Dangerous by Diana Palmer

squared his shoulders. “Winnie’s got a crush on me. She’s too young to feel anything stronger than that,” he said, dismissing her feelings. “She’d be thrilled to have a marriage license in her hands, even if it was for only a couple of weeks. We’d solve the case, get an annulment and go back to our own lives.”
    “Mac…!”
    “Like a date, only we’d live together, briefly.”
    “She has a brother who eats live snakes,” Jon shot back. “I know Boone Sinclair. You do not want him on your neck. He was spec ops in Iraq, and he has skills that could match yours. He’s very protective of his sister.”
    “I’m not going to hurt Winnie,” Kilraven raged. “For God’s sake, we’ll have a vacation together. What’s sinister about that?”
    “A vacation where you’ll troll her as bait to catch the senator’s wife.”
    “You said we can’t get her to talk because we’re men. Okay. Winnie’s a female.”
    “You don’t even know if she’ll do it,” Jon said. “But if you ask her, for God’s sake, tell her the truth. And tell her it’s risky. Because it is. You could be putting her life on the line.”
    “Just for talking to a senator’s wife?” he scoffed. “Don’t be so alarmist.”
    “I have to be. You’re not thinking straight. You’re too bull-headed about this case to be logical.”
    “And you’re too logical to feel revenge.”
    Jon shook his head. “No, I’m not. I saw them, too,” he added quietly. “Melly was a very special child. I may not have liked her mother, but I loved her. Just as you did. I don’t want somebody to get away with killing her, either.”
    Kilraven relaxed, but only a little. “I’ll talk to Winnie.”
    “Do that. But be honest. Okay?”
    “Okay.”

    A LL THE WAY TO J ACOBSVILLE , he was thinking of ways to sell Winnie on the idea without telling her too much. Jon was all business, but Kilraven’s heart was bleeding all over again from the memory of what he’d seen that long-ago rainy night when he intercepted a homicide call and found his family dead. He’d had nightmares for years. He heard Melly call for him, scream for him to save her, and he tried to get up, but he was held down by ropes and he couldn’t get loose. The same dream, night after night, with her screams in his ears.
    He’d dived headfirst into a whiskey bottle for several weeks afterward. Jon had saved him from going even further downhill by getting him into a treatment facility. Fortunately, his bosses had understood his behavior. Counseling and time off had given him the opportunity to pretend to the world that he was over the deaths, well-adjusted and ready to go back to work. Nothing was further from the truth, but he learned to hide his feelings. He was good at it by now.
    He’d taken some of the most dangerous jobs he could find in a futile effort to get the horrible pictures out of his mind. The CIA had taken him on with reservations, but discovered that he was an asset with his knowledge of foreign languages. Like his brother, Jon, he spoke Farsi and several Arabic dialects, in addition to Spanish, French, Russian, German and even Lakota Sioux. If he wore colored contacts, he was olive-skinned and dark-eyed enough to pass for someone Middle Eastern, and he had, working covertly and sometimes with foreign governments to ferret out information vital to national security.
    His specialty had become kidnapping cases, which was why he’d gone undercover in Jacobsville about the time General Emilio Machado went missing and showed up in Mexico. The general had nabbed first Gracie Marsh and then Jason Pendleton in an effort to regain his government in South America. He was friendly to the U.S. and not the same sort of tyrant who held power there, now. Kilraven had been looking for him, but hadn’t realized where he was until he got involved with Rodrigo Ramirez and the DEA on a drug case. And voilà, there was Machado. He’d solved that case.
    Now he had something much