instincts homed in on the luscious body striding rhythmically toward him.
Boobs bouncing in spite of the sports bra, blond ponytail swishing, hips rolling forward.
Mama mia, come to Papa.
And then she drew close enough for him to recognize.
Cassie. Thank God. Relief rolled over him.
He stared at her.
And she ran right by him without a second glance.
Dumbfounded, David’s jaw dropped as he gazed after her retreating figure.
What in hell . . . ?
He quickly looked in the direction from which she’d come to see if anyone was following her. Nobody. Hadn’t she seen him standing there?
Perplexed, David trotted after her. “Hold up,” he called.
She swiveled her head, saw he was following and started running faster.
Dammit. What game was the woman playing?
“Stop,” he commanded, even as he sped up to cover the increasing distance between them. Damn, but she was in some kind of shape. Who knew?
He was running flat out by the time he caught her. He grabbed her by the elbow and spun her around to face him. They were standing on the edge of the embankment, both panting hard, their gazes locked.
Before David could suck in his breath long enough to speak, she whipped a can of mace from the pocket of her sweat top.
She was quick, but David was quicker.
“Oh no you don’t,” he said and clamped his hand over her pepper-spray-clutching fist before she had time to depress the nozzle. He wrenched the can away from her. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Hands off, buddy,” she commanded and jerked backward.
The force of her momentum was so strong she teetered unbalanced on the edge, a look of shock passing over her face.
“Oh,” she cried, her arms windmilling wildly. “Oh.”
Reaching for her, David grabbed at the first thing he could get his hands on. He ended up snatching the front of her workout pants, attempting to reel her in like an unruly tarpon.
She flailed. The material of her pants stretched out, exposing her naked skin, and David swiftly learned that not only was she wearing pink satin G-string undies, but that she was also a natural blond.
He blinked, his mind momentarily numbed with the breathtaking view.
“Hi-ya!” she yelled and aimed a foot at his crotch.
He dodged her kick but the movement sent him reeling off balance too.
Gravity took over and plunged them both headlong toward the river.
“Oh, crap,” David muttered, finally realizing she wasn’t Cassie. This spunky woman could be none other than her identical twin sister, Maddie.
The big man had an even bigger gun.
Maddie felt the hard delineation under his coat as they rolled down the wet, rocky knoll together. Her heart practically hammered out of her chest. He was going to rape her, shoot her and throw her in the river for fish bait. She just knew it.
For years, she’d been running in Forest Park unscathed, but as the cautious type who believed in always being prepared, she had an ongoing contingency plan.
Mace ’em in the face, kick ’em in the nuts, haul ass.
What had gone wrong?
Well, for starters the guy outweighed her by a good eighty pounds, but even so he was quicker than a cobra.
Do something now. Fight back. You can’t die and leave Cassie alone.
As they rolled downhill, Maddie made a feral sound low in her throat and clawed at his face. Too bad she kept her fingernails clipped short. As soon as she had a chance, she’d go for the car keys in her pants pocket and gouge his eyes out.
“Ouch, damn, hell,” he cursed. “Quit that.”
They came to a stop just short of the water, his big body crushing hers into the muddy riverbank.
“Get off me you rapist pervert.” She slapped at his chest and tried not to panic when her hand smacked against his shoulder holster.
Lungs heaving with the effort of drawing in air, he grabbed her wrists and pinned her hands above her head while straddling her. Uselessly, she tried to buck him off, but his weight held her prisoner.
“Maddie,” he roared. “That’s enough!”
She froze and stared into his potent dark eyes. A spark of sexual awareness, so intense it left her stunned, surged between them.
“How . . . how,” she stammered. “Do you know my name?”
“I thought you were Cassie,” he said.
“Oh.” She blinked at him, letting this information sink in. “Let me guess, you two were playing some kind of kinky sex game in the park and it got out of hand?”
“What?” He frowned.
“Cassie’s into all that red hot pursuit stuff. You must be her new boyfriend.”
“No, I’m not.”
They were pressed chest to chest, their lips almost touching. He had an unusually complicated mouth. The outer shape was angular and uncompromising, like some sort of hardware store tool, but at the same time the actual flesh of his lips appeared smooth, soft and inviting. His mouth, she decided, had a personality all its own.
“Then who are you?” Maddie snapped, almost as mad at herself as she was at him.
“David Marshall. FBI.”
FBI? At least that explained the gun. What kind of trouble was her twin in now?
Cassie had told Maddie to meet her in the park at eight-fifteen because she had big news to share. Maddie had scheduled her morning run to coincide with the rendezvous. But her twin wasn’t at the appointed spot and this bearish man claiming to be with the FBI was. The whole thing smelled fishier than the Trinity River.
“Let me see some identification,” she said.
“Only if you promise not to knee me in the groin when I turn you loose.”
“All right,” she agreed warily, even though she had no intention of keeping her promise if she felt threatened in the slightest.
He released her hands and pushed up on his knees. Maddie lay on her back, head cocked, watching his every move and making sure he didn’t go for his gun. Just because he said he was FBI, didn’t mean he
was
FBI.
As she studied his face, she realized he was rather good-looking in a rugged, unkempt sort of way. He was tall and muscular with a granite jaw and chiseled cheekbones that oddly enough, lent him a sensitive air. He wore his sandy brown hair clipped short and spiked up. She kind of liked the kingfisher thing he had going on, not that she was really noticing. His nose was neither too big nor too small for his face, but it crooked slightly to the left at the bridge as if he’d used it once or twice to stop an irate fist.
He got to his feet and held out his hand to help her up.
She hesitated.
He just kept standing there, hand outstretched.
Reluctantly, she accepted his offer of assistance and he hauled her to a standing position. Once on her feet, she immediately turned away from him.
“Hold on,” he said, his skin still branding hers.
“What is it?” she snapped.
“You’ve got mud on your clothing.”
And then, before she knew what he was doing, he reached out and briskly brushed off her bottom.
The touch of his palm against the smooth stretchy Lycra of her workout pants sent a shower of sexual sparks scorching up her backside. Maddie swallowed hard against the storm of sensation flooding her body.
Seriously dangerous stuff.
“There you go.” He released her arm. “All dusted clean.”
She gulped and her stomach lurched because her butt kept tingling long after his hand was gone. “Your badge?” she said, determined not to let him distract her.
“I’m getting to it.” He removed his badge from his coat pocket and flashed it in front of her face.
She held out her palm.
“You wanna hold it?”
“Yes.”
He rolled his eyes, but handed it to her. She traced a finger across the emblem. The badge winked goldly at her in the shaft of hopeful sunlight struggling through the cloud covering. It looked real enough, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She’d heard about psychos who posed as law enforcement authorities and committed crimes.
“You won’t mind if I call the local FBI division and check you out?”
“For crying out loud, woman.” He snatched his badge from her hand. “I am who I say I am.”
“Don’t get testy, bub. You were the one who attacked me.”
“Excuse me?” he raised his voice and glared. “Who pulled out the pepper spray and who tried to kick me in the family jewels?”
“You chased me down,” she protested.
“After I asked you nicely to stop and you ignored me.”
“Because you were a weird guy alone in the park.”
“Weird?
You’re
calling
me
weird?” He jerked a thumb at himself.
“Ya-huh.”
He was studying her as intently as she was studying him, his gaze practically burning a hole through her bottom lip. What did he think of her mouth? Did he find it as interesting as she found his? Her heart was tripping a gazillion beats a minute and a bizarre sensation twisted her stomach.
Good grief! What had come over her?
He moistened his lips and swallowed. “You’re nuttier than your sister, you know that?”
“My sister is not nutty,” Maddie declared defensively. Impulsive, yes. Irresponsible, well at times. Impractical, that was a given. But he had no right to call Cassie nutty.
“She’s a frickin’ sack of cashews and tardy to boot. She was supposed to meet me here at eight o’clock and it is now . . .” He paused to glance at his watch. “Eight-twenty-five.”
“Why were you meeting her?”
He hesitated.
She could see that he didn’t want to tell her any more than he had to. “Well?” she demanded.
“Your twin was working for me. We were attempting to get the goods on an international art thief named Peyton Shriver.”
“Get outta here.”
“I am deadly serious.”
“Cassie? Working for the FBI?”
An uneasy expression that she could not decipher crossed his face. “In an unofficial capacity.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Maddie narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like the sound of this. Not one bit.
“Look,” he said, changing the subject and confirming her suspicion that something wasn’t on the up and up. “Have you heard from your sister this morning? I’ve tried repeatedly to call her. Do you have any idea where she’s at?”
“How was Cassie helping you catch this art thief?” Maddie asked, switching the subject right back again. He’d have to be slicker than that if he wanted to pull the wool over her eyes.
“Shriver had pegged Cassie as his next mark and he was courting her hot and heavy.”
Maddie shook her head. “I’m not totally following you. If you know who and where the guy is, why don’t you just arrest him?”
“Lack of concrete evidence. We need to catch him in the act. Plus, we suspect an influential art broker is backing his little forays and we want to nail that guy too. Your sister is helping me tighten the noose. Now where is she?”