Dream Huntress

by Michelle Sharp

  “You won’t forget them,” he said. “I know you’ll never forget them, but given enough time and no other choice, maybe you just have to move on. I’m—”

  She pressed her fingers over his lips. “It’s the most beautiful, thoughtful thing anyone has ever done for me.”

  Words weren’t what either of them needed; neither was the cheesecake. Not now. He pulled her into a long, deep kiss. Then another. He pushed her back, moved against her, eased between her legs. Stroking her hair away from her face, he grazed down her neck, then quickly jerked away.

  Lost in his touch, finally, she blinked her eyes open.

  His face was hard, his body rigid. A blind woman could have seen the fury that was ready to erupt.

  The sexual haze vanished.

  “What happened to your neck?” he asked, his voice flat.

  The angel-like apparition of a few seconds ago had disintegrated. His nostrils flared, and Jordan got the impression he was barely hanging on to restraint.

  She moved her head from side to side. Everything appeared in working order. “What do you mean? What’s wrong?”

  “Your neck. It looks like a hickey.”

  Shrugging, she said, “Okay, not your smartest move considering the Warren situation, but my hair will cover it.” She fingered her skin. His expression never changed.

  Silence echoed.

  Then her mental fog lifted, and the memory of Warren and his determined lips sliding down her neck surfaced. Oh, shit! This was going to get very ugly, very quickly. She recognized the dangerous shade of red riding his face.

  “I. Did not. Do that.”

  “Sure you did. Things got pretty heated there for a while.” She doubted whether he was going to buy that approach, but she was going to sell it and sell it hard. “Remember when we—”

  “Can it, Jordan. You and I both know I didn’t do that.” He jumped out of the bed and threw on a pair of shorts. “You let Warren Buck touch you, didn’t you? A hickey? A damned hickey? I asked you what happened tonight. Funny, I don’t remember you mentioning making out with Warren.”

  No, she hadn’t told him, hadn’t felt either of them had anything to gain by it. “Look, he did try to kiss me, b—”

  “Try? Sure as hell looks like he succeeded. You let him put his hands on you, his lips on you. Have you lost your fucking mind?” His voice rose. Hot rage blanketed the room. “Are you getting some sort of twisted kick out of stringing him along?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.” Jordan scooted out of the bed and walked toward him. At odds with herself, she struggled between fighting back and trying to keep a cooler head. “You know better than that. After all that’s happened between us, do you honestly believe I’ve got some side thing with Warren?”

  “You tell me. How far are you willing to go to crack this case?” He thrust his hands through his hair and turned away. “In order to keep some level of sanity right now, I won’t let myself believe you’d do what I’m visualizing in my head. But what am I supposed to think when I see his mark on your neck?” He turned back and stabbed a finger at her. “No more, Jordan. It’s over. You will not see him again. I mean it.”

  Being given orders by Ty should have offended her on every level. As a cop, as a woman, she should have been fighting the rage, but there was none. She couldn’t explain why, but the fact that he had become so completely irrational touched her in a way she didn’t understand.

  Still, she was in Titus for a reason and had a job to do. “Ty, you know I can’t do that.” For good measure, she said it with more anger in her voice than she actually felt. “I may look like backwoods Betty Jo in those ridiculous clothes and disastrous hair and make-up, but I’m a cop the same as you. I’m in the middle of an undercover investigation. How am I supposed to stay away from Warren?”

  “What you did tonight crosses a line. A dangerous line. I want it to stop, and I want the truth. All of it this time.”

  “Okay, here’s the truth: you’re letting something insignificant mess you up.”

  “This,” he said, touching her neck, “is anything but insignificant. In fact, it’s the last straw. You don’t get it, do you? Titus was a great place to grow up. Safe. Everybody knew everybody else. I loved this town. But you’re right. It’s a pit now because the Bucks have turned it into one. They ruin lives; they destroy everything good. And if you think I’m going to sit back and let them take one more thing from me that I love, you’re wrong.”

  She stepped back, her mouth gaped open. Emotions she couldn’t even name swam in her head, but the most prominent one felt a lot like fear.

  He propped his hands on his hips and dropped his head. “Damn it. I guess that wasn’t the most romantic way to say that, huh?” He took a few deep breaths before lifting his head again. He stepped toward her, pinched her chin, and forced her gaze to meet his. “I am in love with you, Jordan. And I’ll see Warren Buck dead before he touches you again.”

  Chapter 13

  Spending Thanksgiving night with Ty brought to the surface more emotions than Jordan was ready to deal with. He actually had the nerve to let the L word loose on her. The man just didn’t play fair.

  The attraction had seized them both before they even knew each other’s name. And the sex... Jesus, the power of the sex was mind-boggling. The rest of the world simply didn’t exist when Ty was inside her. Nothing had prepared her for the intensity. That reality alone scared the hell out of her.

  The man had twisted her inside out, upside down, and every other unnatural direction until she honestly felt her head could spin off the top of her shoulders.

  Good God, what next?

  For starters, she was going to brush Warren off as gently as possible. She’d play the let’s-just-be-friends card. How he’d react would be anyone’s guess.

  Jordan pulled into Buck’s expecting to see more than one car in the parking lot. Her head buzzed with questions. Had there been a real burglary last night? Where was the group of people meeting for lunch today? Why was Warren’s red Mustang sitting alone?

  Ty had damn near lost his mind when she got out of his bed this morning and admitted that she was going to see Warren again today. He’d stood like a barricade in front of the door and threatened to handcuff her to the headboard until she came to her senses.

  She’d put up a good show of outrage at his demands. She had more undercover experience in her pinky than most cops ever saw in an entire career, so the last thing she needed was a man dictating how she should do her job.

  And yet the truth was obvious. To Ty. To Bahan. She’d jumped too fast and too hard on this one. China White had begun to spiral in her St. Louis jurisdiction a couple of years ago, but in recent months it had spread like the flu in high season. Law enforcement had a war on their hands.

  But two officers from her unit had lost their lives while in deep cover. Maybe that shouldn’t have made a difference in her sense of urgency to nail the Bucks, but it had. She’d gotten in way over her head with Warren Buck, and now she had to fix things.

  Go to lunch. Go to the movie. But set Warren straight.

  She turned off the ignition and opened her purse to drop the keys inside. They rapped against the grip of her gun. After scoping out the parking lot to make sure she was alone, she slipped the Glock from her purse and laid it in her lap.

  Her gun was so familiar, so comforting. Now, every time she locked it in the glove box before entering Buck’s, a little wave of sickness shot through her. Today the sickness felt more like full-on nausea.

  Again, she contemplated taking her clutch piece. If she’d been wearing it last night, Warren would have found it when they were together on the swing. Nothing screamed cop quite as loudly as a Glock in a handbag or a gun strapped fashionably to an ankle.

  She’d heard it said—on Oprah, if she remembered correctly—that instinct was the whisper in your head that told you something didn’t feel right.

  Many ignored the whisper.

  Despite the training, desp
ite all the undercover years, even despite her perverse flirtation with a world of spirits and energies she didn’t fully understand, she ignored the gnawing sensation that something was off and walked through the door of Buck’s.

  Warren sat at the bar with his back to her. She approached him and smelled booze and sweat filtering through the air. And was he wearing the same clothes from yesterday?

  He swiveled around, and his wild, bloodshot eyes met hers.

  As the whisper in her head did indeed become a full-blown surly voice, she wondered for half a second how Oprah was always right. She also wondered why the hell she’d left her gun in the car.

  “You forgot your gloves and scarf at my house last night.” Anger dripped from every drunken syllable. “I thought you might need them today. Supposed to be cold.” He threw them at her, hard, like a major league pitcher in the bottom of the ninth.

  “Okay, thanks.” The scarf and gloves had bounced off her body. She bent and picked them up. Maybe she’d downplayed the first few subtle warnings, but the danger in the room had her full attention now.

  He’d figured it out. Made her as a cop.

  He slid off the barstool and stalked toward her. “See, the thing was, I decided to bring them to you last night. I had your address on file from your work application.”

  The pieces of the puzzle shifted and clicked. Last night ran through her mind like a silent horror flick.

  The scuffle.

  The kiss.

  The cars passing by.

  He hadn’t made her as a cop. He’d seen her in the parking lot with Ty. The whole encounter had lasted maybe a couple minutes. But that was apparently long enough. It was a careless, dangerous mistake, and she was pretty sure she was about to pay for it. She took a few defensive steps backwards.

  “How long you been screwing McGee?” He stabbed the words at her.

  Stupid.

  She never made mistakes. Never allowed a distraction.

  Ridiculously stupid.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not—”

  “Save it. Does he know I felt you up about an hour before you banged him?” In one swift movement, he backhanded her across the cheekbone.

  She could take a blow, had done it before, but the alcohol and the giant ex-football- playing hand made a hell of a combination. The sharp, brittle snap sent a searing pain straight into her eye socket. Blood swam in her eye and blurred her vision. It was going to make landing a good punch of her own more challenging.

  The only encouraging thought: he was drunk, stupid, and most importantly—slow.

  “Did you have a good laugh at my expense, you fucking little whore?” He snatched up a beer bottle and swung it at her head. But this time, even with one eye, she saw it coming and blocked with her wrist. The bottle shattered and sprayed, sending glass, blood, and her keys to the floor in a chaotic explosion.

  She aimed a kick to his groin, made him grunt, but knew she’d missed the bull’s-eye. She bent and grabbed for her keys.

  He kicked up, snapping her jaw shut and sending a fierce tremor through her head.

  She fell back. The room twisted and spun. Black dots danced in her vision, and she was pretty sure he’d cracked a couple of her teeth.

  Warren came at her, but she rolled and managed to get to her feet. Her only hope was her keys. Her car held her weapon and her escape. She grabbed a chair, and hurled it at him.

  Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was drugs. But his huge body barely registered the blow.

  A few seconds—a few minutes—she had no idea how long she dodged and countered his fists. Training and hand-to-hand techniques flipped through her mind like pages in a magazine. Groin, throat, nose, eyes. She struck all the vulnerable spots a 137-pound female was trained to target against a man three times larger, but her vision sucked. Blood and beer stung her eyes and rendered her damn near blind. Still, she landed a vicious kick to his knee.

  His blurry image went down.

  Of all the thoughts that could have entered her mind, it was with stunning clarity that she realized how precious a few seconds could be. No longer was the issue success or failure of a case, but life and death.

  She made one last effort to locate her keys, and she did find them. But the search took too long. When she grabbed them and turned to run, Warren landed a fist across her jaw that knocked her on her back. She slid across the floor a good four or five feet. Blood erupted from her mouth. Pain and a wave of sickness gave way to a cloudy tunnel vision.

  The trained cop began to crumble under pure female desperation.

  He fell on top of her and ripped at her clothes. “You want to play games, you little bitch? You like it rough? Cause that’s exactly how it’s going to be.”

  Someone pulled Warren off of her. She could swear she heard Arlo’s voice, but she couldn’t see through the blood and tears. Rolling to her side, she curled into a fetal position and vomited.

  Soft gray edges dulled what little vision she had left. As everything faded to black, she could only think that Ty was right. She’d walked a dangerous line long enough to be pushed right off of it.

  Chapter 14

  Ty paced like a caged animal as he pretended not to be half out of his mind.

  Where was she?

  He couldn’t keep his head from turning toward Jordan’s usual station. He’d been at Buck’s for almost two hours, and she still hadn’t showed. Quarter to six. She was never late. Warren wasn’t there yet either.

  No way was she still somewhere with Warren.

  She’d given her word. Promised she was going to put some space between herself and Buck’s idiot son, no matter how it affected the case.

  “Hey, Casey, you heard from Jordan?” Ty tried to act casual while teetering on the edge of a meltdown.

  “No, but she better get her sweet ass here before too long, or I’m going to kick it. This is one of our busiest nights of the year. I can’t cover both of our stations alone.”

  He nodded and walked away. He’d questioned every person in the place. No one had heard from her. Christ, where could she be?

  She wasn’t answering her phone. Her car was nowhere in the parking lot. A person didn’t just disappear. She wouldn’t do that. Something was wrong. They’d agreed to touch base as soon as she talked to Warren.

  What if the asshole got crazy with her?

  Time crept along like snarled traffic in rush hour. Seconds passed like minutes, minutes like hours. Every damn pulse of the music pushed the likeliness of seeing her walk through the door, safe and unharmed, further and further away.

  He checked his watch. Eight thirty. Still no sign of Jordan. No calls. No nothing.

  Where the hell was she?

  His heart thrummed all the way to his ear drums. It wasn’t worry anymore; he’d passed worry two hours back. Keeping himself from raging through the place was taking super-human control. He desperately wanted to topple tables and aim his gun at a few select targets.

  He’d had enough. Weaving through the sea of customers, he walked up behind Buck. “Casey needs help covering Jordan’s section. She says Jordan never showed up.”

  “Haven’t seen her,” Buck grumbled. “Might be sick, but she should’ve called in.”

  “Warren said he was going to sign some paperwork for me tonight. What about him?”

  “Warren’s with his mother in Kansas City. They left late last night to take his grandma back home. Anything that needs to be signed, you can bring to me.”

  Warren wasn’t in Kansas City. He was gone. Missing. And so was Jordan. But Buck had just provided his son with an airtight alibi for the whole night and day.

  Ty’s gut twisted into a sick, desperate knot. He had to start looking for her. The Fed she talked about was named Bahan, and he worked out of the St. Louis field office. Jordan said he’d be in Titus by nightfall, so had to be somewhere close. It couldn’t be that hard to find him.

  ***

  Only one eye managed to open. Jor
dan blinked, trying to regain a small amount of sight. A twilight sky freckled with clouds told her she faced the last few moments of daylight. Dried, dead weeds and the tall, brown grass of winter surrounded her.

  She was outside. In a field.

  Being beaten unconscious and dreaming felt strangely similar; the line that separated reality from violent, painful visions blurred. She’d never ridden in a dark trunk before, but she was certain that was how she’d gotten here.

  Cold. It was unbearably cold. At the same time, she couldn’t stop sweating.

  Curled on her side, she tasted blood and dirt as she licked her dry lips and struggled to suck air in against the searing pain in her lungs.

  She rose on an elbow and vomited into the sticky pool of blood that had formed under her head.

  And she thought of the girl with the beautiful eyes and the long dark hair. The girl was with her now; that’s why the dreams about her had felt so different. That’s why they had a connection. The beautiful girl was preparing her for her own similar fate. Beaten, broken, bloody, and very much left for dead in the middle of nowhere.

  Her life couldn’t end like this, could it? After everything she’d survived, had her destiny been decided by the likes of Warren Buck?

  Determined not to follow the girl quietly into death, she struggled to a sitting position. Barren winter fields spread as far as her eye could see. A tiny structure in the distance came into focus. Real or a hallucination? She couldn’t be sure, but false hope was better than none. Without something to cut the bitter night wind, she’d be dead by sunrise.

  Before attempting to move toward the building, she inventoried her injuries.

  Her chest ached as if someone had sliced her open and plucked out several ribs with pliers. With every breath, every movement, nausea roiled. One ankle had swollen to twice its normal size, and one shoe was missing.

  Who was she kidding? Even with shelter, she’d likely be dead by morning. Warm tears rolled against her frigid skin, but the earnest realization that maybe this was it, gave her a final jolt of adrenaline.

  She hobbled, crawled, struggled. Rested after every few painful feet. The structure ended up being a tiny, dilapidated old shed, the only sign that life had once been anywhere near. It was pitch black by the time she inched her way there. When she made it, she collapsed against an outside wall and fell into a dream.