Page 27 of Risky Passion

No one ever came forward to claim me. I have no idea who my mother was, though if I found her, I would make sure that bitch who threw me away like garbage would die slowly and painfully. And she would know exactly who was making her suffer.

I’d spent my life with the bitter knowledge that I was unwanted and unloved. No one ever cared for me.

No one, except Alice.

Alice had been my one and only true love. The one person who’d seen me, who’d understood me, who’d made me feel like I mattered. And now she needed me again.

But my boys were different. I hadn’t just cared for them; I’d loved them. Loved them as if they’d been my own flesh and blood. I’d fought for them, bled for them, and now they were gone. Stolen from me.

And revenge was the only thing keeping me alive.

I tore my gaze from the camera and let it settle on Hughes. My lip twitched with disdain. I hated that I needed him. His slimy, self-serving demeanor made my skin crawl. But he had a role to play, and he’d better damn well play it.

I didn’t have a backup plan.

And I was running out of time.

Alice needed me. Again.

I would do anything for her.

I was even prepared to die for her . . . once all the killing was done.

CHAPTER 9

Jaxson

A crater-sized potholeappeared out of nowhere. With no time to brake, I stomped the gas. My Jeep launched through the divot like a wounded bull, and my skull cracked against the roof hard enough to see stars.

"Jesus! You okay, girl?"

Onyx's ears twitched, and her chocolate eyes found mine with that unnerving intelligence that made her the best partner I'd ever had. Any other day, I would have taken the tracks slower and saved the suspension. But not today. Not with Tory's plane down somewhere in this mess of coastline.

"We'll find her, girl. I know we will."

Two hours had passed since Tory's plane had vanished off radar. Two hours of my heart trying to sledgehammer through my ribs while we searched for anything . . . wreckage, smoke, a miracle. The coastline fought us at every turn. Pandanus palms and thick banksia created shadow-filled corridors between the dunes, turning the search grid into a green maze. Any other time, I would call it a "logistical challenge." Professional terminology for a professional K9 handler. But with Tory out there somewhere, every wall of vegetation felt like another fortress standing between us and her.

Between finding her alive and finding her too late. But I would find her.

The last thing we needed was another Charlotte. Twenty years of wondering, searching, hoping. It wouldn’t be like that with Tory.

She’s alive. I know it.

Onyx pressed her nose out the window, nostrils flaring.

Good girl. Keep scanning.

We'd already combed three sections of shoreline, but each empty stretch of coast was another reminder of how badly the odds were stacked against us. The K9 handler in me wanted to calculate search grids, plot probable trajectories of the plane crash, and factor in wind patterns. But cold statistics meant jack shit right now. I'd pulled survivors from worse places than this. People who'd defied every survival stat in the book by crawling out of situations that should have killed them ten times over. The memory of their faces all battered and dehydrated, but thankfully alive, was the only thing keeping me from screaming into the wind right now.

I didn’t know Tory personally, but I wish I’d had the balls to talk to her at the Christmas party. A pang of regret tightened in my chest. Another chance I’d let slip away as I’d convinced myself that someone as carefree as her didn’t need my kind of complications.

I wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

"She's alive, Onyx. We’ll find her. That's all there is to it."

The track crested, and the Pacific Ocean stretched ahead through breaks in the coastal scrub in a perfect azure landscape. Tourist brochures loved spouting about this "untamed paradise." What they didn't mention was how this stretch of Queensland's coast served as a smuggler's highway.

Getting shipwrecked around here was a special kind of hell. If the bull sharks or saltwater crocodiles didn't find you first, you had eastern brown snakes and funnel-web spiders waiting in the scrub. And if by some miracle you dodged that lineup and managed to find enough water to stay alive until rescue, then you still had to contend with clouds of mosquitoes that could drain a horse. Or worse . . . the kind of people who'd put a bullet in you just for stumbling too close to their drop point.

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