Her Forgotten Betrayal Read Online Free

mind. She lurched to her feet. She felt her way along the wall, blindly heading for the storage room and its back door to the outside world.
    She was a fool, a weak, clueless fool. But she couldn’t control her panic.
    Kill the bitch… the night whispered.
    Shaw clawed at the back door’s stubborn deadbolt until it gave way, then forced herself to stop. A glimmer of sanity kept her from running into the freezing, moonlit darkness. If she really were in danger, heaven only knew what waited for her outside the mansion’s protection. And there was suddenly nothing but silence behind her, no movement whatsoever.
    She tried to believe this was just like all the other times when she’d freaked herself out and then realized how ridiculous she’d been. She was running from phantoms. She tensed to turn back, to confront her paranoia. And heard footsteps again. Closer than before. Behind her. Coming for her . And there she stood, paralyzed, trapped between the shadows beyond her family’s home and the nightmare crowding closer within.
    A hand clenched in her hair. A gun pressed into her temple. When it fired, the deafening roar of the blast shattered her reality all over again.

Chapter Three
    Cole stared out the window toward the Cassidy mansion, a house he knew as intimately as the faded scars on his back. A trail of light had spread through the place, the same as on each of the other twenty-one nights since he’d returned to High Lake, Georgia. He’d tracked its progress until it had flooded the Victorian’s first floor, then its kitchen.
    His own family’s excuse for a homestead was a shack in comparison to the manor house. But the cabin had been all his drunk of a father could maintain, sitting amidst acres of north Georgia woods that belonged to someone else. Cole’s dad had once been the caretaker for the Cassidy property. Among other things, he’d tended the currently leafless pecan grove that the January moon was now illuminating, setting a moody backdrop for the mansion and the lake beyond.
    As a very young boy, Cole had earned two dollars a bushel from Old Man Cassidy, collecting the nuts that fell from those trees. And he’d loved every second of the chore. Almost as passionately as he’d resented returning to this place now.
    He’d kept up the cabin, once his dad finally killed himself with alcoholism and liver disease. It had become a safe house to land in sporadically between the various federal task forces Cole rotated through. Technically, he worked for the FBI. But almost from the start of his ten years with the Bureau, his tendency to circumvent regulations and his reputation for closing impossible cases had led him to specialize. He’d become the closest a federal officer could get to a free agent. He was on near-continuous loan from the Bureau doing undercover work for state and local law enforcement, infiltrating gangs and organized-crime syndicates, collecting evidence and turning marks for federal stings.
    Ten years of living on the edge had left a slew of enemies in his wake. His High Lake cabin was an off-the-grid stronghold during rare patches of downtime. Ramshackle-looking on the outside, inside he had everything he needed to protect himself from nearly every type of threat. Every threat, that was, except for his present responsibility to keep an eye on the woman who had once again taken up residence in the Cassidy place.
    It didn’t matter that the Victorian estate house had seen better days since Cole first left the mountain as an angry young man. The mansion was still as impressive as when he’d stared across this same stretch of woods as a boy. And it continued to represent his very first lesson in how twisted life could become when you bought into dreams as if they were real.
    After Matthew Cassidy’s death, Cole had made his way back whenever he could, only because Matthew’s heir, the estate’s new owner, had never once returned herself. An insignificant bit of intel had assured