Tracy Montoya - Maximum Security

She’d meant the words to be innocent, but as he reached out to take the container from her, his hands overlapped hers. Whether by accident or design, she didn’t know. She didn’t care.

Time stopped.

The comfort Maggie had felt in Billy Corrigan’s presence during the past four days was replaced by something different, something more. Attraction wrapped around her like a cloud of incense—seductive, heady, dangerous. She raised her head and met his eyes, which had turned from ice-gray to the color of a mountain lake. Then her gaze went to his mouth.

He took his hands away. She blinked and stepped back as the moment was broken.

She couldn’t possibly afford to get involved with him when everyone around her seemed to wind up dead.

Dear Harlequin Intrigue Reader,

At Harlequin Intrigue we have much to look forward to as we ring in a brand-new year. Case in point—all of our romantic suspense selections this month are fraught with edge-of-your-seat danger, electrifying romance and thrilling excitement. So hang on!

Reader favorite Debra Webb spins the next installment in her popular series COLBY AGENCY. Cries in the Night spotlights a mother so desperate to track down her missing child that she joins forces with the unforgettable man from her past.

Unsanctioned Memories by Julie Miller—the next offering in THE TAYLOR CLAN—packs a powerful punch as a vengeance-seeking FBI agent opens his heart to the achingly vulnerable lone witness who can lead him to a cold-blooded killer…. Looking for a provocative mystery with a royal twist? Then expect to be seduced by Jacqueline Diamond in Sheikh Surrender.

We welcome two talented debut authors to Harlequin Intrigue this month. Tracy Montoya weaves a chilling mystery in Maximum Security, and the gripping Concealed Weapon by Susan Peterson is part of our BACHELORS AT LARGE promotion.

Finally this month, Kasi Blake returns to Harlequin Intrigue with Borrowed Identity. This gothic mystery will keep you guessing when a groggy bride stumbles upon a grisly murder on her wedding night. But are her eyes deceiving her when her “slain” groom appears alive and well in a flash of lightning?

It promises to be quite a year at Harlequin Intrigue….

Enjoy!

Denise O’Sullivan

Senior Editor

Harlequin Intrigue

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Debut Intrigue author Tracy Montoya is a magazine editor for a nonprofit outfit in Washington, D.C., though at present she’s telecommuting from her house in Seoul, Korea. She lives with a psychotic cat, a lovable yet daft Lhasa apso and a husband who’s turned their home into the Island of Lost/Broken/Strange-Looking Antiques. A member of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and the Society of Environmental Journalists, Tracy has written about everything from Booker Prize–winning poet Martín Espada to socially responsible mutual funds to soap opera summits. Her articles have appeared in a variety of publications, such as Hope, Utne Reader, Satya, YES!, Natural Home and New York Naturally. Prior to launching her journalism career, she taught in an underresourced school in Louisiana through the AmeriCorps Teach for America program.

Tracy holds a master’s degree in English literature from Boston College and a B.A. in the same from St. Mary’s University. When she’s not writing, she likes to scuba dive, forget to go to kickboxing class, wallow in bed with a good book, or get out her new guitar with a group of friends and pretend she’s Suzanne Vega.

She loves to hear from readers—e-mail

TracyMontoya@aol.com or visit

www.tracymontoya.com.

Maggie Reyes—A bestselling true-crime writer, Maggie has served on criminal task forces because of her first-rate research and sharp memory for details. Now one of her past subjects—an infamous serial killer—has made her the object of his brutal fixation.

Billy Corrigan—The loner FBI agent is going outside his investigative territory to bring down the man who murdered his sister. His search for vengeance leads him to the one woman who survived the vicious killer’s obsession.

The Surgeon—Always one step ahead of the authorities, this psychopath has stalked and murdered women across four states. Now he’s set his focus entirely on one woman—and the only thing standing between him and Maggie Reyes is a rogue FBI agent with a taste for revenge.

Adriana Torres—A friend from Maggie’s college days, Adriana has done everything she can for the past eighteen months to keep Maggie hidden from the Surgeon—but will her selflessness put her life in jeopardy?

James Brentwood—Adriana’s lover, local police detective James Brentwood is willing to put his own life on the line to stop the man who murdered nine women from killing again.

Elizabeth Borkowski—James Brentwood’s wisecracking partner, she knows Billy from way back. The no-nonsense detective wants to help Maggie, but she wonders whether or not to believe the woman’s unlikely tale of a serial killer who stalks across state lines.

To Tom and Ana Rysavy.

Thank you for that rarest of gifts—a truly wonderful childhood.

(Well, except for that whole sharing one bottle of soda thing, but we’ll just not mention it.)

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

Epilogue

He was coming for her.

The now-familiar ache of dread crept through her body as Maggie Reyes traced her finger around the photo of the smilng girl’s face—a photo that now graced the front page of the Monterey County Herald with the words victim and homicide buried in the caption. Four murders in four states in four months. And now he was only minutes away.

Why don’t you run?

Maggie placed her palms flat on her desk and pushed herself up to a standing position. It was funny, even though her head was telling her to run and the fear in her heart robbed her of sleep every night, that odd sense of security she always felt in her cousin Esme’s Monterey beach home was still there. Raising her eyes to the map of the United States above her, Maggie fished a red-tipped thumbtack out of the wooden caddy meticulously placed in the upper left corner of the desk. Little Rock. St. Louis. Denver. All three cities had red tacks plunged through the center of their black dots on the map. And they had fat, corresponding files in the metal cabinet to her left, filled with articles from the dozens of newspapers she subscribed to, printouts from database searches, posts from a few true-crime listservs and other odds and ends pertaining to the cases. In one swift motion, Maggie pushed the fourth tack through Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, releasing the breath she’d been holding as she did so.

Carmel, sister city to Monterey, which she now called home.

Do you wanna live forever, Maggie?

Ignoring the persistent whisper inside her head, she turned her back on the map and padded across the plush Berber rug to the window seat in what she had come to think of as “her” office, where she could watch the white-capped waves break against the jagged black rocks jutting up toward the sky like sentinels. Monterey, California, was a beautiful, sunny city, except for in a few areas along the water that had their own peculiar micro-climates. The house Maggie lived in lay smack in the middle of one of them and was always enveloped in fog and mist. Not that it really mattered.