Marie Ferrarella - Racing Against Time

Brent felt as if his throat was constricting again. His eyes stung, and he didn’t bother trying to blink back the tears. Would he ever see her again?

“Yes, she is,” he agreed quietly. His fingers tightened around the remote, but he made no move to stop the video. “I shouldn’t be standing here, doing nothing. Thinking about eating. Thinking about—” His voice halted abruptly as guilt washed over his face.

“Thinking about what?” Callie half expected him to say something about killing the man who’d done this horrible thing.

She was caught completely by surprise when he quietly confessed, “You.”

www.millsandboon.co.uk

earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy, and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA ®Award-winning author’s goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over one hundred books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

To

Helen Conrad,

still wonderful

after all these years

Prologue

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

Chapter 15

He sat in his car and watched them.

Just as he had yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. Watched them and memorized their movements.

He didn’t want there to be any slipups.

That was what had gotten him in trouble before. Thinking he hadn’t made a mistake when he had. He’d been too confident, too sure that he was smarter than the people around him.

This time he knew better. Knew that he couldn’t allow the fact that he was more intelligent than the people he was dealing with to blur his caution, his inbred sense of survival.

That had gotten away from him before, caused his downfall.

Pride went before a fall.

He still had his pride. And it was that pride he meant to avenge.

His pride and his life.

Because the man who lived in the house he was watching, whose comings and goings he had quickly committed to memory, had taken it all away from him. Taken away his life, his pride.

His daughter.

Payback time was finally here.

Very carefully he turned the key in the ignition. The vehicle he was sitting in purred to life, ready to do his bidding.

He smiled to himself as he moved the transmission shift lever into drive.

He was through waiting.

It was time to act.

Brenton Montgomery didn’t generally oversleep.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Former decorated Aurora police officer, former respected A.D.A. and presently, highly regarded criminal court justice, he had been blessed with an inner clock that went off anywhere from two to five minutes before the alarm clock on his nightstand. It had been that way ever since he’d had a need for an alarm clock.

But every once in a while, after he put in a particularly long night poring over briefs and struggling with his conscience over which was the right path for him to take for all parties who stood before his scarred judge’s desk in criminal court, Brent discovered that sleep wouldn’t come.

And then, when it finally did arrive, it brought with it an asbestos blanket that smothered him, effectively separating him from the rest of the world. From the rest of his life.

This morning he’d rolled over in the four-poster bed that Jennifer had selected—the bed that was the single inanimate holdover from his brief mistake of a marriage—and had hardly been aware of opening his eyes. He didn’t remember focusing on the clock beside his telephone. But the instant he did, he’d sat bolt upright as the flashing blue digital lights imprinted themselves on his brain.

Seven-fifty.

He was due in court at eight-thirty.

Brent had no memory of his trip down the front stairs.

“I thought you’d decided to sleep in this morning, Judge.”

The statement greeted him exactly twelve minutes later as, damp from his shower, his clothes sticking to him as if he’d woken up in a swamp, Brent hurried into the kitchen and past his housekeeper, Delia Culhane. The sight of his five-year-old daughter, Rachel, sitting on a stool at the breakfast counter registered along the perimeter of his mind. She was wearing something blue. Maybe lavender or light purple.

“If I had intended on sleeping in, Delia, I would have told you.”

Without meaning to, Brent bit the words off gruffly as he swung open the refrigerator and grabbed one of the individual orange juice containers that Delia kept stocked for Rachel. There was no time for breakfast. This was going to have to do.

It took effort to rein in his temper. He had no patience with tardiness, least of all his own. “I should have been in the car two minutes ago.”

Briefcase in one hand, juice container in the other, Brent hurried out the back door to the garage where his BMW was housed, a hastily tossed goodbye hanging in the air behind him.

After he’d driven down the first long block, it occurred to him that for the first time in five years, he hadn’t kissed his daughter goodbye.

He debated turning around, but there was no time. He was already going to be late.

Brent kept on driving.

“About time you got here. Everyone else is already seated at the table, eating.”

Barking out the greeting to his firstborn daughter as the back door opened then closed behind her, Andrew Cavanaugh barely dragged his glance away from the professional stove that took up half of the back wall. The French toast he was preparing commanded his entire attention, although his family knew that he could have very easily prepared any one of a number of meals blindfolded and made them to mouthwatering perfection. Approaching his sixth decade, he was a better chef than he had been a police chief, and he had been a very, very good police chief.

Callie Cavanaugh slid in at the wide kitchen table beside her older brother, Shaw. She nodded at her three other siblings and removed the napkin from the center of her plate. She wasn’t really hungry, but breakfast in the house where she and her brothers and sisters had grown up was a ritual. It had been ever since her father had retired from the force.

Andrew claimed it was his way of keeping track of his brood and anyone else who wanted to show up at the table for a meal. There was never a shortage of food. Or love, for that matter, though that was not always as blatantly on display as the plates were. But it was understood. You had a problem, no matter what your age, you showed up at the table. There’d be someone along to help sort things out, by and by.

All five of the Cavanaugh children had followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the Aurora Police Department. Even Lorrayne, the youngest and the official family hellion had finally come around, after giving her father twelve years of grief and turning the rest of his black hair gray. The fact that all of them chose to go into law enforcement was a testament to the regard with which they held their father.

Callie took a sip from the glass of orange juice that was next to her plate. There were times when it seemed to her that everyone named Cavanaugh found their way into law enforcement eventually. Her grandfather had served, as had both of her father’s brothers. The younger of the two, Brian, was currently the chief of detectives. Another brother, Mike, two years his junior, had died in the line of duty fifteen years ago. His son, Patrick, had joined the force, as well.