Page 1 of Playing With Love

CHAPTER ONE

“He’s screwing this up,” I grumbled.

“Liza.”

“Look at her, Frank.” I pointed at the observation window. “He’s losing her.”

Or more to the point, he’d already lost her, and if the detective didn’t think fast, Allyson Diamond would walk despite her sister Jessica’s continued efforts to get her sister to talk.

The woman was shifting in the metal chair beside her sister, staring at the paper takeaway cup of shitty police station coffee in front of her and no longer making eye contact with the detective across the table.

Why Allyson was in an interrogation room was beyond me. She should’ve been invited into an office and given something better than the sludge from the break room.

“Where’s Phoenix Kent?” I asked.

I was back in Georgia. Not my favorite place to be in the middle of summer and less so when the Peach State was amid a heat wave that made vacationing in hell a better destination. The only good thing about being back in Hollow Point was I knew two detectives at the six-twenty-eight—Phoenix Kent and Dalton Neary.

Phoenix or Dalton would have a better chance of coaxing the scared woman to talk.

“Don’t know,” Frank told me.

“When’s this expert supposed to be here?”

“Jesus, Liza, he’s on his way.”

This wasn’t the first time I’d had fantasies about punching my asshole partner in the face. But this was the first time I was dangerously close to acting on it.

“Her body language is all wrong,” I pointed out. “She’s having second thoughts.”

“So? Not our problem. We shouldn’t even be here. We’re ATF not DEA.”

Amendment: lazy asshole partner.

“Did you bother reading the brief?”

Frank’s angry eyes narrowed. An intimidation tactic I’d learned early on not to pay attention to. Frank thought he was better than me, he knew more than me, and he was older and wiser than me. He was incorrect on all fronts. The man was burnt out. He should’ve put in for a desk job years ago, but his ego wouldn’t let him leave the field. Now I was stuck with him until I could pawn him off onto someone else. I didn’t know a single ATF agent who liked Frank. Worse, I didn’t know anyone who respected him.

“I was on the same two-hour flight you were on,” he noted.

That meant no, he hadn’t read it. At best, he’d skimmed it because if he’d actually read the damn thing, he’d know why we were there.

Nu Dawn.

We needed information and Allyson Diamond might be our golden ticket.

Damn.

“We can’t wait, Frank. She’s gonna…” I trailed off when Allyson pushed her chair back from the metal table.

Dammit.

“I’m going in there.”

“Shit, Liza, you can’t.”

Wrong.

Well, technically he was right. I didn’t have authorization to participate—not yet anyway. Allyson had yet to say much of anything and she certainly hadn’t mentioned the presence of weapons on the grounds of the fifty-acre compound owned by Nu Dawn.