The Defiant Hero by Brockmann Suzanne

Author:Brockmann, Suzanne [Brockmann, Suzanne]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345464286
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2003-06-03T07:00:00+00:00

Locke had lost Starrett.

Again.

She’d been right on him when he’d left the hotel in the early afternoon. She’d dressed in sneakers and jeans and a baggy T-shirt, and she’d felt herself become invisible in the crowd of tourists that swarmed the streets.

He’d gotten a sandwich from a sub shop and had eaten while he walked. Strolled, really.

And then he was gone.

One minute he was casually throwing his sandwich wrapper into a trash can, and the next he was nowhere to be found.

It was completely her fault. She’d been lulled into thinking he was going to stroll the entire afternoon away. She’d let her thoughts stray, she’d been checking her cell phone to make sure Tyra could reach her if she needed her and . . .

Poof.

Gone.

She’d searched the area for hours, expecting Starrett to turn up. Expecting him to call.

What good was losing her if he wasn’t going to taunt her afterward?

But it wasn’t until much, much later that her cell phone rang. She was in her car, driving the area she’d walked earlier, cursing herself and hoping he’d just magically show up.

She answered breathlessly, her heart racing, thinking it was finally Tyra. “Locke.”

There was a moment of silence, then Starrett’s voice. “It’s only me. Sorry.”

Somehow he knew she was waiting on a phone call. “What do you want?”

“No luck finding Nils yet, huh? He still hasn’t checked back in?”

She didn’t say a word. There was no way she was going to give him any information that he didn’t already know. For all she knew, he was with John Nilsson and Meg Moore right this very moment.

“I guess not. You on duty?” he asked.

“No.” She was off until late tomorrow morning.

“I’m at a pool hall,” he said, “bored to tears. You know how to play?”

“No.”

“Want to learn?”

“No.”

He laughed. “Want to know where I am?” He didn’t let her answer. He just rattled off the address.

“This is going to be really funny, right, Roger?” Locke said, flipping through her map book until she’d found the street he’d named. “When I come all the way down to that shitty part of town, and walk into some biker bar, and you’re not there. That’s going to be some joke when it’s just me and five three-hundred-pound white supremacists, huh? As a person of color, I don’t appreciate being walked into a potentially dangerous and volatile situation.”

“Whoa, wait—I would never do that.”

“Then you be there,” she said. “You be there when I show up.”

She hung up the phone, feeling like a fool for rushing over at Starrett’s beck and call. But she didn’t have anything else to do, and she was going to feel really stupid when she called Jules and had to tell him that she’d spent the entire afternoon with her thumb up her butt.

Her cell phone rang again and she tensed. “Locke.”

“Hey, it’s me,” her partner said, as if she’d conjured him just by thinking about him. “Lookit, I can’t help you out with Cowboy Sam tonight. I’m sorry, I know I promised to set up camp outside his hotel room from midnight to six, but I’m being sent south.

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