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Holding Out for a Hero
HelenKay Dimon
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
To Kate Duffy,
for her continued support,
and to my husband, James,
for making it all possible
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter One
He sensed her before he saw her. The dangerous mix of high-end perfume and wealth gave her away. Josh Windsor knew some men found the combination attractive. He sniffed and smelled nothing but trouble.
Tucking his pen in his inside suit-jacket pocket, he crossed the marble courthouse hallway to meet Deana Armstrong before she materialized at his side. She would track him down anyway. Might as well take the offensive and be done with it.
“Ms. Armstrong.” He nodded. “What brings you here?”
“To Honolulu?”
“To the fourth floor of the Circuit Court.”
She took a step forward and put them less than two feet apart. “You.”
Somehow he knew she would say that. “How’d you guess I was even on Oahu?”
“I flew over to Kauai and went to your office.”
As if that was a perfectly normal thing to do. “Of course you did.”
“I couldn’t get near the Drug Enforcement Administration. Not even on the same floor.”
“Government buildings are funny like that.”
“I also checked your house while I was there.”
“You…” Surely he heard that wrong. “Wait, what?”
“Your house.”
Nope. Heard it just fine. He ignored her behavior before, wrote it off as annoying, and moved on. Not this time. “Care to explain?”
“Well, it’s really a condo.” She had the nerve to throw out an innocent, wide-eyed look.
To shut that down he leaned in, letting her feel the looming presence of every inch of his six feet. “You actually went to my place in Lihue?”
“Do you have another house?”
“Only one of us has a trust fund and owns multiple properties.” Including a sprawling estate on one of the best beaches on Oahu. That person sure as hell wasn’t him.
“What does my housing situation have to do with our conversation?” She waved her hand in front of her face. “Look, none of this matters.”
“Yeah, it kind of does.”
“Can we focus on the topic, please?”
Was she trying to annoy him? “Which is what?”
“I heard you were on some sort of leave from your position with the DEA—”
“Jesus, lady. Is there anything you don’t know about my life?”
“—which is why I took the chance of catching you.” Her voice increased in volume from cool to almost booming as she talked over him.
“Keep yelling like that and courthouse security will be all over you in two seconds.” Which, the more he thought about it, was not a bad way to get out of this conversation.
“My point is that your home address isn’t exactly a secret.”
“I guess not to people with detectives on their regular household payroll.” When he fixed every other part of this life, Josh vowed to fix that as well. Make it so no matter how much money folks like her waved around, no one would find him unless he wanted to be found. And right now he didn’t. “Did you at least water the plants while you were at the condo?”
She frowned.
He was impressed she managed to show any emotion.
“I didn’t go in,” she said. “That would have been inappropriate.”
At last, a boundary. No sense to know when someone was flinging sarcasm right in her face, but a boundary. “Looks as if we agree on something.”
Deana laced her fingers together in front of her. “I read in the newspaper that you were testifying here today as part of an old case, so I flew back home to Oahu and came downtown to find you.”
Under different circumstances he might be flattered with a woman being interested enough to chase him around Hawaii, but he knew better than to get excited about this one. “So, you’re stalking me now.”
“Of course not.”
“Harassing a federal officer is illegal.” He nodded hello to the judge’s clerk when she stuck her head out of an office. “Sorry. We’ll keep it down out here.”
Deana waited until the younger woman disappeared again before whispering. “You’re overstating my actions a bit, don’t you think?”
Oh, he had done a lot of thinking about Deana. The woman was a walking contradiction. Round face, high cheekbones, big green eyes and long near-black wavy hair that fell below her shoulders. Five-six and slender. An objectively beautiful woman. That part suited Josh just fine. The rest of her, not so much.
She possessed a demeanor chilly enough to freeze steel. Her serious affect and ever-present blank stare made her appear far older than the twenty-nine years he knew her to be. But that wasn’t the oddest thing about her. Even now the woman hid most of her potentially impressive body under a pile of clothing. A long-sleeve navy blazer with a collar cut high enough to strangle. The only piece of skin exposed above her waist, other than her hands, was a thin slice of wrist…with a watch shiny enough to advertise incredible wealth.
Somehow Deana Armstrong lived her whole life in informal Hawaii and yet insisted on dressing as if it were winter at a convent in Nebraska. Few people wore full business suits in Hawaii except