Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek by Lara Adrián Page B

Book: Hide and Seek by Lara Adrián Read Free Book Online
Authors: Lara Adrián
Tags: Romance
Ads: Link
veins at the mere possibility.
    Duarte drew his pistol and bolted back to the shortcut, adrenaline pouring through him like acid. His boots chewed up the uneven terrain. Branches slapped at him as he cut a frantic path through the bramble and over the rocky, root-tangled forest floor.
    All the while he ran, he tried to reassure himself that she was okay. He’d only been gone a few minutes, and the chances that any of Phoenix’s enemies had trailed her to this remote stretch of North Carolina wilderness were slim at best.
    But even slim odds were too much for his liking. Especially when his warrior’s instincts were clanging in high alarm.
    Something felt off about the mountainside as he tore up the incline, racing to reach Lisa. Someone was in these woods with him now. He’d bet his life on it.
    He knew it the same way his instincts had served him well on combat patrols.
    A bogey was somewhere on his land right now with his sights set on Lisa. Closing in on the cabin... armed and ready to kill.
    Son of a bitch.
    Duarte’s chest squeezed as if caught in a vise. If anything happened to Lisa because he’d let his fucking guard down, he didn’t know how he would live with himself.
    And then he heard it.
    A single gunshot. Up ahead of him through the woods. Where the cabin was.
    No. It wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be.
    He couldn’t already be too late to save her.
    He ran faster, his heart about to explode in his chest.
    Goddamn it, no!
     
    ~ ~ ~
     
    Yanked from a pleasant drowse, Lisa bolted upright.
    Was that a gunshot?
    Holding the sheet to her naked chest, she shook off her sleep and blinked to clear her eyes. She was in the middle of John’s bed. His empty bed.
    And that sharp, echoing crack outside had definitely been a gunshot.
    “John?” No answer. No sound at all from anywhere in the cabin. “Oh God, where are you? John!”
    She flew off the mattress. Got dressed as fast as she could, forgoing her bra, which had evidently gotten lost somewhere on the bedroom floor a few hours earlier. No time for shoes, she tore out of the cabin and into the dewy, early morning forest outside.
    She spotted him a couple of yards ahead of her, near the ditch she’d stumbled into the night before.
    “John!”
    He wasn’t alone. Another man stood in front of him, his back to Lisa. A mane of shaggy, sun-streaked dark blond hair fell to his shoulders in beach bum waves, but there was nothing else soft about him. He was dressed in a camo shirt and olive cargo pants that made him blend in with the foliage around him. A big man, he was tall and muscular and intimidating, nearly the size and bulk of John.
    And, like John, he also held a pistol down at his side.
    They both looked her way as Lisa hurried toward them. John’s dark eyes were grave, but he didn’t warn her away as she ran toward him with her heart in her throat.
    The other man’s face was equally sober, and... vaguely familiar.
    Confused, Lisa tried to process the tanned, angular cheeks and sharp blue eyes that stared back at her from this stranger with a gun in his hand. Then realization settled in.
    She knew him. The third member of her brother’s trifecta.
    “Alec?”
    Instead of greeting her as she reached them, he did a quick visual scan of her, from bed-mussed head to barefoot toes. Then he turned a questioning look on John. “I’m not gonna ask.”
    John grunted. “Good. Because I’m not about to explain.”
    “I heard a gunshot,” Lisa said. “Someone want to tell me what’s going—” Her breath caught in her throat. She pointed to the large, unmoving lump in the bottom of the ditch. “That’s a dead body.”
    “It is,” John said, his low voice guarded.
    “Did you shoot him?”
    “I did,” Alec answered, his baritone drawl equally cagey.
    Lisa glanced between the two men caught in their unspoken standoff. Then she glanced down at the body and the nasty looking pistol beside him. The man wore plain clothes, but his trimmed hair and

Similar Books

Medal Mayhem

Tamsyn Murray

Pale Gray for Guilt

John D. MacDonald

Enter Helen

Brooke Hauser

Bindi Babes

Narinder Dhami