Traitorous Attraction (23 page)

With Cade in it, no less.

Cade expected to see some punk-ass kid, maybe two, with cigarettes hanging loosely from their lips and leaving ash all over his vintage bench seat, out for a joyride with a six-pack of cheap beer. Instead, he saw the clean profile of a woman, light brown hair scraped back in a bobbing ponytail that brushed her back below her shoulder blades, and in the seat next to her wobbled a sack of groceries.

Groceries!

Some redneck soccer mom had stolen his truck. Maybe she was drunk already, though it wasn’t even ten in the morning, and confused which truck in the parking lot was hers.

Blood dripped from his jaw onto his neck. Cade reached into his back pocket for a bandanna. Blotting, he looked at the cloth and saw the bright blossom of red there. Scalp wound. A tentative probe with his fingertips showed the cut was neither long nor deep, though it felt tender and was already swelling. The woman had caught him completely off guard. It shouldn’t have happened. His personal radar should have been better. He was a K-9 deputy, for crying out loud. It was his job to pay attention. Just because he was on vacation was no reason to check his brain at the door.

What was worse, he knew not to leave his keys in and the engine running, even if it was only going to be for the two minutes he was feeding Mort. Talk about putting on his thinking cap.... He’d grown soft in the two years since he’d had to leave undercover work at the Marion County Sheriff’s Department after his accident. It was disturbing to realize how much he’d come to depend on Mort’s alertness to supplement his own training, awareness and common sense. Cade glared at the woman impotently, peering past her at the speedometer needle as it crept up and up. He watched her hands shaking on the steering wheel. She was all over the damned road. Drunk, high or terrified by what she’d done?

Staying low, not wanting her to glance in the rearview and see even a shadow of him crouching in the pickup’s bed, Cade shifted toward the tailgate again, edging past his camping gear and fishing tackle, cooler, bedroll and tools. He leaned out cautiously, studied the concrete of the interstate flashing by at high speed beneath him and brought the flap of the truck’s canopy down. He latched it securely to shut out the boil of the truck’s slipstream, then glanced over his shoulder to see if she’d noticed. Her face was still turned toward the front, and she was scooted toward the wheel as if she hadn’t bothered to pull the bench seat forward to accommodate her height.

Still at the back of the bed, Cade settled low and opened his zippered duffel. The 9mm Beretta waited there in its pocket holster, safety on, with a full clip and a bullet chambered. He stuck it in the back of his jeans, and slipped a couple of heavy-duty cable ties out of the same bag. He formed them into a two-link chain before settling low again, in case she pulled another thank-you-ma’am across the roadway. Not much he could do at the moment, but by God, when she stopped—he’d be ready.

She’d stolen the wrong truck.

Copyright © 2014 by Melody Sanders

ISBN-13: 9781460331811

TRAITOROUS ATTRACTION

Copyright © 2014 by C.J. Miller

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