No Good Deed by Allison Brennan Page A

indulge. If it was safe and he had the time.
    Safety above all else.
    He had no family. He’d been the youngest of four kids, and only son, born and raised in Kern County, California, outside Bakersfield, in a rickety old farmhouse that had once dominated five hundred acres. He’d heard the stories from the time he was a toddler, how his grandfather Adam Dover I had been a successful farmer of alfalfa and cotton. A few bad years had him selling half his land, and then oil. Not on the Dover property—but on the property his grandfather sold. For thirty years, his grandfather and father fought in court as well as paid every cent they had—and money they didn’t—to survey their own land for oil.
    But it was dry. They were no longer interested in farming when their neighbors had won the oil lottery and they wanted some of the wealth, too.
    By the time Adam III was born, they owned the five acres surrounding the farmhouse. His grandfather was long dead, his grandmother a bitchy little woman who complained about everything, his father a drunk who blamed everyone for his problems except his own lazy ass. His mother—God bless her—had run off when Adam was five and never returned.
    That was the story, though Adam had always wondered if his father had killed her and buried her under the rosebushes alongside the crumbling barn.
    Adam knew the only way out was to go to college. His sisters all married out—two to men just like their father, and both of them had babies before they were out of their teens. One sister was like him—saw college as the answer—and she was now a chemist with some biotech company in Virginia. She never looked back, so Adam did the same. He studied hard, got a scholarship to California State University in Long Beach, and had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. Landing in the DEA had been partly luck of the draw—his roommate dragged him to a career seminar, and the guy putting it on made some great points. Steady income, rewarding work, early retirement, pension—everything that Adam wanted because his father never had it.
    The fact that his father hated the government, from the president on down to street cops, was icing on the cake.
    Five years later he killed a man for money—a lot of money—and had been working for the Hunt family ever since.
    In two years he’d be able to retire. He didn’t look his age—he looked damn good for turning fifty-one last month. But he wanted that pension. He wanted the luxury of a steady check as well as the million-plus dollars he’d saved up doing jobs for the Hunts. He could do what he wanted when he wanted and that was all he cared about. He had no wife, no kids that he knew about, but he didn’t particularly like people. He didn’t need a wife to get fucked. He was an attractive guy, girls came to him. He took what he could get but didn’t much worry about it. He’d seen what happened to men—like Tobias—who let their sick fetishes interfere with their self-preservation.
    Adam had more control.
    He looked at the redhead again. She glared at him, her pretty blue eyes both scared and defiant. He hoped he had the opportunity to indulge.
    Two of his men clomped down into the rectory basement. “He’s at the hotel,” one said.
    “How many?”
    “Three—four including Rogan.”
    Four would be difficult. He knew everything there was to know about Kane Rogan, and Rogan worked in small teams. For a simple missing person Adam hadn’t expected Rogan to come down with more than a partner … did he suspect a trap?
    Dover had four men, but he wasn’t alive today because he underestimated his enemy. And Kane Rogan was certainly the enemy. “Call for reinforcements,” Dover said. “And don’t engage yet. Let’s see how fast he traces her steps.” He glanced at the redhead and smiled. She continued to glare at him. He just smiled wider.
    He was not easily baited.
    “And bring me the priest.” Dover glanced over at the altar boy he’d