Brown and de Luca Collection, Volume 1

by Maggie Shayne

  “Amy knows how to pick locks?”

  “Yes. And way not the point, Detective. When her kidnapper figured it out, he must’ve gone after her.”

  I didn’t need to tell him that. He was already leaning out the window, examining whatever signs they’d left behind. Then he took me by the hand and ran back through the motel room and out the door and around to the back. “There,” Mason said, pointing. “You can see where the grass is trodden down.” He took off running, and I ran along behind him.

  As I tried to keep up, I looked all around us and it hit me how isolated this place was. There was the motel, but not much else in sight. A scrubby weed patch beside it and a wooded lot beyond that. Far in the distance, I could see a big Mobil gas station sign, standing on a tall pole so it could be seen from the highway, but it had to be a half mile away.

  I tried to think what I would do in Amy’s situation, and realized I would head for cover first and people second. First the woods, then from there I’d make my way toward that gas station or whatever else might turn out to be closer.

  We hit the scrub lot and headed across it. I poured on the speed and caught up with Mason. “She’ll head for the trees, then the gas station, and she’ll zigzag to try to confuse him.”

  “She’s smart, then.” He glanced back at me as we entered the woods. “Like you.”

  And right then, while he smiled at me as if he meant it, something crashed down onto Mason’s head. As he collapsed and my blood went cold, I looked up to see a man standing there holding a tire iron. The man I’d seen in Amy’s photo, getting out of that pickup truck.

  “Dammit, I think you killed him.” I dropped to my knees, laying my body over Mason’s and making a whole lot of female hysteria type sounds while I slid his gun from his hand and up underneath my coat, tucking it into my jeans in front and pulling my sweater over it to hide its presence. “You did, you killed him! You killed him!”

  Mason was breathing. His heart was beating. But his head was busted up pretty badly, and he was bleeding. The guy had hit him with a crowbar. A fucking crowbar. I wanted to rip out the bastard’s tonsils.

  The attacker grabbed my shoulder. “Get up, woman.”

  I straightened, mentally counting the minutes between us and the state cops, and wondering if they’d figure out where we were. Should’ve sent them a text or something. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  “Turn around, lemme have a look atcha.”

  I turned slowly. The guy was short and solid as a brick. Dark brown hair in messy tufts. I watched his face. He wasn’t nervous. In fact, he seemed happy. His smile was slow. “Two for one,” he said. “Come on with me.”

  “Where the hell is Amy?” I asked him. “What have you done with her?”

  He made a big show of thinking, his lips tightening in a big thoughtful pucker he probably thought was cute but wasn’t. “Who the hell is Amy?” I frowned, but he just shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Come on, you’re comin’ with me now.”

  That was exactly what I planned to do, because he was going to take me to Amy, and then I’d get her the hell away from him, come back here and get some help for Mason.

  He grabbed my arm and we started walking, but then Mason groaned and the guy stopped in his tracks. “I thought you tol’ me he was dead?” Turning and pulling out a huge handgun at the same time, he leveled it on Mason.

  I clasped my hands together and brought them up from below, hitting his arm so hard his shot went skyward. I had Mason’s gun barrel pressed to his forehead before he could bring it down again. Not bad for a formerly blind chick, I thought, thanking the fates for adrenaline-enhanced reflexes. Reaching up with my free hand, I took his weapon away, pushed the safety and stuffed the gun into the back of my jeans.

  “On your knees, fuckwad.”

  He dropped to his knees.

  “Where is Amy?” I still had the gun to his head, and when he shook it and shrugged, I said, “The girl you kidnapped. The girl who outsmarted you and escaped out the bathroom window. Where is she?”

  “Oh.” Then he nodded in the direction we’d been heading.

  I looked that way. Something was shuffling around in the brush, and I heard muffled sounds. “Amy?”

  Something moved in my peripheral vision. My prisoner, lunging upward and swinging his arm in a deadly arc, a giant fucking bowie knife in his fist. I tried to duck and bring the gun back around at the same time, but it was as though everything was happening in slo-mo. I had this brief moment of knowing this was it. This was how I was going out. It had been such a short run.

  Suddenly there was an earsplitting gunshot and the guy jerked forward, landing right on me, knocking me flat onto my back. And then he just laid there, bleeding all over me.

  A second later he was dragged off. Mason flopped him onto his back, checked for a pulse, shook his head, then took my hands and pulled me to my feet. “When you take a prisoner, you always pat him down for weapons. You always secure him with cuffs. Rope. A belt. Duct tape. Whatever you can find. And you never, never turn your back on him.”

  “Got it. Where the hell did that gun come from?”

  “Always carry a spare weapon.”

  “I’m gonna need to write all this down.”

  He smiled softly, hands on my shoulders now. “You okay?” He started brushing twigs off my back and out of my hair, eyeballing the blood on my jacket. The worry in his eyes was real, and it hit me where I lived. He really cared about me.

  “It’s his blood, not mine,” I said, my voice all gruff and gritty. “And yes, I’m okay. You?”

  “I think I need my head examined. Hurts like a bitch.”

  “You’ve needed that for a while now, so it’s as good a time as any.” I looked at his head, then his eyes, worrying his skull was fractured or he’d die or something, and thinking how much I’d hate that. “Thanks for saving my life,” I said. “Again.”

  “Thanks for saving mine. Again.”

  He stared into my eyes for a long minute. I thought he was going to kiss me. But then that shuffling sound came again, and we both turned to see Amy, hog-tied with tape over her mouth, moving inchworm style into our line of sight.

  “Amy!” I let go of Mason and ran to her, then hugged the shit out of her before I even began untying her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At seven forty-five on Thanksgiving night, we delivered Amy, safe and sound, into the bosom of her family. Her mom had held off on serving dinner until she arrived. Amy was bruised from fighting nonstop with her abductors but only a little worse for wear. And fear. The second man had been dropped off shortly after they’d taken her at knifepoint from the side of the road. Mason thought her abductors had probably done something to her tire at that gas station, when one of them had been out of camera range for a while. The guy who’d taken Amy to the hotel had been waiting for something. Or someone. He’d called her Venora once, then got all kinds of pissed off when she said her name was Amy. Otherwise, we had no clues. But we’d keep digging.

  Meanwhile Amy was safe and, technically, home in time for dinner, just as I’d promised.

  So Mason and I sat at a food-laden table with cranberry-scented tapers burning between us as the turkey was passed around. And I knew, now that Amy was safe, that we were going to have a hard time keeping our hands off each other on the way home. And I knew, too, that it was no better an idea now than it had been before.

  I walked him to his Monte Carlo with dessert still on my breath.

  The clouds had cleared. It was the starriest night I had ever seen. Literally. He turned around and leaned back against the driver’s side, crossed his arms over his chest and gazed up at the sky.

  “You’re staying the night here, aren’t you?”

  My damn heart hurt. “Amy asked me to. I think it’s for the best, don’t you?”

&nbs
p; “You mean because if you ride home with me we’re gonna wind up having sex again?”

  “That’s a clinical way to put it.”

  “How do you want me to put it?”

  I heaved a giant sigh, then leaned back against the car beside him. Like him, I looked at the stars. “We can’t work together and keep our hands off each other.”

  “No, probably not,” he conceded.

  “So you get why there’s no point in me applying as some kind of consultant.”

  “I get it.” He turned sideways. I did, too. “Doesn’t mean I like it.”

  “I just need time.”

  He put his hands on my shoulders. I put mine on his waist. “I know you do,” he said. “So do I.”

  “So we agree, then.” He pulled me right up against his chest, and I felt like a peanut butter cup on a sunny dashboard. “We’re not ready yet.”

  “No, we’re not.” I tipped my head up and closed my eyes.

  “Not just yet,” he whispered, warm breath on my lips.

  He kissed me. It was heaven and hell all wrapped into one. I told myself to take my time. Three months I’d had my sight back, give or take. Three months he’d been his mother’s only son, his nephews’ surrogate father and the cop who’d hidden the suicide note-slash-confession of the most notorious serial killer ever to hit Broome County. His brother.

  We needed time.

  He pulled his mouth from mine. I felt like crying. “You’re no good for me, Detective. You make me feel like some kind of hormonal teenager.”

  “It’s mutual.” He took my chin in his hand. “Happy Thanksgiving, Rache.”

  “You, too, Mason.”

  And then he got into his car, started it up and drove away.

  I stood there looking at the horizon long after it had swallowed him up.

  “Hey, Rachel!” Amy called from somewhere near the front porch. I couldn’t look away from the last spot I’d seen that ugly Monte Carlo’s ass end. In another second or two she was standing next to me, anyway. “That Thanksgiving you were secretly wishing for just…happened. Did you notice that?”

  “It sorta did, didn’t it?”

  She nodded. “It’s almost like some of that stuff you write about is actually true.”

  I shrugged, noncommittal. I was feeling something new tonight. Something small and deep, like a seed just starting to split open. I didn’t want to stop feeling it to focus on anything else.

  “Well, either way,” she said, turning and heading back to the house, “maybe you’d better start visualizing the Christmas you’d like. You know. Just in case.”

  * * * * *

  Stranded with a murderer…

  Rachel de Luca’s uncanny sense of perception is the key to her success as a self-help celebrity. Even before she regained her sight, she had a gift for seeing people’s most carefully hidden secrets. But the secret she shares with Detective Mason Brown is one she has promised to keep. As for Mason, he sees Rachel more clearly than she’d like to admit.

  After a single night of adrenaline-fueled passion, they have agreed to keep their distance—until a string of murders brings them together again. Mason thinks that he can protect everyone he loves, including Rachel, by taking them to a winter hideaway, but danger follows them up the mountain.

  As guests disappear from the snowbound resort, the race to find the murderer intensifies. Rachel knows she’s a target. Will acknowledging her feelings for Mason destroy her—or save them both and stop a killer?

  Wake to Darkness

  Maggie Shayne

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PROLOGUE

  Marissa Siorse’s new lease on life wasn’t supposed to end this way. Lying on her back on the cold ground, unable to move any part of her body. Her mouth was open wide as she tried and tried to breathe, and failed. Her lungs wouldn’t obey her brain’s commands. Her eyes were open just as wide, as the horror of what was happening played out in front of them. She wished she could close them, but she couldn’t, so she tried to focus on the leafless branches of the tree above her, and the sky beyond that. Blue, with soft, puffy clouds.

  Then the ski-mask-covered face loomed over her, blocking out the sky. One gloved hand used a scalpel to slice the front of her dress open from hem to collar, laying her bare to the elements. To the cold. To the blade. That same hand had jammed a needle into her neck only minutes earlier, as she’d gotten into her car after a lunch date with her husband. She’d dressed up for him. Things were good between them. Better than ever. They hadn’t been. Life had been nothing but fear and struggle, up until her miracle. Back in August she’d been given a new pancreas. And after that, life had become a dream. She was strong now, maybe back to one hundred percent at this point, and looking forward to spending the rest of her life in the pink of health.

  She’d had no idea that would be so short a time.

  God, she was cold. Tears blurred her vision as she thought about her two kids. Erin was fourteen, halfway through her freshman year of high school and just now starting to get comfortable there. Cheerleading had been the ticket that got her through. And Mikey… Mikey was only eight. He needed his mother. And Paul. What the hell was Paul going to do without her?

  Black spots started popping in and out of her vision. She wasn’t getting any oxygen to her brain. She was suffocating.

  And then the hand brought the scalpel sharply across her skin, leaving a path of fiery pain just below her rib cage. Inside her mind, Marissa’s screams drowned out every other thought. But on the outside, she just lay there, still and silent. Until she died.

  CHAPTER 1

  Friday, December 15

  If the bullshit I wrote was true, I wouldn’t have been standing with my back to the man I’d most love to bone, saying “No.” Because if the bullshit I wrote was true, the question he’d just asked me would have been an entirely different one, instead of the one he’d asked, which had been, “Will you help me investigate another creepy fucking case that might get us both killed?”

  Okay, those weren’t his exact words, but they might as well have been.

  I was in Manhattan, in a TV station greenroom, getting ready for my live segment, and having him there was throwing me way off my game. Way off. I was tingling in places I shouldn’t be tingling, and remembering our one-night stand two months ago.

  I should be remembering what happened after. The serial killer who damn near offed us both.

  Mason Brown moved his oughtta-be-illegal bod around in front of me so I couldn’t not look at him. I knew he knew that. “I shouldn’t have sprung it on you like that. Should have started with hello. You look great, Rachel. Really great.”

  “It’s the makeup. They overdo it for TV.”

  “It’s not the makeup.” He tried his killer smile on me. A fucking saint would steam up at those dimples. “I’ve missed you. What’s it been, a month?”

  Three weeks since I’ve seen him. Thanksgiving. Two months, nineteen days and around twenty hours since we’d had sex, last time I checked, but I’ll be damned if I’ll say that out loud. “Something like that.”

  “Too long, any way you count it.”

  “We agreed that we—” I waved my hand between us “—would be a bad idea.”
>
  “Yeah, but I thought that meant we wouldn’t date.” And by date he meant screw. “Not that we wouldn’t ever see each other again.”

  Except that seeing him made me want to jump his bones. Hence the not-seeing-each-other part. But I couldn’t tell him that, either.

  “Look, Mason, I have five minutes before I have to be on that stage, in front of a live studio audience, hawking my new book, and you’re really throwing me off my Zen.”

  “You have Zen?”

  I closed my eyes. “No, but I fake it beautifully when I’m not…” Don’t finish that sentence. “What makes you think I’d be any help, anyway? I only connected with the Wraith because he had your brother’s heart, along with his penchant for murder, and I have your brother’s eyes, and we connected in some woo-woo way I’m still not sure I believe. It was a fluke, and it’s over. I’m no crime fighter.”

  He put both hands on my shoulders. Yeah, that’s right, touch me and make it even harder for me not to rip your shirt off, you clever SOB. “Just give me a chance to tell you about the case. Come on, please?”

  I closed my eyes, sighed hard and dropped my head to one side. When I opened my eyes again, he was flashing those damned dimples. He knew he had me. Hell, he’d had me at hello. The bastard.

  “Buy me lunch after I finish up here and I’ll let you bend my ear, but that’s it, Mason.”

  The door opened. “Two minutes, Ms. de Luca,” said the curly head that poked through.

  I nodded and looked at Mason. His hands were still on my shoulders, and his smile had faded into an “I want to kiss your face off” sort of look.

  I licked my lips, then wished I hadn’t. I reminded myself of all the reasons we’d decided not to “date.” I’d been blind for twenty years. Now I wanted to live my life as a sighted adult for a while before sharing it with anyone else. That made sense, didn’t it?

  I couldn’t look at him. “I’ve gotta go.”

  “Okay.”