The Ultimate Romantic Suspense Set (8 romantic suspense novels from 8 bestselling authors for 99c)

by Lee Taylor

  “I don’t want to kill you,” he said gruffly—which was really a funny thing for him to say since she still had him on his stomach with his face pressed into the pavement.

  She held his left wrist with her left hand. He held her right wrist in his right hand. She wracked her brain while trying to remember which side he favored.

  “I’m left-handed,” he said, startling her. He yanked his arm out of her grasp and swung with incredible speed back and up, slapping her in the face with the metal handcuff still hooked to his wrist.

  She reared back, unwittingly giving Grayson an opening. Before she realized what he was doing, he’d snagged her pistol and twisted around to point it at her.

  “Oh, no you don’t!” She wasn’t ready to let him win that easily. She lunged for her gun. The barrel flared red in the darkness as it fired. The force of the bullet’s impact at such a close range sent her flying. She hit the ground with a heavy thud.

  Great, just great. Braving a backwoods medical facility to be sewn up by a doctor, who probably doubled as the local veterinarian, was not her idea of a pleasant Christmas.

  Her shoulder burned, and her arm had already turned painfully numb. Gulping air, she focused all her energies on Grayson. It took everything she had to hug her throbbing arm to her chest and charge him. She prayed he wouldn’t have time to take careful aim and fire again before she could knock the gun from his grasp. She had nothing to lose. He’d already killed one bounty hunter, and she had no doubt she was about to be next.

  She staggered—the back wall of the bar must have just collapsed—surely, that was a wall that had just fallen on her.

  Clutching her splitting head, she sank to her knees.

  “Damn.” Was the last sound she heard.

  * * * *

  “Damn,” Grayson cursed again. The pistol slipped from his fingers and clattered against the pavement.

  He stood transfixed, staring at the beautiful hellcat lying unconscious at his feet. Her dark blond hair shimmered in the smoky, yellowed light streaming through the back door. The light created an eerie halo around the bounty hunter.

  Tommy towered over her, the baseball bat from the wall resting against his shoulder. “She wouldn’t have stopped fighting you,” he said, giving his head a shake.

  Grayson reluctantly agreed. He’d seen how that glazed look, a look of unrelenting determination, had turned her beautiful cornflower blue eyes wild. She’d crossed over the line and made the decision to fight him to the death.

  “I shot a woman,” he whispered.

  “Never mind her,” Tommy said. “There’s something wrong with a woman who looks like that and chooses to do a dirty job like this. You’d done her a favor, if’n you ask me.”

  Tommy was probably right. But still, he didn’t like shooting women. Killing a man felt different, like he was a warrior championing some cause. Hurting women just made his stomach roil.

  He knelt down beside her and peeled open her leather jacket. Blood oozed steadily from the gaping wound. He applied the weight of his hand to the nearest pressure point while fumbling around in her coat.

  Tommy gave him a queer look. “Now are you gonna tell me what happened between you and Greg or do I have to keep guessin’?”

  Grayson grunted. He wasn’t ready to talk about the angry words, the deep red blood, and the overwhelming guilt…

  “Your decision.” Tommy sounded wary. Perhaps nervous even. “You go on, get out of here. I’ll take care of this and talk nice and sweet to the cops too.”

  In no mood to let anyone clean up after him, Grayson ignored the offer. He found a tiny, silver cell phone in an interior pocket in the bounty hunter’s jacket and dialed 9-1-1.

  “Fetch me a dish rag or something I can use to slow the bleeding. The bullet blew its way through her shoulder,” he said to Tommy while waiting for confirmation that an ambulance was indeed on its way.

  His friend shrugged and disappeared back into the bar.

  Grayson stared at the bounty hunter’s too beautiful face, darkened and frighteningly motionless. “Don’t you go and make me feel guilty about you, too. You picked this fight with me.”

  She was lifeless, her breathing too shallow. She was going to die—just like that last one. How many women would he have to kill before he dropped straight into hell?

  “Go on with you now. Get.” Tommy startled Grayson. He’d returned with a pile of relatively clean dishrags in his meaty hand. Sirens echoed through the dark swamp, only adding urgency to Tommy’s warning.

  He couldn’t stay any longer, not unless he wanted to be taken back into police custody.

  He plucked the bounty hunter’s wallet from her pocket. “This should buy me some time,” he said. He opened the supple leather wallet. Vega Brookes, her driver’s license read. “They won’t figure out my identity until they figure out hers.”

  Tommy nodded.

  There were several hundred dollars in the wallet. Good. That should help him, too. He slipped the wallet into his pocket.

  “I’ll make this up to you somehow,” he said as he tucked her gun into his pants and trotted toward a path that led directly into the swamp, the handcuffs still dangling from his wrist. “Well, maybe not…”

  Chapter Four

  “Vega,” a shadowy voice called to her.

  “Dad?” Vega struggled through the darkness. It’d been ages since she’d seen him. Why had they lost touch? “Dad?”

  Someone was pushing on her shoulders, keeping her pinned to the ground.

  “Vega!” the voice said sharply.

  She blinked. The room was dim. The early morning light was pushing its way around a drawn shade.

  “Oh…Jack,” she said as soon as her uncle’s lean face eased into focus.

  “Don’t sound so eager to see me.” A big, fat smile slid across his lips. He leaned in close. His face blurred as Vega’s eyesight struggled to keep up.

  She glanced around the room, a rather modern hospital room. Slowly, as if on a shaky foundation, her memory returned.

  “Walker?” She bolted up. Pains sparked both in her arm and in the back of her head. She sank back onto the bed.

  “He’s long gone by now.” Jack shook his head and looked damned guilty about something.

  She didn’t have it in her mind to question him, not while her eyesight still insisted on swimming in and out of focus.

  “Merry Christmas,” a new voice sang out. “I see our Jane Doe is awake.”

  A female doctor sauntered into the room. A green elf hat perched on the top of her head. She flicked on the overhead fluorescent lights. The hospital room glowed stark and bright, feeling painfully sharp to Vega’s sensitive head.

  “I’ll need to update your name on this,” the doctor said. She pulled a metal-encased file from the hook at the end of the bed, flipped it open, and clicked a ballpoint pen three times before scribbling something into the file. “Sheriff Townsend contacted me this morning, letting me know who you were. We don’t get many Jane Doe’s around here. You sure stirred up a bit of excitement in town. I’m Dr. Jane Kilpatrick, by the way.”

  Jack stepped back and gave Dr. Kilpatrick room to roll a stool up beside the bed. They murmured greetings in a manner that told Vega the two had already met—which didn’t surprise Vega. Jack probably raised quite a fuss the moment he stepped into the hospital. His fuss-raising ability was legendary, especially when one of his hunters was in need.

  Dr. Kilpatrick wasted no time before shining a viciously bright penlight into her eyes. “Good, good.” She checked the huge lump on her head and probed the gunshot wound paining her shoulder.

  Vega tried to lay still, passive, breathing deeply while she let the doctor do her job.

  “What? No questions about whether I’d be called away to birth one of the farmer’s cows?”

  Cows? She didn’t know the first thing about cows.

  Dr. Kilpatrick laughed. “This one sure went on and on last night, convinced I was the town veterinarian
,” she explained to Jack. Vega didn’t remember any of that. “I’m not a veterinarian. I’m a fully qualified M.D. I can show you my diploma if you’d like.”

  Vega blushed. “No…I believe you.”

  Dr. Kilpatrick laughed again and pushed back from the bed. “You lucked out with the bullet wound. Only minimal tissue damage. You have a pretty good concussion from that blow to the head. We were worried about that lump back there most of the night, but I think we can breathe easy now. You look good, considering.”

  Vega listened, half-dazed as Dr. Kilpatrick and Jack continued to discuss her health.

  “Jane Doe?” she asked, cursing her mind’s snail-pace. “Why call me Jane Doe?”

  Dr. Kilpatrick frowned for a moment. “Well, yes,” she said. “You came in without any identification.”

  “I had called Sheriff Townsend, an old friend,” Jack explained. “Warned him you’d be in town on a job. When a Jane Doe showed up at the hospital, he contacted me.”

  “Jack.” Vega shook her head and immediately regretted it. “I believe you must have an old friend in every police department across this country.”

  Jack scratched his stubbly chin. “I suppose I do.” He turned back to the doctor and laid on his charm. The old dog, he was flirting with her. “When can I get Vega on a plane back home to Detroit?” he asked after smearing Dr. Jane Kilpatrick with a healthy serving of compliments.

  “Wait just one minute,” Vega said while struggling to push herself up. “I’m not going anywhere…not without Grayson Walker chained to my arm.”

  Both the doctor and Jack gave Vega a look that made her wonder if she was about to be told she had no more than six months to live.

  “Don’t pursue this one, Vega. Go home. Heal. Perhaps even find a nice stable man to marry, and have children. That would make your mom happy, you know. Besides, you’re no longer assigned to Walker,” Jack said much too quickly for Vega’s nerves.

  “Who is, then?”

  Jack hesitated.

  Her heart shuddered. “Who?”

  “No one…yet.”

  “Then why that look, Jack? What’s up?”

  “Fiona.”

  “Fiona?”

  The length of silence that followed could have been measured with a calendar.

  She laid in the bed huffing as her anger built.

  “Fiona?” she repeated, nearly leaping off the bed. “My sister?”

  Dr. Kilpatrick rushed back to the bedside. “You really must try and lay still, Miss Brookes. Your stitches are liable to rip out.”

  Vega laid back into the soft pillow, letting the excruciating pains in her head and arm feed her anger. “She doesn’t have the experience I have, and” she swallowed hard, “and look what happened to me.”

  “What could I do?” Jack asked, spreading his arms wide. “She was close to spitting nails after she heard what had happened to you. There was no stopping her from taking the next plane down here. I couldn’t very well tie her up, could I?”

  “Mom’s probably ready to kill you, isn’t she?” she said, conceding that once Fiona set her mind to a task, there was really no turning her attention. “Christmas day, and both of her daughters are in the field because of you.”

  “Yep,” Jack said. He sank into a chair and pulled a hand through his silvery hair. “I don’t know if Gillie will ever invite me over to your house for dinner again. And I so love her fancy shrimp cocktails.”

  * * * *

  For half a day, Vega stayed in the sterile hospital bed, worrying about Fiona playing bounty hunter and wondering just how Grayson had managed to get the better of her. And, she wondered, what had he done with her gun? Her dad had given her that Glock 9, had pressed it into her hands on his deathbed. “You’re strong for a girl,” he’d said to her, the last words he’d uttered in this world.

  What care would Grayson take of that gun?

  She stared at the bright ceiling and worried until she teetered on the verge of madness.

  A call from Snitch pushed her over the edge. “Just dug up a nasty bit of information on that fugitive of yours. He killed a woman,” Snitch’s metallic voice crackled a bit. “He wasn’t Special Forces, but a professional killer for the Army’s Intelligence Support Activity, the ISA. Had been working deep in the bowels of the illegal drug trade in Colombia, his team was given orders to assassinate a drug czar—all off the record kind of stuff, of course.”

  “Of course,” Vega said, her mind reeling. Fiona was out there with a professional assassin?

  “Your boy pulled the trigger and shot an innocent woman through the chest in order to kill his target—a Carlos Briceno.”

  “Shit. He’s determined. What did the army do? Kick him out?” she asked.

  “Nope, gave him a commendation. Of course, that was the official report, though this Briceno guy was a pretty huge thorn in our government’s side. He controlled a solid pipeline of drugs into the US. But your fugitive did walk away from the ISA after that assignment. The three other men in his team left the army with him. Can’t find out why he quit. Perhaps he was drummed out. Or guilt? I came across a communiqué a week before Carlos Briceno’s assassination. Your Grayson Walker was requesting a visa for Mirna Catanzaro, the very woman he ended up shooting. Said he planned to marry her. Can you believe it? He’d planned to marry this Mirna, and then when she got in the way—bam—he killed her. What a jerk.”

  This guy needed to be stopped before anyone else got killed. After lunch, Vega sent Jack out to find her a decent meal. It was a ruse, though. A nasty trick she knew she’d pay dearly for later. She tugged herself from the bed. In the closet, she found the suitcase Jack must have gotten from her motel room. She pulled on her warmest clothes, and stuffed her remaining pair of handcuffs along with the wad of cash she kept in her suitcase into the pocket of her torn and bloody leather jacket.

  A cab ride later, she found herself back at the Broken Cricket. It didn’t take much to find Tommy’s house. It was just down the road from the bar. She’d hunkered down for a good hour, watching with no success. She was just starting to curse herself for being the worst kind of fool to think Grayson might still be in the area when Tommy emerged from his house with a tray in his hands and bolt cutters poking out of his denim overalls.

  That looked suspicious enough.

  She picked her way through the swamp, keeping a safe distance behind Tommy while worrying about snakes, alligators, and any number of unimaginable ghastly creepy creatures as he led her to a wreck of a shack.

  The shack leaned sharply to one side, looking just about ready to collapse. Puffs of white smoke rose from a pipe jutting out of the roof, a stark contrast to the ebony sky. It felt like hours had passed before Tommy left the shack with an empty tray.

  The swamp looked like it regularly poured through that shack. She really didn’t want to step foot inside there.

  Why couldn’t he hole up in the middle of the city? Rats, I can handle any assortment of rats.

  A centipede crawled over her laced boot. She jumped and tossed herself against the wide trunk of an ancient cypress tree. A huge mistake. Her head swam and her arm hurt bad enough to make her stomach pitch. She had no business being out here.

  But Fiona wouldn’t waste time. Her sister would steal her notes, follow the same tracks, and soon find Grayson, too. She couldn’t let that happen. No matter how weak she felt she was determined to stop Grayson before he became a danger to her sister.

  What she lacked in strength, she made up in wits—and surprise.

  She crouched down, just in case Grayson glanced out a window—if he were in fact inside—and began a slow advance.

  She found a loose board on the front porch. It took very little effort to pry the soft plank free from the rusty nails and use it as a wedge to hold the front door shut.

  As expected in a shack this size, she found just one other door in the back, in a direct line from the front.

  That back door would be her entrance.

&n
bsp; She drew up alongside the door and slowed her breathing as she pictured her attack. With one arm in a tight sling, unreliable eyesight, and no weapon, she was at a slight disadvantage. Okay, a big disadvantage.

  No matter, she’d just have to make his strength work for her. Vega closed her eyes and began counting down.

  Eight.

  Forgive me Mom if I don’t survive.

  Seven.

  Fiona why in hell must you insist on following me in everything I do?

  Six.

  Perhaps Jack is right. Perhaps I should settle down.

  Five.

  If only I could find a man who excites me.

  Four.

  Grayson Walker excites me.

  Three.

  Okay, I should find a man who excites me who isn’t also a murderer.

  Two.

  There’s always a hitch.

  One.

  With one swift movement, she kicked in the back door.

  Chapter Five

  Vega stood face to face with Grayson.

  “God, you look like death,” he said. Curiously, he looked pleased to see her. Her father’s Glock, the one he had stolen, was aimed at her head. Somehow, he’d been expecting her. Somehow, he’d bested her—again.

  “Bastard.” She kicked the gun from his grip. Grayson made a dash to the front door. Cursing when he found it blocked, he lunged for her, giving her injured shoulder a good jolt. Too bad for him, the pain just fed her anger and her strength.

  He lunged for her again. She gave the tender area just below his ribcage a good punch. It didn’t stop him. He didn’t even grimace.

  “I don’t have time to play these games with you,” he said, then socked her in the side of her head. She rode the impact as she dropped to the floor, hoping to give herself time to gulp a few short breaths.

  They weren’t to be had.

  Grayson leapt on her, punching her wounded shoulder. She tried to roll away, but he grabbed her arm with a crushing grip and punched her again.

  Escape impossible, she reared up and slammed her head into his chin. She followed with a flurry of cross punches to his temple.