Against the Edge (The Raines of Wind Can - By Kat Martin Page 0,130

grateful for what you did,” the reporter said. “People are calling you a hero. What do you think about that?” The man thrust a microphone into Alex’s handsome face. Six two, dark blond hair and blue eyes, always dressed as if he’d just stepped out of a GQ magazine, Alex Justice was an amazing-looking man.

“I’m a private investigator,” Alex said. “I did what I was paid to do—find evidence that would identify the killer of a ten-year-old girl. I was lucky enough to make that happen. There’s nothing heroic about it.”

“It’s been said you’ll do anything to catch your man. Is that true?”

Alex just kept walking. There wasn’t a glimpse of the deep dimples bracketing his mouth that Rina remembered so well. She hadn’t seen him in more than six months, not since the day her best friend, Sage Dumont, married Jake Cantrell, one of Alex’s best friends.

Rina watched him stride away until he disappeared offscreen, then the camera cut to the reporter, who relayed the story of the little girl who had been abducted, sexually abused and murdered three years ago. Ten-year-old Carrie Wiseman’s killer had never been found—not until Alex Justice had come up with DNA evidence that directly linked the girl to a neighbor who lived down the street from her home.

Two days ago, the neighbor, Edward Bagley, was arrested, which took at least one killer off the streets.

As the newscast came to an end, Rina hit the button on the remote, turning off the TV. She crossed her living room to the delicate antique French writing desk in the corner. Her apartment was a mixture of comfortable contemporary furniture and French antiques: rosewood armoires, gilt mirrors and marble-topped tables, many pieces from the sixteenth century.

The apartment was softly feminine but not crowded, and it suited her personality perfectly.

Reaching down, she picked up the pile of bills from the desk, began to sift through the stack. In the six months since she had last seen the handsome private investigator with the amazing dimples, a lot had changed.

She had broken up with her live-in boyfriend, Ryan Gosford, and moved back into her own apartment. She had liked Ryan; she just hadn’t loved him, and things were beginning to get sticky.

During those months, her finances had dropped sharply. The stock market had taken another dive and this time wiped out the last of the money she had invested in her retirement account. Her job as a stockbroker at Smith Barney Morgan Stanley had become more and more difficult as her clients pulled their money out of the market and put it into gold and silver, real estate bargains and anything else they considered a safer bet than wildly fluctuating stocks.

Alex’s image popped back into her head as she sorted through the bills—utilities that would start to soar as summer approached and the heat rose into the hundreds in Houston, the tax payment on her mother’s small house in Uvalde that Rina had taken over paying several years back; miscellaneous bills just to pay the costs of living in Houston. In a week, the rent would be due on her uptown apartment.

At the bottom of the pile was a white nine-by-twelve envelope from Delaney, Dennison and Smith, Attorneys at Law, the contents of which she had examined a dozen times. Papers finalizing an inheritance from her late uncle Walter, the probate settled and the estate officially hers: three thousand acres of dry, barren land in the middle of nowhere—or, more accurately, the middle of somewhere in the West Texas desert.

It was probably worthless, as her mother and the rest of her family kept telling her, and yet...

The land was the reason she kept thinking of Alex Justice, and seeing him on TV had finally been the catalyst she needed to push her into taking action. Alex was a former navy pilot, a jet jockey with a cocky attitude and an ego that was out of control. Also, like his friend Jake Cantrell and the rest of the men at the Atlas Security office, Alex was a typical macho man who exuded testosterone and buckets of male sexual appeal.

He was the kind of man females lusted after.

All except Rina. Or at least she did her very best not to.

Still, there was one thing about Alex Justice she couldn’t deny. The man was good at his job.

Beyond that, and for reasons she couldn’t completely explain, she trusted him.

A knock sounded at the door. It was the moment she had been dreading all