Witness Seduction

She didn’t mind, though. Sam was busy working at their dad’s construction company, and it made her happy he was doing well. Her brother had always been irresponsible and scatterbrained growing up. It was nice seeing him act like an adult, even if it did mean he’d left his sister in the lurch.

Gwen paused on the front porch. “Want to come to lunch with us?” she offered.

“Thanks, but I’ll pass.” Marley was so not in the mood to watch Gwen make googly eyes at her long-time boyfriend. The two of them still acted as if they were in the mushy newlywed stage when in fact they’d been together for years.

Her friend looked suspicious. “How are you planning to spend the rest of your day off?”

“Cleaning out the eaves,” she said, fighting back a smile.

Gwen blew out a frustrated breath. “You’re incorrigible.”

Marley’s smile reached the surface. “Yeah, but you love me anyway.”

“Can’t argue that. All right, I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow.” Gwen leaned in to give her a quick side hug, then bounded down the porch steps toward the shiny black Jeep parked behind the red Mazda convertible Marley had owned since she was eighteen years old.

Marley waved at her friend, watched Gwen speed away, then walked back inside. Alone, she let out a heavy sigh. Talking about Patrick always brought this awful feeling to her stomach. A cross between sorrow and bitterness, with a hefty dose of anger thrown into the mix. Everyone in her life kept pushing her to forget about him—Gwen, their friends from the hospital, her dad, her brother.

None of them seemed to get it. They didn’t understand how badly Patrick had hurt her. Not only that, but he’d taken a skewer to her judgment and punched so many holes in it she wasn’t sure she could ever trust her instincts again.

What kind of woman fell in love with a murderer? How could she have been so blind to Patrick’s deception? She knew she wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last woman to be duped by a man. Heck, she’d once watched an entire documentary about serial killers and how they skillfully deceived their loved ones.

But that didn’t make this situation any better. She still felt like a fool. She’d completely fallen for Patrick’s lies and she hated how easily he’d conned her. He’d even convinced her to open a joint savings account, saying they’d need one anyway when they were married. Good thing she hadn’t gotten around to depositing anything into it, but it still irked—especially since she couldn’t close the damn thing because the cops had frozen it.

And sure, maybe she was hiding from the world, just a little, but the renovations on her house helped keep her mind off her fugitive ex-fiancé. Besides, she really was enjoying the work.

Her place was nestled in a neighborhood of quaint Victorians and leafy elm trees at the end of the cul-de-sac. Two stories high, it was painted pale cream and in desperate need of new shutters. But she loved the old place. She planned on tackling the exterior after the inside was all spruced up.

Heading to the laundry room, she grabbed all the cleaning supplies she needed. She slipped her feet into a pair of white sneakers, then hauled her bucket of supplies out to the side of the house, where the wooden ladder she’d set up earlier leaned against the slate-green roof.

Fine, so maybe cleaning out eaves wasn’t the most exciting thing to do on one’s day off, but it needed to be done. And who knew, maybe one of Gwen’s what-if scenarios would come true.

A tall, dark and handsome stranger approaches the house. “My mysterious maiden,” he says. “Your beauty overwhelms me. Let me clean your rain gutters.”

Marley smothered a laugh. Rolling her eyes, she snapped a pair of rubber gloves onto her hands and climbed the first rung of the ladder.

“This maiden needs no man to take care of her,” she murmured to herself with a grin.

CALEB FORD LEANED BACK in the plush swivel chair and wondered when exactly he’d become a voyeur. His job had forced him to sit through many a stakeout but somehow this one seemed…wrong.

Arousing as hell…but damn it, wrong.

He’d been a DEA agent for ten years, had put dozens of criminals behind bars, gotten shot twice in his career—and yet this one little stakeout was killing him. It should’ve been easy, a wait-and-grab he could’ve done in his sleep. The location was perfect, the electronic equipment was sweet, and his target, despite the irregular hours she worked, didn’t leave the house much.

Yep, in theory, this stakeout should’ve been a piece of cake.

But none of his theories had taken into consideration the powerful allure of Marley Kincaid.

Caleb shifted in the chair, hoping to ease the ache in his groin. A sip of the cold soda sitting on the desk in front of him helped cool his throat, but did nothing to snuff out the fire in his lower body.

A quick glance at the screens displaying Marley’s front and back doors showed no movement. Not that he had to be so vigilant; the motion detectors they’d set up caused the monitors to release a loud buzz every time anyone walked by them. There was plenty of movement at the side of the house, however.

Marley was up on a ladder, wearing faded cut-off shorts, a red tank top and yellow rubber gloves, and she was cleaning out the eaves using a long brush. Wet leaves and mud went sailing down to the grass ten feet below, remnants of last night’s thunderstorm.

Damn, she was cute up there on the ladder, her blond ponytail swishing back and forth as she worked. When he’d taken the case, he’d seen pictures of Marley, sure, but seeing her in person was a different story altogether. It had been a week since he’d hunkered down next door to her, and already he’d memorized every detail of her face—her golden-brown eyes set over a pair of unbelievably high cheekbones, her cute upturned nose, her full sensual lips. God, those lips. She had a mouth made for sin. Not to mention a body that could cause a man to forget his own name.

For seven days now he’d wondered what she looked like naked. But they only had clearance to install cameras outside the house. And she always closed her drapes when she undressed, forcing his imagination to run wild as he stared at her enticing silhouette removing various undergarments.

His cell phone began to ring, a much-needed distraction from the woman next door.

Sighing, he snatched the phone from its perch near the computer keyboard and pressed the talk button. “Ford,” he said. His voice came out hoarse, and he had to clear his throat before speaking again.

“I’m at the Starbucks around the corner,” came AJ Callaghan’s southern drawl. “Want some coffee?”

Caleb tore his gaze away from the monitor. “Hell, yes,” he told his partner.

“Huh. You sound cranky. Ms. Kincaid doing yoga again?”

“Nope, cleaning the rain gutters.”

“Darn. I won’t hurry then. But call me if she starts up with the yoga.” AJ’s tone revealed the man was no doubt sporting a huge grin. “You know,” AJ added, “I can’t see Grier staying away from her for much longer. We already know he was infatuated with Nurse Hottie, and seriously, with that bod, who could blame the guy?”

Oh, Caleb couldn’t blame Patrick Grier for craving Marley’s extremely delectable body, either. Thanks to all the cameras Caleb and AJ had set up around the perimeter of Marley’s house providing visuals of the kitchen, living room and bedroom, Caleb had firsthand experience with Kincaid’s assets. And he was doing a little bit of craving himself.

Fortunately, all it took was one swift glance at the picture taped to the side of his computer monitor, and the need for vengeance replaced his desire.

As Caleb hung up the phone, he stared at Patrick Grier’s grainy features. What pissed him off the most was how normal Grier looked. Brown hair, brown eyes, handsome in a preppy sort of way. That was drug-dealing murderers for you—they rarely ever looked like the scum they were.

If it were any other scumbag dealer, Caleb might have handed the case over to a junior agent and focused on the bigger fish swimming around in the drug pond. But this particular scumbag had murdered Caleb’s best friend, and he wasn’t going to rest until Patrick Grier was behind bars.

He looked back at the monitor and grinned when he noticed Marley leaning to the side, one slender arm stretched out as she attempted to tackle a clump of leaves that refused to dislodge. The grin faded, however, when something caught his eye. One of the rungs on the ladder looked…wrong. He leaned closer, squinting at the screen.

“Damn it,” he muttered under his breath.

Sure enough, the rung he’d noticed was sagging on one side. He couldn’t see much more than that, but he suspected it was cracked. The thing would probably break the second she stepped on it.

Fortunately Marley’s feet were on the rung below the broken one, but the way she was reaching her arms out, it wouldn’t be long before she needed some more height to connect with her target.

Crap. What should he do in this situation? Sit around and wait for her to fall?

Caleb gritted his teeth. He couldn’t go over there and warn her. Making contact with the person you were watching defeated the entire point of a stakeout. And he wouldn’t risk the possibility of losing Grier. In his gut, he knew the other man was bound to show up here. When they’d raided the office Grier had been using for his web design company, they’d found more than a dozen pictures of Marley taped on the walls. Grier was obsessed with her, and Caleb knew he’d come for her.

He felt it deep in his gut, a certainty his supervisor, unfortunately, didn’t quite agree with. But at least Agent Stevens had green-lighted this stakeout. How long he’d let it go on, Caleb wasn’t sure, but for now, he could sit tight and see if his hunch played out. The local cops were already watching Marley at the hospital, but Caleb knew Grier wouldn’t make a move there. Too many witnesses around. Here, though…Marley lived alone, didn’t have many visitors and her house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac with a large park right behind it. This was the perfect place for Grier to make an appearance.

On the screen, Marley was looking up at the roof in dismay. An ominous feeling crept along Caleb’s spine. He watched as she lifted one foot. His chest tightened with sickly anticipation.

“Don’t do it,” he mumbled at her, though of course she couldn’t hear him. “Look down first.”

But she didn’t, and it was like seeing the chain of events that led up to a disaster, in slow motion, unable to do a damn thing about it.