Free Deliver Me from Temptation by Tes Hilaire

van in front of her. It slowed down, sped up, slowed down, then burst through the light…right as it turned red.
    “Dammit!” Jessica slammed on her brakes, the nose of her Chevy well into the crosswalk. Not that the pedestrians cared; they just weaved around.
    She stared at the light, foot itching on the brake.
    “What’s up with the wrist?” Mike asked.
    She blinked down at the steering wheel and saw she was rotating her wrist back and forth back and forth. It still ached, and in the light of day she could just make out a fine line of discoloration, a rough, three-inch oval area of darker skin that suggested a deep bruise finally making an appearance.
    “Nothing. Bumped it on my bed frame.” I think.
    She frowned at the mark that wrapped most of the way across the bones and to the soft underside below. Didn’t exactly look like she whacked it. More like she’d been grabbed or gotten it caught in something.
    She blew out a breath, turning her attention back to the light. An unexplainable bruise was not the only indication that she needed to screw her head back on. Besides the inability to remember driving home, she still had the damn headache she’d woken up with, only now it was accompanied by a tickling sensation that rode up the back of her skull. The tickling had started the moment she ran into Mr. Calhoun at the vending machines. There was something about him, a moment where she was convinced she’d met him before. Though for the life of her she couldn’t remember where or when. She’d passed the moment off, blamed it on attraction—the hum in her lower body certainly gave credence to the theory—but when she spoke to him on the sidewalk, the sense of déjà vu grew, as if her mind was encased in a great fog, and that tickling sensation was her body’s way of trying to break through it.
    Weird? Definitely. A mystery? No. Jess shook her head. Over-exhaustion explained her gaps in memory. She obviously zoned out after a long night, found her way home on autopilot, then collapsed into bed the moment she wrangled off her boots. The sense that she’d met Mr. Calhoun before? Well, there was that sexual attraction thing again. Not that she’d act on it, given his involvement in the case. Still there was no denying that, unwanted or not, the man packed a powerful punch to her lagging libido.
    And why couldn’t she have that with Damon?
    “Because you’re messed in the head,” she muttered.
    “What’s that?”
    “Nothing, just thinking aloud.”
    Mike grunted, but his long look told her that he was as worried about her head as she was. Luckily she didn’t have to expound. The light changed and, after waiting for a straggling pedestrian, Jess punched the gas, speeding ahead of the clog of cabs around her and bolting up on the backside of the slower-than-molasses traffic that had just made the light they’d been stuck at.
    After a swallowed curse, Mike cleared his throat. “You want to tell me where we’re going in such a hurry?”
    “On a wild goose chase.”
    “I got that part. What are we looking for?”
    “Thomas Rhodes’s car. It never turned up.”
    “Sooo…”
    “So, where is it?”
    Mike’s shoulders lifted and fell. “Chop shop. Bottom of some upstate lake. Who knows?”
    Right. They’d been going on the assumption the killer used Tom’s car to ditch the body and then disposed of the vehicle. Tracking stolen vehicles—especially those without GPS systems—wasn’t as easy as people thought. And the moment a car left the city, their job became next to impossible. So it wasn’t a shock they never found it.
    “I want to know where the car was before Tom took it out that night.”
    “Before?” Mike’s brow furrowed. “Why? Besides, we canvassed the garages within walking distance, and found nothing. No receipts in his personal effects either.”
    “All the commercial garages,” she pointed out, as she swerved around an Escalade.
    Mike didn’t even swear; his focus was too