Insatiable Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

forests.
    She shivered.
    She wasn’t a child anymore or a fanciful teenager. This time she’d heed her grandmother’s warning and protect herself from Vincent.
    Troubling thoughts pounded at Vincent as he drove through the Smokies to Eerie, Tennessee. The mountain ridges jutted around the ghostlike town like soldiers guarding an ancient tomb, a tomb of lost souls and malevolence.
    McLaughlin’s words about relaxing while he was here taunted him. This was not a place to relax—it was a place that bred trouble.
    Storm clouds rumbled above the tall ridges, the spiked, jagged cliffs offering the perfect place for a madman to hide. Childhood memories of hiking through a similar area flashed back, making him break out in a sweat.
    The insufferable heat choked him, the crunch of leaves and animals scurrying for safety echoing in his head. He inhaled the loamy scent of the earth, the rotting vegetation, the stench of an animal’s blood where nearby vultures gnawed at the carcass already too mauled to identify. He heard his father’s breath coaxing him on, driving him into the woods, teaching him to aim at his target, telling him to shoot.
    Kill or be killed . . .
    He banished the memory. The past did not matter now.
    He was here to do a job, and he’d do it, then go home and on to the next case.
    But a frisson of anxiety ripped through him. He had lived in these mountains near Eerie when he was young, then in that juvenile facility on the other side of the Black Forest as a teenager. Would people here remember him?
    Praying they didn’t, he wheeled into the police station entrance and parked, dust spewing from his boots as he strode into the mud-splattered adobe building. This meeting would be a waste of time. Time he’d never get back.
    Time he could have used on a
real
case, not on speculations made by a psychic.
    A short, burly man with wiry graying hair lumbered up from behind a metal desk, a cup of coffee in one stubby hand. “Sheriff Dwayne Waller. Thank you for coming. Do you remember me, Valtrez?”
    Vincent gritted his teeth. Hell, yeah, he did. Waller had been young and cocky years ago, had come out to his house on a couple of domestic calls. “Yes. That was a long time ago.”
And I’m not my father.
    They shook hands, then the sheriff gestured for Vincent to follow him into a cramped, sweltering office overflowing with paperwork, dirty coffee cups, and Dolly Parton memorabilia. The aroma of bacon filled the air, along with strong chicory coffee.
    Vincent fought a caustic remark, but the comment died on his tongue as his gaze shot to the woman seated in one of the caned straight-back chairs to the side. Damn.
    Clarissa.
    Not a frail-looking kid any more.
    Yet those eyes . . . they were still huge in her heart- shaped face. Soft. Troubled. Mysterious. The color of burnt copper.
    She stared up at him with a fierce expression of bravado, like an enemy warrior braced for attack.
    Except this soldier had curly auburn hair that cascaded over slender shoulders. Skin like hot honey. And a body that was sinfully curvaceous.
    His mouth watered as he pictured the womanly Clarissa sprawled beneath him, naked and begging him to bed her.
    He had a habit of imagining a woman naked the first time he saw her. Liked to guess at the color of her nipples. Clarissa would have large areolas, golden brown tipped in bronze. He could almost see them hardening beneath his gaze, imagined wetting them with his tongue.
    He hadn’t believed she could talk to ghosts when he was young. Then she’d freaked him out when she’d offered to commune with the spirits to see if his mother had passed . . .
    Time to get this meeting over with. He cleared his throat. “Clarissa?”
    Her gaze remained steady, soulful like an exotic gypsy’s, as she extended her delicate hand. “Special Agent Valtrez.”
    He clenched his jaw as he accepted the gesture. Her palm would have fit inside his hand twice, her skin soft next to his callouses.
    Heat seared