The Last Temptation Read Free Page A

minds, haj breached all the personal defences she’d constructed overf dozen years as a police officer. She’d made the cardinal errc of letting herself love someone who couldn’t let himself lo\ her.
     
    His decision to quit the front line of profiling and retre to academic life had felt like a liberation for Carol. At last si was free to follow her talent and her desire and focus on thl kind of work she was best suited to without the distractioj of Tony’s presence.
     
    Except that he was always present, his voice in her heac his way of looking at the world shaping her thoughts. I
    Carol ran a frustrated hand through her shaggy blondl hair. ‘Fuck it,’ she said out loud. ‘This is my world now, Tony.]
    She raked around in her bag and found her lipstick. Sh^ did a quick repair job then smiled at her reflection again, thu time with more than a hint of defiance. The interview pane, had asked her to return in an hour for their verdict. Sh^ decided to head down to the first-floor canteen and have thfi lunch she’d been too nervous to manage earlier.j
    She walked out of the toilet with a bounce in her stride:)
     
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    Ahead of her, further down the corridor, the lift pinged. The doors slid open and a tall man in dress uniform stepped out and turned to his right without looking in her direction. Carol slowed down, recognizing Commander Paul Bishop. She wondered what he was doing here at NCIS. The last she’d heard, he’d been seconded to a Home Office policy unit. After the dramatic, anarchic and embarrassing debut of the National Offender Profiling Task Force that he’d headed up, no one in authority wanted Bishop in a post anywhere near the public eye. To her astonishment, Bishop walked straight into the interview room she’d left ten minutes before.
    What the hell was going on? Why were they talking to Bishop about her? He had never been her commanding officer. She’d resisted a transfer to the nascent profiling task force, principally because it was Tony’s personal fiefdom and she had wanted to avoid working closely with him for a second time. But hi spite of her best intentions, she’d been sucked into an investigation that should never have needed to happen, and in the process had broken rules and crossed boundaries that she didn’t want to think too closely about. She certainly didn’t want the interviewers who were considering her for a senior analyst’s post to be confronted by Paul Bishop’s dissection of her past conduct. He’d never liked her, and as Carol had been the most senior officer involved in the capture of Britain’s highest profile serial killer, he’d reserved most of his anger about the maverick operation for her.
    She supposed she’d have done the same in his shoes. But that didn’t make her feel any happier with the notion that Paul Bishop had just walked into the room where her future was being decided. All of a sudden, Carol had lost her appetite.
     
    €We were right. She’s perfect,’ Morgan said, tapping his pencil end to end on his pad, a measured gesture that emphasized
     
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    the status he believed he held among his fellow officers.
    Thorson frowned. She was all too aware of how manj things could go wrong when unfathomable emotions were dragged into play in an operation. ‘What makes you think she’s got what it takes?’
     
    Morgan shrugged. ‘We won’t know for sure till we see her in action. But I’m telling you, we couldn’t have found a better match if we’d gone looking.’ He pushed his shirtsleeves up over his muscular forearms in a businesslike way.
    There was a knock at the door. Surtees got up and opened it to admit Commander Paul Bishop. His colleagues didn’t even glance up from their intense discussion.
    ‘Just as well. We’d have looked bloody stupid if we’d come’ this far and then had to admit we didn’t have a credible operative. But it’s still very dangerous,’ Thorson said.
     
    Surtees gestured to Bishop that he should