Read Online Damned If You Don't by Linda J. Parisi - Free Book Online Page A

cried, “You’re nuts!”
    And yet, he watched her struggle to maintain her composure. Good. She sat up in the seat, trying her damnedest to look neutral, and stared out the window. “Where are we?”
    Obviously, she was trying to change the subject. “We should be arriving at our destination very soon.”
    Jack knew he was her best shot at survival. So did she. Yeah, he’d made a mistake. And yeah, he was going to pay for it. But so had she. Guess that made them even.
    He started laughing softly. He tilted his head to look at her. “Just for the record, it’s not going to go away.”
    “What’s not going to go away?”
    They both knew damned well. The reason she kept shifting in her seat and the same reason his pants felt like jail.
    “Whatever is between us.”
    The afternoon sun created a frame for her hair, sparking tiny flames around her head. So Jack turned up the heat. “Just feel. Live in the moment. You know you want to.”
    “Go to hell.”
    He let his gaze skim over her skin, making it hard for both of them to breathe, let alone think. “Let your hair down,” he insisted.
    “Never. Not after what you did to me.”
    “Broken record. Ditch the anger. You don’t need to hide behind it anymore.”
    He grinned, letting his gaze soften, letting her see in his marbled blue eyes that they weren’t the only part of his body that swirled with heat.
    “Unlock the door,” he cajoled. “Feel. Just feel.”
    He watched her shiver in spite of her anger. She shifted in her seat again, and he knew he’d won the first battle. The spark between them was far from dead. But that also made him realize that playing with fire usually got a body burned.
    “And forget what happened a couple of hours ago?”
    He nodded. Her jaw clenched. She was fighting herself all the way. “You’re freaking crazy.”
    “Maybe. But I’ll never give up. You can bet your life on that.”
    As a matter of fact, I’m betting both our lives on it.

Chapter Eight
    Sam Ormond sat at his desk fuming. Jack had vanished. Not without a trace but damned close to it. He had men canvassing the area for a rental car and had one stationed at the outlet mall to make sure Jack didn’t double back to get his car. He didn’t think Jack would be that stupid, but he might assume—
    Jack Kent wouldn’t assume anything.
    The sound of mortar fire rang inside his head, and he could feel the spray of sand biting into his skin as one exploded way too close to them. Sam remembered lifting his head and trying to see the direction the shells were coming from only to catch sight of Jack skirting a perimeter and lobbing a grenade before ducking behind a dune. One more tick and the entire squad would’ve been toast.
    Sam shrugged and turned off the memories.
    Instead, he went over his painfully thin dossier on Dr. Morgan Mackenzie one more time. She was a straight arrow. Not even one parking ticket. Spent most of her life, so far, in school or in a lab doing research.
    A real geek.
    Her mother and father, both older when she was born, were dead. Her mother from breast cancer, her father a few months later. No siblings. A couple of cousins but obviously not real close. When he’d contacted them, they said they hadn’t talked to her in years. Her parents had been professors at a small college in Connecticut, but Dr. Mackenzie had started her academic career at Boston College and finished her doctorate at Columbia University.
    You would think that going to school in two major cities would open up a lead or two.
    Not.
    She couldn’t be this clean. It was…boring.
    Sam threw the file on his desk and leaned back in his chair, raking his hands through his hair in frustration. It might not look like there was a crack in the wall, but there had to be one. There always was. And Sam knew he’d better find it. He was in this now up to his eyeballs with no way to turn back.
    All of a sudden, his cell phone buzzed on his desk. He snapped forward in his chair. “This