Dealing with Annie Read online

  Danger comes to Cooper’s Corner…

  Annie Hughes had become the Martha Stewart of cosmetics. But when DEA agent Ethan McCall warned Annie that her company was the target of sabotage—and that she was in danger—she wouldn’t listen. Then Annie disappeared. And only Ethan could rescue her.

  Originally published in 2003.

  Dealing with Annie

  Jill Shalvis

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  CHAPTER ONE

  THERE’D BEEN BETTER TIMES in Ian McCall’s life, far better. In a matter of just two short, little weeks he’d taken a bullet in the thigh, had been given a desk job to compensate for his newfound lack in ability to be the best DEA agent in New York City, and had been dumped in front of everyone by Lila at happy hour in McIver’s pub.

  Didn’t get worse than that.

  Oh, wait, it did. The leader of the vigilante gang he’d been chasing all year, the one who kept shooting drug dealers dead before Ian could get them into jail, had gotten away. That really got him. A bullet in the leg, a desk job, a public dumping, plus he’d failed to catch the perp.

  Not good. Making things worse, when his commander had shown up at the hospital, Ian had told him to stuff the desk job. He wanted back out on the field despite the fact he couldn’t yet pull his pants up without wanting to bawl.

  In return, Commander Richards—Dickhead to all who worked beneath him—had stood by Ian’s hospital bed the day after the shooting, looking fit and pissed, and had given Ian a six-week leave. Mandatory.

  Yep, Ian had definitely seen better times.

  Now, two weeks later and fresh out of the hospital, he sat in his brother’s truck, driving from New York City to Thomas’s farm in Cooper’s Corner, Massachusetts. He had nowhere else to be, no one else to be with and nothing to do except brood for a month until February 1, which he would have been happy doing.

  Except Thomas had come and gotten him, refusing—as he had his entire career of being Ian’s big brother—to take no for an answer.

  This bugged the hell out of Ian, who was still in work mode regardless of the hole in his leg. In his life, things fit into two compartments—bad guys and good guys, and never the two shall meet.

  And yet here he was, his head still in his last case, immersed in vigilantes and shootings and investigations, while being tended to by his brother, who didn’t know a perp from the mailman.

  “Cooper’s Corner is great, you’ll see,” Thomas said in his usual way of telling Ian what to do and think.

  “It’s the country.” Ian said country like the bad word it was. “It’s winter. It’s the country in winter.”

  “Shut up. You don’t know how good it’ll be. The air is fresh, for one thing.”

  Ian liked the air in New York. Stuffy, stinky and used.

  Thomas downshifted to get around a truck filled with hay. “I can hear you thinking from here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You’re thinking you’re looking out at the boondocks.”

  Yep.

  “You’ll enjoy the quiet.”

  Nope. Ian stared at the wide-open rolling hills dotted with early January snow, the complete lack of skyscrapers and congested traffic, and swallowed his sigh. He wasn’t fond of quiet any more than he was of fresh air.

  They’d grown up in the Big Apple, he and Thomas and their parents, both of whom had been teachers before they’d retired to another universe entirely…Las Vegas, of all places.

  But their growing-up years had been quite happily spent in Manhattan—playing in alleyways, concrete parks and stairways, finding trouble as often as possible, and loving every minute of it.

  There’d been a freedom to being a kid in such a place that Ian had never forgotten. He’d played cops and robbers all day long, until he’d honed the ability to sniff out anyone from anywhere. So it surprised exactly no one when, as an adult, he’d stayed in his favorite city in the world, ferreting out real bad guys for a living.

  And not just any bad guys, but highly coveted, highly dangerous bad guys who pretty much kept him on an adrenaline rush 24/7, ensuring his life remained on a constant fast-paced roller coaster.

  But he’d been shoved off that roller coaster now, hadn’t he. For at least another month. An eternity, in his book. All thanks to one little bullet he hadn’t managed to dodge and his own inability to force his body to heal any faster. Somehow that felt like a betrayal in itself.

  “I’ve been trying to get you out here forever.” Thomas’s smile was grim. “It only took a bullet to do it. Damn, Ian…” He glanced over at Ian’s cane lying between them and grimaced, his eyes anguished. “You got lucky, huh?”

  Ian rubbed his still-aching leg. A few inches up and to the right, and he’d have been singing soprano the rest of his life. Hell, yeah, he’d gotten lucky. He stared out at the alien landscape of white, white and more white—not a single bus, traffic light or Chinese takeout in sight.

  “Two years,” Thomas repeated softly, then glanced over again. “I quit the landscape architecture business to come here two years ago. We never used to go two days without seeing each other.”

  “You never used to live out in the middle of nowhere, U.S.A., either. You live on a farm, Thomas. Growing…what the hell do you grow, anyway?”

  “Lots of stuff.” He smiled proudly. “Who’da thought, huh?”

  “Well, you always did like to pick worms up off the sidewalk after a rain.” Ian shuddered. “You’d carry those slimy suckers a mile if you had to, just to find them dirt.”

  “I have a lot of dirt now.”

  “Great. That’s terrific.”

  Thomas let out a low laugh. “I know you think this is stupid, me dragging you out here, but you’ll slow down for once. You’ll smell the roses, meet people other than your usual fast babes who want only a quickie—”

  “Hey, there’s nothing wrong with fast babes or quickies.”

  “Maybe you’ll even live without being on the edge for a while, without a gun—”

  “I brought my gun.”

  Thomas sighed. “Of course you did. And a knife, I presume.”

  “Two.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “No.” The truck hit a pothole, which threw Ian against the door. When he came in contact with the steel, white-hot pain exploded from his thigh all the way up through his torso to his head. “Jesus,” he gasped, clutching his leg, grinding his jaw, watching stars dance in front of his wavering vision. “Slow down!”

  “Sorry.” Thomas eased on the brake as they rode down the gravel road that surely led to hell. “That’s a new pothole.”

  Where Ian came from, there weren’t gravel roads. There were speeding taxis with drivers who pretended not to speak English. And there were people, everywhere. Noise. Pollution. Crime.

  God, he missed it already.

  “You okay?” Thomas threw him a quick glance, laced with sympathy and worry. “I’ve never seen you so pale—Well, unless you count your twenty-first birthday. Remember? I took you clubbing, and you drank so much you—”

  “I’m