Aegis Security 03 - Extreme Measures Read Free Page B

I wish you and your sister all the best.”
    Smith rose and tipped his hat. He moved around her and headed away from the outdoor café, his whistling slowly disappearing on the breeze. The waiter appeared and set a mimosa on her table. “Enjoy, ma’am.”
    The noise of the café rose up around Eve. People chatting, silverware and glasses clinking, all melded with the traffic on the street to signal normal. Peaceful. A regular day in a beautiful city. Not a thing out of the ordinary.
    Except this wasn’t ordinary.
    Olivia.
    She hadn’t talked to Olivia in months. Not since their father’s funeral. And then they’d argued over Eve’s gypsy ways and the fact that Eve was never around for the important things, like their father’s last days. Eve already felt guilty enough over that, and Olivia’s rant had only deepened that guilt, which resulted in Eve leaving early and Olivia not returning any of Eve’s calls when Eve had contacted her days later and tried to apologize. But as frustrated as Eve was with her little sister, a tiny place inside knew Olivia deserved an explanation—about all the missed holidays, the months of no contact, and, most important, what she really did for a living. To repair the rift between them, to salvage the last blood relationship she had left, Eve had been ready to confess all to Olivia. Only now it was too late. Olivia’s life was in danger all because of her, and her sister might never even know why.
    Ignoring the drink in front of her, Eve eyed the van, then the bustling four-lane traffic. She’d get herself killed if she rushed right out there. Plus, if anyone was watching, she didn’t want to draw extra attention. Pushing back from her chair, the legs scraping cement with a sound that echoed in her ears, she tossed the cell in her purse and then swung the strap of her bag over her shoulder and walked slowly but intently through the outdoor tables toward the streetlight half a block down.
    She stopped at the corner with a handful of people waiting to cross and worked to keep her expression neutral. Tried to keep her nerves from giving her away. A child—no more than four, holding his mother’s hand—looked up at her with big hazel eyes.
    Eyes, Eve thought briefly, that seemed to look through her, all the way to her soul. Eyes that reminded her of Sawyer.
    She glanced quickly away.
    Come on, come on, come on . . .
    Just when Eve thought the light was never going to change, it signaled Walk, and she stepped off the curb onto the street with the child and his mother and the rest of the pedestrians.
    The van exploded in a fireball that shot flames thirty feet into the air.
    Eve’s body went sailing. Screams echoed around her. She hit something hard, registered a sharp stab in her skull, knew consciousness was leaving her. But before she blacked out, she saw the shops lining the street, the van, even the umbrellas outside the café she’d just been sitting in, all engulfed in flames. Flames that looked like they signaled the end of the world.
    And in the middle of it all, the body of the child, lying still as stone in the rubble around her.

     
    Zane Archer could pick Juliet— correction , Evelyn Wolfe—out of a crowd with barely a look. Didn’t matter that she’d cut and dyed her hair. He knew her walk, recognized those sexy legs in the slim black skirt that hit just below her knees, and, thanks to three months he now wished had never happened, was more than familiar with every inch of that toned body.
    He’d watched her interactions from the shadows of an outdoor table at Starbucks a block down. After six months of searching, he’d finally found her. Meeting with a contact, in the United States, in broad daylight.
    Man, the woman had balls of steel.
    The throb in his thigh kicked up, a result, the doctors said, of the scar tissue and nerve damage he’d sustained from that bullet he’d taken in Guatemala, but he wasn’t popping another pain pill. Not yet. He watched as