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“it’s better than nothing.”
    “I’ll come too,” Marissa said. “The family is going to need someone.”
    “Took my next words out of my mouth, Doc,” Tim said with a toothy grin.
    Marissa hadn’t realized that going to the scene of the missing child meant she would be forced to ride shotgun with the very officer she’d been trying to avoid for weeks. She supposed she could have taken her own car, but then he would have known just how much he was getting to her and she refused to give him the satisfaction. Let him stew and wonder, the little bastard. She was tired of this whole situation. Tired of having her sleep ruined every single night because he had wormed his way into her subconscious. And because of that disturbed sleep, she was just plain tired.
    In the backseat Sargent was pacing back and forth, getting on her nerves with his whining. Jackson must have noticed her tension because he said, “He knows something is up.”
    “I imagine the siren is a dead giveaway,” she said dryly.
    “It is, actually, even though he hasn’t got too much experience with it. We’ve exposed him to it several times already to get him used to the sound, and he associates it with training, which is exciting and rewarding as far as he’s concerned.”
    Marissa stole a glance at him. Although he was trying to adopt a laissez-faire attitude, he had a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. She wished she could read his mind and figure out why. Was it anxiety about working in the field for the first time with a new dog since Chico’s death? Was it tension from the interrupted moment of sensuality between them that still had her heart beating wildly?
    She should have been offended. She should have slapped his face off in a single blow. But she hadn’t. She had been paralyzed as his heated suggestion caused herto get weak and wet in all of a heartbeat. And she had been terrified that he would know it. He seemed to perceive a lot of things lately. Ever since …
    She shook herself mentally and then forced herself to converse with him, trying to prove to herself that he didn’t rattle her in the least.
    “I heard your sister is getting married,” she blurted out—an obvious stumble for conversation.
    He smiled with one side of his mouth, his entire face changing from a guarded expression to one so warm that it peeled years away from him.
    “Yes. To Vincent Marzak.”
    The man who had “kidnapped” his sister three weeks ago. Only it had turned out to be just a very big misunderstanding. She didn’t know all the details … she just remembered Jackson apologizing to everyone for his behavior and then eating a lot of crow and taking a lot of shit from the brotherhood of the SPD. There was very little room for error in an environment like the one they worked in. If you made mistakes you paid for it. But Jackson had wit of Random House, Inc.n when hstood the weeks of ribbing and practical jokes far better than she would have expected from him, considering the short fuse he’d been displaying at the time of the incident.
    But it was like … it was as if she were dealing with an entirely different man. As though the incident with his sister had flipped some kind of switch inside of him that made him recognize where he had been coming up short … or perhaps it finally forced him to reconcile with the recent loss he’d suffered.
    Or so she had thought. But that move a few minutes ago of trying to throw her off balance and disturb her line of concern when he had called Sargent by Chico’s name, that was a classic avoidance maneuver. He was throwing up a smoke screen of sex and inappropriatenessto obscure her focus on the one thing he didn’t want to address.
    Ahhh … so that was it
, she thought. The ultimatum he’d given her had been his way of trying to cut off her access into his mind and emotions! Why hadn’t she seen it before?
    Because a little part of you wanted it to be genuine …
    Marissa ignored