Dark Knight: A Loveswept Romance Classic

  Dark Knight is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A Loveswept eBook Edition

  Copyright © 1998 by Donna Kauffman

  Excerpt from Deep Autumn Heat by Elisabeth Barrett © 2012 by Elisabeth Barrett.

  Excerpt from Callie’s Cowboy by Karen Leabo copyright © 1996 by Karen Leabo.

  Excerpt from Just One Look by Linda Cajio copyright © 1990 by Linda Cajio.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  LOVESWEPT and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Dark Knight was originally published in paperback by Loveswept, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. in 1998.

  Cover design: (Insert name here)

  Cover photo: Gettyimages

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53733-1

  www.ReadLoveSwept.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Editor’s Corner

  Excerpt from Elisabeth Barrett’s Deep Autumn Heat

  Excerpt from Karen Leabo’s Callie’s Cowboy

  Excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s About Last Night

  ONE

  In the end, it was the Grinch that made her cry.

  “This is ridiculous.” Scottie Giardi punched the off button on the remote, tossed her wadded-up tissue on the coffee table, and dragged herself off the couch. She wandered over to the glass doors that led to her tenth-floor balcony and watched the large, wet snowflakes drifting relentlessly downward, blanketing the downtown streets and buildings, promising that tomorrow morning the children of Denver would waken to a white Christmas. Soundless and glittering with light, the city looked even more magical than Dr. Seuss’s Who-ville.

  She leaned her aching forehead against the glass. “Bah humbug.” But the catch in her voice gave her true feelings away.

  She closed her eyes. The steady beat of her pulse clicked away in her head like an alarm clock, each beat the same, giving no clue as to which tick would be the last one. Then BOOM! One day the bell would ring, and it would be too late.

  Too late for friendships. Too late for love. Too late for children. Too damn late.

  She turned away and stalked to the bathroom. She didn’t want love. She didn’t need friendships. And she had long ago come to terms with the fact that she would never have children. A hot shower and a cold drink would loosen the tension that had been plaguing her all evening.

  As head of a secret government task force, known privately as Delgado’s Dirty Dozen, she was always on call, but they were in the final phases of rebuilding and restructuring the team. The few assignments they were currently handling were all running smoothly.

  There was very little chance anyone would need her tonight. The thought made her eyes suddenly burn. She blinked hard several times and yanked on the shower.

  The steaming spray beat down on her head, pounded into her shoulders, ran over her face. She tried to relax, but it felt as if every muscle she had was an individual knot. What in the hell is wrong with you, Giardi?

  If she hadn’t felt so much like crying, she would have laughed. How many times had she heard those exact words?

  The voice that echoed loudest in her mind was her father’s. Followed closely by her late husband, Jim’s. A humorless smile trembled on her lips. No doubt they’d both be amused to know their harsh indictments haunted her in death every bit as much as they’d haunted her when both men had been alive.

  She abruptly shut off the shower, snagged a towel, and rubbed her body with brisk strokes. She knew better than to think she could rub away the memories as easily as she could the water droplets, just as she knew she’d keep trying anyway. Especially tonight.

  Eleven years. It had been exactly eleven years since her father and Jim had been shot in the line of duty, and she’d yet to feel remorse. Guilt? Yes. Self-recrimination? Boatloads of it. Relief … Oh yes. So much so, she still felt the rush of it now, all these many years and miles later. Which circled her right back to the guilt.

  She pulled on a Washington Redskins jersey, then headed for the kitchen. Sipping a glass of chilled zinfandel, she avoided looking toward the balcony doors and flipped on the TV. CNN was always good for a distraction. She hated admitting she needed one.

  If she couldn’t escape to some faraway place where they’d never heard of snow, much less Christmas, she could watch it and wish she were there. But instead of finding sanctuary with some hard-edged reporter spouting gritty details of this week’s current country in crisis, Cindy-Lou Who blazed onto the screen, looking up at the Grinch with her wide, innocent eyes. Scottie went to stab at the channel button, but somehow her fingers wouldn’t move. And the screen was all blurry. It took several seconds for her to realize she was crying.

  Anger didn’t come to her rescue this time, nor did self-disgust. There was no escape. God knew she’d tried them all.

  For the first time in ten years, since she’d left the Metropolitan police force in Washington, D.C., and taken Seve “Del” Delgado up on his lifesaving offer of a place on his special forces team, she had no convenient corner of the globe to run to. Earlier this year, Del had been forced to reveal his background during testimony in a mob trial. For his safety and that of the team, he’d received a new identity, a new face, and had left the team in her hands, never to be heard from again.

  Only now did she realize it hadn’t been ten years of freedom, but ten years of escape.

  The sudden jangle of the phone made her jump. She swore at herself, then went on full alert as it registered that it was her private office line ringing. Bless you. She moved swiftly to the small office next to her bedroom, shamelessly not caring what emergency awaited on the other end of the line.

  With utter relief, she let her mind slip back to her job, dismissing the hours of painful introspection as if they’d never existed. Safe once again in the sanctuary of her work.

  She lifted the phone to her ear and waited for the current code to be recited. The code came. It was the voice that delivered it that stunned her into complete silence.

  “Giardi, I know it’s a shock to hear my voice, but I’m short on time. I’ll explain later.”

  “Del?” Her voice was a stunned whisper.

  “Sí,” he responded in his usual clipped tones. “Now listen closely. We have a problem.”

  “We?” Scottie straightened, her mind focusing quickly as the initial shock wore off. “We have a problem?” Her tone was just as abrupt. She’d learned more than espionage tactics from the man on the other end of the line.

  A short pause followed. “Yes, we.”

  Scottie had often speculated that Del was still somehow involved with the team. She’d always had a niggling sensation that he was hovering somewhere, keeping an eye on her and his precious Dirty Dozen. What was left of them anyway. The fact that he had the code, a new one she’d just put into the system earlier that evening before finally making herself leave the office, proved he was doing a lot more than hovering—and from an inside position.

  “Pack for Code Yellow, there will be a private transport waiting for you at the airfield on tarmac three.”

  Scottie
didn’t question the feasibility of flying out of Denver given the current weather system. If Del had a plane on standby, then it could fly her out. “Destination?”

  “Montana.”

  Their caseload was minimal at the moment. They had only three assignments running. One of them was in Montana. Lucas Blackstone was heading it. He was the last original team member still in the field. She stifled the swift pang of envy.

  “Situation?” she asked.

  “We don’t have a code for this one.”

  That got her attention. “Excuse me?”

  “Seems Blackstone has a brother. The brother has been searching for him and somehow managed to track him all the way to Montana.”

  “To the Brethren? How did this guy find him? Not from Lucas.”

  “That’s what we want to find out. And no, to our knowledge Lucas has no idea of this guy’s existence.”

  That part didn’t surprise her, but she breathed a sigh of relief. One of the mandatory qualifications for becoming a Dirty Dozen team member was that one have no family, no friends. Invulnerable. “Who fell down on the job then? Why the hell didn’t someone notify me? We could have had the brother picked up before he ever got so close.”

  “Well, we didn’t know what was going on at first.”

  “There’s that we again. Del, I’m thrilled to hear your voice, but I’m not real happy here.”

  “There’s no time to go into that now. The reason we didn’t pick him up right away was because we didn’t know it was his brother. We thought it was Lucas.”

  Scottie rubbed her temple. “What?”

  “Lucas Blackstone has a twin brother. As in identical twin.” He didn’t wait for her reaction. “Name is Logan Blackstone. He’s a slippery hombre. Way too smart for his good or ours. You know we’re in the critical stages of this mission.”

  “Apparently there’s a lot I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t realize my job came with marionette strings, Del.”

  He let loose a string of invectives, all in his native Spanish. She fought a sudden smile. She probably wouldn’t recognize him now if she bumped into him in broad daylight, but there was no doubting he was Seve Delgado.

  “You’ll get no apologies from me on this, Giardi. You will get an explanation. But not now. This Brethren thing is going to blow wide by New Year’s Eve. Blackstone sent word out that the cult leaders are planning a Jonestown at the stroke of midnight.”

  Scottie’s anger and irritation fled. “But we thought—”

  “We thought wrong. The drugs they’ve been smuggling down across the border from Canada aren’t for distribution. They’re for—”

  “Self-destruction.”

  Del didn’t have to confirm. “Normally, I’d say let the crazy bastards kill themselves, including Senator Gladiston’s idiot daughter. But we have an official count of sixteen children. Most under age seven.”

  “Oh, Del.”

  “Sí. We have to get them out. Our original cover of rescuing the good senator’s daughter still gives us the perfect in. If all goes right, we can make everyone happy. I want you to get to Logan and do whatever you have to to keep him the hell out of the way until Lucas wraps this up. If any of the Brethren sight Logan and mistake him for Lucas …” He didn’t have to spell out the implications of having a look-alike blunder unknowingly into such a delicate situation.

  “Does Senator Gladiston know about this yet?”

  “No. And I plan on keeping it that way. It’s bad enough I have to deal with the DEA on this.” His tone made it clear she wasn’t the only one upset by how the whole thing had been handled. “There will be a full brief waiting for you in the plane. There isn’t much to brief you on. Sorry.”

  Sorry? She could kiss the man. He’d given her the perfect Christmas present: no Christmas. “No apologies. You just saved my life.” Again.

  “Giardi?”

  She heard the bare trace of concern in his voice and felt her throat tighten. Del was the closest thing to a real father she’d ever had. Not that she’d ever told him. And now was not the time either. “I can be on the field in fifteen minutes.”

  “I’ll let them know. I appreciate this, Scottie.” If there was something more than brisk efficiency in his tone, neither of them commented on it. “You’ll have questions for me. I’ll arrange a meeting when you’re done with this assignment.”

  “I’m counting on it. Who’ll mind the store while I’m away?”

  “It’ll be taken care of.”

  She paused briefly. Despite her relief at this unexpected reprieve, having her authority usurped so easily, even if it was by the man who had bestowed it on her in the first place, didn’t sit well with her. “You’d better schedule a long meeting, Del.”

  She thought she actually heard him chuckle. Must have been static on the line. “Handle this one,” he said. “I’ll answer all your questions after.”

  “Yes, you will,” she replied, but the line was already dead.

  The small jet touched down in Montana on the landing strip under a clear sky and a full moon. It was just past midnight. “Merry Christmas to me,” Scottie murmured, then turned back to the tiny glowing screen of her specially designed Personal Digital Assistant. Del hadn’t been kidding about the brevity of the report. She knew little more now than when Del had disconnected their call.

  She knew that Logan Blackstone was indeed Lucas’s identical twin. They had apparently been separated by their never-married parents shortly after their birth, the father taking Logan, the mother taking Lucas. Both children were raised with the name Blackstone, each believing the other parent had died, and with no knowledge they had a sibling, much less an identical twin.

  The team already had documentation that Lucas’s mother died when he was four. No family member had stepped forward as guardian, so Lucas had been raised in the foster care system. He’d entered the military at age eighteen and had eventually become a Green Beret. A loner, he’d never married, had few friends outside the other Berets. He’d gone on to do Special Forces work until Del had recruited him ten years earlier at age twenty-seven. The documentation of his birth and his mother’s background hadn’t revealed the existence of any living relatives. They had been sufficiently assured that Lucas Blackstone was a viable recruit for the team. But Scottie knew all this. She’d read Lucas’s file when she’d taken on the job of directing the team.

  There was no information on how Logan had discovered Lucas’s existence, but there was documentation that their father had passed away two months earlier. Had he made a deathbed confession perhaps?

  However Logan had discovered the information, the fact remained that he had made it his mission in life to track down his twin brother. And for a former Detroit street cop who’d spent the last five years as co-owner and operator of his late father’s pub—his father also having been a retired cop—he’d been remarkably successful. Not to mention disturbingly resourceful.

  A cop. A second-generation cop. Just like her. Just what she didn’t need. Scottie sighed in disgust as she programmed the handheld machine to encrypt the information. She stood and stretched as best she could in the small confines of the jet cabin, then snagged her backpack, shoved the PDA into an inner pocket, and zipped it up tight.

  The report didn’t tell her the one thing she wanted to know: How in the hell had a cop-turned-bartender managed to get so close?

  “All clear, Ms. Giardi.” The pilot turned in his seat. “Just got a message that your vehicle is waiting for you about fifty yards straight out. Report’s in the usual place.” He stood, opened the hatch, and lowered the steps.

  “Thanks, Tom.” She hugged her pack over her shoulder, balancing the weight on her back. “You heading back tonight?”

  “Yep, gotta beat Santa home.”

  She ignored the odd pang his words elicited inside her chest. “I appreciate your taking the flight tonight.” She wondered briefly who’d made the call. Who else knew Del had resurfaced?

  “No
problem, Ms. Giardi. Anytime.”

  Scottie heard him taxi around as she crossed the small field. She turned and watched Tom take off, unable to keep from wondering what it must be like to know someone was waiting for your arrival with open arms and a smile. Her laugh was derisive as she turned back to the black Land Rover, tossed her bag to the ground, and flung her arms wide. “Hi honey, I’m home.”

  Her smile faded as she ran a quick visual scan of the area before punching in the code to unlock the doors. Pine Lodge, Montana, gave the word “remote” an entirely new meaning. There was no warning prickling sensation tingling her scalp. Whoever had left the truck, and it was likely it had been one of Del’s men, since she didn’t have anyone in place there with the connections to pull it off, was long gone. She was alone.

  She finally allowed herself to acknowledge the low hum of adrenaline that had steadily pumped through her system since the instant the phone had rung. It felt good, she realized. Damn good. God, she had missed being out in the field.

  Man, you are losing it, Giardi. You spend the evening sniveling like a whiny yuppie because your eggs are jumping around a bit, and now you’re all mopey because you aren’t playing Jane Bond anymore. She smiled. “What in the hell is wrong with you, Giardi?”

  She slid into the driver’s seat, reached under it, and felt around, then depressed a small panel. A tiny diskette slid into her palm, which she tucked into a hidden slot in the side of her PDA. Directions to a rental unit Logan had signed for three days earlier flashed on the tiny screen. He was in a cabin up on the north ridge of the Crazies, a small mountain range less than an hour from the Brethren compound. According to the rest of the information, a high-elevation snowfall had trapped him up there. But the snow was melting off. And Del’s other men were needed at the compound. She had to get to Logan before he got off that mountain.

  “Sounds like a fun vacation,” she muttered. Hey, it beats an evening with Cindy-Lou and the Whos. Not wanting to think about where her head had been several hours before, she switched off the PDA and pocketed it, then put the disc in the dashboard ashtray and closed it. She heard the crunch, signifying the tiny compactor had done its job and demolished the disc. She smiled with satisfaction and shifted gears.