Rachel Lee - Defending the Eyewitness

“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

www.millsandboon.co.uk

RACHEL LEEwas 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.

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To those who love.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Extract

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 you have time?”

He glanced at his watch. “Sure. Emma’s working late tonight and the boys are thrilled to be ordering pizza. I’m a free man for a little while.”

Which she took to mean that he wanted to give her a chance to get comfortable with the new tenant. She appreciated that and finally gave him a smile. “Kitchen or living room?” she asked.

“Kitchen’s fine. We do everything in the kitchen at my place. I can’t figure out why we even have a living room most of the time. These days the boys don’t even watch TV. I can’t pry them off their computer games.”

She laughed. “If I had more time I’d probably get addicted to that myself.”

The strange little note fluttered as they passed. She reached for it, intending to toss it in the trash, but then, on impulse, she tucked it, along with its envelope, in one of the drawers of the hall table.

As she poured them coffee, she looked up at the ceiling. “I guess I’m going to have to get used to heavy footsteps.”

“That last tenant you had was a tiny sprite,” he agreed.

“Just a few months, you said? Because I’m probably going to have students wanting to rent for the next semester.”

“He just needs a little time and quiet. You pretend you’re somebody else for a half-dozen years, and then you have to find yourself again.”

“Was it like that for you?”

“Sometimes, but I didn’t go anywhere near as deep. Austin doesn’t have anybody just now. He went way deep from what I understand, and it leaves you a bit messed up. You also can’t just pick up old relationships, not for a while. It could be dangerous if you get identified. But I don’t know much I can tell you. Or even how much I know. Just rest assured that I wouldn’t have brought him here if I hadn’t vetted him.”

She supposed that would have to do. Sharing a house with a man made her feel uneasy, though, and she questioned whether she should really agree to this. But she had already invited Austin to look around. Could she possibly look at Gage now and tell him she had changed her mind?

“He’s DEA?” she asked.

“He’s a friend of a friend,” Gage answered. “I don’t know which agency. I just know that apparently he spent a lot of time in the border towns in Mexico.”