Breach of Trust Read Free

I’ll find you.”
    â€œStop talking to me as though I’ve never done this before.” The words were coated with sass thick enough to choke them both.
    Ah. There was the blowback he’d expected. He grinned in spite of himself. “Then stop looking at me as though you’ve never done this before.”
    She drew her eyebrows together, pulling her keys from her pocket and stepping around him, prepared to make a run for the building. “You have so much talking to do, you’re going to be hoarse by the time you’re done.”
    Tate grabbed her elbow and glanced over his shoulder. “I promise I’ll find you and explain later. Right now I need you to...” He was fully, painfully aware what he was about to ask of the woman he’d trained himself. “Hit me. Pretend you hate me.”
    If the silent anger she fired at him was any indication, this might be the worst punch he ever took.
    Meghan pulled in a deep breath, her posture easing into the one that knew this business was life or death.
    The part of her that knew Tate was a dead man if they couldn’t sell her escape.

TWO
    T ate Walker was alive. And Meghan couldn’t decide whether she hated him or loved him for it.
    As directed, Meghan had avoided her apartment and run here, to the house owned by the Snyder Foundation, the one place that couldn’t be connected to her. She paced the length of the darkened living room, the old hardwood creaking beneath her feet. The midnight wind sang through the trees, ruffling new leaves and brushing branches against the old white farmhouse. Normally, the solitary sounds of the house settling for the night brought comfort. This place had a story, and though Meghan had no idea what it was, she’d love to find out. With the age on the little farm nestled in the midst of the woods, there was no telling what it had seen.
    She might not know the past, but she knew what it would see in the near future. Hope. A place where kids beaten down the way she had been could find refuge and acceptance. The bouncing from foster home to foster home would end at this front door. There would be love here, love that defied thievery or deception, that carried on no matter what mistakes the kids made or what they felt they needed to do to get attention.
    But it wouldn’t happen if Meghan couldn’t keep herself out of trouble long enough to finish the renovations. Her past had come for her, and no one would want a woman with a target on her back working with troubled children.
    At the window by the front door, Meghan lifted a slat on the plantation blinds and peeked through, hoping to see headlights but finding only moonlit shadows.
    She should have stood her ground against Isaac, should have stayed with Tate to have his back if things went south. You didn’t abandon your partner. By following Tate’s directive and fleeing instead of staying behind to see what happened, she’d certainly abandoned him.
    Except he was no longer her partner. And standing her ground would have probably gotten them both killed, especially with her edge worn off by his reappearance.
    Hard as it was, taking refuge was the right course of action. Meghan slipped the phone from her pocket and slid her thumb across the screen, concrete proof his appearance wasn’t the product of an overactive imagination. From her time chasing cybercriminals in their small clandestine army unit, she had no doubt the tech in the device could track her to the nearest meter. So where was he? She’d failed him once and believed her failure had left him dead. If her pseudoescape today had cost him his life...
    Unfamiliar nausea swirled, and she dropped the slat, dragging a finger along the grip of the revolver holstered at her hip, refusing to think anymore. To keep from being traced, she’d pulled the battery from her cell phone and locked it with Tate’s gun in the small safe in what would be her bedroom when