Crazy Hot Read Free

written all over it.
    On the screen, the woman picked up a dusty pile of papers and looked them over, giving him a better view of her face. She was fine featured, with a dusting of freckles across her nose. She was pretty in a quirky way, not elegant, but cute, her eyebrows surprisingly dark in contrast with her hair. Her chin was delicately angled, but definitely set with determination. Her eyes were light, the color indiscernible on the screen. At odds with her all-American looks, her mouth was lush, exotically full, and covered with a smooth layer of plum-colored lipstick.
    Okay. She was nice. Very nice.
    The whole package was nice.
    “Not a known felon,” Kid said from the back of the shop.
    Quinn absently nodded. He would have been damned surprised if the woman's picture had matched that of a known criminal, especially given the kind of wiseguys in Kid's current files.
    “Try the official database,” he said, knowing it was another long shot. Despite his niggling sense of familiarity, the chances of the woman in Burt's being part of an officially sanctioned U.S. government service were exceedingly damn low. And she sure as hell didn't belong to SDF, the very
unofficially
sanctioned group of Special Forces operators that he and Kid were part of. General Grant, the two-star who deployed them, would never hire a woman for fieldwork.
    “Already on it,” Kid confirmed.
    Quinn kept his gaze glued to the woman. Where in the hell, he wondered, had he seen her? He didn't forget faces. He didn't dare, and he knew hers.
    Or had known her.
    “Son of a bitch,”
Kid swore behind him, showing more emotion in the one small phrase than he had in the whole two weeks they'd been camped out in the desert.
    “You've got a match?”
    “No, but it looks like we've got more company,” Kid said, striding back toward the scope.
    Quinn looked through the far window and saw what Kid had seen, a blue SUV coming off the top of a rise in the highway—and slowing down, way down.
    “Two men, no visible weapons, but they don't look happy,” Kid said from his position at the scope. Quinn watched him quickly scan the rest of the horizon and come back to the SUV. “They're checking out the woman's Ford . . . and . . . they're . . . well, hell. They're heading out of Cisco. What do you make of that?”
    “A coincidence? Or maybe Cisco has just gotten real friggin' popular.” Quinn limped back to the Camaro and picked up the Beretta 9mm he always kept close by.
    “Maybe” was all Kid conceded as he checked the load on his rifle, a highly “accurized” sniper's M40.
    Quinn and Kid weren't getting paid to take chances. Not today.
Keep your heads down and don't get your asses shot off
had been Dylan's orders. A couple of weeks ago, when his body had still been pretty messed up, Quinn had been willing to follow orders. But he was mobile now. His stitches were out, and he was ready to get back to the job of taking Roper Jones down. If the unhappy guys in the four-wheel drive were part of that job, great. He just had to get Little Miss Tourist out of the way.
    Damn. In about five minutes, if she was an innocent civilian looking for ghost town junk, she was going to wish she'd driven right on by Burt's old place and Cisco. What he didn't like to think about was that niggling sense of familiarity and the possibility that what she was looking for was him—though God knew how a woman could have tracked him down in Cisco. Or why.
    “Call Denver,” he said to Kid. “Tell them we've got company. I'll get the woman.”
    “No,” Kid insisted, quickly coming around the desk at the back of the shop. “I'll get her. You . . . uh, should be the one to call.”
    Quinn narrowed his gaze at the younger man and was gratified to see him falter just a bit. It took a lot to make Kid Chaos falter.
    “What I mean is, Dylan would rather hear the . . . uh, details of the operation from you . . . I'm sure.” Kid didn't sound too damn sure to Quinn.
    “Dylan's