lyssa’s cell phone rang as she and Jules Cassidy were leaving the bus station.

“On Saturdays, the only bus to Jacksonville leaves in the morning.”

It was Sam.

Who didn’t know what Jules had just told her—that Mary Lou hadn’t left Gainesville the same evening she’d sold her car, despite the ride to the bus station from used car maven Jon Hopper.

Obviously, just as Alyssa had expected, Sam had come to the bus station before them and had gotten a schedule, too.

She’d expected him to call. She wasn’t sure why she was so certain he would, but somehow she’d known that sooner or later, he’d contact her.

If only just to taunt her.

But despite that, she still hadn’t managed to prepare for the sound of his voice.

Jules was looking at her, questions in his eyes, as she heard herself ask, “Where are you?”

Sam didn’t bother to answer. “Next bus out isn’t until Sunday morning. But no one remembers a woman with a kid sitting in the bus station all night—not that that necessarily means anything, although it’s not like the place is huge. She would’ve stood out, if anyone was paying attention. Which they probably weren’t. Still, I’m thinking that the two nights charged on her Visa at the Day’s Inn in Jacksonville was her attempt to lead whoever’s following her off her real trail.”

He was probably right, except for the part where Mary Lou and Haley spent the night in the bus station. Jules had reported that Mary Lou’s credit card had been checked—but not used—by the manager of the Sunset Motel, a mere seven blocks from the bus station, right there in Gainesville.

That activity hadn’t shown up on her regular credit card account. It had taken additional digging by the investigative team, since apparently Mary Lou had settled the bill with cash.

And wasn’t that interesting? Combined with the fact that that very same night Mary Lou had charged and paid for a motel room in Jacksonville, it seemed to confirm their belief that Sam’s ex-wife knew someone was searching for her and was actively attempting to evade them.

“Starrett, there’s an APB out for you,” Alyssa told him.

Jules stepped closer, concern on his pretty face. “Let me talk to him.”

Alyssa shook her partner off, meeting his eyes only briefly.

“I’m guessing that since she wanted Abdul duk Fukkar to think she’d gone to Jacksonville, she probably took, what?” Sam asked. “The two-fifteen to Tallahassee instead? Or maybe the four-fifteen to Columbia, South Carolina.”

Neither. Mary Lou and Haley had probably taken a bus out on Sunday, which meant they could have gone to Miami, Tampa, Fort Myers, New Orleans, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Savannah...

But she wasn’t about to tell Sam that. “I know you think Abdul duk Fukkar is really funny, but it’s not. It’s rude and it’s direspectful to all the law-abiding Muslims in the world—of which there are millions. And if you think for even one minute that I’m going to help you—”

“But you already have,” he told Alyssa. There was laughter in his voice. On some level he was actually enjoying this. “Thanks for the tip about the APB.”

Alyssa came close to snapping her cell phone shut. But Max seemed to think she was capable of getting Sam back into custody. And she was much closer to doing that if she had him on the phone.

Besides, Sam was no fool. She hadn’t really told him anything new. He had to know she’d called out an APB on his ass ten seconds after he’d gone missing.

He also probably knew that she knew that tracing this call was pointless. He knew that she knew damn well that he was somewhere close by. She and Jules could set up a dragnet with the local police, but as a SEAL, Sam knew enough E&E—escape and evasion tactics—to turn the whole thing into an embarrassing joke.

Another embarrassing joke.

And one per day was enough for her.

“Look,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Let’s meet somewhere so we can talk. There’s a Hardee’s down the street—”

“We don’t need to meet to talk,” Sam responded. “We can talk just fine over the phone. And you know it.” He paused. “Unless you really do want to fuck my brains out. In the bathroom of the Hardee’s. Works in a major way for me. Sweet thing.”

“You want to fight with me, Starrett?” Alyssa asked tightly. “Is that really why you called?”

Jules rolled his eyes and sighed and turned his back on her, giving her as much privacy as he could, considering.

“Yeah,” Sam said, “maybe I do. Maybe it pissed me off to find out that you actually thought I’d chose sex over my daughter’s safety.”

“And you’re really in a position to save her now, aren’t you?” Alyssa laughed her disgust. “With every law enforcement agency in the country looking for you?”

“No one’s going to find me unless I want to be found. Which won’t be until after I find Haley.”

“Yeah, and you know how you’re going to find Haley, Sam?” Alyssa asked, letting her temper give her voice an edge. “You’re going to find her because you’re going to be following me. Because I’m going to find her. With the help of the rest of the Bureau and the local police. I’m going to do it, even though it would be twice as easy and take only half as long with your help and cooperation. With information that only you can provide through the questioning that you’re not participating in right this very minute, you selfish, selfish son of a bitch.”

There was silence for a moment, then Sam said, “It really gives me a hard on when you shout at me and call me names.”

“Can’t you be serious for even thirty seconds?”

“I don’t know why you’re so pissed,” he countered. “I told you I wasn’t going to go in with you. What made you think I’d just sit in your car, waiting for you?”

“The fact that you were locked there, for one,” she answered. “Where’d you get the key, Sam? You start carrying one? Learned from past mistakes, maybe?”

At first she’d thought he’d managed to lift her own set of keys. But, no, the key to her cuffs had been right there, still in her pocket.

“Uh,” Sam said. “Look, just let me talk to Jules, okay?”

He was definitely nearby. He knew Jules was now with her.

“Why?” she asked. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if he was watching them right this second. She looked out at the sea of parked cars in the municipal lot. Where are you, Starrett, you invisible son of a bitch?

If he were in a car, it would be at the edge of the lot, near the entrance to the street, parked facing out so he could leave quickly. He’d probably altered his appearance by now, too, either shaving completely or trimming his beard. By cutting his hair or even getting a crew cut. By dressing in something other than blue jeans and a T-shirt. It didn’t matter what he looked like. She’d still be able to recognize him instantly.

“Why do I want to talk to Jules? Because he’s a friend of mine,” Sam said with obviously forced patience. “And I happen to find myself in a situation where I could use a friend.”

Alyssa closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Tried to make her voice sound calm. Calmer, anyway. “Sam. Come on. I’m your friend.”

“No,” he said. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that, and although I’m not a hundred percent certain, I’m pretty freaking positive that a friend wouldn’t have tried to play me the way you did in the backseat of your car.”

For crying out loud... “Like you weren’t playing me right from the start?”

“You know, you were good,” Starrett said. “But the sudden change of heart was a little, I don’t know, too abrupt. I mean, it might’ve been slightly more believable if maybe you’d had a couple of stiff drinks to make the transformation from the FBI ice bitch—”

“You are such an asshole.”

His voice hardened. “Yeah, well, you’re not winning a lot of points yourself today, babycakes. You know when I knew for sure, you know, that you were playing me? Honey, sugar... sweetheart, baby?”

“Oh, shit,” she said.

“Ding ding ding,” he drawled. “You called me baby, Miss ‘Terms of endearment make an encounter into something impersonal, something nameless and faceless, so call me Alyssa if you really want to fuck me.’ It might have worked if I were a stranger and I didn’t know you, but... You know, right up to that point, I had this wild hope that you were actually...” He laughed. “I’m a fucking fool. No, actually, I’m just a fool. No fucking in sight—which is a crying shame. Although I do know where I can get a hand job for a bottle of scotch. And before you start making those outraged noises that happen to be such a turn-on for me, that was just a joke.”

“Not funny.”

“Yeah, well, life’s short, honey. You gotta take your laughs wherever you can get ’em.”

“Okay,” Alyssa said. “You can stop now with the names.” Her anger had deflated into something bad tasting and depressing. “The fact that you’re pissed at me has been received and noted. But just like you told me you weren’t going to Sarasota, I told you I wasn’t going to sleep with you ever again. I guess we’re both guilty of not paying attention.”

Jules had been pretending not to listen, but at that, he sighed. Alyssa started toward the car. Her partner followed, still shaking his head.

“I guess so,” Sam said, his voice quiet now, too. “But you can’t blame me for trying. There hasn’t been a single day that’s passed that I haven’t thought about you, Lys.”

Oh, God. “Then, please, Sam, turn yourself in.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You said something about respecting me—trusting me to watch your six, to guard your back—but I don’t think you really meant it,” she said, the words coming out of her in a rush. “If you did, you would believe me when I tell you that I’m going to find your daughter. If she’s still alive—and from certain information we’ve received, I’m starting to believe that she still is—” Certain information. She probably shouldn’t have told him even that much. “I will find her for you, Sam.”

He didn’t seem to notice her slip. “Jesus Christ, if this was about anything but Haley—”

“I just wish you would trust me.”

“Yeah, well, I wish a lot of things, too. I wish you would give us another chance.”

“Okay,” Alyssa said, unlocking the car door.

Sam laughed. “Yeah, right.”

“No,” she said, opening the door and popping the locks so that Jules could get in the passenger side. “I’m serious. You surrender yourself to me and Jules. Right now. We’ll bring you to the local police, who’ll take you to Sarasota while we go and find Haley. And after we find her, we can both go back to D.C. and take it from my apartment. You turn yourself in, and you’ll get to have your do-over, Sam. You pick me up, we’ll go have dinner.”

Jules was no longer pretending not to listen. He stared at her across the top of the car. “Alyssa,” he said.

On the other end of the phone, Sam was silent for a moment, but then he laughed. “You’re a good liar.”

“Jules doesn’t think I’m lying,” she told him, looking into her partner’s worried face.

“Jules has his own agenda when it comes to you and Max,” Sam said as Alyssa got behind the wheel and closed the car door. “So where are we going now?”

Yeah, he was definitely someplace where he could see them. “To rent another car. Jules is going to Tallahassee and I’m going to Birmingham.” This time she was lying. Not about the second rental car, though. They had to go check out the Sunset Motel here in Gainesville where Mary Lou and Haley had paid cash to spend the night. “Which one of us are you going to follow, hot shot?”

She snapped her cell phone shut.

Jules fastened his seat belt as she backed out of the parking spot. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Alyssa hoped so, too.

She flipped open her phone again and called Max’s assistant, Laronda. She was going to need two agents from the local office to assist at the Sunset Motel, ASAP, as well as George Faulkner from Max’s team.

Working together, they were going to help her apprehend Sam Starrett. She hoped.!!!January 14, 1944!!!Dear Walter,!!!This letter is so very hard to write. I’ve started it nearly two dozen times, two dozen different ways. But there is no easy or less painful way to impart this sorrowful news.!!!Early this morning, your beloved wife Mae gave up her fight. She’s been ill for so long, dear friend. Please don’t blame her for being weak. She fought for so long, but this latest flu was too much for her tired body to take.!!!Please know that I share your grief and pain. This sad news must be impossibly hard for you to bear, so far away from home and those of us who love you.!!!But you need to know that, at the end, you were there, with Mae, in spirit. Oh, how she loved you! Her last words were of you—yes, I was with her here in Tuskegee when she passed. She made me promise to watch out for Jolee, and then she said, “Take care of Walter.”!!!I confess that I am at a loss as how best to do that while we are a world apart, but I gave her my promise, and I will manage somehow.!!!I will start by telling you that Mae’s mother has come to Alabama to care for Jolee. I, too, will visit as often as I can.!!!I will be taking care of Mae’s burial arrangements. Don’t fret about details or payment, I’m handling all of it for now. We’ll sort it out after you get back home from the war.!!!Please allow yourself to weep, dear friend. Grieve deeply for your loss—and what a loss this is! I have already shed enough tears for both of us, but I beg you to feel grief and not anger at your beloved Mae’s passing. There’s no room for anger in the cockpit of any airplane. You must be cool when you fly. You must be careful and never reckless, or I will be burying you soon, as well.!!!Now you must become more determined than ever to live. For Jolee, and for Mae, who was taken from this world far too soon. Make your life a good, long, solid, well-lived one.!!!Of course, you know that if you don’t come home from this great conflict, I will take in Jolee and raise her as if she were my own daughter. Rest assured of that, my friend. But that sweet child deserves her father.

And I would hate to lose my dearest friend.!!!Yours in sorrow, Dot

Gina Vitagliano really loved Florida’s summer weather, especially the daily storms that blew up suddenly, almost out of nowhere. She loved the big, towering, ominous thunderheads, the intensity of the forked lightning that seemed to sizzle the air, the dizzying crash of thunder, and particularly the cloudbursts—the rain that pounded down as if someone in the sky had overturned a giant bucket.

It was absurd how much water could fall in such a short amount of time, capable of giving a thorough underwear soaking to anyone caught out in it for longer than half a second.

But this summer, Florida was having a drought. Day after day after day, it didn’t rain. And it didn’t rain. And lawns dried up, and flowers didn’t bloom. Anyone caught smoking or even so much as lighting a match in a state park was subject to arrest. Barbecuing was outlawed. The entire state felt like one giant tinderbox, ready to go up in flames at any given moment.

But today, finally, it rained the way Gina was used to.

And was she on the beach to see nature’s spectacular show? No, of course she was in her rental car, coming back from the UPS office, when the storm broke, having just shipped the last of the unneeded supplies and equipment back to yacht owner Dennis Mattson’s New York base in Cold Spring Harbor.

This kind of bucket-from-the-sky rain turned nearly every driver in Tampa into either her great-aunt Lucia or her cousin Mario.

Great-aunt Lucia had been four feet eleven before her osteoporosis had shaved a few inches from her height. She was ninety-two years old, but she still insisted on driving Great-uncle Alfonse-may-he-rest-in-peace-the-sainted-man’s 1977 Cadillac Cruiseship through the busy streets of East Meadow, Long Island, because even though she might be old, there was nothing wrong with her vision. No, her eyes weren’t her problem. It was the fact that she was so short she had to watch the road through the steering wheel. And that was with her sitting on the pillow.

So naturally, she drove a touch... cautiously.

Cousin Mario, Gina’s father’s fourth youngest brother Arturo’s third son, on the other hand, could burn rubber standing still in the driveway, and did so at every opportunity. He had two speeds, motionless but gunning the engine, and wanting to go faster than the car in front of him. Gina’s father was convinced his nephew had been permanently warped by too many Mario Andretti jokes when he was a child.

Gina suspected it was the fact that Mario took after Great-aunt Lucia’s side of the family when it came to height that had turned him into a motor vehicular madman. Unlike Gina and her pack of hulking brothers, cousin Mario was petite. After he’d failed to bulk up despite joining the local gym and chugging power shakes, he’d turned to cars for his muscle.

But it was a universal truth that the Great-aunt Lucias and the Marios of the world didn’t mix well, and particularly not with the added ingredient of pouring rain.

Today when the skies opened, Gina had a Great-aunt Lucia in front of her in an oceanliner, stopped dead, and a Mario in a pickup truck about three cars back.

The smart thing for a sane driver to do in weather like this was to crawl along the road, windshield wipers flapping and slapping ineffectively, until it was possible to pull off to the right, into a parking lot, to wait until the rain let up. And the wait wouldn’t be long—it rarely rained for more than ten or fifteen minutes at this time of day.

But the Great-aunt Lucia in front of her was clearly overwhelmed.

The Mario behind Gina was sitting on his horn.

The cars in the oncoming lane of traffic were moving slowly and steadily onward. The Great-aunt Lucia inched her Queen Mary forward, then spotted the driveway to the Publix superstore on the left and jumped on her brakes. She put on her left blinker, dooming them all to waiting forever because there was no way in hell she was going to get across the slow stream of traffic in this lifetime, and there was no room to pass her on the right without going onto the sidewalk.

The rain was so thick, it almost kept Gina from seeing it happen. But the Mario was in one of those big-wheeled trucks, and his headlights were higher than the other two cars behind her. In her rearview mirror, Gina saw him shift to the right, pulling onto the sidewalk in a classic Mario move.

Just as the Great-aunt Lucia changed her mind and started to pull right instead, into the parking lot for the SwimMart.

Also a classic GAL technique—fake left, go right.

“Oh, shit!” Gina said aloud, because the Mario was clearly fooled by the Lucia’s left blinker, still going furiously. She could see that he was actually picking up speed. She leaned on her horn—but it was too late.

Mario hit his brakes, but his truck still slammed into the oceanliner, skidding into Gina’s rental car as it fishtailed, and pushing her left, directly—oh, my God!—into the oncoming traffic.

Metal on metal on metal on metal—how could it sound so awful? Everyone but the Mario had been going so slowly or not moving at all.

Gina’s airbag went off and her seat belt locked down. It was hard to say which was responsible for knocking the air out of her lungs—it all happened so fast.

And then, almost eerily, it was over. There was only the sound of the rain pounding on the roof and the windshield wipers fighting to keep up.

Someone hammered on Gina’s window, startling her. The airbag had already deflated, and she reached for the button that would unlock the car.

The door was yanked open.

“Are you all right?”

Gina stared up at Max Bhagat. He was dressed as Max always dressed, in a dark business suit and a white shirt, but he was soaking wet. Water streamed down his face and his hair was flattened, making him look about as unlike the impeccable, always well-groomed man as humanly possible. But it was definitely Max.

Her first thought was that somehow, impossibly, the accident had been worse than she’d imagined and that she’d actually been killed. And that this was heaven.

But very real water dripped off of Max’s dark hair onto her as he leaned into the car. “Are you hurt?” he asked, carefully looking her over from her Jekyll Island T-shirt to her cutoff jeans to her flip-flops and her red toenail polish.

He pushed her hair back from her face and his fingers were warm.

Oh, God, he was really here. He’d finally, finally come to find her, to tell her he missed her as much as she missed him, to admit that a twenty-year age difference didn’t mean all that much in the cosmic scheme of things.

It was not the coolest or most collected response, but Gina couldn’t help it. She started to cry.

“Max,” she said, and reached for him.

He was solid and warm and very, very wet. She didn’t give a damn about that or the fact that it was raining in as he half sat on the running board, because his arms were around her, holding her, and, for the first time in years, she actually felt safe.

“Hey,” he said, in his incredibly smooth, velvet-perfect, accent-free voice. She still dreamed of his voice, usually a couple times a week—sometimes more, depending on her stress levels at school or at work.

Max Bhagat had been the chief FBI negotiator when the plane Gina’d taken from Athens to Vienna had been hijacked and rerouted to the terrorist hot spot of Kazbekistan. And she’d been the chief hostage when she’d pretended to be a U.S. Senator’s daughter—a role she’d assumed to keep the other passengers from being killed by the terrorists who’d taken the plane. For four days, Max’s voice over that airliner’s radio had been her constant companion.

“Hey,” he said to her now, “you’ve got to talk to me, Gina. Are you hurt?”

“Not anymore,” she said into his shoulder.

“Did you hit your head?” Max pulled back from her slightly so that she was forced to look up at him. He was checking her pupils, his own dark brown eyes filled with concern.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

Why didn’t he kiss her? She’d been waiting for years for this man to kiss her. His arms were still around her and his mouth was right there, right within reach of hers. And Gina, she was done with the waiting. She’d waited far long enough, so she did what she should have done years ago. She kissed him.