Too Wild to Hold

by LETO, JULIE

  Michael closed his eyes and prayed for calm. “No, I can’t. But you’re not a stupid woman, Claire. You know you can’t go off half-cocked with this guy. He knows you. He’ll be counting on you doing what’s right rather than what’s wise. If you do like you always do, you’ll fall right into his hands.”

  It took a few beats before she realized what he’d said. Yeah, he’d studied her file before coming to New Orleans. That was no secret. But they’d never discussed why she’d left the force or why she’d opted for the private sector, where no one told her what to do. He knew without her telling him—and this did not please her one bit.

  Just as he’d done with the book about his notorious ancestor, Michael had mined Claire’s dossier for bits and pieces about her—the kind of revealing nuggets that people in relationships confessed over time. He’d bypassed yet another step toward intimacy, just like he had behind the screen and in the garden.

  But this time, Claire didn’t get anything good out of it except the baring of a painful memory to a man she hadn’t had a chance to really trust.

  Michael wandered over to the stove. A cutting board piled with little mounds of onion, garlic and chopped sausage sat on the counter. The scent of spices clung in the air so that his stomach growled.

  Claire groaned, then pushed past him and grabbed a metal bowl. She cracked four eggs and started whipping them with the kind of violence she might be imagining she could use on his brains, if she had a chance.

  “You don’t have to cook for me,” he said.

  She barked a laugh and pointed her eggy fork at him menacingly. “I’ll either cook for you or kill you. Which do you choose?”

  He sat down at the kitchen table and unfolded a paper napkin onto his lap.

  She turned back to her work. “So how long do you plan to keep me here?”

  “Just until we get a clear picture of what the unsub wants.”

  “He wants me,” she said, her tone flat.

  “Well, that’s the one thing he can’t have. He’ll contact you, eventually.”

  “Like with the flowers? The ones without a note?”

  “As he grows more desperate to find you, he may try calling again.”

  “And you have someone at my house and monitoring my phone?”

  He didn’t bother to answer such an obvious question, but her frustrated sigh sounded more like a growl.

  “What is he waiting for? I get it that the flowers are part of his sick seduction, but why doesn’t he just call and tell me what he wants? It’s been twelve hours since he took her from the cemetery.”

  Eleven, but who was counting? Michael opened his mouth, prepared to discuss his theories and suppositions with her, but he stopped himself. He’d already told her more than he should. She wasn’t his partner. She wasn’t even in law enforcement. She was just the woman he was supposed to protect. Nothing more.

  She could not be anything more. Not until this mess was settled.

  And perhaps, not even then. Especially not if Josslyn was raped or died because he hadn’t anticipated her involvement.

  “You can’t worry about her right now, Claire. Worry about yourself.”

  “Why do I need to worry about me? I’m incarcerated by the goddamned FBI.” The sizzle of vegetables hitting the hot oil in the pan forced her to raise her voice. That and the fact that she was totally pissed off. “She’s out there with a madman and no one is looking for her.”

  “We are looking, but the evidence that she’s been kidnapped is circumstantial at best. She’s an adult prone to disappearing without a trace. She acted seemingly of her own accord at the florist shop and no one at Nouvelle Placage is willing to file a missing person’s complaint.”

  “I’ll file the damned complaint!” she insisted. “She was supposed to meet with me and she didn’t show.”

  “The cops know all that, Claire. They’re on the lookout for her. But until our unsub makes a move, there’s not much we can do.”

  With a vehement curse, Claire turned to her cutting board and proceeded to hack at the sausage, which he was pretty sure would be nothing but mush soon. For a moment, he allowed himself to be envious of her. As a private investigator, she wasn’t bound by laws or procedures or dictates from superiors. If not for him, she could do whatever she wanted, within the confines of the law. And sometimes, she could even skirt that.

  But Michael didn’t have that freedom. Even his father’s ring, glinting at him with mocking brightness, couldn’t give him carte blanche to go off half-cocked and put Josslyn in more danger than she might already be in.

  The only advantage they had at this point was that the Bandit might not know that a federal agency was on his trail. Michael had ordered the agents working with him to be discreet. Even the interview at the florist shop had been conducted by a female agent dressed casually, as if she’d only gone into the store to order flowers. Michael was keenly aware that if the unsub got spooked, he might kill Josslyn, dump her where they’d never find her and then move on to another victim—another woman distantly related to one of Joaquin Murrieta’s lovers.

  And then, later, when Michael wasn’t here to protect her, the Bandit would come back for Claire.

  Unlike the serial criminals he’d chased for years, this unsub wasn’t programmed into a single modus operandi. Any part of his ritual that put his seductions at risk would be discarded. And if he stopped sending scarves, they might not find him again until it was too late.

  After what seemed like an endless silence, broken only by the scrapes and clanks of cooking, Claire slid a pan sized, inch-thick omelet onto his plate. The aroma of egg, potato, onions, peas and chorizo steamed enticingly beneath his nose and he wasted no time in taking a large and ravenous bite.

  “This is good,” he said.

  “It’s comfort food. The freezer was nicely stocked and Ruby arranged for some staples.”

  He gestured for her to sit across from him, and since she hadn’t made any food for herself, he cut off a chunk of his tortilla with his fork and aimed it in her direction.

  She waved it away.

  He frowned, but didn’t push her. He’d bossed her around more than enough today. She’d eat when she was hungry.

  “You could be comfortable here,” he said.

  “Don’t you mean we?”

  He chewed and swallowed the bite she’d refused. “Neither one of us will be here long, Claire. No one wants this to drag out. No one wants Josslyn to get hurt. No one wants you to get hurt.”

  Least of all, me.

  “It’s too late for that,” she shot back. “And you know it.”

  THE POWERFUL SCENT of the tortilla stirred the emptiness in Claire’s stomach, but she couldn’t bear the thought of eating. How could she when Josslyn was missing? The woman might not be a great mother or a responsible wife, but she did not deserve to be held against her will and possibly abused.

  No one deserved that.

  No one.

  She would have to force her worn-out body into remaining upright long enough to help find Josslyn. Her cell phone, retrieved from her aunt and now sitting in front of Ruby, had not rung. No texts. No nothing.

  With his silence, the Bandit was killing Claire.

  Was that his intention?

  “How did he even know about her? About Nouvelle Placage?” she asked, needing to force her thoughts in another direction. His mental cruelty would only affect her if she allowed it to.

  “Listening device aimed at your office? Tap on your phone? Hack of your email? The possibilities are endless.”

  “Josslyn didn’t arrive in New Orleans until the day before yesterday. That’s not enough time for him to have ingratiated himself enough that she’d tell him about our arrangment to meet at the cemetery. She specifically said she didn’t want anyone from Nouvelle Placage to know about her past.”

  He nodded. He hadn’t worked that out so succinctly himself. She’d come up with a strong argument against the theory that Josslyn was cooperati
ng with the Bandit willingly. Not that it mattered. Accomplice or not, the woman was at risk as long as she was in the man’s company.

  “So if she didn’t tell him, how did he know about the meeting at the cemetery? No one else was around.”

  “We don’t think anyone else was around. We can’t be sure.”

  We were distracted.

  He didn’t say the words out loud—he didn’t need to. She knew as well as he did that they’d been so caught up in each other, they had not sufficiently scoped out the area around the secret garden.

  In other words, they’d screwed up.

  And Josslyn was going to pay the price.

  “We have to find her,” Claire insisted.

  “We will.”

  “When? You know that in kidnappings, time is the enemy. We can’t wait around for him to contact us. We have to lure him out. I have to lure him out.”

  Michael finished his omelet, washed it down with coffee and met her gaze straight on. With his shoulders squared and his jaw tight, he looked implacable.

  Infallible.

  But he wasn’t—and neither was she.

  “As we speak, I have agents scoping out positions around your house, sweeping for listening devices inside and reprogramming another cell phone with your number so we can better triangulate calls made to it. The only advantage we have is that there’s a small possibility that the Bandit doesn’t know that I’m FBI. Until he snatched Josslyn, we were a half step ahead of him. We have to use that advantage.”

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

  “Eat,” he said, leaning across the counter and retrieving her plate. “Then get some rest. You’re going to need it.”

  “I can’t,” she said, looking down at the plate as if the egg and potato mixture was crawling with maggots, when, in fact, the scent of chorizo and onion tantalized her tastebuds into watering.

  He picked up the plate. She might have resisted, but he speared a chunk of potato and egg onto her fork and waved it under her nose. She’d made this dish about a thousand times over the course of her life and knew how delicious, rich and comforting it was. She took the bite, chewed and swallowed.

  Despite her frown, he had another bite ready.

  “You don’t need to feed me,” she protested.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Eat.”

  She did as he asked, and when her hunger took over, she retrieved the fork from him and finished off the meal on her own. She should have drawn the line at letting him hold the water bottle up to her mouth, but she didn’t.

  On orders from the agents outside to keep the house dim, she’d cooked with only the light above the stove and the occasional flash from the open refrigerator. The semidarkness had been annoying at the time, but now it rendered the room intimate. When her lips met the rigid edge of the water bottle, she closed her eyes and sipped.

  As soon as she swallowed, he kissed her. The sensation was not unlike a puff of warm air, gone before her lids fluttered open and her eyes read the regret on his face. Kissing her, touching her, wanting her when they were in a different world—a make-believe world—was one thing. But doing it here, now, in the presence of his colleagues and in the midst of a major screw up was both technically against the rules and ethically unwise.

  So why did she feel so instantly pissed off that he’d stopped?

  “I’ve had enough,” she said when he moved to stab another piece of food with the fork. “I’m going to bed.”

  She didn’t give him a chance to argue. She marched out of the kitchen and said good-night to Ruby without breaking her stride. The little bedroom they’d assigned to her, the one that had seemed so tiny when she’d first dumped her stuff onto the twin bed earlier, now echoed with the click from her firmly shut door.

  The emptiness only lasted a second. Even before she’d completely turned around, she felt a presence behind her. She swung her fist around, hammerlike, toward the intruder, but he caught her wrist in a powerful grip and smacked his hand tight over her mouth. “Don’t scream.”

  12

  MICHAEL STOOD IN the kitchen, twisting the ring on his finger, when a spike of electricity seared up his spine. His brain registered the sound of a muffled scream, kicking his body into a sprint across the cottage. He kicked open Claire’s door, gun drawn.

  Somewhere behind him, Ruby shouted, but he wasn’t fully aware of anything except Claire’s wide green eyes and the male hand clamped over her mouth.

  One that immediately released her, then joined the other in high surrender.

  “Hey, now everyone calm down here. I’m not your big bad kidnapper.”

  Michael’s eyes refocused from the center of the man’s forehead so he could take in the whole face. A familiar face. Dark, like his father’s. Like Alejandro’s. A couple of days’ stubble softened his square jaw, but his eyes gave him away. Bright green and alight with humor, even with two weapons pointed in his direction, thanks to Ruby, who now stood directly to his right.

  Danny Burnett, Michael’s middle brother, managed a roguish grin.

  Almost in unison, Michael and Ruby said, “You!”

  Michael dropped his weapon.

  Ruby did not.

  Danny had the sense to leave his hands in the air—which might have been a bad choice when Claire spun around and coldcocked him directly on the chin.

  While she winced in pain, Michael’s brother staggered, but remained standing.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Michael snapped.

  Claire cursed, shaking her hand. “Who is he?”

  “No one dangerous,” Michael groused, shoving his firearm into its holster. “Not unless you have something valuable around here you’d like to keep in your possession.”

  “My life isn’t valuable enough?”

  “I wasn’t going to hurt you,” Danny insisted, making quite the show of rubbing his jaw. A trickle of blood marred his lip. When he caught the flash of red on his thumb, he’d seemed impressed. “Probably couldn’t have even if I wanted to. That’s one hell of a right hook you’ve got there, sweetheart.”

  She charged forward, but Michael caught her around the elbow. He wasn’t sure why his brother was here—or even if it was legal. Thanks to Alejandro, the trumped up murder charges against Danny had been dropped. While Michael had a few niggling doubts about his brother’s innocence, which had been verified in a jailhouse confession by one of the men who’d conspired to set him up, he was fairly certain Danny was still facing a theft charge and had been ordered not to leave California.

  “Don’t bother bruising your knuckles on him, Claire. He’s no threat to you.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  She’d been pissed off before she’d left the kitchen and Danny’s unexpected appearance in her bedroom had her adrenaline pumping so hard, he could practically smell it oozing out of her skin.

  The scent was hypnotic and erotic. It took every ounce of his professionalism to keep from dragging her close and inhaling deeply.

  “Claire Lécuyer, please meet Daniel Murrieta Burnett. My brother.”

  Though his jaw was red and swollen, Danny smiled and politely extended his hand. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

  No, the pleasure’s all mine. Michael bit back the territorial growl. The way things stood between him and Claire right now, neither one of them was going to experience any type of pleasure in the near future. Not until she no longer needed his protection.

  And judging by her deepening scowl in his direction, not after that, either.

  Michael turned toward Ruby. She still had her gun drawn, though admittedly, she’d lowered her aim. A shot from her gun right now might not kill Danny, but it would sure as hell hit him where it counted.

  “You followed me,” she said, grinding her words through tight teeth.

  “Sorry,” Danny said, though Michael didn’t think he sounded the least bit repentant.

  Apparently, neither did Ruby. She raised her gun barre
l so that she now had a straight shot at his torso.

  “I don’t like being lied to.”

  “And believe it or not, I don’t like lying. It’s an occupational must, of course, but it’s not my favorite past time, especially when I’m sharing a drink and oysters with a smoking-hot babe who could probably maim me with her little finger.”

  Danny hooked his pinky, wiggling the digit until Ruby’s chin quivered with the strain of containing a grin. Michael rolled his eyes. Women found this act charming? Really?

  Apparently so, because a split second later, Ruby holstered her gun. “You could have just asked me where your brother was.”

  “And you would have told me?”

  “No,” Ruby said. “At the time, I didn’t know. And besides, you’re a criminal and we don’t need you poking around in our case.”

  “Which is why I opted to don a disguise and follow you from San Francisco until your paths converged. The fact that I’m a criminal is precisely why you need me. Who better to help you catch this joker?”

  Michael had not thought it possible to dislike Danny any more than he had the first time they’d met. He was wrong. His blood seethed and it took every ounce of self-control not to use Claire’s method of dealing with his brother—though he’d probably aim a little more to the left so he could break his nose.

  “We’ve solved a fair share of cases without your involvement, Daniel. I don’t need your help.”

  “You let Alex front you the money to get into that sex club, but you won’t let me contribute my personal expertise to your case?”

  “You’re a thief,” he tossed back. “You steal things. I don’t see how your expertise is of any relevance to our situation.”

  “Well, if what I overheard is correct,” Danny said, “you had someone stolen out from under you. I don’t usually deal with human contraband, but the principles are the same. The guy has something you want, and with my help, you can steal her back.”

  CLAIRE CURLED INTO a chair in the cottage’s tiny sitting room, an ice pack on her hand while she glanced back and forth between Michael and Danny, trying to figure out how these two men could possibly be related.