The Good Daughter by Diana Layne

Italian driver--or native New York driver for that matter--Sandro muscled the car back onto the road through the smallest of openings in the traffic. Car horns and squealing brakes sounded behind them. Dave resisted the urge to jump into the front seat and take over.
    “ I don’t know whose car this is,” Sandro answered once he was in the flow of traffic.
    Dave paused in taking off his overcoat. The car smelled awful, but it was warm and with his wet coat, he felt steam rising from his neck. “You don’t know? You saying this car is stolen?”
    “ I can look at the registration papers if you like.” Marisa offered an innocent smile from the front seat.
    A glance at the steering column showed no key. “You wired this car?”
    “ No. She wired it.” Sandro nodded his head toward Marisa.
    Dave stared, somehow not finding it difficult to imagine Marisa wiring the car. With her sharp intelligence, Dave bet she had all sorts of hidden talents. Immediately, his imagination teased him with images of her in bed, eager to teach him her talents.
    “ My brother runs the auto-theft ring, you remember. He thought it would be amusing to teach his little sister a few trade secrets.”
    Her words brought Dave back to focus. He knew her brother Massimo’s long list of talents as well, which really made him wonder how many of those trade secrets she knew.
    “ She taught me how,” Sandro said. “I will do it next time.”
    “ Next time? You taking up stealing cars in your spare time?” Dave’s head started a low throbbing in his temples. Whether from the strong, stale smell of cigarettes or the new problems piling up, he wasn’t sure, but he had a feeling the throbbing would be a full-fledged pounding before he got out of the stolen car.
    “ It will be best if I don’t use the same car for long,” Sandro continued.
    “ Shit, I can see this on my fucking report . . . Federal witness stealing cars.”
    “ It might look better on your fucking report than, ‘Federal witness found dead’.” Sandro frowned when he caught Dave’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
    Tension filled the air, but Dave broke eye contact. Sandro was right. There was no sense arguing with the legality of it, especially since Sandro and Marisa appeared to be operating on their own agenda now. How much farther would Sandro venture outside the law once he found out about his wife? Dave rubbed his forehead.
    “ I might as well confess about the BMW I stole this morning,” Marisa said.
    Dave sighed. “Because I look like a priest?”
    Marisa’s lips turned up slightly at Dave’s attempted humor. “So you can recover it and return it to the owners. You most certainly do not look like a priest.”
    The look she sent Dave was blatantly appraising, like the night he held her in his arms at the bar. Every time they’d met since, he’d struggled to ignore the feelings she evoked. Long, leggy, lithe, she was perfection personified, no argument there.
    But his attraction would never move beyond the physical, and at the moment, he didn’t have time to even indulge in that little fantasy. Aside from the legal issue of her being an informant, they had grown up in different worlds, both literally and figuratively. Black and white, cop and criminal, total opposites on the spectrum.
    Get back to work, Armstrong .
    “ What went wrong, Sandro?” Dave blurted, jerking his thoughts back to business. “They’ve kidnapped Nia.”
    Sandro stomped on the brake. Dave’s face slammed into the back of the front seat. Okay, so maybe he should have been a little more tactful. He rubbed his sore nose.
    Tires squealed and horns honked impatiently behind them once again. “Damn it,” Dave swore, more upset with himself than Sandro. “Don’t stop in the middle of the road. Find a place to pull over.”
    “ My wife is . . . Gone?” Sandro demanded as he double-parked in front of a popular local restaurant. “And you wait this long to tell me?” He swung around, his