Read Mackenzie's Magic for Free Online Page B

backup.
    "Your partner should be close by," she said. "Am I right?"
    His eyebrows lifted in faint surprise; then he smiled. "In the parking lot. He got into position an hour or so after we got here. No one’s going to take us by surprise."
    If his partner hadn’t been on watch, Maris realized, MacNeil never would have relaxed his guard enough to be in bed with her or let himself be distracted by the sexual attraction between them. Still, she was certain he hadn’t slept but had remained awake in case his partner signaled him.
    "What’s his name? What does he look like? I need to be able to tell the good guys from the bad."
    "Dean Pearsall. He’s five-eleven, skinny, dark hair and eyes, receding hairline. He’s from Maine. You can’t miss the accent."
    "It’s cold out there," she said. "He must be frozen."
    "Like I said, he’s from Maine. This is nothing new to him. He has a thermos of coffee, and he lets the car run enough to keep the frost off the windshield, so he can see."
    "Won’t that be a dead giveaway, no frost on the car?"
    "Only if someone knows how long the car has been there, and it isn’t a detail most people notice." He picked up his jeans and stepped into them, never taking his eyes off her as he considered the somewhat startling workings of her nimble brain. "Why did you think of it?"
    She gave him a sweet smile, her mother’s smile. "You’ll understand when you meet my family." Then she went into the bathroom and closed the door.
    Her smile faded immediately once she was alone. Though she fully realized and accepted the wisdom of not interfering with a trained professional and his partner, she was also sharply aware that plans could go wrong and people could get hurt. It happened, no matter how good or careful someone was. Chance had been wounded several times; he always tried to keep it from their mother, but somehow Mary always sensed when he’d been hurt, and Maris did, too. She could feel it deep inside, in a secret place that only those she loved had managed to touch. She had been almost insane with fear that time when Zane was nearly killed rescuing Barrie from terrorists in Libya, until she saw him for herself and felt his steely life force undiminished.
    It had happened to Zane, and he was the best planner in the business. In fact, expecting things to go wrong was one of the things that made Zane so good at what he did. There was always a wild card in the deck, he said, and she had to be prepared for it, no matter how it was played.
    Her advantages were that she was trained in self-defense, was a very good shot, and knew more about battle tactics than anyone could expect. On the other hand, her pistol was in her cottage, so she was unarmed, unless she could talk MacNeil into giving her a weapon. Considering how implacable his expression had been, she didn’t think she had much chance of that. She was also concussed, and though the headache had lessened and she was feeling better now, she wasn’t certain how well she could function if the situation called for fast movement. The fact that her memory hadn’t returned was worrisome; the injury could be more severe than she’d initally thought, even though her other symptoms had lessened.
    Who had hit her? Why was someone trying to kill Sole Pleasure? Damn it, if only she could remember!
    She wrapped a towel around her head to keep her hair dry and stood under a lukewarm spray of water, going over and over the parts she remembered, as if she could badger her bruised brain into giving up its secrets. Everything had been normal when she went back to the stables after lunch. It had been after dark, say around six or six-thirty, when she stumbled across MacNeil. Sometime during those five hours she had learned that Sole Pleasure was in danger and either surprised someone trying to kill him or confronted the person beforehand and earned herself a knock on the head.
    It didn’t make sense, but the Stonichers had to be behind the threat to their