Read Online Cutting Loose by Tara Janzen - Free Book Online Page A

She twisted around as best she could, which wasn’t very much.
    This wasn’t right, he thought, staring at the contents of her suitcase. Her clothes were a mess, jumbled up, some of them folded, but most of them not. They looked pushed around…like somebody had pushed them around. Like maybe somebody who was looking for something.
    He lifted a white blouse up—and swore under his breath.
    â€œWhat?” she asked, trying to see over the seat.
    Blood, fresh, a long smear of it, stained the blouse’s sleeve. Buzz-cut Boy must have gotten hit by something, too. Zach hoped it had been one of his .45 caliber, 230-grain, full-metal-jacket, flat-point tactical handloads clocking in at nine hundred feet per second.
    That would have hurt.
    And it would have definitely slowed the guy down, which was exactly what Zach needed, because he had a sneaking suspicion he was going to have to go find Buzz-cut Boy real damn quick if he wanted that bracelet.
    Dammit.
He started going through her clothes, piece by piece, carefully checking each item, shaking it out, taking his time in order not to make any mistakes, and hoping to hell Buzz Boy had made a mistake, rushed through the job, and left empty-handed. He hoped the bracelet would fall out of something, like her underwear. She had a lot of it, a lot of colors, a lot of styles, and she obviously liked lace.
    He did, too—black, red, white, purple. Her suitcase definitely had its share of lace underwear. He picked up a demicut lace underwire bra, lime green with hot pink ribbons slinking across the tops of the cups.
    Very nice, he thought, setting it aside and moving on to the next piece of clothing—the matching lime green panties with a hot pink ribbon slinking around the waistband.
    Very nice.
    She had jeans, and yoked shirts with pearly snaps, a tooled leather belt with a silver buckle, and an honest-to-God pair of chaps, brand-new, cream-colored with buff inserts.
    Well, that had been a while, since he’d had the sex-with-a-cowgirl fantasy. He’d never actually had sex with a real cowgirl, but he had a feeling he had a real one handcuffed to his steering wheel. It was enough to make a guy think—make a guy think he better keep his mind on his business.
    A pair of boots came next, slant-heeled, suede, and looking like they’d seen better days. She’d packed them inside a plastic bag, and after shaking them out—and getting nothing—he checked the bag.
    And got nothing.
    Then things got interesting—too interesting.
    Beneath the bag with the cowboy boots was a taped stack of fifty-dollar bills. He moved a tiedyed aquamarine tank top and found another taped stack of bills. A little more careful moving of clothes, including a yellow-flowered shirt stained with blood, revealed a FedEx envelope with another taped stack of bills poking out of it. There were two more stacks inside. He didn’t need to count the bills, or even run his thumb over one of the stacks. He dealt in cash, and he was looking at five short bricks of two thousand dollars each.
    Ten thousand dollars in a FedEx envelope packed inside the suitcase of a woman in possession of an internationally volatile encryption code only said one thing to him: trouble. If anyone was going to get arrested in Albuquerque this morning, it might well be Lily Robbins, and it just might be him doing it.
    He belled open the envelope, looked over the airline ticket, skimmed a very short letter written on expensive paper, and dropped it all back inside the suitcase.
    â€œWh-what are you doing?” she asked.
    Wondering who in the hell you really are,
he thought.
And wondering who in the hell made you that offer.
There’d been no signature on the letter, and the return address on the mailing label was a Ship and Go Store in New York City.
    The cash was preliminary at best, nothing more than traveling expenses. The bracelet was worth millions on the open market.
    â€œI need the