Maggie Price - The Passion Of Sam Broussard

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To timeless love…

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

He’d come to her in a dream each night for the past two weeks. His voice was low, insistent, ripe with warning. And always, the words slipped away, becoming only a hazy memory when she woke.

His blue eyes glittered down at her while his rough hands steadied her, stroking her bare flesh. She sensed he was dangerous, yet she clung to him, reveling in the sinewed, muscled feel of him between her thighs.

Ghostly moonlight broke through the clouds, seeped through the bedroom windows. Tonight, as all others, the light was too weak to illuminate his face—all she had ever seen was the intense, heated blue of his eyes. Eyes that stayed locked with hers as he took her. Possessed her.

Made her his.

All at once, the moonlight hazed over. The air went cold, bringing with it a sharp terror….

“No!”

With the scream still tearing at her throat, Elizabeth Scott shot up in bed. Her fingers clutched reflexively at the cover while she clawed her way through the slippery edges of the dream and battled the icy fear that always came back with her.

She dragged in deep gulps of the night air, knowing that the fear would soon ebb. It always did after the murky dream that began with pleasure and ended on the brink of panic.

She waited while her blood cooled and the last remnants of completion throbbed inside her. He’d spoken to her—she was sure of that—but now, as always, she couldn’t pull his words from her memory. Experience had also taught her that if she slid her hands along her inner thighs there would be no trace of him left there. How could there be when his presence had been only a dream? A dream during which she could swear she’d engaged in hot, passionate sex with a man she didn’t know but whose body was as familiar to her as her own.

She’d given up denying she wanted the apparition she’d tagged Dream Lover. In truth, she lusted for the man whose face she had never fully glimpsed.

“Who are you?” she whispered and dragged a pillow over her face in a failed attempt to block her thoughts.

Suspicion she was going bonkers wasn’t a quality prized by a police detective who had recently snagged a transfer to the Oklahoma City P.D.’s new cold case office. Her assignment involved uncountable hours spent poring over individual case files yellowed with age and filled with hopelessness. Ferreting out leads that had lain dormant for years required a clear mind and absolute concentration. How could she analyze facts and unearth leads when all logic was slowly eroding from her life?

“Holy hell,” she muttered against the pillow.

She was convinced the dream was payback. Some cosmic retribution for hurting the man she’d been so sure she loved. And had planned to marry…twice!

After her second attempt at walking down the aisle failed, her engagement went south. That same night, Dream Lover first appeared, sweeping her away in a fantasy far more erotic than anything she’d experienced while awake.

“Dammit!” Liz flung the pillow away, kicked aside the tangled sheets and rose. Jerking on her robe, she headed downstairs and stalked across her tenth-floor loft. The hardwood floor felt cool against her bare feet as she stood before the glass door that opened off the balcony. Outside, the sky was a dark, cobalt-blue bowl studded with diamonds. It would be hours before dawn broke over Reunion Square. Hours before Liz was due at the police department, her first day back since her life turned upside down and Dream Lover made his initial visit.

She clenched her fists, hating the sense she was losing her grip on the control over her life she’d worked so hard to gain. That’s what came from having been abandoned when she was a week old, then flung into the chaos of foster care. She liked sitting in the driver’s seat, steering her life in the direction she chose. Certainly it was necessary once in a while to change the pattern of things—she wasn’t rigid. But her inability to propel herself down the aisle, then having her sleep taken over by some hot-blooded hunk who seemed to be trying to deliver some sort of warning she couldn’t remember jarred every plan she’d made for her future.

And how totally insane did that all sound?

“He’s all in your head,” she muttered, dragging a hand through her long hair. She had other things to think about, she reminded herself. Although she’d been off duty for the past two weeks she had immersed herself in the details of a cold case homicide of a young woman in which a recently recovered automatic was the murder weapon. The Louisiana cop who’d found the weapon was due in her office this morning to transfer the automatic into her possession.

Even as that quiet assurance escaped her lips, an awareness vibrated in her nerves. And she knew, beyond all reason, all logic, that the man who swept her nightly into a dark storm of feelings did not come to her in a dream.

He was a memory.

“Looks like Lizzie’s running late this morning.”

“When I called Sergeant Scott, she said she would meet me in her office.” Sam Broussard scowled at the short, balding detective who’d led him to the closed door at one end of a murky basement corridor in the Oklahoma City P.D.’s headquarters building. “Eight o’clock sharp.”

The cop who’d introduced himself as Kostka slid a key into the door’s lock and swung it open, releasing a whiff of musty air into the hallway. The space beyond the door reminded Sam of a windowless black cave.

It matched his dark mood.

“When did Lizzie make that appointment with you?” Kostka asked while reaching in and flipping on the office’s overhead lights.

“I called her from Shreveport two weeks ago today,” Sam answered, wondering why the hell that mattered. “She said she was flying to Vegas that afternoon to get married, and would be back at work this morning.”

Which was the start of the first leave time Sam had taken since the tragedy that had thrown his world out of whack. Time off his lieutenant had ordered him to take.

Kostka rubbed his double chin. “That’d explain it.”

“Explain what?”

“Lizzie’s experienced a few…personal complications lately.” Kostka stuck a hitchhikerlike thumb toward the office. “Why don’t you get settled while I give her a call?”

Sam remained in the dim corridor while his narrowed gaze took in the neat-as-a-pin desk in the cubbyhole-size office, its walls lined with battered black filing cabinets. He doubted Liz Scott’s personal complications could get anywhere near to the damnable ones he’d endured. Even after two and a half years the guilt still ate at him like acid.

The one thing—the only thing—that had eased that searing ache was the intense edginess he felt a month ago when he recovered the .45 Colt.