Read Online Heart of Danger by Lisa Marie Rice - Free Book Online

involuntary twitch of the sternocleidomastoid muscle in his right jaw. Not all the training in the world could stop fast twitch muscles taken by surprise. Still, he was very very good.
    She was better.
    “Patient Nine didn’t say so in so many words—” Actually he hadn’t said it in any words, just vague images of shadowy men. “But I think that there are several of you here. Two, maybe three others. Like you. Somehow friends of his?”
    Again, he didn’t move a muscle, but a coldness crept over his features.
    “Not friends of his?”
    Silence.
    “Look.” She bit her lips. “Before you knock me out, I want to know that somehow I got this message across. In the way it was given to me. I—” She hesitated. Stilled her trembling hands under the table. Tried to calm her fast-beating heart. “I came here at some personal risk. Because a patient of mine, a man who is deathly ill, could find no rest until I promised him I would make every effort to find—” You, she thought. Find you . “To find this man, this Tom McEnroe. Mac. To give him that object I gave you, the tiny metal hawk, and to tell him Code Delta. You can believe me or not believe me. But I am telling the truth. And I think your friend—at least he considers himself your friend—is in danger. I have no idea if any of this means anything to you, Mr. McEnroe. Because that’s who you are. I hope all of this makes sense, because otherwise I have just made a huge mistake.”
    Calmer now, having done all she could do, she placed her hands on the table, as if laying cards down. And she had. She’d laid it all out for him, for this tall, deadly-looking man. She’d done her best and possibly risked her life.
    The rest was up to him.
     
    “Tell her the truth, Mac,” Jon’s voice said in his ear. “I think the time for games is over.”
    “Yeah,” Nick echoed, ever laconic.
    Mac sat, eyes narrowed, looking at the woman carefully. She sat completely still under his gaze. He got no read off her, none at all. She could be telling the truth, she could have been sent by their traitorous former commander, Lucius Ward, to trap him. She could have been sent by goddamned Martians for all he could tell.
    Shit. He’d been trained in interrogation techniques. They all had. He didn’t like torture, not for intel. If he had to off someone, he just did it without drawing it out. Pain wasn’t always useful if you wanted the truth. Most everyone would say anything, anything at all, certainly what the interrogator wanted to hear, just to make pain stop, go away. But he’d interrogated his share of shitheads and had made them talk and pain had been involved.
    Men like Mac or Jon or Nick wouldn’t talk at all, under any conditions. They’d been trained to resist torture, but beyond the resistance training, they were unbreakable. They’d been selected and tested for that trait, then hardened, like hardening steel. And most of the time they had a discreet suicide method on them.
    Just check out. Try pumping a corpse for intel, asshole.
    So he knew all about breaking people down and—
    Shit.
    He couldn’t do it with this woman. Just couldn’t.
    What the fuck was the matter with him? She’d found him. Nobody could find him.
    “Take it from the top,” he said. “Beginning to end. And make me believe you or I’ll MIB your medical degree out of you.”
    She sighed. “Okay. My name is Catherine Young. Someone on your team”—she looked around the room, but the vidcams were invisible—“maybe several someones, the ones who are listening to us right now, has Googled me, I’m sure. So you know I am who I say I am, because you’ve already seen the documents I have on me—my driver’s license, my company ID. You probably have my high school picture.”
    “Roger that,” Jon said quietly. “She’s good.”
    She was. It wasn’t anything that argued in her favor.
    “Go on,” he said.
    She watched his face carefully. “I have always been interested in the