To Trust Her Heart Read Free

door. Without opening it, he asked, “Who is it?”
    Maddie’s eyes bugged as she realized that he had a big black gun in his hand. Who the hell was he expecting to come to the door, for crying out loud? She frowned, realizing she probably didn’t want to know the answer to that question.
    But it was unusual for him to involve her in anything that might be a threat to her. She knew what he did for a living, well, vaguely, anyway. She knew it involved covert operations of some sort conducted by the government all over the world, and that he would never be free to talk about his work. Sometimes she’d felt like one of the Mafia wives in “The Godfather”, who were never allowed to ask their husbands about what really went on in the family.
    At first glance, they had the proverbial white picket fence of a marriage, as long as one didn’t look too closely. But he was gone for long stretches of time during which she was lucky if she had so much as a contact number for him, other than an old friend who might or might not be able to get a hold of him. Sometimes he came home wounded, she’d nursed him more times than she could count, and he almost always came home with a new scar of some sort, which meant that he’d been hurt badly enough that “they” had decided he’d needed to be hospitalized. But any inquires about what had happened, how he’d been hurt, had been met with a stony silence. He’d explained it to her even before they’d gotten married, that he’d been in the military for a while and now he was doing special assignments that would take him away from her and that he couldn’t tell her about. Ever. Maddie had loved him so deeply and so completely that she couldn’t imagine anything driving her away from him for any reason.
    Eventually, though, being married to an absentee husband who was apparently doing a good job of trying to get himself killed when he wasn’t with her made Maddie take a good, hard look at their marriage. Not at the man she was married to, because she knew she’d always love him, foibles and all, but at the relationship itself. She’d been sure she would be fine not having him around all the time, but it was driving her crazy never knowing if he was dead or alive from one minute to the next. Even the wives of the soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan had a reasonable idea of where their men were and had fairly dependable means of getting a hold of them. Maddie hadn’t been able to get an answer at the number he’d given for his “friend” when his father had died, so she tried to get the Red Cross to find him but they didn’t know anything about him.
    He hadn’t found out about his father’s passing until he came home a month later.
    But he’d always kept that part of his life very far away from her, from all of them. She’d never felt in any danger when he was home – just the opposite. Maddie felt she was protected by an ultimate warrior of sorts on those rare occasions when they actually shared a bed. He’d even deliberately claimed the side of the bed that was closest to the door. She’d never felt the least  bit scared when he was around.
    But now he was standing at a hotel door with a gun drawn, his stance poised and ready for anything. Maddie felt a chill run down her spine and grabbed up what she could reach of the sheet and blanket to clutch against her chest. What the hell was going on?

 
    Chapter Two:
     
     
    “Hotel security. We got reports of a woman screaming,” a man on the other side of the door replied.
    Ty shot her a glare that would have smote a weaker woman, but she merely frowned back at him. He had a lot of explaining to do once this little incident was settled, she thought, and he had no right getting all bent out of shape about one little scream, to which he had driven her to by his own pigheaded stubbornness in not getting the hell out of her way when she’d wanted him to!
    She watched as he tucked the gun back into a duffle bag on the floor,