Lawman Lover

Light blue eyes stared up at her, now open when before they’d been closed.

Her lips parted on a shocked gasp. Then a scream burning in her throat, she tried to utter it, but a big palm clamped tight over her mouth. His skin was rough and warm against her lips.

The man sat up, the body bag falling off his wide shoulders to pool at his lean waist, leaving his muscled chest bare but for a light dusting of golden hair and a bloodied bandage over his ribs.

Macy twisted her neck and her wrist, trying to wrestle free of his grasp. But he held on tightly, the pressure just short of being painful. Her heart pounded out a crazy rhythm as fear coursed through her veins.

She had to break loose of him and run out the open door. With his lower body still zipped in the bag, he wouldn’t be able to chase her, and maybe the elevator would be back. Or she’d take the stairs…

“You’re safe,” he murmured, his voice a deep rumble in that heavily muscled chest as he assured her, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Bestselling, award-winning author LISA CHILDS writes paranormal and contemporary romance for Mills & Boon. She lives on thirty acres in west Michigan with her husband, two daughters, a talkative Siamese and a long-haired Chihuahua who thinks she’s a Rottweiler. Lisa loves hearing from readers, who can contact her through her website, www.lisachilds.com, or snail mail address, PO Box 139, Marne, MI 49435, USA.

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Kimberly Duffy, for always being there for me.

Your friendship means the world to me!

The cell door slid open with the quick buzz of the disabled security alarm and the clang of heavy metal. Rowe Cusack swung his legs over the side of his bunk and jumped down onto the concrete floor. Had the warden reinstated his privileges?

Rowe couldn’t understand why they’d been suspended in the first place. He hadn’t started the fight in the cafeteria even though he had ended it. But the warden had punished him anyway and ignored Rowe’s demands to use the phone.

He needed to make the call that would get him the hell out of…hell. His instincts tightened his guts into knots; he was pretty sure his cover had been blown.

But how? He had been going undercover for years before he had joined the Drug Enforcement Administration, and even as a rookie with the Detroit Police Department he had never been discovered.

“Hey, guard,” Rowe called out, disrupting the eerie quiet of predawn in the cell block. “What’s going on?”

Even if his privileges had been reinstated, they wouldn’t allow him to make a call at this hour. He hadn’t been allowed one in over a week. No visitors either, not even a letter or an email. After just a few days of no contact, his handler, in his guise as Rowe’s attorney, should have checked in on him. Or Special Agent Jackson should have had him pulled out. Leaving him in here with no backup and no real weapon for self-protection, if his cover had been blown, was like leaving him for dead.

“You got a new roommate,” a deep voice announced, and a hulking shadow darkened the cell. “Get out of here, Petey.”

Rowe’s scrawny cell mate scrambled out of the bottom bunk and flattened his back against the wall as he squeezed through the cell door opening around the giant of a man entering it.

Rowe reached for his homemade shiv, closing his fingers around the toothbrush handle. Even in the dim glow of the night security lights, he recognized the man whom he’d given a wide berth since his incarceration. His flimsy weapon wouldn’t be much protection against the burly giant.

“What the hell do you want?” he asked the monster of a man.

“Same thing you do,” the deep voice murmured. “To get the hell out of here.”

“There’s no escape route in here.” Rowe had checked for one. He’d had some tough assignments over his six years with the DEA, but getting locked up like an animal, with animals, was his worst mission yet. From between his shoulder blades, sweat trickled down his back, and panic pressed on his chest.

Damn claustrophobia…

He’d fought it since he was a kid, refusing to let it rule or limit his life. But maybe he should have used it as a reason to get out of taking this assignment.

“You’re my escape route,” Jedidiah Kleyn said, stepping closer. Light from the dim overhead bulb glinted off his bald head and his dark eyes. The eyes of a cold-blooded killer.

This was the last person Rowe would have wanted to learn his real identity. He shook his head in denial. “You got the wrong guy.”

The prisoner laughed; the sharp, loud noise sounded like a hammer pounding nails into Rowe’s casket. “That’s not what I hear.”

“What do you hear?” He wondered how the man heard anything; Rowe wasn’t the only prisoner who gave him a wide berth. Nobody wanted to mess with this man, and so as to not risk pissing him off, nobody talked to him.

“I hear that you ask a lot of questions.” Kleyn stepped even closer. Rowe was over six feet tall and muscular, but this guy was taller. Broader, like a brick wall of mean. “I hear that you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.”