Hotter Than Wildfire by Lisa Marie Rice Page B

features; Bolt was dark blond with fine, angular features—they shared a look. Tall, impossibly strong, self-possessed.
    And they both looked really dangerous. Not for the first time, she wondered whether she’d made a mistake in coming here. If she was wrong, if Kerry had somehow steered her to the wrong place, she could have sacrificed her life for nothing.
    These men spirited away endangered women. You’d think that there would be softness and kindness in their gaze. That they’d be sort of like social workers, only taller.
    These two men looked worlds away from being social workers. If she were told they were crime lords or killers, she’d believe every word.
    No softness, no kindness, no discernible mercy.
    What had she done?
    There was silence in the room for a minute, two. Ellen’s throat was too tight and dry for her to even think of speaking.
    “Well?” Harry Bolt fixed her with an unblinking stare, light-brown eyes fixed as in an eagle’s gaze, and just as impersonal. “You are Eve, aren’t you?”
    Yes. And I have just given you enough personal information to track me down. If you’re not going to help me, I’m done for.
    No. Of course not. What a ridiculous notion. And excuse me, I need to be somewhere else right now.
    Yes. No. Yes. No.
    “Yes,” she blurted out, as if some seal across her lips had just been shattered. Except for her agent, no one else knew. Well, maybe her boss, Mario, because beneath his laid-back tattooed exterior he was really smart. Still, he’d never asked and she’d never told. “Yes. And I’m afraid that might be the way my former boss found me, though everyone on the production side signed a confidentiality agreement.”
    She’d made Roddy swear to secrecy and they’d drawn up the confidentiality clause together. She knew enough legal lingo to make it airtight and to make anyone think twice about selling out to the tabloids. The musicians had played in a separate room, with a separate entrance and had never even seen her, only heard her. She’d insisted on that.
    Roddy hadn’t really taken her seriously, but he had seen the marketing potential. At a time in which anyone in the media ran a website, blogged, friended on Facebook, Twittered, had RSS feeds and was linked in, a mystery identity was a sure-fire publicity gimmick.
    Harry Bolt addressed Sam Reston without taking his eyes off her. “So, Sam, this is Nora Charles, aka Eve. She got our number from Dove. Eve, this is Sam Reston, the man who helped your friend.”
    She was vibrating with nerves, sweat trickling down her back and between her breasts. She knew her pale skin would be ice white with stress.
    Sam Reston didn’t even try to shake hands with her; he must have seen that she was on the knife’s edge. He simply nodded soberly, said, “Ma’am” in a low voice and sat down next to his partner.
    He addressed his partner without taking his eyes off her. “Harry? Sitrep.”
    Now both of them were looking at her intently. Most stares come off as aggressive, but theirs didn’t. Just…intense. Like they were listening carefully to what she said, but other information was coming their way from her eyes, her hands, her feet. Maybe even her gut.
    “Ms. Charles is an accountant. She worked for a company…in the South?” He raised his eyebrows slightly.
    Ellen nodded shakily. She’d spent a lifetime getting rid of her cracker accent but there was still a Southern tilt to her voice, particularly under stress.
    Harry Bolt continued. “At a party, a company employee told her that the owner of the company stole a big sum of money from the U.S. government in Iraq. Twenty million dollars.”
    Now it was Sam Reston’s turn to raise his eyebrows.
    “That employee died the next day. His forehead met a bullet. Men came for her and she ran. Her boss told the police and the media she’d embezzled a million dollars, maybe killed the guy who talked.”
    Her heart ached a little every time she heard that. She’d