When he insisted on tending to her ankles even before he showered, she secretly gave up fighting her attraction to the man.

  She might live. She might die. Reality was, she was in one hell of a mess with a strong possibility of being killed.

  And all she could think about was getting the most out of life while she still had it.

  At the moment, Devon Miller comprised every single part of that “most.”

  * * *

  Devon didn’t like the idea of Rachel being watched. If his partner had been made, he would be too. Neither of them was ready to give up on the operation. As she’d said in their phone call, it was possible that, yes, she was being watched, but the eyes on her could be because she was a new active link in the chain the two of them were trying to pull apart.

  And he knew Kacey’s kidnappers could be the reason someone was watching for his truck outside a bar in which the abductors were sitting. If the men were powerful, as he was beginning to think, they’d have a lookout wherever they went.

  Rachel didn’t ask how he knew the woman who’d supposedly wanted to know about the men at the bar because they knew her brother. He’d told her, initially, it had nothing to do with their case, and she’d respected his privacy on the matter. If it got to the point where he had to read her in, he’d do so.

  They weren’t at that point yet. There were still too many unknowns, suppositions and unsubstantiated possibilities. They were in the gathering stage and one small tip of the wrong hand could blow either case in an instant.

  Back at the cabin, immediate threat to their lives abated for the moment, touching Kacey’s calves and feet as he tended to her ankles, he had to guard against a vastly different but equally powerful danger.

  His desire to lose himself in Kacey Ashland was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. In the danger-induced passion grown from the fact that they’d both gone over the cliff after his truck, seeking each other, he’d kissed her. That had been his one and only warning. He couldn’t let sexual need get such a hold on him that he made a horrific mistake. He’d promised her that she was safe from any advances from him.

  He would rather die than be the man who broke that promise.

  As he stripped down, got in the shower, he forced himself to focus fully on the case.

  Turned the shower on cold. Stood there with the droplets stinging the front of his body, having little effect on the enlarged organ between his hips.

  And heard a knock on the bathroom door.

  Immediately shoving in the knob to stop the water, Devon grabbed a towel and his gun, and went to the door. “Kacey?”

  Had someone found them? Penetrated his property in the ten minutes he’d been in the shower?

  “Yes.” She didn’t sound frightened. Or coerced.

  She sounded...inviting.

  He opened the door a crack, ready to shoot if someone had a gun at her throat.

  His jaw dropped, instead.

  Chapter 17

  On fire like she’d never been in her life, Kacey stood naked except for the towel she’d wrapped around herself and smiled at her dripping-wet host.

  “You said that you’d never proposition me, but you didn’t say you were opposed to being invited.” She said the words she’d been rehearsing for the past five minutes. And then, when he opened the door wide and stood there, openmouthed, staring at her, she just kept talking. “These last two days have taught me like never before that there is absolutely no guarantee in life. I’ve nearly lost mine a few times in the past two days and there I was spending precious moments standing in the kitchen alone when where I wanted to be was naked in here with you.”

  He hadn’t moved. Hadn’t said a word.

  She saw the telling bulge in the front of the towel at his waist. Licked her lips without thinking about what she was doing and felt naughty in a totally invigorating way for having done so.

  “The way you kissed me earlier made me think that you had some interest in seeing me naked.” She glanced pointedly at the juncture between his thighs.

  He hadn’t moved. Wasn’t speaking.

  But the truth was a living being pulsating back and forth between them.

  “It’s your turn,” she told him.

  “You said you wanted to be naked in here with me.” His voice sounded a bit thick. But completely coherent.

  “That’s right.”

  “Yet you’re neither in here nor naked.”

  Desire swirled heavy and hard in her lower region as she lowered the towel. And continued to grow as she stood there, watching him devour her with his gaze.

  She took a step forward, placing herself just inside the bathroom, inches from his wet towel, and leaned forward to lick drops of water off his shoulder.

  Devon’s gaze was on fire and yet he stepped back. “Kacey, our lives outside this cabin diverge. It’s too complicated...”

  “I might never have a life outside this cabin. I’m making choices based on the one moment I have, as I have it.” She kissed his neck, smelling the soap she’d recently used, and shivered at the sexual chills that shot through her. “Life is too precious to waste and when you have a moment like this one...”

  He did not back away again, and, completely serious, she looked up at him. “I don’t know how many more times I can escape death,” she told him. “But I do know that if and when I meet you in the afterlife, I want to be meeting up with a lover.”

  * * *

  Devon couldn’t get enough of her. Couldn’t touch everywhere at once, or thoroughly enough. He couldn’t see enough. And didn’t want to waste another second standing in a puddle of water on the bathroom floor.

  Letting his towel drop, he picked Kacey up and, avoiding the cameras he’d placed himself, walked with her to his bedroom, depositing her in the middle of the crumple of sheets covering his unmade king-size mattress, and slid down next to her. Half on top of her.

  His room, like the bathroom, was motion detector only.

  Neither of them spoke. He had no words to convey any of what he was feeling. The need. The tenderness he felt toward her. The sexual drive. All mingling together, feeding off her hungers, reaching for more than he’d ever had before.

  “Now,” she yelled out at one point, spreading her legs, and he touched her, had her crying out with pleasure in seconds, and then began to titillate her again, her nipples, her neck, behind her knees. His creativity came out of nowhere, driving him to touching in ways he’d never done, never even thought about doing. And every brush of his skin against her brought new heat borne of a liquid fire that consumed him.

  When he finally entered her, barely holding himself together as she sat on top of him and slid the condom down his painfully swollen length, he heard his own cries from far off.

  As though they belonged to someone else.

  Until that moment—the moment Kacey had chosen to take her life in her own hands and share it with him—he’d been a completely silent lover.

  If they ever did meet in the next life, she’d have that to put her on a pedestal above the rest.

  She was the one who’d received everything he had to give.

  * * *

  Kacey awoke to the sight of dawn’s purplish haze showing through the row of small windows lining the top of the wall in Devon’s bedroom. Lying still, she savored those first seconds, feeling cozy and happy in bed with the man who’d given her more life in a couple of hours than she’d ever imagined possible.

  And then, hearing the coffeepot in the kitchen, turned over to find herself staring at an empty mattress with an indentation in the sheets where his body had been.

  That’s when the next negative thought hit. She’d left her towel on the floor outside the bathroom door. Had nothing to cover her nakedness except the sheet wadded on Devon’s bed—or clothes from his drawers.

  While she didn’t relish taking another’s possessions without permission, she most definitely was not going to walk out into the kitchen completely nude.

  She’d had her moment. Had lived it to the fullest. And was back to the job of staying alive.

  Sitting up on her way to the dresser across from the bed, she saw the clothes just beyond her feet at the bottom of the bed. The sweats and T-shirt she’d put on after her shower the night before.

  Donning them hastily, lest her host hear her moving around and came in before she was fully covered, Kacey felt a little let down as she entered the empty kitchen. And saw Devon outside the cabin, talking on his phone.

  For all she knew, the man had an early morning river trip that he had to get to. She had no business having any other expectations of him—or of being disappointed that their night together included no intimacy on the morning after.

  In shorts, a T-shirt with the logo of the recreational boating company he worked with and tennis shoes, he put a hand to his head, looked off in the direction of the river, and paced around a small portion of his desert land as he spoke.

  She stood there, watching, waiting, because his conversation could very well have something to do with her life.

  Was Rachel on the phone? Giving him more information about the three men in the bar the night before? Or maybe asking him about the woman he’d had up in her apartment?

  Was it Sierra’s Web, his firm of experts, giving him the identities of the three men who’d kidnapped her?

  Shivering, she didn’t make her necessary trip to the bathroom. Didn’t even go for coffee. She just watched the man she’d shared her body with the night before, feeling as though he was a somewhat intimidating stranger in a world from which she had to escape.

  The sensation dissipated some when he re-entered the cabin, seeing her there, meeting her gaze with a look that seemed to hold recognition of what had passed between them during the night.

  “That was Rachel.”

  The bartender sure was up early for someone who’d been at the bar at two in the morning. And her catty thought had no place in Kacey’s life. Just because Rachel had been up before her, had spoken to Devon before they’d had a chance for at least a tender smile to start their morning after, didn’t give Kacey any cause to resent the woman.

  Her thoughts came. They went. She waited silently for whatever her host had to tell her.

  “The police woke her up half an hour ago. A man was found dead in a Colorado River lagoon not far from here.”

  Instantly fully focused, and feeling childish for her slow-moving brain that morning, Kacey asked, “Does she know him? Was it one of the kidnappers?”

  “No,” he told her. Holding up his phone. “She sent a photo.”

  Kacey looked and felt her chest tighten around the air sucked into her lungs. “Is that one of the men you ran off your property the day I got here?”

  With a tilt of the head, a half shrug, Devon took his phone back. “Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

  “Do you know who he is?”

  “Nope. Neither did Rachel.”

  “Why did the police go to her, then?”

  “The man had the address of the bar written on a marina business card in his wallet.”

  “Something’s going on at that bar, Devon.” And it was beginning to look like his woman friend was involved in whatever it might be.

  Involved with whoever wanted Kacey dead?

  Throat closing in on her, Kacey felt herself go cold. Had Devon told the woman about Kacey? Including that she was staying with him?

  Before she could get the question out, Devon was speaking again. “There’s more. The man was found crammed into an empty packing crate.”

  According to Devon’s bartender friend, Kacey’s kidnappers had been looking for a crate. Filling with horror, she stared at the unrelenting man standing before her with no hint of tenderness on his face at all.

  “The bottom of the crate had a piece of plastic wrap stuck to it,” Devon said. “A partial label for a pornographic movie...”

  Devon had said he’d sent the movie she’d found by overnight express to Sierra’s Web in Phoenix.

  “Have you heard back from your expert firm about the movie I found?” she asked then, growing more frightened, feeling more powerless, by the second.

  He shook his head, then, watching her closely, asked, “Is there anything you want to tell me before I do?”

  If she hadn’t already been sinking back into hell, his question would have slapped her down there quickly. “You still think I have something to do with all of this?” She met his gaze fully, held on tight. “That because the kidnappers mention a missing crate of supplies right before a crate turns up with a dead man in it that had a partial movie label matching a movie I found means I’m somehow involved in it all?”

  “I don’t think it. Viewing all the current circumstances, I see it as a logical possibility.”

  He still didn’t trust her.

  And really, why should she think he would? Sex didn’t magically create trust. Nor, apparently, had running for their lives together.

  With a nod, she moved toward the bedroom he’d loaned her. Planning to get her stuff and...what? Head out?

  Where could she go and stay hidden?

  How would she get there?

  And then what?

  How was she going to find the truth that would allow her to put her life back together?

  Show herself at the marina bar that night and take on her kidnappers alone—assuming they were there?

  Call Kyle again and demand that he talk to her?

  Her previous run-in with her abductors had nearly cost her her life. And Kyle had already refused to tell her anything. On two separate occasions.

  “I need to get dressed,” she said, realizing that putting on underwear and clothes that fit her, brushing her teeth and hair, using the restroom, were the activities that would serve her best in the moment, as she prepared to protect her life for another day.

  * * *

  Where was the dead man’s companion? The two had clearly been together the day Devon had chased them off his land.

  Had one killed the other?

  And the crate...he’d heard about a missing crate the night before, feasibly from Kacey’s kidnappers who were missing one they said was filled with supplies for their fishing trip. And then a trespasser on his property suddenly showed up in one?

  Pieces were oozing out like worms. Yet he had no clear indication of how they went together. Which pieces answered what questions.

  Sitting at the table while Kacey showered, Devon used his stylus to draw a chart on his phone just to organize the information in his head. Three cases, in three different corners. Hilton Grainger’s old case that Sierra’s Web was investigating. Tommy Grainger’s current undercover assignment with the Henderson police. And Devon’s involvement with the kidnapping, near-murder and rescue of Kacey Ashland.

  And then he listed anything he could think of that could be a part of any of the three. The men at his property were listed twice. Under Kacey’s kidnapping since they appeared the day that he’d found her. And then she’d risked her life the next day to go chasing after a boat and came home with a pornographic movie. A case of which had been found in the crate housing one of the two trespassers.

  As she’d pointed out, Kacey’s kidnappers had mentioned a missing crate. Could be the same one. Or just something else for the unrelated corner.

  But that movie, if there was a crate of them as the bottom of the dead man’s crate would imply, then they also had to be added to his father’s case, as the movies were likely illegal contraband on the river.

  The trespassers ended up in that corner, too. The dead man had had the address of the bar in his pocket written on a marina business card. Which could implicate both Devon and Rachel.

  He put those two men in the fourth corner as well—the one that had nothing whatsoever to do with anything he was investigating.

  He had no idea why Kacey had been kidnapped, other than a knife bearing human blood. Wrote “knife” only in her corner.

  Possible police misconduct went in Kacey’s corner, too. Along with his father’s.

  His own corner contained Belen Alexopoulos. And the critical confirmation that the drugs the good-looking Greek man had sold Rachel were from the same source as those traveling across the country. Ironic how his own potentially dangerous undercover case seemed to be the only easy corner he had.

  The random rowboat floating down the river? Shaking his head on that one, he entered it in Kacey’s corner, as well as the one reserved for unrelated material. For all he knew, the thing could have been his trespassers’ boat. Or, as he’d said earlier, a random boat knocked loose by the storm that floated downriver.

  Brother in trouble and four-man-argument-at-night went only to Kacey.

  Kidnapping, another rowboat, ropes, all just in Kacey’s corner.

  He’d yet to hear back on the ropes he’d shipped to Phoenix, to Sierra’s Web. Wasn’t expecting much out of them but put them on the list that had started as Kacey’s corner but was taking up much of the screen.

  Being followed—that went in Tommy Grainger’s case column as well as Kacey’s.

  Hearing the shower turn off, he quickly saved the chart as a hidden file on his phone and was preparing to make some breakfast when he got a text from Sierra’s Web.

  While the blow-dryer ran in the bathroom, he called Hudson Warner, his Sierra’s Web contact.

  “There’s nothing on the ropes,” Hudson said straight off. “Kind commonly purchased at any big box or hardware store. No fingerprint hits. The way her abductors got her so quickly, managed to get her away and on that boat without her even seeing them...these guys don’t seem like amateurs to our team. The supposition is that they wore gloves.”

  Devon listened intently.

  “No obvious hits with standard facial recognition on the images you sent, but we’re just getting started on our identification processes.”