He’d checked on her periodically over the next hour, saw her heading toward the river, afraid the boat was her target, hated that she was exposing herself out on his land when they still didn’t know who the two men were who’d been on the property the day before.

  Or why they’d been there.

  But she was a free woman. Free to stay because he’d offered her the room. And free to go. He couldn’t risk his cover because the woman had chosen to put herself in potential danger.

  As much as every instinct within him was urging him to get off the raft and into a motorboat that could take him to whatever trouble she might be walking into, he knew he couldn’t do so. He wasn’t her babysitter.

  And he most definitely was not going to blow his cover, blow a many-months-long case, because the woman he’d rescued was getting to him.

  Most particularly not when they’d had their first real break in the case. Rachel tended bar at the dive across the street from the docks. Had a room upstairs.

  She was their eyes and ears at the dock they’d pinpointed as a major source of the drugs. The others were in similar positions along the river, in Utah and Colorado, at other suspected ports.

  Places chosen for the number of young people turning up in area hospitals with drug overdoses—all with similar symptoms, caused by the same hallucinogen as the cases they were seeing across the country.

  Virginia was handling the influx of drugs on the East Coast in their own way.

  His job was to stop the flow into the country. There’d be others. He didn’t kid himself. But if people didn’t fight against them, there’d be a pandemic that could take control of them.

  Rachel had made the score she’d set up with Belen Alexopoulos. Devon had seen it go down. She’d be sending the drugs to her captain in Phoenix to have them tested.

  She’d also agreed to meet up with the guy for drinks later that night. It had taken months for them to identify the source of the drugs causing the overdoses. They’d known they were coming from the river, knew, by process of elimination, that they had to be traveling via recreational boating.

  What they didn’t know was how much this Belen Alexopoulos was transporting and selling. The good-looking young Greek man seemed to travel among the lowly and most of the drugs were being distributed to the wealthy. They knew of one high-school-aged dropout who’d bought drugs from him. And then distributed them at a party, where another high schooler bought some. From there drugs went through two more buyers before they’d reached the girl who’d overdosed.

  Thankfully, she survived.

  Rachel’s job, once the current drugs were tested and confirmed to be their same recipe, was to find out as much as she could about Alexopoulos.

  And, at Devon’s insistence, she was to text him as soon as she was locked in at home for the night.

  He’d told her nothing about his housemate.

  They didn’t talk about personal stuff.

  Keeping himself focused as he drove home, Devon took a lot of deep breaths. Kacey had made it back to the cabin safely. Had spent time in the bathroom and come out looking fresh and clean in a pair of the shorts and one of the loose sleeveless blouses he’d picked up for her.

  When he caught himself thinking about the panties and bras that had also been on her list—he forced a quick swerve to his thoughts again.

  He had to stay pissed at her. Not admire the guts it took for her to head out on her own. He’d keep those thoughts to himself.

  Kacey wasn’t going to get the chance to hold out on him. If she expected to stay with him, she had to spill her secrets. He wasn’t going to have her bringing danger upon herself under his watch.

  And he didn’t much fancy the idea of her bringing it to his home, either.

  His place in the woods...he liked it a hell of a lot more than he’d expected to. Having grown up in Vegas and spending his entire life in the city and her suburbs, he’d expected the hardest part of his current operation to be the cabin in the woods.

  And perhaps it would be, with his rescue of a strangely invigorating petite blonde woman that he didn’t wholly trust and his subsequent invitation for her to stay with him.

  Something about Kacey’s story just seemed off.

  He was certain the Colorado River was being used to transport drugs...but people dumping bodies there? Leaving them to die?

  But then, when he considered Lake Mead—a huge reservoir on the Colorado just outside Las Vegas—and the number of bodies that had been found there recently as the water lowered...

  Devon was shaking his head as he pulled onto his property. Tamping down any sense of anticipation he felt as he parked the truck and headed toward the front door.

  He hadn’t decided if he was going to reprimand his guest, give her an ultimatum, or just ignore her until he had time to think clearly about her actions that afternoon, as he stepped inside.

  She came out of the laundry room, looking...attractive...in the shorts and colorful top...until his gaze landed on the fresh bandages around her ankles and he wondered if she had river sludge in her cuts again.

  Turning away from her before he said something he’d regret—something inappropriate like insisting that he look at those ankles—he noticed the plastic case on his table.

  “What’s this?” he asked, picking it up.

  And then, seeing the image under the sealed plastic, threw it back down to the table.

  “I found it, down at the river.”

  He hadn’t noticed her picking up anything. And he’d viewed the reels from the day while he’d been sitting at the bar nursing a lemon-lime soda with a lime wedge, made to look like an alcoholic beverage, waiting for Rachel’s hookup.

  “It was downstream from your place, stuck in some reeds. I didn’t know if it was yours...”

  “Hell no, it’s not mine.”

  He didn’t need to watch sex. If he wanted to enjoy bodily pleasures, he knew where to find women who’d expressed mutual interest in sharing it with him.

  “Just to be clear, while prostitution is legal in parts of Nevada, and in Vegas, where I grew up, I’ve never paid for sex. Just not my cup of tea.”

  What in the hell had he thrown that out there for?

  He’d never said anything so asinine in his life.

  She didn’t flinch. Or even blink. Just shrugged and said, “Seems like an odd thing for the men who’d been on your property to have left behind, but do you suppose it could be theirs?”

  He supposed it could have floated downriver from a lot of places. He didn’t give a damn about the movie. Other than...

  He glanced at it again. A DVD in a CD case. Seemingly professionally packaged, albeit on a low budget.

  Probably someone in a houseboat on the river who lost possessions during the storm. It happened. As light as the case was, it could have floated. Been caught on debris. Washed up onshore.

  Or it could have been part of some kind of illegal distribution. His thoughts flew as he stood there, aware that his houseguest hadn’t moved from the doorway of the laundry room.

  The boat he’d seen on-screen—while newer looking than the one she’d described being held in, and metal, not wood, was about the same size.

  She’d seen it on-screen and had risked her life to swim out to it.

  Because she knew there could be something of value in it? Not just one movie, but other things? Drugs, maybe?

  His suspicions grew, even as parts of him didn’t want to buy what he was thinking. He’d grown soft on the woman. He couldn’t listen to those parts.

  “Why did you go down to the river?”

  “I saw a boat with no one in it. It was just too odd. A seemingly empty boat floating downriver only miles from where I’d been tied up and anchored, in a similarly small boat only two days before? I had to go. What if someone had been in the bottom of it, as I had been? Or what if I recognized something about it?”

  His tension started to dissipate. Until he thought of the way she’d moved in the water. As well trained as he was on surveillance, and as much time as he’d spent staring at his own screens, he’d lost her as soon as she’d gone down the bank. Out in the water, a lot of the time she’d been outside his camera view. But during those last seconds...

  It was like she’d been trained, too. To stay hidden.

  “And the movie?” he asked.

  “After the boat went over the rapids, I saw something glinting by the shore. Turned out to be the plastic case.”

  “After the boat went over?” he asked, honing in on what he could deal with at the moment.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it possible the case came out of the boat?”

  “Not while I was holding on to it,” she said, taking a step closer to him. “The boat, I mean...”

  “You held onto the boat.”

  “I had to see what was inside.”

  “And the boat went over the rapids.”

  She looked him in the eye. Nodded.

  “You could have gone over with it.” The air in his lungs constricted.

  “It’s a chance I had to take, Devon. I’m well trained to handle the water. If not for the ties at my ankles the other night, I probably would have survived the storm.”

  His admiration for her grew.

  He wasn’t happy about that. Figured maybe he needed to keep her on the same level as Rachel. Nothing personal at all between them. Not even talk.

  Except that it was possible he was being personally associated with her by those who wanted her dead. He had to know everything she could.

  “What was inside the boat?”

  “Nothing. Not even the oars.”

  “Likely something that broke away from a dock or pier during the storm. It could have been traveling the river since yesterday morning.” He put the possibility out there. Wasn’t buying it.

  But had to acknowledge that he had no other viable explanation at the moment.

  If she was to be believed.

  What if she’d known the boat would be coming downriver and had gone to intercept it knowing it would be carrying contraband? Because she was a part of whatever Kyle had gotten involved with, or to get some kind of leverage to help out herself and her family, he didn’t know.

  Either could be possible.

  The drugs he was after were not the only contraband flowing up and down that mighty river. With borders along Arizona, California and Nevada, and flowing to Mexico, the river was a potential hotbed for interstate trafficking of all kinds of illegal goods.

  And he was purposely positioned at a known hub. A recreational boating mecca. The legal revenue alone from water activities up and down the river was astronomical. As were the numbers of vacationers who passed through the area between Quartzite and Bullhead City. And that was just on the Arizona side. Directly across the river, in California, the business was equal or even greater.

  “Did you take your gun with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Into the river?”

  “Yes.”

  He was both relieved and bothered by that. Glad that she’d had the wherewithal to protect herself as much as possible.

  And wondering if she’d gone into that water knowing she was taking on the men who’d kidnapped her—even just by trying to confiscate one of their boats or known contraband.

  For that matter, he had no way of knowing if the one movie on his kitchen table was all she’d brought back to the cabin.

  “Do you mind if I search you?”

  The question was all wrong.

  And all mistrustful cop.

  She held out both arms. Submitted to his pat down.

  First time he’d ever done one where grazing a breast with the back of his wrist distracted him from his job.

  He stepped away. Searched the bathroom. Came back out to find her standing right where he’d left her. “And now your room?”

  He knew she hadn’t stashed anything anywhere else on his property or in his cabin. He’d viewed the tapes.

  Wordlessly, she motioned toward the door.

  He made quick work of going through the space he’d allotted her. Returned to the main living area with a mixture of regret and relief. Focused on the relief.

  “Thank you,” he told her.

  “You still don’t trust me.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” he told her. “I don’t trust anyone.”

  She nodded. “You want me to leave?”

  “No.” Solid truth. On many levels. At least one of which he wasn’t going to explore. Ever. He couldn’t like having her there for personal reasons. Period.

  “You want me to make meat loaf for dinner? I saw you have hamburger thawing in the refrigerator.”

  “I was planning on just grilling up plain burgers, but if you want to, knock yourself out.” No. Wrong words. Insensitive to say to a woman who’d nearly been knocked out permanently.

  And why did he keep saying such ludicrous things about the woman? He’d never had a problem conversing with a female in his life.

  “My mother used to make a great meat loaf,” he said then, to soften his inadvertent blow.

  Kacey didn’t show any reaction—either to his gaffe, or his attempt to make it better. She moved with her usual softness to the kitchen. Giving him a view of the back of her ankles.

  Both bleeding through the gauze she’d wrapped around them.

  “Let me take care of those ankles, first,” he said then. Reaching for the first aid kit he’d left on a table by his bedroom door.

  And considered himself forgiven when she immediately took a seat and let him tend to her cuts.

  The skin was raw, painful looking, and she’d left a small piece of sludge in one of the cuts. He was as tender as he could be, caring that he had to be hurting her, feeling her pain as though it was his own.

  And reminded himself—she could just be allowing his attention because she knew she could be facing infection if she didn’t let him do so.

  Because she needed her skin to heal quickly and allow her to get on with whatever questionable, likely illegal, business she was getting on with.

  Problem was, he wasn’t believing a word of it.

  Chapter 13

  As soon as he’d finished bandaging her ankles, Devon asked for Kacey’s gun. She supposed it was inevitable—her activities that day had blown what trust he’d had in her.

  She handed over the weapon without a word. Started on the meat loaf. And ridiculously started thinking about his bigger, warm hands skimming her body moments before. He couldn’t have been more impersonal—and yet the blood in her veins had grown instantly warm. Like he was some kind of infrared wave.

  Turning to the refrigerator to get an egg to add to the meat mixture in the bowl on the counter, she saw him. And warmed all over again.

  He’d taken her gun apart. Was drying it by hand with a small towel.

  Didn’t mean he was going to give it back to her. But he hadn’t taken it just to punish her, either. He’d asked her if she’d had it in the water. She’d thought he’d wanted to know if she’d protected herself. Had been glad to say that she had.

  She should have thought about gun parts that could rust.

  Back at the counter, her hands in a mixture of ground beef, oatmeal, catsup, onion, egg and a couple of spices, she was startled again when the gun appeared beside her bowl. Devon didn’t say a word. About her hands in the glob in the bowl, the day—or the weapon. Just set it there and walked out.

  When she saw him on his phone outside a few minutes later, she understood his abrupt departure. He’d obviously had a text from that firm of experts again. Requiring another phone call.

  Though she knew she shouldn’t, she placed the finished loaf, already in its pan, in the oven and then stood there and watched the man who’d been her only companion for the two worst days of her life.

  His shoulders, while broad, weren’t huge. Yet they seemed stronger to her than even her brother’s. Who’d trained his whole life and took on bruisers on the football field.

  The long hair had seemed odd to her at first, not anything she’d ever be attracted to, but as he stood outside in the desert wilderness, staring off into the distance, a frown on his face, she thought the hair he’d set free when he’d come home suited him completely.

  He was wild and unpredictable.

  And yet...she felt safe with him.

  More than that, she was hot for him. Growing hotter by the hour. Maybe some kind of Stockholm syndrome, but she didn’t think so. Devon wasn’t holding her hostage. To the contrary, he’d made it clear that he’d help her leave anytime she wanted to go.

  She didn’t want to go.

  She liked Devon’s cabin. She liked being there with him.

  She liked him.

  Still standing there with the thoughts, not yet having had time to process them, she watched the man—in shorts and a T-shirt and flip-flops—hang up the phone and head for the cabin door.

  One look at his face and she knew that whatever had made him frown on the phone had to do with her. Not his father’s cold case.

  “What?”

  He looked her in the eye—his expression serious, and something more. She couldn’t tell if he was doubting her, or worried about her. “What?” she asked a second time.

  She’d deal with it, whatever it was.

  “Your brother reported you missing today.”

  A swallow got caught in her throat. She choked. Thinking about the words. Coughed until tears ran down her face.

  When Devon came closer, she put him off with an upheld hand. She just needed a minute.