“Is this what you do? Just shut down when it gets to be too much?”
“Apparently so,” Corey murmured. Drifting in emptiness seemed preferable to dealing at the moment.
All of sudden, she felt hands grip her shoulders. Her eyes snapped open and she saw Austin kneeling in front of her.
“You went to this place when you were seven,” he said quietly. “There’s no reason to do it now, Corey. You aren’t alone.”
“Who the hell do you think you are? Haven’t you battered me enough for one night?”
His head jerked back, and his hands released her. She felt a momentary satisfaction. He’d been dishing it out all evening. Her turn.
He jumped up and started walking away. But he turned around suddenly. “Hate me,” he said.
“Even hate is better than nothing.”
The words seemed to make no sense, but the next thing she knew, he lifted her off the couch and sat with her across his lap. Astonished, furious at being manhandled, she opened her mouth to yell at him, but the moment was lost as he kissed her.
Then she was lost, too.
Defending the
Eyewitness
Rachel Lee
RACHEL LEE was hooked on writing by the age of twelve and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.
MILLS & BOON
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Contents
Chapter 1
Corey Donohue tossed the odd little note aside as she went to answer the doorbell.
I remember you but you don’t remember me.
Exactly, she thought, the kind of joke she would expect one of her friends to play. They believed she was entirely too busy keeping up with the sewing shop she had taken over from her grandmother and thought she needed to shake up her life a bit. Well, that wasn’t going to do it.
She hesitated, though, for just a second, looking back at the hall table where she had thrown the piece of notepaper. Anonymous envelope, typed... Wouldn’t one of her friends have scrawled something like that with a pen?
But then she pushed the momentary uneasiness aside and reached for the doorknob. Whatever it was, it sounded teasing, not threatening. She supposed some old friend would finally call her to give her a hard time.
She was surprised to find the Conard County sheriff, Gage Dalton, standing there with another, younger man. The guy looked as if he’d just crossed the metaphorical train tracks from the wrong side—shaggy black hair, unshaven, wearing leather and denim, with dark eyes that looked like chips of coal. With bronzed skin and high cheekbones, he looked at once exotic and dangerous.
“Corey,” Gage said, “meet a colleague of mine, Austin Mendez.”
Austin nodded. She nodded back, wondering what was going on here. Strange men made her jumpy, and if Gage hadn’t been there, she would have slammed the door.
“Austin’s just come off an undercover assignment and he needs a place to decompress. I remembered your last roomer moved out, and while I know this won’t be the long-term kind of thing you’d prefer, Austin needs a room for at least a month, maybe more.”
Corey didn’t at all like the looks of Austin. He was the kind a very young woman would find appealing, with his unkempt aura of danger, but she was long past that stage. She was also blunt. She turned to Gage. “You vouching for him?”
“Absolutely. He’s law enforcement.”
She wondered how much that really meant when dealing with a man who had been undercover. Someone had once remarked that the difference between a criminal and an undercover agent was that the agent had to lie.
She looked at Austin Mendez again. A man. In her house. But she felt the pressure of doing a favor for Gage, who had always been good to her. She couldn’t just refuse. Gathering her courage, she said, “You get the whole upstairs. It’s furnished. You can use the kitchen. I don’t make meals for tenants because I’m usually at work. You can go on up and take a look, if you like.”
It wasn’t the friendliest she’d ever been to a tenant, but she didn’t want to be friendly. She was accustomed to renting the space to women, one of the teachers, college students or nurses in the area. The last had been a student at the junior college, a truly nice young woman who had moved on to a four-year school. The fall semester had just begun, and she didn’t have a replacement roomer yet. At this point, she probably wouldn’t until the spring semester.
This was certainly going to be different, she thought as she watched Austin hike up the stairs.
She gave her attention back to Gage. “I just got home and made some coffee. Do