A temptation she hadn’t been able to resist when she was twenty-two. But one she would ignore now.
Tall, muscled, with bright emerald eyes and sun-streaked blond hair, Dante was a southern boy with charm and a dimple in his chin.
A long, thin scar marred his right cheek. She’d been there the day he got that scar. The mark didn’t detract from Dante’s looks. No, the scar just made him look all the more dangerous.
She stared at him, trying to be detached. A strong jaw, wide lips, slightly twisted nose—he shouldn’t have been handsome.
But he was.
No, not handsome. Sexy.
Dammit.
Monica cleared her throat. “The past is over, Dante.” They’d been over this before, when he’d made the mistake of tracking her down. Serious mistake. “We’re professionals, we can—”
“Pretend we never had sex? Pretend we didn’t nearly tear each other apart because we were so f**king hungry those nights?”
Her heart thumped hard enough to shake her chest.
He smiled at her, flashing his white teeth. “Don’t know if I’m that good at pretending, Ice.”
Her eyes narrowed. She hated that nickname. The jerks she’d been in training with had tagged her with it. No one understood.
Control—control mattered. But she’d sure lost control with him.
Dante was her one mistake over the years. The one slip that had broken past the walls she’d worked so hard to erect.
Ice.
All the agents had been given names in their class.
Dante had been called Devil. The guy liked to take risks, to push boundaries. A devil who didn’t care about being cautious. How were you supposed to resist the devil?
His name hadn’t stuck, though. Hers had.
Monica sucked in a hard breath and deliberately relaxed her fingers. “Long time ago, Dante. And I don’t deal in the past.” Wrong. She’d spent years running from her past. “I focus on the present.” As much as possible. She held his stare and knew that her face would be expressionless.
She’d practiced that. Ice.
So, okay, maybe she’d helped a little bit with that nickname. But being cold kept the others away, and it could be dangerous when someone got too close.
Straightening her shoulders, she said, “I’m the senior agent here, and I’m not looking to screw around.” Too dangerous. “We’re on a case. We work together because that’s what we have to do in order to get the job done.” Simple. Flat.
Dante didn’t so much as blink.
“Now, are you going to have a problem with that? Because, if so, it won’t be too hard to send your butt back to Atlanta.” Total bullshit now. Like she had that kind of power.
Hyde wanted Dante on his team. He’d been adamant about him. He’d even overridden her objections, and the guy usually listened to her opinions about people. Not this time.
A muscle flexed along Dante’s jaw. Perfectly shaven now, but she’d seen him at dawn, seen the rough stubble that—
“No problem, ma’am,” the title was a sardonic taunt. “I can do my job just fine.” A pause.
“Good.”
“Can you?”
Monica ground her teeth together. “Trust me, Dante, it won’t be an issue for me.” Liar, liar…
She could still remember all too well what the man looked like na**d.
And what he felt like.
She swallowed.
Leaving him before had nearly ripped her apart, but there hadn’t been a choice. The man was a weakness, one she couldn’t afford.
“Prepare for descent.” A male voice broke over the intercom system. “Buckle your safety belts. We’ll be arriving in Jasper…”
Monica caught the belt in her hands as the rest of the pilot’s words washed right past her. Snap.
If Dante handled his first SSD case right, she’d be working with him, every day and all those nights, for a long time to come.
Shot down. Luke blew out a slow breath. He could handle it. A case waited. Victims. He could focus and get the job done.
They climbed down the small flight of stairs leading out of the plane. A private plane. His jaw had nearly dropped when he’d caught sight of it.
Hyde must know some serious dirt on the higher-ups in order to have swung a plane—just for the SSD. But the ride had been pretty close to torture. Trapped in the plane with her, he’d been able to do little more than drink in her scent and drink in… her.
Even after all these years, the woman was still too beautiful. Smooth, pale skin. Nose perfectly straight. Full, red lips. And those legs…
He could still feel them around him, digging into his back, clenching tight as he drove into her, as hard and as deep as he could go. Those legs…
On the plane ride from hell, she’d crossed them, then begun to kick one foot slowly while she made her notes. Watching that foot, then letting his gaze rise to follow the smooth lines of her legs up to the edge of her skirt…
Once, he’d licked his way up her body. Tasted the flavor of her skin. But that was the past.
In the present, the woman had frozen him out. She’d looked at him with those blank eyes and pretty much told him to go screw himself.
Hands off or your ass heads back to Atlanta.
So much for picking up where they’d left off.
Business only. He could do that.
Luke jerked his gaze off the sway of Monica’s ass and caught sight of the two uniformed sheriff’s deputies waiting for them.
Stick to the case. Forget the girl.
Her high heels clicked across the pavement. The two cops shot up from their slouching positions and hurried toward her. Smart men.
“Agent Davenport?” The first guy to reach her asked, shoving out his hand. A fresh-faced kid, he looked like he’d just skated past twenty-one. He had black eyes, olive skin, and twitchy fingers.
Monica gave a firm nod. The wind on the runway caught her hair, tossing the dark locks and wrecking her smooth style. She ignored the wind and caught his hand, shaking once.
“I’m Deputy Lee Pope, and this here is Deputy Vance Monroe.”
She nodded to the other deputy, then offered her hand.
He caught the slight widening of Vance’s brown eyes. The second deputy was older than the other guy—tall, with ruddy cheeks, dark red hair, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Vance seemed to hold Monica’s hand a little bit longer than was really necessary.
“This is my associate.” Her voice rose easily above the wind. “Special Agent Luke Dante.”
He flashed a smile, and when the deputies blinked, he figured maybe he’d used too much teeth.
Reflex. He’d been trying to bite back a pissed-off snarl.
“Sheriff wants us to take you to see the bodies, ma’am.” From Lee. He shifted from his right foot to the left. “You don’t—you don’t really think we got us a serial killer down here in Jasper?”
Luke positioned himself next to Monica. He caught a glimpse of the faint tightness around her mouth.
“I don’t know what you’ve got, deputy.” Monica stared down the guy. “I just know my boss told me to get on a plane.” A little shrug. “So here I am.”
Senior agent.
Hyde had given him a quiet warning before he’d left the office. “Don’t screw up, hotshot. When in doubt, do whatever Davenport tells you.”
They’d trained together. Studied together. Graduated together.
But from the beginning, he’d known Monica was being fast-tracked. Everyone had figured that out pretty much from day one.
The profiler who knew the killers. Whispers about her had floated through every area of Quantico. There wasn’t a test the woman didn’t ace. Wasn’t a drill she didn’t nail.
She’d graduated at the top of her class. Then been swooped up by Special Projects the next day.
He’d worked his cases over the years, busted ass and proven that he knew the victims better than pretty much any-damn-body. Yeah, he’d shown he could crack the cases, and he’d gotten the coveted interview with Hyde.
“True serial killers can be very rare,” Monica said, voice cool and easy, with just a hint of her own southern drawl creeping through the words. “Your Sheriff Davis simply wanted us to come down and give our opinion on these cases.”
“We got a twisted f**k out there.” Deputy Vance shook his head and spat on the ground. “Ma’am, I saw what he done to that Moffett girl.”
He’d seen, too. Thirty knife wounds. All on the face and chest. Pretty girl, at least in the before pictures. After…
Deputy Vance was right. Twisted f**k.
Though Luke doubted Monica would consider that a professional term.
“Her body’s still at the morgue?” Luke asked. From the report he’d been given, he knew the victim had been found two days before, dumped like garbage in an abandoned house.
If the deputies hadn’t raided that place, looking for a drug dealer…
“Yeah, she’s still there.” Lee stepped back. The sun glinted off his badge. “You folks need to get settled at the motel or you wanna—”
“Take us to the body,” Monica ordered just as Luke said—
“The body.”
The deputy yanked out his keys. “Sorry… but you two are gonna have to ride in the back…”
In the back of the squad car. Nice.
Monica climbed in first. Luke sucked in a breath, smelling her, warm woman and a hint of that light perfume she’d always worn, and he tried his level best not to touch the woman as he crowded in beside her.
His thigh brushed hers. Focus. He cleared his throat and managed to say, “The second body—I didn’t see much about that victim in my files.” He leaned toward the gray cage that separated him from the uniforms. The better to get away from Monica’s soft flesh.
The engine kicked to life, and the car shot forward.
Vance, buckled in the passenger seat and with the radio at his mouth, glanced back at him. “That’s cause there wasn’t much left of Sally to see.”
• • •
Morgues sucked. Luke hated ’em, always had.
And the dead—they were everywhere. Hell, he’d joined the Bureau to save lives. Not to sit with the dead.
But Monica, she sauntered around the room, those heels tapping, staring at the dead woman from every angle, her bright eyes narrowed and intense—and not the least bit hesitant as she fired question after question at the ME.
“Time of death?”
“What was the killing wound?”
“Any drugs in her system?”
“These marks on her face… that look like a pattern to you?”
Her white-gloved fingers pointed right above the woman’s left cheek.
The ME, Doctor Charles Cotton, was a balding man with some of the palest skin Luke had ever seen. Cotton eyed her with a worried stare as she circled the table like a vulture coming to pick apart her prey. The two deputies were there, huddled at the back of the room. Lee kept glancing at the floor, and not the body, and old Vance had his lips pressed so tightly together Luke thought the guy might draw blood soon.
Not morgue guys. He didn’t blame ’em, not one bit.
Luke swallowed and tried to ignore the scent of death that shoved up his nostrils.
“So our killer took his time and did all of this…” Monica motioned to the criss-cross of wounds on Patricia “Patty” Moffett’s face and chest, “before he decided to kill her.”
A prick who liked to play.
“That’s what my report says.” Cotton crossed his thick arms over his chest. The guy’s half-eaten pizza sat on a table behind him.
The guy ate in here with the bodies? Jesus.
Monica glanced over at Luke.
Ah, his cue. Luke took a step toward the body. The stiffs really weren’t his specialty, and he hadn’t thought they were Monica’s either.
The killers—those guys were all hers.
But if one thing had been drilled into him in those profile classes at the Academy, it was that even dead victims could talk. You just had to know how to hear them.
He glanced at Patty’s wrists. Saw the purple circles.
Restraints.
Luke stalked to the end of the table and lifted the sheet. The same circles mottled her ankles.
“No drugs.” At least not when the slicing started. You didn’t restrain someone who was out cold. “She was awake and aware while the a**hole carved her up,” he said, fury boiling through him. The woman had been small, petite, and she’d just turned twenty-nine.
Hell of a way to die.
“The wounds on her face are so precise,” Monica whispered.
He heard the shuffle of feet behind him. A look over his shoulder showed the deputies craning their necks and inching closer.
“No hesitation.” Monica inhaled sharply. “Pleasure cuts.”
The ME’s jaw dropped and so did both of his chins. “What?”
Luke nodded because he knew exactly what she meant. Cuts to make the vic suffer and to give the perp his sick thrill.
The door of the morgue shoved open.
“Pope, Monroe—get your asses back out on the street!” Luke turned at the snarl and saw the sheriff, his uniform perfectly pressed, his hands balled into fists on his hips. “Billy Joe is drunk down at Taylor’s again, and Ron needs backup.”
The two deputies shot to attention. “Sir!”
“Now!”
They flew past him.
When the door slammed behind them, the sheriff marched forward and faced Luke. “You here to tell me what the hell is goin’ on in my county?”
Tall, muscled, with bright emerald eyes and sun-streaked blond hair, Dante was a southern boy with charm and a dimple in his chin.
A long, thin scar marred his right cheek. She’d been there the day he got that scar. The mark didn’t detract from Dante’s looks. No, the scar just made him look all the more dangerous.
She stared at him, trying to be detached. A strong jaw, wide lips, slightly twisted nose—he shouldn’t have been handsome.
But he was.
No, not handsome. Sexy.
Dammit.
Monica cleared her throat. “The past is over, Dante.” They’d been over this before, when he’d made the mistake of tracking her down. Serious mistake. “We’re professionals, we can—”
“Pretend we never had sex? Pretend we didn’t nearly tear each other apart because we were so f**king hungry those nights?”
Her heart thumped hard enough to shake her chest.
He smiled at her, flashing his white teeth. “Don’t know if I’m that good at pretending, Ice.”
Her eyes narrowed. She hated that nickname. The jerks she’d been in training with had tagged her with it. No one understood.
Control—control mattered. But she’d sure lost control with him.
Dante was her one mistake over the years. The one slip that had broken past the walls she’d worked so hard to erect.
Ice.
All the agents had been given names in their class.
Dante had been called Devil. The guy liked to take risks, to push boundaries. A devil who didn’t care about being cautious. How were you supposed to resist the devil?
His name hadn’t stuck, though. Hers had.
Monica sucked in a hard breath and deliberately relaxed her fingers. “Long time ago, Dante. And I don’t deal in the past.” Wrong. She’d spent years running from her past. “I focus on the present.” As much as possible. She held his stare and knew that her face would be expressionless.
She’d practiced that. Ice.
So, okay, maybe she’d helped a little bit with that nickname. But being cold kept the others away, and it could be dangerous when someone got too close.
Straightening her shoulders, she said, “I’m the senior agent here, and I’m not looking to screw around.” Too dangerous. “We’re on a case. We work together because that’s what we have to do in order to get the job done.” Simple. Flat.
Dante didn’t so much as blink.
“Now, are you going to have a problem with that? Because, if so, it won’t be too hard to send your butt back to Atlanta.” Total bullshit now. Like she had that kind of power.
Hyde wanted Dante on his team. He’d been adamant about him. He’d even overridden her objections, and the guy usually listened to her opinions about people. Not this time.
A muscle flexed along Dante’s jaw. Perfectly shaven now, but she’d seen him at dawn, seen the rough stubble that—
“No problem, ma’am,” the title was a sardonic taunt. “I can do my job just fine.” A pause.
“Good.”
“Can you?”
Monica ground her teeth together. “Trust me, Dante, it won’t be an issue for me.” Liar, liar…
She could still remember all too well what the man looked like na**d.
And what he felt like.
She swallowed.
Leaving him before had nearly ripped her apart, but there hadn’t been a choice. The man was a weakness, one she couldn’t afford.
“Prepare for descent.” A male voice broke over the intercom system. “Buckle your safety belts. We’ll be arriving in Jasper…”
Monica caught the belt in her hands as the rest of the pilot’s words washed right past her. Snap.
If Dante handled his first SSD case right, she’d be working with him, every day and all those nights, for a long time to come.
Shot down. Luke blew out a slow breath. He could handle it. A case waited. Victims. He could focus and get the job done.
They climbed down the small flight of stairs leading out of the plane. A private plane. His jaw had nearly dropped when he’d caught sight of it.
Hyde must know some serious dirt on the higher-ups in order to have swung a plane—just for the SSD. But the ride had been pretty close to torture. Trapped in the plane with her, he’d been able to do little more than drink in her scent and drink in… her.
Even after all these years, the woman was still too beautiful. Smooth, pale skin. Nose perfectly straight. Full, red lips. And those legs…
He could still feel them around him, digging into his back, clenching tight as he drove into her, as hard and as deep as he could go. Those legs…
On the plane ride from hell, she’d crossed them, then begun to kick one foot slowly while she made her notes. Watching that foot, then letting his gaze rise to follow the smooth lines of her legs up to the edge of her skirt…
Once, he’d licked his way up her body. Tasted the flavor of her skin. But that was the past.
In the present, the woman had frozen him out. She’d looked at him with those blank eyes and pretty much told him to go screw himself.
Hands off or your ass heads back to Atlanta.
So much for picking up where they’d left off.
Business only. He could do that.
Luke jerked his gaze off the sway of Monica’s ass and caught sight of the two uniformed sheriff’s deputies waiting for them.
Stick to the case. Forget the girl.
Her high heels clicked across the pavement. The two cops shot up from their slouching positions and hurried toward her. Smart men.
“Agent Davenport?” The first guy to reach her asked, shoving out his hand. A fresh-faced kid, he looked like he’d just skated past twenty-one. He had black eyes, olive skin, and twitchy fingers.
Monica gave a firm nod. The wind on the runway caught her hair, tossing the dark locks and wrecking her smooth style. She ignored the wind and caught his hand, shaking once.
“I’m Deputy Lee Pope, and this here is Deputy Vance Monroe.”
She nodded to the other deputy, then offered her hand.
He caught the slight widening of Vance’s brown eyes. The second deputy was older than the other guy—tall, with ruddy cheeks, dark red hair, and a nose that looked as if it had been broken more than once. Vance seemed to hold Monica’s hand a little bit longer than was really necessary.
“This is my associate.” Her voice rose easily above the wind. “Special Agent Luke Dante.”
He flashed a smile, and when the deputies blinked, he figured maybe he’d used too much teeth.
Reflex. He’d been trying to bite back a pissed-off snarl.
“Sheriff wants us to take you to see the bodies, ma’am.” From Lee. He shifted from his right foot to the left. “You don’t—you don’t really think we got us a serial killer down here in Jasper?”
Luke positioned himself next to Monica. He caught a glimpse of the faint tightness around her mouth.
“I don’t know what you’ve got, deputy.” Monica stared down the guy. “I just know my boss told me to get on a plane.” A little shrug. “So here I am.”
Senior agent.
Hyde had given him a quiet warning before he’d left the office. “Don’t screw up, hotshot. When in doubt, do whatever Davenport tells you.”
They’d trained together. Studied together. Graduated together.
But from the beginning, he’d known Monica was being fast-tracked. Everyone had figured that out pretty much from day one.
The profiler who knew the killers. Whispers about her had floated through every area of Quantico. There wasn’t a test the woman didn’t ace. Wasn’t a drill she didn’t nail.
She’d graduated at the top of her class. Then been swooped up by Special Projects the next day.
He’d worked his cases over the years, busted ass and proven that he knew the victims better than pretty much any-damn-body. Yeah, he’d shown he could crack the cases, and he’d gotten the coveted interview with Hyde.
“True serial killers can be very rare,” Monica said, voice cool and easy, with just a hint of her own southern drawl creeping through the words. “Your Sheriff Davis simply wanted us to come down and give our opinion on these cases.”
“We got a twisted f**k out there.” Deputy Vance shook his head and spat on the ground. “Ma’am, I saw what he done to that Moffett girl.”
He’d seen, too. Thirty knife wounds. All on the face and chest. Pretty girl, at least in the before pictures. After…
Deputy Vance was right. Twisted f**k.
Though Luke doubted Monica would consider that a professional term.
“Her body’s still at the morgue?” Luke asked. From the report he’d been given, he knew the victim had been found two days before, dumped like garbage in an abandoned house.
If the deputies hadn’t raided that place, looking for a drug dealer…
“Yeah, she’s still there.” Lee stepped back. The sun glinted off his badge. “You folks need to get settled at the motel or you wanna—”
“Take us to the body,” Monica ordered just as Luke said—
“The body.”
The deputy yanked out his keys. “Sorry… but you two are gonna have to ride in the back…”
In the back of the squad car. Nice.
Monica climbed in first. Luke sucked in a breath, smelling her, warm woman and a hint of that light perfume she’d always worn, and he tried his level best not to touch the woman as he crowded in beside her.
His thigh brushed hers. Focus. He cleared his throat and managed to say, “The second body—I didn’t see much about that victim in my files.” He leaned toward the gray cage that separated him from the uniforms. The better to get away from Monica’s soft flesh.
The engine kicked to life, and the car shot forward.
Vance, buckled in the passenger seat and with the radio at his mouth, glanced back at him. “That’s cause there wasn’t much left of Sally to see.”
• • •
Morgues sucked. Luke hated ’em, always had.
And the dead—they were everywhere. Hell, he’d joined the Bureau to save lives. Not to sit with the dead.
But Monica, she sauntered around the room, those heels tapping, staring at the dead woman from every angle, her bright eyes narrowed and intense—and not the least bit hesitant as she fired question after question at the ME.
“Time of death?”
“What was the killing wound?”
“Any drugs in her system?”
“These marks on her face… that look like a pattern to you?”
Her white-gloved fingers pointed right above the woman’s left cheek.
The ME, Doctor Charles Cotton, was a balding man with some of the palest skin Luke had ever seen. Cotton eyed her with a worried stare as she circled the table like a vulture coming to pick apart her prey. The two deputies were there, huddled at the back of the room. Lee kept glancing at the floor, and not the body, and old Vance had his lips pressed so tightly together Luke thought the guy might draw blood soon.
Not morgue guys. He didn’t blame ’em, not one bit.
Luke swallowed and tried to ignore the scent of death that shoved up his nostrils.
“So our killer took his time and did all of this…” Monica motioned to the criss-cross of wounds on Patricia “Patty” Moffett’s face and chest, “before he decided to kill her.”
A prick who liked to play.
“That’s what my report says.” Cotton crossed his thick arms over his chest. The guy’s half-eaten pizza sat on a table behind him.
The guy ate in here with the bodies? Jesus.
Monica glanced over at Luke.
Ah, his cue. Luke took a step toward the body. The stiffs really weren’t his specialty, and he hadn’t thought they were Monica’s either.
The killers—those guys were all hers.
But if one thing had been drilled into him in those profile classes at the Academy, it was that even dead victims could talk. You just had to know how to hear them.
He glanced at Patty’s wrists. Saw the purple circles.
Restraints.
Luke stalked to the end of the table and lifted the sheet. The same circles mottled her ankles.
“No drugs.” At least not when the slicing started. You didn’t restrain someone who was out cold. “She was awake and aware while the a**hole carved her up,” he said, fury boiling through him. The woman had been small, petite, and she’d just turned twenty-nine.
Hell of a way to die.
“The wounds on her face are so precise,” Monica whispered.
He heard the shuffle of feet behind him. A look over his shoulder showed the deputies craning their necks and inching closer.
“No hesitation.” Monica inhaled sharply. “Pleasure cuts.”
The ME’s jaw dropped and so did both of his chins. “What?”
Luke nodded because he knew exactly what she meant. Cuts to make the vic suffer and to give the perp his sick thrill.
The door of the morgue shoved open.
“Pope, Monroe—get your asses back out on the street!” Luke turned at the snarl and saw the sheriff, his uniform perfectly pressed, his hands balled into fists on his hips. “Billy Joe is drunk down at Taylor’s again, and Ron needs backup.”
The two deputies shot to attention. “Sir!”
“Now!”
They flew past him.
When the door slammed behind them, the sheriff marched forward and faced Luke. “You here to tell me what the hell is goin’ on in my county?”
