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Trust the enemy?
Desperate to escape her kidnappers, Kody Cameron can turn to only one man…and he’s holding a gun. Outnumbered and trapped in the deadly Everglades, she has little recourse, but something in this captor’s eyes makes her believe she can trust him. Does she dare to take the risk?
Undercover agent Nick Connolly has met Kody before and knows she might very well blow his cover. Though determined to maintain his facade, he can’t let Kody die. He won’t. And his decision to change his own rules of law and order are about to make all hell break loose.
The Finnegan Connection
They were still in danger—very real, serious danger. And yet, she felt ridiculously attracted to him.
They’d both been hot, covered in swamp water, tinged with long grasses…
Her flesh was burned and scratched and raw…And she was still breathing!
Was that it? She had survived. He had been a captor at first, and now he was a savior. Did all of this mess with the mind? Was she desperate to lean on the man because there was really something chemical and physical and real between them, or was she suffering some kind of mental break, brought on by all that had happened?
“Come on!” he urged her.
And they began to move again, deep into the swamp. She felt his hand on hers. And she felt a strange burning sensation…
Even as she shivered.
Law and Disorder
Heather Graham
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author HEATHER GRAHAM has written more than a hundred novels. She’s a winner of the RWA’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the International Thriller Writers’ Silver Bullet. She is an active member of International Thriller Writers and Mystery Writers of America. For more information, check out her website: www.theoriginalheathergraham.com. You can also find Heather on Facebook.
For Kathy Pickering, Traci Hall and Karen Kendall
Great and crazy road trips
Florida’s MWA and FRA…
And my magnificent state, Florida
Contents
Dakota Cameron was stunned to turn and find a gun in her face. It was held by a tall, broad-shouldered man in a hoodie and a mask. The full-face rubber mask—like the Halloween “Tricky Dickie” masks of Richard Nixon—was familiar. It was a mask to denote a historic criminal, she thought, but which one?
The most ridiculous thing was that she almost giggled. She couldn’t help but think back to when they were kids; all of them here, playing, imagining themselves notorious criminals. It had been the coolest thing in the world when her dad had inherited the old Crystal Manor on Crystal Island, off the Rickenbacker Causeway, between Miami and South Beach—despite the violence that was part of the estate’s history, or maybe because of it.
She and her friends had been young, in grammar school at the time, and they’d loved the estate and all the rumors that had gone with it. They hadn’t played cops and robbers—they had played cops and gangsters, calling each other G-Man or Leftie, or some other such silly name. Because her father was strict and there was no way crime would ever be glorified here—even if the place had once belonged to Anthony Green, one of the biggest mobsters to hit the causeway islands in the late 1940s and early 1950s—crime of any kind was seen as very, very bad. When the kids played games here, the coppers and the G-men always won.
Because of those old games, when Kody turned to find the gun in her face, she felt a smile twitching at her lips. But then the large man holding the gun fired over her head and the sign that bore the name Crystal Manor exploded into a million bits.
The gun-wielder was serious. It was not, as she had thought possible, a joke—not an old friend, someone who had heard she was back in Miami for the week, someone playing a prank.
No. No one she knew would play such a sick joke.
“Move!” a husky voice commanded her.
She was so stunned at the truth of the situation, the masked man staring at her, the bits of wood exploding around her, that she didn’t give way to the weakness in her knees or the growing fear shooting through her. She simply responded.
“Move? To where? What do you want?”
“Out of the booth, up to the house, now. And fast!”
The “booth” was the old guardhouse that sat just inside the great wrought-iron gates on the road. It dated back to the early years of the 1900s when pioneer Jimmy Crystal had first decided upon the spit of high ground—a good three feet above the water level—to found his fishing camp. Coral rock had been dug out of nearby