She drew another uneven breath and forced a smile. “She must be somebody special,” she murmured, wishing it didn’t sound so trite when she meant it with all her heart.

She wondered why he laughed, then, as if he knew a delicious secret.

The airfield north of Reno was much larger than the dirt airstrip in the desert near Las Vegas. Since it had once been an air force base and now served as home to the air tankers used in fighting forest fires in the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains, its runways were long, wide and smooth-a factor for which Holt’s backside gave thanks. Tony guided the Cherokee to a flawless landing, then taxied onto the expanse of tarmac where they were to park. Before leaving Las Vegas, Holt had called and arranged for a taxi to meet them, and he could see it waiting for them in the parking lot next to the airport office building.

Tony cut the engine and turned to give Billie a thumbs-up and a smile. “See? Told you I’d get you here.”

Holt managed to get himself straightened out and limbered up enough to open the door and exit the plane first, Tony being occupied with the unknown details involved in concluding a flight and buttoning down his aircraft. While Billie was slowly unbuckling herself from her seat harness, he gingerly stretched his legs and aching back, then turned to give her a hand climbing down, if she needed it.

But she was still crouched in the doorway of the plane, poised as if for a leap off a high diving board, and her face was bleached to the color of desert sand.

“Airsick?” he said gently, even though the gnawing sensation in the pit of his own stomach told him that wasn’t her problem, not by a long shot. He held out his hand to her and added, “You’ll feel better once your feet are on the ground.”

She gave him a withering look as she crept onto the wing, then hopped, with a nimbleness he envied, to the ground. “I’ve changed my mind,” she announced, glaring at a point somewhere off to his right. “This is stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking. Take me home.”

Her teeth were chattering. Holt took the jacket she was carrying folded over one arm and, while she transferred her glare to his face, slipped it around her shoulders. Her eyes seemed too big, too fiery for such a small, pixieish face, as if the heat and turmoil that fed them was trying to consume her from the inside out. He wanted so badly to take her face in his hands, hold it, protect it like some fragile, delicate blossom, soothe the burning with his kisses. He could barely contain himself, she touched him so.

“You’ll be fine,” he said in what he’d meant to be a murmur but sounded instead like a growl. To emphasize his words, he tugged the two sides of her jacket he was holding, giving her a little shake. Her sunglasses slipped out of one of the jacket pockets and fell onto the tarmac. He bent down and picked them up, unfolded and slid them onto her face. It was like closing a door on a roaring furnace.

He couldn’t resist stroking the spikey feathers of her hair behind her ears as he settled the earpieces in place, and his voice held more gravel as he said, “Better now?”

The lenses held steady for a long moment, and then she gave him the ghost of a smile. He let out a silent breath and hooked his arm around her shoulders, and as he did he cast one quick look back at Tony Whitehall, crouched in the doorway of the Piper Cherokee, giving him the thumbs-up sign.

She didn’t speak a word on the twenty-minute ride into Reno, just kept looking out of the window of the cab, keeping her face turned away from him.

When they turned into the residential neighborhood of curving streets and stucco houses of the northwest part of the city, Holt said in tentative encouragement, “Looks nice-nice trees…nice houses.”

She nodded but didn’t reply or look at him.

“Nice place to raise a kid,” he offered, and she didn’t reply to that, either.

He checked his watch, then leaned forward to tap on the cab driver’s shoulder. “This is okay-pull over right here.”

“You sure? The address you gave me is a couple houses farther on down.”

“Yeah, I know. This is fine. Might be a few minutes…keep the meter running.” He’d explained their mission to the cabbie before they’d left the airport, not wanting to alarm him when they might appear to be stalking a child.

“No problem,” the cabbie drawled as he pulled in to the curb and shifted into park. “Long as you’re payin’ me, I got all day.”

Around them the neighborhood was stirring to life. Cars pulled into and out of driveways and came and went along the street. Two boys on bicycles whizzed by the waiting cab; children’s voices mingled with the slap of running footsteps on sidewalks and pavement. Doors slammed.

“School just let out,” Holt murmured. “Shouldn’t be long now.” He was looking over his shoulder, through the back window of the cab, intently watching the children coming along the sidewalk in clusters of twos and threes, sometimes more. The boys were untidy knots of motion, hopping, whirling, punching, pushing, laughing, the girls more sedate, heads together, arms linked, giggling and sharing secrets. Here and there a child walked alone, head bowed over a handheld electronic gadget or cell phone, thumbs busily punching buttons, oblivious to all else.

“There she is,” he said suddenly. He put his hand on Billie’s shoulder and pointed past her, directing her attention out the side window to the three girls now coming into view a block away. “Purple pants, pink jacket-see her?”

Billie’s head moved, a quick up and down. Other than that she seemed to have gone still as stone-except that beneath his hand he could feel her body quivering.

“She’s blond,” he said softly, his lips near her ear. “Like you.”

She nodded again, and this time made a sound, a very small hiccup of laughter.

After that there was stillness, except for the cabbie’s raspy breathing and the ticking of the meter, while they watched the three girls pass by their taxi with only a brief, incurious glance. Two houses farther on, the girl in the pink jacket detached herself from her friends with a wave and a little pirouette and ran up the driveway, her blunt-cut blond hair bouncing on her shoulders, to disappear inside the open garage.

Billie sat motionless. Holt caught the cabdriver’s eye in the rearview mirror and nodded. The car moved away from the curb, moved along the street past the house where the girl in the pink jacket lived and turned the corner.

There was a soft sigh of exhaled breath as Billie turned from the window at last and sat back in the seat. Her head swiveled toward him. “It’s a pretty name-Hannah Grace,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

Her glasses gazed at him, blank, bleak…empty.

“Ah, Billie…” he said, and then was silent. What could he say?

You touch my heart. You make me want to wrap you in my arms and keep you from ever again knowing heartache, loss, despair.

The words would feel awkward and sound silly coming out of his mouth. He wasn’t a poet, a man comfortable with words and feelings.

He put out his arm and was only mildly surprised when she let him pull her close. Her glasses bumped awkwardly against his shoulder, and he reached across with his free hand and removed them. She nestled her face in the hollow of his chest and arm, but he knew by her stillness she wasn’t crying. He wondered what it would take to make this woman cry.

Chapter 6

It was late by the time they got back to Las Vegas.

They had taken time out for a fast-food hamburger before leaving Reno, which was pretty much Holt’s customary choice of cuisine, anyway. He had noticed Billie barely touched the salad she’d ordered, although she did help herself to a few of his French fries. Then, at the Vegas airstrip Tony couldn’t let them go without getting one of his cameras out of the back of the plane and snapping a bunch of pictures, mostly of Billie.

She had been good-natured about it, probably figuring it was pretty much to be expected, given that Tony was a photographer. Naturally, she didn’t know the real reason he wanted those pictures, which was that Brooke, twin sister to Brenna and the woman Tony Whitehall planned to marry and start having kids with in the very near future, would surely have skinned him alive if he’d come home without them. That was a revelation both Holt and Tony had agreed would be better kept for another time…another place.

Billie hardly spoke a word on the drive back into the city. She hadn’t said much during dinner or the flight from Reno, either, except to answer direct questions, usually accompanied by a distracted smile. And the closer they got to her neighborhood, the less Holt liked the idea of dropping her off at her front door and leaving her alone. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to risk giving her a chance to cut out on him. They’d had a deal and he’d kept his end of the bargain, and now her moment of reckoning was at hand. He had no idea in the world what was going on inside her head right now, but he did know she had a history of running when things got rough.

But he knew in his heart that was only part of it, and that the whole truth was both simpler and more complicated than that. The truth was, he didn’t want to leave her. Period.

He pulled into her driveway and turned off the Mustang’s motor and got out of the car, expecting her to tell him he didn’t need to come in, that she’d be fine, thanks for everything and good night.

She didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything at all, just walked beside him along the avenue of potted plants, up the steps and onto her front porch. Holt kept his hands in the pockets of his windbreaker to keep from touching her, putting his hand on her back…the nape of her neck. He told himself it would only have been a touch meant to give comfort and sympathy. Which was a lie. But even if it had been the truth, he didn’t know that he had the right to offer her anything so personal, or that she wouldn’t misunderstand if he did.

There was, he realized, a lot he didn’t know about Billie Farrell. Or Brenna Fallon, either.

She’d forgotten to leave a porch light on, so there was only the dim glow of the streetlights to see by as she unlocked the front door, pushed it open, then turned to look at him.

“You want some coffee? Or a Coke, or something?” She’d thrust her hands into her jacket pockets, and her shoulders looked hunched and defensive.

“Sure,” Holt said. “Sounds good.”

He followed her into the dark house, across the living room and into the kitchen beyond. There was more light here, shining in from a porch light outside, above the back door. Without turning on the kitchen lights, Billie shrugged out of her jacket and dropped it onto a chair beside the dining table, then went into the kitchen’s work space to make coffee. Holt took off his jacket and draped it on the back of a chair, then went around the table to look out the window into the backyard.

He was about to ask her why there wasn’t any water in her swimming pool-just to make conversation-when something crunched under his feet. He froze-outwardly. Inside, adrenaline was exploding through his veins. He knew what broken glass felt and sounded like when he stepped on it.

“Billie,” he called quietly. But she had the water running and didn’t hear him.

He was beside her in three strides, maybe less. She turned startled eyes to him as she reached to turn off the faucet, and he pressed a finger against her lips before she could utter the exclamation poised there.

“Shh,” he whispered, his lips close to her ear, “I think you’ve had a break-in. Window’s broken. Stay here while I check the house.”

She nodded, eyes wide above his cautioning fingers, and he gave her neck a reassuring squeeze before he left her.

He took his weapon from its holster in the small of his back and began a room-to-room sweep of the house, gratified at how quickly it came back to him from his cop days, long years past. How natural it seemed. He cleared every room, closet and cubbyhole as he’d been trained to do, and when he was satisfied the intruder was no longer in the house, he retraced his steps to the kitchen, where Billie was calmly filling the coffeemaker as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

He switched on the lights, tucked away his weapon and reached for the phone that was sitting on the counter. She looked over at him and said, “What are you doing?”

“Calling nine-one-one.” He paused, phone in hand, to frown at her. “Somebody broke into your house. I’m calling the cops. And before they get here you need to check and see what’s missing.”

She shook her head and went on filling the coffeemaker, silently counting out spoonfuls of coffee. Her lips were pressed tightly together, and her movements were jerky with anger. When she’d finished counting, she set the coffee can down with a clank and snatched the phone out of his hands.