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important people hostage?
    “Caroline.” Ware spaced her name out: Car-o-line. Just like he had always done. She refused to acknowledge the shiver that sexy drawl sent down her spine. God, between his presence and her father’s, this was going to be the job from hell, and she found herself wishing that anyone else had been on call tonight. But as the junior negotiator, she got the crappiest shifts, so here she was. Recalculating quickly, she had to throw the approach she had been planning to use with the perp out the window. Ware knew too much about her, too much about the way cops worked, too much about how hostage negotiation generally went down. She was going to have to go with her gut and what she knew about him, improvising on the fly. He continued, “Been a long time, cher.”
    Cher, which he pronounced shah as they did back in the bayous, meant dear or sweetheart. He’d called her that sometimes when she’d come down in the middle of the night to watch TV with him while he was on guard duty in the rented house where her family had been holed up; he’d called her that when he’d found her, trembling and upset, huddled on the staircase landing one night after her parents had had yet another terrible fight, and she’d ended up confiding to him the truth about how her father treated his family; he’d called her that on the night when she’d plopped her shorty-nightgown–clad self on his lap, twined her arms around his neck, and kissed him. He’d kissed her back for a hot, memorable moment, after which he’d stood up with her, carried her through the sliding glass doors to the patio, and dumped her unceremoniously into the swimming pool.
    At the time, she’d been outraged, furious—and humiliated. Much as she hated to admit it, the memory still stung.
    Luckily—unless he was the kind of guy who bragged about his conquests, and she didn’t think he was, or she would have heard—no one knew about that mortifying episode except the two of them.
    No one knew that there had ever been any kind of personal relationship between them.
    But it made what she was trying to accomplish here just that much more complicated. Firmly she pushed that tiny little bit of near-forgotten history out of her mind.
    Here, tonight, she was a police negotiator and he was a perp, and that was it. Lives were on the line.
    “Why are you doing this, Detective?” Her tone was brisk and businesslike as she rephrased her previous question slightly, made it blunter in hopes that she would get an equally blunt response. He’d located the camera, which was somewhere above him and to his left: she knew because he was looking directly into it. His dark eyes seemed to burn into hers.
    He said, “First of all, I want this house cleared. Nobody in it outside this room. If I even think there’s somebody else inside, we’re going to have a problem.”
    “That’s not an answer,” Caroline replied. “Help me to understand so that I can help you.”
    Ware looked impatient. “You don’t need to understand. And if you want to help me, just do what I tell you.”
    Knowing that pushing him could prove counterproductive and rebound on the hostages, Caroline didn’t persist. Instead she released the talk button on the receiver and glanced at Dixon, who shrugged and said, “I got people checking him out. We know he’s got a clean record. All I can tell you at this point is, something must have happened recently to send him over the edge.”
    “You know I mean it about getting the house cleared out, right, Caroline?” Ware’s tone made it an implicit threat.
    She pressed the talk button. “Yes, I know,” she replied in her best conciliatory tone. “The house is being cleared. What else can we do for you?”
    Ware’s voice was hard. “A kid I know was arrested earlier tonight. I want him out of jail. Hollis Bayard.”
    Caroline shot a quick glance at Dixon, who shook his head: don’t know anything about who that is . He glanced at her