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  The knife shot through the air and hit the wall with a sharp thud. Cassie flipped on the light switch to see the handsome dark-haired man standing against the wall, the knife embedded in the Sheetrock an inch from the left of his head.

  “Losing your touch?”

  “Not likely. If I hadn’t recognized you at the last minute your ear would be pinned against the wall. What are you doing here, Kane?”

  She didn’t bother to ask him how he’d entered her house. There wasn’t a locked door or a security system invented that could keep Kane McNabb out if he wanted in.

  He moved with a languid grace away from the window and sat on the edge of her bed. “You didn’t call.”

  “You’re right, I didn’t.” She walked over to her knife and pulled it out, satisfied to see that a little putty and touch-up paint would easily heal the wall wound.

  “Aren’t you intrigued?” Kane asked.

  She turned back to face the man who had once been her partner and lover for two years. He hadn’t changed much in the past five years. Like a chameleon, he had the ability to look like a debonair man of means, a disreputable drug lord or a high-ranking foreign government official. He could be whatever the agency wanted him to be. The last time she’d seen him he’d been pale, lifeless and unconscious in a hospital room bed.

  Now his eyes were dark and brooding and a remembered flutter of heat ignited in the pit of her stomach. She tried to ignore it. “No, I’m not intrigued. I’m tired.” She bent over and untied the laces of her black boots, then kicked them off.

  “You should hear the details before you make any decision.”

  “I don’t need to hear the details,” she replied coolly. “I’m not interested…and get off my bed. In fact, get out of my house.” Now that she was closer to him she could smell the scent of his familiar cologne.

  To her irritation he didn’t move a muscle. “We need you, Cassie. This is big…really big.”

  “I don’t care. I told you I’m not interested. Now, get out.” It was bad enough the agency wanted her back, it was sheer manipulation by them that they’d sent Kane all the way from the L.A. office to recruit her back. It made her more adamant about staying out of all of it.

  He stood and moved toward the bedroom door. “So I guess it doesn’t matter to you that within two months’ time tens of thousands of men, women and children will probably be dead and you may be the only person on earth to stop the carnage.” He shrugged. “Pleasant dreams, Cassie.” He left the bedroom and she slammed the door shut behind him.

  “Good riddance,” she muttered as she removed her flashlight and billy club from her belt, then took off her service revolver. As she placed the knife and gun in the drawer next to her bed, she tried not to think about what he’d said.

  Tens of thousands of men, women and children, and she was the only person on earth to stop the carnage. She was sure Kane had added on that last part in an effort to appeal to her ego, but it hadn’t worked. The agency had hundreds of agents, including other females as effective as she was.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and worked the tie out of her hair, allowing the long blond strands to spill free around her shoulders. Damn them. And damn him for intruding back into her life.

  Her fingers moved to the top of her light blue uniform shirt, but instead of unbuttoning the buttons, her hands fell back into her lap. Tens of thousands of men, women and children. What could possibly be brewing in the underworld? Was it a terrorist plot of some sort? Certainly the world was ripe for such potential.

  Damn them, she thought once again as she rose from the bed and yanked open the bedroom door. The scent of brewing coffee had just begun to make its way down the hall.

  With a new rise of irritation welling up inside her, she followed the scent to the kitchen and turned on the light. Kane sat at the table, two cups in front of him awaiting the brew…and obviously her.

  She wasn’t sure what she hated more, the fact that he’d found her special stash of vanilla-flavored coffee or that he knew her so well he’d anticipated her inability to remain completely uninvolved on all levels.

  She threw herself into the chair opposite his, unsure if she was angry with him or angry with herself for playing right into his hands.

  “I’m not promising anything, but I’ll admit, you’ve piqued my interest.”

  He nodded and stood to grab the coffee carafe. “Ever hear of Adam Mercer?” he asked as he filled their cups with the fresh brew.

  “Adam Mercer?” She frowned. “Isn’t he some sort of rich philanthropist?” She watched as he returned the coffee carafe to the machine. Kane moved with an almost feline grace that belied the strength and power she knew him capable of.

  He returned to the chair opposite hers and wrapped a hand around his coffee mug. “Adam Mercer…fifty-four years old, wealthy as Midas and the behind the scenes leader of a grass roots coalition called MAD.”

  “MAD…as in Men Against Drugs?” Kane nodded and she racked her brain to think of everything she knew about that particular organization. It was easier to focus on the matter at hand than to sort out her emotions about seeing Kane again. “All I really know about the organization is that they run several shelters around town.”

  “They run a hell of a lot more than a few shelters,” Kane replied. He paused a moment to take a drink of his coffee, then continued. “At the moment MAD runs dozens of shelters in cities all across the nation. They also maintain several rehabilitation centers specifically geared toward substance abuse.”

  “What does this all have to do with the death of thousands of men, women and children?” she asked impatiently. Kane McNabb had always liked the sound of his own voice.

  “Adam Mercer and his organization has lobbied for law changes, provided drug education and paid for antidrug advertising. The agency began to monitor the group when it realized that MAD was gaining not only huge political support, but also amassing a cultlike following with the movers and shakers of the country.”

  “Just get to the point, please.”

  “Patience was never one of your strong suits.” His dark eyes gave nothing of himself away. “Bottom line…three years ago Adam lost his only daughter to a drug overdose. He lost his daughter, then months after that his wife left him and we think he’s gone off the deep end. The man has lost his mind to hatred and an obsessive need to wipe out all drug use.”

  He paused to take another sip of his coffee. “Several months ago a new kind of marijuana and cocaine hit the streets. It was called Blue…Blue grass or Blue snow…because it has a faint blue tinge to it. It’s better, purer and stronger than anything that’s hit the streets in years.”

  “I heard a couple of vice cops talking about it,” she said and sat up straighter in her chair. “They said it was the most potent stuff they’d ever seen, but if I remember right, nobody ever figured out where it came from.”

  “A month ago it dried up. You can’t find any Blue on the streets anywhere in any city right now. The demand is huge, but the supply is gone.”

  “So what does this have to do with Adam Mercer?”

  “He supplied the original Blue, then he pulled it off the market to create an enormous demand.”

  Cassie stared at Kane in disbelief. “That doesn’t make sense. You just told me the man is over-the-top antidrug and now you’re telling me he’s become a drug czar providing the best dope in America? That’s crazy.”

  “Yeah, but there’s a method behind the madness,” Kane replied. He shoved his coffee mug to the side and leaned across the table toward her. “He’s managed to create a huge supply of Blue and our sources tell us in the next couple of months he intends to flood the market with more Blue…except this time the drugs will be highly lethal. He’ll kill the users, put the dealers out of business and rid the world of the scourge of drugs.”

  Cassie leaned back in her chair, stunned by the ramifications of what he’d just told her. “But that’s insane,” she said softly. “It’s not only in
sane, it won’t work. The minute people started dying, we’d be able to get an alert to the public about the tainted drugs.”

  “You know that and I know that, but apparently Mercer has lost touch with reality.” Kane’s dark gaze held hers. “He’s crazy all right, but also highly intelligent.”

  “So what are you doing here talking to me?”

  “We need somebody to get inside the organization…get up close and personal to Adam Mercer.”

  “And what makes you think I can get up close and personal with him?”

  His gaze slowly slid the length of her. “Because Adam Mercer has a weakness for sexy, long-legged blondes.”

  The heat that had flickered to life in her stomach moments before intensified beneath his gaze. “So how would somebody go about meeting Adam Mercer?”

  “Mercer frequents a nightclub called Night Life. It’s an upscale kind of place and his last two relationships have been with waitresses that work there. We’ve got a contact there and whomever we send in will have a job as a cocktail waitress.”

  There was no way she was going to get roped into this, she told herself. “There are plenty of other women in the agency that can do this. I’m not interested.”

  She stood and carried her cup to the sink, where she emptied out the coffee, shut off the coffeemaker and turned back to him. “Get somebody else. I have a nice, uncomplicated, complete life here. I don’t intend to screw it up.”

  “Okay, if that’s the way you want it.” He shrugged his broad shoulders. “I just thought maybe you’d be personally interested in this particular job.”

  She eyed him warily. “What do you mean…personally interested?”

  He finished the last of the coffee in his cup and also stood. “Adam Mercer and his team have worked with drug addicts in this city and others for years. Sources tell us he maintains a data base with the names of all the people he’s helped in the cities where MAD works. It’s possible at one time or another he ran into your mother. It’s possible he might have some information about both your mother and your brother.”

  “Get out.” She was grateful her voice contained nothing more than the cold command, grateful that there was no indication of the emotions his words had stirred.

  “Cassie…”

  “I mean it, Kane. Get out of here now.”

  He placed a piece of paper on the table, then moved to the back door and grabbed the handle. “Twenty-four hours, Cassie. You have twenty-four hours to make up your mind. That’s the address where you can find us.” With these final words he slipped through the door.

  She reset her alarm system, then stalked out of the kitchen and into the spare bedroom that held nothing but her punching bag.

  She pulled on the lightweight red gloves, then the padded foot protectors. She drew several deep, cleansing breaths in an attempt to gain control of the emotions that threatened to surface.

  Thoughts of her mother always brought with them a strange combination of bittersweet longing and anger. Mingling with those two emotions was a tinge of reluctant excitement as she thought of going back to work for the agency.

  However, the most threatening, confusing emotions she felt at the moment concerned Kane McNabb. She’d thought she’d forgotten him. She’d worked so hard to forget everything about him. But seeing him again had forced memories back into her head…the memory of lying in his arms, of feeling his body against her own, of seeing him almost die.

  She delivered a roundhouse kick to the bag, then followed it up with a flurry of punches that left her half-breathless. Damn them.

  Damn them for contacting her again and for manipulating her with her past by making Kane the contact. As if it wasn’t bad enough seeing him again, he’d given her the one compelling reason she’d find it difficult to say no.

  Chapter 2

  Cassie didn’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed. She woke up on the wrong side of the world. She’d slept restlessly, her sleep filled with nightmares that weren’t so much the fantasies of unconsciousness, but rather memories she’d spent her adult life trying to forget.

  The morning was heralded in when her neighbor, Ralph Watters started his lawn mower. Like clockwork, every Saturday morning at precisely eight o’clock, the man began yardwork.

  Cassie might have gotten used to the monotonous whir of the mower, but Ralph didn’t stop there. After the mower he cranked up a weed eater and after whacking weeds to an inch of their lives, he used a high power blower to blast ever speck of grass, dirt and dog crap off his driveway and sidewalk.

  Many an early Saturday Cassie had fantasized about taking that blower and blowing old Mr. Watters into the next subdivision.

  She might have forgiven the man his fanatical fixation with noisy machines if he wasn’t such a cantankerous old fart whose pastime was making Cassie’s life miserable.

  She pulled herself out of bed to the growl of the nearby mower and padded into the kitchen to get the coffee started. Surely a cup of coffee and a hot shower would help the foul mood she felt building inside her.

  Moments later she stood beneath a hot spray of water, trying to forget her late-night visitor, trying not to remember the words Kane had spoken to her.

  Drugs and death. The combination was certainly not anything new, but the scenario Kane had painted had been chilling.

  And if that wasn’t incentive enough for her to join the team, Kane had found it necessary to dangle the carrot of the possibility of gaining information about her mother and her brother.

  She stepped out of the shower and, wrapped in a towel, went back into her bedroom. Sitting on the edge of the bed she pulled open the drawer in her nightstand.

  Inside were several items…a box of tissues, a half-eaten bag of M&M’s, a manila folder filled with papers and a small silver trinket box. It was the trinket box she withdrew and placed on the bed next to her.

  She rarely opened it, almost never took out the item it contained, but she opened it now and stared at the thin gold chain and gold heart-shaped locket that rested inside.

  When she’d been twelve years old she’d nearly lost her life protecting the necklace when an older street kid had tried to take it away from her. The necklace was the only link she had to the mother who had abandoned her and the little brother who had called her Ci-Ci.

  The teenage punk had managed to yank the chain from her neck, but he’d dropped it. When he bent down to the sidewalk to swipe it up, Cassie discovered the power she had in her legs. She’d already spent a year on the streets, alone and afraid, surviving by instincts she didn’t understand and didn’t question.

  As the punk had bent over she’d kicked him, connecting with his upper chest. He fell to the sidewalk, his breath whooshing out of his lungs like air from a depleted balloon. Pumping with adrenaline, she’d kicked him one more time in the ribs, then had scooped up her necklace and run like the wind.

  She’d never had the chain fixed. It was still broken and was too small for her neck now anyway. She picked up the locket and held it for a long moment in her hand. It was cool, and yet burned her palm as if on fire.

  Her mother had given it to her the week before they’d left their home in Kansas City to travel to California to start a new life. Cassie had been thrilled with the unexpected present. Of course, she hadn’t known at the time that it was a going-away present and she would eventually be left behind while her mother, her brother and her mother’s boyfriend went off into the sunset.

  She opened it and stared at the two tiny photos held within. The one on the left side was of a blond woman with too much makeup and a desperate kind of hunger in her smile. On the right was the image of a little boy with a blond crew cut and laughing eyes.

  She touched the picture of the child with her index finger. Billy. He’d been five when her mother and her mother’s boyfriend had dumped her out of a battered pickup on the streets of Los Angeles. The last vision she’d had of him was of his sad little face peeking out the grimy back window of a pickup truck. />
  “We’ll be back in an hour.” Cassie could still hear her mother’s voice as the pickup zoomed away.

  Back in an hour, yeah, right. She shoved aside an ache that never completely went away and snapped the locket closed. She threw it into the trinket box, then placed the box back in the drawer and slammed it shut. That hour had stretched into forever.

  For just a moment she was that child again, standing on the street corner waiting for her family to return. She could taste the fear that had twisted up from her stomach. She swallowed hard and shook her head to dispel the images.

  In a moment of weakness she’d told Kane about her past. And now she hated the fact that he knew her Achilles’ heel.

  She hastily pulled on a pair of red workout shorts, a matching sports bra and a large white tank shirt. It was Kane’s fault that she was in a foul mood since opening her eyes this morning.

  Kane McNabb was just as sinfully handsome now as he’d been five years before. The two of them had made a terrific team. Like synchronized swimmers, they’d worked with one mind, swimming the waters of danger in perfect rhythm.

  They’d spent two weeks in Libya posing as husband and wife scientists in an effort to learn how close Qaddafi really was to obtaining nuclear weapons. They’d pretended to be brother and sister for several weeks to infiltrate a cult in South Carolina.

  Their assignments took them far away from home or as near as their own city as they took care of problems that fell through the bureaucratic cracks of other agencies.

  He’d also been the best lover she’d ever had. But that was the past and the past was best left alone.

  After two cups of coffee she felt lucid enough to get behind the steering wheel of her car. Max would be expecting her between now and noon for their ritual Saturday morning breakfast. If anyone could put her right with the world again it was Max Monroe.

  Before she left the house, she grabbed the address that Kane had left on the table the night before and shoved it into the bottom of her tan purse.