Amanda Stevens - Gallagher Justice

Justice is in her blood...

Fiona Gallagher hails from a long line of Chicago lawmen, and has fulfilled her heritage as a prosecutor, driven to put away the slime of the streets. But now she’s going head-to-head with the police force, on the trail of a cop gone bad…

Detective Ray Doggett is hell-bent on preventing Fiona from getting in too deep. The determined prosecutor has gotten too close to exposing the truth about the crime ring…and about him. Forcibly attracted to Fiona, he’d been sent undercover to investigate corruption—not fall in love. That is far too dangerous…for both of them.

Previously published.

Gallagher Justice

Amanda Stevens

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

Also available from Amanda Stevens

Mira Books

The Graveyard Queen Series

The KingdomThe RestorerThe Prophet and coming in 2016 The Kingdom

Harlequin Intrigue

The Kingsley Baby SeriesThe Long-Lost HeirThe Brother’s WifeThe Hero’s Son

Gallagher Justice Series

The Littlest Witness

Secret Admirer

Forbidden LoverGallagher Justice

Eden’s Children SeriesThe InnocentThe TemptedThe Forgiven

Quantum Men SeriesHis Mysterious WaysSilent StormSecret Passage

Stranger in ParadiseA Baby’s CryA Man of SecretsThe Second Mrs. Malone

Somebody’s Baby

Lover, Stranger

The Bodyguard’s AssignmentNighttime GuardianSecret Sanctuary

Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.comfor more titles

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

IT WASN’T A NOISE THAT awakened Fiona Gallagher, but a scent. A sultry, provocative fragrance that carried a subtle note of sandalwood.

She tried to rouse herself to investigate, but the dream kept pulling her back under.

“You always smell so good.”

He tangled his hands in her hair. “How good?”

She looked up with a smile and then showed him . Heart pounding, Fiona bolted upright in bed, her frantic gaze searching the far recesses of the room. It was dark, but enough light filtered in from the street that she could make out all the corners, all the nooks and crannies.

Nothing stirred, not so much as a ghost. She was alone, safe and sound in her second-floor apartment protected from intruders by a series of locks and dead bolts her brother, Tony, had helped her install when she’d first moved in six years ago. No one could get in. She was fine.

Except...she wasn’t fine. She’d been dreaming about David again, dreaming she was still in love with him. That only happened these days when she was under a lot of stress.

The DeMarco case had brought back the nightmares, she thought wearily. As a prosecutor for the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office, Fiona had come face-to-face with evil before, more times than she cared to remember. But there was something about Vince DeMarco’s eyes... the way he looked at her...that sly smile...

There was something about him that reminded her of David.

Falling back against the pillows, she wiped a hand across her brow. Seven years since that night and David Mackenzie still had a hold on her, one so powerful that sometimes, during moments of weakness, she imagined his scent in her apartment. Heard his voice over her telephone. Saw his smile on every defendant.

Even fully awake now, she could still smell his cologne, but she knew it wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. She and her therapist had hashed out her hallucinations a long time ago. “The scent is symbolic, Fiona. Not of David, but of your guilt.”

Her guilt smelled like sandalwood. Good to know.

Realizing she would never fall back asleep now, Fiona got up and went into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. Pressing the towel against her skin, she studied her reflection in the mirror. Outwardly she looked the same as she always had, but deep inside, where all her dark secrets lay hidden, she’d undergone a drastic metamorphosis.

You can’t go through what you did and expect to walk away unchanged , Dr. Westfield had warned her.

She couldn’t expect to ever have a normal relationship again, either, but then, relationships were overrated in Fiona’s opinion. She had her cat, she had her career, she had HBO. What more did a girl need really?

Flipping off the light, she returned to her bedroom long enough to pull on a robe over her pajamas, then she padded on bare feet down the hallway to the living room. Her apartment was small, cramped and drafty, with lots of creaking floorboards and noisy water pipes, but Fiona didn’t mind. The quiet, once-elegant neighborhood on the Near North Side of Chicago with its well-kept lawns and shady streets more than made up for the inconveniences.

And it was a long way from Bridgeport, she reminded herself ruefully as she glanced out the window at the fog-shrouded street below her. Maybe not in miles, but in culture and attitude.

Her parents had grown up in the same blue-collar neighborhood on the South Side where they still lived in the same house they’d bought when they first married. They had the same neighbors, the same circle of acquaintances, the same values and expectations. They’d raised four kids in that neighborhood, and two of Fiona’s brothers had moved only a few blocks away from the family home.

By contrast, the ambitious, thirtysomething professionals who flocked to the renovated brownstones in Fiona’s neighborhood guarded their privacy like rabid rottweilers. She had a nodding acquaintance with only a handful, knew even fewer by name. Like her, most of them came home late—briefcase in one hand, cell phone clutched in the other—to close themselves off from the rest of the world until it was time again to rush off to work the next morning.

There were hardly any families in the neighborhood, no children playing on the stoops. The streets were sometimes almost unnaturally quiet, and if this deepened Fiona’s sense of isolation and the occasional bout of loneliness, well, there was also no one there who knew about David. No one to look out their front window when she drove home each night to shake their heads and wonder how such a nice girl like Fiona Gallagher, someone with her brains and education, the daughter of a cop , no less, could have fallen in love with a killer.

In their own way, though, they were still proud of Fiona in the old neighborhood. She was a rising star in the State’s Attorney’s office, a tough, bare-knuckles prosecutor who fought crime just as ferociously as she battled her inner demons. In the past six years, she’d won every major case, including a high-profile murder trial that had put her on the radar of Chicago politics.