Must Love Hellhounds

He immediately felt a familiar weight on his lap. Geoff searched for his headset, his fingers moving along the edge of the laptop. “There was a microphone and-Ah, thank you,” he finished when the headset landed in his palm. A convenient thing, that hammerspace.

Maggie’s gaze left him as she pulled onto the street, but he didn’t need her eyes for this. With a combination of touch and voice commands, he searched the computer for the files he wanted… and was mildly surprised when he found them.

“Did they toss my hotel room, take anything?”

“If they did, they weren’t messy about it.” The car slowed. A look through her eyes showed a yellow traffic light before her gaze moved to his profile. “Did the one who drugged you say anything about Miss Blake? Anything about why he’d taken her, or who he was?”

“No. But a few hours before he grabbed me, hotel security e-mailed this to me. It was from the day that Katherine disappeared from her room.” He angled his laptop, showed her the photo he’d pulled up.

Maggie briefly glanced at the screen. Then she looked at the picture again and didn’t take her eyes away.

Through them, Geoff saw the same face a taxi driver had seen just before Geoff had blacked out. The same face someone outside the brownstone had seen, only moments after he’d taken Geoff’s blood and left him handcuffed to a radiator.

He saw the face Maggie did, but he had no idea what she saw when she looked at the picture. A friend, a former lover-an enemy? Or just a man she happened to have worked with in the past?

“This is the hotel elevator. He got off on Katherine’s floor,” Geoff said.

Maggie blinked once, slowly. Her voice was flat. “That’s a good lead. I’ll follow up on it.”

“While I’m flying out of here to safety? You might want to reconsider. When I didn’t check in last night, what do you suppose was the first thing Uncle Colin asked his fiancée to do?” When Maggie didn’t answer, he continued, “I’d bet he asked Savi to pull my phone records, then hack my e-mail accounts. She’d find out what I’d received in the past couple of hours, who contacted me, where I might have gone. And she would have found this picture.”

Maggie’s eyes closed, then opened. She stared ahead at a green light.

“And with Savi’s photographic memory, it wouldn’t take much for her to connect that face with the one in this picture.”

The second photograph was from a political rally in Washington, D.C., only a few months before Maggie had resigned from the CIA. The original photo had been enlarged to show Maggie-slightly blurry but recognizable-standing in the far background, wearing a dark suit and a military-straight bearing. Beside her was the same man from the first photo.

A horn blared behind them. Maggie tore her gaze from the computer screen and drove through the intersection.

Geoff pushed into the hellhound’s mind. Pain spiked through his head, but he was in luck: Sir Pup was watching her, and so Geoff could, too. He could see her indecision, the rapid beat of her pulse, the tension in the faint lines at the corners of her mouth.

But she wasn’t denying a connection to the man. And, thank God, she wasn’t trying to lie to him.

He asked quietly, “How did you know where to find me?”

She hesitated, then said, “I got a tip.”

“From…?”

Her gaze flew to the picture.

Had she forgotten he couldn’t see that silent admission? He wouldn’t remind her. “Do you think he’ll contact you again?”

“Yes.”

“Then you want me with you, Winters. Right now, I’m the only person standing between you and my uncle.”

Her lips firmed, as if in frustration, before curving into a reluctant smile. “Then let’s go find your sister, Mr. Blake.”

Chapter Three

According to the ISP, the e-mail she’d received that morning had been sent from southern New Jersey. Maggie doubted James was still in the same place, but it gave her a direction to go until she had more information.

A direction, but no solid destination-and reaching the same area he’d been in when he’d contacted her meant spending hours on the road. It had been years since Maggie had tried to leave the city on a Friday afternoon, but she doubted they’d be driving faster than a crawl. So there was business to take care of first: food and clothes.

She asked Sir Pup for jeans and one of the shirts they’d taken from Blake’s hotel room. They fell, still neatly folded, into her lap.

She glanced over at Blake. He’d called Ames-Beaumont and spoken briefly with the vampire, and was now carrying out the rest of their conversation via instant messaging-Blake typing, and then listening to the response through his headset.

Anxiety tightened her stomach. Blake had said he’d stand between her and Ames-Beaumont, but it wouldn’t be for Maggie’s sake. Blake wanted to find his sister, and Maggie was their one connection to James. Blake’s offer of protection wouldn’t last any longer than it took to find Katherine.