Finding Kate Huntley Read Free Page A

regular basis. It was hard to tell how old he was, but with his shirt torn open she couldn’t help but notice that he was well-built, hard in all the right places. Under different circumstances, she might be tempted to run her fingers through his hair and press her lips to his.
    He raised a curious brow.
    “I’m trying to guess how old my captor is.”
    “Thirty-two,” he said. “And I’m not your captor.”
    She held up the arm still hooked to his. “I beg to differ. If you weren’t my captor, I wouldn’t be handcuffed to you.”
    Unease crept into his mesmerizing blue eyes as if her close proximity made him nervous. She leaned into him, brushing her chest against the thin soft fabric of his shirt. “Or would I?”

    Jack felt sorry for her. She looked exhausted, as if she’d been running from ghosts every hour of every day for the past ten years. The emptiness in her eyes and the hollow sound to her voice only served to make him more determined to bring her back safely. The agency had lots of questions. They needed her, and whether she knew it or not, she needed them. For ten years she’d managed to hide from the world. He wasn’t going to lose her now. “If you hadn’t run,” Jack said, “I never would have used the cuffs in the first place.”
    Her attention was elsewhere. Her eyes had grown round and sharp like that of a trapped fox.
    “Are you alone?” she asked.
    He rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand and nodded. Looking over his shoulder, he followed her gaze, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. “Is something wrong?”
    She fumbled with the key again. There were two holes in the metal cuffs, but she kept sticking the key in the wrong one. Since he wanted to keep her talking, he didn’t tell her what she was doing wrong.
    “My father never would have told me to hide from the world if it wasn’t necessary,” she told him. “Damn cuffs. For ten years I’ve survived by listening to my instincts. And right now my instincts are telling me something’s not right.”
    “I never would have come looking for you if I thought I was putting you in danger.”
    “Oh, that’s charming.” A shaky laugh escaped her. “What are you, FBI man in shining armor?”
    Ignoring her sarcasm, he noticed she kept looking behind him. Once again he looked over his shoulder. “What are you looking—”
    A bearded man wearing sunglasses and dressed in khaki shorts and a short-sleeved print shirt stepped onto the deck, gun drawn and aimed in the vicinity of their heads.
    Jack tensed. “Shit!”
    Kate moved fast. She slapped the keys into Jack’s hand, then reached behind him and whipped out the gun he didn’t think she knew about. She jerked back the safety latch with her thumb. With a shoot-now, ask-questions-later mentality, she shot the man in the shoulder. His gun skittered across the deck and out of reach.
    “Jesus!” Jack said. “What the hell are you doing?”
    She was ignoring him again. That much was clear. She was also stronger than she looked. Dragging him along, she stepped over the injured man and kicked his gun off the boat and into the water.
    Just when Jack thought things couldn’t get worse, a second man stepped out from behind the cabin. He was Haitian. His long hair was pulled back in a ponytail.
    Kate jabbed an elbow into the newest arrival’s gut. Nothing happened, so Jack came up hard and fast with the hand that was connected to hers and knocked the thug flat on his back.
    “Jump,” she said right before she leapt off the boat and onto the dock.
    If not for his keen ability to follow orders, Jack might have found himself flat on the deck. Instead, their shoes thumped against the dock as they ran toward the crowded streets.
    When they reached the boulevard, Kate shouted, “Run!”
    “What do you think I’m doing?”
    Psssss.
    A bullet whizzed by Jack’s head, leaving an eerie ringing in his left ear.
    People shouted and ran in every direction.
    Jack stepped up his pace